“…we need to not have a woke democracy…sorry but these are tough times.”
HE believes in democracy and that’s final, even if it means that a wokester fanatic is elected President. That said, the chances of a wokester fanatic winning the 2028 Democratic nomination for President are 100% nil. Wokeys have been totally discredited, and have fled into the forest.
HE is looking for a list of characters who didn’t whine or fold or collapse when faced with death…characters who essentially said “fuck you, dickhead,” knowing full well what the response would be.
Matt Friend is only 26. He’s never done a devastating Chris Walken (or at least not to my knowledge), but nobody does a better Barack Obama.
Late yesterday afternoon I tapped out a few Mickey 17 reactions from my Norwalk AMC theatre seat. I was the only one there so no concerns about iPhone glare.
(a) I’m 40 minutes into Bong Joon-ho’s long-delayed, politically fraught follow-up to the over-rated Parasite, and it’s obviously ass…dystopian primitivism, visually dreary, crudely plotted, sadistic characters, physically gross and slimy. Vomiting, brutality, chaos, writhing agony, bodies dropped into molten lava…and it’s a stab at black comedy, of course. The broad, emphatic and profoundly unfunny kind.
(b) I’m the only humanoid in the theatre so I can write all I want. This poor little futuristic allegory, shot entirely on sound stages, is an instant commercial tank. Zero want-to-see. I am the late Earl Holliman back in ‘59…”where is everybody?”
(c) “No multiples! No more re-prints!”
(d) Mickey 17’s lighting is grayish, murky, shadowy, draining. You can make out various visual details but the film is so dark you’re left wondering “why am I even watching this?”
(e) AMC concessions should offer packets of heroin as special coping additives. Sold only to customers with ID verifying that they’re over 45 years of age.
(f) Bong sure loves his creepers! Creepers are fat, insect-like life forms, cousins of Dune sand worms (thousands!), mixed in with a few large, woolly mammoth creepers, but mostly the size of bloated armadillos…despised by Mark Ruffalo’s Trump-like, dental-veneer-wearing leader but in fact benign and Ewok-like in a certain sense, and representing harm to no one.
(g) Creepers, of course, symbolize immigrants or social lessers. This is a movie offering explicit social instruction. Trumpian evil must be eradicated! Wokeys leading a revolution on a Hoth-like snow planet!
(h) RPatz is no longer the young, slender, dishy guy…he’s still thin but now on the brink of middle-age…time cuts no one a break.
(i) The menage a trois scene between Naomi Ackie and the two Pattinsons (the amiable, kind-hearted Mickey 17 and the hostile-aggressive Mickey 18) is the most interesting interlude so far. Superfluous but interesting.
(j) I’m almost at the one-hour mark. Actually the 75-minute mark. A full hour to go. I really do need to snort a little smack. Oh, you have some? Thank you…thanks so much.
(k) Poor Toni Collette….over-acting as Ruffalo’s icy-phony wife…pocketing a paycheck but doing her career no favors.
(l) Ruffalo: “You’d better be on your toes. One false move and you’re man-burger.”
(m) At least Mickey 17 ends happily. The diverse, under-40, white coat or military fatigue-wearing Bong wokeys make things right.
The Ankler’s Richard Rushfield is forecasting a nightmare scenario (NS) for the Los Angeles-based entertainment industry, not 15 or 20 years down the road but closer to 5 to 7 years…
…for what I’m feeling right now…I know in my gut that what awaits me later this afternoon will not be pleasant, much less transporting…I’m about to enter a celestial snow colony by way of a futuristic Bong hellscape…creepers! Which RPatz’s lead protagonist feels compassion for. Two hours and 17 minutes of this…God.
In any other city a cannabis store might call itself High Society, and that would be fine. But on Ludlow Street just south of Houston (a few doors down from Katz’s Quaking Orgasm Performance Deli). a different spelling is required.
Come clean about the false Demi Moore narrative that she “sold” at the Golden Globe awards. Be honest, cut the shit.
I’ve been dying to hate Mickey 17…champing at the very bit…if only I didn’t have to sit through it.
“The brilliance of Bong Joon-ho‘s Parasite lay in how it took apart the superficial ‘niceness’ of its privileged characters. But in Mickey 17, they are so obviously and uninterestingly awful — characterizations worthy of a bad Saturday Night Live skit — that the effect is to defang the story of any genuine bite. That might be forgivable if the film was at least funny — but again and again lines and scenes strain for comic effect, but fail to deliver the goods.” –from Hugh Montgomery‘s BBC.com review.
Last night I finally paid attention to this trailer for Seven Veils, a psychological Atom Egoyan thriller starring Amanda Seyfried. It opens two days hence, but why so long after its intial premiere at the 2023 Toronto International Film Festival? A decent Rotten Tomatoes score (81%) but a shitty rating (62%) from Metacritic.
The presumption is that Meryl Streep will play an older version of Joni Mitchell in Cameron Crowe‘s forthcoming biopic, but how could ManCalledC not be thinking of Amanda Seyfried as a younger version? The uncanny resemblance between Seyfried’s singing voice and that of early ’70s, Court & Spark Mitchell….c’mon.
I deplored the stealth woke-ism and mediocrity of Kamala Harris, and yet I voted for her last November because she’s a relatively sane and sensible type…a steady-at-the-helm administrator who wouldn’t fuck things up too badly.
Alas, Donald Trump got elected for the most part because wokeys overplayed their hand (DEI oppressions, 1619 Project historical revisions, George Floyd riots & lootings, punitive #MeToo corrections and cancellations, trans intimidation in public schools + bottom surgeries for minors, free-for-all Mexican border policies, men in women’s sports, trashing the reputation of Abraham Lincoln, Kathy Kennedy destroying Star Wars franchise). They did this to themselves, and have no one but themselves to blame. Thanks, Joe!
And so, despite my loathing of Trump’s scoundrel-ish demagoguery and lying criminality, my heart fluttered last night when I heard the words “woke no longer!” The dream I’ve been holding in my heart since 2018 — that wokesters would one day be on the run and searching for tall grass — has finally come to pass.
I hate what Trump is doing on so many other fronts (Ukraine in particular) but lashing wokesters to the whipping post is a good and glorious thing.
