SHAKEDOWN: WHY BRAZILIAN POLICE AND CORPORATE MEDIA SHOOK DOWN AND DEFAMED OLYMPIC SWIMMERS

By Cole Smithey

Welcome!

Groupthink doesn't live here, critical thought does. This ad-free website is dedicated to Agnès Varda and to Luis Buñuel. Punk heart still beating.

Get cool rewards when you click on the button to pledge your support through Patreon.

Thanks a lot acorns!

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Remember the reports of the broken bathroom door, and broken mirror, and broken soap dispenser? All lies espoused by the oh-so-reliable Brazilian police who were busy shooting protesters with rubber bullets and killing hundreds of other impoverished Rio citizens as part of the daily violence that goes on in the same hellhole that filmmaker Hector Babenco famously captured in his unforgettable neo-realist drama “Pixote” in 1981. Babenco’s film was, and is, a cinematic plea for an end to an inhuman social system in and around Rio that has blood running in the streets on a minute-to-minute basis. An all too common, and tragic, footnote to "Pixote" came a few years later when the film's charismatic non-professional lead actor Fernando Ramos de Silva was murdered by a cop in the city's litter-strewn streets. Evidently, not much has changed since 1981.

You got played if you’re one of the suckers who bought into the establishment media’s pillorying of American Olympic champion swimmers Ryan Lochte, Jimmy Feigen, Gunnar Bentz, and Jack Conger. They fell victim to anti-American public relations attack designed and executed by Rio de Janeiro’s notoriously corrupt police officials. As if ignoring the public robbery of four Olympic athletes wasn’t enough, the Brazilian Police Department exploited the crime to deflect blame and extort money from the victims. The “security guard” bandits were never even named, much less arrested. Here is a criminal international incident twisted to blame American Olympic champions and humiliate anyone who isn’t Brazilian.

An utter lack of editorial oversight and responsibility would be a generous alibi for the thousands of media outlets (American and otherwise) that fell for the Brazilian police's ploy. The first rule of engagement with any media outlet that everything is a lie, and you have to read between the lines to come away with any semblance of truth.

Long story short: a Rio yellow taxi with four American Olympic swimmers inside pulls up to a gas station in the wee hours of the morning. Gas station workers and security guards shark the [obviously drunk] America Olympic athletes desperate to relieve themselves. Bathroom doors are locked. The four young men go behind the station and urinate in the grass.

Let he or she who has not peed upon sage or brush, throw the first stone. If you pretend to feign indignation at four inebriated guys peeing in the grass behind a gas station at six in the morning, you be frontin’ homie.

An armed guard approaches the athletes, presumably in the act of urinating. Lochte plays the punk when he pulls down a paper ad posted on the side of the gas station as he exits the area. The athletes calmly get inside their waiting cab before being ordered out of their taxi by two black-clad men with badges, both waving around loaded guns. Happy 2016 Olympics suckers.

At gunpoint the athletes are made to sit down with their hands raised, execution style. At one point in the video of these events, we see Lochte stand up to argue with the guards holding he and his pals at gunpoint. Brave or dumb. Doesn’t matter. Dude stood up. Ryan Lochte did the right thing in the heat of the moment regardless of how drunk he was. You feel me? 

An English/Portuguese-speaking man intercedes to translate what the guards are saying to their victims. This ringer tells the athletes that the guards are demanding that each of the four American hostages pay up for damages done to the gas station property. Who knows if that grass will be able to survive so much Olympian pee? The four swimmers forked over whatever money they had, and were allowed to leave. The badges wearing men-in-black used semi-automatic handguns to rob four American Olympic champions at gunpoint, and got away with it Scot-free. You feel me now?

Don’t forget that this was these athletes’ big night of celebration behind a punishing schedule of Olympic heats. Why these Olympic athletes didn’t have proper chauffeurs and official escorts for their big night out on the town remains a burning question that no one in corporate media has thought to ask.    

If Lochte and his teammates are smart they’ll hire a big American law firm to sue every single media outlet that libeled them, and also personally sue each Rio police official responsible for the miscarriage of justice and public smearing they committed. If these athletes do follow up in the courts, Ryan Lochte Jimmy Feigen, Gunnar Bentz, and Jack Conger could become the most financially successful Olympic athletes in its history.

So what about the legacy of the 2016 Rio Olympic Games? Police officials on an international revenge crusade have reduced that sporting relic to the public mugging, and consequent pillorying, of four of the fastest swimmers in the world. File the 2016 Olympics in the file entitled, “Mistakes to never make again.”

Brazilian politicians and authorities are still smarting two years after Edward Snowden’s revelations about the NSA’s spying on Brazil’s [now impeached] president Kilma Rousseff. Whether you call Rousseff’s ousting a “soft” coup or a hard one, one thing’s for sure; there was nothing legal or proper about it. At the time, the Guardian news outlet called the situation, “the most serious diplomatic fallout to date from the revelations by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden."

Aside from the monies they extorted, the Rio police’s lust for vengeance derives from the slaughter that their soccer team received at the hands of the German team at the 2014 FIFA World Cup before a crowd of 58,000 in Brazil. The 7 to 1 loss spoke volumes of inconvenient truth about where the rubber meets the road in World Cup soccer.

At the recent Olympics, Brazil’s shootout match victory against Germany, that delivered gold to Brazil’s soccer team for the first time in history, has drawn much suspicion for obvious reasons. Sometimes, winning is losing. Let’s also not forget the U.S. Department of Justice’s recent indictment of Marco Polo Del Nero, the president of Brazil’s soccer federation. Salt on an open wound.   

I stopped watching the Olympics the second the story about the robbery of the U.S. swimmers came out. I wasn’t the only one. Brazil sent its message loud and clear, if you come to Rio you can expect to be robbed at gunpoint. The police will then rob you again before they let you leave the country. We know this because they made Lochte’s companions each pay a charity donation in the neighborhood of $15,000. You don’t need to worry about the nature of the unidentified charity; this is strictly a cash deal. False arrest, kidnapping, extortion, and liable per se are just a few of the charges that a large firm of American attorneys should be looking over.

Whether or not you bought into the lies dreamed up by the Rio police, which every media outlet in the world regurgitated like twice-vomited split pea soup, I bet you’re not in any hurry to vacation in Rio anytime soon.

If the shoe were on the other foot, and this same sequence of events played out for a group of foreign athletes visiting a city in America, this automatically politicized narrative would have played out in a very different way. You can bet the gas station guards would be sitting in the pokey, and not the athletes.

Much has been made of Ryan Lochte’s exaggeration of specifics involving the proximity of the gun pointed in his direction, and cocking of said pistol, but there is no question that two guns were drawn and the four swimmers were made to sit down, at gunpoint.

More egregious than Lochte’s enriched telling of events were exaggerations from the Rio police, who stated that the American swimmers had vandalized a bathroom at the gas station. Supposedly, this unruly group of hooligans reportedly broke a door, a mirror, and a hand-soap dispenser broken. That none of this happened didn’t stop every newswire in the world from running the lies. Good luck finding any retractions. What you will find, however, in supposedly respectable news outlets such as the Guardian, is reference to “the Olympic gas station hold-up that wasn’t.” Except that it was a hold-up followed by a police shakedown.

Welcome to Rio, now give us all your cash along with your reputation, and we'll sell you back your passports for $15,000. Don't come back, or [better yet] don't come at all.

Posted by Cole Smithey at 12:01 PM in America, Corporate Corruption, Corporate Culture, Sports | Permalink

 

Remember the reports of the broken bathroom door, and broken mirror, and broken soap dispenser? All lies espoused by the oh-so-reliable Brazilian police who were busy shooting protesters with rubber bullets and killing hundreds of other impoverished Rio citizens as part of the daily violence that goes on in the same hellhole that filmmaker Hector Babenco famously captured in his unforgettable neo-realist drama “Pixote” in 1981. Babenco’s film was, and is, a cinematic plea for an end to an inhuman social system in and around Rio that has blood running in the streets on a minute-to-minute basis. An all too common, and tragic, footnote to "Pixote" came a few years later when the film's charismatic non-professional lead actor Fernando Ramos de Silva was murdered by a cop in the city's litter-strewn streets. Evidently, not much has changed since 1981.

You got played if you’re one of the suckers who bought into the establishment media’s pillorying of American Olympic champion swimmers Ryan Lochte, Jimmy Feigen, Gunnar Bentz, and Jack Conger. They fell victim to anti-American public relations attack designed and executed by Rio de Janeiro’s notoriously corrupt police officials. As if ignoring the public robbery of four Olympic athletes wasn’t enough, the Brazilian Police Department exploited the crime to deflect blame and extort money from the victims. The “security guard” bandits were never even named, much less arrested. Here is a criminal international incident twisted to blame American Olympic champions and humiliate anyone who isn’t Brazilian.

An utter lack of editorial oversight and responsibility would be a generous alibi for the thousands of media outlets (American and otherwise) that fell for the Brazilian police's ploy. The first rule of engagement with any media outlet that everything is a lie, and you have to read between the lines to come away with any semblance of truth.

Long story short: a Rio yellow taxi with four American Olympic swimmers inside pulls up to a gas station in the wee hours of the morning. Gas station workers and security guards shark the [obviously drunk] America Olympic athletes desperate to relieve themselves. Bathroom doors are locked. The four young men go behind the station and urinate in the grass.

Let he or she who has not peed upon sage or brush, throw the first stone. If you pretend to feign indignation at four inebriated guys peeing in the grass behind a gas station at six in the morning, you be frontin’ homie.

An armed guard approaches the athletes, presumably in the act of urinating. Lochte plays the punk when he pulls down a paper ad posted on the side of the gas station as he exits the area. The athletes calmly get inside their waiting cab before being ordered out of their taxi by two black-clad men with badges, both waving around loaded guns. Happy 2016 Olympics suckers.

At gunpoint the athletes are made to sit down with their hands raised, execution style. At one point in the video of these events, we see Lochte stand up to argue with the guards holding he and his pals at gunpoint. Brave or dumb. Doesn’t matter. Dude stood up. Ryan Lochte did the right thing in the heat of the moment regardless of how drunk he was. You feel me? 

An English/Portuguese-speaking man intercedes to translate what the guards are saying to their victims. This ringer tells the athletes that the guards are demanding that each of the four American hostages pay up for damages done to the gas station property. Who knows if that grass will be able to survive so much Olympian pee? The four swimmers forked over whatever money they had, and were allowed to leave. The badges wearing men-in-black used semi-automatic handguns to rob four American Olympic champions at gunpoint, and got away with it Scot-free. You feel me now?

Don’t forget that this was these athletes’ big night of celebration behind a punishing schedule of Olympic heats. Why these Olympic athletes didn’t have proper chauffeurs and official escorts for their big night out on the town remains a burning question that no one in corporate media has thought to ask.    

If Lochte and his teammates are smart they’ll hire a big American law firm to sue every single media outlet that libeled them, and also personally sue each Rio police official responsible for the miscarriage of justice and public smearing they committed. If these athletes do follow up in the courts, Ryan Lochte Jimmy Feigen, Gunnar Bentz, and Jack Conger could become the most financially successful Olympic athletes in its history.

So what about the legacy of the 2016 Rio Olympic Games? Police officials on an international revenge crusade have reduced that sporting relic to the public mugging, and consequent pillorying, of four of the fastest swimmers in the world. File the 2016 Olympics in the file entitled, “Mistakes to never make again.”

Brazilian politicians and authorities are still smarting two years after Edward Snowden’s revelations about the NSA’s spying on Brazil’s [now impeached] president Kilma Rousseff. Whether you call Rousseff’s ousting a “soft” coup or a hard one, one thing’s for sure; there was nothing legal or proper about it. At the time, the Guardian news outlet called the situation, “the most serious diplomatic fallout to date from the revelations by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden."

Aside from the monies they extorted, the Rio police’s lust for vengeance derives from the slaughter that their soccer team received at the hands of the German team at the 2014 FIFA World Cup before a crowd of 58,000 in Brazil. The 7 to 1 loss spoke volumes of inconvenient truth about where the rubber meets the road in World Cup soccer.

At the recent Olympics, Brazil’s shootout match victory against Germany, that delivered gold to Brazil’s soccer team for the first time in history, has drawn much suspicion for obvious reasons. Sometimes, winning is losing. Let’s also not forget the U.S. Department of Justice’s recent indictment of Marco Polo Del Nero, the president of Brazil’s soccer federation. Salt on an open wound.   

I stopped watching the Olympics the second the story about the robbery of the U.S. swimmers came out. I wasn’t the only one. Brazil sent its message loud and clear, if you come to Rio you can expect to be robbed at gunpoint. The police will then rob you again before they let you leave the country. We know this because they made Lochte’s companions each pay a charity donation in the neighborhood of $15,000. You don’t need to worry about the nature of the unidentified charity; this is strictly a cash deal. False arrest, kidnapping, extortion, and liable per se are just a few of the charges that a large firm of American attorneys should be looking over.

Whether or not you bought into the lies dreamed up by the Rio police, which every media outlet in the world regurgitated like twice-vomited split pea soup, I bet you’re not in any hurry to vacation in Rio anytime soon.

If the shoe were on the other foot, and this same sequence of events played out for a group of foreign athletes visiting a city in America, this automatically politicized narrative would have played out in a very different way. You can bet the gas station guards would be sitting in the pokey, and not the athletes.

Much has been made of Ryan Lochte’s exaggeration of specifics involving the proximity of the gun pointed in his direction, and cocking of said pistol, but there is no question that two guns were drawn and the four swimmers were made to sit down, at gunpoint.

More egregious than Lochte’s enriched telling of events were exaggerations from the Rio police, who stated that the American swimmers had vandalized a bathroom at the gas station. Supposedly, this unruly group of hooligans reportedly broke a door, a mirror, and a hand-soap dispenser broken. That none of this happened didn’t stop every newswire in the world from running the lies. Good luck finding any retractions. What you will find, however, in supposedly respectable news outlets such as the Guardian, is reference to “the Olympic gas station hold-up that wasn’t.” Except that it was a hold-up followed by a police shakedown.

Welcome to Rio, now give us all your cash along with your reputation, and we'll sell you back your passports for $15,000. Don't come back, or [better yet] don't come at all.

"Ricky and his family have been fighting an uphill struggle against debt since the 2008 financial crash. An opportunity to wrestle back some independence appears with a shiny new van and the chance to run a franchise as a self-employed delivery driver. It’s hard work, and his wife’s job as a carer is no easier. The family unit is strong but when both are pulled in different directions everything comes to breaking point."

Cinema's most revered and prolific leftist filmmaker Ken Loach ("Kes," "The Wind That Shakes The Barley," "I, Daniel Blake") returns once more to Cannes with yet another social-activist film to touch the hearts and minds of audiences. Loach works with his longtime screenwriting partner Paul Laverty to dramatize the toll being exacting on working British families by a government system designed to humiliate and punish average citizens attempting to live productive lives. Loach's filmic efforts may not always strike with the intended affect, but his films are never less than rigorous and convincing. Ken Loach won the Palme d'Or for "The Wind That Shakes The Barley" in Cannes in 2006, where I was in attendance.

Get cool rewards when you click on the button to pledge your support through Patreon. Thanks a bunch pal!

Welcome!

Groupthink doesn't live here, critical thought does.This ad-free website is dedicated to Agnès Varda and to Luis Buñuel.

Get cool rewards when you click on the button to pledge your support through Patreon.

Thanks a lot acorns!

Your kind generosity keeps the reviews coming!

 

 

_{Karen lays out her editorial agenda.}

Recently, actress/director Brie Larson used her award acceptance speech (for the Crystal Award for Excellence in Film at the Women In Film + Lucy Awards event) to put forth an ideological agenda intended to push racial and sexual equality among film critics — Rotten Tomatoes’ “Top Critics” specifically.

Affirmative-action comes to film review aggregation. It wasn’t clear whether Larson was attacking Rotten Tomatoes or the corporate media outlets that garner the aggregate film review website’s coveted “Top Critics” designation, but it was clear that she isn’t keen on white male film critics, or even necessarily female film critics for that matter.

_{Karen savors the odor of her own flatulence.}

With heavy sighs Larson quoted stats from a report titled “Critic’s Choice?” by USC’s Annenberg Inclusion Initiative under founder and director Stacy L. Smith.

Larson stated, “67 percent of the Top Critics reviewing the 100 highest grossing movies in 2017 were white males, less than a quarter were white women, and less than ten percent were unrepresented men, only 2.5 percent of those Top Critics were women of color.”

The authors of Smith’s report propose several solutions for groups that work with or educate critics. Most notably, they offer a set of target inclusion goals for the field.

Smith said, “Groups should think of the phrase 30/30/20/20 — this is the U.S. population breakdown for white males, white females, underrepresented males and underrepresented females.”

“This report reveals the absence of women of color working as reviewers — especially on movies built around female and underrepresented leads.” 

Know that the USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative has multiple corporate partners including, but not limited to, Google, Epix, Sony Pictures Entertainment, and Walt Disney. You couldn’t get much closer to the corporate Hollywood industrial complex than USC if you tried. “Tainted by industry involvement” rolls off the lips so easily in this context. 

Rotten Tomatoes “Top Critics” (full disclosure, I am not on that lofty list) is an elite group favored by a system that grandfathers in critics hired to write for old-school media outlets such as Newsday, The Washington Post, or the Village Voice. Jane Doe might never have written a film review in her life, but as soon as she gets hired by the Arizona Republic to write about movies, she wins the coveted crown of Top Critic on Rotten Tomatoes. La dee da.  

This is important to know considering that, in her speech, Larson illogically reached out to minority [would-be] bloggers whose chances at becoming a Rotten Tomatoes “Top Critic” is considerably less than the already thorny task of being admitted as a Rotten Tomatoes critic in the first place. Rotten Tomatoes doesn’t typically recognize independent blogs.

Larson said, “We [Hollywood] are expanding to make films that better reflect people that [sic] buy movie tickets, but they are not allowed enough chances to read public discourse on these films by the people that these films were made for.” 

Karen makes more money than all of the film critics on RottenTomatoes combined.

Larson seems to have a blind spot for the blockbuster Marvel superhero franchise movies she’s currently involved with as the first female “Captain Marvel,” since that saturated market caters to lowest common denominator movie audiences rather than to the minority-made independent films that Larson uses to mask her actual intention. Evidently, this is what Larson means when she refers to "films that better reflect people that [sic] buy movie tickets." Cough. 

“It really sucks that reviews matter, but reviews matter. Good reviews out of festivals give small independent films a fighting chance to be bought and seen. Good reviews help films gross money, good reviews slingshot films into awards contenders. A good review can change your life; it changed mine.”

It's significant to note the subtle dismantling if critical thought at play in Larson's bent logic. A "bad" review means both a negative review, and a review considered incompetent based on the author's competence. Thus it follows that any negative review is automatically bad. Pauline Kael is rolling over in her grave.

Larson clearly wants “good” (positive) reviews for every movie she makes, and she wants those reviews to come from young, (ostensibly under or unemployed) female, minority audiences who she thinks don’t know any better. Larson blatantly shows just how dumb she considers minorities to be. In Brie Larson’s mind, negative reviews are for suckers. Evidently, harnessing Rotten Tomatoes’ algorithmic groupthink for that all-important 100% mark looms large in a movie industry attempting to manufacture [non]critical opinion.

The intent here seems to be to force a utopic vision of critical equality down the nation’s throat via Rotten Tomatoes. Nevermind that in this utopic vision, critical thought is the bane of its foundation since Larson’s emphasis is on positive reviews equaling to that precious 100% Rotten Tomatoes score that distributors can then use in advertising. Really. 

_{Me, me, me, me, me, me, me. Brie Larson, a textbook narcissist.} 

Larson comes across as tone-deaf to the fact that the number of rent-paying film critic jobs in this country probably falls well beneath 200 positions. In effect, Brie Larson is trolling for free, young, untrained, uneducated, labor (in the guise of independent bloggers), who she imagines will miraculously be anointed as Top Critics on Rotten Tomatoes. It’s strange that Larson doesn’t prioritize the safety of American immigrants and black people being hunted like animals in this country. Larson’s social posturing is all about her livelihood, not theirs. Entitled, condescending, patronizing, and ignorant are just a few terms that paint Larson's character.

As has always been the case throughout history, there needs to be more minority critical voices expressing values and ideas that really do challenge the status quo (think John Waters's "Multiple Maniacs" in 1970). Think David Lynch with "Eraserhead" in 1977. Charles Burnett's "Killer of Sheep" in 1978.

It is clear that challenging the status quo is not what Brie Larson or Stacy L. Smith are encouraging or promoting, quite the opposite. Larson and Smith represent the worst aspects of the status quo because they mask their capitalist motives with a false plea for human equality, the last thing that either of these duplicitous women want for themselves, or for the world. 

Brie Larson didn’t spare the insults. “I do not need a 40-year-old white dude to tell me what didn’t work for him about “A Wrinkle In Time,” it wasn’t made for him. I wanna know what that film meant to women of color, to biracial women, to teen women of color, to teens that are biracial.” What about the things these movies get wrong? Brie Larson doesn't want to know. 

_{Justin Chang rocks.}

As Justin Chang pointed out in his brilliant piece for the LA Times on this subject, “Who is this movie for?” is an inherently limiting question” that “leads to ridiculous generalizations.” The result of “writing off men [critics] as a gender is hard to do without projecting a similarly dim view of women.” Yep, sexism is sexism.

Chang went on to say, “Above all, “Who is this movie for?” rules out the possibility of sympathetic imagination, the ability to empathize with a perspective other than one’s own, as the chief impulse behind artistic depiction and appreciation. We negate the possibility of sympathetic imagination when we assume that someone’s particular affinity for a work of art will be dictated in advance by specifics of race, gender and age. It’s not that those specifics aren’t factors. It’s that some have a tendency to mistake factors for absolutes.” 

It seems that Brie Larson doesn’t know the first thing about film criticism. I didn’t “need” a 55-year-old white lady (namely Pauline Kael) to tell me what "didn’t work" for her regarding Bernardo Bertolucci’s “1900” (my favorite film of all time), but I can re-read Kael’s negative review of that film over and over because her writing and perspective is so rich. Passion. Pure passion. You want to know what makes a great film critic like Justin Chang or Pauline Kael so great? Passion. You either have it or you don't. If you want to be a film critic then you've got to dirty but keep it immaculately clean the whole time. Hunter S. Thompson, I salute you brother. 

I get a serious intellectual and emotional kick out of reading Pauline Kael tear my favorite movie apart. That's entertainment. And, let me tell you I get my money's worth.

_{Brie Larson doesn't know me like that. Wanna talk diversity? Here I am on my High School swim team, The Ebony Pearls. Can you pick me out? Black lives matter.}

Any criticism of art is about resonance, not redundancy. I’d be bored stiff reading a film review that patronized me the way Brie Larson’s idea of film criticism portends. I already have my own opinions, I don’t want to be told what I already think or know. I'm grown up enough to know that different people will have different opinions than my own. So what? That's how we prove our respect for one another. 

Larson exploited the #MeToo movement to smear white male film critics with the same dung used on such reprehensible examples such as Donald Trump, and Harvey Weinstein. Ms. Larson made a point to sniffle for dramatic effect and roll her eyes while reeling off statistics about the disproportionate number of white male critics as opposed to “people of color;” meanwhile Stanislavsky rolled over in his grave. Method acting be damned, this was ham acting at its worst.

“Am I saying that I hate white dudes?” “No (complete with snotty vocal fry), I’m not.” Except, she was; Brie Larson was very clearly stating that she hates “white dudes.”

This is exclusion, not inclusion, territory. Larson isn’t promoting independent thought, far from it. We learn from Larson’s speech that now movies are made for specific classes, if not nationalities, of audiences. White males are not invited to the party.

Larson put a fine point on it. “And, for the third time, I don’t hate white dudes.” 

Believe me, Brie Larson, we “white dudes” get just how much you hate us. You don’t need to deny it anymore. Clearly, Brie Larson has an issue with older white men. All the more reason for Stacy L. Smith to use Larson as a Trojan Horse to smuggle through a pork-barrel ideology designed to push out professional film critics (i.e. film historians) engaging in the demands of the job, which intrinsically prioritizes criticizing faults and flaws of any movie as based on years of experience working in the medium. Larson’s speech (ostensibly authored by Smith) humble shames cheap or free minority labor to do their bidding, namely writing positive film reviews at the expense of professional integrity. It’s as though they [Smith and Larson] were shilling for good Yelp reviews.   

Still, the immediate net effect of Larson’s war on critical thought has been superficially positive so far, if you don’t count the potential effect it will have on film critic jobs currently held by “white dudes over 40.” The Sundance Film Festival and the Toronto Film Festival have pledged that 20 percent of their press credentials be given to underrepresented journalists and critics. There is, however, no small amount of irony in the fact that The Toronto Film Festival famously and frequently charges journalists to attend. Then there’s the fact of a journalist having to bankroll flight and hotel bookings before setting out to complete a workload of writing (if done well) that would make a college student cramming for exams look lazy by comparison. 

From a critical perspective, Brie Larson’s speech was ignorant, preachy, and cynical. It was ageist, racist, and sexist. Larson delivered her frequently patronizing lines like a petulant spoiled child talking above her education level. The actress went so far as to break the forth wall to pat herself on the back during the speech for positive reviews of her own film “The Room.” Larson lacked charisma and intelligence. The social themes that Larson equated to human equality lacked the necessary humanitarian foundation that she pretended to imbue. Larson could not conceal the capitalist subtext simmering beneath the surface of her awkward argument. The speech was unwatchable for its pathological loathing of “white” men.

You can easily extrapolate that 10 years from now, another version of Brie Larson will come along to bemoan how he or she doesn’t need 30-year-old woman of color to tell them what didn’t work for them regarding a movie that wasn’t made for them. These are treacherous waters.  

I don’t “need” to be berated by rich white women for doing the work that my passions lead me to do, namely working as a film critic. I consider myself lucky to be able to constantly study, celebrate, and criticize the medium of Global Cinema for its universality of the human condition. I take umbrage when someone goes out of their way to insult and diminish me as a professional and as a human being based on my race and age. I give Brie Larson and Stacy L. Smith a grade of F for attempting to subvert the nature of Cinema as something to be segregated rather than embraced by all.

FOCUS ON CANNES 2019: SORRY WE MISSED YOU —KEN LOACH

"Ricky and his family have been fighting an uphill struggle against debt since the 2008 financial crash. An opportunity to wrestle back some independence appears with a shiny new van and the chance to run a franchise as a self-employed delivery driver. It’s hard work, and his wife’s job as a carer is no easier. The family unit is strong but when both are pulled in different directions everything comes to breaking point."

Cinema's most revered and prolific leftist filmmaker Ken Loach ("Kes," "The Wind That Shakes The Barley," "I, Daniel Blake") returns once more to Cannes with yet another social-activist film to touch the hearts and minds of audiences. Loach works with his longtime screenwriting partner Paul Laverty to dramatize the toll being exacting on working British families by a government system designed to humiliate and punish average citizens attempting to live productive lives. Loach's filmic efforts may not always strike with the intended affect, but his films are never less than rigorous and convincing. Ken Loach won the Palme d'Or for "The Wind That Shakes The Barley" in Cannes in 2006, where I was in attendance.

Get cool rewards when you click on the button to pledge your support through Patreon. Thanks a bunch pal!

BRIE LARSON SHILLS FOR POSITIVE FILM REVIEWS FROM MINORITIES

Welcome!

Groupthink doesn't live here, critical thought does.This ad-free website is dedicated to Agnès Varda and to Luis Buñuel.

Get cool rewards when you click on the button to pledge your support through Patreon.

Thanks a lot acorns!

Your kind generosity keeps the reviews coming!

 

 

_{Karen lays out her editorial agenda.}

Recently, actress/director Brie Larson used her award acceptance speech (for the Crystal Award for Excellence in Film at the Women In Film + Lucy Awards event) to put forth an ideological agenda intended to push racial and sexual equality among film critics — Rotten Tomatoes’ “Top Critics” specifically.

Affirmative-action comes to film review aggregation. It wasn’t clear whether Larson was attacking Rotten Tomatoes or the corporate media outlets that garner the aggregate film review website’s coveted “Top Critics” designation, but it was clear that she isn’t keen on white male film critics, or even necessarily female film critics for that matter.

_{Karen savors the odor of her own flatulence.}

With heavy sighs Larson quoted stats from a report titled “Critic’s Choice?” by USC’s Annenberg Inclusion Initiative under founder and director Stacy L. Smith.

Larson stated, “67 percent of the Top Critics reviewing the 100 highest grossing movies in 2017 were white males, less than a quarter were white women, and less than ten percent were unrepresented men, only 2.5 percent of those Top Critics were women of color.”

The authors of Smith’s report propose several solutions for groups that work with or educate critics. Most notably, they offer a set of target inclusion goals for the field.

Smith said, “Groups should think of the phrase 30/30/20/20 — this is the U.S. population breakdown for white males, white females, underrepresented males and underrepresented females.”

“This report reveals the absence of women of color working as reviewers — especially on movies built around female and underrepresented leads.” 

Know that the USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative has multiple corporate partners including, but not limited to, Google, Epix, Sony Pictures Entertainment, and Walt Disney. You couldn’t get much closer to the corporate Hollywood industrial complex than USC if you tried. “Tainted by industry involvement” rolls off the lips so easily in this context. 

Rotten Tomatoes “Top Critics” (full disclosure, I am not on that lofty list) is an elite group favored by a system that grandfathers in critics hired to write for old-school media outlets such as Newsday, The Washington Post, or the Village Voice. Jane Doe might never have written a film review in her life, but as soon as she gets hired by the Arizona Republic to write about movies, she wins the coveted crown of Top Critic on Rotten Tomatoes. La dee da.  

This is important to know considering that, in her speech, Larson illogically reached out to minority [would-be] bloggers whose chances at becoming a Rotten Tomatoes “Top Critic” is considerably less than the already thorny task of being admitted as a Rotten Tomatoes critic in the first place. Rotten Tomatoes doesn’t typically recognize independent blogs.

Larson said, “We [Hollywood] are expanding to make films that better reflect people that [sic] buy movie tickets, but they are not allowed enough chances to read public discourse on these films by the people that these films were made for.” 

Karen makes more money than all of the film critics on RottenTomatoes combined.

Larson seems to have a blind spot for the blockbuster Marvel superhero franchise movies she’s currently involved with as the first female “Captain Marvel,” since that saturated market caters to lowest common denominator movie audiences rather than to the minority-made independent films that Larson uses to mask her actual intention. Evidently, this is what Larson means when she refers to "films that better reflect people that [sic] buy movie tickets." Cough. 

“It really sucks that reviews matter, but reviews matter. Good reviews out of festivals give small independent films a fighting chance to be bought and seen. Good reviews help films gross money, good reviews slingshot films into awards contenders. A good review can change your life; it changed mine.”

It's significant to note the subtle dismantling if critical thought at play in Larson's bent logic. A "bad" review means both a negative review, and a review considered incompetent based on the author's competence. Thus it follows that any negative review is automatically bad. Pauline Kael is rolling over in her grave.

Larson clearly wants “good” (positive) reviews for every movie she makes, and she wants those reviews to come from young, (ostensibly under or unemployed) female, minority audiences who she thinks don’t know any better. Larson blatantly shows just how dumb she considers minorities to be. In Brie Larson’s mind, negative reviews are for suckers. Evidently, harnessing Rotten Tomatoes’ algorithmic groupthink for that all-important 100% mark looms large in a movie industry attempting to manufacture [non]critical opinion.

The intent here seems to be to force a utopic vision of critical equality down the nation’s throat via Rotten Tomatoes. Nevermind that in this utopic vision, critical thought is the bane of its foundation since Larson’s emphasis is on positive reviews equaling to that precious 100% Rotten Tomatoes score that distributors can then use in advertising. Really. 

_{Me, me, me, me, me, me, me. Brie Larson, a textbook narcissist.} 

Larson comes across as tone-deaf to the fact that the number of rent-paying film critic jobs in this country probably falls well beneath 200 positions. In effect, Brie Larson is trolling for free, young, untrained, uneducated, labor (in the guise of independent bloggers), who she imagines will miraculously be anointed as Top Critics on Rotten Tomatoes. It’s strange that Larson doesn’t prioritize the safety of American immigrants and black people being hunted like animals in this country. Larson’s social posturing is all about her livelihood, not theirs. Entitled, condescending, patronizing, and ignorant are just a few terms that paint Larson's character.

As has always been the case throughout history, there needs to be more minority critical voices expressing values and ideas that really do challenge the status quo (think John Waters's "Multiple Maniacs" in 1970). Think David Lynch with "Eraserhead" in 1977. Charles Burnett's "Killer of Sheep" in 1978.

It is clear that challenging the status quo is not what Brie Larson or Stacy L. Smith are encouraging or promoting, quite the opposite. Larson and Smith represent the worst aspects of the status quo because they mask their capitalist motives with a false plea for human equality, the last thing that either of these duplicitous women want for themselves, or for the world. 

Brie Larson didn’t spare the insults. “I do not need a 40-year-old white dude to tell me what didn’t work for him about “A Wrinkle In Time,” it wasn’t made for him. I wanna know what that film meant to women of color, to biracial women, to teen women of color, to teens that are biracial.” What about the things these movies get wrong? Brie Larson doesn't want to know. 

_{Justin Chang rocks.}

As Justin Chang pointed out in his brilliant piece for the LA Times on this subject, “Who is this movie for?” is an inherently limiting question” that “leads to ridiculous generalizations.” The result of “writing off men [critics] as a gender is hard to do without projecting a similarly dim view of women.” Yep, sexism is sexism.

Chang went on to say, “Above all, “Who is this movie for?” rules out the possibility of sympathetic imagination, the ability to empathize with a perspective other than one’s own, as the chief impulse behind artistic depiction and appreciation. We negate the possibility of sympathetic imagination when we assume that someone’s particular affinity for a work of art will be dictated in advance by specifics of race, gender and age. It’s not that those specifics aren’t factors. It’s that some have a tendency to mistake factors for absolutes.” 

It seems that Brie Larson doesn’t know the first thing about film criticism. I didn’t “need” a 55-year-old white lady (namely Pauline Kael) to tell me what "didn’t work" for her regarding Bernardo Bertolucci’s “1900” (my favorite film of all time), but I can re-read Kael’s negative review of that film over and over because her writing and perspective is so rich. Passion. Pure passion. You want to know what makes a great film critic like Justin Chang or Pauline Kael so great? Passion. You either have it or you don't. If you want to be a film critic then you've got to dirty but keep it immaculately clean the whole time. Hunter S. Thompson, I salute you brother. 

I get a serious intellectual and emotional kick out of reading Pauline Kael tear my favorite movie apart. That's entertainment. And, let me tell you I get my money's worth.

_{Brie Larson doesn't know me like that. Wanna talk diversity? Here I am on my High School swim team, The Ebony Pearls. Can you pick me out? Black lives matter.}

Any criticism of art is about resonance, not redundancy. I’d be bored stiff reading a film review that patronized me the way Brie Larson’s idea of film criticism portends. I already have my own opinions, I don’t want to be told what I already think or know. I'm grown up enough to know that different people will have different opinions than my own. So what? That's how we prove our respect for one another. 

Larson exploited the #MeToo movement to smear white male film critics with the same dung used on such reprehensible examples such as Donald Trump, and Harvey Weinstein. Ms. Larson made a point to sniffle for dramatic effect and roll her eyes while reeling off statistics about the disproportionate number of white male critics as opposed to “people of color;” meanwhile Stanislavsky rolled over in his grave. Method acting be damned, this was ham acting at its worst.

“Am I saying that I hate white dudes?” “No (complete with snotty vocal fry), I’m not.” Except, she was; Brie Larson was very clearly stating that she hates “white dudes.”

This is exclusion, not inclusion, territory. Larson isn’t promoting independent thought, far from it. We learn from Larson’s speech that now movies are made for specific classes, if not nationalities, of audiences. White males are not invited to the party.

Larson put a fine point on it. “And, for the third time, I don’t hate white dudes.” 

Believe me, Brie Larson, we “white dudes” get just how much you hate us. You don’t need to deny it anymore. Clearly, Brie Larson has an issue with older white men. All the more reason for Stacy L. Smith to use Larson as a Trojan Horse to smuggle through a pork-barrel ideology designed to push out professional film critics (i.e. film historians) engaging in the demands of the job, which intrinsically prioritizes criticizing faults and flaws of any movie as based on years of experience working in the medium. Larson’s speech (ostensibly authored by Smith) humble shames cheap or free minority labor to do their bidding, namely writing positive film reviews at the expense of professional integrity. It’s as though they [Smith and Larson] were shilling for good Yelp reviews.   

Still, the immediate net effect of Larson’s war on critical thought has been superficially positive so far, if you don’t count the potential effect it will have on film critic jobs currently held by “white dudes over 40.” The Sundance Film Festival and the Toronto Film Festival have pledged that 20 percent of their press credentials be given to underrepresented journalists and critics. There is, however, no small amount of irony in the fact that The Toronto Film Festival famously and frequently charges journalists to attend. Then there’s the fact of a journalist having to bankroll flight and hotel bookings before setting out to complete a workload of writing (if done well) that would make a college student cramming for exams look lazy by comparison. 

From a critical perspective, Brie Larson’s speech was ignorant, preachy, and cynical. It was ageist, racist, and sexist. Larson delivered her frequently patronizing lines like a petulant spoiled child talking above her education level. The actress went so far as to break the forth wall to pat herself on the back during the speech for positive reviews of her own film “The Room.” Larson lacked charisma and intelligence. The social themes that Larson equated to human equality lacked the necessary humanitarian foundation that she pretended to imbue. Larson could not conceal the capitalist subtext simmering beneath the surface of her awkward argument. The speech was unwatchable for its pathological loathing of “white” men.

You can easily extrapolate that 10 years from now, another version of Brie Larson will come along to bemoan how he or she doesn’t need 30-year-old woman of color to tell them what didn’t work for them regarding a movie that wasn’t made for them. These are treacherous waters.  

I don’t “need” to be berated by rich white women for doing the work that my passions lead me to do, namely working as a film critic. I consider myself lucky to be able to constantly study, celebrate, and criticize the medium of Global Cinema for its universality of the human condition. I take umbrage when someone goes out of their way to insult and diminish me as a professional and as a human being based on my race and age. I give Brie Larson and Stacy L. Smith a grade of F for attempting to subvert the nature of Cinema as something to be segregated rather than embraced by all.