BARBIE

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!

Your kind generosity keeps the reviews coming!

 

A wrench and a cat walk into a bar.

Ouch!

Preachy, insipid, wrongheaded, mean-spirited, and fossil fuel-driven, "Barbie" is by far the worst movie (or more accurately, commercial) I have ever witnessed.

"Barbie" is to feminism as a wrench is to a cat.

This plastic character has no charm, no grace, no sense of romance or inner beauty of mind.

To be clear, "Barbie" is not a movie; it is a rip off.

Evidently, it would have taken John Waters or Trey Parker and Matt Stone to properly trash the capitalist monolith of Mattel with a transgressive movie based on a sex doll turned pop toy icon.

And yes, Mattel (the toy company) produced this overlong commercial.

Could anything be more obvious?

And, yes that's right, the creator of Barbie based this popular landfill ingredient on a sex doll.

They probably should have left the sex doll parts intact, at least then it could have been used for sex education.

Too late now.

Corporate cult pap. Unrelenting dystopia.

Vomiting all of the time.

You've heard of "cult of personality," well this is cult of image, used to dumb down society in the service of profit. Forget about life imitating art, here life follows toys.

Gross. Really, really gross, and sour.

Toxic.

"Brave New World" indeed.

Aldous Huxley was right all along.

Here is narcissism, infinity squared.

Let's put it this way, "Barbie" is the exact opposite of "The Wizard of Oz" in every square centimeter of quality, metaphor, and nuance.

"Barbie Land" is a gated community inhabited by lesbian Barbies and gay Kens.

How do we know this?

When Ken asks Barbie if he can stay over one night for reasons he can't explain, Barbie says, "no."

Barbie is a Breadcrumber.

"Every night is girls' night" at the Barbie house of endless fun. This is not to say that sexytime doesn't happen between consenting plastic girl/women with no vajayjays. Feet are the operative sex organ here.

In response, Ken usurps that long revered animal of teenage girl fetish obsession, the horse, as his personal connection to all things manly.

Choke.

Barbie's red or blue pill moment. She chooses the one she has to buy on Amazon.

Oh the ugliness of its sickly sweet set designs. This commercial looks like Mattel spent $1000 to make it. And yet, they still spent way too much.

At least Mattel got their money's worth out of their herd of actors. Here is a perfect example of why Alfred Hitchcock called actors, "cattle." Ryan Gosling, Margot Robbie, and the rest, are nothing more than mindless props.

Meanwhile, Barbie (Margot Robbie) has thoughts of...wait for it...death.

The death of capitalism, or the death of Mattel's profitable practice of polluting the globe with plastic?

Not so much.

No, we would have needed John Waters, or maybe even Todd Haynes, for such grounded satire.

Nevermind that David Lynch already gave us the movie that addresses female stardom lust, namely "Mulholland Drive."

This is more, battle-of-the-sexes Barbie. Equality, as a benchmark human value, is never mentioned. Take that, Simone de Beauvoir.

Valley Girl baby. Like, "literally."

"It's like barf me out. Gag me with a spoon," as Frank and Moon Zappa put it.

Anytime you hear someone utter the word "literally," I suggest you exit the room immediately.

"Barbie" is nothing more than a (nearly) two-hour commercial, designed to send hordes of potential customers to Amazon to purchase an endless array of plastic toys. And you thought only Marvel could play in that crap-infested sandbox.

Extermination of rational thought is this commercial's goal. For nearly two-hours, it achieves its mission.

Co-screenwriters Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig stumble over themselves with face-plants of dialogue and monologues that wallow in stupifaction.

"I'm just so tired of watching myself and every single other woman tie herself into knots so that people will like us. And if all of that is also true for a doll just representing a woman, then I don't even know."

What is this "us" bullshit?

The crux of all nature's beauty springs from the female form. This commercial doesn't know what beauty — female or otherwise — looks or sounds like.

Immaturity and idiocy go hand in hand. In Barbie Land there is no such thing as individuality.

A trip to the OBGYN substitutes for a sexual encounter.

Where is John Waters when you need him?

"Barbie" is a chunky diarrhea stain on humanity.

Notice how you feel sick to your stomach just from looking at images from this worthless commercial.

Peter Bogdanovich was a skilled and informed master filmmaker and screenwriter. Check out "The Last Picture Show," and compare it to this filmic (sic) turd called "Barbie."

What a fecking embarrassment and insult "Barbie" is to society, and to Cinema.

Greta Gerwig is a hack screenwriter, and a remedial filmmaker at best.

You wanna see post-modern feminism in cinematic action, check out "I Am Curious, Yellow and Blue," and tell me how that beautiful piece of cinéma vérité art compares with Gerwig's commercial garbage.

I could go on but why should I. — Note the absence of a question mark.

I will say that anyone calling themself a "film critic" has no business giving "Barbie" a passing grade; if they do, they should turn in their credentials and quit because they haven't the first clue about Cinema, film, or movies — to pretend otherwise is just wrong.

Rated PG-13. 114 mins.

LESS THAN ZERO STARS

THE HOUSE ON 92ND STREET

   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!

 

Created during America’s ham-fisted effort at producing propaganda films during the early 1940s era of World War II, “The House On 92^nd Street” stands as a noxious example of patriotic pap disguised as faux docu film noir.

For all of the film’s publicity about it featuring actual FBI footage, the filmmakers couldn’t be bothered to use the film’s promised 92^nd street location; the building featured was located on 93^rd street just east of Madison Avenue in Manhattan’s Carnegie Hill district.

The picture was made following the same period that Luis Buñuel was hired to edit U.S. propaganda films for the Museum of Modern Art from 1940 to 1942 before Government agents got a hold of Salvador Dali’s 1942 autobiography that named Buñuel as an atheist and a Marxist.

The powers in charge had misunderstood Buñuel’s political persuasion when he replied that he was a “Republican,” meaning that he sided against General Franco’s fascist regime which was responsible for the deaths of more than one million civilians during the Spanish Civil War. Therein lies a clue about where American political leanings bent. Dali's revelation caused Buñuel to be fired from his post at MoMA.

Hokey as a three-dollar-bill, “The House On 92^nd Street” layers on heavy-handed voice-over narration by newsreel standard bearer Reed Hadley about the oh-so-reliable FBI’s ability to defeat foreign (namely Nazi) spy operations attempting to take seed on U.S. soil. J. Edgar Hoover’s name gets dropped a lot. Bombastic music underscores a pre-roll that credits all but the “leading players” as F.B.I. personnel.

“Actual F.B.I. surveillance films” show men carrying trunks into the German embassy in Washington D.C. Director Henry Hathaway professedly shot the footage himself, guerilla-style. Nevermind that the pulp story by Charles G. Booth takes place in Manhattan. Fifteen minutes of such preamble is necessary before William Eythe’s double agent Bill Dietrich is ordered into action to investigate shenanigans at Elsa’s Dress shop at 53 E 92^nd street. Signe Hasso plays Elsa Gebhardt as a villain with avarice dripping from her every movement and word.

Although loosely based on the F.B.I.’s Duquesne espionage ring which captured more than two dozen spies and traitors, “The House On 92^nd Street, is most memorable for Elsa’s last minute transition into male form with the aid of a man’s suit, hat, and a handsome pair of two-tone high-button shoes. I wonder if the film’s producer Louis de Rochemont (of “March of Time” newsreel fame) would have given the film’s leading part to William Eythe if he knew that Eythe was a closeted gay actor. Considering that J. Edgar Hoover exerted his considerable will over the picture, perhaps all is as was intended.

Either way, “The House On 92^nd Street” is a laughable piece of American propaganda for all of the reasons you’d expect. The U.S. political machine has never understood how to under-promise and over-deliver. Rather the reverse is always proven to be true. With cartoon villains and overconfident heroes like these around, no one is safe.

Not Rated. 88 mins.

 

AMERICAN SNIPER

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!

Breaking Modern Presents

BreakingModern.com

 

 

Corporate Political Military Junta Propaganda
Hollywood Commits Cultural Suicide With Clint Eastwood’s Help

All films are political; all films are propaganda, some more so than others. Imagine a movie entitled “Russian Marksman.” Visualize one named “Israeli Shooter.” These simple titles offhandedly refer to military occupations currently taking place in oppressed countries. As a Palestinian living under occupation, you probably wouldn’t be pleased to see “Israeli Shooter” playing at your local cinema.

These corollary film titles evoke racist ideologies once you consider that modern wars are motivated by imperialist agendas seeking to kill, humiliate, and rob weaker cultures of their natural resources and cultural identities. The capitalist ideology of war is built on the intrinsic basis of racism. So it follows that Hollywood’s current system serves as the corporate-controlled US Government’s most visible means of spreading its xenophobic political agenda next to Fox News. Thanks Warner Brothers; thanks a lot.

"American Sniper" is a war movie built more on fantasy than reality. It would be more correctly categorized in the war fantasy genre shared by films such as Jack Starrett’s “The Losers” (1970) or Quentin Tarantino’s “Inglorious Basterds.” If you want to see recent movies that fit more accurately into the war genre designation you could check out Kimberly Peirce’s “Stop-Loss” (2008) or Paul Haggis’s “In the Valley of Elah” (2007).

“Stop-Loss” is especially germane to “American Sniper” because it exposes the U.S. military’s treacherous and unprecedented policy of sending soldiers back for two, three, four, or more tours of duty, pushing combatants past their breaking points and into walking time-bombs. Chris Kyle, this film’s real-life sniper, completed four tours of duty in Iraq. The average US soldier in Vietnam completed just one tour of duty, as did soldiers in World War II and the Korean War.

One of the film’s most egregious examples of manufactured fiction occurs in the guise of a “rival” Iraqi sniper named Mustafa (Sammy Sheik) who presents Chris Kyle with an all-encompassing focal point of mirror reflection. The cartoonish construct of the Mustafa character sends a clear signal about the film’s crude level of disinformation.

It’s revealing that Senator John McCain felt obligated to speak up in defense of “American Sniper,” a one-note piece of cinematic propaganda so obnoxious that it threatens to undermine the very nature of its intended effect. The Hollywood military scriptwriting machine can’t compete with Paul Verhoeven when it comes to creating nuanced cinematic propaganda; see “Starship Troopers,” a brilliant example of antiwar satire.

In the same way that the Internet has liberated hordes of people from the oppression of religious doctrine (atheism has exploded exponentially around the globe in the past 10 years), it is possible that “American Sniper’s” enormous box office success will backfire as more people wake up to the con game that America’s corporate political military junta is running. Consider Scientology’s “prison of belief.” Their membership is in steady decline since the Internet exposed the Scientology con game for what it is. “American Sniper” is catching a wellspring of justified criticism that the movie is doomed to soak in forever more.

The U.S. Government’s long-running collaboration with Hollywood dates back to War World II. Recent war films such as “Black Hawk Down” (2001), and “United 93” (2006) wear their obvious political ideologies on their sleeves. Still, many American movie audiences buy (hook, line, and sinker) every piece of spoon-fed text and subtext they’re given as gospel truth. Coincidentally, the US military refers to its “Hooyah”-happy soldiers as “true believers.” Nevermind that the shallow pond of every soldier’s belief system is built entirely on misrepresentation. Chris Kyle believes he is fighting in Iraq to avenge 9/11, of all things. (Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11.) Cue the sad trombone. He would have been better off selling his soul to the Church of Scientology.

U.S. soldiers have a lot in common with religious zealots; their blind faith enables them to kill without question. Chris Kyle sported a blood-red Crusader cross tattoo to make his Christian faith obvious to those around him. He worships at a bloody altar. In “American Sniper” hero worship is everything. Chris Kyle is nicknamed Legend. We hear the tag a lot throughout the film. “Savages” is the epithet applied to the Iraqi freedom fighters that oppose their US occupiers in once-vibrant cities that are now reduced to rubble.

Chris Kyle’s “first kill” is a child soldier whose mother passes him a grenade to throw at a crew of heavily armed American soldiers stationed around an armored security vehicle. How and why does it occur that the film’s intended American audience doesn’t choose to empathize with the brave Iraqi mother and child whose military-aged male relatives and friends have all been killed or hauled off to prison?

Gilo Pontecorvo’s classic 1966 resistance film “The Battle of Algiers” eloquently addresses this question with a cinema vérité-styled depiction of the French occupation of Algeria. “The Battle of Algiers” extrapolates on historic truisms regarding occupations from the perspective of the occupied freedom fighters, i.e. occupied people, always fight harder and better than their occupiers because they have more at stake. And, in the end, resistance fighters always win. Take Afghanistan for example. The British couldn’t take it despite three attempts; the Russians got chased out; and now the Taliban are stronger than ever after handing the American military's ass on a sand-covered plate, albeit it in trillions of pieces.

How would you respond if you were put in a similar situation, in which most of your town’s buildings had been leveled by foreign occupiers who can’t even speak your language and yet kick in your doors at 5am to violate your every mode of dignity? History has proven time again and time again exactly how you would respond, just like the desperate mother and son that we see Chris Kyle kill with single shots from his well-hidden sniper’s position. Clearly, he was not a student of history.

In his book, Chris Kyle said that he was “not a fan of politics.” He failed to see, however, that he was its victim. A particularly repulsive scene in “American Sniper” shows Chris’s father at the dinner table with his wife and two young sons. Dad preaches a brand of Christian indoctrination as dogmatic and dubious as anything in Islamic scripture when he distills humanity into three types: sheep, sheepdogs, and wolves. Papa Kyle detests bullies, and yet fails to recognize his own reflection in their mirror. The ferociously angry father insists that his sons be sheepdogs protecting those weaker than them. Throughout the film, Chris Kyle repeats his vociferous desire to protect his fellow soldiers, unrepentant bullies like him, whom he mistakes for guardians of America. He talks as if he is the oppressed freedom fighter doing battle with occupiers on his own home soil. Talk about twisted and confused.

Forget that America went to war with Iraq under false pretenses concerning non-existent “weapons of mass destruction,” or that the Big Oil interests that pushed for Bush Junior’s invasion of Iraq led Americans to believe that the Iraq War was directly linked to avenging the perpetrators of 9/11. Everybody and his sister knows that the Iraq war was always only ever about oil and the ever-growing greed of the military industrial complex.

“American Sniper” is an artless nuance-free hate piece built on insultingly unsound narrative ground. That Clint Eastwood got roped in to be a party to such a nasty bit of business will forever tarnish his career, but who cares? As long as patriotic (read sheep-like) American audiences walk around with shouts of “hooyah” (“Heard—Understood—Acknowledged”) rattling around in their dumb little heads, then America’s corporate political military junta has done its job. Their big mistake lies in presuming that Americans are that “dumb” to begin with. Message to the Hollywood political military junta: we know more than you do, and we know what to do with our knowledge.

Rated R. 134 mins.

ZERO STARS