Age of Disclosure: a Documentary Review - The Truth is Out There...Somewhere

AGE OF DISCLOSURE - Currently Available to Rent or Buy on VOD

My Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT/SEE IT. This is a good documentary for those new to the UFO subject to watch as it features a lot of credible people, but for those looking for new info, look elsewhere.

Age of Disclosure, directed by Dan Farah, is a new documentary which makes the claim that the U.S. and other governments have been gathering evidence – including alien craft and bodies, over the last 80 years of extraterrestrial intelligence visiting earth.

I have been immersed in amateur “UFO studies” since the 1980s…back when they were called UFOs and not UAPs (Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena). UFOs were for the majority of that time a fringe topic, spoken about either in jest or in sincere and sometimes frantic whispers.

But ever since the esteemed New York Times published an article in 2017 that reported that the U.S. Navy had a multitude of encounters with very strange and advanced technology right off the coast of the United States – and had videos of those encounters, then the UFO topic has become much more acceptable to discuss in serious company.

Once the press gave UFOs legitimacy, Senators and Congressman have been drawn to the subject and have given it even more credence by holding hearings and things of that nature.

Since 2017 there have also been a plethora of whistleblowers who have told stories of first-hand UFO encounters, government programs, crash retrievals, body retrievals, reverse engineering and the like.

The most front facing person in the UFO story since 2017 is undoubtedly Lue Elizondo, a former Special Operator in US military intelligence who claims he was put in charge of a government program called AATIP (Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program) – which investigated UAPs and if they were a threat to national security. The answer to that question is a resounding “YES!”

Elizondo has been on all of the TV networks, lots of podcasts and been the focus of many documentaries since 2017. In Age of Disclosure, he is essentially the star, guiding viewers through the dark corridors where UFO information and government power collide. Elizondo tells a stark tale, one filled with intrigue, corruption, and even murder. Quite the story.

As someone who is in many discussion groups regarding UFOs I can attest that Elizondo is a polarizing figure. His military and intelligence background give him a certain stature and credibility, but that same experience also makes him untrustworthy in the eyes of some. Why is that? Well, as an intelligence agent he was…or is…a professional liar trained in the art of deception and propaganda.

Is Elizondo lying and deceiving the public now regarding UFOs and plots and conspiracies and murder? Your guess is as good as mine…but mine says, “yes, he is lying”. I say that as someone who believes that UFOs do exist, that “alien” intelligence has come to earth and is still here now and that government knows it.

So, if I believe, in general, the story that Elizondo tells, then why do I think he is up to no good? I do not know the exact reason Elizondo is doing the things he’s doing, but I get the sense he is a nefarious player in this game, meant to, at a minimum, muddy the waters, if not be an out and out distraction.

What is odd about Elizondo is that he constantly says that he knows so much secret and powerful information about this topic but he’s not allowed to say what it is because that information is “classified”. Essentially, what he is saying is, “trust me, bro!” No thanks.

In Age of Disclosure Elizondo makes the claim that a secret government cabal runs things and even presidents don’t know the truth. I think that is probably accurate not just regarding UFOs but a lot of other things. The problem though is that Elizondo also claims that there was a meeting of the 27 people who run things, and they seriously debated murdering Elizondo – as they have done to other people, because he is a threat to their power. Quite a claim.

I have no problem with a claim like that as governments kill people…routinely….without due process or anything like it. The problem I have is that Elizondo says in the documentary he won’t reveal the code names of those 27 people. Hmmm. Why not? These people are plotting to kill you and you are protecting them? Strange. Elizondo then says that if he is found floating in the Potomac that he “didn’t kill himself.” Okay…so these people are real and they still might kill you but you won’t even tell us their codenames – which is a good thing to know if Elizondo does end up floating in the Potomac? Elizondo also just says that this shadowy group has killed other people, but he doesn’t say who they killed – which is kind of an important detail don’t you think?

This sort of tortured logic from Elizondo is always unchallenged by UFO afficionados and, more importantly, by the mainstream media, which is why I find it all so…curious.

Beyond the information that Elizondo shares, the other issue I have is that he just seems like a bullshit artist and con-man as he uses all the same old tricks to sell his bullshit without ever actually telling us anything.

This documentary has some very, very serious people in it, and they all act seriously and dress seriously and speak seriously. But Elizondo, unlike all of his fellow compatriots who wear suits, wears jeans and v-neck black t-shirt that emphasizes his tattooed body and his fat/muscled arms. It all screams unprofessionalism, and reeks of a desperate narcissism and “look at me!” mindset.

Besides Elizondo there really are some major league people in this film that lend a great deal of credence to the topic.

First off is Marco Rubio of all people. Rubio, the former senator from Florida and current Secretary of State, is someone I loathe with the fury of a thousand suns, but in Age of Disclosure he acquits himself extraordinarily well and comes across as not just reasonable but very thoughtful and serious – things I never thought I’d say about him. And the fact that a poll-cat politician like Rubio would get out in front of this topic and spend some of his credibility on it says something.

Other very serious people spotlighted in the film include Stanford University Medical School professor Garry Nolan, who is one of the more compelling voices in the entire UFO discussion in general, as well as quantum physicist Hal Puthoff and astrophysicists Eric Davis – both beacons of knowledge, wisdom, reason and experience.

Also featured are the Navy pilots who interacted with the alleged UFOs, Commander David Fravor and Ryan Graves as well as US Navy Chief Oceanographer Tim Gallaudet, all of whom are extremely credible.

Less credible is Christopher Mellon, a former Undersecretary of Defense who has years of experience in the Pentagon and intelligence. Mellon comes across as a very smart, well-informed, very reasonable person, but his professional background in intelligence, and his family – the famed Mellon banking family, scuttle his credibility in my eyes despite his serious presentation.

As for the documentary itself…it is well put together, it looks professional – with the notable exception of Elizondo, and it puts forth credible people and credible looking people to make the case that UFOs are real, the government knows about them and is hiding what it knows, and a vast conspiracy is operating behind the scenes to keep us all in the dark and under their thumb.

But with that said, if you’ve been following this topic as long as I have, or even in just recent years, then you will come to find that no new information is shared or revealed in this documentary. It is more of the same of – “I know all of this amazing stuff but I just can’t tell you - sorry!!”

If you are new to the topic or if you are a grizzled vet like me but want to bring a newbie into the discussion, this could be a good place to start as it has lots of serious people in suits with loads of credibility that normies will find compelling. U.S. Senators and congressman and military leaders talking about UFOs being real is powerful stuff to John and Jane Q. Public who have been conditioned for nearly a century to laugh at this stuff – so Age of Disclosure could help break that conditioning.

If you really wanted to put together a starter pack for a newbie to get into and understand the UFO issue, I would say start with Out of the Blue – James Fox’s masterful 2002 documentary that is the Citizen Kane of UFO documentaries. I’d follow that up with Fox’s 2009 film I Know What I Saw. I’d also throw in Jeremy Corbell’s intriguing 2018 documentary Bob Lazar: Area 51 and Flying Saucers.

I would conclude the UFO education of a newbie by having them watch the 2024 four-part documentary series from JJ Abrams’ production company, Beyond: UFOs and the Unknown. This series is as good as it gets, especially for those who are well versed on the subject.

As for Age of Disclosure, this film came with a lot of hype and a lot of speculation that it would, in fact, lead to actual disclosure from the government regarding aliens. I’d like for that to be true, and even cynical and skeptical old me perks up my ears when I hear people saying Trump is soon going to make a statement declaring that we are not alone. But the truth is…I doubt it.

The way these things have gone in recent years is that some person will come forward, like whistleblower David Grusch, or some documentary will come out, or some earth-shattering interview will occur, or a major government hearing will take place, and there will be a lot of sound and fury and ultimately it all signifies nothing.

The standard practice is that things get heightened, the fever rises…and then it subsides and absolutely nothing changes in any way, shape, or form. Whistleblowers come forward but don’t actually blow the whistle, insiders speak out but don’t actually reveal inside information…and the saga on and on.

I’d like for a wildcard president like Trump to spill the beans but the truth is he is a charlatan and just like with the JFK assassination, and the Epstein files, and all the rest, Trump will huff and puff and blow nothing but his marginal mandate – or if you believe the internet rumors – Bill Clinton.

So once again we reach a heightened moment in regards to UFO disclosure and once again that moment passes with everyone left in the dark and the powers that be left in charge. Sigh.

My recommendation regarding Age of Disclosure is it is somewhat worth seeing but to wait until you can watch it for free when it hits a streaming service and don’t do what I did which was buy it on VOD – the bottom line is that while it has some usefulness, especially for those new to the subject, but it ultimately it really isn’t worth paying for.

©2025

Mr. Scorsese: A Documentary Review - Into the Mind of a Master

MR. SCORSESE

My Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. A flawed but fascinating documentary that thrives when examining Martin Scorsese’s childhood, and stumbles when trying to navigate the personal politics of Hollywood.

Mr. Scorsese, directed by Rebecca Miller, is a five-part documentary series that examines the life and career of esteemed auteur Martin Scorsese.

The series, which debuted on October 17th, is available to stream on Apple TV+.

Martin Scorsese is, in my not so humble opinion, most definitely on the Mount Rushmore of greatest filmmakers of all-time. His career, which has spanned over half a century, is littered with such greatness it is difficult to fathom. But as Mr. Scorsese shows us, Martin Scorsese’s career, and life, has been anything but smooth sailing.

The series opens with an episode titled “A Stranger in a Strange Land”, which chronicles Scorsese’s tempestuous childhood in New York City’s Little Italy – a neighborhood which at the time was riddled with crime and violence.

The very best part of Mr. Scorsese is the first episode and all other episodes dealing with Scorsese’s childhood. The reason his childhood is so fascinating is that by examining it you can literally see where Scorsese’s filmmaking artistry was born.

A sickly child, Scorsese was confined to his apartment and had to watch the world through the panes of his window…which essentially created his worldview simulated through the box of a film screen. This detachment from the world allowed for his analytical side to connect with his artistic…thus a filmmaker was born.

In addition to being confined to his apartment, Scorsese’s severe asthma forced his father to take him to movie theatres during the hot summer days and nights – since movie theatres were the only place in the city with air conditioning which would ease his asthmatic symptoms. This gave Scorsese a great education in filmmaking and storytelling, as well as bonded cinema with his love for his father…a powerful force indeed.

On top of all that, Scorsese’s childhood was riddled with characters that would come to fill is films…gangsters, clowns, losers, thugs. Whether it be Mean Streets, Raging Bull, Goodfellas, Casino or The Irishman, Scorsese’s movies are populated with some of the very same, or at least similar, people as those that populated his childhood.

Another staple of Scorsese’s childhood which directly relates to his films is his Catholicism. Scorsese obviously has a tortured relationship with Catholicism (I can relate), but it is undoubtedly the animating force in his artistic life.

Even the darkest of Scorsese films are fueled by Catholicism, in one way or another. As are his other more straight forward films about faith…be it The Last Temptation of Christ, Kundun or Silence.

As the docu-series progresses we watch Scorsese graduate the mean streets of Little Italy and attempt to navigate the even meaner streets of Hollywood.

As compelling as Scorsese is as a person, and as astonishing as his career has been, one can’t help but feel a bit cheated watching this documentary try and tell the story of his storied filmmaking. The reason for this is that Martin Scorsese isn’t just the subject of this documentary, he is also the controlling force of it. And no matter how honest Scorsese may attempt to be, it is foolish to expect him to really hold his own feet to the fire.

Due to the constraints of Scorsese’s position – an active filmmaker and producer, we never get the down and dirty truth about his struggles with Hollywood. The only brief glimpse of the ugly world of it all is when Harvey Weinstein is held up for the briefest bit of ridicule and contempt….and even that feels soft-pedaled and exceedingly safe.

That said, it is an important exercise to go through Scorsese’s career if for no other reason than it is easy to forget how astonishing and tumultuous it has been.

The highs of Scorsese’s career…which would undoubtedly be his films Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, Goodfellas, and The Departed (his lone Oscar), take on more meaning when you understand the struggles he endured to even get his movies financed, never mind recognized.

It seems that no matter how great Scorsese was, and he is one of the all-time greats, Hollywood never embraced him and the money people never accepted him.

And so Scorsese was left to scratch and claw just to get movies made, and even when they were made he still had to fight to get them released in the form he wanted. A perfect example of this is one of Scorsese’s dream projects – Gangs of New York, which starred the biggest movie star of the era – Leonardo DiCaprio, and the best actor of the era – Daniel Day-Lewis, and yet Scorsese had to go to war with a grotesque pig like Harvey fucking Weinstein to keep control of the film. Ultimately Scorsese lost that battle, and the film greatly suffered because of it – and one is left to wonder how much even greater could his career could have been if it weren’t for the Weinstein types and their ilk fucking everything up.

One of the nice benefits of Mr. Scorsese is that it is chock full of people who normally would never appear in a documentary. For example, Leonardo DiCaprio is in it, Robert DeNiro is in it, as is Daniel Day- Lewis…who also happens to be married to the documentary director Rebecca Miller.

Miller brings a deft, if somewhat overly protective, touch to the documentary, no doubt herself informed by her artistically brilliant famous father – Arthur Miller, and his tumultuous life. Rebecca Miller’s instinct to protect Scorsese is probably born from her desire to protect her own father and also by the fact that Scorsese is so darn likeable and such a compelling figure.

If there is one takeaway from Mr. Scorsese besides the obvious – which is Scorsese’s singular artistic genius which was often beyond the world’s understanding, it is that Martin Scorsese seems like someone you’d love to spend as much time with as possible.

As a documentary about Martin Scorsese, Mr. Scorsese is a flawed work as it is much too deferential to be truly enlightening…but that doesn’t mean it is devoid of enlightenment. The first two episodes about his childhood in particular, are really fantastic and give as much insight into Scorsese as an artist as is possible.

If you are looking for a bareknuckle expose on the excesses of Scorsese’s life – of which there is much, this isn’t the docu-series for you…and if you’re looking for backroom Hollywood scuttlebutt…the same is true. But if you’re looking to discover what made Martin Scorsese the filmmaking genius he is…this documentary does as well as any could.

In writing this review I was tempted to put together a ranking of all of Scorsese’s films. After attempting to do so I decided against it because it is an impossible task. Scorsese is too great and too important a filmmaker to simply reduce his films to best and worst. His movies don’t work that way. I would feel the same about similar monumental talents like Akira Kurosawa or Ingmar Bergman.

Instead, I would just offer this brief viewer’s guide.

If you want to watch the seminal Scorsese works, start with Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, Goodfellas, and Casino. If you want to dive a bit deeper into the canon then watch The King of Comedy, The Color of Money, Cape Fear.

If you want to watch the most accessible movies in the canon (notice I said accessible and not audience friendly) then go with The Departed, The Wolf of Wall Street, Shutter Island, The Aviator and The Irishman.  

If you really want a glimpse into the mind and soul of Scorsese then watch three often overlooked films (which are among my favorites) The Last Temptation of Christ, Kundun, and Silence.

And finally, the film that is so often overlooked people tend to forget he made it but which is truly a remarkable piece of work, is The Age of Innocence. The Age of Innocence is a parlor drama that most would think is out of his wheelhouse but which reveals Scorsese to be a truly master filmmaker. Just a tremendous piece of work.

In conclusion, Mr. Scorsese is not the greatest documentary about a filmmaker you’ll ever see, but it is an enjoyable handful of hours spent with one of the greatest to ever do it, and one of the more compelling directors in cinema history…so it is worth your time.

©2025

Becoming Led Zeppelin: A Documentary Review - It's Been a Long Time Since I Rock and Rolled

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT/SKIP IT – Led Zeppelin are among the greatest rock bands of all-time, but this documentary, despite featuring some scintillating music, is a bit too anti-septic to be a worthy monument to their massive musical accomplishments.

The documentary Becoming Led Zeppelin, directed by Bernard MacMahon, was released in theatres on February 7th of this year and hit Netflix on June 7th…and I just watched it.

The documentary chronicles the famed rock group’s formation and early years and features interviews with all the band members – Jimmy Page (guitar), John Paul Jones (bass), and Robert Plant (vocals) along with archival audio from late drummer John Bonham – who died in 1980 from alcohol induced pulmonary aspiration (he choked on his own vomit).

Like many red-blooded males of my generation (Gen X), I discovered Led Zeppelin in my youth – when they were still together and before Bonham’s untimely death. As a result, I have become fond of saying that every boy goes through a Led Zeppelin phase…or at least every boy should go through a Led Zeppelin phase.

The band’s power and majesty, or as its detractor’s may describe it – its bombast and bravado, is fantastical fuel for youth marinated in copious amounts of testosterone and magical thinking.

Bonham’s skilled primal ferocity on drums, mixed with Page’s muscular blues guitar work, Jones’ masterful heavy yet nimble bass and Plant’s brilliant banshee wail make for a mystical musical experience for twelve-year old boys…and that feeling doesn’t fade with time.

I remember in my teens going through different Led Zeppelin phases where my favorite album would shift from Led Zeppelin II to Led Zeppelin I to Physical Graffiti to Zoso to Houses of the Holy to Presence to Led Zeppelin III to In Through the Out Door to Presence (Presence is often considered their “worst album” but I think “Nobody’s Fault but Mine” is maybe my favorite Zeppelin song – paging Dr. Freud!!) and back again…and I would listen to my favorite album over and over, getting joyously lost in the mystery and maze of each masterfully constructed musical journey.

Watching Becoming Led Zeppelin certainly re-ignites that manic sensation at times, particularly when the band is shown playing live. For example, the footage from its first big gig, which was played in Denmark in 1968, is absolutely electrifying to witness, as is one of their first British gigs, which is very funny because they are absolutely crushing it in front of a very disinterested and confused bunch of old people and kids.  

It is undeniably true that the music in this documentary is phenomenal, and it jumps off the screen and grabs you by the throat and throttles you left, right, front and back in glorious fashion.

Oddly enough though, as good as the music sounds in this documentary, the sound mix is absolutely dreadful as the music is rich, vibrant and loud and the interviews are much to quiet, tinny and muddled, which can make for a frustrating experience.

The members of the band all come across as quite likeable and thoughtful people in their interviews. Page, once a satanic wizard on stage with his guitar, is a quiet, soft-spoken and quite engaging fellow. John Paul Jones, the mysterious and seemingly aloof bassist, comes across as an extraordinarily interesting and charming guy. And Robert Plant, the once upon a time golden god of a front man, seems like a sly and savvy older man still coming to terms with the wounds of his youth.

All that said, the biggest issue I have with Becoming Led Zeppelin is that it is far, far too antiseptic a documentary considering Led Zeppelin weren’t just one of the greatest rock bands of all-time, they were infamous for being one of the most debauched bands of all-time…quite an accomplishment.

The documentary is a rather sugar-coated journey through the band’s early years that never enlightens or, for knowledgeable fans of the band, informs very much.

Like so many documentaries nowadays, Becoming Led Zeppelin is subject-controlled hagiography, pure and simple, and because of that restricted and contrived nature it never gives any true insight into this incredible band or shows the very complex humanity of any of the band members – all of whom are musical geniuses in their own right.

The film runs two hours long and for a fan like me – who I admit hasn’t, for one reason or another, listened to Led Zeppelin in a long time, revisiting the music was a shot of pure adrenaline and nostalgia, and made the film worth watching.

But if you are looking to get into depth, or learn anything of value about Led Zeppelin, or want to be entertained by tales of their epic debauchery, then Becoming Led Zeppelin will be a disappointment…granted it’ll be a disappointment with a superior and savage soundtrack, but a disappointment nonetheless.

©2025

CHAOS: The Manson Murders - A Documentary Review: Errol Morris' and Netflix's Anti-Conspiracy Agenda

My Rating: 1 out of 5 stars

MY Recommendation: SKIP IT. Errol Morris makes a mess of his look into the Manson murders by never daring to search for truth. An intellectually incurious and vapid film that commits journalistic malpractice.

CHAOS: The Manson Murders is a new Netflix documentary from acclaimed documentarian Errol Morris based on Tom O’Neill’s expansive book CHAOS: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties.

Tom O’Neill was a magazine reporter given an assignment in 1999 to do write up on how the infamous Manson murders of 1969 changed Hollywood. O’Neill dove into the story so deeply that he was neck-deep in all things Manson for twenty years, and finally published his findings in 2019 in his epic Tome CHOAS: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History the Sixties.

What O’Neill uncovered in his investigation is much too extensive and expansive to flesh out here, and most definitely too expansive to be given its proper due in a documentary that runs a measly 90 minutes, which CHAOS: The Manson Murders does.

Errol Morris is one of the more respected documentarians of our time but he is shockingly off his game and way out of his depth on CHAOS: The Manson Murders, which feels like a cheap and tawdry episode of Dateline rather than a serious documentary.

This flimsy and foolish documentary is so vapid and vacuous as to be guilty of documentary malpractice. The documentary ignores the majority of O’Neill’s work, obfuscates much of the truth he revealed, and instead of diving deeper or at least adequately stating O’Neill’s thesis and argument, it spends it’s time rehashing frivolities and pondering inane questions like “why are people so interested in these murders?”

For example, one of the many things O’Neill proves in his book is the corruption and moral and ethical bankruptcy of famed Manson prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi – who also wrote the famous book on the case Helter Skelter. Morris doesn’t even mention Bugliosi until the final twenty minutes of his documentary, and never gets into any of the scandals that O’Neill uncovered and experienced first-hand in his reporting.

The biggest bombshell O’Neill uncovered in his book is the connection between Charles Manson and villainous government psychiatrist, Jolly West. Jolly West, for those who do not know, was a psychiatrist for the CIA who headed up MKULTRA, the CIA’s mind-control program. West seems to have been connected to many curious and nefarious events throughout his time as a CIA psychiatrist.

For example, when Jack Ruby was sitting in a Dallas prison cell waiting to be interviewed by the Warren Commission, he got a special visit from Jolly West, who spent the day with him and at the end of that day, lo and behold, Jack Ruby had lost his mind and West recommended he be institutionalized. How interesting.

Jolly West was in San Francisco working out of a free clinic in Haight-Ashbury during the “Summer of Love”, which also happened to coincide with the implementation of CIA’s CHAOS program - which was designed to co-opt and destroy the anti-war movement through the introduction of drugs and agent provocateurs. The FBI program COINTELPRO was designed to do the same thing and started at the same time.

Well, you’ll never guess who was in the Haight-Ashbury clinic of Jolly West once a week for a year during the late sixties…you guessed it…Charles Manson. Manson brought his girls in there for medical treatment and he himself met his parole officer in the same building. The same parole officer who, time after time, refused to have Manson’s parole revoked when he got arrested multiple times in San Francisco…and who even wrote letters urging judges not to imprison him. Curious.

Errol Morris shows little to no interest in the Jolly West intrigue, instead just shrugging his shoulders at the notion that the CIA was really up to no good with its MKULTRA program. Morris even says that ‘yes, the CIA wanted to do bad things, but it never succeeded’. Hmmm.

O’Neill then chimes in and corrects Morris by stating that there is documented proof (found in a document the CIA covered up for half as century) from Jolly West himself, who admitted in a CIA memo that he had mastered the ability to create a “Manchurian candidate” type of situation by implanting false memories in patients through hypnosis and various drugs. Morris replies to this information in shockingly flaccid fashion when he retorts, “well, Jolly West could be lying”.

This exchange perfectly encapsulates why Errol Morris is so out of his depth with this story. He is repulsed by “conspiracy theories” of any kind and prefers to embrace mundane explanations, even when the mundane explanation isn’t adequate and the “conspiracy theory” is well documented. This approach shows that Morris isn’t interested in truth but instead in his own respectability amongst the corporate media and “people who matter”.

Morris’ cowardice and journalistic impotence reminded me of a podcast I listened to a few years back about the RFK assassination titled The RFK Tapes. This podcast got a lot of traction at the time as the host of it did a deep dive into the conspiracy surrounding the RFK assassination. And just as the evidence had piled up to a tipping point in favor of conspiracy, the podcast host had a very abrupt change of heart and instead not only denounced the idea of a conspiracy surrounding the RFK assassination, he stopped investigating it at all. His reason for this change of heart (notice I say heart and not mind), was because, in essence, he felt bad people like Alex Jones believed in conspiracy theories and propagated them so he didn’t want to be a conspiracy theorist. So, in order to protect delicate sensibilities of the Sandy Hook families – which has no connection or correlation to the RFK assassination, this podcaster simply turns off his mind and turns his back on his research and his research partner.

This podcaster didn’t discover something that proved the conspiracy theory wrong, quite the opposite…but he did realize that he didn’t love the Truth more than he loves his reputation amongst the corporate media. This podcaster played it off as some sort of moral and ethical act of courage to do so…but it was an act of intellectual cowardice.

Errol Morris just did the same thing with the CIA’s connection with the Manson murders and Tom O’Neill’s expansive research. Morris has such an intense case of cognitive dissonance regarding O’Neill’s thesis he chooses to ignore the lion’s share of his research and expertise and instead elevates and gives the last word to Bobby Beausoliel, a member of Manson’s ‘family’ who was arrested for murder before the Tate-LaBianca murders occurred.

Beausoliel met Manson in Los Angeles about a year before the murders, and he was never in San Francisco with Manson and the family, and he has no first-hand experience about what happened regarding the Tate-LaBianca murders, as he had been on the run for ten days prior to the murders and arrested the day before they occurred. In other words, Beausoliel, who has been in prison since his arrest in 1969, is incapable of having a big picture view of Manson and who may or may not have “created” him and potentially “directed” him. But Morris still lets Beausoliel get the last word of the film by saying essentially, ‘people make too much about this stuff, the truth is simple…Occam’s Razor rules the day – Manson was just a bad dude out for revenge.’

Ultimately, Errol Morris is one of those intellectuals who can’t get out of his own way and is so crippled by his slavish devotion to institutionalism, establishment and his paymasters in the corporate media (like Netflix), that he is incapable of seeing what is right in front of his nose.

I know many people of a similar ilk, who are incredibly smart and successful but are incapable of thinking critically or of seeing what is obvious to those that have eyes to see and the courage to actually look.

Netflix has adamantly embraced the establishment’s anti-conspiracy position in its documentaries. Besides this Manson documentary there was The Octopus Murders documentary series which investigated the Danny Casolaro story and despite all of the evidence to the contrary, came to the conclusion that well there is no conspiracy because conspiracies are bad. Sigh.

I really, really wish CHAOS: The Manson Murders was good, or at least did an adequate job of presenting Tom O’Neill’s work, but it is really bad and it doesn’t do the least bit of justice to O’Neill’s work. This documentary is, quite frankly, an absolute travesty.

My recommendation for anyone, Manson aficionados or newbies alike, is to pick up O’Neill’s book CHAOS: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties, and read it.

The book isn’t perfect, in fact it can be downright frustrating because O’Neill refuses to speculate or project, but instead sticks to what he can prove. The book tells a fascinating tale and takes you down many tantalizing roads of inquiry but repeatedly comes up just short because the case is so old and cold and so many people associated with it are no longer alive.

But it is O’Neill’s journalistic restraint that gives the book credibility. This is not some wild-eyed exercise in wish fulfillment, this is a serious examination of one of the most curious cases in American juris prudence and cultural history, where the CIA, FBI, LAPD, LA County Sheriff’s Department, Bureau of Prisons, and the Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office, all behaved in the most bizarre of ways in order to enable Manson before his arrest, and pervert a free and fair trial after it.

If you’re interested in the reality of the world that you inherited and currently inhabit…go read Tom O’Neill’s CHAOS: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties, and skip entirely Errol Morris’ mendacious, deceptive, and deceitful documentary CHAOS: The Manson Murders, for it is a total waste of time.

©2025

Oscar's Round Up - The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

OSCARS ROUND UP

Well…that was tough.

At the 97th Academy Awards some good things happened…namely that Anora, a movie I like and respect, won a bevy of awards – most notably Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actress. And some bad things happened…like I had to sit through an abysmal Oscar telecast to see Anora win.

The Oscar telecast, as is its wont, ran an excruciating four hours and was chock full of lifeless musical numbers and impotent gags and jokes as it was hosted by feverishly flaccid unfunnyman Conan O’Brien.

The Oscars’ consistent futility through the years has earned it a well-deserved thrashing on the pop culture whipping post…and last night’s telecast was a target rich environment for those foolish enough to watch, but smart enough to discern the dearth of quality entertainment.

The Oscar telecast now only seems to exists for the sole purpose of being the target of much deserved ridicule from the viewing public. The highlight of my night watching was exchanging cutting barbs with friends over the inanity and banality of the entire enterprise.

Conan O’Brien is an acquired taste…and I can proudly declare that, just like herpes, syphilis and AIDS, I have never acquired it. Conan is, first and foremost, a writer…a bad writer but a writer nonetheless. He is not a performer. And it shows.

Conan’s go-to shtick is to be faux edgy and mix it with a narcissistic self-deprecation that reeks of arrogance. He relied heavily on that formula last night and it fell flat.

Conan’s opening gag, a play on the movie The Substance, where he crawls out of and back into Demi Moore’s body, was remarkable for how poorly constructed it was. The bit could have been funny as the premise was good, but Conan bungled it and prolonged it unnecessarily, thus defeating its purpose. As Shakespeare has taught us…”brevity is the soul of wit”, and I do declare - Conan O’Brien has no soul.

The comedy only got worse from there. The lowest point in terms of comedy was when Conan did a bit with Adam Sandler. The bit was a bad idea because it wasn’t funny, it was poorly executed and most of all…Conan and Adam Sandler are two of the most unfunny human beings to have ever been considered comedians. The two of them doing a bit together is like a black hole of humor…no laughs can escape the gargantuan sucking of it all.

Speaking of sucking…there was the Dune sandworm bit…which became a recurring bit. The less spoken about this the better.

The show also featured some of the worst musical performances in recent memory.

The show opened with Ariana Grande giving us as mediocre a rendition of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” imaginable. This was followed by Cynthia Erivo, who I have been told is the greatest singer alive, belting out a decidedly pitchy rendition of “Home” from The Wiz and “Defying Gravity” from Wicked…both were exceedingly underwhelming.

Then there was the bizarre tribute to James Bond, which for some reason featured three songs, all of them sung so poorly it felt like some community audition show on cable access.

Some person named Lisa sang “Live and Let Die”, and did so very poorly. She was followed by a stunningly awful performance by Doja Cat of “Diamonds are Forever”. The highlight of Doja Cat’s performance was that she was singing notably off-key…you go girl!! And finally, someone named Raye sang an amateur version of “Skyfall” and it felt like a bad karaoke night had broken out at the Dolby theatre.

Then of course there was a tribute to Quincy Jones where Queen Latifah, who isn’t a singer but rather a rapper – and has the weak, tepid voice to prove it, attempted to sing “Ease on Down the Road” from The Wiz. The entire tribute, from Oprah and Whoopi Goldberg’s intro to Queen Latifah’s brutal belching out of the tune, were an embarrassment to the greatness that was Quincy Jones.

As for the awards…it was Anora’s night and writer/director/editor/producer Sean Baker won four awards himself and gave pleasant and heartfelt speeches each time at the podium. Others were less dignified.

Adrien Brody won his second Best Actor Oscar and automatically became the worst actor in history to have won two Best Actor Oscars.

Brody’s speech was rambling, self-serving and overlong…sort of like his acting career. That he was being cheered on and coached by his girlfriend Georgina Chapman…who has a real-eye for talent…she used to be married to Harvey Weinstein, says a lot about Brody, Hollywood and The Brutalist, and none of it good. It was also a nice touch that he called out “anti-Semitism” at the same Oscars where the Best Documentary winner No Other Land, about Israel’s apartheid and ethnic cleansing against Palestinians, can’t get distribution in the United States…just more proof that Hollywood, of all places, is “anti-Semitic”. What a fucking doofus. Yo Adrien, can’t wait to see you being awful in a second-rate movie or tv show in the near future!!

There were also a bevy of pronouncements about “first ever” status among winners. So, the guy who won Best Costume Design was the “first Black man” to ever win the award. Yawn. No one gives a shit or should give a shit.

In the pre-show red carpet coverage Julianne Hough gave a land acknowledgement about how the Oscars were taking place on the indigenous land of various tribes. These tribes, like all native tribes, have been fucked over a billion times by the federal, state, city and local governments here in the U.S.

That said, land acknowledgements irritate the shit out of me because they are solely designed to signal virtue, which is a repulsive form of moral preening and narcissism.

The bottom line on this issue is this…if it means so much to you quit making empty gestures like land acknowledgements and just give the fucking land back to the native tribes. And shut the fuck up.

As for the fashion…once again there were some major mistakes that stars made that always baffle me.

Little Timmy Chalamet dressed in an all-yellow suit that looked like it could have been made of denim and that made him look like he was a background dancer in a Big Bird stage show or Curious George’s handler. Timmy is 29 years old…but this outfit made him look like he was 12…not a good look Timmy.

Zoe Saldana, winner of Best Supporting Actress, wore an egregiously designed dress that made her look like a cheap lamp in a thrift shop. She’s a beautiful woman but goodness gracious she looked ridiculous.

There were a bevy of “performers”…like Doja Cat, who was dressed like a cat, and Miley Cyrus, who was dressed like a Belgian hooker on Halloween, who showed off their tattoos. I have to say visible tattoos on a woman look extraordinarily trashy. It also didn’t help that Miley shaved her eyebrows for some reason…and she doesn’t have the face for no eyebrows.

The biggest news about the Oscars, and what my readers have been dying to find out…is whether I won my Oscar pool for the 30th year in a row. The answer is…yes…of course I did. But to be fair I had a very bad night, going a paltry 16-23 in my picks.

The good news though is that the film I liked the most out of the nominees, Anora, won Best Pic, Best Director, best Editing and Best Actress.

Speaking of Best Actress, the biggest surprise of the night was Anora’s Mikey Madison beating odds-on favorite Demi Moore for the gold. I was shocked when it happened and happy for Mikey Madison, but it was impossible to not feel bad for Demi Moore, who, by all accounts, is a decent human being who has really fought hard to survive in this nasty, nasty business.

Oh…and one last thing…in an attempt to end on a positive note. I thought the funniest bit of the night was Ben Stiller giving out the Production Design Oscar on a set that failed to work in lifting him from below the stage, to stage level. It was a clever bit and was impeccably executed…kudos to Ben Stiller.

Too bad Conan O’Brien wasn’t as clever or funny as that bit.

Alright ladies and gents…that’s my Oscar round up. Stay tuned to this website in the coming days as the biggest awards show of all time…The Mickeys®©™ will be announced as will the Slip-Me-A-Mickey®©™ Awards!!!

So hydrate and buckle up everybody because the party has just begun!!

©2025

97th Academy Awards: 2024 Oscar Predictions Post

2024 OSCARS PREDICTIONS

The 97th Academy Awards are upon us and anyone with half a brain in their head and any semblance of a life doesn’t even remotely give a flying fuck.

Unfortunately, I do not meet the previously stated requirements…so here we are at my Oscar predictions post.

As long-time readers know I am the proud owner of the longest Oscar predictions winning streak in history…and even more remarkably, this is not just the longest winning streak in Oscar history, but the longest winning streak of any kind in any competition….EVER!

What’s it like to be the greatest Oscar predictor of all time? Thanks for asking…the reality is that it’s a blessing and a curse. It’s a blessing because being great at anything is a gift from God. It’s a curse because…well it’s the dumbest fucking thing in the world to be great at.

And truth be told…and this stays just between us…I really have no idea what I’m doing. Of course, that works to my benefit because the members of the Academy who vote on the Oscars have no idea what they’re doing either, so I guess that’s why I succeed in reading their diseased minds.

Every year the trade papers in Hollywood publish interviews with anonymous Academy members in the hopes of deciphering who will win the awards. These interviews are extraordinary because they always reveal Academy members as being the biggest dopes, dupes and dipshits on the planet.

It's nice to fantasize that Academy members are dedicated professionals who take their craft, their art, cinema and the film community seriously…and then you read these interviews and realize these people are lazy and entitled pieces of shit with the worst taste imaginable.

My favorite part is that these people get to see all the nominated movies for free…in their home…and they still don’t watch them, or they watch just fifteen minutes of them.

Then there’s the mindlessly political pricks who won’t vote for anything that doesn’t have the “correct”, and most obvious, politics. Yawn. This explains a great deal about how the Oscars work and why we get so many atrocious movies not just getting nominated, but winning big awards.

The truth is that the Oscars are nothing more than a popularity contest for the adult high school known as Hollywood. The expansion of the Academy membership in recent years in order to be more diverse and inclusive, has only heightened that sentiment.

Regardless of how ridiculous some members of the Academy are, and how diminished the Oscars have become…I still watch the movies and watch the Oscar telecast. Although if I’m being honest…there’s a very good chance that I will bail pretty early on the telecast because I’m on the East Coast and I’m an early riser. Missing the Oscars would’ve been inconceivable a few years ago…but not now. I am now indifferent to the Oscars and very protective of my precious sleep.

As for my Oscar predictions this year, I have to be honest…I have almost no idea how this year’s awards will play out. It’s been a strange year at the movies, and unfortunately not a particularly good one, so picking winners is a fool’s errand. But as you all know…I am nothing if not a fool.

So…on to my picks!!

BEST PICTURE

Anora

The Brutalist

A Complete Unknown

Conclave

Dune: Part Two

Emilia Perez

I’m Still Here

Nickel Boys

The Substance

Wicked

This is a rather underwhelming collection of films, only one of which, Anora, did I think was very good. Does that mean Anora will win? You’re guess is as good as mine. If Anora doesn’t win, then Conclave will…or at least that seems to be how the Academy is shaking out. There is a miniscule chance that A Complete Unknown sneaks in out of nowhere…but I wouldn’t bet on it. If Emilia Perez or Wicked win then we have officially entered the End Times.

WILL WIN: Anora

SHOULD WIN: Anora

 BEST DIRECTOR

Sean Baker - Anora

Brady Corbet – The Brutalist

James Mangold – A Complete Unknown

Jacques Audiard – Emilia Perez

Coralie Fargeat – The Substance

Ok…this is an interesting category. Baker won the Director’s Guild award, which should give him the leg up here…but don’t be shocked if Brady Corbet or dark horse James Mangold sneak in and steal it.

WILL WIN: Sean Baker - Anora

SHOULD WIN: Sean Baker

BEST ACTOR

Adrien Brody – The Brutalist

Timothee Chalamet – A Complete Unknown

Colman Domingo – Sing Sing

Ralph Fiennes - Conclave

Sebastian Stan – The Apprentice

Lots of hub-bub about Timothee Chalamet and his win at the SAG Awards last weekend…but Oscar voting was over so his speech and such will have no sway. This is really a two-man race between Chalamet and Brody, but if they split votes there could be a dark horse winner in Ralph Fiennes. My guess is that two-time Holocaust survivor Adrian Brody pulls it off (this is a great Nikki Glaser joke).

WILL WIN: Adrian Brody – The Brutalist

SHOULD WIN: Colman Domingo – Sing Sing

BEST ACTRESS

Cynthia Erivo – Wicked

Karla Sofia Gascon – Emilia Perez

Mikey Madison – Anora

Demi Moore – The Substance

Fernanda Torres – I’m Still Here

A three-woman race between the big favorite Demi Moore, the ingenue Mikey Madison and the international, dark horse candidate Fernanda Torres.

I think Demi Moore wins it because it’s a great “comeback” story and makes Academy members feel good about themselves for some reason. Personally, I think Moore is good in the film and gives a “brave” performance, I just think Mikey Madison’s performance is much better.

WILL WIN: Demi Moore – The Substance

SHOULD WIN: Mikey Madison - Anora

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS

Monica Barbaro – A Complete Unknown

Ariana Grande – Wicked

Felicity Jones – The Brutalist

Isabella Rossellini – Conclave

Zoe Saldana – Emilia Perez

Zoe Saldana is the big favorite…but if there’s an upset it will come from Isabella Rossellini…and maybe, maybe, maybe…from Monica Barbaro.

WILL WIN: Zoe Saldana

SHOULD WIN: Monica Barbaro

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR

 Yura Borisov – Anora

Kieran Culkin – A Real Pain

Edward Norton – A Complete Unknown

Guy Pearce – The Brutalist

Jeremy Strong – The Apprentice

I was not a fan of A Real Pain and not a fan of Kieran Culkin’s performance, but this shit is set in stone.

WILL WIN: Kieran Culkin – A Real Pain

SHOULD WIN: Yura Borisov - Anora

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY

Anora – Sean Baker

The Brutalist – Brady Corbet

A Real Pain – Jesse Eisenberg

September 5 –

The Substance – Coralie Fargeat

This is a fascinating category…if Sean Baker wins this…there’s a real chance he could win four Oscars in one night (Picture, Director, Screenplay and Editing), which would be incredible…so incredible I don’t think it will happen. I think the Academy spreads the love and rewards one of their own Jesse Eisenberg with the Oscar here.

WILL WIN: Jesse Eisenberg – A Real Pain

SHOULD WIN: Sean Baker - Anora

BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY

A Complete Unknown

Conclave

Emilia Perez

Nickel Boys

Sing Sing

Conclave is the frontrunner and presumptive winner…but if it doesn’t win then we might be in for a wild night.

WILL WIN: Conclave

SHOULD WIN: Conclave…I guess. I liked Sing Sing a lot but the script isn’t elite.

BEST ANIMATED FEATURE

Flow

Inside Out 2

Memoir of a Snail

Wallace and Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl

The Wild Robot

A fascinating category…The Wild Robot is in the lead but I actually think Flow is going to win it thanks to the international contingent in the Academy.

WILL WIN: Flow

SHOULD WIN: Flow

BEST INTERNATIONAL FEATURE

Emilia Perez

Flow

The Girl with the Needle

I’m Still here

The Seed of the Sacred Fig

Emilia Perez had this wrapped up a few months ago and then the Gascon scandal hit and…well…not so good for Emilia Perez after that. I now think the vociferous Brazilian contingent drags I’m Still Here over the finish line.

WILL WIN: I’m Still Here

SHOULD WIN: Flow – I just really liked that movie.

BEST DOCUMENTARY FEATURE

Black Box Diaries

No Other Land

Porcelain War

Soundtrack to a Coup

Sugarcane

This has the potential to be the funniest category of the night. The Oscars are notoriously political when it comes to documentaries, so I think the Ukrainian war documentary Porcelain War will win because the simps in the Academy fall for this type of shit. The funniest outcome would be for the Palestinian documentary No Other Land to win because the presenter for this award is Gal Gadot…actress and former member of the Israeli Defense Forces. Watching Gadot have to give this award to Palestinian activists would be hysterically delicious …but it won’t happen for the same reason No Other Land has no distribution in the U.S. – because the people who run Hollywood (and our government) are Zionists or, at a minimum, Zionist adjacent.

WILL WIN: Porcelain War

SHOULD WIN: No Other Land

BEST LIVE ACTION SHORT

A Lien

Anuja

I’m Not a Robot

The Last Ranger

The Man Who Could Not Remain Silent

I have no idea…

WILL WIN: A Lien

SHOULD WIN: No clue

BEST DOCUMENTARY SHORT

Death by Numbers

I am Ready, Warden

Incident

Instruments of a Beating Heart

The Only Girl in the Orchestra

I’m just picking based on the subject matter…which is exactly how the Academy members do it!

WILL WIN: I am Ready, Warden

SHOULD WIN: No idea

BEST ANIMATED SHORT FILM

Beautiful Men

In the Shadow of the Cypress

Magic Candles

Wander to Wonder

Yuck!

I’ve not seen any of these so I’m stabbing in the dark here.

WILL WIN: Magic Candles

SHOULD WIN: You’re guess is as good as mine.

BEST ORIGINAL SCORE

The Brutalist

Conclave

Emilia Perez

Wicked

The Wild Robot

Interesting category that could be a harbinger of bigger things to come for some movies. If Wicked wins, then it might have a good run in a bunch of categories. Same with The Brutalist and Conclave.

WILL WIN:  The Brutalist

SHOULD WIN:  The Brutalist

BEST ORIGINAL SONG

El Mal – Emilia Perez

The Journey – The Six Triple Eight

Like a Bird – Sing Sing

Mi Camino – Emilia Perez

Never Too late – Elton John

I think all of these songs are awful….but what do I know?

WILL WIN: El Mal – Emilia Perez

SHOULD WIN: None of them

BEST PRODUCTION DESIGN

The Brutalist

Conclave

Dune: Part Two

Nosferatu

Wicked

Another interesting toss up category. I feel like Wicked could get some below the line love and these seems like a category it could win. That said, The Brutalist could start a big run here.

WILL WIN: Wicked

SHOULD WIN: Nosferatu

BEST SOUND

A Complete Unknown

Dune: Part Two

Emilia Perez

Wicked

The Wild Robot

I just want to say that I think it’s really stupid that a few years ago the Academy combined the Best Sound Editing and Best Sound Mixing categories into one. Disrespectful and dumb.

WILL WIN: A Complete Unknown

SHOULD WIN:  A Complete Unknown

BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY

The Brutalist

Dune: Part Two

Emilia Perez

Maria

Nosferatu

I think Nosferatu should definitely win this award going away but unfortunately won’t. I think that The Brutalist gets the gold.

WILL WIN: The Brutalist

SHOULD WIN: Nosferatu

BEST COSTUME DESIGN

A Complete Unknown

Conclave

Gladiator II

Nosferatu

Wicked

I think Conclave and Nosferatu are head and shoulders above everything else in this category…which of course means they won’t win.

WILL WIN: Wicked

SHOULD WIN:  Nosferatu/Conclave

BEST FILM EDITING

Anora

The Brutalist

Conclave

Emilia Perez

Wicked

This category is a great indicator of how the night will go. Writer/director Sean baker also edited Anora…so if he wins then expect that film to do very well. On the other hand, there is a chance they give him an award here and then feel like that’s all he gets and spread the love elsewhere. Don’t find that non-prediction helpful? That makes two of us. Anyway…I think Anora wins but won’t be shocked if either The Brutalist or Conclave get the gold.

WILL WIN: Anora

SHOULD WIN: Anora

BEST MAKEUP AND HAIRSTYLING

A Different Man

Emilia Perez

Nosferatu

The Substance

Wicked

I think Wicked could win here again because the simps in the Academy like shiny, shitty things. That said, this is a category where they can reward The Substance and I think they will.

WILL WIN: The Substance

SHOULD WIN: Nosferatu

BEST VISUAL EFFECTS

Alien: Romulus

Better Man

Dune: Part Two

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes

Wicked

A tough category…again this could be an indicator of a big below the line night for Wicked if it wins here. But…the craftsmen of Dune: Part Two are highly respected and they did do tremendous work. Toss up.

WILL WIN: Dune: Part Two

SHOULD WIN: Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes

And thus concludes my Annual Oscar Prediction Post. There’s a very good chance that I go 10-23 this year so my recommendation is that you don’t gamble actual money based on my predictions…that would be foolish. But feel free to follow along Oscar night and see how poorly I did this year… for as the great American financier Jeffrey Epstein once taught us…all good things must come to an end…and this year might see the ignominious end to my miraculous Oscar prediction winning streak.

p.s. Don’t look for me at the after party!!

©2025

UFO Week - The Program: A Documentary Review

UFO WEEK - THE PROGRAM

My Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. An informative and worthy effort from James Fox, one of the very best ufo documentarians in the business.

Day five of UFO Week is here and today we review the highly anticipated new James Fox documentary, The Program, which was released on December 16th and is available on video on demand.

James Fox is unquestionably one of the very best ufo documentarians working today. He has made five UFO related documentaries in the last twenty-seven years, with The Program being his sixth.

Not all of Fox’s UFO documentaries have worked, but the ones that have, like Out of the Blue (2003), I Know What I Saw (2009) and The Phenomenon (2020), are among the very best ever made.

Fox’s most recent film, Moment of Contact, was a major disappointment as it never fully came together as a noteworthy cinematic venture, and so I was very apprehensive about his newest film.

I am glad to say that The Program, while not nearly as good as the masterpiece that is Out of the Blue, is certainly a top-notch document and important piece of the UFO puzzle for any interested in a serious examination of the topic.

The film, which runs a brisk one hour and forty-two-minutes, opens with a discussion of the “Wilson Memo”, a 2002 memo allegedly sent between Admiral Wilson and astrophysicist Eric Davis regarding the secret UFO programs run by various black budget government agencies in conjunction with aerospace and military contracting companies.

The story goes from there and includes discussions with such serious luminaries as Dr. Gary Nolan of Stanford University and Hal Puthoff, as well as lesser-known insiders like former intelligence agency analyst Lenval Logan, DOD research scientist Sarah Gamm, and former Asst Deputy Secretary of Defense Christopher Mellon.

Logan and Gamm in particular make for compelling subjects as they seem like smart people trying to tell the truth while trying to avoid saying anything that would violate any oaths or NDA’s they have signed.

Mellon has become a mainstay in UFO discussions and documentaries and he gives a good interview as he comes across as serious as can be without being a fanatic. That said, I’m a bit wary of the guy with his intelligence background and his insanely rich family background (he comes from the Mellon banking dynasty).

One of Fox’s real strong points as a filmmaker is his ability to properly pace a documentary. His good films flow with an effortlessness that is compelling, and The Program is no exception.

While Fox does appear in many of his films, he is most successful when he is not the protagonist, but just an observer/interviewer.

To his great credit, Fox is masterful with his direct yet easy-going interview style, and he gets the most out of his subjects as is possible.

Another subject examined in the film is the case of Gary McKinnon, a British hacker who broke into U.S. government computer systems searching for secret UFO stuff…and found it. And for his trouble he was arrested and faced extradition and life in prison in the U.S.

What McKinnon discovered hidden away in the government vaults, besides a crystal-clear photo of a UFO, was a list of “non-terrestrial officers” which included names. Quite the unnerving find.

The film then stays in the UK and transitions to a case in Calvine, Scotland where in August of 1990, two Scotsmen photographed a UFO. The British government confiscated their pictures…but one savvy officer held one for himself and kept for thirty years, finally releasing it in recent years.

The photo is extraordinarily good, the story of the two men who took it as told by one of their co-workers, is not. The co-worker sounds like a drunk making up a story as he goes along…and it would’ve been better leaving him on the cutting room floor entirely.

Another issue with the film is the story of Jason Sands, a former-USAF airmen who worked at infamous Area 51. Sands, who was vetted and recently gave private testimony to congress, has footage of a UFO at a firing range, and tells a strange story of an interaction with an alien.

Sands’ story of his alien interaction is definitely outlandish, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t true. Unfortunately, after having watched the film, I’ve since seen Sands interviewed elsewhere where he tells even more outrageous tales about having to execute an alien at the behest of his superiors in order to guarantee his silence about the program in which he worked. This story is just a bridge too far and makes Sands sound like a committed fabulist or a fabulist who should be committed. I wonder if he told that same tale to Fox and Fox wisely kept it out of his film or if it is a new revelation? Either way, I think in terms of credibility it probably would’ve been better for Fox to keep Sands out of his documentary entirely.

The final portion of the The Program deals with the deep state obstruction of disclosure and features the always reliable Rep. Tim Burchett and Mellon describing the undemocratic government within a government that keeps all the secrets. (As an aside about Burchett, I was recently watching an episode of Finding Bigfoot with my son, an Animal Planet reality tv series from the 2010s – and in one episode the crew goes to Knox County, Tennessee to search for bigfoot and the mayor of Knox County – good old Tim Burchett, is there to help out and discuss his interest in the subject. I wholly endorse him being named director of the Federal Department of the Weird, Wild and Wonderful.)

There’s also a very damning display from the repugnant Bill Nelson, a former Senator from Florida and now head of NASA, who puts on a bullshit display that is so transparently dishonest and full of bureaucratic bluster that it is painful to watch. That Fox himself questions Nelson in an open forum, and then does a split-screen between Nelson blatantly lying about whistleblower David Grusch, and Grusch speaking to congress, is a master stroke.

The reality is that deep state despots like Bill Nelson, Admiral Wilson and their ilk are the tyrants of our age. These unelected bullying bureaucrats run the security and surveillance state that is antithetical to democracy and a republic and keeps us in the dark and in our cage.

The Program is about the UFO programs that men like Nelson and Wilson control, and the knowledge they refuse to share because that knowledge is power and they will never give up their unearned power.

The Program is a solid, well-made documentary that is well-worth watching. Unfortunately, it is only available to purchase and not rent, and the purchase price is $17...pretty steep.

The film will no doubt be available to rent at a much cheaper price in the coming weeks, and as good as I think it is, I think it’s worth waiting to rent it a cheaper price than buy at a steep one.

The bottom line is this, The Program is a very good companion piece to Fox’s earlier films, Out of the Blue, I Know What I Saw and The Phenomenon. As a collection, these films make a great starting point for newbies to the subject, and an excellent library of information for more experienced ufologists.

©2024

UFO Week - Battle for Disclosure : A Documentary Review

UFO WEEK - BATTLE FOR DISCLOSURE

My Rating: 1/2 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. Another in a long line of self-serving, money-grab documentaries from the narcissistic to the point of being messianic, Dr. Steven Greer.

Day four of UFO Week is here and today’s topic is the newest documentary from legendary ufologist Steven Greer, Battle for Disclosure.

The film, which runs one hour and forty-one minutes and is directed by Brent and Blake Cousins, was released on December 10th and is available to rent on video on demand. I rented it the day it came out and paid $1.99, but I have since went back to check the price and has been listed at $9.99 one day and $3.99 another.

The hard truth is the film isn’t worth $1.99, nevermind $9.99 or $3.99.

Steven Greer has produced a bevy of documentaries in recent years. The Lost Century: And How to Reclaim It (2023), Contact: The CE-5 Experience (2023), UFO: Endgame to Disclosure (2023), The Cosmic Hoax: An Expose (2021), Close Encounters of the Fifth Kind (2020), Unacknowledged (2017) and Siruis (2013) are among the titles.

These films all share one very prominent feature…namely Steven Greer talking mostly about Steven Greer and how much Steven Greer knows.

If you don’t know who Steven Greer is…here is a primer. Steven Greer, or more accurately Dr. Steven Greer, is a physician turned ufologist who claims to have been an advisor of sorts to numerous presidents and governments officials over the years on the subject of ufos. How he became so close to the halls of power has never adequately been explained, but Greer does have pictures of himself with various big wigs, so there’s that.

Greer claims he saw a ufo as a kid and again as a teen and that he has some deep connection with them. Apparently, it is a very strong connection because he actually claims to be able to summon them.

And thus, we get to the crux of Dr. Greer. Dr. Greer has the distinct whiff of the grift to him, and that stench is quite odious. Greer obviously has a messiah complex as indicated by the fact that he, and he alone, has been bequeathed special powers and the he, and he alone, is the holder of special, secret knowledge. In this way Greer’s school of ufology feels more like a cult than a scientific exploration.

Greer’s ufo thesis is that aliens are a benevolent bunch who want to give humanity free energy technology that will release us from the bondage of our evil overlords and unleash a utopia here on earth. To be clear…I WANT Greer’s thesis to be correct. But Greer is such a shady character and seeming charlatan that I can’t help but dismiss his ideas even when some of them are somewhat believable.

For example, in Battle for Disclosure, Greer talks about how a lot of ufo sightings are actually human made crafts that were reverse engineered from alien craft byu a dep state cabal. Greer’s argument is that these human-made ufos are “illegal”…and he can “prove it in a court of law”, because the government didn’t disclose the technology…or something like that.

Greer’s legal grandstanding feels like just another example of his messiah complex…like who gives a shit if Steven Greer can “prove in a court of law” that the dark deep state is up to ufo shenanigans…because you aren’t going to get it into a court of law…that’s how the game works.

Throughout the film Greer, with a peculiar, ever-present and diabolically persistent, booger-free nose hair saluting out of his left nostril, declares that HE could prove his case in court…but then never actually meticulously makes his case for the cameras.

Battle for Disclosure is structured in such a way that it is obviously made for people who have been closely following Greer’s films and philosophy over the years. It hits the ground running from the get go and doesn’t give much context, expecting viewers to know the backstory already.

In another peculiar move, Greer goes out of his way in the first third of the film to berate, diminish and ultimately dismiss journalist Ross Coulthart, and whistleblowers David Grusch and Lue Elizondo as deceptive scions of the deep state. He doesn’t specifically lay out his case against them but just attacks them.

Now, many of my friends in the ufo community (I have a lot of them), think very highly of people like Grusch and Elizondo and Christopher Mellon. They are all in on these guys and hang on their every word. I, on the other hand, am not and do not. I look at these characters with the most jaundiced of eyes. I don’t trust them because to trust members, or former members, of the intelligence community, is a fool’s errand. These people are professional liars and they are very good at manipulation. To be clear, I don’t dismiss everything they say out of hand, I am just skeptical of what they say and more importantly, why they may be saying it.

The problem, of course, is that Greer attacking Elizondo and Grusch and their ilk without making a viable and clear case against them, doesn’t do much to damage their credibility nor does it elevate his…it just makes him seem petty and jealous of all the mainstream attention those guys get.

In the last third of the film the narrative shifts to a collection of men recounting their experiences with ufos of one type or another. These men, all military men at the time of their encounters, tell compelling but often-times preposterous tales – all of which Greer substantiates through his alleged unnamed insider sources in the deep state.

The first story is from former US Marine Michael Herrera, who claims to have stumbled upon a human trafficking operation in Indonesia run by black ops guys that used ufo/alien tech. He said his superiors were pissed at him and his team about their discovery and told him to keep his mouth shut.

Another story was told by DC Long, who while working on a military base saw technology that could use some strange sound wave technology of some sort to lift massive blocks of granite. When Long refused to sign an NDA regarding what he saw, the government destroyed his father’s construction business and confiscated all his equipment. Long’s father never spoke to him again until he was on his deathbed.

The third story is from Steven Digna Jr., who saw a ufo while doing live fire drills on a military base. Digna is in such a diminished physical and mental state at the time of shooting his interview, that it is preceded by a disclaimer of sorts telling the viewer that these guys have been through the ringer and it’s taken a deadly toll on their lives.

Digna’s story is, frankly, the most believable, but he is in such a fragile physical and emotional state it is difficult to watch him or to know if he is telling the truth.

The final story comes from Eric Hecker, who worked for the Navy and Raytheon and went to Antarctica to work security there. Hecker claims he saw a directed energy weapons system there that is capable of creating earthquakes. He claims it is the largest telescope that is also a phased array transmitter – a sort of air traffic control for UFOs – and is capable of faster than light communications. Hecker claims this weapons/communications system is above and beyond nations…it’s a transnational program that answers to no government.

The stories told by these men are pretty fascinating. I found Hecker’s the most chilling, Digna’s the most believable, Long’s the saddest, and Herrera’s the most bizarre and incomprehensible. Your mileage may vary.

As for the Battle for Disclosure as a whole, I found it to be a poorly constructed, muddled and jumbled mess of a cinematic venture. It is less a document designed to inform or convince than it is a money grab from those already converted to the Church of Greer.  

Battle for Disclosure, or any of Greer’s films for that matter, are not really useful for the majority of ufologists, nor are they a good place to start for newbies, as they are too fantastical and Greer is too aggressively grating and dubious a spokesman to be convincing.

The bottom line is, while I am immensely skeptical to the point of devout disbelief, I do hope that Steven Greer is right and that E.T. is coming to save our home and free us from the villains who currently rule our world, but that doesn’t make his documentaries good or worth watching or very informative. They are, for the most part, pretty much a waste of time….and if you’re a dope like me…a waste of money too.  

©2024

UFO Week - Beyond: UFOs and the Unknown (MGM+) - A Documentary Review

BEYOND: UFOS AND THE UNKNOWN

My Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE. IT. NOW. One of the very best UFO documentaries I’ve seen. Highly informative and insightful. Well worth watching whether you’re a seasoned ufologist or a newbie to the topic.

It is day three of UFO Week here at the home office and things got off to a decidedly bumpy start with two less than stellar documentaries in day one and two.

Thankfully, day three is a gem.

The documentary today is Beyond: UFOs and the Unknown, a four-part documentary miniseries from JJ Abrams’ production company Bad Robot that released it’s first episode on October 27th and its last episode on November 8th.

Bad Robot released their first UFO documentary back in 2021, simply titled UFO, and I found it to be professionally made but underwhelming in a style over substance kind of way.

Beyond: UFOs and the Unknown is not underwhelming in the slightest. Simply said, it is exquisitely made, abundantly researched, and one of the very best documentaries on the subject I have ever seen.

The documentary series, which runs roughly four hours long in total, hits upon a myriad of angles related to the UFO topic. It examines it scientifically, historically, politically and spiritually.

If you’re looking for a murderer’s row of UFO experts Beyond: UFOs and the Unknown is the documentary miniseries for you.

The stellar first episode opens up with a bang with Dr. Gary Nolan, an esteemed medical professor at the prestigious Stanford University, speaking about his scientific and medical work with various intelligence agencies on deathly serious UFO-related topics.

It then dives into the bevy of sightings and experiences of Navy pilots who witnessed and recorded their interaction with various entities in the last twenty years…resulting in the Gimble and Go-Fast videos made famous in the New York Times article of 2017 that brought the UFO topic into the mainstream.

This episode features prominent Naval personnel like former pilot Ryan Graves, Rear Admiral Tim Galudet, as well as Leslie Kean, the journalist who wrote the NY Times piece in 2017, and Christopher Mellon, a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense – and now prominent UFO disclosure advocate.

Also examined are the maze of various UFO programs in the Pentagon over the years and the mind-numbing acronyms that go along with them. As well as the very complex political situation around the subject, which is explained by Senator Kristen Gillibrand, who describes the military’s handling of the UFO situation, “duplicitous and inappropriate.” Wow.

Episode two delves into the history of ufology and features a who’s who of UFO heavy-hitters, like the godfather of ufology, Jacque Vallee, and the guy who knows where all the bodies are buried, PhD Hal Puthoff.

Also explored are the early days of ufology, including Donald Keyhoe’s important work and the curious case of J. Allen Hynek.

One of the most important things discussed in this episode is how it is the Navy pilots who are reporting UFO encounters, with nary a peep from the Air Force. The reasons why this might be are fascinating, not the least of which is that the intelligence agencies take a large chunk of the Air Force budget for black projects, so they are deeply intertwined with the Air Force…and not the Navy.

The other big topic in episode two is Whitley Strieber and alien abduction. Strieber, who was a novelist who was allegedly abducted in the 1980s in upstate New York and wrote a best-selling book about it titled “Communion”, was a catalyst for hundreds of thousands of regular people across the country to come forward with their abduction stories in letters to him after he published his book.

Strieber’s story is an intriguing and compelling one, and he is a terrific spokesperson - articulate, humble and serious.

This leads into episode three and four which feature Jeffrey Kripal, a professor of philosophy and religion at Rice University, who has begun to gather UFO source material from Strieber and Vallee among others in one place so that scientists and academics can do serious study of the subject without ridicule. He has also has begun conferences on esoteric subjects that brings together experts and experiencers to discuss once taboo subjects academically and scientifically.

Episodes three and four delve deeply into the metaphysical and spiritual aspects of UFOs and what they may be beyond physical objects, and what they may mean to science, philosophy and humanity going forward.

Episodes three and four are so rich with deeply serious and thoughtful discussions on elevated esoteric matters that they are worth watching over and over again…as is the rest of the series.

For seasoned followers of the UFO topic, Beyond: UFOs and the Unknown is a gloriously rich documentary that not only informs but seriously challenges.

For newcomers to the subject, this documentary is a great starting place if for no other reason than to give a brief glimpse at the scope and scale of the subject matter, and to do so with a seriousness that it deserves.

The biggest problem with Beyond: UFOs and the Unknown is that it is very difficult to find. The documentary is currently only available on the streaming service MGM+. Not only do I know no one who is a subscriber to MGM+, I myself had never heard of it until I went looking for Beyond: UFOs and the Unknown. That’s not a good thing because unless if you’re a UFO nerd like me, you wouldn’t know this documentary series exists, and therefore won’t ever stumble upon it unless you explicitly are looking for it.

Hopefully it will eventually become available to rent through Amazon or Apple in the future, but for now the best thing to do to see it is to sign up for MGM+…which will give you a free week before it’s month to month subscription at $6.99 kicks in. Watch Beyond: UFOs and the Unknown during your free week…in fact I’d recommend you watch it twice, like I did…and then cancel your subscription before you actually have to pay.

The bottom line is this…whether you’re a ufologist or a newbie, Beyond: UFOs and the Unknown is a must-watch documentary miniseries if you want to have a deeper understanding of the UFO phenomenon and topic. I highly recommend you put in the effort to find and to watch it because considering what is going on in our world at the moment, arming yourself with as much knowledge as you can is a very good idea.

©2024

UFO Week - Investigation Alien (Netflix): A Documentary Review

UFO WEEK - INVESTIGATION ALIEN

My Rating: 0 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT.  An abysmally made mini-series that is allergic to insight and context. Total shitshow.

Investigation Alien, a six-part documentary mini-series that premiered on Netflix on November 8th, follows legendary reporter George Knapp as he and his team seek the truth of the UFO phenomenon.

George Knapp, for those who don’t know, is one of the most important journalists in the UFO community. Knapp was taking the UFO subject seriously back in the 1980’s as a television reporter for KLAS-TV in Las Vegas when no one in the mainstream media would touch it with a ten-foot pole. In fact, when Knapp was maybe the first legitimate journalist to cover the UFO topic without smirking and winking to let the audience know it was all a joke. To Knapp, and to a large audience, it isn’t a joke, and he covered it like a real news story.

Among the prominent stories that Knapp has brought forth are John Lear’s claims of the U.S. government having downed craft and bodies, much reporting on Area 51, reporting on bizarre happenings at Skinwalker Ranch, and his bombshell 1989 interview with Bob Lazar, who claimed to have worked at Area 51 on alien craft.

Knapp is still at the forefront of serious journalists reporting the UFO topic, and if you watched the recent congressional hearings with whistleblower David Grusch, you could see Knapp sitting directly behind him in the galley.

Knapp’s bona fides and his integrity when it comes to UFO reporting is unquestionable, so when I heard he had a Netflix documentary mini-series coming out, I was very excited.

Then I watched Investigation Alien.

This series is a devastating disappointment. It is so bad, so cheaply made, so derivative and dull, and frankly, so tawdry and stupid and such a brazen money-grab, that it has deeply damaged Knapp’s standing as a journalist, his integrity and has forever tarnished his legacy.

The series is poorly produced and shot like a second-rate reality series as it follows Knapp, and some superfluous and annoying underlings, as they go out seeking the truth about cattle mutilations, Brazilian UFO sightings and alien encounters, underwater anomalies off the Pacific coast, the Phoenix lights, and government cover-ups.

None of the six episodes is even remotely interesting or well-made, and in fact, some are so stupid they made me laugh out loud when I wasn’t cringing. No new information is presented, no insights gained, no compelling knowledge shared.

To give an indication of how ridiculous this series is, there’s a sequence where Knapp goes to talk to a “whistleblower” and they meet out in the middle of nowhere at night, with car lights the only illumination. The setting is obscenely absurd but is fitting as the whistleblower is a clown who fits right in with the reality tv circus that is Investigation Alien. If this were a genuine journalistic endeavor, instead of a tawdry money-grab, they’d meet the whistleblower in a hotel or office and keep him in shadow instead of putting on a dog and pony show meant to look like an adolescent spy thriller.

The cattle mutilation episode opens the series and is so painfully moronic and intellectually obtuse it made teeth hurt. Knapp goes to the Northwest to talk to two ranchers who’ve lost cattle to mutilation. No insight is given, no context supplied, no case built or presented.

Watching the first episode was a devastatingly deflating experience, and the rest of the series goes about as well as episode one. Getting through this idiotic mess of a mini-series is a complete slog.

I’ve spoken to multiple people with considerable knowledge on the UFO topic who have watched this series and the vast majority of them were at a minimum disappointed, and some of them loathed it with a furious passion.  Consider me among those in the latter category, as this series’ stupidity left me in an incandescent rage.

One well-informed ufologist I spoke to was so pissed about the series that he seriously thought that the show was intentionally bad at the behest of the powers that be who demanded Knapp scuttle his credibility and with it the ability of the general public to take the UFO topic seriously. I don’t know if that is true but I will say that the series is so bad that I can see how someone would think it is.

Knapp is partnered on a podcast, titled Weaponized, with documentarian Jeremy Corbell. Corbell and Knapp are one of the more prominent pairs in ufology - for example, Corbell too can be seen sitting in the front row of the congressional hearing featuring David Grusch, right next to Knapp.

It is very interesting to me that Corbell, despite being attached at the hip to Knapp the rest of his professional life,  is only seen very briefly in Investigation Alien. It is also curious that Corbell himself didn’t direct it, since he is a documentarian and has made a notable documentary on the UFO subject, titled Bob Lazar: Area 51 and Flying Saucers. It would seem from Corbell’s reticence to be in this ill-conceived and dismally executed Knapp series that he knew it was going to be a shitshow from the jump and was trying to salvage whatever credibility he could by keeping away from it. Wise move.

Ultimately, Investigation Alien is an unconscionably awful documentary mini-series that would set back the seriousness of the UFO topic decades if it weren’t for the real-time events happening in the world that prove it needs to be taken very seriously.

I cannot, under any circumstances, recommend Investigation Alien, even as an introduction to the topic of UFOs. The series is just too egregiously made and too unserious to be of any value even to newcomers.

©2024

UFO Week - Manhattan Alien Abduction (Netflix): A Documentary Review

UFO WEEK: MANHATTAN ALIEN ABDUCTION

Earlier this year I was alerted to the fact that starting on October 30th and running up to December 16th, there were going to be five UFO-related documentaries being released on various streaming platforms.

As someone who has been interested in the topic and followed it for the majority of my adult life, I was glad that there would be a bevy of new UFO documentaries to digest. I was so happy, in fact, that I decided that once the final documentary, James Fox’s The Program, was released on December 16th, I would have a celebratory “week” on the website and review all the UFO documentaries over the course of five days – one review a day.

But then a funny thing happened on the way to UFO week…namely UFOs!! In the past two weeks there has been a cavalcade of coverage of the UFO topic because apparently New Jersey is being swarmed by drones of “unknown origin” that nobody seems to be able to do anything about. (As an aside…its odd that they are called “drones” when in fact they are the etxtbook definition of UAP’s - unidentified aerial phenomenon, or UFOs - unidentified flying objects…makes you think)

The New Jersey reports have been followed by reports, and video, from other areas of the country and the globe. Truth be told, a week before the New Jersey sightings, my son and I witnessed a very bizarre anomalous object flying at night over our farm in rural Pennsylvania. It looked somewhat like a plane, but it wasn’t a plane, and it made no noise and had odd lights on it that are not like the lights on a regular plane. We spotted something similar, but not identical, just last week as well, again at night.

We get lots of military craft flying over our farm so I just chalked it up to some military craft I couldn’t identify….and maybe it is…and maybe that’s what everyone is seeing over New Jersey. Who knows? There have been other reports in the local media of UAP/drones in the area over the weekend.

The theories about the sightings in New Jersey are all over the map. There are people claiming they are “Special Ops” drones used to sniff out a nuclear threat posed by a “loose nuke” or a “dirty bomb”. The theory goes from there and speculates the nuke is from Iran or China or Russia.

Others speculate that it is actually a false flag and that nefarious elements of the U.S. government are planning to detonate a nuke and blame it on…Iran, China and/or Russia in order to get the neo-con world war of their dreams.

Then there are those who think the “drones” are from Iran/China/Russia and are part of some recon mission that is a prelude to a Pearl Harbor type event.

Then there are others who think that the events of the last two weeks are the beginnings of “disclosure”, where the government admits there are aliens and they’re here, or the aliens step out of the shadows and tell everyone themselves that they’re here.

There are others who think that this is just a false flag using Project Bluebeam to make it appear there are alien craft in our skies in order to scare people and drum up a draconian response that demands we give up more rights to the powers that be in order to stay “safe”.

And finally, there are those who claim that this is all a hoax or a mass hallucination, and that some teenagers are flying normal drones over New Jersey as a gag and the media and the populace are going full War of the Worlds on it because they’re in the throes of hysteria.

As for who to believe…one thing is for certain, whatever government spokespeople say - don’t believe it as it is either going to be a manufactured lie or completely and utterly incorrect. That you can take to the bank.

What do I think is happening? Honestly, I don’t know. My sense is that the false flag discussion, be it about nukes or Project Bluebeam, are probably on the correct track…but who the hell knows?

On that note…let me officially welcome you to UFO Week!! Let’s start things off with a review of the Netflix documentary mini-series Manhattan Alien Abduction.

MANHATTAN ALIEN ABDUCTION

My Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. This could have, and should have, been a thorough debunking of an abduction claim, but it is a rather empty and shallow miniseries that diminishes everyone involved.

Manhattan Alien Abduction, which premiered on Netflix on October 30th, tells the story of Linda Napolitano – who claims to have been abducted from her New York City apartment on November 30th, 1989, and her nemesis, Carol Rainey, who thinks the story is an elaborate hoax.

Napolitano’s story is, not unexpectedly, an odd one. She claims that on November 30th, 1989, in the middle of the night, that aliens abducted her out of her 12th floor Manhattan apartment “on a blue beam of light, lifting her onto a reddish-orange spacecraft that quickly sped off toward the Brooklyn Bridge.”

Linda’s story could easily be dismissed as the ravings of a mad woman except for the fact that there were 23 people who claimed to witness it, among them a “world leader”, namely United Nations Secretary General Perez de Cuellar.

What really propelled Linda’s story into the spotlight was that she brought her tale to ufologist Budd Hopkins, who was one of the leaders in the study of alien abduction in UFO culture, and was a conduit for Linda to the wider UFO community.

Hopkins, who died in 2011, was very well known in the UFO world for having been among the first, along with Harvard psychiatrist Dr. John Mack, to use hypnosis to help people recall their abduction experiences. Hopkins hypnotized writer Whitley Strieber and assisted him in recalling his famous abduction experience which is recounted in the blockbuster book Communion (1987).

Hopkins brought Linda into his world of self-help alien abduction survivor meetings in his New York City apartment, and dove deep into her story, including with hypnosis.

Carol Rainey was Budd Hopkins’ wife at the time of Linda’s alleged abduction, and had a front row seat to Linda’s relationship with Budd and with her time in the spotlight recounting her tale to anyone who’d listen in the media.

Manhattan Alien Abduction is essentially a cat fight between Linda and Carol stretched over three episodes.

Carol is there to debunk Linda’s story, and Linda is there to convince you of it.

In my less than humble opinion, neither woman succeeds, despite the mini-series obviously being made for Carol’s benefit and from her perspective rather than from Linda’s or from a genuine journalistic instinct.

Linda’s story is, frankly…preposterous, and it only gets more and more outlandish with every passing fact and incident that comes to light.

For example, Linda claims that two bodyguards for UN Secretary general Cuellar, named Richard and Dan, come to her apartment in the days after her abduction and, in a somewhat menacing fashion, question her about the incident, and in doing so admit they, along with Cuellar, saw the whole thing while driving by that night.

That element of the story is fine and is very helpful in making Linda seem somewhat believable…but the Richard and Dan story just goes off the rails from there.

Linda claims Richard and Dan later abducted her…while she was walking down the street audio recording herself for her own safety, and abscond her to some location to threaten and question her again.

This second Richard and Dan story is, frankly, embarrassing. It sounds so fake and so stupid is boggles the mind that anyone would tell it, never mind believe it. But Linda told it, and Budd Hopkins believed it.

Linda seemed to have Hopkins wrapped around her finger by playing the ‘fragile bird who needs protecting’ game, and Hopkins fell for it. This seemed to infuriate Carol back in the 1980’s and 90’s…and still today.  

Back at the time, Carol, a self-proclaimed documentarian and journalist, then goes about getting Linda on camera as much as she can and investigating her story in order to debunk it. Carol, and the makers of this docu-series, think she has succeeded…I don’t.

To be clear, I don’t believe Linda’s preposterous and ever more outlandish story. It is so outrageous and ridiculous as to be absurd. But that also makes it very easy to debunk…and Carol and the makers of this documentary, fail to do even the most rudimentary journalistic work to expose Linda as a fraud…but they work very hard to make it seem like they’ve done the work.

For example, Linda and Budd have 23 witnesses who claim to have seen her being abducted into the New York night sky. That’s a lot of witnesses. A scene plays out in the documentary where Carol, while videotaping in the early 90’s, has Budd call one of the witnesses in order to question them, but Budd isn’t able to get in touch with them and leaves a message. This is his second attempt to do so. No other attempts are made…and Carol, and the producers, claims this proves all the witnesses are fake or frauds. Huh?

The claim is also made by Carol that she called one witness and that it “sounded like Linda”. Again, this is the extent of the journalism on display in this series. Out of 23 witnesses, one didn’t call back and the other sounds kind of like Linda, and so that makes all 23 fake or fraudulent? That is just as ridiculous a claim as Linda’s original claims.

Then there’s the story of Richard and Dan, the UN security guards for the Secretary General. Back in 1990 Carol films Linda as they go through file footage of various UN events and Linda actually identifies one of the guys in the video as being Dan. She literally ID’s the guy.

Now, does that mean it is the guy? Does that mean that the guy she ID’s came to her house and did all the things she claims? No. What it does mean is that it should be easy to investigate who that person is…and maybe…just maybe…find him and talk to him. If you work as a security guy at the UN, there’s a paper trail, pay stubs, taxes, insurance, and all the rest. There’s a paper trail and probably a picture ID on file. Do Carol and the producers of this series investigate and find that material? No, they don’t. Why not? I have no idea. Maybe they’re lazy.

Carol and the producers do have handwriting analysis done on a type-written letter signed by Secretary Cuellar in which he claims to have seen all that happened to Linda that night in 1989. The hand writing analysis is on Cuellar’s signature and the expert declares that no one writes their name exactly the same way twice and this signature is too perfect to be real.

Now, the signature and the type-written letter may very well be fake, but public officials use signature stamps to sign their name all the time…is it out of the possibility that this happened here? No. Did Carol or the producers acknowledge this? Also no.

If Linda is as big a bullshitter as she appears to be in this documentary, you’ve got to find more substantial evidence and prove she is a bullshitter…it can’t be that hard.

What about the other 22 witnesses? Did they try and track them down? Who are they and where are they?

Where’s the investigation into Richard and Dan and the UN and all that? This is simple stuff. It may not be easy to do and may take effort, but if Linda is so full of shit then it should be easy to prove and yet they never prove it.

With the slightest bit of awareness on the game being played on you by understanding what is missing from this series, Manhattan Alien Abduction looks in hindsight to be a cheap and tawdry venture.

As bizarre and unbelievable as Linda’s claims are the investigation into them is shallow and amateurish. Do the work. Track down the witnesses. Find a connection. Don’t just speculate and assume and conjecture and imply…investigate and prove…or in this case, disprove.

Here’s another oddity about this mini-series, namely that Carol Rainey has her own major biases from a tormented childhood in a religious cult, and from her personal relationship with Budd Hopkins, that skew her own objectivity and judgement.

Hopkins and Rainey divorced in 2006, and when he died in 2011 he was in a relationship with Leslie Kean. You know who Leslie Kean is? She’s the journalist who went on to break the big UFO story published in the New York Times in 2017 that brought ufology into the mainstream.

The question I have after learning of Hopkins relationship with Kean, and Carol Rainey’s background and her obvious jealousy of Linda Napolitano, is this…is this docuseries just Carol Rainey in a jealous fit trying to destroy the legacy of Budd Hopkins, Linda Napolitano’s reputation and undermine Leslie Kean’s life’s work?

As much as I think Linda Napolitano is a fabulist, I think Carol Rainey is one too…and a much more nefarious one. Rainey is the woman scorned, and while she may be right about everything, her personal vindictiveness and venom are not journalistically acquired evidence…they are just grievances in the form of accusations.

Ultimately, Manhattan Alien Abduction disappoints despite a very compelling thesis, and is scuttled by a thoroughly amateurish and weak journalistic effort that fails to adequately disprove something that should be so easily debunked.

©2024

Brats (Hulu): A Documentary Review - The Brat Pack, Revisited

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT/SKIP IT. A nostalgic, often narcissistic despite lacking self-awareness, journey back to the 80s that never adequately answers the question at its center.

Brats, a new documentary by “Brat Pack” actor Andrew McCarthy (now streaming on Hulu), examines the origins of the label “Brat Pack” and how it impacted that group of young actors from the 1980s.

I’m a Gen Xer through and through, so the Brat Pack era coincided with my early teen years, but in case you missed it, the Brat Pack were a collection of actors in the 1980’s who starred in films that were geared toward teens and young adults – movies like Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, St. Elmo’s Fire, Pretty in Pink and Some Kind of Wonderful.

The Brat Pack included, but was not limited to, Emilio Estevez, Rob Lowe, Judd Nelson, Molly Ringwald, Demi Moore, Ally Sheedy and Andrew McCarthy. Other actors who are sort of Brat Pack adjacent are Anthony Michael Hall, Jon Cryer, Lea Thompson, John Cusack, Joan Cusack, James Spader and even such luminaries as Tom Cruise and Robert Downey Jr.  

The term Brat Pack was the brainchild of David Blum, who in 1985 wrote a profile of Emilio Estevez for New York Magazine where he lambasted the group of young actors taking over Hollywood for being vapid, entitled and spoiled. At best, the term “Brat Pack” is reductive and unkind, at worst it is vicious, mean-spirited, and derogatory…although despite that truth it must be remembered that the reality is that it’s just a label, and not a prison sentence.

Not surprisingly, the members of the Brat Pack didn’t like being called the “Brat Pack”. The label being like a scarlet letter to them and they pushed back against it, and worked hard to overcome it. None more so than Andrew McCarthy.

McCarthy’s career cratered in the wake of the Brat Pack designation, and he was never able to recover. Brats is his attempt to make sense of it all. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem like he’s able to.

McCarthy was always a bit of a wet noodle of an actor, and in real-life, at least according to how he presents himself in Brats as he drudges up the past by interviewing fellow Brat Packers, he’s not much different. A morose and melancholy fellow, McCarthy is so fragile and sensitive he’s like a hemophiliac, and any bruise, no matter how small, could be fatal. Someone this thin-skinned and soft trying to navigate the rough and tumble, cutthroat world of Hollywood, particularly in the 80’s, is like having a newborn infant try to run with the bulls at Pamplona.  

Brats is, in the broadest sense, heartbreaking, for no other reason than Andrew McCarthy let some two-bit, douchebag writer, and make no mistake, writer David Blum is a douchebag, essentially ruin his career by letting him get into his head with some shitty article forty years ago. That McCarthy is still so under the spell of Blum’s contrived moniker, is, frankly…pathetic. That McCarthy, even when presented with the opportunity to confront Blum in Brats, is unable to muster even the most minimal amount of testicular fortitude, is humiliating for McCarthy and frustrating for viewers.

McCarthy is not alone in having been destroyed by the Brat Pack label. Emilio Estevez, who was maybe the leader of the Brat Pack, seems to have lost the most. At the time, Estevez was the “it” guy in Hollywood. He was starring in movies and directing them too. But he came across as frivolous, delusional and arrogant in Blum’s piece and then spent the next decade trying to escape the Brat Pack curse, but to no avail.

The truth is that Estevez, and many of the Brat Packers, WERE arrogant. Estevez in 1985 thinking he’s the second coming of Francis Ford Coppola is, if nothing else, hysterical for his inflated ego and its delusional nature.

But…thus is Hollywood….home of arrogance and delusion and all sorts of other malignant maladies that are so rampant as to be as commonplace as herpes and depression.

The Brat Pack were no more or less obnoxious and arrogant and delusional than any other bunch of actors having massive success at a young age. The Brat Pack also weren’t unique in having been targeted by a bitter and jealous press out to knock them down a notch or two.

The problem with the Brat Pack is that they responded to negative press, like being called the “Brat Pack”, in the worst way possible. They let it get to them.

For example, Estevez and McCarthy admit in Brats that they didn’t make a movie together back in the 80s explicitly because they wanted to avoid the Brat Pack label.

My thinking regarding the “Brat Pack” moniker is why not lean into it? Grasp it with both hands and say “fuck it and fuck you!” And then only make movies with fellow Brat Packers…or Brat Pack adjacent. If they’re going to force you into a group…then pull some marketing jiu-jitsu and make it the “in” group.

McCarthy and Estevez are certainly the actors who were most crippled by the Brat Pack designation, at least among those featured in Brats (not all Brat Packers are in Brats – Molly Ringwald and Judd Nelson the most conspicuous absences). Demi Moore and Ally Sheedy seem to be the most self-aware. Moore, in particular, is quite a charming and captivating a figure in Brats, and speaks with a grounded wisdom that feels hard-earned and genuine.

Rob Lowe on the other hand, feels as inauthentic as ever, as he’s like a bad politician doing a late-night infomercial in his interview with McCarthy.

When Estevez sits down – actually they both awkwardly stand during the interview – with McCarthy it is as uncomfortable as can be and they seem like two people who just met while waiting in line at the DMV. Estevez seems like a hollowed-out human with the accompanying thousand-yard-stare. Estevez and McCarthy standing across from one another, well into middle-age, both wearing the same shirt, look like Vietnam war veterans, shell-shocked and diminished by what went wrong over there.

As for the documentary filmmaking on display in Brats…the uncomfortable truth is that Andrew McCarthy was never a good actor…and he’s not much of a filmmaker either.

McCarthy does all he can to make himself seem like a serious documentarian, but he is exposed by his inability to stick to the subject and hold himself and his subjects to account.

Brats just isn’t as well-made as it could and should be. For example, there’s a meandering and meaningless section in the middle where the lack of diversity in the Brat Pack and in 80s film in general takes center stage. This section is so devoid of any insight or intelligence it gave me a migraine. That this topic is beside the point is never considered by McCarthy because the only reason it’s in the film is for McCarthy to virtue signal and to pander to the usual suspects.

Another example of McCarthy missing the point is when he sits down with the villain of the movie, David Blum. McCarthy is so neutered he can’t even rip into this guy whom McCarthy thinks ruined his life. If McCarthy, through his inability to stand up for himself seems to be so disinterested in confronting his demon, why should we as viewers care about any of this weak-kneed nonsense?

If someone had socially “slandered” me and “ruined” my career, I would let that person know, in no uncertain terms, that there’s a price to pay for that and that price is having me eviscerate him in person and in my documentary. McCarthy obviously thinks differently. Maybe he’s a better person than I am…but he’s certainly not a better man.

It would be nice to think that McCarthy is some sort of evolved being and going to battle with Blum is beneath him…but the entire premise of Brats says otherwise. As does the fact that McCarthy not only made this documentary but also wrote a book about his life in the Brat Pack. The ugly truth is that McCarthy, despite his posing, isn’t evolved and he isn’t self-aware…no…Andrew McCarthy is weak…and a coward…and this is how he got into this whole mess.

On the bright side, McCarthy wisely uses music from the 80’s peppered throughout Brats in order to generate nostalgia, and for the most part is works. But besides the soundtrack the documentary feels incomplete and often times unsatisfying and un-enlightening.

Ultimately, my takeaway from Brats is that if you were a member of the Brat Pack, why give a shit about some hump from NY Magazine and the label “Brat Pack”? You’re young, successful and making movies…of course you’re going to have to endure the slings and arrows of a mendacious and malicious media…but so what? Why let that cripple you?

Unless, of course, like Andrew McCarthy, you subconsciously want a way out…and this is the excuse you give yourself for not wanting to endure and compete and potentially fail due to a lack of skill and talent. So, you blame some moronic label put on you and then go off and pout about it for the next forty years…not even man enough to take responsibility for your failure or lack of toughness. In Andrew McCarthy’s world it’s always somebody else’s fault.

But when it comes to Brats, McCarthy has no one to blame for the film’s failure but himself.

 Follow me on Twitter: MPMActingCo

©2024

The 10th Annual Mickey™® Awards (2023)

10th ANNUAL MICKEY™® AWARDS

Estimated Reading Time: The Mickey™® Awards are much more prestigious than the Oscars, and unlike our lesser crosstown rival, we here at The Mickeys™® do not limit acceptance speech times. There will be no classless playing off by the orchestra here…mostly because we don’t have an orchestra. Regardless… expect this awards show article to last, at a minimum, approximately 6 hours and 37 minutes.

It’s that time of year again when Hollywood and the whole world holds their breath to find out who wins the most prestigious and most glorious award in human history...THE MICKEY™® AWARD!!

The Mickeys™® are far superior to every other award imaginable…be it the Oscar, the Emmy, the Tony, the Grammy, the Pulitzer or even the Nobel. The Mickey™® is the mountaintop of not just artistic but human achievement, which is why they always take place AFTER the Oscars!

It is pretty amazing that the Mickeys™® turn ten years old this year! It’s crazy to think that means the Mickeys have been around long enough that they are now old enough to drink!!

This has been a decent year in cinema. It wasn’t a massive success like in say 2019, but it was considerably better than the last four miserable years.

There are a multitude of outstanding films eligible for a Mickey™® award this year. Actors, actresses, writers, cinematographers and directors are all sweating and squirming right now in anticipation of the Mickey™® nominations and winners. Remember, even a coveted Mickey™® nomination is a career and life changing event.

Before we get to what everyone is here for…a quick rundown of the rules and regulations of The Mickeys™®. The Mickeys™® are selected by me. I am judge, jury and executioner. The only films eligible are films I have actually seen, be it in the theatre, via screener, cable, streamer or VOD. I do not see every film because as we all know, the overwhelming majority of films are God-awful, and I am a working man so I must be pretty selective. So that means that just getting me to actually watch your movie is a tremendous accomplishment in and of itself…never mind being nominated or winning!

The Prizes!! The winners of The Mickey™® award will receive a free lunch* with me at Fatburger (*lunch is considered one "sandwich" item, one order of small fries, and one beverage….yes, your beverage can be a shake, you fat bastards). I will gladly pay for the Mickey™® winner’s meal…but know this…the sterling conversation will be entirely free of charge…and will probably not be sterling.

Now…fasten your seatbelts, gird your loins, and get ready to rumble…because IT’S TIME!!

Here are the 10th Annual Mickey™® Awards!!

POPCORN MOVIE OF THE YEAR

Godzilla Minus One – This movie crawled out of the Pacific and stomped across the globe winning hearts and minds while destroying everything in its path. Godzilla is back, baby!!

Spider-Man Across the Spider-Verse – These Spider-Verse animated movies are really great stuff as they fully embrace the Spidey of everything while churning out some jaw-dropping animation.

The Killer – Fincher’s take on the assassin’s life is pure Gen X cinematic bliss. It qualifies as a popcorn film simply because it’s so deliciously amusing and so light on its feet.

And the Mickey™® goes to…GODZILLA MINUS ONE! Not just a fantastic Godzilla movie, but a really terrific movie! Welcome to the Mickeys™ Godzilla!

BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY

Oppenheimer - Hoyte van Hoytema – Hoytema, who won a Mickey™® in 2017 for his work on Dunkirk, is one of the best in the business. His work on Oppenheimer was as good as it gets and is a testament to his outrageous skill.

The Zone of Interest – Lukasz Zal – Zal’s previous work on Ida (2014) and Cold War (2018) got him the attention of the Mickey nominating committee. This year he stunned with his precise and pristine cinematography on The Zone of Interest. An absolute masterwork in minimalism and framing.

Asteroid City – Robert Yoeman – Yoeman brought a vibrant color palette and a strict adherence to Anderson’s infatuation with straight lines to Asteroid City. As beautifully and uniquely shot a film as seen all year.

Poor Things – Robbie Ryan – A glorious and imaginative piece of work that utilizes black and white and then color with a glorious verve. Ryan is among the best cinematographers in the world and his stellar work on Poor Things is a testament to that fact.

And the Mickey™® goes to…LUKASZ ZAL – THE ZONE OF INTEREST! Zal’s visual discipline and inventiveness are what makes The Zone of Interest the powerful cinematic experience that it is.

BEST SOUND

Oppenheimer – The sound on Oppenheimer was extraordinary, and it needed to be. The sound was integral in conveying the mammoth, existential event that was being dramatized before us.

The Zone of Interest – This movie used sound to such great effect it feels like as cinematic miracle. When sound was introduced into the cinematic arts this is how it was meant to be used.

Godzilla Minus One – The earth-shaking sound on Godzilla Minus One kept the film in reality, and turned that reality into a horrifying experience…as it was meant to be.

And the Mickey™® goes to…THE ZONE OF INTEREST. As great as the sound on Oppenheimer was, the sound on The Zone of Interest was even better. Just a masterful sound design, execution and mix. This is not only the best sound of the year, but among the best sound in a film of all-time.

BEST SCORE/SOUNDTRACK

The Killer – The mod and morose pop-infused laments of The Smiths are what makes The Killer the darkly fun ride that it is. Never has a soundtrack so matched the emotional and mental theme of a film and character.

Oppenheimer – A wonderfully dark and majestic score that effortlessly mixes with the sound of the film to create a mesmerizing cinematic sensation.

The Zone of Interest – A bizarre and unnerving score makes The Zone of Interest feel like a disorienting horror movie. Just a sterling piece of work.

Killers of the Flower Moon – The late Robbie Robertson mixes and matches modern guitar driven music with Native American drums and vocals to create a swirling and scintillating soundtrack that is the best thing about Killers of the Flower Moon.

And the Mickey™® goes to…THE KILLER! This win is based on The Killer’s masterful use of the musical musings of Morrissey and The Smiths.

BEST COSTUME/HAIR/MAKEUP

The Mickey™® goes to…Poor Things – I am not exactly as fashionista, but even I appreciated the original and fascinatingly unique costumes, hair and make-up on display in Poor Things. The artisans who created these looks and perfectly executed them, are absolute masters deserving of the highest praise…and the highest praise available is a Mickey™® Award.

BEST EDITING

Oppenheimer – A truly spectacular piece of editing kept this mammoth story from flying off the rails.

The Zone of Interest – Subtle editing gave this movie a perfect pace and tone.

Anatomy of a Fall – The editing on this film was so seamless and deft as to be miraculous.

And the Mickey™® goes to…OPPENHEIMER – Editor Jennifer Lame’s work was stunning as she wrestled this sprawling, time-jumping behemoth and turned it into a smooth and easy ride.

BEST EFFECTS

Godzilla Minus One – Godzilla feels real and utterly terrifying in this film and that is thanks to the special effects geniuses who threw him together with a minimal budget.

Oppenheimer – A lot was made of the fact that Christopher Nolan used minimal special effects and mostly actual effects to make this movie. How-ever he did it, it is astonishing to behold.

No One Will Save You – This little movie made the most of it when designing and executing their movie monster aliens. It is quite incredible that a small movie like this was able to make such notable effects and utilize them so effectively.

And the Mickey™® goes to…GODZILLA MINUS ONE!! Somehow these filmmakers were able to make the best special effects of the year…and of the last few years, on a shoestring budget that would be laughable on a Hollywood blockbuster. Well done Team Godzilla!

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR

Willem Dafoe – Poor Things – Dafoe, as always, brings his weirdness to the fore as the Dr. Frankenstein in this bizarro movie. Despite his eccentricities, Dafoe is able to find humanity in every role he touches.

Robert Downey Jr. – Oppenheimer – It’s easy to forget that Downey is more than just iron Man and amusing snark. In Oppenheimer, Downey’s restraint isn’t just necessary but notable and it creates a compelling and convincing character that subtly dominates every scene he inhabits. The line, “no, just a shoe salesman”, is delivered with such perfection as to be devastating.

Ryan Gosling – Barbie – As much as I loathed the movie Barbie, I loved Ryan Gosling as Ken. When Gosling goes for it he is an unstoppable force, and he goes for it with gusto as Ken. Good for him.

Milo Machado-Graner - Anatomy of a Fall – This kid is so good in Anatomy of Fall I forgot I was watching some kid actor. A nuanced and tormented performance that feels as real as real can be.

Charles Melton – May December – I had never heard of Christopher Melton prior to May December, but apparently, he was on some stupid teen show. Who knows? All I know is that he gives the very best performance in that film and it isn’t even close. Subtle and heartbreaking, Melton never falters.

And the Mickey™® goes to…ROBERT DOWNEY JR. – OPPENHEIMER – This was a very tight category, with Gosling and Melton tying for second place just mere percentage points behind Downey. But Downey’s work in Oppenheimer is layered, nuanced, subtle yet very powerful. A true tour de force performance that despite its wins in award shows, is often downplayed because Downey is such a Hollywood icon. The truth is he absolutely crushed this role….and now he’s got the Mickey™® award to prove his worth….as well as all that Iron Man money.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS

Sandra Huller – The Zone of Interest – Huller’s Nazi wife in The Zone of Interest is an absolutely stunning piece of work. Banal yet bravado, Huller imbues her housewife with a drive and fear that make her part momma bear and part Nazi supremacist. Pray she never runs for your school’s PTA board.

Penelope Cruz – Ferrari – Cruz is often overlooked (even by me) but she is a master craftswoman. Her work in Ferrari could have been throwaway stuff (like her counterpart Shailene Woodley) but in Cruz’s hands it became a well-rounded, nuanced and subtle piece of dramatic work that never fails to compel. Her scene in the cemetery is the best acting caught on screen this year.

Da’Vine Joy Randolph – The Holdovers – Ms. Randolph was a revelation as the grieving mom in The Holdovers. More impressive is the fact that she absolutely nails the Boston accent that has been butchered by so many other notable actors. A truly impressive performance.

Julianne Moore - May December – Speaking of actresses that have butchered Boston accents…Julianne Moore plays a weird lady in May December with a relentless aplomb. This is the type of role that she excels in…it’s like a cross between her work in Boogie Nights and Magnolia.

And the Mickey™® goes to…PENELOPE CRUZ - FERRARI!! I have not been able to get the scene where Cruz’s character visits her son’s grave out of my head since I’ve seen it. In the scene Cruz doesn’t say a word and yet conveys a panoply of emotions and tells a dramatically compelling and emotionally devastating tale in less than a minute of screen time. It really is incredible and a monument to her colossal talent and skill.

BEST BREAKTHROUGH PERFORMANCE OF THE YEAR

The Mickey™® goes to….the little kid in Godzilla Minus One and the Dog in Anatomy of a Fall – Okay…I’m a grown man so I don’t really care about babies or whatever…but the little kid in Godzilla is so damn cute and is such a good actress it’s astonishing. This kid was crying on cue so well I was worried she was being abused in order to trigger it. Hopefully she wasn’t.

Speaking of great acting…I’m being serious when I say that Messi, the dog in Anatomy of a Fall, is maybe the greatest actor in a movie this year. His near-death scene is so good it had me weeping. This dog has it all…charisma, good looks and acting chops. Somebody get this dog a movie franchise!

BEST ANIMATED FILM

The Boy and the Heron – Hayao Miyazaki is among the greatest animated filmmakers of all-time. The Boy and the Heron may, or may not, be his last film, but if it is he went out with a bang. With his distinctive bizarre flair Miyazaki relays a boy’s grief and fears and his first steps on the journey to manhood. It is the work of a master craftsman and a singular genius.

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse – These Spider-Verse films are as great as can be as they treat the Spider-man mythos with respect all while generating some of the most impressive animation styles imaginable. This is the second film in a trilogy and the third will be very highly anticipated.

And the Mickey™® goes to…THE BOY AND THE HERON!! Miyazaki’s work is a favorite of both mine and my son (who is also a member of the Mickeys Voting Committee) so this was a no-brainer. It is nice that a master like Miyazaki can now retire in peace if he so chooses, having won the most prestigious award in human civilization – The Mickey™®

BEST FOREIGN FILM

Godzilla Minus One – This is the movie Godzilla and Godzilla fans have been waiting decades for. It is a brilliant piece of work that is a truly great movie.

The Zone of Interest – Jonathan Glazer’s film about the banality of evil is so steady and precise that it seeps into your brain and refuses to let you forget it…which is both a blessing and a curse.

Anatomy of a Fall – Expertly made and fantastically acted, Anatomy of a Fall is the type of movie Hollywood used to make but hasn’t for like fifty years.

The Boy and the Heron – Miyazaki is the epitome of the master craftsman combined with artistic genius. There is no one better than him and there has never been anyone better than him.

And the Mickey™® goes to…THE ZONE OF INTEREST!! Not only a cinematic masterpiece but a staggeringly relevant piece of culture in a time when we are so eager to be blind to the evil and moral and ethical corruption that surrounds us to such an extent it feels as prevalent as the air we breathe.

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY

Godzilla Minus One – The key to this script’s success is that it treats Godzilla as a real threat with real human consequences. It’s shocking how beautiful this script is.

Anatomy of a Fall – Masterfully written court room drama that keeps audiences guessing for weeks after seeing the film.

No One Will Save You – A truly original and energizing piece of work that elevated what could have been a mundane alien movie into a deeply poignant psychological story.

The Boy and the Heron – Miyazaki is in his 80s and is still exploring the wounds from his youth. Beautifully written.

The Holdovers – A vibrant and well-paced drama that never lacks for witticisms.

And the Mickey™® goes to…ANATOMY OF A FALL! As well-rounded an original script as we’ve seen in years as it refuses to indulge in easy labels and black and white thinking.

BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY

Ferrari – This adaptation was floating around for years and finally made it to the big screen. It is a nice companion piece with 2019’s Ford v Ferrari.

Oppenheimer – It’s impressive that Christopher Nolan read this book, never mind adapted it. This massive tome would be an unruly mess in most other writer/director’s hands, but Nolan tames the wild beast and creates a beautiful historical tapestry.

The Zone of Interest – Glazer apparently used the Martin Amis book of the same name as a launching off point and he creatively catapults his adaption into the stratosphere.

Poor Things – An absolutely batshit tale that is so unbelievable but feels realer than real. A solid piece of work.

American Fiction – Funny and insightful, the flawed American Fiction loses focus occasionally but it never fails to be amusing, and its premise is spot on.

And the Mickey™® goes to…OPPENHEIMER! That Christopher Nolan could make a compelling and coherent film out of the massive tome about a scientist is a testament to his extraordinary storytelling capabilities. As impressive an adaptation as we’ve seen in decades.

BEST SCENE OF THE YEAR

The Killer - Fight scene – Fassbender’s assassin engaging in hand-to-hand combat with a giant gang leader in the middle of the night is as viscerally engaging a scene as you can imagine. Great stuff.

No One Will Save You – First contact scene – This heart-pounding scene is so well executed it stayed with me for days. Just a glorious piece of quality and imaginative filmmaking.

Godzilla Minus One – Godzilla city rampage – Godzilla coming ashore and leveling a Japanese city is what you want from a Godzilla movie…and boy oh boy does this one deliver.

Poor Things – Dance scene – Nothing had me laughing harder this year than watching Emma Stone’s Bella Baxter cut the rug at some fancy French ballroom. Fantastic!

And the Mickey™® goes to…GODZILLA MINUS ONE!! This gripping scene is jaw-dropping and spellbinding.

BEST ACTRESS

Emma Stone – Poor Things – Stone’s bravura work in Poor Things is absolutely mesmerizing. Like an acting exercise on steroids, Stone’s Bella matures before our eyes and never fails to completely command your attention.

Sandra Huller – Anatomy of a Fall – As genuine and grounded a performance as you’ll see, Huller brings nuance and subtlety to new heights.

Kaitlyn Dever – No One Will Save You – An energized and unnerving performance that grabs you from the get go and never lets you go.

And the Mickey™® goes to…EMMA STONE- POOR THINGS! Emma Stone is the best actress in the world at the moment, and it isn’t even close. She now possesses a Mickey™® award proving she is an acting goddess who walks amongst us.

BEST ACTOR

Cillian Murphy – Oppenheimer – Murphy’s controlled yet frantic Oppenheimer is a masterclass in containment and a vivid inner life. A sensitive and deeply moving portrayal.

Christian Friedel – The Zone of Interest – This is an astonishing performance as it embraces the ordinary amongst the extraordinary. Subtle and skillful.

Jeffrey Wright – American Fiction – Wright is a terrific actor and his work in American Fiction is a testament to not only his likability but his acting ability.

Paul Giamatti – The Holdovers – Nobody embodies curmudgeons like Paul Giamatti, and he does some of his best curmudgeonly work in The Holdovers.

And the Mickey™® goes to…CILLIAN MURPHY – OPPENHEIMER!! The Mickey Awards have been the center of controversy since their inception for our notorious and blatant anti-Irish bias. Despite the uproar, the Mickeys™® have refused to change their stance at all…and still believe that the Irish are sub-humans and the most base and vile of creatures. That said, it is a testament to Cillian Murphy’s talent and skill that he convinced the Mickeys™® that he wasn’t just human, but the particular human that was Robert Oppenheimer. For his noble and notable work, Cillian Murphy wins the most prestigious award of all…the Mickey™®. But the Mickeys™® still consider him to be an Irish animal and no award, no matter how prestigious will ever change that.

ACTOR/ACTRESS OF THE YEAR

Sandra Huller – Anatomy of a Fall/The Zone of Interest – Sandra Huller has the highest distinction this year in that she came in second place in both the Best Supporting Actress and Best Actress categories of the Mickey™® Awards. Her work in both films is astonishing, and one can only hope she finds equally challenging and impressive roles and films in her future because when given quality material she is as good as it gets. Her 2023 was as good as a year as we’ve seen from an actress in quite some time.

BEST ENSEMBLE

Poor Things – Great cast with a few exceptions (Mark Ruffalo and Jerrod Carmichael are actively awful in the movie) is led by the inimitable Emma Stone, who brings her absolute A-game to the festivities.

The Holdovers – Paul Giamatti leads a strong ensemble that features two quality supporting turns from Da’Vine Joy Randolph and Dominic Sessa. Just a solid cast across the board.

Oppenheimer – Everywhere you turn in this movie you run into a quality actor turning in a solid performance. Cillian Murphy, Robert Downey Jr., Emily Blunt, Matt Damon, Casey Affleck, Josh Hartnett and Jason Clarke among many others. This film doesn’t work without such a notable and strong cast.

Anatomy of a Fall – A bevy of French actors and actresses…and even a dog, turn in subtle and nuanced performances in a film that never gives away the game. A very strong group.

And the Mickey™® goes to…OPPENHEIMER! This movie would crumble if it weren’t for the genius of Christopher Nolan and the cornucopia of strong actors and actresses he put together for the ensemble.

BEST DIRECTOR

Christopher Nolan – Oppenheimer – Mickey™® award winner (Dunkirk - 2017) Christopher Nolan is the best blockbuster auteur working in cinema today and he lives up to his impressive history with his stellar work on the massive cinematic achievement that is Oppenheimer. It is inconceivable that any other director could have pulled this film off as well as he did.

Jonathan Glazer – The Zone of Interest – Glazer is a bit of an odd duck of an auteur, but his vision and the execution of that vision, on The Zone of Interest is the most artistically ambitious and insightful directorial work since Alfonso Cuaron’s Roma. Just extraordinary.

Justine Triet – Anatomy of a Fall – As skilled a directorial job as any this year, Triet’s firm and steady hand kept this film from floundering and showed her to be a master craftswoman.

Yorgos Lanthimos – Poor Things – Yorgos Lanthimos is an acquired taste…but I’ve acquired it. His sense of humor and his ability to draw out superb performances from his cast while embracing the comedy and drama with an exquisite cinematic artistry, is what makes him one of the best, and most original and interesting, filmmakers of our time.

And the Mickey goes to…JONATHAN GLAZER – THE ZONE OF INTEREST! Glazer doesn’t make many movies, but when he does, they demand your attention, none more so that The Zone of Interest. That Glazer could be so artistically committed and disciplined with his approach on this film speaks to the power of his cinematic vision and his artistry. Kudos to him and congratulations on winning the most prestigious award in cinema and world history.

BEST PICTURE

10. American Fiction – A funny and sometimes insightful film that may or may not be in on the joke its telling. The film is flawed and a bit scattered, but is an amusing ride.

9. Ferrari – Hamstrung by a poor lead performance from Adam Driver, this movie still manages to be compelling thanks to director Michael Mann and supporting actress Penelope Cruz.

8. No One Will Save You – A little movie with big ideas that never fails to keep you guessing or on the edge of your seat.

7. The Killer – David Fincher goes full Fincher in this wry and culturally aware assassin’s tale which feels like a poorly camouflaged autobiography.

6. The Boy and the Heron – A Miyazaki movie through and through as it is deeply moving and also deeply weird.

5. Anatomy of a Fall – A masterfully constructed and acted courtroom drama that grabs hold of you and never lets you go…even in the days after seeing it.

4. Godzilla Minus One – Godzilla is back, baby! This movie is a truly top-notch piece of cinema.

3. Poor Things - Yorgos Lanthimos proves once again why he is among the very best filmmakers in the world, and Emma Stone proves she IS the best actress in the world. A stunningly original piece of work.

2. Oppenheimer – A massive and sprawling film that director Christopher Nolan makes feel intimate. A throw-back to Hollywood’s glory days when big movies about big ideas got made and made very well.

1.The Zone of Interest – An unnervingly banal yet artistically ambitious look at the Nazi death machine that is masterfully directed by Jonathan Glazer.

MOST IMPORTANT FILM OF THE YEAR

The Zone of Interest/Oppenheimer – These two films have much in common. For example, they both deal with the same World War II era, albeit from different sides of the divide. They also have protagonists that are employed by the state to manage their massive industrial machinery of murder.

And most notably, at least in my eyes, is that both films strictly refuse to show the fruits of their protagonist’s nefarious labor.

The Zone of Interest is set in a concentration camp but never shows Jews being murdered, and Oppenheimer is about the atomic bomb but never shows the slaughter it produced.

These two films are the most important films of the year because they dramatize and embody our own steadfast refusal to see what is right in front of our eyes…namely the insidiously evil nature of the government of the United States of America and its affiliates, and the slaughter and suffering they cause across the globe.

I can’t remember who it was, but someone once said, “isn’t it funny how the good guys win every war?” The reason that joke is funny of course is because it’s the winners of wars who write the history of those wars and they always see themselves as the good guys. To the victor’s go the spoils and the spoils in modern warfare are that you get to paint yourself as a hero…always and every time.

If Rudolf Hoss, the protagonist of The Zone of Interest, had written a book in the wake of a Nazi victory in World War II, it no doubt would’ve been about how through his brilliant management style he heroically helped save Germany and the rest of Europe. It would probably be titled “Somehow I Manage”.

Former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara once stated in the wonderful Errol Morris documentary The Fog of War, that if the U.S. had lost World War II the entire American military command would’ve been tried and hung as war criminals for the firebombing of Tokyo.

Of course, the same would be true for Robert Oppenheimer as a result of the massacres at Hiroshima and Nagasaki which were directly the result of his scientific achievements.

The U.S. was on the winning side of the war, and so Oppenheimer faced no executioner. Rudolf Hoss, on the other hand, was on the “wrong side of history” and was tried at Nuremberg and hung for his war crimes.

To be clear, no one weeps for Hoss, the Commandant of Auschwitz, despite the fact that Hoss, like Oppenheimer, was just “following orders” and “doing his job” and “fighting for his country”, but that doesn’t make him any less culpable or morally and ethically repugnant.

Hoss and Oppenheimer were both exceedingly good at their jobs and both were deft bureaucratic infighters who could maneuver through some very tricky situations in order to get what they wanted. Both of them ultimately paid a price for their successes, Hoss was hanged and Oppenheimer hung out to dry.

Hoss was a Nazi and I think we can all agree that the Nazis were a stunningly clear embodiment of evil. But if the Nazis were so evil why were so many of them absconded from post-war Germany and brought to the U.S. via Operation Paperclip? Why did so many Nazis, like scientist Wernher von Braun, become integral parts of the U.S. power structure?

Could it be that our moral preening in the wake of WWII was just that, empty preening, and our victory, which wasn’t really ours but the Soviet Union’s, was nothing more than window dressing for the masses – the shuffling of cards in a rigged deck? Could it be the Fourth Reich is alive and well and ruling the world from some smoky backroom in D.C. or Geneva or some other monied capitol?

The Nazis, or Not-sees as my friend The Falconer calls them, did NOT-SEE the humanity of the Jews and Slavs they slaughtered on an industrial scale. But that inability to see the humanity of their enemy isn’t a Nazi thing, but a human thing, an impulse and instinct we must struggle against.

The most-clear example of this is that the ancestors of the same Jews who survived the Holocaust perpetrated upon them by the Nazis, are now perpetrating a holocaust upon Palestinians. The same dehumanization that animated the Nazi Holocaust is the same one that animates the current holocaust inflicted upon the Palestinians.

In a way, the brutal occupation and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians at the hands of Israelis is the epitome of a historical tragedy because Israel was formed as a direct result of the Holocaust, and now it has become the monster from which it was birthed. It is like a child conceived in rape growing up to become a serial rapist.

That Israelis and Palestinians cannot see one another as human is no surprise considering the tormented, tortured, bloody and brutal history of that region, but that Americans refuse to see their own complicity in the dehumanization and slaughter is much more alarming and shameful.

Americans are as ill-informed, mis-informed and dis-informed as any group of people on the planet, and their ignorance and willful blindness to the U.S.’s malignant presence in not just the Middle East, but across the globe, is truly disturbing.

American’s refusal to see that they are complicit in the massacre in Gaza and the war in Ukraine, is exactly what The Zone of Interest and Oppenheimer are dramatizing, consciously or unconsciously.

The U.S. instigated the war in Ukraine with a coup in 2014, and have thwarted any and all peace attempts and encouraged Ukraine to break any peace accords or ceasefires. As a result, hundreds of thousands are dead…mostly Ukrainians. But our media and political establishment stomp their feet and screech and wail about the villainy of evil Putin and so on and so forth. You don’t have to think Putin is a hero to know that we Americans are the villains in Ukraine.

The same is true regarding the Palestinians and Israel. Israel’s occupation and long-time expansion of settlements in the West Bank, only occurs because we give them financial and military aid as well as diplomatic cover at the U.N.

The tens of thousands slaughtered in Gaza? Their blood is on our hands because if our leadership – and I use that term loosely, wanted it to stop they would simply say to Israel, “if the settlements in the West Bank aren’t torn down, and the killing in Gaza doesn’t stop now, then all U.S. aid, be it financial or military, will cease now and forever”, but that will never happen. The reason it will never happen is something you aren’t allowed to say but is true nonetheless…namely Israel does whatever it wants because it runs America, not the other way around. Joe Biden doesn’t tell Israel what to do, Israel tells Joe Biden what to do. And the same was true with Trump and will be true if Trump wins this year’s election. It doesn’t matter who the President of the United States of America is in regards to Israel because the American leadership class in its entirety is thoroughly compromised by Israeli’s over-sized lobby and massive money-machine, Israeli’s ruthless intelligence apparatus (does anyone remember Jeffrey Epstein?), and a bevy of Zionist fifth columnists throughout the U.S. government.

This is why the U.S. is so quick to slander Putin as a war criminal but would never dare to suggest that of Israel…because Netanyahu IS a war criminal, but…he’s OUR war criminal. And Americans simply accept this unending hypocrisy and moral duplicity blindly and without a second thought.

This desperate and willful blindness, be it moral, ethical or political, is what animates The Zone of Interest and Oppenheimer, and what animates the entirety of the political and media establishment, as well as the populace, in the United States of America.

The bottom line is that closing your eyes to moral atrocities doesn’t actually make you blind, it only makes you gullible and culpable…and the American people are lots of both.

Well on that very, very upbeat note….the tenth (THE TENTH!! – and God-willing not the last!) Mickey™® Awards comes to a close!! Thank you so much for continuing to read my work and for sticking with me through thick and thin. I greatly appreciate it. I hope you have a great 2024 and we’ll see you next year…AT THE MICKEYS™®!!

Follow me on Twitter: @MPMActingCo

©2024

The 96th Academy Awards: 2024 Oscar Predictions

96TH ACADEMY AWARDS: 2024 OSCAR PREDICTIONS

It’s that time of year once again…when all the self-righteous degenerates and pedophiles of Hollywood gather together to celebrate how wonderful they are…that’s right…the Academy Awards are here!!

For the first time in the last five years, I find myself mildly interested in the most nauseatingly narcissistic of awards shows just because I actually liked a few of the movies, and especially because I liked the front runner Oppenheimer.

 I would enjoy Oppenheimer going nuclear on the competition at the Oscars for a variety of reasons.

1.   I liked the movie.

2.   I like Christopher Nolan.

3.   I like that it’s incredibly well-made.

4.   I like that it’s a movie made for adults that is three hours long and it still made nearly a billion dollars.

5.   I want it to win so that they make more movies like it.

It seemed that the Academy Awards, and Hollywood, over the last few years were quickly hurtling toward their well-earned demise as a brief glance at the last four Best Picture winners reveals a poopoo platter of putrid movies….Nomadland (2020), Coda (2021) and Everything Everywhere All At Once (2023)…YIKES!

But this year we have a bunch of films nominated for Best Picture that are actually decent movies, Oppenheimer chief among them. So maybe this signals that the movie business and the art of cinema are, if not climbing out of their graves, then at least no longer digging.

Of course, I’m not going to get too optimistic as Hollywood is very good at shitting all over themselves in any given situation, so I will just wait and see how this year goes…and if there is a next year, then how next year goes.

But for now…this is a solid Best Picture contingent. The other categories? Well, I admit it seems like slim pickings in many of them, and the closer you look the less pretty the picture of this year at the movies looks, but for now I’m just going to enjoy an actual movie – Oppenheimer, being the belle of the ball at the Academy Awards.

As for the Academy Awards…as longtime readers know I have won a record setting 35 straight Oscar pools. My domination in this field is less a testament to my brilliance than to the fact that I have no friends and therefore am competing only against myself…and I’m an idiot so it’s easy to for me to outwit me.

Anyway…enough of my rambling…let’s get on with it!! Here are my official picks for this year’s Oscar winners.

BEST PICTURE

American Fiction

Anatomy of a Fall

Barbie

The Holdovers

Killers of the Flower Moon

Maestro

Oppenheimer

Past Lives

Poor Things

The Zone of Interest

This is a pretty easy category as Oppenheimer has been the front runner since it hit big screens last summer and hasn’t wavered even a little bit. The movie is everything that Hollywood used to stand for and celebrate…and will reap the rewards.

As for the other films, Barbie and Maestro are dogshit and should not be nominated…and neither should Killers of the Flower Moon. But beyond that the films are all good to very good.

Will Win: Oppenheimer

Should Win: Oppenheimer

BEST DIRECTOR

Justine Triet – Anatomy of a Fall

Martin Scorsese – Killers of the Flower Moon

Christopher Nolan – Oppenheimer

Yorgos Lanthimos – Poor Things

Jonathon Glazer – The Zone of Intertest

This is Christopher Nolan’s year. This Best Picture/Best Director Oscar win is less a celebration of Nolan than a coronation. He is the ultimate blockbuster auteur…and frankly…the only blockbuster auteur we have. No one is beating him for Best Director.

Will Win: Christopher Nolan Oppenheimer

Should Win: Christopher Nolan

BEST ACTOR

Bradley Cooper – Maestro

Colman Domingo – Rustin

Paul Giamatti – The Holdovers

Cillian Murphy – Oppenheimer

Jeffrey Wright – American Fiction

This is a thin category as Domingo Colman and Bradley Cooper have zero business being nominated…but then again, the year is not filled with a plethora of sterling performances. Cillian Murphy does excellent work as the title character in Oppenheimer. He’s not a movie star and he’s not an acting star, he’s just a decent, quiet, likable guy who crushed a difficult role.

Will Win: Cillian Murphy Oppenheimer

Could Win: Paul Giamatti The Holdovers – Giamatti has a shot to pull off the upset, but it’s a long shot. Not impossible, but very difficult.

Should Win: Cillian Murphy

BEST ACTRESS

Annette Bening – Nyad

Lily Gladstone – Killers of the Flower Moon

Sandra Huller – Anatomy of a Fall

Carey Mulligan – Maestro

Emma Stone – Poor Things

Another strange category as Annette Bening and Carey Mulligan are actively atrocious in their performances. Sandra Huller is terrific in Anatomy of a Fall. Lily Gladstone is just…ok…in what is really a supporting role in Killers of the Flower Moon. Emma Stone gives one of the greatest performances of the last 25 years in Poor Things and should win her second-best Actress statuette. But she won’t because the Oscars are about virtue signaling their Diversity, Equity and Inclusion bona fides as much as anything else. Lily Gladstone will be the first Native American woman to win an Oscar, and to Academy members that means a lot, despite the fact that her work is unworthy of the award…and Emma Stone’s work is so transcendently sublime.

Will Win: Lily Gladstone Killers of the Flower Moon

Could Win: Emma Stone Poor Things – Stone has a chance, and I hope she wins, but I just think that the Diversity Cult wins the day over meritocracy.

Should Win: Emma Stone

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR

Sterling K. Brown – American Fiction

Robert DeNiro – Killers of the Flower Moon

Robert Downey Jr. – Oppenheimer

Ryan Gosling – Barbie

Mark Ruffalo – Poor Things

Downey is a great reclamation/redemption story. The arc of his career is fascinating, and his being the lynchpin in the MCU and how much money those movies made for Hollywood, and Downey’s charm and resilience, are what make him the unquestioned favorite to win this award. Oh…and he also does exceptional work in Oppenheimer, so that helps too.

Will Win: Robert Downey Jr Oppenheimer

Could Win: Ryan Gosling Barbie – Gosling is beloved but not as beloved as Downey. Gosling’s time will come…just not this year.

Should Win: Robert Downey Jr

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS

Emily Blunt – Oppenheimer

Danielle Brooks – The Color Purple

America Ferrera – Barbie

Jodie Foster – Nyad

Da’Vine Joy Randolph – The Holdovers

This is an incredibly weak field, and Randolph is far and away the best performance and will without a doubt win the award…and deservedly so.

Will Win: Da’Vine Joy Randolph

Should Win: Da’Vine Joy Randolph

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY

Anatomy of a Fall

The Holdovers

Maestro

May December

Past Lives

Tricky category. I think Justine Triet (Anatomy of a Fall), who is also nominated in Best Director, gets the nod, as the Academy likes to reward directors with a screenplay award when they’re not getting a director’s award.

Will Win: Justine Triet Anatomy of a Fall

Could Win: Celine Song Past Lives – There’s a lot of affection for this film but I think Anatomy of a Fall has the momentum.

Should Win: Justine Triet

BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY

American Fiction

Barbie

Oppenheimer

Poor Things

The Zone of Interest

Easily the most fascinating of all the categories. This category could be an indicator of an absolute blowout for Oppenheimer if Nolan wins the award. Or it could be another chance for the Academy to signal its virtue by rewarding Cord Jefferson and American Fiction, which isn’t worthy but deals with race and the Oscars love that sort of thing. But what I think will happen is that the Academy will reward Greta Gerwig for Barbie as a way to show they’re not sexist, and to acknowledge the “importance” (*barf*) of Barbie and its success. It will also be Gerwig’s first Oscar win after four nominations.

Will Win: Greta Gerwig Barbie

Could Win: Cord Jefferson American Fiction/Christopher Nolan Oppenheimer

Should Win: Christopher Nolan Oppenheimer

BEST ANIMATED FEATURE

The Boy and the Heron

Elemental

Nimona

Robot Dreams

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse

This is a two-way race between Miyazaki’s The Boy and the Heron and the Spider-Verse movie. I think it goes to Miyazaki because he is an acknowledged master and this may (or may not) be his final film. And the first Spider-Verse movie won this category, and there is another Spider-Verse movie coming, the final in the trilogy, so that gives Academy voters a chance to not vote for this one and wait for next time. Regardless…I think Miyazaki wins the award…which will make me very, very happy, as I love his films.

Will Win: The Boy and the Heron

Could Win: Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse

Should Win: The Boy and the Heron

BEST INTERNATIONAL FEATURE

Io Capitano

Perfect Days

Society of the Snow

The Teachers’ Lounge

The Zone of Interest

This is no competition at all. The Zone of Interest is nominated for Best Picture and Best Director as well as Best International Feature. It won’t win the first two, but it sure as hell will win this one. It’s a terrific arthouse movie, one of the very best films of the year. It is unbeatable in this category. Now, if Anatomy of a Fall had been France’s official selection and were in the running here…then this would be a barnburner of a category…but it isn’t…so it isn’t.

Will Win: The Zone of Interest

Should Win: The Zone of Interest

BEST DOCUMENTARY FEATURE

Bobi Wine: The People’s President

The Eternal Memory

Four Daughters

To Kill a Tiger

20 Days in Mariupol

In an act of predictable and pretentious political posturing, 20 Days in Mariupol will win this award and easily. Yawn.

Will Win: 20 Days in Mairupol

BEST DOCUMENTARY SHORT

When picking the short categories you have to focus on two things…1. Is someone famous involved. 2. What is the most compelling “agenda” on display which will satiate the Academy’s self-righteousness. The ABCs of Book Banning seems like a perfect fit for the self-righteous, politically-motivated, virtue signaling crowd in the Academy.

Will Win: The ABCs of Book Banning

BEST LIVE ACTION SHORT

This short category fulfills the “famous person” requirement for Academy interest. Wes Anderson has never won an Academy Award. This seems like a good way for the Academy to finally give him a nod. It also helps that his short is very, very good.

Will Win: The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar

BEST ANIMATED SHORT

This short satisfies BOTH the famous person and agenda requirements as Sean Lennon and Yoko Ono are featured and it’s anti-war.

Will Win: The War is Over!

BEST ORIGINAL SCORE

American Fiction

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny

Killers of the Flower Moon

Oppenheimer

Poor Things

A mildly interesting category. Goransson (Oppenheimer) should win this easily, and deservedly so, but John Williams (Indiana Jones) is a Hollywood institution and he’s 91 years old, so there’s always the chance the Oscars bestow a thank-you-for-your-service Oscar to him in this category. In the same way, Robbie Robertson (Killers of the Flower Moon) died this past year, so the sympathy vote could go his way and he could win in an upset. Anything is possible, but I think Oppenheimer is in for a big night and this category will be a leading indicator.

Will Win: Ludwig Goransson Oppenheimer

Could Win: John Williams Indiana Jones/Robbie Robertson Killers of the Flower Moon

Should Win: Ludwig Goransson Oppenheimer

BEST ORIGINAL SONG

The Academy wants to reward barbie and this category is a good place to do it because it also gives them a chance to attract and satisfy younger viewers. Billie Eilish fills the bill on both counts.

Will Win: Billie Eilish Barbie

Could Win: I’m Just Ken Barbie

Should Win: I’m Just Ken Barbie

BEST SOUND

The Creator

Maestro

MI Dead Reckoning

Oppenheimer

The Zone of Interest

Another bellwether category. If Oppenheimer wins this it will signal a huge night for the Team Nolan…but if The Zone of Interest wins, which is very, very possible, then it signals that Oppenheimer will have a good night, but not a great one. I have flip flopped on this category a dozen times and am still not sure. But I guess I’ll go with the mild upset and pick The Zone of Interest. That said, I won’t be upset if Oppenheimer wins.

Will Win: The Zone of Interest

Could Win: Oppenheimer

Should Win: Oppenheimer or The Zone of Interest – They are both exceedingly well done.

BEST PRODUCTION DESIGN

Barbie

Killers of the Flower Moon

Napoleon

Oppenheimer

Poor Things

Let’s be clear…if Oppenheimer wins this award then it is going to dominate the Oscars in the most epic and historical of ways. I don’t think it wins here though as this seems like a two-way race between Barbie and Poor Things. I think Poor Things is much more deserving of the award and will win it, but won’t be surprised if Barbie gets the nod.

Will Win: Poor Things

Could Win: Barbie

Should Win: Poor Things

BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY

Edward Lachman - El Conde

Rodrigo Prieto - Killers of the Flower Moon

Matthew Libatique - Maestro

Hoyte vna Hoytema - Oppenheimer

Robbie Ryan - Poor Things

Hoyte van Hoytema (Oppenheimer) is one of the most respected cinematographers working today who hasn’t won an Oscar. I think that changes this year. There is a very outside chance that Robbie Ryan wins for his spectacular work on Poor Things…but that seems unlikely. Chalk another one up to the Oppenheimer juggernaut.

Will Win: Hoyte van Hoytema Oppenheimer

Should Win: Hoyte van Hoytema Oppenheimer

BEST MAKEUP AND HAIR STYLING

Golda

Maestro

Oppenheimer

Poor Things

Society of the Snow

I think this is a battle between Maestro and Poor Things. If Oppenheimer wins here then holy shit we are in for an epic landslide of Oscars. I don’t think that happens though, as Maestro gets the nod over Poor Things.

Will win: Maestro

Could Win: Poor Things

Should Win: Poor Things/Maestro – As much as I loathed Maestro…the old man makeup in that movie was astounding.

BEST COSTUME DESIGN

Barbie

Killers of the Flower Moon

Napoleon

Oppenheimer

Poor Things

Barbie and Poor Things square off once again, and Poor Things gets the win. If Barbie wins, which is not impossible, it could be a signal that the film will win a respectable amount of categories like Production Design and Costume Design.

Will Win: Poor Things

Could Win: Barbie

Should Win: Poor Things

BEST FILM EDITING

Anatomy of a Fall

The Holdovers

Killers of the Flower Moon

Oppenheimer

Poor Things

I think this is a slam dunk for Oppenheimer. If anything else wins, like Anatomy of a Fall, that is a strong signal that Oppenheimer will have a tough night outside of Best Picture and Best Director.

Will Win: Oppenheimer

Should Win: Oppenheimer

BEST VISUAL EFFECTS

The Creator

Godzilla Minus One

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3

Mission: Impossible

Napoleon

I think this is a pretty close category but that Godzilla Minus One will win. First off, the effects in the film are outstanding. Secondly, the effects team and the entire production have been out there celebrating their nomination. And third, the film was surprisingly very successful for a foreign film in the American market. For all these reasons, I think Godzilla Minus One wins the award…and frankly, rightfully so.

Will Win: Godzilla Minus One

Should Win: Godzilla Minus One

So that’s it…those are my Oscar predictions. I have Oppenheimer winning seven awards and with a very real chance to win nine. Maybe I’m wrong…but who cares? The real award, the most-presitgious award, the one that Hollywood insiders truly care about, is the Mickey Awards™…and they come next weekend!! So stay tuned!!

Until then, enjoy the Oscars and hopefully winning your Oscar pool!

 Follow me on Twitter: MPMActingCo

©2024

American Conspiracy: The Octopus Murders - A Review : The Octopus Thrives in Muddy Waters

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. A flawed but good enough documentary mini-series that serves as a place to dip your toe into the pool of the villainous conspiracy that is currently ruling the U.S. and the western world.

American Conspiracy: The Octopus Murders, is a true crime documentary mini-series on Netflix that explores the mysterious 1991 death of journalist Danny Casolaro and the vast criminal conspiracy – named The Octopus, which he was attempting to uncover at the time of his demise.

The Octopus Murders is directed by Zachary Treitz and Christian Hansen, who act as guides and protagonists while leading viewers through the tangled web of The Octopus and of Casolaro’s death – which was officially ruled a suicide but which is certainly circumspect.

The series opens with Treitz being concerned about his friend Hansen – who is a respected photo-journalist, having become obsessed with Casolaro’s story and the allure of a vast conspiracy.

Casolaro’s story is this…that he was just a regular writer working for a small computer-related magazine when a massive story about government corruption fell into his lap. He investigated the story and discovered a deeper and more complex conspiracy than he ever could have imagined. And then, just as he was on the verge of breaking the story wide open, he goes to meet a source in West Virginia and is found dead, in his hotel room with his wrists slashed a dozen times.  

While the authorities were quick to rule his death a suicide, his family, and many others, disagree. The fact that his body was embalmed without family permission before an autopsy could be done, is a damning piece of evidence in favor of a cover-up surrounding Casolaro’s death.

While Casolaro’s death is certainly pivotal regarding this story, it is also, in many ways, just a sideshow. The real story at the heart of it all is the Octopus he was uncovering.

The Octopus story began in the early 1980’s with a scandal involving a software company named Inslaw and its software PROMIS, which was being used by the Department of Justice to set up a massive database of criminal cases.

The Justice Department then defrauds Inslaw and steals their PROMIS software and distributed it to various other countries for nefarious means (more on that later). Inslaw goes into bankruptcy because the DOJ stole its software and so, led by its founder, William Hamilton, they take the DOJ to court. A federal bankruptcy judge ruled in 1988 that the DOJ had taken PROMIS through “trickery, fraud and deceit” and are liable to pay a massive million-dollar settlement.

The DOJ retaliates by replacing the judge who gave the favorable ruling with one of the DOJ lawyers who worked for the department on the Inslaw case, and then in 1991 they get the ruling overturned and thrown out of court.

This infuriated William Hamilton, and his lawyer, former Attorney general Eliot Richardson, who was astonished at the bold-faced corruption of it all. Eliot claimed this scandal was bigger than anything regarding Watergate…and he knows about Watergate since he resigned rather than fire the Watergate Special Prosecutor at the behest of Richard Nixon.

This is where Casolaro picks up the story and begins investigating it all. One of his primary sources is Hamilton, who guides him through the Inslaw end of things and points him towards various characters who are up to all sorts of no good. Casolaro then starts looking even deeper and finds even more remarkable criminality.

For example, the DOJ gave PROMIS to America’s allies across the globe, and used it to spy on them (a precursor to the modern-day Israeli-Pegasus spyware story).

The story doesn’t end there…as it ends up expanding to include the infamous “October Surprise” where during the 1980 presidential election candidate Ronald Reagan made a deal with Iran for them to refrain from releasing American hostages in order to hurt President Carter politically and thus help Reagan win the 1980 presidential election.

Then there’s the Cabazon Indian Reservation in California used as a CIA base for gun running and drug smuggling, under the direction of CIA cutout security firm Wackenhut. The Cabazon story is filled with multiple “unsolved” murders.

The Cabazon story also expands into Iran-Contra, as it was a way station/money laundering operation for weapons going to Central America and the Middle East, and drugs coming into America.

Casolaro got neck deep into this tangled web of intelligence agency nefariousness back in the early 90s, and Hansen follows in his footsteps in the last few years. Hansen even looks a bit like Casolaro and so he actually plays the role of Casolaro in recreations of his story.

There are lots of side characters in this conspiracy, some are well-known in the world of conspiracies – like Michael Riconoscuito, who is in federal prison on drug charges but who has strong ties to both organized crime and the intelligence community.

Riconoscuito is well-known to conspiracy theorists as being the guy who claimed to have designed a special type of bomb, and that this special type of bomb was used in the bombing of the Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995. Most critically thinking conspiracy theorists believe the Riconoscuito Oklahoma City bomb story was a plant to obfuscate and distract from the actual conspiracy involving a second man working with Timothy McVeigh, and from McVeigh’s odd background and motivations. Regardless…Riconoscuito is one of those intelligence agency characters that tells just enough of the truth, and just enough of lies, to completely muddy any waters…as his role in The Octopus Murders shows.

All that said, I found American Conspiracy: The Octopus Murders to be an interesting mini-series, but it is also predictably deceptive in how it presents itself.

There’s an investigative reporter featured late in the series whose work shadowed Casolaro’s back in the early 90’s, and she says she dropped the story because she “wanted to live a normal life, and have fun”. Oh…how noble.

For decades and decades, the standard approach for the corporate media was that conspiracy theories are for kooks, and conspiracy theorists are mentally ill. Of course, the establishment press do believe in conspiracies, just not the ones that threaten the establishment.

As a result, you can still count on at least one or two corporate press outlets putting out an article every year that declares that there’s a new study from some expert who found that people who believe in conspiracies are retarded narcissists who have small penises.

That said, a mild shift has been occurring in recent years. Too many conspiracies have proven to be obviously true of late and so the new approach by the gatekeepers is to say that conspiracy thinking is dangerous not only to the institutions accused of wrong-doing, but to the people doing the accusing.

The Octopus Murders uses this approach as it basically takes the position that yes there are obvious conspiracies that occurred back in the 1980s where dozens were murdered and where government agencies and officials lied and committed heinous crimes…but you’d be crazy to look into it…or more accurately, you’ll go crazy if you look into it.

Danny Casolaro looked into it and he went a little crazy and maybe, just maybe, killed himself. And if he didn’t kill himself then he was killed…which wouldn’t have happened if he just “lived a normal, happy life.”

The dramatic premise established at the beginning of this mini-series is that Christian Hansen is in great peril because he too, just like Danny Casolaro, is getting close to falling into the abyss that is The Octopus conspiracy.

Back in 2017-2018 there was a podcast called “The RFK Tapes”, where two hosts dive deep into the RFK assassination. It was an interesting podcast until, at the end, just as things are getting spicy, one of the hosts says that despite the evidence staring him in the face, he can’t accept a conspiracy regarding RFK’s assassination because only bad people like Alex Jones believe in conspiracies. So, this host shuts everything down and basically goes back to sleep so he doesn’t empower Alex Jones. How courageous.

In 2008, famous former prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi wrote a book about the JFK assassination titled Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy. I read this 1,600 page monstrosity and what was amusing about it, I mean besides the tortured reasoning and allergy to logic captured within it, was that Bugliosi concludes that Oswald acted alone in killing JFK…but more importantly, he also concludes that the case is so convoluted and crazy that readers should never even dare look into it. In other words, don’t worry your silly little heads about the JFK assassination…go back to sleep my little pets.

Bugliosi’s admonition to stay away from the JFK assassination is only made all the more delicious when you consider his nefarious behavior regarding the Manson murders and trial…all of which is gloriously laid out in Tom O’Neill’s wonder book Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties.

As a brief aside, go read O’Neill’s book and dive into the astonishing “coincidence” that is CIA psychologist Jolly West, the mastermind behind MKUltra, treating Charles Manson before his infamous killing spree, and Jack Ruby following his murder of Lee Harvey Oswald.

Conspiracies abound, and you don’t have to be some wild-eyed conspiracy theorist to see them clearly.

For example, the reality is that the Octopus Casolaro uncovered, is much bigger than he could ever know. One of his main targets in his investigation was George H.W. Bush, and Bush himself is a lynchpin when it comes to the Octopus and the conspiracy ocean it swims in.

For example, Bush, the former Director of the CIA, and eventual Vice President to Reagan, President of the U.S. and father to a President of the U.S., was integral in the October Surprise, and used the connections he developed with Iran to facilitate Iran-Contra as Vice President.

It should also be noted that Bush was knee deep in the JFK assassination as well. He had longtime ties to George de Mohrenshildt, Oswald’s handler in Dallas, and Zapata Offshore Company, one of Bush’s oil companies, was an asset for the Anti-Castro Cuban movement in laundering money and running guns into Cuba. Bush was alleged to have been in Dealey Plaza the day of the assassination and is also one of the very few people alive at the time who has no recollection of where he was the day JFK was killed.

Bush was also very close with the Hinckley family, whose son John shot Ronald Reagan in April of 1981. If Reagan had died Bush would’ve become president. Bush’s son Neil was scheduled to have dinner with John Hinckley’s brother Scott on the evening of the assassination. What a coincidence.

Speaking of coincidence, George H.W. Bush was at a Carlyle Group meeting in New York City on September 11, 2001. Also at this meeting was Osama Bin Laden’s older brother. Ummm…that’s a strange coincidence. George HW Bush is like the Zelig of intelligence agency shenanigans.

And of course, there’s the deep ties between the Saudi Royal Family and the Bush family, the same Saudi Royal Family which directly funded the 9/11 attackers.

Besides the Bush storyline there’s also the banking scandals, which include but are not limited to BCCI, the Savings and Loan scandal, the 2007/2008 financial collapse and a bevy of banks laundering drug money for cartels over the years.

The point I’m trying to make is that American Conspiracy: The Octopus Murders, is a nice little primer despite its flawed and tainted thinking regarding “conspiracies” and how they are dangerous to mental health.

And also that the Octopus isn’t some relic from the remote past, it is alive and well and bigger than ever and feeding off of the misery in the world while lining its pockets and filling in graves.

The Octopus today runs the show – the whole show. It doesn’t matter if Biden or Trump or Obama or Bush are President, because the Octopus is the one pulling the strings.

The Octopus ran a coup in Ukraine and started a war there so it could have a massive money laundering and gun running operation in full effect. The Octopus started a war in Afghanistan for the same purposes and also got the added benefit of an endless supply of drugs to flood into the West…which gave us the Opioid epidemic.

JFK, RFK, MLK, Malcolm X and Fred Hampton were killed by the Octopus. Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Congo, Chile, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Bosnia, Chechnya, Iraq, Afghanistan, Iraq again, Syria, Ukraine and a host of other wars, coups and slaughters were initiated by the Octopus. BCCI, S&L, Tech Bubble, Housing Bubble and Crash, Bank fraud and drug cartel money laundering, were all Octopus operations. Jeffrey Epstein, the Franklin Affair, Johnny Gosch and all the rest of the sex trafficking and child sex trafficking operations are run by the Octopus.

The Octopus has been doing this and a whole bunch of other insidious and nefarious shit time immemorial, and they’ll continue to do it, and those who point it out will be ridiculed, blacklisted or much much worse. Julian Assange is dying in prison because he exposed the Octopus. Danny Casolaro was killed by the Octopus. Gary Webb was killed by the Octopus.

The bottom line is that American Conspiracy: The Octopus Murders is a teardrop in an ocean of misery, and its biggest flaw is that it tells you not to dive in because the waters are treacherous.

I agree that the waters are treacherous, but Truth is the only thing that matters, so grow a pair of balls, gird your loins and dive in…the water is fine.

 Follow me on Twitter: @MPMActingCo

©2024

Nyad (Netflix): A Review - Sports Drama Drowns in Shallow Waters

****WARNING – THIS REVIEW CONTAINS CLEARLY MARKED SPOILERS!! THIS IS NOT A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!!****

My Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. Typical sports movie nonsense that avoids any genuine human drama in favor of generic hagiography.

Nyad, starring Annette Bening and Jodie Foster, is a sports biopic/docu-drama that chronicles famed long distance swimmer Diana Nyad’s attempt to swim from Cuba to Florida as a 60-year-old.

The film, which is a Netflix original, is directed by Academy Award winning documentarians Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin (Free Solo) and is written by Julia Cox.

I vaguely remember Diana Nyad as a sports commentator on ABC’s Wide World of Sports back when I was a kid, but beyond that I knew absolutely nothing about her prior to seeing Nyad. Her feats of swimming endurance, such as crossing the English Channel and her attempt, as chronicled in Nyad, to swim from Cuba to Florida, were unknown to me.

Not knowing anything about Diana Nyad or her accomplishments helps to make the film Nyad somewhat compelling in the most rudimentary way as viewers will fall into the comfortable position of just being intrigued if she will or won’t make it on her perilous journey from Cuba to Florida.

The downside though is that if you know nothing about Diana Nyad before watching this film, you still won’t really know anything of substance about her when it’s over.

Nyad is as generic and cliché-ridden a sports drama as you’ll find, and it spends all of its time treading in painfully shallow water and avoiding diving into any noteworthy depths.

The reasons for the film’s tepid dramatic tone are numerous but obvious. The first of which is that Diana Nyad, and many of the real people portrayed in this movie, are still alive and were actively involved in the making of the film. It’s tough to tell a revealing, warts and all story about someone when you’ve actually met them and may run into them at the premiere. This is a major pitfall for all biopics and in our current age of documentary as self-produced marketing venture, in the documentary genre as well. A perfect example of this was The Last Dance, the Emmy award winning Michael Jordan documentary series that was executive produced by…Michael Jordan. Not surprisingly Jordan comes across as a god, who’s only flaw is that he was too committed to winning.

Biopics and documentaries made about or by people who are involved in the process, seem like job interviews where the applicant is asked what their weaknesses are and the answer is “I work too hard and care too much!” Nyad is no exception as Diana Nyad’s greatest failing is revealed to be she is too driven to greatness. Yawn.

Another reason why Nyad was so forgettable was that the directors Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin simply aren’t very talented or skilled filmmakers when it comes to feature films. Their documentary Free Solo was an astonishing piece of work about a remarkable man and his deadly sport, but feature films are a different animal from documentaries and Nyad is evidence that these two directors were out of their depth.

Screenwriters Julia Cox is equally to blame for the film’s soft-pedaled approach and allergy to genuine drama, as the story she focuses on, Diana Nyad’s attempted swim from Cuba to Florida, is actually not the most interesting, or dramatic, tale to tell about Diana Nyad…but more on that in a bit.

The performances in Nyad are as shallow as the story. Annette Bening’s Nyad is an ornery, tenacious narcissist…and is as one note as it gets. Gruff and determined appear to be the only emotions that Diana Nyad has ever felt, at least according to this movie.

Bening brings plenty of bluster to Nyad but never any genuine humanity. It all feels like an actress avoiding the uncomfortable emotional truth of her character and instead wallowing in frivolous play-acting.  

Jodie Foster is at least likable as the beleaguered yet loyal assistant/coach Bonnie Stoll, who bends over backwards to keep Nyad content and focused. Unfortunately, Foster is reduced to being little more than a collection of soft smiles and worried and concerned looks. The character of Bonnie is the ultimate supporting role since all she does is support.

Rhys Ifans plays John Bartlett and while he looks like the real-life Bartlett, he seems terribly miscast as the grizzled navigator with the heart of gold. His somewhat stilted American accent is a major cause for that failing.

After watching Nyad I went to Wikipedia to read about Diana Nyad’s life. What I discovered there was quite fascinating, especially considering little of it made it into the film.

***************SPOILER ALERT*******************

The most important thing I learned is that Diana Nyad’s remarkable swim from Cuba to Florida, which is the centerpiece of the film, is decidedly in question. Both the Guinness Book of World Records and the World Open Water Swimming Association (WOWSA) have declined to ratify or acknowledge the accomplishment due to “lack of independent observers and incomplete records”.

This was quite a revelation to me as the film goes to extraordinary lengths to point out that Nyad followed all the stringent protocols in order to make her swim legitimate.  

According to articles written in conjunction with the film’s release, Nyad’s swim from Cuba to Florida isn’t the only thing that may not be totally on the up and up, as some have claimed she is a serial fabulist.

I have no personal opinion on Diana Nyad as a fabulist or whether she did or did not cheat while swimming from Cuba to Florida, but as a cinephile I do have an opinion.

Frankly…the more compelling, dramatic and interesting story to tell wouldn’t be the black and white sports drama of Nyad, but rather the tale of Diana Nyad being so obsessed with making this historic swim and fulfilling her destiny that she cuts corners and cheats. That is a story that would be much more profound, insightful and dramatic, especially in our current age of self-assured righteousness where if you believe your cause is noble and your intentions pure then any wrongs you commit are actually right.

Diana Nyad as a self-obsessed, self-absorbed, virulent narcissist who commits fraud in order to convince the world she is great out of a need to cover the grievous wound from her childhood that aggressively haunts her, is the stuff of dramatic gold. But the makers of Nyad, including Diana Nyad herself, are incapable of that kind of honesty, only hagiography.

In this way, Nyad reminds me of The Imitation Game, the 2014 Academy Award Best Picture nominee starring Benedict Cumberbatch. The film chronicles the travails of Alan Turing, a brilliant British mathematician and computer scientist who creates a codebreaking machine that in essence helps the allies win World War II.

Turing was a closeted homosexual at a time when that was a crime. The film dramatizes his struggles with his secret sexuality while he helps the Allies win the war…and then the movie ends.

I found the film to be, like Nyad, rather generic fare and decidedly underwhelming. After the final frame though a scroll ran which informed viewers that less than a decade after the war, Turing was persecuted and prosecuted for his homosexuality and eventually submitted to chemical castration as part of a plea deal. Then, a few years later, he killed himself.

After reading that I sat in stunned silence…I mean…my God…that is absolutely and utterly horrific. I then wondered why I just watched a two-hour movie about Alan Turing which ended before the true drama of Alan Turing’s life had even begun. Turing helping to beat the Nazis should’ve been the first half hour of the film, and his crucifixion at the hands of the British government, which he had just helped save, should have been the majority of the story.

The same is true of Nyad. Diana Nyad is a fascinating character, but she is much more fascinating, and illuminating, if she cheated on her historic swim than if she actually did it. And the fact that the movie Nyad simply wants to avoid that controversy and make Diana Nyad out to be an uncomplicated, if disagreeable, hero, is why the film fails.

***********END SPOILERS****************

If as a filmmaker you want to take the safe, generic path then you shouldn’t be making films, you should be directing corporate commercials. Go get a job at a public relations and marketing firm and leave the art of cinema to artists who don’t mind getting their hands, and their idols, decidedly dirty.

If you like movies that stay in the shallow end of the pool, then Nyad is for you. But if, like me, you like films to dive into the dark depths of the raging sea in order to find the truth, and in so doing, the drama and humanity of it all, then Nyad is most definitely not for you.

 Follow me on Twitter: @MPMActingCo

©2023

Encounters (Netflix): A Documentary Mini-series Review - The Truth is Out There...But Not So Much in Here

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

 My Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT/SEE IT. Newbies to the UFO story might find this a decent if uneven place to dip their toe into the topic. Viewers more informed on the UFO phenomenon won’t find much useful in this tepid and tame mini-series.

Encounters is the new four-episode docu-series on Netflix that explores four different UFO mass sightings at four different locations across the globe. The series, which premiered on the streaming service September 27th, is garnering some attention because it is produced by Steven Spielberg’s production company Amblin.

As someone who has had a longtime interest in the subject of UFOs, and who has read and watched a great deal about the phenomenon, I was excited to see Encounters. With UFOs, or as they’ve now been deemed UAPs (unidentified aerial phenomenon), finally being publicly taken seriously by governments and the media after years of being scoffed at, the opportunity for quality documentaries to inform audiences and initiate further investigation is at an all-time high.

Prior to Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment producing Encounters, other high profile Hollywood producers/directors have stepped into the UFO breach in recent years in similar fashion. JJ Abrams’ 2021 docu-series titled UFO, is one example.

Encounters is very similar in some ways to Abrams’ UFO as both are four-part docu-series, both cover a lot of familiar ground that UFO afficionados will know well, and both are decent enough starting places for the uninitiated to dip their toe into the UFO subject. Unfortunately, both are also, despite their best intentions, middle-of-the-road, rather forgettable projects.

Unlike Abrams’ UFO series, Encounters for the most part stays away from the UFO hot topics that have made headlines in the last five years or so and instead focuses on four mass sightings in recent and not-so-recent history.

The first episode is about the 2008 sighting by hundreds of people in Stephensville, Texas.

This first episode is, like all the others, very well shot and professionally produced. The witnesses presented aren’t just credible but are interesting, and their stories are compelling. Even more compelling is the radar evidence discovered after a FOIA request that backs up the claims of those who saw UFOs and saw F-16s quickly chase after them.

One minor issue I had with the first episode is that it never mentions that Stephensville, Texas is very close to the home of George W. Bush, who was President of the United States at the time of the UFO incident. This seemed a curious omission in recounting the tale.

Episode two covers the 1994 encounter at the Ariel School in Zimbabwe. This incident is fascinating, but the episode is a bit bumpy. For instance, 60 students claim to have seen a UFO and an alien in broad daylight, but one student, who is now a grown man, claims he made the whole thing up and everyone else just went with it and now believe the delusion. I understand wanting to show both sides of an argument, but this lone student seems, frankly, unhinged, and his testimony about it being a hoax feels, ironically enough, absurd in the face of the counter evidence.

This episode is noteworthy solely because it introduces the remarkable Dr. John Mack, the late Harvard psychiatrist who in the 1990s began to take the alien abduction phenomenon seriously.

John Mack’s story is worthy of an extensive documentary all its own, but Encounters is only able to give a brief background on his astounding career and the impact he had on the subject. One can only hope that a more extensive documentary on Mack is produced, but for the time being this quick review in episode two will hopefully pique newbie’s interest in the man and his work.

Episode three examines the 1977 Broad Haven Triangle incident, in which a bevy of Welsh school boys and townspeople witnessed UFOs and aliens. This episode was the weakest of the bunch as it never streamlines its storytelling or clarifies the bizarre incidents in question.

The incident itself is fascinating, as all of the children who witnessed it were quickly separated by skeptical teachers and asked to draw what they saw, and drew the same thing. The counter point is that at that time the culture was awash in UFOs and so all people, not just children, had a foundational understanding of what UFOs would look like and thus rendered them in unison upon request.

Much of the other witnesses in the Broad Haven case tell interesting stories but they feel less compelling, and frankly less believable, than the three other incidents examined in this series.

The final episode looks at the plethora of UFO sightings in Fukushima, Japan after the horrific earthquake and tsunami of 2011.

This episode features the very best video evidence in the series, but also wanders down some pretty bizarre, and frankly, unhelpful paths when interviewing residents of the area.

For example, one woman, a drama teacher and pseudo-spiritualist, claims she is an alien and is inhabiting a body on earth to witness the great transformation that is happening. This woman, who is like every other new age kook I’ve ever met, and trust me when I tell you I’ve met a hefty number of them, suffers from the shadow disease of new age-ism, namely egregious narcissism. Why the producers would include such an obviously low-credibility nutjob like this woman is beyond me as it demeans the topic and diminishes the mini-series.

The spiritual element of UFOs is a big topic in this episode as the cultural differences between East and West are explored, with the East being more open to UFOs as some sort of spiritual phenomenon rather than a physical one.

The Fukushima UFO case is one of the more evidence-based ones, so it makes the producers decision to focus on more esoteric subjects rather than on the actual evidence very counter-productive and dismaying.

On the whole, Encounters is disappointing for someone like me as I know a lot about these incidents already, and the series doesn’t really bring anything new to the fore.

To someone with any background in UFOs, Encounters is decidedly tame and feels rather out of date. If the series came out a decade ago it would’ve felt much more relevant and interesting.

That said, if you spend the majority of your time in the mainstream and are a newbie to the UFO subject, then Amblin’s Encounters could be a decent enough place to dip your toe into the topic, as would be JJ Abrams’ tepid UFO series.

But if you want to take a serious look at the subject of UFOs, I would recommend starting with the work of documentarian James Fox, whose films Out of the Blue (2003), I Know What I Saw (2009) and Phenomenon (2020), are as good and as informative as it gets in the genre.

With those three films as your foundation, you’ll have a solid understanding of the history of the subject and how we got where we are today, and what might come tomorrow.

As for Encounters, despite covering some truly vital incidents, it never rises to be anything more than a brief overview of a topic worthy of so much more.

 Follow me on Twitter: @MPMActingCo

©2023

Jury Duty: A TV Review - Guilty of Being Funny

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!***

My Rating: 3.25 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. Brevity is the soul of wit and this quick hitting reality/hoax series is brief and funny.

I finally got around to watching Jury Duty, the much-talked-about reality/hoax/sitcom series that premiered in April of this year on Amazon, and I have some thoughts.

The premise of Jury Duty is that a collection of people are called to serve jury duty for a civil trial in Los Angeles. But the twist is that the entire trial is fake, and all of the jurors except one – the target of the hoax, are actors who are in on the scam, as are the fake judge, bailiff, plaintiff and defendant.

The thing about Jury Duty that really surprised me was that unlike nearly every other reality tv show ever made, it actually left me with some hope for humanity.

The “regular guy” who is the target of the hoax is Ronald Gladden, who is the most normal of normal guys imaginable, and he is a really good dude. He treats everyone, no matter how weird or annoying they may be…and they are often very weird and very annoying, with not just respect but with genuine kindness. He also takes his civil duty as a juror seriously and doesn’t just bide his time on jury duty but actually fully engages with the process.

Watching Ronald navigate some very potentially uncomfortable-to-the-point-of-being-ludicrous situations with grace and good-nature restored some of my long-lost hope in humanity.  

The reality, pardon the pun, is that the majority of people in the world are like Ronald, but the vast majority of reality tv, the most loathsome of television genres, is about rewarding boorish behavior and spotlighting self-serving, self-centered, fame-whoring anti-Ronalds.

For this reason, I was skeptical of even giving Jury Duty a try as I assumed it was the usual soulless formula of talentless/narcissistic people masquerading as real people acting like fake people reality tv bullshit that always leaves me irritated, aggravated and depressed. But watching Ronald thoughtfully negotiate through the bizarre situations he is thrust into, and do it with such a pleasant and appealing attitude, not only left me laughing but also optimistic…not a state I’m used to.

Jury duty in real life is like spending time in Darwin’s waiting room, and the series Jury Duty is no different as the fake jurors are a perfect and hilarious encapsulation of the army of morons and misfits that inhabit our world.

For example, there’s Todd, the socially awkward pseudo-inventor, who never fails to be incessantly weird. The actor who plays Todd, David Brown, is remarkable as he repeatedly does the most insane and inane things but never even approaches breaking character or laughing…a Herculean accomplishment.

Joining Todd is Noah, the clueless Mormon, and the far-out floozy Jeannie, who is hungry to take Noah’s virginity.

There’s also the crotchety old lady, Barbara, and Ken, a slow-talking Korean, who are unique enough to be realistic but not so odd as to raise red flags. The same is true of Nikki the bailiff, who I never expected to NOT be a real-life bailiff.

The “star” of the show is actor James Marsden who plays a hyper-narcissistic version of himself. This version of Marsden is constantly talking about his fame and his movies and even gets his own private bailiff so he can stay at home and not be sequestered with the riff raff at a hotel for the trial. Ronald takes all of Marsden’s celebrity quirks in stride and with a smile…even when Marsden takes egregious advantage of him in the most odious (literally) of ways.

I am a pretty tough audience, but Jury Duty was actually able to make me laugh out loud on numerous occasions, something that rarely happens when I watch tv.

The last show that had me laughing and cringing this much was last year’s bizarre, pseudo-reality show The Rehearsal on HBO. In fact, The Rehearsal and Jury Duty would be a fascinating and fantastic double feature to watch back-to-back, as they somewhat inhabit the same documentary/hoax genre but approach it in very different ways.

Jury Duty is a breezy watch, as each of its eight episodes average a brisk 24 minutes or so and keep you engaged the whole time.

So, if you want to experience the absurdist humor of serving on a jury without having to experience the hell of actually serving on a jury, then I strongly recommend you hop into the bizarro-world of Jury Duty.

My final verdict on this show is that it is NOT GUILTY of being the usual reality tv junk and is definitely GUILTY of being funny…and maybe…just maybe…a little bit profound…or at least inspirational.

 Follow me on Twitter: @MPMActingCo

©2023

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 100 Part Two - Popular Streaming Platform Recommendations

On the conclusion of our 100th episode celebration, Barry and I finish up our streaming service  film/tv recommendations. Topics discussed include the wonders of the Criterion Channel, the god-awful shit that is Peacock, and how HBO Max was better before it became Max. Oh...and a flock of geese gets slaughtered on air for no apparent reason. 

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 100 Part Two

Thanks for listening!

©2023

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 100!! Recommendations for Movies and Shows Currently Available on Streaming Services - Part One

On this very special episode, Barry and I host a massive party at LCFM headquarters to celebrate our 100th episode. In part one of this historic podcasting event, we not only name drop our bevy of celebrity friends, but also give our selections for good movies and shows to watch currently available on each streaming service. Stay tuned for part two of this blockbuster celebratory event in the coming days.

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 100!! Top Movies and Shows Currently Available on Streaming Services

Thanks for listening!

©2023