Summary

Reviewer

Rainer Chlodwig von K.

Review Date

Reviewed Item

"“Dragged Across Concrete”"

Author Rating

4

S. Craig Zahler is back with a solid and satisfyingly rough follow-up to the jaw-dropping Brawl in Cell Block 99, reuniting with Vince Vaughn and teaming him up with Mel Gibson in a literally gut-ripping, downbeat buddy cop brutalizer. Seasoned detective Brett Ridgeman (Gibson) and partner Anthony Lurasetti (Vaughn) are caught on video using excessive force in the apprehension of a Hispanic drug dealer, creating a scandal for their police department, and get suspended without pay by their superior (Don Johnson). Both men need money – Lurasetti because he plans to propose marriage to his girlfriend, and Ridgeman because his daughter is no longer safe in their ghettoized neighborhood and the family needs to get out. At the extent of his tether, Ridgeman hatches a half-baked plan to rip off a heroin dealer that winds up with him and his partner pitted against a gang of formidable paramilitary bank heisters. A career highlight for Gibson equal to his over-the-hill hero roles in Edge of Darkness and Blood Father, and yet another impressive entry in Vaughn’s growing résumé of scary tough guy characters after True Detective and Brawl in Cell Block 99.

4.5 out of 5 stars. Ideological Content Analysis indicates that Dragged Across Concrete is:

Anti-drug. Troy Kittles plays ex-con Henry Johns, whose stint in prison illustrates a very possible outcome for a dealer. His mother, a heroin addict, has turned to prostitution. It is also mentioned that the dealer Ridgeman mistreats has been selling drugs to children, undermining any potential audience sympathy for the criminal.

Ableist! Lurasetti compares a hearing-impaired woman’s speech to a dolphin’s.

Anti-Semitic! Writer-director Zahler, as Soiled Sinema’s Ty E. puts it, is an artist who seems to have “transcended his Jewishness”, which may account for the brief and harmless but stereotype-oozing portrayal of the friendly jeweler Feinbaum, who says his wife has two brothers who are therapists and three sisters who are lawyers.

Homophobic! Henry dismisses his “cocksuckin’ father” as “a yesterday who ain’t worth words.” Disapprovingly, Ridgeman fails to see “much of a difference these days” between men and women, and also mocks Lurasetti’s “gay hair s**t” disguise.

Media-critical. Chief Lieutenant Calvert (Johnson) derides the anti-police bias of “the entertainment industry formally known as ‘the news’”, which “needs villains” and fabricates them if necessary.

Natalist, i.e., sexist! Unexpectedly, the movie features a tender (albeit offbeat) portrait of a new mother, Kelly Summer (Jennifer Carpenter), desperately trying to avoid going back to work after using up her maternity leave. The necessity of keeping a job seems cruel and absurd now that she has a baby. Her proper place, she realizes, is at home with her child. Her boss, Mr. Edmington (Fred Melamed) describes her as a “radiant vision of maternity”. The section of Dragged Across Concrete that follows Kelly is even more affecting on a second viewing.

Class-conscious. “My job [in a bank] is so stupid,” Kelly laments. “I go there and I sell chunks of my life for a paycheck so that rich people I’ve never even met can put money in places I’ve never even seen.” Henry’s little brother Ethan, meanwhile, sees big game hunting as “rich white people s**t”. There is also the suggestion that those with wealth have the means to elude the law, as Ridgeman at some point in the past allowed the son of businessman Friedrich (Udo Kier) to escape punishment for an unnamed crime in exchange for a future favor from the well-connected father. Ridgeman no longer believes in a meritocratic American dream. “I don’t politick and I don’t change with the times and turns that that s**t’s more important than good, honest work,” he tells his partner, determining: “We have the skills and the right to acquire proper compensation” for thankless years of public service.

Race-realist – with exceptions. “They’re so cute before they get big,” says Ridgeman’s daughter Sara (Jordyn Ashley Olson) – ostensibly with reference to lion cubs, but subtextually referring to the black boys who harass her when she walks home from school. “This fucking neighborhood, it just keeps getting worse and worse,” frets Mrs. Ridgeman (Laurie Holden). “You know I never thought I was a racist before living in this area. I’m about as liberal as any ex-cop could ever be, but now,” she demands, “we really need to move” or else, “someday, you and me,” she tells her husband, “we are in a hospital room with our daughter talking to a rape counselor.”

Ridgeman and his partner are both depicted as casual racists. “I’m not racist,” Lurasetti jokes: “Every Martin Luther King Day I order a cup of dark roast.” In a twenty-first century world in which “digital eyes are everywhere”, however, old-school law-and-order enforcers like Ridgeman and Lurasetti are living on borrowed time. “Like cell phones, and just as annoying, politics are everywhere,” Calvert observes. “Being branded a racist in today’s public forum is like being accused of communism in the fifties. Whether it’s a possibly offensive remark made in a private phone call or the indelicate treatment of a minority who sells drugs to children […] It’s b******t – but it’s reality.”

Softening Dragged Across Concrete’s racial edge is the presence of Henry, the conspicuous specimen of Africanus cinematicus played by Troy Kittles. This ghetto thug with the soul of a poet is given to saying things like, “Before I consider that kind of vocation, I need to get myself acclimated” and is at all times depicted as being more astute than those around him. His little brother Ethan, too, is portrayed as an underprivileged but bright lad of great potential. The case can be made that Dragged Across Concrete makes examples of its most prominent bigots by punishing them while rewarding Henry in the end. Ridgeman, who has refused to change with the times, is taught the important lesson that he “should have trusted a n*****.”

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Summary

Reviewer

Rainer Chlodwig von K.

Review Date

Reviewed Item

"“The Public”"

Author Rating

3

Try as it might to seem hip and relevant, Emilio Estevez’s hero-librarians vanity project The Public never manages to shake a vague feeling of being something slightly quaint left over from the 1990s. Estevez, in a role perhaps intended to reference the actor’s iconic turn as a cool school library detainee in The Breakfast Club, appears as an idealistic but hardship-weathered employee of the Cincinnati Public Library whose personal and professional ethics are tested when a mob of crazy homeless men occupies the facility and demands to be allowed to use the library as an overnight shelter on a bitterly cold evening. Curiously, writer-director-producer Estevez appears to cling to the outmoded liberal convention of the white savior coming to the aid of downtrodden blacks and browns – in 2019. Star-power casting, with Christian Slater and Alec Baldwin also appearing, make the movie more watchable than it probably deserves to be.

3 out of 5 stars. Ideological Content Analysis indicates that The Public is:

Green. Annoying but well-meaning millennial chick Jena Malone rides the bus to work to reduce her carbon footprint, and the presence of a taxidermied polar bear (“Beary White”) in the library serves to remind the viewer of wildlife impacted by melting ice caps.

Anti-drug. One subplot involves the search for a missing opioid addict (Nik Pajic). Estevez’s character is also revealed to be a recovered alcoholic who once lived on the streets.

Media-critical. A self-promoting local reporter (Gabrielle Union) intentionally misrepresents the protagonist’s stance of solidarity with the homeless, leaving viewers with the impression that he is a madman holding hostages inside the library. Her cameraman (Ki Hong Lee) objects, but is ultimately complicit in the duplicity. Provocatively, the term “fake news” is applied to the mainstream media rather than to independent commentators.

Communist. “To each, according to his needs” is very much the moral of the film.

Racially confused. The Public represents a partially naïve effort at postracialism while also including distinctively anti-white elements. Against expectation, the film casts black actress Gabrielle Union as the unlikable reporter – showing that blacks can also be bad – but other blacks in the movie appear well-intentioned or victimized, with some depicted as harmlessly insane. Jeffrey Wright, however, appears as a polished and capable black library director. Christian Slater plays a slickly dressed law-and-order prosecutor and mayoral candidate who, though his political party is never mentioned, represents a heartless all-white Republicanism that must eventually give way to a more inclusive vision represented by his compassionate black political opponent.

Oddly, the movie opens with an angry black rapper shouting “Burn the books!” and ranting about tearing down monuments as various unfortunate street people appear queuing up to get into the library and out of the cold. The rap’s apocalyptic vision forecasts what is presumably the fate awaiting reactionary whites who fail to get “woke” and join the fight against inequality. European-American literary heritage in The Public is a universal legacy and an inspiration for all of “the people”, but Europe’s classical civilization is also insulted. The setting of Cincinnati invokes Cincinnatus, the exemplar of selfless public service, but the name “Athena” – evoking the Greek goddess of wisdom – is given to an eccentric old anti-Semite (Dale Hodges) who suspects those around her of belonging to “the Tribe”, while another of the vagrants (Patrick Hume) is nicknamed “Caesar”, with antiquity symbolically displaced, homeless, and reduced to pitiable madness in the context of multicultural modernity. A library book defaced with a swastika, meanwhile, reminds viewers of the persistent threat of white bigotry.

More interesting is the treatment of the preserved polar bear, “Beary White”, which – whether intentionally or otherwise – evokes “polar bear hunting” or the anti-white “knock-out game” in a ghettoized urban setting in addition to bolstering the global warming messaging. The film concludes with a shot of the towering, fierce, and triumphant-looking polar bear, which is perhaps intended to symbolize the moral victory of white-liberal-savior-with-soul Emilio Estevez, who redeems himself and his race and hopefully avoids the hunt by self-sacrificingly taking up the cause of impoverished minorities. The irony of such an interpretation is that the life-like bear is merely a feat of accomplished taxidermy and that the once-majestic creature is already dead inside.

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Summary

Reviewer

Rainer Chlodwig von K.

Review Date

Reviewed Item

"“The Miseducation of Cameron Post”"

Author Rating

3

Chloe Grace Moretz, who began her career in a skintight superhero costume as a sexually exploited child in the disposable Kick-Ass films, embraces her prostitution to the cultural Marxist establishment in her role as a teenage lesbian cruelly condemned to be treated at a totalitarian Christian conversion therapy camp. There, she is insensitively disciplined by a suspiciously cold and masculine Christian psychologist (Jennifer Ehle) and mentored by a friendly reverend (John Gallagher, Jr.) who, unsurprisingly, turns out to be a recovered homosexual himself. The Miseducation of Cameron Post has little point apart from further demolishing western civilization and tediously depicting Christians as stupid, corny, boring, mean, and hatefully judgmental.

The other major objective of the film is to tempt young women into lesbian relationships. The unsightliness of male-male physicality is prudently kept off-screen, but more than one sultry scene of hot, quick lesbian seduction is featured. A key meta moment occurs in the sequence depicting Moretz’s first girl-girl experience. She and a friend (Quinn Shephard) are hanging out and watching Donna Deitch’s 1985 film Desert Hearts and find themselves overcome with lust during one of the movie’s lesbian scenes. This, of course, is how The Miseducation of Cameron Post is intended to function. With its much greater reach than this obscure eighties predecessor, The Miseducation of Cameron Post is designed to get mentally malleable adolescent girls to question their own pedestrian sexuality and wonder if it might not be more rewarding to luxuriate in a childless life of unending slumber parties and digitally induced, guy-free orgasms.

I find a great irony in this movie’s contrived shock moment of homo horror, when gay boy Owen Campbell, tortured by the contradiction between his Christian ardor and his burning desire to gobble a c**k, freaks out and mutilates his genitals, leaving a pool of blood on the floor of a bathroom for Chloe Grace Moretz to find. Are Bible-thumpers really the ones bullying young men into cutting off their penises, though, or is that messaging emanating from some other quadrant of our cultural landscape?

3 out of 5 stars. Ideological Content Analysis indicates that The Miseducation of Cameron Post is:

Democratic. When Moretz and two of her pals at last escape from Sobibor, they hitch a ride in a pickup truck that boasts a Clinton Gore sticker – the Democratic Party being the vehicle that will carry Americans forward into a more enlightened future.

Multiculturalist. Moretz’s buddies at camp include American Honey’s mystery-meat dreadlocks vixen Sasha Lane and fellow pothead Forrest Goodluck, a laid-back Native American lad with “two spirits”.

Pro-drug. Dope enhances the thrill of an intense backseat lesbian encounter, and Moretz also bonds with her new gay camp companions over weed.

Anti-Christian. Yes, apparently Christianity isn’t quite dead yet – or, at any rate, Hollywood wants to make absolutely sure, and so continues to flog its carcass. “How is programming people to hate themselves,” the screenplay poses, “not emotional abuse?” (I wonder if the buffoon who wrote this line has, in this same spirit of fairness, taken an honest look at the ways in which whites are typically depicted in Hollywood fare.)

Anti-family, antinatalist, and pro-gay (i.e., pro-AIDS). Gay as the U.S.A. is these days, it still isn’t proactively putrescent enough to satisfy the ass venerators in Hollywood. Movies have given us gay teens, gay parents, gay artists, gay cowboys, gay scientists, gay singers, gay strippers, gay soldiers, gay superheroes, gay angels, gay Holocaust victims, and even gay Nazis – and yet, as The Miseducation of Cameron Post capably demonstrates, there remain still-ungay filmic frontiers to be reamed in trailblazing explorations. As long as there are virgin goyish bloodstreams yet to be blessed by the gift of a full-flowered autoimmune disease, and homophobic churchgoing bigots yet to be epically BTFO’d on the big screen with feels and thotness, Hollywood can hardly afford to flag in its valiant venereal efforts.

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Summary

Reviewer

Rainer Chlodwig von K.

Review Date

Reviewed Item

"“Sollers Point”"

Author Rating

4

American Honey’s McCaul Lombardi stars as Keith, a directionless Baltimore wigger and drug dealer just released from prison and attempting to find his place in the world. At stake in the formless, meandering story is whether the poorly behaved and inarticulate protagonist will settle into the family pattern of working-class tedium and community coexistence or fall back in with the white nationalist gang with which he became affiliated while incarcerated. Keith bowls from one unnecessarily unpleasant situation into another, getting into fights, making a little money, and chasing after various specimens of ghetto tail. Lombardi is an intense performer, and Jim Belushi is likable as his boring but well-meaning dad. What at first appears to be a downbeat and largely pointless character study, however, is revealed to be an accidental comedy once the filmmaker’s ridiculous intentions are taken into consideration.

4 out of 5 stars – in part for the unintentional humor furnished by the director in the DVD extra features. Ideological Content Analysis indicates that Sollers Point is:

Anti-drug. Diminishing marijuana’s glamor, a thug mentions that his stash had recently been stuffed up his ass. The film also offers a putrid portrait of an aging, heroin-addicted w***e hawking her unappetizing wiles on a roadside.

Pro-family. Keith’s father does what he can to protect and provide for his wayward son, and other family members are also helpful and affectionate. Keith seems to be troubled by his absence from his niece’s life.

Multiculturalist, pro-miscegenation, and anti-white. Baltimore appears in the film as a more or less functional chocolate city marred only by the presence of reckless and immature young white men and trashy white women. Keith’s father, at least, seems to be a good man as evidenced by the fact that he hangs out and plays cards with blacks – so not all white people in the movie are criminals or addicted to dope. “I was really interested in reflecting the diversity of this neighborhood in southeast Baltimore,” soyboy writer-director Matt Porterfield explains in an interview included on the Sollers Point DVD, “but I wanted to sort of focus on the ways in which they shared space rather than the divisions, you know?” The way in which Keith shares space with his black neighbors, however, seems to entail an inferior and deferential role. When Keith’s wigger nationalist acquaintances roll up with hostile intentions, Keith’s black thug neighbors come to his aid by throwing liquor bottles at the white gang’s van; but then they expect him to pick up the broken glass littering the street – which he obediently does. Keith, Porterfield says, has to “figure out who his people are”, and as Porterfield concludes, “his people in the film are white and black” – which may go a long way toward explaining why the character is so lost. Interestingly, the writer-director describes his movie as “a portrayal of a white male in society trying to find his place,” adding that Keith is “not being given any traditional rites of passage.” I burst out laughing, however, when he added that the protagonist is “representative of, you know, a large portion of the population that put our current president in office. […] It’s tapping into a cultural energy that we all kind of want to understand, that put Trump in office.” Which, of course, is 2016 in a nutshell. The Dems should never have underestimated Trump’s appeal to the wigger jungle fever ex-con MAGA drug dealer demographic!

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Summary

Reviewer

Rainer Chlodwig von K.

Review Date

Reviewed Item

"“Hunting Emma”"

Author Rating

3

This is an okay Afrikaans-language thriller about a schoolteacher, Emma (Leandie du Randt), whose car breaks down in South Africa’s arid Karoo region on her way to her father’s home for a holiday visit. Compounding misfortunes, Emma is witness to a drug-related execution and must flee for her life through the desert whilst pursued by a gang of criminals. Unfortunately for the bad guys – led by the icy Bosman (Neels van Jaarsveld), who comes across like a cross between Gian Maria Volonté and Bono – it turns out that the resourceful Emma was trained in military survival skills by her ex-Recce father. Will the direness of her situation be enough to goad Emma to finally dispense with her philosophy of nonviolence? Furthermore, will she ever learn to shoot straight? Finding out makes for a fun hundred minutes.

3.5 out of 5 stars. Ideological Content Analysis indicates that Hunting Emma is:

Family-ambivalent. Emma’s father (Tertius Meintjes) is depicted as a devoted parent whose lessons stand his daughter in good stead in the face of a challenge. Emma, however, displays a distaste for domesticity, and teaching seems to fulfill whatever impulse she has toward motherhood.

Class-conscious. One of the crooks is a rich, recreational criminal.

Feminist. “My favorite kind of kitchen work – ironing,” martial arts expert Emma declares after tediously dispatching a sexist gang member with an iron. This fight, significantly, takes place in an abandoned home.

Anti-white. Leave it to South Africa’s Department of Trade and Industry, the agency responsible for Black Economic Empowerment, to facilitate the production of a film in which the threat to a woman traveling alone through the “Rainbow Nation” is a pack of white rapists and drug dealers. Emma’s mocha-colored students, meanwhile, give a glimpse of the country’s non-white future.

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