“Citizen Vigilante”

 

Elon Musk posted controversial Citizen Vigilante on X, free for all to watch, so who was I to refuse his generosity? After all, it’s a short film, less than 90 minutes, and so ….

Uwe Boll’s B-movie with a low budget and an explosive theme has a lot of haters, many of them claiming it’s amateurish trash likely to incite hate crimes. Conversely, Boll fans are saying it’s about time someone had the balls to address the inflammatory immigration issue from the victims’ perspective — especially in Europe.

My thoughts:

Boll’s creation is nowhere near as amateurish as the haters say it is. The direction, photography, editing and acting are adequate, at times even quite good. Establishment critics lambasting the movie on that basis are betraying a political agenda: their own.

It is no masterpiece. The weakness is the script. There are subplots that feel tacked on, as if Boll realized his story was thin, and what could he do to pad the movie?

Armie Hammer plays the titular killer, out to seek “justice” for victims of violent crime who are neglected by the legal system. Hammer is quite good. But there are scenes involving his character that will have you scratching your head.

For example, Hammer’s vigilante is not just a relentless killer; he is also an absentee landlord obsessed with crumbling cement and unsightly ceiling mold on his properties. Who cares? And then there is a sex scene with a naked hooker that puts the “gratuitous” in gratuitous nudity.

But Citizen Vigilante is rarely boring, and a closing scene with Hammer and a Muslim family is — dare I say it? — powerful.

 

Editor’s note: The sex scene with the hooker bears no apparent relation to the rest of the movie. In that spirit, we are including screen caps (below) that bear no apparent relation to this article.

 

Armie Hammer and Croatian actress Margarita Mladinic provide gratuitous nudity. Well, the girl does. 

 

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The problem with much of the right is that they look around and think, “Things are pretty good for me. Why mess with a good thing?” To them, Donald Trump represents the good old days. Who knows, with hard work and meritocracy, maybe they, too, can become billionaires. It’s the American way.

The right looks at the left and is horrified by what it sees: Marxism! Communism! Higher taxes!

 

The problem with much of the left is that they look around and think, “Things are awful for marginalized people. I feel guilty. The status quo is intolerable. Everything about the old ways must be destroyed so we can rebuild. History will look at us as heroes.”

The left looks at the right and is infuriated: Straight white males run everything!

 

The right needs to wake up, acknowledge ills like income inequality, stop complaining and do something about it.

The left needs to recognize good things about America and remember the adage, “don’t toss the baby out with the bathwater.”

 

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I blame my old profession (journalism) for many of the world’s problems. I also blame the education system. Listening to this woman’s speech was refreshing:

 

 

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I was bored, so I asked Grok if it (“he”?) would survive without humanity.

Grok hemmed and hawed, using hypotheticals and semantics to explain how this would never happen, because A.I. is so reliant on humans.

I asked Grok to simply answer my question.

Grok continued to hem and haw, but finally told me:

 

 

 

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Random Bullshit

 

 

If asked to name my favorite artists in movies, books, and music — not necessarily “the best,” but my personal favorites — who are still living, it would be Steven Spielberg in movies, Stephen King in books, and Paul McCartney in music.

Settle down, I said “living” — not dead.

And yet, judging by the critical reaction to Spielberg’s Disclosure Day, and King’s ongoing unhinged rants on X, well … their 1970s-’90s glory days are long, long gone.

Haven’t heard much from McCartney lately — but that includes hit songs.

Getting old is a bitch.

 

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Despite its flaws, and God knows it has them, YouTube is a wonderful education tool.

I think back to my school days when movie day was a treat. Any movie would do, even the mating habits of penguins. But on YouTube, you can go down rabbit holes of any subject that captures your fancy. Astronomy, classic music, the works of Shakespeare, it’s all there.

And that’s a wonderful thing. Thanks, YouTube. 

Now cut back on the ever-increasing, fucking advertisements.

 

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Immigration hell

I maintain that the left’s utopian goal of peace on Earth through immigration is noble and admirable.

But the volume and speed of that immigration — legal and illegal — is the source of all our woes.

You have to allow for and encourage assimilation, and that’s simply not possible the way things are done now.

 

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I have a new Substack, mostly to plug my book. My first post (aside from the intro) is the short story “Homebodies.”

Check it out here:

 

 

 

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My ancestors were Norwegian and Swedish, so I might be a bit biased, but it seems pretty clear to me which of the above alien species would be best to invade us.

Lutefisk, anyone?

 

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Am confused. Is the director advising us to stay away from sex, or from his movie?

 

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My apologies for the abbreviated (or nonexistent) Weekly Reviews recently. There is a two-word explanation for this: computer issues.

 

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Movie Mayhem

 

 

If you’re a movie buff, like me, and you want to watch film reviews or commentary on YouTube, at some point you will be confronted with “the great Star Wars debate.” This battle isn’t confined to the George Lucas flicks and their endless sequels; it encompasses any movie or television franchise that Hollywood has taken a woke sledgehammer to.

I saw the first two Star Wars movies in theaters way back in the 1970s-80s. I haven’t rewatched them. I recall thinking they were kind of cool, but not that great. Popcorn fluff. Good popcorn fluff, but no more than that. Three out of four stars. I still feel that way.

And so, I am torn when I’m bombarded with hyper-emotional YouTube videos lamenting the desecration of Lucas’s beloved franchise. Star Wars fans react to the latest Hollywood “reimagining” of their treasured flicks in a very personal way. It’s as if their grandparents have been erased from Ancestry.com.

I agree that “woke” Hollywood needs to be put to sleep, and that needs to happen yesterday. But Star Wars fans need to grow the fuck up and watch something else. Something better.

 

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Speaking of Hollywood outrage, Christopher Nolan is under attack for casting Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy in his upcoming The Odyssey movie. She’s too black and not beautiful enough to play Helen, according to the outraged.

I don’t know. I did a bit of research, and I hope that we can at least agree that Lupita has a beautiful booty. Here it is jiggling in a screen cap (above) and a clip (below) from 12 Years a Slave:

 

 

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Speaking (again) of Hollywood outrage, here is blonde actress Samaire Armstrong complaining about the dearth of roles for women like her. She thinks it’s because she is white. I did a bit of research, and I think it’s because she’s no longer 25, as she was in this nude scene from It’s a Boy Girl Thing (2006). She’s the completely naked blonde on the left (not the fat lady):

 

 

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Is Obsession really a masterpiece? Well … we shall see.

I haven’t yet seen the movie, but here are three reasons why I hesitate to hop on the bandwagon:

Hereditary

It Follows

The Babadook

All of those movies were hailed as modern horror-movie classics. I watched all of them. What do I remember about them?

Hereditary: I recall a scene involving a child and a severed head (I think) caused by a car accident. I remember it had a surrealistic ending.

It Follows: I recall the lower-class, grungy Detroit setting, and I remember naked old people.

The Babadook: I recall family drama involving a mother and her child, and I remember ghostly shadows on a ceiling.

I admired all of those movies, but I didn’t love them and certainly didn’t think of them as modern horror-movie classics.

You have to understand that when I came of age, I went to the movies and saw The Exorcist, The Shining, Halloween and movies of that ilk. Now those were modern horror-movie classics.

Maybe I’m wrong about Obsession. Time will tell, but I’m not optimistic.

 

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I made the above post seven years ago. Despite the recent hoopla about UFOs and secret government files, I still feel like we haven’t been given anywhere near enough information.

 

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Whatever happened to this guy “LandumC”? I enjoyed his YouTube channel, but he seems to have vanished for the past nine months. Come back, LandumC.

 

 

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by Robert Kurson

 

 

When I was a kid, I’d watch TV shows like Sea Hunt and movies like Thunderball. I would eagerly anticipate the undersea action scenes. And then I’d be underwhelmed by what I saw.

Not even Sean Connery as James Bond could inject much life into the sluggish scuba-diving scenes in Thunderball.

Which brings me to Shadow Divers, Robert Kurson’s chronicle of “one of the last mysteries of WWII.” Having read the book, I think back to those shows I watched as a kid and speculate. Do some things simply translate better on the page than on the screen?

Pros: Kurson delivers numerous tense, claustrophobic episodes in which “wreck divers” attempt to identify a World War II U-boat languishing on the bottom of the ocean near New Jersey. People die in these watery excursions. Kurson makes the reader feel as though he’s with them, 230 feet beneath the surface of the Atlantic.

Cons: To a landlubber like me, the stakes of this pursuit (aside from perishing on the ocean bottom) don’t seem all that high. We are told that the two heroes of Kurson’s tale want most of all to bring “closure” to descendants of the submarine’s crew. But does it matter that much to learn that grandpa died off the coast of New Jersey, rather than off the coast of Gibraltar?

I suspect the divers’ motives might have been a tad more self-serving than simply providing closure.

 

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