Category Archives: Film & Mass Media

On Basketball

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I’ve proclaimed myself a basketball purist, so it is incumbent on me to define this & then prove it as a sportswriter. Really I’m a sportsblogger, which is a form of sportswriter, but different in that bloggers aren’t held to a corporate standard or code-of-practice which binds sportswriters into a political straitjacket, severely restricting them from expressing their truest & deepest thoughts.

So much has to be censored & covered-up, in the name of fake news, which means corporate media sportswriters only scratch the surface on the most serious stories. Their task is often to keep it vague, and then forget it & move on. Current stories like ‘NFL ownership colludes to suppress QB salaries, then covered-up by NFLPA legal representatives’ don’t play well in the mainstream media. ESPN has just announced the purchasing of the NFL Network, so there’s no way ownership-union collusion can be a story to investigate & feature any more than professionally required.

The most compelling sports stories are usually discovered (& always best-analyzed) by bloggers & other independent entities these days. Virtually everyone promotes themselves on social media, which organically helps bloggers over corporate sportswriters whom we’ve heard from too much already. We all know they have very little to tell us despite all their Hollywood access & face time on Network cameras.

Network (1976) is the best Hollywood film ever. If you want to talk film with me then start there, otherwise you’re shit on movies. That’s basketball trash talking on cinema. Notice how it is concise & directly to the point. That’s how you win at a fast-moving game like basketball.

I’ve loved this game since Bird & Magic, and of course I was a Celtics fan back then. I hated the 76ers & Lakers, until the Celtics won three championships. Then Len Bias tragically died and these Celtics were finished winning titles. It got to the point where I accepted the greatness of Magic Johnson. That junior, junior sky hook was undeniable in its beauty & championship finality. Larry Bird’s shooting and overall play made black players give their respect to white dudes who can play. That was only part of how they transformed the game of basketball.

Basketball is a game where it is accepted by all serious participants that the black players are the best. When it was Larry Bird taking the last shot, it scared opponents to death, because they went in so often, and Larry would look at everyone with an expression that said, “I knew it was going in. What did you expect?!” That’s legendary hall-of-fame trash talking from a master, the first time a white guy could really do it.

Michael Jordan became the ultimate hoops master, the perfect basketball player. What does this mean? It means he has no weaknesses in his game, every aspect is the highest level of excellence & durability: scoring, passing, rebounding, defense, making your teammates better, being a team leader, winning, handling the media & being an ambassador for the game without claiming to be perfect. It takes all that & more to be the best and MJ did that for Generation X. He was the first modern rockstar athlete who you compare to Tiger Woods, Roger Federer & LeBron James.

Before Michael Jordan, sports heroes were different. They were allowed their privacy because they were so revered by sportswriters, as compared to the TMZ paparazzi media we’ve had since the rise of ESPN. In baseball Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Jackie Robinson, Mickey Mantle, Sandy Koufax & Bob Gibson would be treated much more harshly today by a media industry that is looking to build you up to tear you down. We shouldn’t do that to our sports heroes, and I’m a sportsblogger who understands & expresses that. Too many sportswriters have egos and want to make the game about themselves. For example the issue of PEDs & MLB hall-of-fame voting, it is very political with stubborn intransigence among a class of ‘old school’ sportswriters who are eligible to vote, but maliciously shut out worthy candidates.

The NBA is a much different game today because of the great players I’ve mentioned from the 1980’s. The 1992 Dream Team is unquestionably the best basketball team ever assembled. Being on that team is equivalent to winning a NBA championship, so Charles Barkley, Patrick Ewing, Chris Mullen, John Stockton & Karl Malone earn that respect. They are ALWAYS to be addressed as champions in NBA terms. What they did in Barcelona transformed the game. Opposing players were asking for pictures, sincere handshakes & autographs before their games because they knew they were going to lose and were simply honored to be on the court with them. No one had, or has since, seen anything like that in Olympic competition. It’s the athletes who create these-type moments that catapult them into the best-ever discussions, in any sport.

Here’s a digression that will eventually lead back to modern basketball, I promise. I’ve been a fan of women’s soccer since before the start because I played with girls in our hometown leagues as a kid and through high school. Summer leagues were more relaxed and you could pick your coach which was important because high school & traveling league teams were monopolized by local sports politics, with coaching dads often prioritizing college scholarships for their boys over developing the best players and building a winning style of play that can eventually compete with Europe & South America. That still hasn’t happened and that’s why the USMNT loses.

The World Cup is in North America next summer, so the USMNT gets the automatic hosting invite and didn’t have to qualify. If they had, they wouldn’t have made it. The next big day is when the World Cup teams in the 12 groups are revealed and the brackets are set. Lots of betting worldwide on the World Cup. It’s bigger than the Super Bowl because it’s only once every four years and football/futbol is the world game. The world stops when the ball is rolling in the World Cup.

As for the USWNT, their next World Cup is in 2027 and there will be no issue for them qualifying, they’ll again be a favorite but no longer THE favorite. The USWNT has slipped from it’s highest of highs in WC 1999 to settle in as a global force in women’s soccer. The best coaching in US soccer eventually realized the men were hopeless, so they gravitated into the women’s game. It was that dynamic that help US women’s soccer win the world.

Their best player from the start in 1991 was Michelle Akers. Mia Hamm was the first Gen X rockstar female athlete. They all had something you liked so they were like the Beatles in the summer of 1999, and after that it was cool to be a soccer mom. Soccer in the 1980’s didn’t have enough girls in most towns to have their own league, so they had to play with the boys.

The 1999 USWNT became the Dream Team of their sport. Now girls in every small American town have girls soccer leagues. What was achieved was a social revolution and what is important to understand is that an entire society was involved in it. Everyday people were inspired by this team of determined young women, and used their glorious victory to get something they didn’t even know they wanted for their children. The revolution was inspired by sports stars, but achieved by all the “little people.” Understanding that is the art & science of dialectics.

This is why I prefer the USWNT to the WNBA.  They did it more organically and under greater adversity, where the WNBA has had huge promotional assistance from the NBA & its corporate sponsors from the start. Since the USMNT has always sucked, the soccer women had to do it on their own, which is much more impressive to me. Soccer & tennis are the two sports I most enjoy watching women compete, outside of the Olympics.

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My all-time rotating basketball five by position: PG- Magic Johnson/Steph Curry; SG- Michael Jordan/Kobe Bryant; SF- LeBron James/Larry Bird; PF- Karl Malone/Kevin Durant; C- Kareem Abdul Jabbar/Wilt Chamberlain. You get two bench guys and three reserves on a NBA team. Tim Duncan is one and the rest are debatable among a dozen or so great great players. You want Phil Jackson & Gregg Popovich coaching, I’ve always loved Hubie Brown, Chuck Daly, Doc Rivers & Steve Kerr too. They know the game, understand what it takes to win, and always respect the talent and get the most out of it by treating them as men first.

If you want to become a good basketball player then learn the rules. Become an official and learn the game from a different perspective and get paid for it. You’ll play a lot smarter after doing this because you’ll know how & why officials make calls– good & bad. Handling the officials is a skill & artform and no one was better at it than Michael Jordan. This video is the only known instance of MJ getting handled in trash talk, and Magic Johnson still half-apologizes for it– because he knows. Larry just laughs. This is as good as it gets.

Basketball is the easiest game to manipulate/fix through corrupt officiating. Too many team fouls and the other team gets free throws (easy points to a good team) for the rest of that period. Too many individual fouls and you’re either on the bench or disqualified. No other sport has this as such a big part of the game that determines winning & losing. Soccer is the next easiest sport to manipulate through officiating, but fans seem to recognize it quicker so it’s less of a constant at the highest professional levels. VAR and replay officiating have cut down on bad calls determining the outcome, but also have slowed down the game.

The NBA has had officiating problems since before the ABA/NBA merger in 1976. The NBA allowed the ABA to raid its top officials early in their existence, which helped the ABA gain legitimacy with its players and hurt the NBA. If you know you have straight & professional officiating, then you can actually play. If you have an incompetent officiating crew, then it’s hopeless and good players will quit on it one way or another. No point busting your ass only to get cheated with every whistle. I’m not MJ, I can’t overcome bad officiating by being ultra-dominate to a point where the officials have to respect my game. That’s how the rest of us who aren’t superhuman approach playing against bad officials. It’s part of the game, no question.

As far as not watching the NBA, the Shaq/Kobe Lakers early 2000’s titles were all tainted by league-biased officiating, favoring the Lakers every step of the way to three consecutive NBA titles, before it blew apart. It was a political ideology of the era (9/11) that insisted on physical dominance being the most rewarded trait that biased NBA officiating in favor of Shaq & his power game. I always thought Tim Duncan was the superior big man to Shaq. He worked hard and was a better teammate, a true quiet leader– the rarest of rare birds.

There was an aesthetic quality to Tim Duncan’s game that really impressed basketball purists. There was no waste in how he did things. Economical equals five NBA titles with the right coach. Critics called his game boring. The lesson there is don’t listen to the critics. Tim Duncan was the last great college player (Wake Forest) to stay four years when he could have been a top pick earlier. The San Antonio Spurs were the perfect franchise for him, an organization that understood him as the main guy to replace Dream Team center David Robinson when he retired. The right organization builds a dynasty around that by properly valuing his contribution to winning and showing him contract respect by never letting him get close to leaving.

On the other side of the management scale, Shaq from LSU went to the Orlando Magic in 1992, which proceeded to foolishly squander its championship aspirations in that era despite have (on paper) what it took to win a NBA title. They had Chris Webber as the #1 overall pick to go with Shaq in 1993, and potentially replace him in case he bolted for Hollywood– which he did. Weak management in Orlando listened to Shaq lobby for Penny Hardaway, and Magic management let their superstar player make their trade, dealing away the best player in the draft in Webber, a sophomore from the University of Michigan’s legendary Fab Five.

When Michael Jordan came out of his first retirement to re-join the Bulls and kick every team in the Eastern Conference’s ass, that was when Shaq finally went to the Lakers as a free agent and trashed Penny & the Orlando Magic as he left. When Penny hurt his knee and Orlando Magic team physicians were too incompetent to diagnose & understand the serious nature of his injury, Penny Hardaway was finished as an All-Star player. They didn’t do too well with Grant Hill either, all covered in this classic write-up of this tragic franchise.

Brian Hill, Chuck Daly, Doc Rivers & Stan Van Gundy are all above average NBA head coaches (at least) which needs to be respected. None of them could win a title despite having hall-of-fame dominate big men in two different eras: Shaq in the 1990’s & high school #1 overall pick Dwight Howard in the 2000’s. That’s organizational failure starting with cheapskate ownership and its incompetent GM’s, first & foremost. They had great players and all the resources needed to be a dynasty, but couldn’t figure out winning and still haven’t. They have another chance now with Paulo Banchero, another miraculous #1 overall pick that fell in their laps (call it NBA Magic), but I don’t like the guys they have around him so color this central Florida native skeptical on the Orlando Magic for a NBA title. Salary cap aprons really limit a modern NBA franchise’s ability to maintain championship rosters, meaning ‘windows to win’ are shorter, tougher and less predictable than ever.

If it happens for the Magic, it would be like how the Bucks got lucky in 2022. You need a great player, some serious guys around him, good luck & full health. They all count the same when you do it, dominant or lucky. It’s so tough to win so it’s celebrated as greatness as it should be in any integrated & competitive era. Can you imagine the NBA without blacks or foreign players today? Just watch a few YouTube videos and you’ll see it’s unwatchable by modern standards, NBA & NCAA. Diversity is good for everything is the lesson basketball teaches us all.

To understand the greatness of Steph Curry requires respect for ‘old school’ to be blended with an appreciation of ‘new school’ when referring to style of play in professional basketball. When the NBA began after WWII, it was all-white & had only has two levels of scoring: the painted area and an outside shot. Both counted for two points, but since it’s easier to score the closer you get to the hoop, an inside shot in the painted area was always preferred as a winning strategy. Coaches, announcers & analysts harped on this repeatedly, so you couldn’t get past it.

The ABA (1967-76) had the three-point shot from the start and its outside shooters embraced it. Boston Celtics GM (& league power broker) Red Auerbach was against the 3-point with the NBA-ABA merger, but when he acquired the draft rights to Larry Bird in 1978 he changed his mind and the 3-point shot has been in the NBA since the 1979-80 season. Larry Bird was immediately the best 3-point shooter in the game and changed how NBA players & coaches thought about that shot as a weapon. Back then it wasn’t used enough to be considered as a consistent source of offense. That came with Reggie Miller of the Indiana Pacers and his era. Ray Allen is the other hall-of-fame sharp-shooter in the pre-Steph Curry era. Their three-balls were now a potent source of offense on championship level teams.

What the 3-pointer did was create a ‘third level’ of scoring offense, where you can get 3 points by making a shot behind the line. This opened the game up for little guys (under 6’5″) who can shoot, which is always fun & exciting to watch as a basketball fan. SGA of OKC has mastered the mid-range, the area between the 3-point line and the painted area. Jimmy Butler is another guy who has that mid-range game and can finish at the rim. The 3-point shot has caused a lot of young players (Gen Y & Gen Z) to mistakenly abandon the mid-range. There are plenty of clean scoring opportunities in the mid-range, without have to absorb all that contact you get taking it to the hoop. A good mid-range game is a career-extender at any level of play.

What Steph Curry did was create a ‘fourth level’ of offense, well-beyond the 3-point line. You can’t give Steph Curry a wide-open 30-footer, he’ll make that shot consistently and if he gets hot the other team is finished– at any point in the game. Draymond Green sets a solid screen just past half court and the defense is in trouble. No basketball player has ever created such fear & panic from a screen set just past half-court. That’s how far the ‘fourth level’ extends out from the 3-point line.

Everyone from Luka Dončić to Caitlin Clark are prodigies of the Steph Curry ‘new style’ of play. Big men now handle the ball & shoot 3’s, when that was discouraged or forbidden by head coaches back in the day. Quick shots are okay now because advanced metrics have proven you might not get a better look so take the shot. No need to make your team work longer & harder to get essentially the same (or a worse) shot. Hubie Brown & Tex Winter always understood this, but they were in the minority in the profession of basketball coaching.

This ‘fourth level’ creates more opportunities for little guys with skill. For big guys, they are considered & referred to as ‘wing players’ instead of forwards in modern basketball terminology. They need to be long, quick & athletic. Their job is to rim protect and cover out to the 3-point line on defense, and be a vice versa threat on offense. Centers are thicker today, all can shoot 3-pointers, and need to be good passers to help their team on offense. Wing players are more shot-blocking conscious than ever, so center dominance of the Shaq/Wilt variety isn’t really possible in today’s NBA. The level of grinding & physicality creates a big man preference towards skilled mid-range & 3-point shooting over power basketball in the painted area. This reduces wear-and-tear on the body, and saves energy for when it is needed late in the game & season.

Health is a skill, and staying healthy in such a grinding game as the NBA requires hard work and serious maintenance. LeBron James is the ‘old man’ of the NBA at age 40, yet he has maintained his body at the highest level of basketball fitness. He went straight from high school, at age 18 into the NBA, and now you can’t do that anymore. When they change rules because of your talent, and fans are still amazed at it over 20 years later, that’s true greatness.

Basketball is a trash talking game. Every sport has its form of discourse between the competitors, but basketball is a fast moving game that only allows a series of split seconds & brief pauses to say what’s on your mind, and if you hesitate, the moment is gone and the other guy might get hot from there on which really shuts down your trash talking ability. That’s why so many young players start trash talking from their first made shot, because they know they might not see another one go in, so they’re talking like they are Kobe Bryant. As a rule: If you don’t have the skills & ability to back it up, then it’s usually best to check your trash talk.

The best way to shut down trash talking opponents is to play good defense. Shut them down, steal the ball, block their shot, fake them into travel violations, etc, and they’ll get real quiet. Defense is ~15% physical technique with the rest being heart, hustle & brains. All great defenders are among the smartest players. They know the rules, as well as all the tricks they can get away with and how to work the officials. And how to trash talk.

The US men’s team lost to the USSR in the 1988 Olympics because basketball is a team game. The US had the most-talented players, but they were up against professional teams from Europe that had been together for years. Playing as a team is the ultimate difference maker in competitive basketball. This filters down to high school, AAU & even YMCA leagues.

Unless there is a player who is exponentially better than everyone else on the court, generally speaking it’s the side that plays most as a team that wins the game. If you have basketball talent, but don’t help your teammates, then you create a ceiling for that team’s success because it’s all about the individual ego. Speaking of egos in basketball, corrupt and/or bad officiating can skew any game into unwatchable madness. There are plenty of (too many) out of control egos in the ranks of basketball officiating.

This is how I view basketball from an amateur perspective. I’m an amateur in the sense that I’m not paid for any of this, I publish here because I love the game and believe these thoughts are worthy of your consideration. You don’t have to have played the game professionally to know the game, you just have to study & apply yourself at it and you can learn many things about yourself and the world we live in.

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Political physiology of the Jeffery Epstein cover-up

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Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche interviewed Ghislaine Maxwell in Tallahassee, FL on July 24-25. As a reminder, when Donald Trump was found guilty on all 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in 2024 in his Stormy Daniels hush money trial, Todd Blanche was Trump’s defense attorney, so the political self-interest here is clear to all.

Another reminder, Ghislaine Maxwell was not only convicted of abetting Jeffery Epstein in his sex trafficking ring, but was also found guilty of two counts of perjury. This makes Todd Blanche’s interview with Ghislaine Maxwell all the more troubling, since he hasn’t reviewed all the FBI Epstein files and therefore wouldn’t be able to keep her in line during questioning if she attempted to lie– as she has provenly done in the past.

Despite this criminal history, Blanche claimed, “Ghislaine Maxwell answered every single question” during the Justice Department meeting, and that she answered them honestly without taking the 5th Amendment. That’s quite a statement, and impossible to verify without transcripts of the interview and the full release of the FBI Epstein files.

Along these same political lines, Trump’s impromptu order to release grand jury testimony, which was denied by the courts, was another red herring in that nothing revelatory or consequential was contained in them. Victim privacy wasn’t asked to be protected, which was the reason for the court’s denial, which once again indicates Trump’s motivation was to distract, instead of reaching truth & justice on the matter.

What we have is a bipartisan cover-up operation that is fooling no one. The Democrats are just as implicated in the Epstein files as Republicans, along with their rich friends & political supporters who solicited the services of Jeffery Epstein for decades. Bill Clinton rode the “Lolita Express” 27 times, so he doesn’t want these files released any more than Donald Trump, meaning any Democratic Party posturing on this is cynical grandstanding meant to score political points while they work behind the scenes to conceal the evidence & facts.

What keeps getting lost in all this are the rights of the victims, as over 1,000 girls & young women were molested, abused & discarded by this criminal & depraved sex cartel and its clientele. There has been no justice for these victims, as political interests have protected the powerful men who solicited Epstein’s sex trafficking operation.

Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-LA) called an early recess to prevent any Congressional action this past week, as Trump tries to evade responsibility for his criminality. All Congress has to do is subpoena the estate of Jeffery Epstein, and the attorney in charge of it would immediately release the Jeffery Epstein “50th-birthday book” to Congress, but that hasn’t happened either. All evidence of criminal relations to Jeffery Epstein have been systematically kept from the public by both political parties as they maneuver to cast ‘conspiracy blame’ onto the other.

All this is meant to protect the existing set-up. A vast fake economy is being insulated from accountability because to expose this criminality would lead to its collapse. Corporate bosses, major celebrities & sports figures are surely on the Epstein client list, and to ‘out’ them would be to prosecute them, which is something that is unacceptable to the ruling class. Capitalism has created these fake heroes and to disgrace them en masse would undermine the authority that has been bestowed upon them by their wealth & celebrity.

ICE immigration raids, #MeToo witch hunts, and slandering anti-Zionist protesters as ‘antisemitic’ are all part of the same reactionary cloth, whose purpose is to attack & scapegoat the working population and keep left-wing political dissent under the thumb of right-wing class rule. Occasionally a prominent politician, businessman, or celebrity needs to be sacrificed to maintain the whole, but never can the entire ruling class be prosecuted. This is the class battle that is being fought now. It is a war for truth & justice, and working people everywhere must take up the fight themselves, otherwise the truth will get buried (as it always does) by corporate-driven, two-party politics.

Tulsi Gabbard has become one of Donald Trump’s leading flak stooges in his campaign to deflect the Jeffery Epstein crisis. Gabbard’s recent attack on Barrack Obama, claiming he ordered a false intelligence analysis to show Russia had worked to help Trump win the 2016 election has truth to it. This has elicited a violent reaction from the Democratic Party controlled media.

Recall that the “Russian interference” campaign began as an attempt to deflect WikiLeaks revelations of the DNC fixing the 2016 primary for Hillary Clinton after Bernie Sanders received an unexpected groundswell of popular support, especially from young voters. Support for Bernie Sanders was deemed unacceptable by Democratic Party bosses. The DNC staffer who likely leaked this information, Seth Rich, was murdered under murky circumstances, and his murder (unsurprisingly) remains unsolved. “Russian interference” then became the Democratic Party & liberal media standard line for the reason Hillary lost to Trump in November 2016. Any left-wing critique of this elite-level corruption & electoral defeat branded commentators as “agents of Putin,” etc.

So what we have now is a political death struggle, with Donald Trump & his MAGA political supporters on one side, and the rest of the ruling establishment on the other. It is the working masses who must intervene with an international socialist program to prosecute & overthrow this entire rotten political system, otherwise there will be no justice for any of the victims of Jeffery Epstein & his elite clientele.

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Intersecting Hollywood dramas & documentary filmmaking

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I have written previously that the 21st century is the beginning of the golden age of documentary filmmaking. The internet now provides ambitious artists with the means & material necessary to make a movie on any subject, and distribution is more readily available. This means the rules have changed, and of course the Hollywood film industry doesn’t like this. In fact, it is fighting this with everything they’ve got as Artificial Intelligence (AI) is now their main tool (weapon) of choice in creating new dramatic films.

But technical gadgetry & AI special effects can only take filmmaking so far, and its limitations are already being reached. The quality of Hollywood films now is generally poor. Audiences who thirst for challenging & stimulating content aren’t finding it in the multiplexes, whose vapid content is generally a form of dumbed-down propaganda.

Sports movies: a critical analysis

Hollywood sports movies are generally disappointing because they fail to capture the “spirit of the game,” emphasizing fictitious drama over hard realities. See Moneyball (2011), perhaps the best baseball book ever published (2003), which became a watered-down sports-drama starring Brad Pitt. Actors aren’t professional athletes, and their attempts to portray them are usually unconvincing & clichéd.

To this movie-lover, the best Hollywood sports movies are The Longest Yard (1974), Bull Durham (1988), and The Great White Hype (1996), which had engaging scripts revealing a deep respect & understanding of that particular sport. Most of the rest of Hollywood sports movies are lame-to-unwatchable because they lack these qualities. Note that this phenomenon also applies to films about musicians & artists. Documentaries on such subjects are almost always more worthwhile because of the authentic footage, voices & artistry on display. Hollywood sports flicks suffer from a lack of genuineness created by an inherent weakness in these types of movies that few filmmakers can overcome.

The difference from other subjects of Hollywood films is that the public is usually very familiar with celebrity athletes, sports, music, etc, so the audience is harder to fool on the big screen. Movies are about creating an ‘illusion of reality’ with scripts, actors, special effects, etc. Network (1976) & House of Cards (2013-2017) are brilliant examples of bringing political reality to life through film fiction. Politicians & business executives generally hide their intentions & actions, so Hollywood filmmakers can exploit that gap in understanding more readily & effectively because the public is often unaware of these realities. Conversely, sports are rabidly followed by the masses, and thus their level of comprehension is far greater from the start, which makes sports movies unsatisfying to many movie buffs, especially sports fans.

War movies: documentaries vs dramatic re-enactment

War movies are an area of filmmaking that provide room for Hollywood-type dramatization and documentaries to be artistically successful. This is because the subject is far too broad for just one genre to tell the whole story. The best documentaries on war include The World at War (1973), a 26-part UK production on WWII narrated by Laurence Olivier. The authentic footage & participant interviews are its greatest strengths. But what is missing are the individual acts of bravery, heroism & drama, and that’s where dramatic films can fill in the gaps.

Das Boot (1981) is a German/UK production on the life of a German U-boat crew in 1943, a perilous time for these sailors. It has riveting action & drama, bringing their terror to life on the big screen. The World at War has a chapter titled “U-boats in the Atlantic,” which relates the objectives, strategies and history of this war theater. The U-boats had the potential to win the war for Nazi Germany if Hitler had used them properly, and it wasn’t until mid-1943 that the Allies solved the U-boat problem by exploiting aircraft with radar. This is an instructive filmmaking example of a documentary & a fictional thriller complimenting each other. If you’ve seen them both, then you have a much greater understanding of the subject from both a military & human perspective.

Midway (1976) is a Hollywood war movie that splices actual US Naval war footage with dramatic Hollywood filmmaking. The Navy war footage was shot in 16mm, and then blown up to 35mm and weaved into the fictional drama. This movie has many stars, but the editing-in of authentic war footage is what makes it all come together. Film clips from war dramas 30 Seconds Over Tokyo (1944) & Tora Tora Tora (1970) were also used, along with newly shot warbird & aircraft carrier footage at sea. Miniature models were filmed on a lake in California to great effect for recreating the destruction of the Japanese carrier fleet at Midway in June 1942. Midway is one of the best Hollywood war movies because of how it edits authentic Naval footage with dramatic film scripting.

Ken Burns best documentary project is arguably The Vietnam War (2017), and probably the best film on the subject to date. In the Year of the Pig (1968) is the other essential Vietnam War documentary. Many dramatic Hollywood Vietnam War movies had been made previously, the most notable & popular include: Apocalypse Now (1979), Platoon (1986) & Full Metal Jacket (1987). Until Ken Burns’ definitive documentary, these Hollywood productions were among the best film documents on the subject. What Ken Burns did was to render these Hollywood productions less important by creating a definitive documentary. Apocalypse Now and Platoon no longer have the impact they did when they were released because a documentary has artistically eclipsed them.

What this process reveals is that just about any important film subject (based on non-fictional events) needs a definitive documentary, and when it is made, it renders all Hollywood dramas on the subject less vital. This is a dialectical process of discovering truth, first through fictional drama, then through documentary authentication. This is why documentary filmmaking is the true future of movies as an artform.

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The Blend

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In musical artistic terms “the blend” refers to how your voice is integrated with the instrument you are playing. In my case it’s guitar. The blend is correct instrument playing & vocals which are projecting your true voice. You don’t have to be a 4-octave vocalist to be an influential singer. You don’t need to be Eddie Van Halen on guitar either, but you do need to blend like Jimi Hendrix. Blending means you have no weakness which limit your ability to communicate with an audience. All aspects of performance have to be at a high level of competency to be able to effectively blend.

Jimi Hendrix is still that standard for perfect rock blend, an unbeatable guitar prodigy who found his songwriting voice which is now imitated by everyone. No one can match Jimi Hendrix, so take what you can from that and realize he didn’t leave a blueprint to follow– for if you try to live like Jimi, you will die like Jimi. Hendrix had so much pure talent (which none of us have), meaning you can’t surpass him artistically– only be inspired by his greatness & learn from his mistakes. Jimi Hendrix was too far ahead of his time to be understood, but he was also human with fallibilities like the rest of us.

Blending on guitar means playing the notes well along with using volume & syncopation. Volume helps create drone effect, which the Velvet Underground perfected with John Cale, while Jimi Hendrix mastered drone by controlling amplifier feedback. See his famous Woodstock solo performance of “The Star Spangled Banner” posted below, as it’s the drone effect which hypnotizes the listener. He’s so natural.

Syncopation comes more into play as a solo performer who favors an acoustic approach with no drummer. Artistically & stylistically it can be considered the difference between Bob Dylan & Jimi Hendrix. Bob Dylan can’t play guitar like Jimi Hendrix, but he is a better songwriter, so he turns down the volume (even in his electrified coming out era) as compared to the Velvets or Jimi. Bob Dylan favors syncopation (beats in his head) over feedback. Bob Dylan achieves drone effect on harmonica, and is one of the most prolific harmonica players ever. Bob Dylan came from folk music & the blues, and when he found his songwriting voice (which he also blended as drone) became arguably the biggest rock star ever. It’s because he could blend.

John Lennon is another brilliant example of blend. Whether it’s on guitar or piano; with the Beatles, solo, or with studio musicians John Lennon could create songs with anyone who had talent. He could always blend.

Understanding the recording process & production is part of the blend. If you can do this then surely you will perform better to a live audience. The studio is where a lot of good musicians feel intimidated and can get overwhelmed. The art of blending comes when nervous, but talented musicians are on the clock in the studio. A new song is uncharted territory which can be scary. The leader is the one who blends by getting their part (in my case guitar & vocals) well recorded in a way that makes everyone else’s job on the song easier. If it needs a click track, for the drummer & bass player to add later, then it must be done to a click track, otherwise they won’t be able to blend with the song. Figure out what the song needs and pick your blend.

If the lyrics are tight & engaging that will inspire creativity from everyone involved. Everyone wants to be part of something great, especially in the music business. It is the songwriter’s responsibility to give the musicians & producer what is needed for them to blend their talents into the project. You can’t do it all by yourself, but you can learn how to do as many things as possible, making everyone else’s job easier.

Blending is about leadership. In rock music you start everything by writing a new song, then you find the right people to help and inspire them to be creative. It really can’t happen any other way. Blending isn’t allowed to happen anymore by a music industry that has been locked-up tight since the late 1990’s & American Idol. What’s happening now is all about professional songwriters & producers who are completely out of touch. Technically they have the chops, but there is no heart, soul, or real love in any corporate music anymore. It’s all canned product. The producers deserve most of the credit for any catchy hit that is made anymore. As a musical artist, it feels like K-Pop has now been mainstreamed into American popular music. K-Pop is about sexual exploitation, human trafficking, drug trafficking & the fashion industry but no one is allowed to say that.

Blending a songwriting voice with guitar in this era means understanding the politics of our time and being a leader. This means you will have fans & haters, so deal with both appropriately. What we have politically is fascism under Trump with the Democrats acting as Vichy collaborators. Writing new songs from this Marxist perspective keeps an artist on the path of truth politically, making the music more influential & easier to blend over time.

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The Eric Meeker

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Dr. Robert Cade at the University of Florida developed Gatorade in 1966. His laboratory potion had the right electrolytes & salts from the start, but it didn’t taste good, so the football players who needed it often wouldn’t drink it. Dr. Cade took home an early batch of Gatorade to his wife, who recommended cutting it with lemon, and thus sports science was changed forever. Sometimes a brilliant doctor just needs a good woman to help him out. Gatorade won QB Steve Spurrier the Heisman Trophy in 1966, and “The Sweat Solution” is one of the best ESPN 30-for-30 shorts.

Arnold Palmer popularized professional golf and invented his own drink, now commonly referred to as an Arnold Palmer– which is ice tea with lemon. There are arguments about how to proportion an Arnold Palmer, but Arnie says it is mostly ice tea with the lemon garnishing the drink. Some people prefer an Arnold Palmer with half lemonade or more, so it allows that flexibility and there are various acceptable preferences.

The most delightful moment in this ESPN 30-for-30 short is when Arnold Palmer reveals the moment he finally gave up and started referring to his favorite drink as an Arnold Palmer. His attributed concoction became so accepted & widespread that every waiter/waitress now knows what an Arnold Palmer is, so he gave up and started ordering it as an Arnold Palmer– laughingly hoping that no one will recognize him. It’s a great lesson in how to handle fame and giving up false humility from one of the most beloved athletes of the 20th century.

With that introduction, I am now sharing a drink I invented, which I have named after myself. An ‘Eric Meeker’ is half apple cider & half high-pulp orange juice. Individually orange juice and apple cider are very acidy, which limits  consumability, but surprisingly when these two are combined the acids mellow each other out and you are left with a fruity burst of natural sugar rich in vitamins & minerals your body needs. In this sense it is much better than Gatorade because it is organic. It’s superior to an Arnold Palmer in that it is much healthier, while being comparably delicious.

The Eric Meeker is a 50/50 mixture, and leans no more that 60/40 in either direction. The drink’s inventor says it’s better to have more apple cider than orange juice in an Eric Meeker, and you definitely need high-pulp OJ. Also, apple juice doesn’t work like apple cider. Perhaps the most beautiful thing about an Eric Meeker is its economy & easy mixing, with ingredients that are always available in any decent Midwest food market. The nutrient burst you receive from a cool Eric Meeker will replenish your body with what it needs– and fast.

For years Arnold Palmer didn’t self-reference his favorite drink when ordering it, but I’m skipping past all that. As I’ve learned, it’s a hoot to have invented your own drink, and this blog allows publication of the recipe with all the nuances, so enjoy!

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Classic comedy & crypto-fascism

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Mind if I show you a little something? I’ve been watching you, to see what the hell you’re up to, and this is what I see…

Caddyshack (1980) is the funniest movie ever. Beyond that, it was the first movie with a modern soundtrack, featuring the music of Johnny Mandel and also containing two hit songs from Kenny Loggins: “I’m Alright” the film’s classic theme song, and “Mr. Night” the caddy pool-party song. This christened a new movie soundtrack style for the decade, which showed-up in features across all genres including: Flashdance (1983), Ghostbusters (1984), The Breakfast Club (1985) & Dirty Dancing (1987) to name just a few.

Caddyshack is about class lines & the differences between country club members and the caddies who serve them. The class bite gets hidden somewhat underneath all the laughs. Danny Noonan represents the young, unmotivated everyman who see little reason to work hard because there is little-to-no reward for him.

Bill Murray delivers the best scenes, often by himself, and they live in golf lore– as every golfer loves Caddyshack. If you don’t laugh with the Caddyshack audience, then that audience is laughing at you. Few comedies can twist you up like that, and Caddyshack sets the standard.

And to clarify a Caddyshack point regarding Donald Trump, he is a real-life amalgamation of Judge Smails & his grandson Spaulding– meaning they are cheaters at golf, not golfers. This is why you have to be careful when someone asks you to kill every golfer on the course.

Rodney Dangerfield & Ted Knight represent the battle of new money vs old money in Caddyshack. Ted Knight never had a better or more memorable role. Rodney Dangerfield was in one other classic comedy, Back to School (1986), which is relevant to this discussion. Back to School is an underrated movie, with a stellar cast including: Sally Kellerman, Ned Beatty & Robert Downey Jr.

Sam Kinison helps students of history appreciate what happens when you give a good answer to a difficult question, but it isn’t the answer the teacher is looking for…

Robert Downey Jr. as Derek Lutz intervenes at his college homecoming rally to “point out that football is a crypto-fascist metaphor for nuclear war.” Somewhere very recently, that line got me thinking and helped me theorize Trump-Musk crypto-fascism. This proves the arts & laughter are food for thought & meditation, so take a hike all you elitist fraternity scumbags…

The latest on crypto-fascism: Stablecoins are seen as “low hanging fruit,” so that’s the current top priority for the crypto industry. Congressional legislation in May has multiple crypto bills being circulated, as the financial media is finally beginning to see the priority of crypto in the Trump-Musk administration. Increasingly it is apparent that crypto is a primary economic & foreign policy driver for the Trump White House.

Stablecoins are a way of connecting worthless crypto to tangible assets such as the US dollar, Treasury notes, etc. In short: stablecoins are a gateway to a crypto-fascist billionaire heist of the US Treasury. Not one “stablecoin” has ever held its 1:1 peg to whatever it’s tied to. STABLE & GENIUS are the crypto bills currently being “debated.” Political blowback has already started as the ‘crypto PAC money Democrats’ are starting to sway due to increasing public concerns. Crypto is a political fight where an educated public can really benefit the cause of revolutionary socialism.

April 2 was “Liberation Day” when the Trump tariffs were announced. The tariff plan was to declare economic war on the nation of China, along with a cost-of-living & jobs war on the international working class. A side benefit for Trump was the chaos it provoked in the news cycles, which deflected attention away from his hidden crypto agenda. The crypto-fascist plan was for the STABLE & GENIUS bills to already be passed, or at least well on their way by now. But these bills have been “paused” instead. Crypto works best in secret, and the timelines on these events (tariffs & crypto legislation) suggest they were part of a coordinated fascist plan. Any public disclosures & analysis of crypto-fascist criminality damages Trump immeasurably.

Lou, dressing down his troops in Caddyshack: I’m gonna lay it right on the line. There have been a lot of complaints already– horsing around on the course, bad language, smoking grass, poor caddying! You wanna get fired, be replaced by golf carts– just keep it up.

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Wasting human capital

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Reuters/Markets headline: Treasuries, U.S. dollar sell off as Trump trade war drives recession fears

In Succession (2018-23) Logan, Kendall, Roman, Shiv & Conner constantly bounce stupid half-baked ideas back-and-forth, always choosing in the end to lean politically to the right towards fascism– and that’s how it ends up.

Two years later, we have in real life with the Trump administration the result of what was depicted in that HBO political drama series. In Succession, the 1%, and especially the 0.01% are clueless & impotent, back-filling their limitations with hysterics & rage. The power of money buys them everything, yet they still aren’t satisfied.

The most likable characters in Succession are the human throw-aways including: Tabitha, Jess, & (my favorite) Karolina. These minor characters are serious people who are intelligent & very good at what they do, but get no respect or love from those they dutifully serve. Without such talent, this parasite class would immediately shrivel up & die. These fictionalized conflicts wonderfully portrayed in Succession are actually real and are happening every day in all the institutions of bourgeois power.

Many of monied class don’t understand where money comes from at all, they simply perceive money as a divine right to be held by themselves. Inform them that money is a congealed expression of the value of human labor power, and the 1% gets hysterical and starts screaming for a fascist strongman.

It’s all very convenient for the puppet-masters of international finance & commerce. Their authority is never to be questioned, along with the 2-party political set-up and elite-biased court system. International law is ignored & attacked by US imperialism to further its predatory ambitions of world conquest and that’s how it is we are told. We are always fighting the evil Russians because of 1917, and we must submit because we are mere mortals compared to our demi-god leaders who are infallible.

The Frankfurt School of post-modernism provides the ideological justification for much of this propaganda, based on pre-fascist philosophers such as Friedrich Nietzsche in their writings on the “overman-superman”, etc, expressing an admiration for a strongman leader. German soldiers received copies of Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra as gifts during World War I, as a conscious attempt by the far right to divert the working masses from the Marxism of Lenin & Trotsky. The social Darwinism of ‘survival of the fittest’, Malthusianism depopulation, and the rest of this epoch’s pseudo-science are simply genocide-enabling bourgeois rationalizations.

Spinoza & Hegel are the philosophical & ideological influencers of Karl Marx. There is no ‘overman’ or ‘fuhrer principle’ with socialism, as that Nietzsche garbage belongs in the dustbin of history. What we currently have in the White House is a cabal of Nazis who think they can enslave the world and are determined to do so. The popular resistance they face is massive and unconquerable, yet the fascists insist on this fight to the death. The Democrats are aware and doing everything they can in their service of fascism to disarm & misdirect the working population.

The international youth & working class must organize itself independently from existing capitalist political forces, which are all lined-up for battle against the working masses. These hostile camps include the DSA & Greens, the union bureaucracies, and NGO’s/non-profits with their million ties to big business & the military-police state.

The police are of no help to the working masses, in fact they are brought in by criminal corporate & government officials to drive worker leaders out of the factories while arresting anti-genocide student protesters exercising their right to free speech on campus. I can’t remember the last time I heard of a real cop acting heroically, I suppose it happens, but I mostly read about police shooting & arresting people without cause and then being protected by the courts. I wonder why police abuse & terror and legal system corruption is never seriously discussed in the media? A lot of other people do to.

Deep in the Oval Office everyday, fascists are meeting and plotting their next attack on the population. Elon Musk & Stephen Miller appear to have the most influence over Trump at this point, which means anti-immigrant scapegoating, tariff wars & crypto. All these reactionary policies are implemented in a series of chaotic fits, then modified by unexplained zig-zags and walk-backs intended to placate political resistance until the death squads can take over. It’s remarkable to note that Biden-Harris had over a year to question Trump on all this during their election campaigns, but never seriously did so. Now the Democrats are acting surprised by Trump. For the rest of us, it’s like being forced to watch a hideously bad TV show every day.

A final word on acting: I’ve now seen Succession twice all the way through. It’s a beautifully done series on some really ugly issues and probably the best streaming content since House of Cards (2013-17). You certainly have to be in a certain mood to watch & appreciate it. Succession perfectly cast three amazing actors for extremely difficult roles in bringing humanity & likability to deeply-flawed characters in Jeremy Strong, Kieran Culkin & Sarah Snook. Succession viewers takes turns hating Kendall, Roman & Shiv, while fitting in touching human drama involving the human capital they are wasting & abusing. The Hollywood trap is to romanticize these characters into real life, instead of learning the political lessons, and thus absolving the ruling class from mass criminality.

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Modern Diet & Junk Food Cravings

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Human beings & popular culture keeps evolving. What I’ve noticed as I walk through life is how unhealthy much of the American population has become, including (and sometime especially) children. For reference, I’m Generation X and it wasn’t like this when I was a kid. So what are the causes?

For sure, advertisers targeted Gen-Xers during Saturday morning cartoons and any other children’s programming available back then– before cable & satellite TV. Then MTV, ESPN & TNT/USA came along and advertiser targeting became even more nefarious & precise. It is now a consumer fact that Gen-X and beyond craves Cocoa Puffs, Captain Crunch, Fruit Loops, Lucky Charms, Hostess snacks, Cheetos, Coke, Pepsi, Mountain Dew, McDonald’s & Pizza Hut. Kids my age were bombarded with millions of ads, while today’s internet kids see tens-of-millions of ads by adulthood.

So how do you control your junk food urges when watching TV or browsing the internet? To start, we must define junk food for everything it is. Junk food is a craving we can’t ignore, but it is a health-buster so it must be tamed. It’s all about correct identification, then finding substitutes & compliments.

For instance, after a certain point ice cream becomes a junk food. Everyone loves ice cream, but it’s a gut-buster, so I substitute cottage cheese in my diet and that handles my ice cream craving in most instances. I still have ice cream in my freezer for when the craving becomes the food I eat, I just eat a lot less of it since I substituted cottage cheese. Since cottage cheese can be boring by itself, it needs a compliment for it to be a sustainable substitute. I use jelly/jam or fresh fruit and that compliment gives the variety needed to sustain cottage cheese in my diet. That keeps the waist & ass leaner, while lowering the diabetes risk.

Rule #1 to a healthy diet is: Eat whole fruits & vegetables as staples. Peanut butter is a super-food that goes well with just about anything. So is milk, eggs & real cheese. This reduces meat consumption, while giving your body the necessary protein & good fats it needs. Remember that fresh is best and what is available depends on your geography. Learn to adapt– regionally, seasonally & economically.

For example if you juice cucumbers as part of your regular diet, and suddenly cukes aren’t available or become of poor quality, you must find an alternative source of juice & veggies. Fresh cucumbers are a super-food so making up the difference in lost nutrition will require a major re-adjustment to the fruits & vegetables in your diet.

I’ve mentioned super-foods a few times already, which is a generic term for nutrient-dense foods that give you health. Green peanuts & citrus are super-foods available in the southern latitudes of North America, while apples & cabbages are examples of super-foods that should be worked into a regular northern latitude diets. Consider juice or cider for citrus & apples if not in the native latitude. Understand that apples get mealy in the south due to extreme heat, so they are only super-foods when grown in the north.

Junk food is least damaging if it is consumed when all the body’s nutritional requirements have been met. Be honest with your deepest cravings and find a healthy alternative, particularly in the cereal aisle of your grocery store. Cereal is junk food, but Cheerios, Raisin Bran & granola are among its healthiest forms and can be substitutes. For me, Cheerios satisfies my potato chip craving and my stomach thanks me for it. A bowl of cereal with milk kills a lot of junk food cravings for candy bars, cookies, etc.

A hot air popcorn popper kills the corn meal junk food (Cheetos, etc) cravings. Eliminate bread & pasta from your at home diet, these starches are huge gut-busters, so only consume them when eating out. Substitute and find compliments. Vegetables need creamy dippers to encourage consumption, etc. You need to cover all your junk food cravings with always-available substitutes, otherwise these cravings will ruin your body & physical health. This is one of the most difficult challenges in modern life and one of the most important GenX lessons to learn.

Celebrities who can be trained to spread desired messaging

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Yesterday, a former US government official, Mike Benz, published an article on the USAID program to integrate imperialist messaging into popular music. Among those prominently named are: Taylor Swift, Dua Lipa & (of course) Pussy Riot. Also discussed in the piece are 22 rappers from around the globe, who have visited the US State Department over the years and been trained to write lyrics that dovetail with US imperialist interests.

The argument that USAID is necessary to fight global hunger, advocate for democratic rights, etc, is a fraud– a cynical concoction of Western intelligence. Trump/Musk are shutting down the notorious CIA fronts of USAID & the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) because of it’s fake left bias, which the fascists despise.

This has nothing to do with democracy, as Trump/Musk seek to reshape US intelligence in their Nazi image. Note that “Trump/Musk” and “intelligence” is an oxymoron.

It was a convenient starting point for the Trump/Musk government wrecking ball because so many people recognize this imperialist corruption. Only a few well-paid rainbow warriors (pic above) have protested the shutting down of USAID & NED. Perhaps the State Department can coax one of these celebrity assets into writing lyrics about the unfairness of this defunding. Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, Vogue, etc, would give it a great review– for sure. That’s their job.

“Celebrities who can be trained to spread desired messaging” is the exact State Department phrase which became the title. These trainable celebrities are fascist collaborators & sympathizers. The irony is that most of these puppets weren’t fascists to start, but the Black Hand has corrupted them and that’s the Faustian deal one must make to become a celebrity. These iconic defeatists see no hope, no path to fight Trump/Musk, taking all their political cues from the CIA Democrats. These trained celebrities who learned nothing from history are Vichy France.

Vichy collaborators were paraded though the streets of liberated Paris with swastikas drawn on their foreheads, while the women also had their hair shaved-off for giving aid & comfort to the Nazis from 1940-44. The population of France lined their streets to spit upon & hurl verbal abuse at these fascists, seething with revolutionary anger & class hatred of the bourgeoisie. Fascism, which flows out of imperialism, is the bitterest enemy of democracy and that’s the lesson of WW2. The masses of the world still hate Nazis, and it is this retribution of the international working class that historically awaits celebrities trained to spread desired messaging.

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Chuck Norris movies as comedy

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Unacknowledged comedies happen because media bias becomes so influential that many viewers can’t comprehend what they are watching. You have to have intelligence to recognize the humor in an unbelievable situation that is presented & promoted as deadly serious. This is how camp & cult classics come about in film. Chuck Norris rightly belongs in this camp. The Chuck Norris movies from his classic period, 1979-1985, are his only watchable films, proving there are limits to badness which an educated viewer shouldn’t go past. I’ll stay within the era to illustrate some Chuck Norris laughs you may have missed & why.

To start at the beginning, Chuck Norris was a middle-weight kick boxing champion when few people followed the sport. Before that he was in the US Air Force, which clearly shaped his views on politics. Chuck Norris trained under Bruce Lee, and got his film break when he was a fight villain in Return of the Dragon (1972), written, directed by & starring Bruce Lee. This film, also known as The Way of the Dragon, was made in Hong Kong and has been widely dubbed into English. Not even Chuck Norris’ voice survives, as this movie deserves subtitles with no dubbing to hear Bruce Lee’s authentic voice in Chinese, along with the rest of the characters, but a dubbed version is still worthwhile because it’s really about the Bruce Lee fight scenes. If you ever wanted to see Chuck Norris get killed in a fight, as he deserves, then watch Return of the Dragon.

Enter the Dragon (1973) was produced by Warner as a US release in English and was Bruce Lee’s final completed film. After Bruce Lee tragically died in July 1973, Chuck Norris began boasting in the media that he was an equal of Bruce Lee in fighting & developing in his own system– which clearly wasn’t true. Jackie Chan, along with billions of Asians who love martial arts, have taken fierce exception to Chuck Norris for this. It’s helpful to know that when watching Chuck Norris movies.

Bruce Lee’s Jeet Kune Do revolutionized hand-to-hand fighting, training, philosophy, etc; while Chuck Norris’ limited & brutal kick-boxing style– didn’t. He was an early world champion when no one cared, and those who did were watching Bruce Lee. Bruce Lee, along with Arnold Schwarzenegger in body building, were the earliest true-action movie stars– meaning they could really do it. Before them it was guys like Sean Connery, who could act, but weren’t athletes.

Chuck Norris can’t act, but he can do action. Chuck Norris sorta filled the action movie void that fans were craving for before The Terminator (1984) & Rambo (1982 & 1985) took over. The first classic Chuck Norris comedy is A Force of One (1979), definitely one of my favorites from him. This is low-budget work from American Cinema, shot over the Christmas holidays, as it keeps referencing itself as a Christmas movie but by the end it hardly feels Christmassy. It feels like a raw martial arts action movie, with no acting talent except Clu Gulager. In the trailer for this movie, he is called “Clu Gallagher” which should give the viewer an idea about the attention-to-detail in A Force of One.

Other comic delights include the guy who later played Angel Fernandez who got chainsawed to death in Scarface (1983). Here he is one of the cops that gets his neck broken by the masked karate killer terrorizing Los Angeles. In his lone encounter with Chuck Norris, he says, “We’re gonna comb the west side, then meet some Colombians at the Sun Ray Motel about two keys of ya-yo. Catch you later.” I least I think he says that, and when I do I laugh.

A bad movie means you must press the riff button in your head. That means it’s now okay to speak out loud as the movie is running, because the movie isn’t holding your attention, it’s insulting it. The original MST3K (1989-99) taught us that.

In A Force of One, it’s a good thing we have Chuck Norris ready to teach these amateur LA cops how to defend themselves. Keep in mind, this is presented as hard hitting reality action on film. Another thing about Chuck Norris movies is that you don’t want to be his best friend, buddy, or police partner– because you will get killed. It happens to Chuck Norris’ step-son in A Force of One, and it’s all about revenge & vengeance from there. No sorrow or regrets as a step-father from Chuck Norris.

Jennifer O’Neill breaks that stereotype by living, but she is completely useless, unable to do the required stunts believably, and can’t act. She’s semi-pretty but clearly fading due to anorexia & the Hollywood lifestyle. At the climactic end, when Chuck Norris has unmasked the karate killer and they are having their fight-to-the-death amongst ex-US Special Forces soldiers, Norris is finally really to deliver the deathblow when Jennifer O’Neill screams, “NO!” Chuck Norris backs off and turns his back to his deadly foe, which almost gets him killed but Chuck Norris is so amazing at martial arts that he karate kicks his way out of that and then kills the bad guy. The credits roll over their awkward embrace for several minutes.

Another scene that deserves recognition is when Jennifer O’Neill is recruiting Chuck Norris, and takes him to see a 15-year old girl who has run away from home and become a prostitute. No explanation as to why she keeps running away from home, only that her parents are wealthy and therefore provide a loving home, but to their horror their daughter is now a junkie. Chuck Norris hates junkies. Before being led into the young prostitute’s room, we see her being fondled by a middle-aged white man, who runs out as the lady cop busts through the door… and Chuck Norris lets the pedophile john go [!]. Our hero, ladies & gentlemen. Chuck Norris then glares unsympathetically at the young girl, until her Hispanic pimp struts in and starts barking orders. There’s nothing Chuck Norris hates more than a loudmouth Hispanic pimp, so THEN he moves into action. Got that?

A Force of One has Christmas tinsel, wreaths, etc, in half its scenes, yet it somehow never feels like a Christmas movie, even when a Salvation Army brass band is playing holiday music to the public. And yet it is a Christmas movie. This movie lets you have the debate with other viewers, which is also part of the comic charm of A Force of One. I’ll leave it to you to watch & decide for yourself. FYI, I say it is a Christmas movie.

A Force of One was a minor box-office hit, so a bigger budget was allowed for The Octagon (1980). This is Chuck Norris’ best movie because there is so much talent helping him out. Never again would a studio invest in Chuck Norris like The Octagon, which features three leading ladies with whom he has dinner, and two get killed. It’s ninjas this time, as his disgraced Japanese half-brother is the arch-villain, Seikura, who trains terrorists in the ninja style which is silent but deadly.

An echoplex effect box is used on Chuck Norris’ voice to great effect. Chuck Norris never has much to say, and has trouble when he does, so an echo effect adds weight & importance to his dull words. This will teach you the value of good production… production,,, production. The real star of The Octagon (as a comedy) is Art Hindle, Norris’ best friend [!] in the movie. Art Hindle’s passion & energy in The Octagon were never duplicated in any other performance by him. Art Hindle gives everything in his limited imagination & ability in The Octagon, and that’s all you can ask from an actor. I firmly believe Art Hindle’s tour du force performance is the key to a true understanding of The Octagon.

One of the most ridiculously funny premises of Art Hindle’s character, AJ, is that he’s a martial artist. Not once in this movie do we see him training, or fighting. We mostly see him talking, getting drunk, and striking out with the ladies. We see him get captured easily as he reaches the perimeter of the octagon terrorist training camp. When AJ gets slaughtered at the end, The Octagon approaches great comedy. Art Hindle has no fighting skills, yet he keeps mouthing off to Chuck Norris like he’s a martial arts Jedi. Great comedy, as Art Hindle steals every scene he’s in, all the way to the bloody end. AJ is the glue & guts that gets Chuck Norris to the Octagon, otherwise he’d still be sittin’ on his ass. It’s this kind of vicarious pleasure that make action & comedy fans want to watch again & again.

Lee Van Cleef is in The Octagon, and he is delightful as a FBI anti-terrorist named McCarn, also known as McWho. Interestingly, Lee Van Cleef would become a ninja master himself in the short-lived TV series The Master (1984), which later got Mistied. Lot’s of tough talk here with Lee & Chuck, pretending to understand global politics, etc. There’s a fat Jew who bankrolls Seikura’s ninja terrorist camp, a greasy boxing promoter hassling Chuck Norris to return to the ring, and finally a wealthy & beautiful heiress who is a fundraiser (& victim [!]) of this ninja terrorism due to her high political principals– or something like that. Chuck Norris movies are always vague with these details on economics & politics. The important thing is that Chuck Norris is ALWAYS ready to kick some terrorist butt, just point him in the right direction and remember– he works alone.

He says it a lot, “I work alone,” but I think it’s really the opposite– people don’t want to work with him. Just consider it. In Invasion USA (1985) Chuck Norris is now with Golan-Globus. No decent leading actresses wanted to work with Chuck Norris anymore, as that was death on-screen & for a career. And just as Joel & the Bots riffed in the opening credits for Time Walker/Being From Another Planet (1982), Melissa Prophet’s career went nowhere. Very prophetic indeed.

Several comedy notes need to be made for Invasion USA to be watchable. Near the beginning, when Chuck Norris is wrangling a gator with his Native American buddy [!!], he doesn’t knot the rope around the alligator’s snout, so it sheds the rope and snaps at John Eagle as it is going into the cage. Not helpful, Chuck, and his soon-to-be-dead buddy lets him know.

The opening scene of Invasion USA is Golan-Globus at its worst, as Richard Lynch playing a Russian terrorist leader Rostov, disguised under a US Coast Guard flag, machine guns a crew of apparently stranded Cuban refugees. After everyone on board is dead, a hatch is opened and hundreds of kilos of cocaine are revealed inside. The poor refugees were really drug smugglers! Except, if you really had hundreds of kilos of coke on a boat manned with 30+ people there would be guns, a mechanic to fix the engine, a working radio, etc. You certainly wouldn’t be drifting helplessly in the ocean. Disgraceful Golan-Globus anti-immigrant propaganda, so push the riff button right away on Invasion USA and make it a comedy.

Like A Force of One, Invasion USA is a Christmas movie. Maybe not as much, but it is. A little girl asks he daddy if she can place the star on top of the outside Christmas tree before Rostov blows up her home and everyone in it. There’s Christmas music in the neighborhood just before this villainy. This leads to an interesting production note on Invasion USA, as this demolition was done in an Atlanta neighborhood that had been annexed for an airport expansion, so Golan-Globus was allowed to blow up those homes for real, not some fake Hollywood explosion which you often see. It’s quite striking to watch.

Richard Lynch as Rostov, convincingly plays a Russian terrorist mastermind who is haunted by Chuck Norris and maniacally shoots his enemies in the genitalia. But even he has a few friends to help him. Chuck Norris works alone, and he makes that clear to the government agent with whom he meets in south Florida to accept the assignment of saving the United States. Chuck Norris closes the scene by walking away from the agent in mid-sentence and sticking him with his dinner bill. I think that’s supposed to be funny, but it actually reveals something else.

Apparently in Invasion USA, the entire US Navy & Coast Guard were napping when Russian terrorists landed on a Miami beach under cover of darkness, then loaded themselves into trucks and scattered across America to spread terror and destroy our way of life. A teenage couple necking on the moonlit beach are slaughtered by Russian reconnaissance, otherwise they may have notified US authorities and foiled the terrorist invasion. Often these foreign terrorists disguise themselves as police while massacring civilians, and this leads to people not trusting the police. Chuck Norris will battle these evil foreigners to restore the image of the police as benevolent & friendly civil servants.

In reality, by 1985 the Reagan/Bush administration had organized a federal response to the Cocaine Cowboy violence in Miami which had plagued the community for years. The DEA, FBI & Pentagon were now coordinated with local police in their efforts to secure the US border in Florida from well-organized Colombian drug cartels. Before that, any mass invading force trying to establish a Miami beachhead would have to take it from the Colombian & Cuban drug gangs. All that reality makes the action & motivations in Invasion USA comically unbelievable.

When waiting in a hotel room for the US government to take him into custody, as part of his master plan to flush out Rostov and end the reign-of-terror, Chuck Norris is mindlessly watching TV in bed when he takes his finished chewing gum out of his mouth and sticks it to the picture on the wall behind him while not taking his eyes off the important television programming he is watching. If I had to choose one scene that defines Chuck Norris as an actor & unintentional comedian, that could be it.

But my favorite scene in Invasion USA is when Chuck Norris is patrolling the Miami streets vigilante style in his souped-up truck. He’s looking out the window with barely concealed contempt at the human refuse he despises, when a working girl steps off her corner and yells to him, “Fuck you, asshole!” It’s the best line in the movie.

One final point on Chuck Norris is that in every movie I’ve discussed, and those I haven’t, he’s always Chuck Norris. His character name & profession are irrelevant. Can you name another actor like that? You kinda have to go back to Buster Keaton & Charlie Chaplin for that. In other important respects Chuck Norris evokes Joe Don Baker in Mitchell (1975). Chuck Norris never served in the Vietnam War, although he likes to make you believe that he did, and thus is credentialed to speak as a veteran soldier. He isn’t. As far as being an actor goes, Chuck Norris is in a category by himself when it comes to action-comedy as a genre– an unintentional-comic force of one.

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