Ethan Linehan

Except for the Trump Derangement Syndrome — the Antifa massacre, lynchings and racist death pits, the dismantling of the FBI, criminalizing the press, and of course, the culminating moment of the execution fantasy of the president — besides the TDS, the film completely lacked political content. The causes or stakes of the war were never explained, just taken for granted. The film elevates photography above narrative art forms and storytelling. Its extremely slow pacing asks the viewer to dwell on still images rather and an accumulation of impressions rather than a dynamic plot that moves forward. The film tacitly identifies the viewer with the objective standpoint of the journalist protagonists. Obviously, the tragic arc is how journalistic objectivity is achieved at the high price of the journalist's humanity; "they don’t judge their subjects so that we can." They just take the pictures for everyone else to have an opinion about. Journalism is depicted as some high moral vocation despite it having no audience in the film's reality. It's a nostalgia for War on Terror era Middle East war correspondents without a real object to match today. But in the absence of any political narrative about who is struggling for what and why, all that one is left with is an ahistorical moral condemnation of violence and celebration of the pseudo-objective standpoint of the journalist. Both the moral and journalistic standpoints inhabited by the film exemplify the idea of a “view from nowhere” - a view that Lukács calls the “apogee of capitalist reification.” The only authentic moment is the heartfelt, unhinged Democrat Jan. 6th storming of the seat of government at the end. But elevating that into art is sad.

Lucky that Anne Hathaway is worth looking at for 2 hours because the movie is terrible otherwise. The main guy isn't a good actor, the love between them is rather contrived and never explained, and there are virtually no supporting characters of any substance.

Bill Burr is a great lead, but the supporting cast shines too. This film is incredibly hilarious, but more importantly it is painfully contemporary. A real reminder that just because the years go on, they don't always go forward. Very questionable that the Millennials and Gen Z have made any progress over Gen X.

This Obama-produced movie dusts off a forgotten historical leader only to completely sanitize him and assimilate him to neoliberalism. Shame! An Oscar bait movie if ever there was one. Notable actors in sentimental and topical biopic released late in the fall. The film moves at a blistering pace and never pauses to develop any tension or emotion beyond the level of cliche. There was no depth at all to any of the supporting characters. Rather than inviting its viewers to consider history by focusing on the very dramatic political back-and-forth that was the Civil Rights Movement, the film is a boring spotlight on Rustin's emotions of being scorned by colleagues and lovers. The film invented a fake love interest just so they could foreground Rustin's homosexuality and pretend that it was his gay escapades that put him at odds with his contemporaries (not his intense critiques of his own movement for failing to live up to its potential). The movie pretends like history started in 1963 and the March of Washington was conceived and executed overnight, and with zero sense of purpose or goal explored for it. I don't think a single demand of or issue in the March was mentioned, which is apropos for the early 2020s when no demands or issues, however paltry, can even be considered. The example of this that stood out is how there is zero build-up to MLK's speech, which gets about 5 seconds of focus. Ostensibly the movie should have explored race relations of the era, but for the most part it feels like racism is something that happens off-screen e.g. you only feel the shadowy spectre of Strom Thurmond through radio broadcasts. His righthand man Tom Kahn was not even allowed to have a last name in the movie --- God forbid an interested moviegoer googles the inflammatory writings of this vintage New Left rabble-rousing socialist. Of course the film would end on the steps of the Washington Monument, but history did not, and by virtue of the narrative building towards them without much dissent or larger vision, the Civil Rights Acts are wrongly framed as the final victory of the Civil Rights era. You'd never know that Rustin's name was run through the mud in the next two years because he was insistent that progress not stop just because there are Democrats in Washington.

EDIT: adding this blurb to say after episode 4 the show gets exponentially better, less woke, more believable, more entertaining. The characters have better chemistry, the action picks up. But everything below this line is what I typed originally, and it still applies up to ep.4. ////// The show has potential. The mystery they're solving is complex. The unknown backstories of the main cast leave viewers curious. The big heist in Ep 2 was executed very well on screen. But the choice to make the cast young adults and to give them cheesy lines really makes the show feel childlike. The cast doesn't have a fraction of the charm that the cast of the fan-favorite Nicolas Cage movies did. Being rated PG, it feels like the Millennials that loved the old films are being infantilized. Biggest issue of all is Disney simply cannot resist being annoyingly woke. The bad guys pulling the strings are a board of rich old white business men. Ep 3 reveals the main plot to be a hidden mystery about the rising of indigenous women against colonizers. A major plot point is the main lead is undocumented and has DACA, so it's always a threat that the pretty immigrant will be taken away by the white folks. Ep 4's reveal is finding a clue left by "another black hero forgotten by history." If you don't like a show that beats you over the head with its attempts to keep up with the current authoritarian culture war trends, then you're not the intended audience.

I recommend watching the HBO documentary The Janes (2022). It tells the story of the Jane Collective, a group of activists in Chicago in the late 60s - early 70s who organized their community against both the state and the mob to provide abortions and other female healthcare. It's not lighthearted entertainment at all, but it is a near heroic portrayal of civil disobedience without any of the sentimentality or triumphalism that too often accompanies such tales.