Hey, Somebody at CNN Finally Got Fired!
Can you believe it?
No, Jeffrey Toobin didn’t get canned because he whacked his pud on a work Zoom call. No, Chris Cuomo isn’t packing up his desk for helping his big brother lie about sexually assaulting all those women, or for breaking COVID-19 quarantine and lying about it, or for threatening to throw a guy down a flight of stairs for calling him “Fredo.”
It was just some regular schlubs who wouldn’t get vaccinated.
Even if they work from home?
My opinion on this is, of course, the least popular one: I’m against vaccines being mandated by the government, because this is America. But if a private company wants to fire you for refusing to get vaccinated, that’s literally their business. If you don’t like it, find somewhere else to work. Start an OnlyFans. Or a Substack, same difference.
And, also, in addition to that: Ha ha ha, CNN sucks! What a bunch of clowns. Pretty much every on-camera employee at that place should be fired for one reason or another,1 and it’s not like any of them are bringing in great ratings. But they can do whatever they want, as long as they don’t displease Jeff Zucker. I’m not a big fan of cable news as a whole right now, but it brightens my day every time I hear about CNN’s ratings dropping even lower.
Joe Biden doesn’t care about the Constitution. He doesn’t care about the rule of law.
“Yeah, it’s probably illegal. Whaddaya gonna do about it?”
All the Dem caterwauling about “our lawless president” between January 20, 2017 and January 20, 2021 was a bunch of horse$#!+. They don’t care about the law unless the other team is breaking it.
For once, maybe my excessive cynicism, borne of a lifetime of disappointment, is unfounded. Maybe Andrew Cuomo really is done for?
The Democratic fundraising platform ActBlue has removed a donation page that New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo's campaign committee used to solicit contributions, the company confirmed to Axios…
ActBlue is the lifeblood of grassroots Democratic fundraising. Its decision to cut off Cuomo following damning allegations of sexual harassment and assault deals a body blow to what's left of his political future.
I certainly hope so. He’s an evil ghoul and I hate him. But I keep hearing that he’s on his way out, over and over for almost a year now, and he’s still around. All he cares about is power, and he’s not going to give it up until you make him.
On the other hand, Janice Dean rules.
Kudos to Washington Free Beacon reporter Matthew Foldi for his story about ActBlue not cutting ties with Cuomo, which got them to, well, act. You know, Foldi isn’t bad… for a journo!
My five-word review of The Suicide Squad:
Wow. Guardians of the Cemetery!
My longer, spoilerier review of The Suicide Squad is in the footnote at the end of this sentence.2 No, wait, you missed it! Go back.
Here’s the first trailer for the long-awaited Y: The Last Man television series, set in a post-apocalyptic world after all but two of the male mammals on the entire planet suddenly die at the same moment:
Okay, it looks fine, but…
Why are all these strong, capable, independent women so worried about keeping the power plants running? What does that have to do with all the men being gone? Women can do anything men can do, right? It’s not like they need us.
And this trailer doesn’t address the most important people in the entire world: those who were born male but now identify as women. Trans women are women! So they’re spared this grim fate, right? Their chromosomes shouldn’t condemn them to death, should they? Because that would be transphobic, and I know FX isn’t transphobic.
Other than that, this looks fine. I read the DC comic this is based on for the first year or so, but the main character Yorick was so insufferable that I gave up. If he’s the last man on earth, they’re better off with none at all. But it’s such a big, ambitious sci-fi idea that I want to see if they pull it off.
Please just let it be better than the Preacher TV series. At least Seth Rogen has nothing to do with this one.
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Well, not counting Mary Katharine Ham. And maybe one or two others. The rest… ptui.
SPOILERS FOR THE SUICIDE SQUAD!
When James Gunn said he was gonna kill ‘em all, he wasn’t kidding. Almost half of the supervillains on the movie poster get wiped out in the first 15 minutes, and it’s hilarious. You learn just enough about these worthless pieces of crap that you don’t care when they die horribly. This is the movie for anybody who’s ever wanted to see Pete Davidson get shot in the face.
And then you think, “Okay, it’s a movie about disposable losers, and Gunn just wiped out a bunch of them like it was nothing. He’s made his point.” But he hasn’t! The killing doesn’t stop with the third-string nobodies. Out of the small army of DC supervillains in this movie, only six make it out alive, and they might not all be the ones you expect. I’m not spoiling anything by telling you Harley Quinn doesn’t die, because she’s a cash cow for DC. If Harley can survive Birds of Prey, she can survive anything. But it’s called The Suicide Squad, it’s about a suicide mission, and boy does it ever deliver.
It’s also the craziest goddamn superhero(ish) movie I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen almost all of them. It’s nuttier than the Guardians movies, even. DC threw a bunch of money at Gunn and let him do whatever he wanted, and what he wanted was to be #weirdAF. It’s got that same uneasy blend of cynical humor and eye-rolling schmaltz he brought to Marvel, and there’s a hell of a lot more blood. I mean, Aquaman could set up an undersea kingdom in all that blood.
All the main characters are legitimately insane in various ways, and at times I felt a little guilty for laughing at their sick antics. I would not want to be stuck in a room with any of these psychopaths, including the squad’s utterly ruthless warden/boss/executioner Amanda Waller, but it’s fun to watch them being awful to each other.
Here and there, between the bouts of demented ultraviolence and quippy banter, there are odd moments of almost lyrical beauty. Remember the old Superman tagline, “You will believe a man can fly”? Well, in this movie you will believe a woman can float serenely inside the intraocular fluid of a giant telepathic alien starfish’s eye as she gazes in ecstatic awe at a teeming horde of tamed rats devouring its living brain.
Out of all the characters from the Justice League’s first appearance in The Brave and the Bold #28 (1960), the only one to appear in a good DCEU movie is Starro.
The squad’s “support” staff back at Belle Reve Penitentiary reminded me of the techs in The Cabin in the Woods. For most of the movie they don’t care what the hell happens to any of their prisoners, which makes it all the more effective when they finally do care. They’ll be back in the HBO Max Peacemaker series, apparently.
Speaking of which: John Cena can act! He’s not going to win any awards or anything, but he’s very believable as a bloodthirsty lunatic who justifies his total disregard for human life by calling himself a patriot. He also gets some of the funniest lines.
(Gunn doesn’t really get too political in this movie, but I assume the Peacemaker series will be annoyingly leftist. Knowing that Cena is a shill for the Chinese Communist Party in real life doesn’t help.)
Bloodsport is pretty obviously just Deadshot with a British accent. Will Smith dropped out, so Gunn just did a search-and-replace in the script and turned it in. Hell, Bloodsport even has a semi-estranged daughter who’s the only thing in the world he really cares about. He’s clearly Deadshot, but they didn’t want to insult Smith by replacing him with a better actor.
John Ostrander probably got paid more for uttering one line of dialogue in this movie (“Good dog”) than he did for writing all those Suicide Squad comics.
I also liked the use of the surrounding environment for the credits and interstitials. Like when Michael Rooker’s skull gets blowed up real good, and the blood spreads out and spells “Warner Bros. Pictures Presents.” At one point the action stops and some clouds in the sky form the words “EIGHT MINUTES EARLIER.” Gunn does that stuff at least a dozen times. It reminded me of Will Eisner’s The Spirit, which I assume Gunn is dorky enough to have read. I’m not sure Eisner would’ve really approved of the way Gunn uses the technique, but it’s a nice nod to the medium of sequential art.
It’s probably 20 minutes too long, there’s almost literally no plot, and not all the jokes land, but I LOL’ed a lot more than twice. And I’m pretty sure it’s got more F-bombs than both Deadpool movies put together. Holy fahrvergnügen, do these people swear a lot. I don’t mind it at all, but if you allow a child anywhere near this movie, you’re a cad and a scoundrel.
And not that you need to be told, after almost 15 years of Marvel movies, but yes, you should watch all the way to the end.
Oh, and Lynne Ashe as Polka-Dot Man’s mom should be nominated for an Oscar. An amazing, multilayered performance.
So yeah, I really liked The Suicide Squad! If you’ve read any of the original ‘80s comics, this is basically a funnier, bloodier, much stranger version. Three thumbs up. Well worth an HBO Max subscription.
I've written a spec screenplay about the sudden death of all the human males on the planet save one - it's a rom/com. (See, this woman breaks up with the guy just before the disaster, saying, "I wouldn't marry you if you were the last man on Earth!" And then she wakes up the next morning - and he IS! So she has to figure out how to win him back. It's called Her Dream Wedding.)|
I didn't insult the distaff half of the species by accusing them of being incapable of keeping the world running perfectly well without men. Or by having them let the world's most precious biological resource run around loose - they put him into protective custody at the Navy Lodge at the Bethesda Naval Medical Center.