Tag: Hollywood

Avatar, the United Nations Message about Sustainable Development: Liberalism has killed movies and Disney in general

I feel like it’s appropriate to gloat a bit about the box office disappointment of Avatar: The Way of Water is seeing. I predicted this poor showing several weeks away from the release in December of 2022, and everything is happening just as I said it would. I like Jim Cameron, and I have been very supportive of Disney as a company over the years. But these people and companies have moved much more to the leftover political time and use their entertainment platforms to communicate radical left ideas. And Avatar is essentially a United Nations sustainable development advertisement that centerpieces a save the whales campaign. In the world we live in today, people are tired of having left-leaning messages crammed down their throats. And that is what this new Avatar film is, a massive environmental message about how primitive society is superior to a technological capitalist one, and people aren’t exactly flocking to see it. Now with the first Avatar, back in 2009, when people assumed that there were freedoms of choice and that the political left deserved a chance to be heard from after eight years of George W. Bush, the massive growth of government after 9/11, and the belief that liberalism and conservatism could all live well together, people were willing to give Avatar a chance. And because it was a visually spectacular film, they went to see it and listened to what James Cameron had to say about the benefits of worshipping nature.

I don’t hate Avatar; here, my wife and I are at the Avatar land at Disney. I think it’s fantastic. But it certainly advocates a political, environmental message as its purpose. We filmed this for my children to see who were curious about what we were doing on our vacation.

This new Avatar film is doing good business from all normal measures. It is on track to break a billion dollars quickly with global box office numbers. Avatar is doing fantastic in countries where the United Nations is much more respected, such as Europe, and the greenie-weenie message is more accepted than in the United States. The liberal message with the fantastic visuals is worth seeing for people. But this film is now two weeks out and tracking with other blockbusters, and from the beginning, Disney was hoping this movie would be something special and that people would flock to see it like the previous movie. After all, Disney is committed to several more sequels of these Avatar films, and they think they will all make a few billion dollars each. Instead, what they are finding is a product with brand damage. In a post-Covid world, people are a lot more jaded about the liberal messages that are in movies. People watched their president being stolen from them. Instead, we were given by American intelligence agencies a loser in Joe Biden and told that all fossil fuels would be eliminated and we’d be forced to deal with power losses due to a lack of sustainability of solar and wind power. And the reason for Democrats is essentially the plot of Avatar 2. We have to save the whales. Capitalism is bad. And white people in big technical ships want to exploit indigenous people who live in harmony with nature. It’s the same argument against the formation of America and arguing that the Indians found in North America had their lives taken from them in favor of a greedy capitalist culture of technology lovers who are too into themselves and not bowing at the feet of mother universe.   

Of course, the pin-heads at Disney believe that the World Economic Forum people in Davos are the future and have bought into it. Larry Fink’s BlackRock has bought up much of the board at Disney. Now their leadership is filled with purple haired transexuals who think the grooming of kids in kindergarten is appropriate. They wanted to go to war with Ron DeSantis in Florida to throw their weight around as a company, which would somehow work out fine on the public trust front. When the first Avatar film was made, it was produced by 20th Century Fox, but now that Disney has acquired that production company, Disney has the rights to Jim Cameron’s creations. And behind the scenes, they have been attached at the hip with their environmentalism messages. While Avatar doesn’t appear to have much going on with gay characters, the politics of the green movement is clearly the driving force. And people get enough of that on CNN, MSNBC, and all the newspapers these days. They are not inclined to spend money seeing a 3-hour movie about those topics. In days before the government showed all its ugliness with election fraud, FBI insurrections to throw a popularly picked president out of office, and all the evils government showed with Covid and the lockdowns, we are in a much different world than when the first Avatar film came out. Cameron has always flirted with liberal messages in his films, the Terminator films were cautionary tales of the evils of technology, and the Abyss was all about aliens who were warning us about our own tendencies toward destruction. But the old truck driver in Jim Cameron managed to speak a language of violence and independence that people could relate to. Hence, they overlooked the growing liberal in Cameron because his movies were good.  After all, at the end of the Alien films, it was always the woman, Ripley, dressed in underwear, who representing Mother Earth would defeat the terror and save the quest.  The message was always obvious in those films, the feminine aspect of nature would always save the day.  But back then, Cameron and his fellow filmmakers were coyer about it.

But the success of Titanic, then Avatar went to Cameron’s head, and he has forgotten what made his movies great. Now he thinks he has the political capital to put very liberal messages in his movies, and people will love his movies so much that they might just learn something along the way. And that clearly is the belief of the Disney people who have drunk the Cameron Kool-aid. Where Cameron used to disguise his liberalism much better in the past, now he’s like the old man who farts at the table and just doesn’t care who might protest because everyone is hoping that they’ll get a nice present from that crazy old man at Christmas time, so they keep their mouths shut. And that Emperor Has No Clothes on mentality has hurt Jim Cameron. He has lost touch with his audience and thinks people like these blue people he created in Avatar are much beloved. But in truth, and this is the fact he hasn’t faced yet, it is because of technology, not the nature message, that people have gone to see Avatar at all. It’s all about the visual spectacle, not the message that people go to see, and this time around, people have seen it and done it. And liberalism is driving them away. It’s certainly not bringing them into the theaters. This isn’t Top Gun: Maverick which I would say is an average film from the 80s done now that people desperately crave a return to. People went to see Maverick because it made them feel good. Not because the movie was great but because they wanted to see that kind of patriotic story, even in places around the world separated from American influence. Avatar is the opposite; people go see it for the colors and the curiosity. But they forget the names of the characters after because they really don’t care about the people. Only the pretty scenery. And that gets them into the seats the first time, but we see that they go once and then forget about it. The film doesn’t have legs, and that is because of the grotesque liberalism contained in the story that has ultimately destroyed the Disney brand forever.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

 

The Liberalism Behind ‘Avatar Way of Water’: It won’t turn out the way Disney hopes

Usually, the people reading the tea leaves on television and radio get it all wrong because the leaves they are reading aren’t the right ones. I would suggest a different approach: to read the leaves of media currents themselves and to study what the public likes and doesn’t like as a much more accurate measure. And to that effect, much of where the world is going by way of populism, corporate control, and the way many treacherous characters hide their acts of malice behind liberal causes are on a crash course with destiny and collapsed diabolical intent. With that in mind, I’m talking about the new Avatar film, Way of Water, as if the world is being steered back to nature, into some oriental wisdom from the ancient past to reveal to our modern selves how far we have fallen from the tree. Because the tea leaves that Jim Cameron, the director and writer of the film, and the parent company of the new Avatar films, Disney, are reading the tea leaves of a wilted plant from the past that has long died. The world is a much different place from when the first Avatar movie came out, which earned a record-breaking 2 billion dollars at the box office. I was doing some work with Hollywood then, specifically with RealD 3D, so I knew what many producers and distributers wanted to do with 3D to convince movie goers to put their butts in seats instead of staying home watching movies on their magnificent home theater systems. And the first Avatar movie benefited from a good story, a great filmmaker, and outstanding cutting-edge 3D technology. But people at that time were comfortable with their lives; they trusted that America would always be there and that government wasn’t nearly as corrupt as we know it to be now. And the World Economic Forum was something that nobody knew much of anything about. People lived their lives and were open to strange ideas about environmentalism because there was room in a comfortable life to accept such ideas, so long as they could go home in their gas-powered car and had a full bank account. Church on Sunday put their minds to ease about what would happen tomorrow. 

It will be interesting to watch how audiences accept this new Avatar movie, released over a decade after the first. Disney hopes it will make a lot of money like the first, but I think it will be far short of the original. As will the subsequent films that are already planned will be. People will go see the movie for the same reason they are waiting in line for more than two hours to ride the magnificent ride at Disney World’s Animal Kingdom because they want to step out of their lives and into a unique experience. The Avatar ride at Animal Kingdom in Florida is one of the most outstanding technical achievements I have ever seen for human imagination. The whole Avatar land there is a monument to what the human imagination can produce, and I think it’s great. But, the cat is out of the bag now on Disney and Jim Cameron, who are both much more liberal than they used to be, and the country of America isn’t that liberal. The Desecrators of Davos “back to nature” message is not the priority for the people living in the world. With an overt message of environmentalism versus technical achievement, humans tend to cheer on the products of their minds, not the pagan superstitions of the past, which is the true intent of liberalism and its desire to reset the Vico Cycle into anarchy and back to a theocracy where nature is worshipped as the modern Earth Goddess. The first Avatar walked a very fine line between overt lectures about the terrors of corporate greed and the majesty of nature’s wisdom. And that redeeming message is the heart of the Desecrators of Davos plan to unite all the corporations of the world behind their pagan religions and to drag everyone in the world who uses those products with them to the Liberal World Order priorities for existence. 

It’s not that the new Avatar film The Way of Water will be boring. I’m sure that after ten years of making the movie, Jim Cameron has done some great things in film. But the message itself, this Dances with Wolves in space concept of rejecting technology for the idea that we are all cells within the body of something greater than ourselves, is a political message that people don’t want to hear. It’s been crammed down their throats for a long time now. Since the first Avatar movie in 2009, we’ve been through the Obama presidency and all the terrible things that happened as a result. That led people to vote for Trump in 2016. And when the great America that came from the Trump administration was taken from people in 2020, the Desecrators of Davos through their election tampering, especially with Facebook, they gave us Joe Biden, an embarrassment who has declared war on fossil fuels and represents the forces which essentially want to create Pandora, the land from the Avatar films, here on earth and as a political platform. Through public relations trickery, they can attempt to show that elections are close in America, just as in other places worldwide, such as Brazil. But in reality, people do not vote against their best interests, and this evidence shows in other aspects of our culture the kind of things people choose to be entertained by.

And that’s ultimately the problem with the new Avatar films; they are essentially the Biden political platform, the new religion of the globalists around the world of earth worship, presented as entertainment behind top-level special effects and all the magic a movie theater experience can provide. There are movies scheduled all the way through Avatar 5 that I think are getting way out over their skis. If they were just entertainment, people might enjoy them. But if you have read Klaus Schwab’s books from the World Economic Forum, you would see that Avatar and Disney’s production of them is essentially the world they want to get to hear on earth; it’s a political platform and their goals for the transformation of the world. They want us all to strip down naked, make love to our animal powers, get right with nature, and bend to its will, like the characters in Avatar do. And because of that, I think people will reject the films aside from their initial spectacle and the lack of anything else to see at a movie theater. I predict that all the hard work that Jim Cameron has put into these films will ultimately be lost on a public that is sick of the politics of liberalism being pushed into their lives from every direction, especially in their entertainment. And the results will be embarrassing for Disney and Cameron in the end. It is one thing to visit the Avatar World at Animal Kingdom and to marvel at the technical achievements that essentially attempt to make a primitive life great again in the minds of the Desecrators of Davos. But when you get tired of it, you can go back to your nice hotel, get a nice meal, sit by a very modern pool, and enjoy the world of technology and business with all the audacity that American capitalism can provide. But the point of the Avatar films, and the liberalism behind them, is to get rid of that comfort and to return mankind to a primitive state, so there is nowhere else to go. And people don’t like that message at all, and it will show in the box office results and, ultimately, Disney’s stock.   

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

What is a Right-Winged Radical: If I’m one of them I am very proud to be, and I’m not changing

I don’t know how you defend anybody who thinks about sex with little kids or even jokes about it. But because of the Matt Miller mess at Lakota schools, and my opinions about it, and leading up to it, I have been referred to as a “right-winged radical” more recently than normal. Part of the reason is that Democrats are poised to lose big on November 8th of 2022, and anybody on the side of MAGA (Make America Great Again) is being called derogatory names. The term “NAZI” is even being applied to anybody who is right-winged, as opposed to those on the “left wing,” which is most of the media, the political class, and all public schools to their core. But once again, the people doing the name-calling have a warped view of the world and clearly don’t understand how things work in the world. The projected bad election results are coming up because people are rejecting the Liberal World Order and its many failures.   The bottom line, which has apparently been their strategy all along, was to cheat in elections and gain power they didn’t deserve. If you keep liberals from cheating and disputing illegal votes so they aren’t counted, and that kind of thing, then Democrats can never win. There just aren’t that many liberals out there to have even the balanced power they appear to have now. Democrats and the Liberal World Order behind them stole the 2020 election with all kinds of mechanisms, electronic voting machines that could change votes and Covid to make mail-in ballots much easier to cheat, which they did in both cases. The proof is abundant, and we’ll talk about how they did it for the next hundred years. Americans will never forget what happened in 2020. And the cheaters will pay for what they did during several elections to come, starting with this one in 2022. 

But regarding right winged radicals, I have never moved my political position from the one I recognized from my grandparent’s generation. I have asked the right questions as to whether I needed to adjust what I was taught or modify it based on the projections of modern education. In cases where I might not have thought they were right, I asked those questions. But I quickly learned that it was the world that was wrong. The traditional America of my grandparents and beyond was the one I wanted to defend, and I have been that kind of Republican my entire life. I grew up with television shows like Gunsmoke, Bonanza, Eddies Father, Little House on the Prarie, and many others, which showed a kind of America that was successful and brought many hopes and dreams to the world. The screwups, such as fighting World Wars and America being the police of the United Nations in places like Iran, Vietnam, Korea, and all other places of socialist, communist, and far-left instability, are the fault of the new political left that reinvented itself as progressives after their failures during the Civil War in America. The liberals were represented by the South, who wanted to maintain a European aristocracy. The Industrial North wanted a complete divorce from Europe and the rest of the world in general and to become an example to the world of how things should be. Not a follower. The America of Buffalo Bill, of American Expansion, and the great westerns of John Wayne, the Lone Ranger, Zorro, and Disney’s Davy Crockett is my America. The big difference is that I have stayed right with that America while many felt the pressure to move further to the left because they didn’t want to be called names by radicals from the left and were forced through taunts to adopt Karl Marx’s ideas to keep the peace. I have viewed this procedure as an invasion, not political discourse. I am where I have always been. It’s the rest of almost everyone else who moved to the left and expected that to become the new political center. 

Since the Matt Miller thing broke, I have heard the tactics of many of these far-left lunatics, people who obviously don’t know me very well. They are learning many hard lessons. I’m never going to move from my spot, and I’ll fight anybody anywhere, anytime, over it, in any fashion, they want to fight. That is kind of my standard policy. But I’m never moving to the left of where I am. Nazis, as I’ve said many times are inventions of the pollical left. They are a problem of European thought. Fascism, such as Musullini projected, is another leftist concept. They are all far to the left of where I am and not even close to the gun-slinging gunfighters of America with a whole new Biblical take on morality in a nation not run by an aristocracy but by hard work, innovation, empowered risk takers, and a desire to win as opposed to make a master happy with licked boots and professional titles. Anybody suggesting that is wrong for the kind of America that we have always been is out of their minds. But some of those Matt Miller fans have sent me lots of nasty messages, such as one I received making fun of my cowboy hat and referring to my right-winged view of the world with the famous Jim Carrey video he did called Cold Dead Hands. One of the shows that I always did like when I went to my grandparents’ house on a Saturday night at 7:30 PM was Hee Haw, and in the Jim Carrey video, he was recreating a Hee Haw episode to make fun of the kind of America that used to like it. Well, I still like it, and I reminded that person that Jim Carrey’s career never recovered from when he did that video. He and the Hollywood left thought it was cute, but America rejected Carrey thereafter, and his career has tanked ever since. 

What they call the “hard political right” is really where America has always been. I think the father in Little House on the Prairie, Charles Ingles was what every man should strive to be. I think the father in Eddie’s Father is the kind of dad every kid wants in their life; of course, they want a mom too. The wise old gunslingers from Bonanza who always had the right answer when a young person asked a question is what America has always strived to be. And what the political left has offered to America is a destruction of that. And to kiss the feet of an Administrative State run by Europe and the United Nations. I grew up wanting to be like those people, and I am. And I’m never going to move off that spot. I’ll hand out bottled waters to the wore out people who gave lefty ideas a chance and want to return to sanity in the new MAGA Republican Party. But there is nothing in the world that will move me off my position. The attempts recently have been humourous, but more than a laugh at them, it has illustrated where all the political divisions have sourced themselves. It’s in the push by politics, the media, corporate culture, and globalism in general to adopt the methods of Karl Marx, and America is about rejecting everything about Karl Marx. Anything that moves in that left-leaning European direction is garbage that must be fought, and fight it we will. The process has already started. But after this upcoming election on November 8th, things will start moving America back to the kind of America I have talked about here. Because to me, that is the only America, and I’m not going to leave it no matter how many losers scream that I should.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

What ‘Bob’s Burgers’ says about American Society: What people will do to have a good family

At face value, it would be one of those strange mysteries. But when you dig into the issue a bit, it makes a lot of sense and says a lot about what kind of society we really are as Americans. I’ll admit, I was perplexed as to why any studio would produce a Bob’s Burgers theatrical release. With so many streaming services that are out there these days, why would anybody make a movie of the somewhat popular cartoon on Fox called Bob’s Burgers, which is a version of the typical animated formula that they have made so popular over the years with other offerings like The Simpsons, and Family Guy? I’m not too fond of Bob on Bob’s Burgers; I think of him as a loser. He’s not very ambitious; as a dad, he’s perpetually broke. He runs a little New England burger place in a resort town, and he can barely rub two pennies together.

Most of the episodes are about the problems they have as a family because they never have enough money to do things. And of course, my famous saying to people complaining about not having enough money is just to work and make more. Especially in America, if you want money, you can have it. You may not make all the money you want in 8 hours of work. Forty hours a week may not be enough; you might have to work 80. When I was raising a family, I have told the stories of only having one car, and I rode a bicycle 25 miles a day, so my wife could have the car for the kids and worked two full-time jobs to make the money we needed as a family. So, I can’t relate to Bob in Bob’s Burgers, and I find it odd that young people like the show so much. But, apparently, they do. Enough so that they made a theatrical movie release this year as something they thought was justifiable. 

I also had a unique experience while attending various comic cons with my daughter, an outstanding illustrator who does exhibitions of her work at those types of events. As I have said, it’s interesting to watch people cosplay at comic cons, the kind of outfits they want to dress up in, and invest so much of their time to bring characters they enjoy to life in some way. I can understand the various Star Wars characters and those from the Marvel movies. Those are action movies that make you feel good when leaving the movie theater in some way, so it makes sense that people would want to dress up as those characters during Halloween and at comic cons. Bringing fantasy to life is a specific function of the human imagination, a conceptual vehicle that expresses inner values that manifest in mythological impressions during social exchanges. Dressing up as a favorite character is a way to vote for the kind of values that you see in pop culture. Imitation is the ultimate compliment. But while I was at these events, I was just a little shocked to see young people dressing up as characters from Bob’s Burgers, which is hard because they are all cartoons. It’s not easy to bring a cartoon character to life, yet people did, and some were really good costumes. Why? I’ve watched many episodes of Bob’s Burgers, and I just don’t enjoy the show that much. For me, it’s often filler in the background while I’m doing five or six other things. I occasionally watch it because I like the colors of cartoons. But I can’t relate to the characters much at all. 

Oddly enough, my wife likes Bob’s Burgers a lot. I’d say it’s her favorite show, so this problem has been something I’ve been thinking about for a while. Yet, in working to understand the current political sentiment of our mass society, I felt something was going on with Bob’s Burgers that was worth noticing, significantly if film executives believed that a theatrical release of a subpar cartoon series on Fox justified its own movie. So the one thing that really jumps out about Bob’s Burgers that is likable is that all the family members like each other. Bob, his wife, and his three children all live in a little dump of an apartment, yet they don’t act like a bunch of losers who are waiting in line with a bottle of booze to buy lottery tickets. They work hard for the money they make and love each other as a family while running the family burger business. Bob is always a few cents short of whatever the family needs, but his wife never talks about leaving him for a better life with a more ambitious lover. The kids are just happy to have mom and dad together in the house. The brothers and sisters aren’t out to kill each other; they go on many neighborhood adventures and solve problems like rational people. They are a very “traditional” family. 

And that’s what it is with Bob’s Burgers; like many of the other Fox primetime cartoons, they all have in common a mom and a dad in the home who love each other. That is certainly the case with Family Guy, a very progressive show that features a family that stays together. There aren’t step-parents and step-children in these cartoons. They are all very traditional. Other animated shows have tried to make it with more progressive storylines, but they always fail. The ones that stick around over the years are the cartoons that feature traditional family settings. The Simpsons have been on for decades now, a very long time. And yet, with many hundreds of storylines, Homer and his wife Marge still love each other and work through marital problems together in a way that never ends in divorce or a family breakup.   And that was the key to this Bob’s Burgers mystery. Here was a family on an animated show with many problems, and they seemed limited in their ability to solve those problems. But, they enjoy each other as a family. You don’t see Bob running around on the town to cheat on his wife. Or running away from the attention that the kids obviously want from him. He’s a good dad, even if he’s unambitious socially. And his family loves him for it. Obviously, the audiences who can’t say the same about their own families have found a reliable father figure in Bob’s Burgers. In Bob’s Burgers, they see the family they always wanted and never had in the fictional settings. And it has such an impact on them that they even dress up as the characters in cosplay. It says a lot about the true state of our society when those types of fictional stories indicate what people really feel inside. Their vote for the type of entertainment they wish to enjoy says what all people really crave outside of political theater. Most people would give up a lot to have a family like Bob’s Burgers, where at least mom and dad loved each other, and their siblings worked together to help make the family a family. In a world full of disappointments, at least Bob and his animated television family were willing to fight through disappointments for the key ingredient to all happy societies, a good family that might not have a lot of money, but at least they had what all humans crave, a genuine love for each other. And that is worth noting and something that should give us all hope for the future. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

The Elephant in the Room: Why the new ‘Top Gun’ movie is so successful and what it means to ESG scores in corporate America

I have always looked at box office results as a kind of vote for what the temperature of the political world truly is. As we know now, elections are often rigged, especially regarding the digital machines and ballot stuffing efforts that have been common in big American cities for years. So political votes don’t often reflect what people really desire culturally. But when a person is willing to get out of their chair and go out into a darkened theater and share a movie experience with perfect strangers, which is a discomfort of its own, the kinds of choices people make reflect a lot about their true character. So I have always looked toward box office numbers to understand what’s happening worldwide and the kinds of mythologies the human race responds to. Knowing all that, I was not surprised that Top Gun: Maverick did well at the box office; it looks like it will come in over 1.2 billion dollars for the summer of 2022. It has been remarkably strong for what I consider a typical 80s movie. I grew up in the 80s, so I remember when there was a movie like Top Gun coming out every weekend, and then when you got back in the car to drive home, there was a new top 40 hit on the radio. We had a thriving culture back then mainly because Ronald Reagan, as an actor, knew how to sell America to America, and people felt good about their country. Hollywood rushed to make movies that appealed to them, which was reflected in the movie-making industry. 

Obviously, I loved the new Top Gun movie, but as I said, I don’t think the film is a technological masterpiece. It will likely win some awards because the kind of people who pursued careers in movie making are happy that finally there is a movie out there that reflects why they got into the business in the first place, the way Hollywood used to make movies before all the woke ESG rules took over and ruined everything for everybody. While Top Gun has been doing well, another film franchise from Disney, Thor: Love and Thunder, came out over a similar summer season release. It died on the vine by the second weekend because it embraced all the woke ESG garbage injected into corporate America, and the voting movie audience decided they didn’t want any of it. For a film with big intentions to gain a billion dollars at the box office from a global audience, Thor: Love and Thunder quickly fell out of favor, while Top Gun: Maverick continued to be in the top 10 even after two months in theaters. Because of this behavior, there is a massive elephant in the room to talk about that I have heard nobody in the commentary business from entertainment or politics nail down, which is worth discussing because of what it means. What we see with movie audiences is a total rejection of the globalist push for ESG values that will undoubtedly be reflected in society in general, and what has been happening in the movie business will ultimately be reflected in society in general, with restaurants, business commerce, and populist politics. The only way the ESG system was ever going to work was to take away all people’s options for what they really wanted. Top Gun: Maverick shows just how successful breaking the ESG formula can be for anybody who dares to, and now that people have seen the benefits, the ESG attempts will fail miserably.

Considering that Top Gun: Maverick was entirely filmed before Covid came along to destroy its original release date for the summer of 2020, the film was not a conscious effort to push back against the globalist trends toward ESG. It was able to get funding because it had been in the works for many years and had Tom Cruise attached to it, so the movie got made. But the global sabotage with Covid, as I said in the beginning, was more of an attack against American culture in every way and the intent was to destroy American capitalism. Small businesses were meant to be destroyed. Amusement parks bankrupted. And the American film industry was targeted to be choked off, even though the political lefties in Hollywood were kissing the ring of the globalists most aggressively. Those market sectors were intended to be destroyed before the year of 2020 ran out, which was the goal of the World Economic Forum members behind the Covid virus, using China to be the face of the disruption. The world was going to have a Great Reset, and America would come out of it under the fold of global socialism run by health agencies controlled by the United Nations, and that was the end of the story. Paramount Pictures was shrewd to wait out the storm and hold Top Gun: Maverick for another two years to hope the American movie industry would survive and that theater owners would not all go bankrupt. Along the way, Paramount listened to its potential audience, and they decided to tweak the film toward a domestic market and ignore China completely, which many considered to be suicidal. But once the movie was released and movie theaters finally opened into something resembling normal, great things happened, and people were hungry for a non-woke movie without ESG goal posts that told a pro-American story that people could feel good about. And the rest is history.

It’s not that Top Gun: Maverick is a great movie. But it offers a non-ESG story that people are starving for, and they have voted with their feet. There are so many other options now with streaming services that people could easily have just stayed home and watched hundreds of other options. So it says something any time people are willing to go to the theater to see a movie of any kind. But what we are seeing happening with this particular movie is that people are voting against the ESG world that is being imposed on them, and the first real offering of American patriotism since President Trump was removed from office through political upheavals is the true sentiment of the voting public. You can’t fake personal choice. Ballot stuffing and other forms of fraud can manipulate results to look like more people than really do support progressive causes. But the tickets bought for a darkened theater in direct competition with other offerings, like Thor: Love and Thunder, show the true sentiment of the public when choice is the deciding factor. With most movies these days being produced for a global audience, especially from Disney, it had been considered suicide to focus on a domestic release, which is what Top Gun: Maverick boldly did. And the result was that the world came to the doorstep of the movie because they wanted to experience American life with their movie purchase. Not to see the same old ESG political nonsense that all the other films were offering, the same homosexual propaganda, the soft stories without defined heroes, and the noticeable lack of patriotism that was clearly part of the plan for a post-Covid world. Top Gun: Maverick broke all the rules and returned to what worked for years. And because of that success, many other industries and political movements will follow. 

Rich Hoffman

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They Have Already Eaten the Pie: Steve Bannon and Titus Andronicus

“It’s too late; the bad guys have already eaten the pie.” That’s the message I left for Steve Bannon, whom I like, respect, and have been talking to a bit through text messages and on Gettr.  Steve had been reposting some of my contributions, and we have had discussions about the ground game of the populist movement. As he gets raked over the coals for the phony trial in Washington D.C., intent on destroying the populism that put Trump in the White House the first time, I am proud of what he has done. And happy to say publicly I support him and still would despite the mudslinging from CNN, who published a documentary about Bannon at 8 PM on the 17th in an obvious attempt to taint the jury in the case against the popular Warroom host. I thought the documentary fascinating. I often pay a lot of attention to the enemy’s thoughts and where they get their information. I try to see the world from the enemy’s perspective, walk in their shoes metaphorically, and understand their motivations. And with CNN, they were clearly lost as to why Steve Bannon was so popular. They were looking desperately for some way to stop Trump from running again in 2024, and their obvious hope was that perhaps if they took out Bannon, that Trump would be left dead in the water. But, the situation is much bigger than that, much bigger than Steve Bannon. And as the Bannon case for contempt of Congress goes to court and the Biden Justice Department attempts to stop the strategy of the populist movement across the world, it looks like the light is going out of their eyes as they begin to realize that Steve was just a tiny drop of water in a massive ocean of red that is coming at them from all directions. The rejection of the administrative state, the Liberal World Order, and the dreams of progressivism most expressly conveyed in the 1988 book Looking Backward were coming apart. And there was nobody to blame but themselves. 

To understand Steve Bannon, you would have to understand the Shakespeare play Titus Andronicus. It is by far my favorite play by the famous English playwright, and Steve translated it to movie screens in the 90s with his Anthony Hopkins effort, Titus, which featured a whole cast of Hollywood heavyweights who told what many consider the bloodiest of Shakespeare’s plays. I loved the movie when I first saw it and when I found out that Steve Bannon had been the executive producer, I was a fan of him, even when he took over at Breitbart before the first Trump term. Bannon would have to really understand the role of Titus to do what he is now in the world, and I would argue that he is the real-life embodiment of the famous character. For a quick review, Titus Andronicus was known throughout Rome as their hero general. He brings to the emperor the captured queen of the Goths, whom Titus had killed her son. The emperor then marries the captured queen making her superior to Titus now as a head of state. She vows revenge against Titus. She uses her remaining sons to torture and rape the daughter of the great general.  Titus falls into despair and goes mad. The emperor gives him a job in the court kitchen out of respect for his depleted condition. But Titus was only pretending to be crazy. He traps the queen’s sons, hangs them upside down in the kitchen, and slits their throats in front of his disgraced daughter. Then he slices up the boys and makes a pie out of them. Then he invites the emperor, the queen, and the rest of the court to a fine dinner he has prepared for them and feeds them the pie, which they eat happily. Revenge is a wonderful dish served cold. 

CNN was very upset that Steve Bannon’s Warroom has connections to populist movements worldwide. Bannon has been involved in Brexit, the uprisings in Hong Kong, the populist revolts in Europe, and of course, the Ulta-Maga posse in America that is poised to put Trump back in office with even more votes than he had in 2020, which officially was 75 million. He likely had much more than that, and the election fraud story just won’t go away from those who committed the biggest crime in the history of the world. Now, after two years of a failing Biden administration, the fantasy from the insurgents, who gained the power of the White House through illegal activity, believe that if they can shut down people like Bannon, they just might get away with it. And in so doing, they might send a message to the rest of the populist movements around the world to put away their mechanisms of rebellion and to fall in line. They intend a crucifixion of Bannon on the largest stage possible. And many of the same people involved in the election fraud scandal are involved in this attack against Bannon. The crime is one thing, the coverup is far worse, and we are into the coverup now. That’s what the contempt of Congress charge is all about, and only about that. 

Yet like the queen in the great Titus story, they have already eaten their own. Bannon has already made the pies with over a decade of leadup to the present day. And if Bannon hadn’t done it, someone else would have. There is a vast network of freedom fighters out there who will always refuse the tyranny of the globalists. The only reason this fight hadn’t happened sooner was that those attackers of America were hiding their intentions behind charities and tax shelter foundations with globalist intentions. And with his crazy hair and disheveled appearance, Bannon has been playing the cook, Titus, and has been busy making pies in the kitchen to feed to the globalists the flesh of their own kind. And they have been eating it with smiles on their faces. They thought he was crazy. They thought he was done and destroyed politically when Trump released him as the White House strategist. But now you know the rest of the story. Steve Bannon is the real-life Titus Andronicus, and to do what he needed to, with the forces that were against him and the MAGA movement, he put the sword away and went into the kitchen to fight the battle in a way that the enemy would never suspect. And now that they are at the table and presented with fine pies to eat, they had no way of knowing that all their progressives’ schemes from the last century were cooked within it. And now they have eaten it and turned the whole thing into digestive interest. And now comes the time when Titus gets to tell the world what was in the pie.

The midterms are coming; the red wave can’t be stopped now. Europe is turning to populism. So is Hong Kong against China. Japan will strengthen its constitution to take the passivism out of it. And Brexit is such a real thing that Boris had to step down because he failed to stand up to globalism. And to the Desecrators of Davos, they are learning that they aren’t safe in the mountain town any longer. The world is on to them, and they want their scheming antics in the next pie they intend to eat. The sentiment goes way beyond Steve Bannon. He was just the cook. The hunger for pie was already there.

Rich Hoffman

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Why The New ‘Top Gun’ is So Popular: Americans like rule-breakers, not conformists

It is funny to hear industry analysts trying to figure out why the new Top Gun: Maverick movie is doing so well going into its third weekend. I’ve listened to and read several hundred reviews of the film at this point. Unlike other kinds of movies, I have not yet found anybody who understands why the American market is flocking to see it many times now. Is it patriotism and the lack of wokeness that is in the movie? Or is it Tom Cruise himself, which many in the trades would like to think is the case? Well, Tom Cruise was smart to make Top Gun the way it needed to be, especially coming out of the Covid years. The film was done well before there was ever a pandemic, and Paramount sat on it for several years because of the uncertainty of the future of Hollywood, Top Gun: Maverick has the feel of a movie made in a different time and a different country, all the way back to 2019. I remember being on an airplane flying out of Orlando and watching Comic-Con footage of the movie for a 2020 summer release, so it’s been out there for a long time. But the film was released during a market recovery in a post-Covid world, and all kinds of forces were at play that inspired Americans to return to the movie theaters to see a movie worth leaving the house to view. Yet, there is an element to Top Gun that is very much reminiscent of the 80s when Tom Cruise was making so many blockbuster films, along with other movie stars, that say more about Americans to the world than anybody has seen in a while. It is that element that was on raw display in the new movie and is why the film is doing well without the rest of the world driving a majority of the box office numbers, specifically the Chinese market. 

The character of Maverick is a rule-breaker, and that is a trait that Americans love. They don’t like someone who follows the rules to the letter. Americans want out-of-the-box characters who will bend or break the rules to accomplish something great in the world, even down to the name of the Tom Cruise character. Tom Cruise himself is not like Maverick. But he was wise to play a character like Maverick and let all the elements of a rebel within the military shine in many reckless ways. Just the name of the character, Maverick, indicates a loner, a rugged individualist, someone who goes their own way in life. And that is not how the rest of the world is. Only American cultures celebrate such traits. The stories other cultures put on the silver screen are conflicts with conformity as opposed to what we see in Top Gun, a character so reckless that he costs the military hundreds of millions of dollars in damage in just this one movie. Maverick crashes two very expensive aircraft and puts at risk many more in his exploits of individualism that are often audacious, unapologetic, and way over the top. In most cultures, Maverick would be in jail. But in America, he is considered the top navy pilot that the military has, and audiences love it.

Literally, in the movie, all the people who have trouble are those who follow the rules. There is a scene where all the best pilots are in a bar talking about the upcoming mission, and they wonder who will be able to teach them anything. And of course, it is Maverick who has been picked to lead the mission because for it to be successful, it will require someone willing to break all the rules and discover what nobody yet knows. There is a scene where Tom Cruise playing Maverick, stands in front of a giant American flag and tells his students to throw out the rule book because it’s what your enemy knows. To succeed in this movie, the characters must learn to “not think” and act on “instinct.” It’s really the message of the first Star Wars movie from way back in 1977 and is a yearning that most people often experience in their lives. The desire to be their own authentic person and not some caricature of social order. The only way a mission like the one featured in Top Gun: Maverick can be accomplished is by breaking all the rules because the enemy is stuck in rules and is their ultimate weakness. It’s not the military jets, the companionship, or even the music that makes people love movies like this one. They help sell the story, but the essence is that Americans love rule breakers. So does the rest of the world, but they can only experience such things in American movies, and that is precisely why all these woke politics have infected the industry to the extent they have. For the producers of Top Gun to turn loose a character like Maverick again into the movie business was a very deliberate act, and the results are apparent. 

In much the same way that ESG scores are failing the financial industry because the world does not value those measures, they have been artificially created to inspire liberal political change to a climate change fanatical religion. Real value is what people are encouraged to see in the movies, not just in the act of buying popcorn actually to see a movie just because it’s there. It’s what the story tells that matters to people, and in Top Gun, it’s about recklessness over logic. It’s about breaking the rules in a rigid military environment to do what the military itself can’t do. It’s thinking out of the box to solve the problems society at large gets stuck on. And that’s why this movie Top Gun: Maverick is doing such good business while other movies come and go, and people forget about them five minutes later. So there is much more going on with this new Top Gun movie than just great music, interesting visual effects, and a vintage throwback to the kind of movies made in America during the 80s. Americans love rule breakers, before and after Covid. Covid was everything that Americans didn’t want to be. They gave authority a chance in case it saved lives, but knowing what we do now in hindsight, they would never do it again. Instead, millions of Maverick types sit in a darkened theater cheering on the new Top Gun because they see themselves in the character. And they want characters like that to succeed, to win at all costs. That’s the American way of doing things, and the rest of the world is fascinated by it. Even though they can’t relate, they will still buy a movie ticket to see it in the fictional character of Tom Cruise’s Maverick. For them, it’s the closest thing they will ever get to a society that thumbs its nose at procedures and conformity and embraces adventure and the treasures found in recklessness. And like all great movies, because Maverick was so reckless, so brash, and such a rule-breaker, he saves society in the process, which says more about us all than any other measure of human achievement.

Rich Hoffman

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Hollywood’s Democrats are Blood Sucking Occultists: Study what they do, not what they say, and start with Alister Crowley, Jack Parsons, and L. Ron Hubbard

When faced with so much evil, it’s logical to wonder about conspiracy theories, such as does the Illuminati run Hollywood and the record industry? Do modern actors and musicians worship Satan? Is there a blood cult of liberals who drink the blood of tortured children hoping to invoke help from the spirit realm to make their lazy asses more successful in life? Well, I’d say, based on experience, that the answer to all those questions is yes. Liberals, in general, are lazy, and yes, they would instead seek supernatural aid in bringing success to their lives through the occult than in being good, honest, and hard-working to achieve success. Yes, they will contact spirits from some parallel dimension to work through some problem, just as they would sit on the side of the road with a flat tire and wait for someone to come along to change it for them. Evil is driven by laziness, and lazy people will always be prone to evil deeds. How do we know? There is plenty of evidence of it, especially from characters I have written about before, who helped start Hollywood and NASA, L. Ron Hubbard, Alister Crowley, and Jack Parsons. All three of those people brought sex magic to Pasadena, California, in the hopes of getting help from the spirit world to further their success. It’s clear that Jack Parsons is the man behind rocketry in America and putting people on the moon. Without Jack Parsons, there would have never been a NASA. There is a crater on the moon named after him, so he’s not some crazy, irrelevant figure. When you know history, you can understand the motivations of people. So when concerned voters these days look at the occult for rationalization as to the level of evil they are seeing now in modern times, there’s a good reason for it.

The sex orgies of the movie Eyes Wide Shut and the spirit world interactions of David Lynch films is a very real thing, even though people may not talk about it. Alister Crowley so entranced members of the band Led Zepplin that they bought his house at Loch Ness, which is said to be horribly haunted. Likely because of all the rituals that Crowley utilized in the house to manipulate the spirit world to his aims. You can’t really talk about politics and liberalism in general without pulling back the layers of the occult that reside just underneath the surface. Liberals in the Democrat party believe what they do for a reason, and we need to understand what those things are. Based on their belief system, including the “spirit cooking” that we know about in John Podesta’s emails, revealed by Wikileaks, contact with the spirit world is essential to these people. Podesta himself, the campaign manager for Hillary Clinton in 2016, is a huge UFO advocate who is pushing for full disclosure to the public of what the government knows about the activity, and for those who don’t know, UFO phenomena and occult rituals are closely linked. It’s not so much about little green men “out there” somewhere but other kinds of characters. You don’t hear about conservatives doing these things. These beliefs that liberals have must be analyzed to understand their political viewpoint, which at the center of it involves a massive blood cult of killing babies. Abortion is at the center of what all Democrats believe in, and the scandal of Covid has ripped away the cloak of their primary concern. For abortion it’s all about the rights of the mother. But for Covid, nobody owned their body, and the government could tell everyone to get mandatory medicine. See how things fall apart with these people; logically, they are up to no good, which gets revealed in such quandaries.

Understanding the political left’s stance on abortion and knowing the background of their origins in Hollywood, such as the cults left behind by Alister Crowley, L. Ron Hubbard, and Jack Parsons, it makes more sense to view the killing of babies as a massive blood sacrifice to the demons of existence than to argue that sex and perversions are acceptable to a nation founded by Christians for the appeasement of ambitious spirits who seek to bring great harm and mayhem to our world through rituals and blood magic. Its more logical to view satanic influences in the movie industry, human trafficking, music, drugs, and all the communist elements of the counter-culture movement that followed Jack and the gang after the 1940s, when many Hollywood actresses, producers, and influencers were at these massive sex orgies trying to invoke the spirit world to their desires expressed through orgasm to the universe addicted to the pornography of human inhabitants on earth. Not your typical Little House on the Prairie storyline, but it’s what these people essentially are doing. By opening such a thoughtful door to such creatures of mythology, the political left has actually tried to commit mass ritual destruction to America through these practices. Even today, L. Ron Hubbard, who stole away the wife and centerpiece of the sex orgies at Parson’s house, is at the heart of Hollywood with his religion of Scientology based on science fiction books. And Jack was OK with it at the time. Hubbard would start one of Hollywood’s prominent religions after that, where they believe that we all have harnessed spirits that need to be set free because the galactic dictator Zenu brought them to earth and imprisoned them in human bodies, which gave birth to the human race. These are the kind of Democrats who voted for Joe Biden and worked against President Trump in modern times, killers of babies, desecrators of America’s puritan founding, and advocates of massive sex magic rituals to invoke the spirit world to help their lazy asses to gain fame and fortune. Would many people in Hollywood drink menstrual blood and pray to the celestial sign of Venus under the chanting and drug inducement of a bunch of lunatics? Yes, they would, especially if they might gain fame and fortune in the entertainment industry.   

Of course, they will lie to our faces. They don’t believe in God, so what’s to stop them from lying? What does it matter if they put their hand on a Bible and take an oath to the Constitution? These people don’t believe in the same kind of things that the rest of us believe. And they have been operating in the light of day for over a century. Like I say all the time, don’t listen to what they say; pay attention to what they do. And look at who the founders of Hollywood were; sex magic was a thing in Pasadena at the start of two major industries, entertainment, and aviation. And people in those industries know it, but you don’t see NASA change the crater’s name on the moon due to cancel culture. Instead, many have followed in the footsteps of the characters mentioned here. They watched their success, and they sought to do the same for themselves. We’ve seen what kind of losers are running the Disney Company these days. This stuff didn’t just grow overnight. It took years to develop the occult fascination that we see so many references to in our entertainment culture, especially in music. Why all the Illuminati signs from pop culture icons? Well, because they believe it works and will help them succeed in life. For them, it’s a better life than following some poor dude who was nailed to a cross and died for all our sins. They’d rather commit those sins, sacrifice babies to the demons of existence, and drink menstrual blood to give birth to the moon goddess than actually work for a living the traditional way. And that is why there is so much evil in the world. Occultist personalities are lazy, real, and everywhere, especially on the progressive side of belief. And that is the reality of what we are fighting today. 

Rich Hoffman

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The Will Smith Hit: “Welcome to Earth” Part II

After hitting Chris Rock at the Academy Awards, the only thing Will Smith did wrong was apologize for doing it. The world needed some old-fashioned face-to-face combat. I thought it was a little wimpy to slap Chris Rock for making fun of his wife with an off-color joke about G.I. Jane part II because she had shaved her head due to an illness. A good punch would have been better, but in our overly legalized world of lawyer parasites, the difference between an open hand and a closed fist is a premeditation assault that indicates an intent to inflict harm. So, a slap it was, and it was good for the soul of America to see on what is supposed to be the biggest entertainment show on earth. However, ratings have been down. Hollywood has moved a long way away from Main Street, USA, thinking they could drag everyone with them as they bent the knee to China and a new middle-class there of over a billion people. I’ve been following this kind of thing for a long time. For many years, I really wanted nothing more in life than to make movies in Hollywood. So I know it from behind the curtain more than most do. As it turned out for me, I was way too conservative for the Hollywood of the 90s and the early 2000s. I would have fit in a lot more during the 70s and 80s, but Hollywood had gone woke way before the rest of the nation. America’s enemies targeted it for that very reason, and the attack always came from finance. Will Smith knew all that as he decided to go up on stage and hit Chris Rock. I didn’t just see the action, but many actions behind the move. It was a very interesting thing to do. 

Surprisingly many conservatives in the aftermath openly called for Will Smith to be arrested for assault. It was the standard law and order argument. How many young people now that they witnessed Will Smith hitting another human being on live television and repeatedly replayed on social media would now do something similar? A message had to be sent. That was the conservative rationalization. But as many know, I welcome this kind of thing. I would love to return to a world where we had duels in the streets over disagreements. And slaps in the face are harmless enough. What’s important is the protection of our individual sanctity, of our honor. Our integrity. And at face value, Will Smith protecting the honor of his wife, his woman, his family property was a great thing that many women yearn for, which was confirmed in polling taken after the incident. Despite what destructive woke culture says about men and women, the sexes are what they are, yearning for the same things they always have. Will Smith is no dummy; he has his finger on the pulse of what’s going on in the world. Despite being a great actor, he’s also a producer, and he knows the country’s temperature and where it’s going. Most good Hollywood types do, even if they deny it. They see the trends, and there is a tremendous hunger for American Main Street in the world. Not an America caving to global woke impediments. 

Meanwhile, down in paradise, Disney World, Florida, some radical employees took exception to the Ron DeSantis “Don’t Say Gay” bill, which doesn’t even say “gay” in it. But they were upset that there wasn’t going to be gay indoctrination of little children in public schools, and they were outraged, leaving Bob Chapek, the Disney CEO, with a heck of a pickle to be in. He couldn’t afford to have a massive employee walkout at the happiest place on earth. But he also must stand for what Disney is, a representation of Main Street USA. That is kind of the point of Magic Kingdom, after all. Guests going there don’t want to think about gay sex and rainbow flags. They want to see family values, the American dream, and good winning over evil. Of course, the enemies of America want to see all that brought down, so a small percentage of radical ESG score employees from Disney were attacking those aspects of the Disney product publicly, and it was having an impact on the brand. This is a fight that is happening everywhere. It is most notable in Disney because it’s a brand that interacts with so many Americans. But in general, it was present very much at the Academy Awards and Hollywood in general.  Americans have been turning away from Hollywood, and the people who make the movies know it. Aside from their feelings of abandonment that Main Street America has for the Hollywood product these days, as the realization over liberalism settles over them that America is a Trump-voting nation. Americans will never fall for progressivism when it is spelled out to them directly. So, what happens next? How does the entertainment industry continue on, especially if the China gamble doesn’t pan out as globalism fails everywhere? Main Street USA is still where the money is, and now Hollywood has alienated itself from them. 

Enter the hit by Will Smith against Chris Rock on national television, shocking the world. The incident may have been staged. It may have been pure outrage. But what it was, in essence, was a significant member of Hollywood trying to appeal to mainstream Main Street America and recognizing that the nation hasn’t changed at all from what it’s always been. Hollywood changed. Globalism changed. Finances changed, but people really haven’t, despite the efforts of many to change those people. Americans want to see their private property defended, women want to be protected by their men, and justice must be swift and sure. The way Will Smith marched up there on that stage was a call-back to hundreds of movies over the years where a good guy punished the bad guy, and Will Smith was playing that modern version of the “good guy.” It was very similar to when Will Smith punched the alien in the face in the movie Independence Day and said, “welcome to earth.” Hey, these guys aren’t stupid. They have their finger to the wind, seeing what’s coming. Trump is going to be re-elected. Globalism is failing everywhere. China is closing its markets more, not expanding them, and Hollywood knows it needs Main Street to live and survive. And more than that, Americans understand a duel in the street more than a bunch of sissy slapping passive-aggressive nonsense ran by corrupt governments and paid off judges. A man-to-man fight is much preferred, and if we returned to it, we’d have a much more honest society. That is how Main Street America feels, and ultimately, that’s what happened at the Academy Awards. It was a concession by them to what they’ve become and an olive branch to what they need to return to. Justice, Americans want justice. They don’t want excuses. They don’t want to surrender their life’s work to a mob of collectivists. There needs to be a point in life, and the fight against evil by the good is a goal worth pursuing. Will Smith obviously understands that and felt it was the time to do something to win people over because if he didn’t, Hollywood was headed for irrelevancy anyway. So why not do something? And he did.

Rich Hoffman

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‘The Batman’ is an 11 out of 10: The root of all corruption comes from bad parenting

If you are thinking of seeing The Batman at the movie theater, waste no more time doing so. Just go do it. I think the new film in the Batman franchise is one of the best ever, and it’s a top 50 movie of all time, directed by Matt Reeves and acted by Robert Pattinson. Just talking about good movies; they just don’t make them much better than this one, at nearly 3 hours long. Technically it hits all the cylinders in a very satisfying way. The music is great, the cinematography, sound design, direction, acting, everything is fantastic. There is a love for this subject that obviously comes out of the filmmakers. They painstakingly put that love into every shot of the film, and it shows both behind the camera and in front of it. When you think of a movie that has been done so much, it is easy to be skeptical that anything substantial could come out of a new version of Batman. But this was clearly a fresh take on an idea that Warner Bros. has been building for nearly a century. And it culminated in this film. It reminded me of one of my favorite Dirty Harry films from back in the 70s called Magnum Force. It explores corruption on both sides of the law and why there is a need for good people to step in and fight for justice. But there is, of course, more depth to it than that, and that is why this film is an exceptional one with great artistic value for a culture like we have in our modern one in desperate need of clarity on the definitions for existence. There is big stuff in The Batman that is valuable on many levels, and for that reason, I can’t recommend it enough. I’d give it an 11 out of 10 stars. Go see it now!

I’d go further in scale in recommending this movie because there is an underlying element to it that says a lot about modern culture and its failures. This is the best Batman character I’ve ever seen in any form, comics, television show, or movie. At no point in the film does this Batman waiver in his resolution to fight for good and to fight for justice. He is never tempted or shoved over the edge, only to be redeemed later. He is solid throughout the entire film, and in the end, he becomes a great leader instead of a hiding recluse. Coming out of the Covid years, there is a lot that this film has to say about the state of our world. And this is not a Hollywood progressive offering of nonsense. It’s an honest story examining real human issues, and as Batman faces those issues, he is a solid pillar of virtue through the entire event. Apparently, they are planning to make three of these Batman movies, and if they put the kind of effort into the following two as they did this one, I can’t imagine what that will look like. The amount of work it took to make this The Batman movie is on a big scale that it would be hard to duplicate, ever. The focus on all the little details is overwhelming. This is Hollywood at its best. It’s just a shame that we can’t get more films like this from an industry that has turned so radically left politically. I would not say that this Batman film is political in the way of Republicans and Democrats, but it does explore in detail the cause of all corruption and gets into the weeds in a better way than even the best of the mobster films ever produced. In many ways, I kept thinking of Scarface from the 80s as a comparative film to what they pulled off with The Batman. 

Yet, the best part of The Batman is that it honestly explores the nature of evil and what leads to all corruption, and that is when the adults let kids down. Parents’ impact on children is a real, unexplored problem in our modern society. Governments have even attempted to replace the parents in society with government supervision, which has worsened the situation. We now have a culture in real life that has produced millions and millions of villains like the Riddler in this movie, the primary bad guy. But I found myself understanding the Riddler quite a lot.   Who could blame him for his anger when the world he sees is so corrupt, and all the parental figures in his life were robbed away from him? The constant theme in The Batman is the cost to young people when adults let them down. When dad runs off with a cheap whore. Or when the District Attorney spends the night in a risqué club instead of staying home with the kid’s doing cocaine with young women draped from his arms. When kingpin fathers manipulate the entire police force and have illegitimate children all over the place, leaving those kids to feel abandoned and broken as adults. The real villains in The Batman are the parents who fell short and left their children without something to hold on to, turning them into adults, broken and vengeful.   What is the cause of all crime and corruption, bad parenting? As I sat watching the movie, I looked around at the glassy eyes of the parents taking their kids to see this film.   Could the parents relate to the good guys or the bad guys? Or was it just too much for them?

I understood Batman and the Riddler. At the end of the film, I loved the question, which was the same posed to Clint Eastwood in Magnum Force. Who is good, and who is bad?   What does it mean to fight for what’s good when most of what’s going on in the world are so bad? Is any of it worth fighting for at all? Should we just leave the world and head for the country as Catwoman did at the end, warning Batman that his fight for justice would likely kill him? And when Batman said to her that he had to try to save the city, it’s the same things we are now saying about our country. Is it worth saving? Should we fight at all, given all the corruption that we see? It’s a worthy question, one that we are all asking in our own specific ways. These are complicated things to think about, but this movie, The Batman, has a definitive statement on it, and I think it’s a great definition that will take time for many to let wash over them. This is a movie worth seeing for more than entertainment. It’s what families should watch together and figure out their place after that where they fit into the puzzle. And hopefully, in the end, the resolution is that they’ll want to be more like Batman than the other characters.   And parents will want to be good role models for their kids instead of just the lately louse that fills the halls of corruption in almost every institution created by mankind. Despite the enormous responsibility it requires to bring children into the world, it is worth doing. But the job only gets more complicated the older they get, and if there is a lesson in the movie, The Batman, failing in that job can lead to all the corruption we see in Gotham City and the greater world in general. 

Rich Hoffman

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