By Debbie Schlussel

Nothing great and/or worth seeing new in movie theaters today. Sorry. You can’t put lipstick on a silver screen pig. The biggest movie wasn’t screened for critics ‘cuz it’s a bomb (and a Hillary Clinton infomercial). And then, there’s that Black Lives Matter incitement movie. Yup, we’re smack dab in the middle of what used to be the height of the summer blockbuster movie season, and the movies suck.

* Independence Day: Resurgence – PG-13: This wasn’t screened for critics, which usually means that even the studio knows it stinks. And that’s the case for this one. I went to see it last night, and it was so bad, I thought Scientology made this movie. It’s a long, slow bore, plus it’s a campaign commercial for Hillary Rodham Cankles and propaganda for the “One World”/no sovereignty crap. When I was watching it, a lot of the other moviegoers left to buy refreshments. I was very thirsty and thought, you know, if I leave to get a Coke, I won’t miss anything. I didn’t listen to my internal voice, but I should’ve. I literally would have missed nothing. This movie reminds me of a show I watched on TV a couple of decades ago, “L.A. Doctors.” The show was mildly entertaining, but it was canceled after a single season. After two decades, would I want to see a few of the actors in their old, crotchety state make a comeback with a bad script and a bunch of irrelevant newcomers? Not really. And the same goes here, with what should’ve been called, “Independence Day: Regurgence.” The original “Independence Day” came out 20 years ago. Absolutely no reason to revisit it, other than to make Hollywood’s elitism junkies even more rich.

The story: It’s 20 years later, and a chick, Sela Ward, is the Prez of the U.S. But that doesn’t really matter because the countries of the world have set aside their “petty differences,” and they are all “one people.” It’s nauseating to see the U.S. Capitol without the American flag flying overhead, but instead many countries’ flags flying in unison and equality down the walls of the Capitol building. Oh, and the “tough” chick Prez (designed to make you think positively of Hillary, complete with “mom hair”) has to take a vote from the “council” of international leaders before she can make a decision. Plus, the jet fighter pilots fly for all different countries, including the Chi-Coms. Buh-bye, U.S. Air Force. The only good part of this is when the chick Prez and her supporters are killed and an alpha male general becomes Prez (with no qualms about making commands independent of others).

So, now, the aliens from two decades ago have returned to destroy Earth after harvesting its core for energy and technology upgrades. The aliens are now stronger and tougher and wreak havoc, death and destruction throughout the globe. They have a spaceship that is 3,000 miles in diameter that overshadows Earth and sucks everything upward. But that’s after the U.S. first shoots down a smaller spaceship that has nothing to do with the enemy aliens. The chick Prez, her cabinet, and other world leaders think it’s the enemy. Despite Jeff Goldblum’s and former Prez Bill Pullman’s warnings not to shoot it, the Prez gets the pilots to shoot it down. After she’s killed (aliens attack the underground bunker where she and the entire cabinet are being sheltered), the aforementioned general takes over as Commander-in-Chief. Even though the aliens seem to have total control and are much more powerful than the humans and their planes and bombs, somehow–miraculously–the human pilots and others on the ground manage to kill the queen alien, who is a giant. It doesn’t make sense and is stupid, but by that time, you just don’t care.

Oh, and did I mention that in a couple of obligatory “Muslim savages are people, too” scenes, we see the angst and worry of a bunch of ISIS Muslims in a tent in the desert when the aliens invade. Then, we see them–complete with keffiyehs and hijabs–cheering when mostly American pilots defeat the aliens. Uh-huh, like that would ever happen. And, I’m sure, as the movie tells us, ISIS Muslims put down their beheading swords and burn-them-alive cages because we are all now “one people.” Yup, that would definitely happen.

There’s nothing “Independent” about “Indepence Day” other than its independence from story, plot, and entertainment of any sort.

TWO MARXES PLUS TWO L. RON HUBBARDS

Watch the trailer . . .

* Free State of Jones – R: This is this summer’s Black Lives Matter/“Twelve Years a Slave” (read my review) movie, designed to incite and provide an excuse for Black Americans to hate on da Crackaz. In this case, Matthew McConaghey is an honorary BLM member, playing real-life figure Newton Knight. But the filmmakers take liberties with Knight’s story in order to fit Hollywood’s narrative. A lot of liberties. Moreover, the movie has a Bernie Sanders/Occupy vibe to it. So your Hillary-votin’ neighbor will just love it . . . and love to slop in the White guilt or the Black lording and feelings of entitlement.

To say this movie is incredibly heavy-handed is the understatement of the year. It’s chock full of N-words and evil, racist, violent, murderous White people. I guess someone forgot to tell them that slavery ended 1.5 centuries ago and the prevalent racism in this country is Blacks against Whites. But you won’t ever see a Hollywood movie about that. Nor will you see one about the places where slavery of and racism (and mass murder) against Blacks is still prevalent today: the Muslim Mid-East and Muslim-dominated sections of Africa.

The story in this movie: Knight, a Southern farmer from the Mississippi County of Jones is a nurse on the Civil War battlefield. He sees a lot of death and dismemberment, and the screen doesn’t spare the viewer from the most grotesque examples of that, including dismembered leg joints, shot-up faces, and pigs eating the dead. One day, the Confederates are told that owners of at least 20 slaves get to go home from the war and no longer have to fight. Knight and the others sitting around the fire next to the battlefield are upset. They don’t own slaves, and they don’t grow cotton. So they wonder what they’re fighting for and are upset that they are “fighting a rich man’s war.” On top of that, Knight’s young nephew comes to find him, telling him that that Confederate Army is seizing all of the family’s crops, livestock, and property, leaving them with nothing to eat and live on. Right after that, the young nephew is killed on the battlefield, further angering Knight.

So, Knight deserts and returns home to Jones County, where he trains the people to resist the Confederates. Then, the Confederates get mad and try to capture Knight as a deserter. They use the dogs that are usually used to track down escaped slaves to try to find Knight. He gets bitten by the dogs, but escapes to a swamp, where he is tended to and befriended by escaped slaves and Rachel (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), the beautiful slave of a neighboring rich man who owns a plantation. Soon, Knight organizes the entire Country of Jones–Whites and escaped slaves–into a militia to fight the Confederate Army. And after that, he organizes three counties to do the same. Knight has essentially abandoned his White wife and son and begins a romance with the female Black slave, who was raped by her wealthy master. After the war, Knight and the slave settle down on their own homestead farm and have a child. His White wife and son join him and live there, too. And they all live happily ever after.

Stitched in and out of the movie are scenes of a court case in the late 1940s against a descendant of Knight, Davis Knight. Davis Knight is married to a White woman and appears to be White. But he is apparently one-eighth Black because he is a descendant of Knight and the Black slave, Rachel. Because of this, Mississippi prosecutes him for violating its anti-miscegenation laws. Again, I’m not sure what the point of all this is, since interracial couples are all over the place now, and many TV commercials and store fliers and catalogs pimp us on interracial relationships regularly. Also, the press regularly cheers on the “browning of America.” The movie seems like more piling on and justification for those media cheers of the extinction of White America.

As noted above, the movie takes quite a bit of liberties and makes up a lot of stuff to make the story more palatable and in line with liberal Hollywood’s agenda and narrative. There was never a Knight nephew who died on the battlefield. That whole vignette never happened. Yup, completely fabricated. And Knight never deserted. He was given a furlough to leave to visit a sick relative. You can learn more about what’s true and isn’t in this movie from a great site, History vs. Hollywood.

The movie also shields us from Knight’s weird unconventional cult-like life afterward. He and his wife Serena had nine children, not just the one depicted in the movie. He and the former slave Rachel had five children. And Rachel was not the slave of a local plantation owner. She was Knight’s grandfather’s slave. She also brought with her the four children she had with her former slave owner, presumably Knight’s grandfather. After she died, Knight had sex with and fathered at least two kids with Rachel’s daughter (and maybe his aunt) Georgeanne. Now, all of these kids, including the ones Knight had with Rachel and Serena and Georgeanne and those Rachel had with Knight’s grandfather, married each other and had kids. Weird, gross, and definitely incestuous. Of course, none of that is shown in the movie because then we’d know the real Knight was a multi-babydaddy and incestuous weirdo, which would sully Hollywood’s glorification of the guy in this propaganda flick.

On top of all that, while McConaghey’s acting is good, the movie is a long, slow slog that seems like it will never end. When it finally does, after two hours and 19 minutes, you’re thankful . . . and wonder when the next Black Lives Matter movie is coming down the pike to punch you in the face.

By the way, this is produced and financed by Huayi Brothers Media Corp. a/k/a “H. Brothers,” a Chi-Com company, which some American studios enlist to finance their films. When is the movie about Chinese slavery (which exists to date) going to come out?

TWO MARXES PLUS THREE OBAMAS PLUS THREE MICHELLE LAVAUGHN ROBINSON HUSSEIN OBAMA IDI AMIN DADAS PLUS TWO JESSE JACKSONS PLUS TWO AL SHARPTONS

Watch the trailer . . .

* The Shallows – PG-13: This stars the beautiful Blake Lively. And although she clearly does a lot of work, physically and emotionally, on the acting front in the movie, it’s just not a middle of summer big movie. It’s more like a made-for-TV, Lifetime-esque, damsel-in-distress movie. Or, at least, a January or August pet-cemetery-of-movie movie. For guys, there are a plenty of close-up shots of the toned Lively’s body in a tiny bikini. But the movie, while entertaining for sure, just isn’t anything extraordinary or very suspenseful, especially for a “man (or in this case, woman) versus the elements” flick. For instance, last year’s “The Revenant” is far more exciting and worthwhile, even if you loathe Leonardo DiCrapio’s politics, as I do.

The story: Lively is the daughter of an American woman who passed away from an illness, apparently cancer of some sort. She has a photo of her mother at a younger age, surfing at a secluded, secret, hidden Mexican beach. And so she goes to Mexico with a girlfriend and convinces a local to drive her to the secret beach, while her friend is with some guy. Nobody will tell her the name of the secret beach, and yet she tells the driver that she will summon an Uber driver to get back to her hotel at the end of the day. Um, how do you get an Uber guy to pick you up at “you know, that secret beach no one will tell me the name of”? Also, who goes alone, driven by a total stranger, to the middle of a jungle, to a secluded beach, all alone, in a foreign country? Incredibly stupid. Even more stupid: going surfing alone there, when the only others nearby are two 20-something males who could easily rape, torture, and kill you without a single witness. But Lively’s character does all this, because paying silly tribute to her late mother is so much more important than safety and common sense. This is the kind of movie where you tell your daughter, niece, or granddaughter (if you have one of these), “Don’t do what she did.”

Lively goes surfing off the beach and has a great time. She rides high waves and sees dolphins jumping over her. But then the two guys nearby leave, and she sees a sick whale that has come close to shore. Suddenly, a shark is nearby and bites her leg, injuring her and causing a lot of blood to emerge. She realizes that the shark thinks she is disturbing his “meal”–the sick whale. For the rest of the movie, Lively–who plays a medical student–treats her wound and struggles to stay alive. In the meantime, the shark has his violent, bloody way with the only visitors to the secluded beach. And Lively is, all the while, stuck in the water, trying to live by taking shelter on a rock and then a buoy and hanging out with a seagull who is a character in his/her own right.

This isn’t Jaws, even though the shark somewhat resembles the movies’ most famous underwater danger. And while fighting off and trying to outsmart a shark is exciting, the shark in this movie strains credulity. It’s very vindictive and way too smart, figuring out even how to destroy a buoy and its anchor system. Come on . . . .

But, like I said, this is entertaining and suspenseful in a campy kind of way. Not a great movie, but fun escapism nonetheless. And not the worst I’ve seen.

ONE REAGAN

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* The Neon Demon – R: The feel-good cannibal, necrophilia, lesbian model movie of the year! I absolutely hate-hate-hated this movie written and directed by Nicolas Winding Refn (who also directed the openly anti-Semitic and extremely violent and grisly 2011 movie, “Drive” (read my review)). There’s a reason his last name rhymes with effin’. This movie is effin’ terrible. High on style, low on story, and absolutely stupid and disgusting. Two wasted hours of my life I’ll never get back.

The story: Elle Fanning plays a young, new model who has just arrived in Los Angeles and wants to make it big. Quickly, she does. And two other established models are jealous. All three of the women are blonde and gorgeous. A makeup artist who meets Fanning and is nice to her has a secret lesbian crush on her, but when she reveals her feelings to Fanning (and tries to rape her), Fanning rejects the makeup artist. So the makeup artist, who also works on cadavers at a funeral home, has sex with a dead body and fantasizes about Fanning. Soon enough, she and the two jealous models end up killing Fanning, and then, it turns out, the two models eat Fanning’s body. We learn this because one of them has Fanning’s eyeball pop out of her mouth at a photo shoot, then she vomits, and then, she kills herself by cutting out her stomach with a knife. Oh, and by the way, the blood-covered models have a lesbian shower scene to wash it all off (that’s before the aforementioned eyeball regurgitation and stomach-ectomy, or whatever you call it).

Yup, I sit through sick, warped crap like this so you don’t have to. And on top of the absolutely disgusting “story,” this movie is a total bore. It’s long, slow, and incredibly uninteresting. It’s also very disjointed and focuses way too much on becoming the next, next, big thing in pretentious, artsy-fartsy movies. The women are perfectly beautiful. The makeup is very cool and stark. And the clothes and scenes are very fancy and bright. And everybody poses for the camera with pouts and poses so stupid they are comical.

If only the movie were just as comical. But it isn’t. It’s just a warped, depraved bore made by a warped depraved bore whose goal is to shock you, steal your ten bucks, and then have you tell him how great and smart he is. He’s the primary demon here and it’s time to exorcise him from the movie biz. Long past time.

It’s trite but true–the old adage that a sucker is born every minute. That’s what the makers and distributors of this crap are banking on. And laughing at all the way to the bank.

FOUR MARXES

Watch the trailer . . .