RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2025/07/12/superman/

The good news for Warner Bros./DC Studios is that its new Superman movie is quickly becoming a cultural touchstone, the standard by which all future superhero movies will be judged. The bad news is that it’s the low-end benchmark, representing the absolute worst that a superhero movie can be while not going straight to streaming. Director James Gunn is suddenly the Mario Mendoza of action filmmaking, and his Superman denotes the Mendoza Line, the trough of superhero futility. Or, as political commentator Ben Domenech put it, “This movie absolutely, totally sucks. The CGI sucks. The writing sucks. The cast, which is, for the most part, much higher quality than the material, sucks…. I’ve seen a lot of superhero movies, and this one—given the level of investment involved, the promotional push, the iconic nature of the character, and the importance to the future of DC and Warner Bros.—is by far the worst.”

That’s unfortunate, but it’s not exactly surprising. Gunn had been dropping hints for some time that he was worried the movie would be poorly received and would tank as a result, possibly taking DC Studios down with it. A couple of weeks ago, Gunn, apparently fearing that his Superman would be ignored, did what any self-important movie director would do in such circumstances: he decided to gin up some controversy by insulting his audience. Any publicity is good publicity in the film business, after all, and so Gunn went full “Hollywood liberal,” telling The Times of London that “Yes, [Superman is] about politics.” Moreover, he continued, it’s about politics that are likely to ruffle some feathers in the nation’s culturally and politically conservative heartland. “Superman is the story of America—an immigrant that came from other places and populated the country, but for me it is mostly a story that says basic human kindness is a value and is something we have lost.” Ah, yes. There you have it. Caring about national borders or wanting immigration law enforced makes one unkind—or even inhuman. Take that, Trumpers and ICE!

Conservatives are likely to gloat about the results of Gunn’s publicity stunt. “Go woke, go broke,” many will chortle at the movie’s failure. If the guy had focused more on making a good film and less on injecting politics into it and abusing his customers, he might have created something that didn’t “absolutely, totally suck.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/attack-on-london/

To mark the 20th anniversary this past week of the devastating July 7 Islamist bombings in London, Netflix has released Attack on London: Hunting the 7/7 Bombers, a four-part documentary series directed by Liza Williams. This compelling and meticulously crafted series revisits the terror attacks that killed 52 people and injured over 700, while also chronicling the intense police investigation that followed. Through survivor testimonies, previously unreleased footage, and interviews with key figures, including former MI5 Director General Eliza Manningham-Buller and former Prime Minister Tony Blair, Attack on London serves up a gripping reconstruction of the events and their aftermath.

However, while the series excels in its storytelling and historical detail, it treads too carefully around the broader societal implications of the attacks, particularly regarding the ideology that drove them and the divisive impact of mass Muslim immigration on the tiny United Kingdom. This caution, reflective of today’s Islamophilic sensibilities of Britain’s political elites, underscores a dangerous reality: the memory and meaning of the 7/7 bombings are being dishonored by the official suppression of any criticism of Islam, which is smeared as “Islamophobic.”

The series opens with a chilling account from survivor Dan Biddle, who describes locking eyes with one of the bombers, Mohammad Sidique Khan, moments before the latter set off the explosion on the Circle Line. Biddle’s harrowing description of the chaos—limbs severed, darkness enveloping the carriage—sets the tone for the documentary’s unflinching portrayal of the human cost. Biddle himself suffered the loss of his legs, which makes for a breath-catching reveal in the documentary.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/drop-dead-city-documentary-new-york-city-fiscal-crisis

This year marks a half-century since the acute phase of New York City’s fiscal crisis. It began in February 1975, when a default by a state-backed housing authority alarmed the bankers who regularly lent to the city, prompting closer scrutiny of New York’s own finances. In April, the banks stopped extending credit to cover the city’s chronic deficits. That led to a state takeover of city finances in June and, finally, a federal guarantee of the state rescue plan in December.

The crisis still sparks both ideological and practical debate: Was it the banks’ fault—for lending too much, or for cutting off credit? Or was it the city’s fault, for borrowing beyond its means? Did the reforms that followed usher in an era of harmful austerity or broad-based prosperity? Was the outcome a bailout, a punishment, or both?

This year marks a half-century since the acute phase of New York City’s fiscal crisis. It began in February 1975, when a default by a state-backed housing authority alarmed the bankers who regularly lent to the city, prompting closer scrutiny of New York’s own finances. In April, the banks stopped extending credit to cover the city’s chronic deficits. That led to a state takeover of city finances in June and, finally, a federal guarantee of the state rescue plan in December.

The crisis still sparks both ideological and practical debate: Was it the banks’ fault—for lending too much, or for cutting off credit? Or was it the city’s fault, for borrowing beyond its means? Did the reforms that followed usher in an era of harmful austerity or broad-based prosperity? Was the outcome a bailout, a punishment, or both

We’ve both recently attended a screening of a new documentary on the crisis, Drop Dead City. The title comes from the famous Daily News headline paraphrasing President Gerald Ford’s initial refusal to rescue New York in October 1975: “FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD.” As with many famous quotes, Ford never used those exact words—though what he did say was close enough. Directed by Michael Rohatyn and Peter Yost, Drop Dead City blends newly unearthed archival footage with clips and fresh interviews featuring key figures from 1975, including union leaders and financiers.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2025/05/rosie_o_donnell_as_a_sexually_active_lesbian_nun_hollywood_keeps_hitting_new_lows.html

Next time you’re wondering how low Hollywood can go, whatever you come up with, go lower than that. While Hollywood once sought to catch the largest audience possible, nowadays it seeks to find niche audiences—and, once it finds them, it must constantly figure out how to hold that niche attention.

The creative minds behind HBO Max’s “And Just Like That,” the spin-off to the 1990s hit “Sex and the City,” may have come up with the niche-est idea yet: They decide to have leftist lesbian, and one-time actress and show host, Rosie O’Donnell, play a virginal nun who has an affair with Miranda, the character played by the lesbian socialist Cynthia Nixon, who lives in a world filled with “trans” children.

For those not au courant on pop culture, some background might help. Sex and the City debuted in 1998 and ran for six seasons. Based on Candace Bushnell’s eponymous book, it purported to tell the story of four female friends in New York City navigating their way through the dating scene. Week after week, the characters hopped in and out of bed with frenzied ferocity, something that made sense once you learned that the show’s creator and chief writers were gay men (Darren Star and Michael Patrick King). The characters were female; the approach to sex was not.

After the show ended, Cynthia Nixon, who played Miranda, announced that she was a lesbian. Despite her estimated $20 million net worth, she’s also a socialist, carrying on the grand tradition of the nomenklatura getting very, very rich while the people upon whom they visit their ideology suffer. Nixon recently made headlines by boasting that just about every young person in her world is a member of the so-called “transgender” cohort. The odds of that being nature, not nurture, are zero:

And then there’s Rosie O’Donnell. She started life as a stand-up comedian, acted in some movies, and then had a talk show. Along the way, to no one’s surprise, she came out of the closet as a lesbian and, naturally, as a Democrat party activist. Over the years, she has adopted multiple children with various partners. Most recently, she made headlines when she fled to Ireland to escape the horrors of Donald Trump’s second term.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/snow-white-is-dead/

There’s bad news in fairyland. Snow White isn’t white. The Queen is the fairest of all. And after eating from the woke apple, Snow White is so dead that all the mocap CG dwarves in the Mouse House can’t begin to raise her. Neither can Prince Charming who now identifies as a woman.

After last weekend’s poor opening, there was a scramble in Hollywood to deny that wokeness was the cause, followed by prognostications that this weekend would fix all. The Friday numbers are in and while the weekend numbers aren’t set yet and certainly not final, they’re catastrophically bad

A Working Man, the latest Jason Statham male-skewed action movie, walloped Snow White Badly. To make matters worse, Friday numbers actually have Snow White behind ‘The Chosen: Last Supper Part 1’.

While Snow White may not actually end up in third place, it was struggling to keep pace even with The Woman in the Yard horror movie.

Making matters even more depressing, Captain Un-America, Brave New World, fell 91% to a miserable 7th place.

Again those numbers may not end up holding, but at the moment Disney’s spring is off to a really bad start.

It’s not just about the numbers, which are bad enough, but the per theater average which registers enthusiasm.

Disney’s Snow White had the highest number of theaters, monopolizing 4,200 theaters, but its per-theater average was below $1,000, putting in 5th place for public enthusiasm. And Captain Un-America in 9th place with a $306 per theater average and still short of $200 million.

Disney’s IP spam is no longer looking like a solid bet for theater owners and that’s really bad news for the mouse.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/house-of-david-replaces-jews-with-muslims/

The story of the rise of David, a shepherd boy, into a hero, a king and one of the great religious lyricists, is a phenomenal drama that Hollywood has fumbled again and again. For different reasons.

1951’s ‘David and Bathsheba’ was the typical clunky overdramatized spectacle of the era and the less said about Richard Gere as David the better. NBC’s Kings was an interesting, but baffling TV series, setting the struggle between Saul and David in a modern-day New York City ruled by kings.

Amazon Prime ‘House of David’ is more repugnant, but that has more to do with our own age than anything else. Our age is woke, Amazon Prime’s originals are particularly woke and ‘House of David’ starts out by jettisoning the Jewishness of the story in the most woke way possible by replacing both Saul and David with Arab Muslim actors.

David, traditionally seen as a redhead, becomes the latest ‘ginger’ to bite the dust and be replaced by what woke Hollywood decided is a more diverse appearance.

I recently wrote about a William Tell adaptation bringing in Muslim characters to show how diverse 14th-century Switzerland was. Biblical Israel was also apparently a very diverse place. But in typical woke DEI fashion, that diversity only goes one way, sidelining people who ‘look’ the wrong way and replacing them with more ‘diverse’ Arab Muslims who look the right way.