Chicago High School Administrator Brings Anal Toys to Class, How Wednesday Could Hurt Netflix in the Long Term, Jennifer Lawrence Torpedos Own Career...Again (The Five for 12/13/22)
Hey,
Welcome to The Five.
Well, this one is very late…but that’s life sometimes.
Enjoy a special mid-week version of Culture & Commentary.
[one]
As previously covered in The Five, Canada has now legalized assisted suicide for “mental health” reasons. Euthanasia is now responsible for 1 in 30 Canadian deaths.
The situation is rapidly devolving, if this eyewitness account is to be believed. A paralyzed Canadian vet claims the socialized health care system asked her if she wanted assisted suicide when she called to complain about her wheelchair ramp taking too long.
The counter argument to socialized medicine has long been that the government will be tempted to “reduce expenses” through the termination of human life…something (terrible VP candidate) Sarah Palin brought up during the 2008 election vs. Obama/Biden.
Credit where credit is due. The death panels came true…and they’re just over our Northern border.
[two]
“Are you gonna do one of these child sexual abuse stories every week?” I can hear the critics cry at me.
Well, I wish I didn’t have to…but we’re coming very close to #MeToo levels of cover up across religious, educational, civic and entertainment spaces when it comes to child sex abuse…turns out the abusers are pretty open if you just ask them, like Dean of Students Joseph Bruno, a Chicago prep school executive who was busted bragging about bringing anal toys into the classroom.
“In a classroom, while I’m sitting there,” Bruno said — noting it was for kids as young as 14.
“They’re just, like, passing around dildos and butt plugs … The kids are just playing with ‘em,” he said of the high schoolers.
“They’re like, ‘How does this butt plug work? How do we do — like, how does this work?’” he said, with the drag queen there to “pass out cookies and brownies and do photos.”
Child abuse, plain and simple.
Before the internet calls me a prude, here are a list of topics I would expect a public/non-religious private school to likely cover:
some kids at school may have same-sex parents
how birth control methods work
STD’s, risks, etc.
And here’s what I would expect a school NOT COVER as part of the curriculum:
things to shove up your rectum
the practicalities of shoving things up your rectum.
Seriously, what is the point here…except to normalize explicit conversations in order to later normalize explicit acts between adults and legal children.
A conspiracy theory stops being a conspiracy theory once a mountain of evidence has been compiled. And we past that milestone awhile ago on the journey to uncovering rampant child sex abuse in the US.
The hand-wringing about this being the Handmaid’s Tale or Puritan society reborn is just absurd. Just don’t rape kids or give them sex toys at age 11 at school and nobody really cares what you do with your life.
Which is a very low threshhold…that apparently some folks just can’t meet.
[three]
Could the smash success of Netflix’s Wednesday, the Addams Family reboot/spinoff that’s become a massive hit (and helping to save the struggling streamer) be a bad thing?
Well…maybe, kinda-sorta.
From Yahoo:
The middling quality of Wednesday is not what concerns me, though. I’m more worried about its success, and the consequence these numbers will have going forward. Wednesday’s popularity – the level of which is unprecedented – could have an adverse effect on the greenlighting process for new shows. In other words, original ideas could be moved to the bottom of the pile.
When reboots, prequels and sequels work this well…why would media companies take risks on new ideas?
It’s a sad reality…but it is reality.
[four]
I’ll never forget the first time I watched Jennifer Lawrence’s Oscar-winning debut, Winter’s Bone, in which the rookie actress played a Missouri resident attempting to navigate poverty while on the run from meth dealers. I’ll also never forget the excitement I felt when I found out the Louisville, KY native would take up the mantle of Catniss Everdeen, bringing the uber popular YA novel series The Hunger Games to the big screen.
Unfortunately for Lawrence, I did forget the abysmal American Hustle, along with Red Sparrow, X-Men: Dark Phoenix and the abysmal Mother!, a five-film run of consecutive box office flops that reduced Lawrence from in-demand A-lister to…I’m not even sure what her status is now.
Lawrence is attempting to stage a comeback with an excellent looking Causeway, about brain trauma in a military vet, now streaming on Apple TV+.
It looks…like another strong entry into the Apple TV+ catalog.
However, Lawrence appears to be her own biggest enemy, as her career and image are no longer being shaped by mega-producer Harvey Weinstein, who will likely spend the rest of his life in prison.
In an interview with Variety this week, Lawrence claimed to be the first female action hero (sure, if you don’t count Alien, Aliens, Terminator 1, Terminator 2, The Fifth Element, Wonder Woman, Black Widow in the Marvel films, Trinity in The Matrix, The Underworld movies…you get the picture).
She followed that statement with one about Hollywood believing boys couldn’t see themselves in female action heroes.
Uhh….wut? Doesn’t the phenomenal success of Lawrence’s signature franchise, The Hunger Games, and the massive amount of money that was poured into making and marketing those films, disprove her theory? Hollywood doesn’t invest the big bucks if half the population is going to stay home from the theater.
For the record, I don’t think Lawrence is a bad person…and I remain a fan.
But being a good actor isn’t the only part of the job known as acting…you also have to go out there and self yourself and your projects to the public. In Lawrence’s case, she would have been better off to have been working before the age of the internet, when a handful of major media outlets and an army of PR pros tightly controlled the narrative.
[five]
As always, let’s wrap up with a pop culture roundup.
Video games don’t often translate well to live action, but The Last of Us may well break the streak. Based on a bestselling Playstation game, the series re-unites Game of Thrones alums Bella Ramsey and Pedro Pascal (The Madalorian).
Hitting HBO Max sometime in 2023…
I’m not much of a rom-com fan, but Jonah Hill (War Dogs, Moneyball) teaming up to write a comedy with Kenya Barris (Black-ish, Girls Trip) sparks my interest.
The supporting cast includes Julia Louis-Dryfus (Seinfeld, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever) David Duchoveny (The X-Files), Eddie Murphy (Coming to America, Shrek), Lauren London (ATL), La La Anthony (Wu-Tang: Coming to America, Grown-ish) and comedian Andrew Schulz.
On Netlflix 01/27.
Tom Hanks (Saving Private Ryan, Forrest Gump) does another “America’s dad” role in A Man Called Otto, who is suicidal after the death of his wife, until a rambunctious family moves next door.
Before Marvel took over the movie business, we used to get more one-off, character driven stories like this, with no possibility of a sequel or spin-off.
But the studio is dumping this in the middle of January, which means they don’t think this comedy-drama can compete with the special-effects driven serials.
It’s probably true that I over-cover all things Yellowstone, but it’s not my fault writer/creator Taylor Sheridan doesn’t miss.
The latest prequel telling the tale of the Dutton family arrives on Paramount+ on 12/18, and stars a pair of legends, Harrison Ford (Star Wars, Indiana Jones) and Hellen Mirren (The Queen, Hitchcock). It looks like Mirren, in particular, shines here.
“Men kill quick, with a bullet or a noose. But your fight is with me. And I kill much slower.”
Daaaang.
NEW MUSIC
Apple Music | YouTube Music
Americana singer/songwriter Adeem the Artist captures the current state of things, post-COVID so dang well…where the working class have been largely left behind by rampant inflation, and the gig economy means “employment,” is always available…but the grind to survive is often dehumanizing.
Oh, and he even captures the weirdness of the student loan did-it-or-didn’t-it-happen bailout, referencing robo collection calls.
I rarely print lyrics for featured songs…but, dang. This is just so perfect.
These past few winters have been harder than expected
Unknown numbers call us all hours of the day
We've both been learning how to cook our suppers cheaper
Stretch it out until we get paid
The way it goes, I doubt we ever will retire
But the cast iron will be seasoned well by then
And if we're lucky we'll have moments by the fire
Put a record on and read a book again
We've been selling off our books and records
Instruments our grandparents played
We've been selling off our books and records
But we're gonna buy them back someday
I’m not sure I’ve heard a song that captures what everyone is feeling, but not one has said out loud, that’s quite so accurate since Green Day dropped “American Idiot.”
Until the next one,
-sth