High School Debate Team Wins National Championship By...Refusing to Debate?! Will South Park Get Disney Exec Fired? The Next Big Trend in Movies is...Books? (The Five for 11/03/23)
High School Debate Team Wins National Championship By...Refusing to Debate?! Will South Park Get Disney Exec Fired? The Next Big Trend in Movies is...Books? (The Five for 11/03/23)
Plus, Marvel (finally) takes itself seriously--lands a TV-MA rating, Hulu's Samurai Epic looks like a hit, Green Day's punk resurgence.
Hey, welcome to The Five, a publication about the things that matter.
Before we dive in, I just dropped the 2nd episode of We Actually Built This, a podcast about business and creativity.
Now, it’s Friday…so let’s get into Culture & Commentary.
[one]
In the final round of the most prestigious high school debate competition in the U.S., a team won…by refusing to debate.
Posted to X (formerly Twitter):
What you are about to watch is the **final round** of the most prestigious national high school debate tournament. Team A proceeds to tell Team B that they **will not** be debating the assigned topic (benefits/costs of the IMF) because trans people are being genocided by MAGA Republicans and that is way more important than debating the IMF.
Team A starts off by playing an audio clip from a 1980s AIDs protest and says that “28 states want to kill” trans people like her. They tell the judges that this round "does nothing to the IMF itself" and as such they have decided that "this round is going to be a debate about debate" and the judges' "choice instead is whether to affirm our performance." They proudly declare that they will "occupy the debate space until trans debaters can participate safely."
Team B then immediately concedes the round because they don’t want to dispute that trans genocide is real and be labelled transphobic. The rest of the round is a struggle session where Team A states that misgendering is “violent” and that if you do it, you should automatically lose.
This is the *final round* of the *most prestigious high school debate tournament* of the school year, and they made a mockery of it with their selfish, unintelligible performative rant. The worse part? The judges praised Team A for their bravery and courage and crowned them the national champions. This is sick. It’s anti-merit, anti-debate, and anti-American. No wonder droves of kids are quitting high school debate.
Ladies and Gentlemen…welcome to the Upside Down. You may have heard the phrase “we all live on campus now” in regards to Woke College policies entering corporate America…but we all live in in the world of Stranger Things.
If you’re not familiar with the IMF (International Monetary Fund), is a financial agency of the UN and considered a “lender of last resort” to broke nations. It’s worth debating. The idea that our society just rewarded kids for changing the subject and showboating is absurd.
And finally “until trans debaters can participate safely?!” My dude…it’s a Zoom call.
[two]
South Park, one of the most sharpest and most consistent voices of criticism of pop culture…absolutely buried Disney’s recent failures in film and TV (which was covered two weeks ago in The Five). It’s worth taking a moment to see the 90 second clip before continuing.
(Note: Kathleen Kennedy is the President of Lucasfilm, and oversees all Star Wars projects as well as the most recent Indiana Jones film).
Former Mandalorian star Gina Carano (who was fired by Kennedy) responded on X (formerly Twitter):
This is the part where KK demands any YouTubers get censored off of YouTube for sharing and laughing at this hilarious episode, she’ll have YouTube disable the thumbs down option because of the ratio she’ll receive, then she’ll have her publicist ghouls make sure Variety and Hollywood Reporter run hit pieces about the South Park creators and their families smearing their names through every useful idiot she has under her thumb who would sell their soul to work for Lucas film, she’ll activate her online mob to repeat that the South Park creators are racist, bigot, transphobes, and demand the South Park creators publicly apologize by only using words she approves of and finally she’ll demand they subject themselves to a re-education course of 45 people in the lbgtq community zoom call to sit there and listen of how badly they got their feelings hurt all over a little boop of a South Park episode.
But maybe just maybe the jig is up.
Based on what we’ve all seen in the entertainment industry, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Kennedy was behind a major smear of Carano’s career after firing her from the Star Wars franchise…which would make the Disney studio head a similar monster to Harvey Weinstein, as far as tactics go.
But unlike Carano, who worked for Kennedy, it’s going to be a lot more difficult to dethrone South Park, which has been a ratings juggernaut since the era of the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal.
Fans of all stripes have been calling for Kennedy’s firing for years, after the failure of the most recent Star Wars trilogy, as well as a lukewarm response to several other projects she’s touched. Earlier this year, South Park’s sharp satire seemed to end the public’s obsession with Prince Harry and Meghan Markle…so if lightning strikes twice and Kennedy is fired in the near future, we may need to thank those animated third graders from Colorado…
[three]
A PAC (political action committee) is calling for black voters in Kentucky to turn against the black Republican candidate for Governor in favor of his white counterpart on the Democratic ticket.
A liberal Super PAC that counts billionaire George Soros as a major donor is running racially charged ads in Kentucky against Republican Daniel Cameron, who says his Democrat opponent should condemn the “racist and hateful” attacks being aired ahead of next month’s election.
The ad from Black Voters Matter Action PAC, an electioneering group that spends millions in support of Democrat candidates, is up with an ad that refers to Cameron as “Uncle Daniel Cameron,” and uses the saying, “Skinfolk ain’t kinfolk” — a refrain used by black liberals to suggest that anyone who disagrees with them politically is a race traitor.
Black Voters Matter Action PAC has thrown its resources into Kentucky, which is one of just a few states slated to hold major elections next month. The Super PAC has been on the ground in Kentucky holding events in support of Democrat Andy Beshear, the incumbent governor running for reelection. Its ad ran on WMJM Magic 101.3, an R&B station in Jeffersontown, Kentucky.
The radio version of the ad was posted to X (formerly Twitter).
So, just to recap here…George Soros, who’s white, puts money into telling black people to vote for a white guy through an ad that portrays the black candidate as a racist stereotype. That’s…something.
If you haven’t seen the Quentin Tarantino film Django Unchained, Samuel L. Jackson’s character (pictured left in the ad) is a favored slave to Leonardo DiCaprio’s character, who treats new freeman Django (Jamie Foxx) with contempt. (You can see a clip here, which has a LOT of profanity, FYI). Using that caricature as a political attack…sets a new watermark in the no-holds-barred arena of modern political underhanded tactics.
I’m not going to pretend to know anything about either candidate (it is, after all, a state election), but it’s difficult to imagine any scenario where referring to a candidate as “Uncle Daniel Cameron” paired with that imagery, could be justified.
Now, the only question remains…will it work on the voter base? If it does, expect more political ads for 2024 to be…increasingly nasty.
We’ll find out the answer on 11/07.
[four]
Book-to-movie adaptations are all the rage in Hollywood right now. I, for one, am quite excited about this trend.
One big deal just closed at Universal, for an action thriller based on the unpublished 43-page short story Run For Your Life. The story is about a groom marked for death on his wedding day, and the studio is at the altar with a pre-emptive purchase that has Safe House scribe and Designated Survivor creator David Guggenheim attached to write and Sam Hargrave in talks to direct. Latter helmed the Chris Hemsworth action films Extraction and its sequel for Netflix and AGBO; Hargrave will next direct another high-action thriller, Stay Frosty, for Warner Bros with Dark Horse Entertainment.
Separately, buyers are circling The Woman In Me, the just-published memoir by Britney Spears about her going from a pop diva to a shackled songbird. This after her father cited unpredictable behavior — that included publicly shaving her head — as grounds for successfully petitioning the courts for a conservatorship that basically kept Spears under lock and key, except to perform and make more money she had no control over.
Finally, we’re hearing Sony, Amazon, Warner Bros and A24 are in the hunt for How to Rule the World: Yacht Parties, Culture Wars and the Downfall of a President at Stanford. Written by Theo Baker, book tells his story of being an 18-year old student at Stanford University who wrote a series of reports skeptical of the questionable research practices of the school’s president Marc Tessier-Lavigne, a neuroscientist who was on the short list for the Nobel Prize. The college president responded by hiring a top law firm and big PR firm to take down the neophyte journalist who wrote the pieces for the student newspaper. Baker wound up being named the youngest-ever recipient of a Polk Award, and in late summer the Stanford president resigned. The book will be published by Penguin Press/Penguin Random House.
In a world filled with copy/paste horror projects and increasingly bad offerings from Marvel, I welcome this sea change.
[five]
As always, let's head into the weekend with a pop culture roundup.
Ryan Gosling (Barbie, The Place Between the Pines) plays a stunt guy who re-connects with his ex girlfriend Emily Blunt (A Quiet Place, the Devil Wear Prada) before going on a real life espionage mission to rescue a leading actor from real life bad guys…or something.
Confusing, but looks like a fun, dumb, popcorn flick. Gotta wait till March to see it, bummer.
I remember walking out of Thor Love & Thunder with my (at the time very pregnant) wife, and saying “that’s it. No more Marvel.” We had only gone because there was nothing else playing, and we knew we wouldn’t get to the theater again for another year.
The Marvel Cinematic Universe, a once-great popcorn flick franchise had devolved into too many jokes, too much silliness.
Well, I’m happy to see a course correction here. Echo borrows the villain from the popular Daredevil show (the great Vincent D’Onofrio of Full Metal Jacket and Men in Black fame) and tells the tale of a deaf superhero raised by a crime boss. To kick off the series, Maya Lopez returns to her roots in Oklahoma with the Cheyenne community.
The most notable thing here is that it’s rated TV-MA, which means the violence (and narrative stakes) have been dialed way up.
Can’t wait for this one to drop in January.
A historically accurate Samurai TV series? Sign me up. Uh oh, the Samurai head into battle with swords vs. an army with guns. Even if you’re not a history buff…probably aint gonna end well (and, it didn’t, IRL).
On Hulu in February.
NEW MUSIC
What’s gotten into Green Day? I had written off the Gen-Xers as a touring greatest hits package (their last four albums ranged between below average to outright terrible), and now they’ve dropped back-to-back singles that recapture the energy of their Bay-area grassroots punk roots. Full album coming 01/19.
Apple Music | YouTube Music
Morgan Wade started to gain popularity at the same time as Zach Bryan. The former signed a major label record deal (which included a French Bulldog as a signing bonus…awww), while the latter stayed independent and went on to play NFL stadiums.
Wade’s status hasn’t caught up to her early YouTube buzz yet…but it’s not for lack of great songs. Halloween may be over as a holiday, but this heartbreaker ballad can stay on your playlist all winter long…
And finally, pop superstar/grunge revivalist Olivia Rodrigo dropped the lead single for the upcoming soundtrack to The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songs and Snakes. Like the Twilight saga before it, Hunger Games has a pretty rich legacy of pairing teen movies with better-than-expected indie rock, hip hop and Americana. West Virginia native Charles Wesley Godwin has also announced he’ll be a part of the project. See the very Americana/country tracklist here.
Until the next one,
-sth