Will Smith's New Movie Glorifies Abusive Parenting, Billie Eilish Thinks Wildlife=Disney Movie, The Fed Gives...Nutrition Advice? (The Five for 11/26/21)
Hey,
Happy Black Friday.
When I started The Five two years ago, this publication began with 20 readers. Since then, the readership (and loyalty) has grown exponentially.
I can’t say thank you enough for your attention and trust over the last 24 months.
Today, I’m launching two products to support The Five.
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The Five will always be a free publication…but if you find value in what you read, your support would mean the world me and help keep this publication as a high quality source of news and pop culture.
Now let’s get into the news.
[one]
To kick off a pair of stories about turkey, this week, the Federal Reserve Bank decided to get into the business of nutrition, for some reason.
The headlines is deceptive, and contradicted within the St. Louis Fed’s own blog post:
Now for the main course: turkey (i.e., poultry) or tofurkey (i.e., soybeans)?
According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, roasted turkey has almost 3 times the caloric value and 1.5 times the protein value of an equivalent serving of fried tofu by weight.
Journalist Sean Davis of The Federalist put it this way:
Davis’ is correct here. The current rate of rapid inflation destroys the buying power of savings for the working class with higher earners, by definition, being less affected.
If you’re household income is $200,000, a $24 turkey this year, and $3 per gallon of gas to travel to see family is going to hurt a lot less than if your household income is $60,000.
Which makes this take from racist NY Times reporter Sara Jeong so tone deaf:
Despite a pedigree that includes California Berkley and Harvard Law School, Jeong apparently has no understanding of basic economics. During the pandemic, the net worth of billionaires has increased by 54%.
Meanwhile, the real wages of working class Americans decreased in 2021 due to inflation, despite higher pay.
What looked like a big jump in workers’ wages during October turned into just another gut punch after accounting for inflation.
The Labor Department reported Friday that average hourly earnings increased 0.4% in October, about in line with estimates. That was the good news.
However, the department reported Wednesday that top-line inflation for the month increased 0.9%, far more than what had been expected. That was the bad news – very bad news, in fact.
That’s because it meant that all told, real average hourly earnings when accounting for inflation, actually decreased 0.5% for the month. So an apparent solid paycheck increase actually turned into a decrease, and another setback for workers still struggling to shake off the effects of the Covid pandemic.
The gap between the way cultural and media elite are discussing inflation, and the way inflation is hitting working class wallets…are worlds apart.
Apparently “let them eat Tofurkey” is the new “Let them eat cake.”
[two]
Pop megastar Billie Eilish advocated for veganism in an image shared to her Instagram stories yesterday:
This argument can only come from someone who has lived almost all their days around stoplights and concrete.
Turkeys eat insects and small animals, so they're predators that surive by ending the lives of other creatures.
Predators, by nature, are not “gentle.”
I doubt this bird wanted to be “held,” as turkeys haven’t been domesticated to live with humans the way dogs, cats, horses etc. have for millennia.
Turkeys also fight each other to the death, sometimes in group brawls where they bite and slash with their talons.
According to the likes of PETA and the celebrities they influence, if we just let the turkeys off the farms, they would join the bunny rabbits and baby deer in the magical forest for Disney sing alongs.
Here’s what would actually happen.
Due to being raised in captivity, turkeys raised on farms would be quickly eaten by coyotes, possums, weasles, skunks, hawks, snakes and feral dogs if released into the wild. The birds have a lot of natural predators in North America who would be happy to cash in on quick, easy meals with these vulnerable prey.
The options for Thanksgiving turkey are not:
A. You eat a turkey, ending a bird life.
or
B. The turkey goes free and lives a life of self discovery in the wild.
Either you eat the turkey, or we turn the turkey loose in the woods, and it torn apart by a predator in less than 24 hours.
The Five began as an outlet to foster civil conversations in an increasingly divided America.
But I’m not sure where we can go when even the most basic, really proven facts are in dispute.
You likely know this, but in 2016 a man rushed into Comet Ping Pong Pizza in Washington D.C. wielding an AR-15, believing he was going to free captive children from the basement of the building. Edgar Welch, then 28, had driven to D.C. from North Carolina after becoming conviced by internet message boards the pizza shop was operating a child sex slavery operation.
Welch currently in prison.
To believe that turkeys live in the wild “peacefully,” may be more innocent than Welch’s felony assault on the pizza parlor, but it’s no less delusional.
[three]
Will Smith may be earning solid Oscar buzz for his performance as the father of tennis phenoms Venus and Serena Williams, but King Richard is hiding the grim and unethical past of one of pro sports most famous (and cruel) parents.
For starters, Richard Williams moved his family from Long Beach, CA (where they family home boasted an ocean view), into the notoriously dangerous and violent Compton, CA
According to Richard Williams:
“What led me to Compton was my belief that the greatest champions came out of the ghetto. I had studied sports successes like Muhammad Ali, and great thinkers like Malcolm X. I saw where they came from. As part of my plan, I decided it was where the girls were going to grow up, too. It would make them tough, give them a fighter’s mentality. They’d be used to combat. And how much easier would it be to play in front of thousands of white people if they had already learned how to play in front of scores of armed gang members.”
Huh?
Many parents living in high crime neighborhoods are desperate for a way to move their children to a different place, with better schools and away from gangs and drugs…and Richard Williams moved his daughters into that environment, because he thought it would make them standout athletes (and him rich). In fact, Richard fully admitted to CNN in 2015:
On the tough streets of Compton in the late 1980s, a crowd of school children hurled insults at two young black girls, whose father happily watched.
The city, in Los Angeles County, was riven with internecine gang warfare at the time, and verbal conflict could quickly escalate to violence.
Yet this was not one of Compton’s then-common violent scenes.
For a start, the schoolkids had been bused in specifically to the local tennis courts.
This was Richard Williams doing his worst to toughen up his beloved daughters Venus and Serena, who in just a few years would begin their domination of women’s tennis.
“In order to be successful you must prepare for the unexpected – and I wanted to prepare for that.,” Williams recalls in an interview with CNN’s Open Court, explaining why he let the girls be exposed to such abuse. “Criticism can bring the best out of you.”
/My concern with King Richard the movie is that it glorifies a man who deserves no glory, an abusive father who’s being lionized for the fame of his daughters, without any questions being asked about the emotional, psychological and spiritual price of success.
Which may well inspire other parents to follow similarly psychotic strategies, or at least encourage reckless parenting that was already happening.
As Joe Poznanski writes on Substack about the film:
There have been plenty of King Richards out there with outsized dreams for their children.
But there has only been one Venus Williams, only one Serena Williams.
They are the happy ending.
Many parents try to “break down” their children, in a similar fashion to Richard Williams, in order to turn them into prodigy athletes/actors/dancers/whatever.
Most don’t wind up with superstars.
Just broken kids who grow up to be scarred adults.
[four]
Director Ridley Scott (The Martian, Black Hawk Down) is blaming the failure of his latest historical epic on [clutches pearls] these Millennials and their cell phones [faints].
“I think what it boils down to – what we’ve got today [are] the audiences who were brought up on these f--king cell phones,” the director told Marc Maron on his WTF podcast.
“The millennian do not ever want to be taught anything unless you are told it on the cell phone,” he added. “This is a broad stroke, but I think we’re dealing with it right now with Facebook. There is a misdirection that has happened where it’s given the wrong kind of confidence to this latest generation, I think.”
While there’s nobody who loves talking bad about Millennials more than this Millennial…this explanation completely ignores the hesitation of older Americans (who typically turn out for historical epics) to return to the local multiplex…and ignores the fact that moviegoers who saw The Last Duel loved it, and blamed the film’s poor performance on bad marketing.
There are many, many things I’m happy to blame on Millennials…just not this one.
In the words of my generation…OK Boomer.
(But seriously, please see this movie…my current favorite of 2021).
[five]
As always, let’s head into the weekend with a pop culture roundup.
Netflix just dropped the first trailer for Inventing Anna, created by legendary producer Shonda Rhimes, who created mega-hits Greys Anatomy, Scandal and Bridgeton. The limited series, which follows the investigation of a con-woman posing as a German heiress and social media influencer while stealing from members of New York City’s high society. Looks like yet another homerun for Rhimes.
Jonah Hill (Moneyball, The Wolf of Wall Street) will play Jerry Garcia in an upcoming biopic on the life of The Grateful Dead frontman from director Martin Scorsese (Goodfellas, The Departed). I’m guessing the movie will clock in around two hours…or roughly the runtime of a single Grateful Dead song.
The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air reboot I didn’t realize I wanted (or needed) looks quite interesting. From the official synopsis:
Set in modern-day America, Bel-Air is a serialized one-hour dramatic analogue of the 90’s sitcom “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air” that leans into the original premise: Will’s complicated journey from the streets of West Philadelphia to the gated mansions of Bel-Air. With a reimagined vision, Bel-Air will dive deeper into the inherent conflicts, emotions and biases that were impossible to fully explore in a 30-minute sitcom format, while still delivering swagger and nods to the original show.
First trailer here. Streaming on Peacock in 2022.
P.S. This scene from the original show, in my opinion, is one of the finest moments in TV history. Will Smith’s hat wasn’t supposed to fall off, but the first take was so perfect the director opted not to reshoot.
MY PICK—TV: I’ve been absolutely sucked into season one of The Wheel of Time on Amazon Prime. The series was allegedly born when then CEO Jeff Bezos told the Prime TV team to find “the next Game of Thrones,” and Amazon entered into a deal to adapt the renowned fantasy novel series by author Robert Jordan. However, The Wheel of Time, in my opinion, is much closer to Lord of the Rings than G.O.T., at least from the first three episodes.
MY PICK—MUSIC: Brian Fallon, who’s best known as the front man for the New Jersey based punk outfit The Gaslight Anthem, released “Night Divine,” a collection of classic hymns and Christmas spirituals. Fallon has always been open about his Christian faith (in a notably non-religious subculture), but this is the first time the punk legend’s musical output has crossed paths with this beliefs. If, like me, you tend to hate the cornier side of Christmas music, this one may hit home with you.
Until the next one,
-sth