Category: US Politics

Boy, the critics do NOT like Jennifer Lawrence’s new movie, mother!

Yes, the movie’s title is lower case (pretentious) and includes an exclamation point. Really. And while it pulls down a respectable 68% on the film rating website Rotten Tomatoes, some of the most renowned critics slashed the movie to tiny pieces.

Most brutal was Rex Reed. Writing for the Observer, Reed emptied his clip — then reloaded like 20 times.

This delusional freak show is two hours of pretentious twaddle that tackles religion, paranoia, lust, rebellion, and a thirst for blood in a circus of grotesque debauchery to prove that being a woman requires emotional sacrifice and physical agony at the cost of everything else in life, including life itself. That may or may not be what Aronofsky had in mind, but it comes as close to a logical interpretation as any of the other lunk-headed ideas I’ve read or heard. The reviews, in which a group of equally pretentious critics frustratingly search for a deeper meaning, are even nuttier than the film itself. Using descriptions like “hermeneutic structure,” “phantasmagoric fantasia,” “cinematic Rorsach test” and “extended scream of existential rage,” they sure know how to leave you laughing.

Reed suggests ignoring the reviews that praise the director, Darren Aronofsky, as some sort of visionary.

One critic says it’s a satire on the chaos the dysfunctional world has been turned into by Donald Trump. Another says the title refers to the role played by Jennifer Lawrence, the director’s current personal squeeze and cinematic muse, whom he slobbers over in endlessly annoying close-ups that emphasize her flaws and rob the viewer of the power of self-discovery. One reviewer says she plays the quintessential Earth mother who works feverishly to restore balance to a planet Earth that is being constantly torn apart by wickedness and savagery. I love the review that compares the movie to the “lancing of a boil.” They all insist mother! is a metaphor for something, although they are not quite sure what it is. …

The New York Times critic arrogantly warns in his review: “Don’t listen to anyone who natters on about how intense or disturbing it is.” Sorry, pal, but a mob that burns a screaming baby and its mother alive, then turns cannibal, eats the baby and rips its heart out to flush down the toilet while Patti Smith sings about the end of the world pretty much fits my definition of both “intense” and “disturbing.” What’s yours?

Nothing about mother! makes one lick of sense as Darren Aronofsky’s corny vision of madness turns more hilarious than scary. With so much crap around to clog the drain, I hesitate to label it the “Worst movie of the year” when “Worst movie of the century” fits it even better.

Ouch.

CinemaScore, which tracks audience reactions on opening night, has given the movie a rare F (only 12 films since 2004 have earned the worst score).

Critic Susan Granger said the flick is just “another instance of pretentious, self-indulgent torture-porn.”

The liberal Huffington Post wasn’t keen on the film, either.

“mother!” is the kind of film where anything and everything is thrown up on the screen. Nothing has to make sense because it is all a matter of interpretation. Some may call that art but I call it befuddlement. There is no central theme to the film because it is all in the audiences’ heads as to what means what.

It is hard to imagine that most members of the audience will face the final scene of the film, if they last that long, and say, “Well that explains everything”. It doesn’t. Aronofsky might have thought by flinging paint against a canvas he made a masterpiece. He didn’t. He made a mess.

Kyle Smith of National Review called the movie “a biblically-infused version of torture porn” and said that “it may be the most vile and contemptible motion picture ever released.”

“To experience the final half-hour is to understand what it must feel like to be a clump of broccoli in a Cuisinart,” he wrote.

Critic Sonny Bunch also ripped the last 30 minutes:

The skill that went into crafting mother! is undeniable — the final thirty minutes or so are as relentless as they are nasty — but so is its unpleasantness, its aggressively nihilistic and misanthropic ugliness. I can’t quite tell whether I hate the movie or just its message, but mother! may be one of the rare artistic instances in which this is a distinction without a difference.

The movie opened on Friday and Deadline.com wrote on Sunday: “Well, it’s clear: Moviegoers officially hate Darren Aronofsky’s Mother! … The bold Jennifer Lawrence pic crashed well below its $11M projections with an estimated $7.5M in third as of Sunday morning. When compared to her wide releases in their first weekend (1,000-plus theaters), it’s the lowest opening for Lawrence, even lower than her 2012 Relativity horror movie The House at the End of the Street ($12.3M).”

A Michigan school district suspended a sixth-grade teacher who physically forced a student to stand during the Pledge of Allegiance after the student refused to stand.

Stone Chaney, a sixth-grader at East Middle School in Farmington Hills, Michigan, claims his teacher violated his rights by physically forcing him to stand during the Pledge of Allegiance during the first week of school on September 7.

“The teacher consultant comes up behind me and snatches me out of my chair violently,” Stone said. “I was so confused. I didn’t know what was going on.”

Stone alleges a similar thing happened the following day when a different teacher yelled at him for refusing to stand during the Pledge.

“I don’t stand because I don’t pledge to a flag,” Stone said, insisting that he only pledges to his family and God – but not his country.

Stone’s father, Brian Chaney, insisted that the choice was his son’s and that he doesn’t force his son to show respect for the Pledge by standing. “What we see on the TVs, what’s going on in America, it just came to my living room,” Chaney told The Washington Post. “Tears are done. I’m mad now. We’re looking for accountability.”

Stone has not returned to school as his family is considering relocating him to a different district.

“I don’t feel safe going to that school anymore because I don’t know what they’re going to do to me next,” Stone added.

The superintendent of Farmington Public Schools said in a statement that the teacher in question is on administrative leave while the district investigates the alleged incident.

WDIV received an official statement from George Heitsch, Superintendent of the Farmington Public Schools District, which reads in part:

The District fully supports the right of each student to participate or not in the daily Pledge. The teacher allegedly involved in the incident has been placed on administrative leave. At this time, the District cannot speculate about the outcome of the pending investigation.

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Just hours after a homemade bomb ripped through a London Underground car, injuring 30, President Trump tweeted that British police had had the attacker “in their sights” and should have been “more proactive” in catching “the loser.”

Scotland Yard hit back, saying Trump’s comments were “pure speculation” — but refusing to name the suspect. Others said Trump’s tweet was “idiotic” and “extremely unhelpful.”

Prime Minister Theresa May said: “I never think it’s helpful for anyone to speculate on what is an ongoing investigation. The police and security services are working to discover the full circumstances of this cowardly attack and to identify those responsible.”

But now it turns out that Trump was, in fact, right, The Daily Mail reports.

The 18-year-old being held by police on suspicion of planting a bomb on the London underground was arrested two weeks ago at the exact same tube station where the device exploded but released, neighbours have said.

The teen – who is being held after police tracked him to the departures hall at the Port of Dover – is thought to have been a ‘problematic foster child’ who was raised in Sunbury-on-Thames by Penelope Jones, 71, and husband Ronald, 88.

Serena Barber, 47, who has known the couple all her life and lives in a property backing on to theirs, said: ‘They have two boys at the moment, both are foreign. One is very quiet and polite, the other who is 18 is awful.

‘I know about two weeks ago he was arrested by police at Parsons Green, for what I don’t know and returned back to Penny and Ron. After that Penny said she was going to have to stop caring for him, she couldn’t handle him.’

The revelation comes after President Donald Trump tweeted that the ‘loser terrorist’ behind the latest London attack was ‘in the sights of Scotland Yard’ – and heaps pressure on the force to reveal whether he was detained and why he was released.

A neighbor of the house raided, Stephen Griffiths, 28, told the Mail that police had been at the house numerous times in recent weeks.

He also saw officers using drones to search the garden at the back of the property. He said: ‘Police have been at this address a few times in the last couple of weeks. At the time we just put it down to it being foster kids that needed to be spoken to.

‘But it clicked in my head earlier – what if one of the children was under investigation or surveillance? Why couldn’t something be done sooner to stop this happening? Why couldn’t the police have questioned him? Three or four officers would turn up and would speak to the foster parents on the doorstep.

‘They were in normal police cars but they weren’t wearing police hats or reflective jackets – they were dressed all in black. It was nothing like just a normal officer doing a duty call, it seemed like something a bit higher in the chain. The other day they were out there for a long time – a few hours – and they could have even gone in the house.’