Why Bridgerton Is the Most Subversive Show on Television
By Tom Weiss
This review contains spoilers for Bridgerton Season 1
I wasn’t looking forward to watching Bridgerton, a new Netflix series which debuted on Christmas Day last year. I hadn’t read the novels – the show is based on Julia Quinn’s eponymous series – and was not familiar with Executive Producer Shonda Rhimes, who signed a $100 million contract with Netflix in 2017, even though everybody on the planet knows her work.
However, even if I had I been exposed to either of those things, I still wouldn’t have cared. There is no shortage of stories about priviledged British royals and their straphangers, and after a while the characters and plot lines all tend to blend together in my head. For me to want to be invested, I have to know I’m going to see something unique.
Downton Abbey accomplished this by focusing on the straphangers as much as the royals. That was interesting, and the entire series held my attention.
Bridgerton held my attention in perhaps the most subversive way possible in this day and age.
Django Unchained ’s Bleak Racial Vision
By Shant Eghian
In an interview years before he made Django Unchained, Quentin Tarantino said, “[I want] to do movies that deal with America’s horrible past with slavery and stuff but do them like Spaghetti Westerns, not like big issue movies. I want to do them like they’re genre films, but they deal with everything that America has never dealt with because it’s ashamed of it, and other countries don’t really deal with because they don’t feel they have the right to.”
Tarantino called this new genre the “Southern,” as opposed to the “Western.” And just as the Spaghetti Westerns from the Sixties (Westerns made by Italian directors) were often quite violent (at least, for the time) to portray the rugged realities of the Old West, Tarantino could bring his signature style of violence to this new genre in a way that displayed the awful exploitation and racial hierarchy that was the nexus of the Antebellum South.
This is Part 2 in an ongoing series analyzing Quentin Tarantino’s filmography. For Part 1 on Inglourious Basterds click here.
Dave Chappelle’s All-American Anti-PC Heresies Vs. Ramy Youssef’s Woke-Intersectional-Islamist Cousin-Loving
Check out my new article on Islamist entertainment at The Daily Wire
By David M. Swindle
I had a new article published yesterday at The Daily Wire. I compare and contrast the comedy specials of two American Muslims, and Ramy Youssef, coming down very hard against the latter:
Among the fascinating phenomena of America’s most prominent Muslim activist organizations is how they decide which Muslims to lift up and which to ignore. Compare two recent comedy specials. One, Dave Chappelle’s newest Netflix special “Sticks & Stones,” which is generating intense reactions given its choice of material — including abortion, #MeToo, Transgenderism, “the alphabet people” (referring to the expanding acronym LGBTQIA+), and the implications of the “cancel culture,” which seeks to silence all who do not adhere to the “woke” doctrines of political correctness.
Thinking about this hilariously offensive special brought to mind another recent comedy special that challenged different cultural taboos: Millennial Ramy Youssef’s “Feelings,” released on HBO on June 29.
The Paper of Record Just Recorded They’re All Right with Racism. Really
Or: “The black people were surprisingly good last night…”
By Roy Griffis
One of my personal failings (well, the only one I feel like admitting) is I have a strong fairness impulse. It was the whole thing, judge people by the content of the character not the color of the skin. My father, who had grown up in the deep South, surrounded by virulent racism, introduced me to the concept, mostly by living it. It was what made me a nascent liberal as a young man.
That belief in fairness was the same thing that drove me away from Liberals. Growing up, my experiences with other kids growing up were a lot like the Woody Allen joke about going to youth camp “…where I was sadistically beaten by children of all colors and creeds.”
Those experiences made it clear to me that “jerk” was a choice limited to any race, sex, or religion. And thus I was rather heretical toward the idea that People of Color were really Saints of Color.
Don’t Play Those Funky Politics, Black Boy
Wherein Mr. West’s Brethren School Him on his Proper Place
By Roy Griffis
When I was but a lad in Nebraska, one-hit wonders released their epic paean to the seductive joys of finding one’s groove and getting down wid it.
Since our only exposure to the song was courtesy of the blown-out speakers of the AM radio in my Dad’s ’54 Chevy truck, the most we nascent deplorables could make out was the bouncy beat and the repeated admonition “Play that funky music, white boy.”
Talk about words to live by. It wasn’t until I was older (with access to better sound systems) that I began to appreciate the crazy joy in the music. But speaking of crazy and music, we have Kanye West, a fellow with no shortage of confidence and very debatable musical ability.
