Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: Higher Learning!

Aight, listen up you filthy crackkkers. This week's greatest movie of all time of the week is by a Black director (it's about time). John Singleton's magnum opus, Higher Learning, stars Foreman from House as Will Smith, a young college freshman who butts heads with his bowtie conservative surrogate father figure Uncle Phil (Laurence Fishburne, Cherry 2000, Dream Warriors).

"WRONG, Will, the answer was in fact lupus" - Laurence Fishburne

Meanwhile, a wise and prescient campus raype subplot results in Kristy Swanson (The Chase, The Phantom) making out with Jennifer Connelly (Dark City, The Hot Spot), as though such a pretext were remotely needed.

"Um, John, what's my motivation for this scene?"
"Yours?"

In a fit of 90s rap typecasting, the movie also stars Ice Cube (the "Bye Felicia" gif) as himself, and Busta Rhymes as Soyjak:

"wHITE peephole on MY campus? I'm going insaaaane aaaaagh" - Busta Rhymes

Worse still, Will must contend with that perennial college campus menace: the local neo-nazi frat.

Your campus had one of these, right?

Naturally, these inconspicuous ne'er-do-wells fly safely under the radar of the racially profiling campus security, because I see bald wHITE guys in Doc Martens hanging around colleges all the time, looking to recruit shy autistic guys (those freaks need to be watched closely at all times). Naturally, these evil ethnats start an unprovoked race war against the noble, oppressed Black ethnats, culminating in a mass shooting. No spoiler warning necessary; we all know wHITE peephole just do that.

"Now hold your horses there, Patravious", you might object, wHITEly. You might go on to note that real-life instances of racial violence are far more likely to be Black-on-wHITE than wHITE-on-Black, recalling RACISTLY such cases as the Southport mass stabbing and the Waukesha Christmas parade car massacre. You might further note that all the real-life rape cultures turned out to be in overwhelmingly l*ft-wing environments like Hollywood, the BBC and the public school system, among homosexual priests, in minority-wHITE prisons, in South Asian immigrant communities in Bri'ain, and in m*ssad pedo blackmail rings, while all the hyped-up college campus cases turned out to be bullshit.

But here's the thing, wHITE DEVIL: you only know all that because you've been paying attention and learning, when what you should have been doing is unlearning. For today's kino has a righteous message so subtle I missed it the first time:

"'Ignorance is strength' - George Orville" - John Singleton

Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: Kontroll!

Article theme: Downbound Train - Chuck Berry

Me at the end of a workday too.

In your heart of hearts, you still like Clerks. and Fight Club, but you're afraid r/criterion tryhards will bully you for "entry level" "film bro" taste. Sack up! But, in the meantime, you'll be pleased to know there's a better version of both: 2004's Hungarian sleeper kino Kontroll, set entirely in the underworld of a sprawling Budapest metro system so bleakly rendered that the film had to be prefaced by a piece-to-camera telling you it's not nearly so bad in real IRL.

The briefing room alone is impressively depressing (dimpressing).

Bulcsú (Sándor Csányi) is our existentially weary protagonist working the thankless job of ticket inspector and sleeping overnight on the station platforms, resigned to a purgatorial existence of his own choosing. Commuters routinely try to swerve their fares and get belligerent when haplessly entreated to comply. The inspectors are threatened with knives, sprayed in the face with foam and violently beaten by football hooligans. They drink on shift, play games of chicken with the trains, and there are suspiciously high rates of suicide among the passengers.

Yeah...I could tell you some stories...

But while this sounds about as fun as a chronic illness, Kontroll is at least half a comedy. Much of this sturm und/or drang is as perversely funny as After Hours, and what isn't is impactful in surprising other ways. There's compassion and cameraderie among the bickering inspectors, between Bulcsú and the kindly old train driver Béla (Lajos Kovács), and there's even a place for beauty and inspiration amid the grungy tunnels, in the form of archetypal dream waifu Zsófi (Eszter Balla):

And her bear behind.

Yet these contrasts only serve to heighten the powerfully oppressive atmospherics of the subterranean scenario. At its bleary, acrid core, Kontroll is suffused with the same dense fog of dualism and Jungian nightmare imagery as the darkest of Lynch and Bergman.

Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: The Mighty Crusaders!

Article theme: Crusader - Saxon

Me and the boys gather round the sacred gaming chair (2025, colourised).

The Muslim conquests started in the 7th Century and devastated the Persian and Byzantine empires, not because the Arabs had superior technology, strategy or tactics, but because both empires had outsourced large swathes of their militaries to Arab mercs who simply defected to Islam en masse. No one has learned anything from this, as the Respectable Bipartisan Consensus for the west under the Global American Empire has been to continuously wage war on Muslim countries like Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria and Palestine while simultaneously importing Muslim immigrants into Europe at replacement levels.

Great job, asshole! You really thought that one through.

The same staggering endemic historical illiteracy and incuriosity explains why most westerners now think that The Crusades were unprovoked wars of aggression by Evil Christians instead of the most provoked and justified wars ever fought in history - a misnomer actively astroturfed by every single institution in the first world in a campaign of systematic DARVO that would shame Amber Heard. Pope Urban II called the First Crusade in 1095 after four and a half centuries of nonstop Muslim pillage and sporadic efforts at defence and reconquest by heroes such as Charles Martell and Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar (El Cid Campeador).

I choose to believe they were this dripmaxxed IRL.

But Italian kinograph The Mighty Crusaders, very loosely based on Jerusalem Delivered by Torquato Tasso, the epic poem that should rightly be renowned the Christian Iliad, extends thoroughly unwarranted grace to the forces that occupied Jerusalem at the time of the First Crusade. Just as in Homer's oftener regaled narrative, this siege has heroes on both sides.

For never was a story of more woe, than this of Tancredi and his mid MENA ho.

Macchiato Luigi plays Tancredi, the mightiest crusader of them all. Ferrari Pepperoni plays his archenemy and love interest, Clorinda. Gabagool Ovaheah plays Armida, the ambiguously witchy femme fatale. The epic poem has straight-up magic spells being thrown about this way and that, but the movie, much like the 2000s Troy, plays down any hint of supernatural bewitchment, rendering some of the characters' choices dumber than we might allow had the sorcery remained overt. Crusaders also treats us to some Star Trekian fight choreography:

"To win a swordfight, whip your sword around in the air like you're a helicopter" - Shadiversity

But as dumbed-down an adaptation as it inevitably is, it's still based to have an aesthetic kino celebrating those who took the cross, to say nothing of a film set in the middle ages with a colour palette beyond brown and grey.

It's also funny how Italian it all is.

Watch The Mighty Crusaders, read the poem, press S to spit on Ridley Scott, etc.

Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: Son of Sinbad!

Article theme: Girls, Girls, Girls - Mötley Crüe

It is a truth seldom acknowledged that thoughtcrimes like "orientalism" and "the male gaze" are the fundamental cornerstones of entertainment. Universally forgotten RKO gem Son of Sinbad opens with your friend and mine, Vincent Price, looking for the titular character amid the streets of Baghdad. A hot wench offers to lead him to his errant friend, but first proceeds to dance sexily for three and a half minutes of screentime. There are at least four more scenes like this in the movie.

Which prompts the question: why isn't this the case in every movie?

Sinbad, Jr. (Dale Robertson), whom we shall call Sinbad for simplicity's sake, is not a sailor like his fabled father. In fact, no scene in this movie takes place anywhere near the sea. This Sinbad is instead Joey from Friends; an amiably dim Don Juan constantly running into and away from the Caliph's guards in the act of romancing said Caliph's harem of Howard Hughes' hand-picked hotties. Price's long-suffering sidekick, whomst Infogalactic tells me is supposed to be poetical polymath Omar Khayyám, tags along in his wake and tries to bail him out of trouble, like the Jeeves to his Wooster, but in a defiantly anachronistic fantasy Arabia.

"This is another fine mess you've gotten me into" - Omar Khayyám

"How anachronistic?" you ask. Well, for starters, the plot revives the Arabs vs Mongols theme from The Thief of Bagdad, with the villains stated to be agents of Timur. The OG Sinbad stories took place in the 8th Century, Khayyám lived in the 11th and 12th, and Timur wasn't born until the 14th. Who, however, cares? If you wanted a history lesson over entertainment, you'd read my ßlôg. Son of Sinbad is pure entertainment in the vein of Tall in the Saddle, Chandu the Magician and The Adventures of Hajji Baba. The lame sub-Bob-Hope humour in the script is masterfully spun into endearing territory mostly by virtue of Price, the silver screen's crown prince of ham, trying to phone it in and failing.

"Vince, we haven't started rolling yet. Vince no. Stop it" - director.

The cheerful, breezy tone could redeem many a stumble more than Son commits and should be studied by filmmakers intent on rendering every hero a surly asshole in a grim, humourless world to appeal to that kid who used to tell everyone to "grow up" without a shred of irony in primary school. An half-assed stab at a thematic subplot has Sinbad caught in a love quadrangle with three (main) love interests, but rather than draw everything to a screeching halt to berate the audience that This Is Wrong around the act-two-low-point, Son just pairs them off with other characters at random and leaves Sinbad's gf's plea for his monogamy (but not her) unsatisfied because Sinbad is Sean Connery, not Daniel Cr**g.

"I swear to love you until the end of the credits" - SinChad

So while bluehairs and Melonie Mack simps seethe and sperg, the rest of us can cheerfully separate IRL right action from old-school James Bondian fantasy. Watch Son of Sinbad, then read the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám in Vincent Price's voice. ♪ That's entertaaainment!

Greatest Album of All Time of the Week: Secret South!

There's something about that old-timey typewriter font.

16 Horsepower came on the scene in 1996, when Nick Cave's Let Love In and Murder Ballads had been all the rage in goth-folk-alt-country-roots-blues-whatever-rock, with Sackcloth and Ashes, an album of backwoods revival tent snake handling old tyme religion so bleak, vaguely ominous and mordant the insistently jaded yet clueless 90soids must certainly have taken it for sneering pastiche, a bit of aren't-those-dueling-banjos-rubes-creepy-and-weird condescension. But by the time they rolled out Secret South something became clear to even the densest George Carlin fanboy: David Eugene Edwards and his posse of preachers weren't joking; they meant every word of their musical ministry.

"But Pat", you splutter, spit-soaked dorito fragments spraying all over your mustard-stained "Better a wolf of Odin than a lamb of God" T-shirt, its structural integrity strained to the maximum over your sparsely hairy, heaving moobs, "Christian music suuucks!" A refrain long overdue a righteous repudiation: Christian *lyrics* suck. Finding a Christian band whose verbal cogitations stretch beyond sounding horny for the Lord can be a penance in itself, but your humble blôggeur is equal to the challenge. Lordian Guard is downright stately epic metal, Batzz in the Belfry is atmospheric ethereal wave, and even the tiresomely over-maligned Stryper eventually dropped an album of straight bangers sans the crush-on-Christ cringe. But 16 Horsepower remains the highest water mark for divinely inspired, transportive musikino on the theme of almighty God.

You might have heard their rendition of well-worn standard "Wayfaring Stranger", which dips audaciously into dark ambient, but don't expect the whole album to plow the same deep furrow: "Clogger" leads the pack with a hard rock stomp, "Praying Arm Lane" awes with the inevitability of judgement, "Splinters" sounds like the eye of an almighty storm, and Bob Dylan cover "Nobody 'Cept You" exults with an energy straight from beyond the veil. Banjos, organs, squeezeboxes and more find their way in and out of the mix but there's not a hint of gimmickry left over from the first two, more theatrical, albums. Clear a space in your top ten, and get it now.