Weaponize Art

Weaponizing Art

The return of #BrandZero has dissident creatives asking how they can use their art to counter the prevailing narrative. Taking the Death Cult-profaned entertainment industry back looks like a nonstarter since Hollywood is quickly falling to China. Starting a parallel cinema scene might be a more feasible idea for dissidents.…
July 28, 202115 Comments
Lecter Skinsuit

Ignore the Skinsuits

A major hurdle to understanding our new era that most people struggle to surmount is the shift from an economic frame to a moral frame. Everyone currently living in the West was raised under a Left vs Right paradigm with roots in the eighteenth century. Especially in its American expression,…
July 27, 202127 Comments
Master and Commander

Master and Commander

As Hollywood progressively loses touch with its audience, finding a genuinely entertaining, non-propagandizing movie made after 1997 is a rare treasure indeed. One such overlooked gem graced theaters in 2003 to critical acclaim but disappointing box office. Yet it remains a sterling exemplar of its genre and even has wisdom…
July 26, 202124 Comments
Post-PopCult

The Post-Pop Cult Age

Almost everyone reading this grew up under a largely monolithic American pop culture. Whether it's Baby Boomers' love of the Beatles or the multigenerational Star Wars fandom that originated with Gen X, anyone who came of age in the past several decades could easily navigate the pop landscape by several…
July 23, 202114 Comments
Tarantino

The Tarantino Riddle

If you're a member of Generation X or Gen Y, chances are the films of Quentin Tarantino affected how you interact with pop culture to this day. His status as the last man standing of the indie directors who broke onto the early 90s film scene makes him a black…
July 20, 202110 Comments
FF VII Remaster

Defusing the Pop Bomb

Rivers of ink have been spilled in our corner of the counterculture scene about Cultural Ground Zero. For the uninitiated, that's a shorthand description of the abrupt decline that struck Western entertainment right around 1997. The movie moguls, rock gods, and video game wizards who'd spent the 80s and 90s…
June 11, 202115 Comments

Mann Hunt

An FBI agent racing against time to catch a grisly serial killer before he strikes again seeks help from an even more cunning and brutal killer who plays mind games with his interviewer from behind bars. This adaptation of a Thomas Harris best seller took a bit to gain traction…
May 20, 2021

Money Isn’t Real

"Money isn't real." That's the advice Fred Jung, played by Ray Liotta, gives his son George in the 2001 crime drama biopic Blow. Though more workmanlike than visionary in its execution and more of a noteworthy mid list film than a classic, Blow has an abundance of wisdom to share about…
May 20, 2021

Stealing the Limelight

The clearest creative vision can be thwarted if a writer's own characters get other ideas. Sometimes a secondary character can emerge from the background and steal the limelight from the rest of the cast. These breakout characters often start out benign, but studio and network interference are notorious creative carcinogens. Here…
May 20, 2021

OG #StarWarsNotStarWars

Now that #StarWarsNotStarWars has secured its place at the apex of newpub, it's worth looking back at what made the original Star Wars successful. I've long maintained that George Lucas achieved his genre-redefining opus by solving old storytelling problems in fresh and exciting ways. Specifically, he presented refined expressions of…
May 20, 2021