Month: January 2026

The reviews are in

FUCK.

German-occupied Poland, summer of 1943. More than anything, Hedwig, an indefatigable mother of five, wants to keep her well-organised life as is. After all, she has worked her fingers to the bone to create a fragrant slice of paradise to raise her children, and nothing will change that. If only her husband, the distinguished SS officer and Auschwitz commander Rudolf Hoess, weren’t always burdened by his duties. But perfection is a fleeting illusion. As the oblivious life of the commandant’s wife unravels in cloudless bliss, Rudolf finds himself swamped with work, saddled with testing a new ventilation design and overseeing the installation of a highly effective Topf and Sons multi-muffle, non-stop incineration oven system. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine that just a hair’s breadth away from the peaceful and idyllic Höss household, the unimaginable horrors of the Final Solution were unfolding in full swing. And as noisome fumes and muffled, blood-curdling noises blemish Hedwig’s verdant utopia, a question emerges. When evil becomes banal and apathy requires no effort, what separates man from beast?

That is the IMDB summary of the film The Zone of Interest. Obviously there’s been a lot of comparison with the Krasnov regime to the schöne Zeiten of Germany in the 1930s/40s, but I think Xan Brooks just drew the bleakest and nastiest one, and he only gets nastier after that:

This mood of cosy conviviality extends all the way through the opening credits; at which point the chill descends and the novocaine kicks in, as the film’s star and executive producer proceeds to guide us – with agonising glacial slowness – through the preparations for her husband’s second presidential inauguration. She glides from the fashion fitting to the table setting, and from the “candlelit dinner” to the “starlight ball”, with a face like a fist and a voice of sheet metal. “Candlelight and black tie and my creative vision,” she says, as though listing the ingredients in a cauldron. “As first lady, children will always remain my priority,” she coos, and you can almost picture her coaxing them into her little gingerbread house.
No doubt there is a great documentary to be made about Melania Knauss, the ambitious model from out of Slovenia who married a New York real-estate mogul and then found herself cast in the role of a latter-day Eva Braun, but the horrific Melania emphatically isn’t it. It’s one of those rare, unicorn films that doesn’t have a single redeeming quality. I’m not even sure it qualifies as a documentary, exactly, so much as an elaborate piece of designer taxidermy, horribly overpriced and ice-cold to the touch and proffered like a medieval tribute to placate the greedy king on his throne.

And, a bit more locally, this critic saw it was eight other people. Yes, as many as that:

As I emerge from the cinema, I have the strange feeling that I have not only learned nothing but lost brain cells.
“What did you think?” I ask the elderly lady. “I loved it, wow!” she cries.
I pin down the only two people who didn’t see the movie alone. The couple tell me they’re a fan of Trump, and of Melania, but they found the experience too much like a “PR vehicle”.
“It’s not as insightful as I thought it would be,” one says.
“I’ve loved Melania for 15 years … and I feel like it was made to make Trump look better,” the other says.
“As much as it was for her, it was for him.”
Isn’t everything.

Still, at least it’s actually showing here, which is more than can be said for some countries:

Cinemas in South Africa will not be showing the documentary about US First Lady Melania Trump that is due to be released around the world on Friday.
The South African distributor Filmfinity has decided not to release it, its head of sales and marketing told the New York Times and South Africa-based website News24. The company was not explicit about the reasons behind the move.
The film, Melania, is not promoted on the websites of the country’s main cinema chains. One Cape Town independent cinema contacted by the BBC said that it was called by Filmfinity and told not to list it.
Relations between the US and South Africa have seriously deteriorated over the past year. […]
“Based on recent developments, we’ve taken the decision to not go ahead with a theatrical release in territory,” Filmfinity’s Thobashan Govindarajulu is quoted as saying by the New York Times.
He told News24 that the decision had been taken “given the current climate”.
The executive did not elaborate on what he meant by “recent developments” or “current climate”.

Trump’s insistence that there’s a “white genocide” happening in South Africa and Cyril Ramaphosa’s letting it happen has nothing to do with it, I’m sure. In its way, this is the best review of all, I suppose…

EDIT (late night Feb. 3rd): There’s been a correction to the Xan Brooks review:

Which answers the question I did have about why Brooks still gave the film one star instead of none if he thought it was that heinous, i.e. 0/5 was the intended rating. Bloody subeditors, eh…

Melania goes down?

Remember that “documentary” about the current Mrs Trump? It is now bidding fair to be one of the worst box office tankers of all time, having cost an obscene $40m (which NO documentary should ever cost; apparently nwarly three-quarters of that amount went to its subject) plus an alleged $35m extra for marketing. It looks like it will return almost none of that investment. From the Graun:

UK ticket sales for Melania are so far “soft”, according to Tim Richards, the chief executive of Vue, one of the country’s biggest cinema operators. Just one ticket has been sold for the first 3.10pm screening on Friday at its flagship Islington branch in London, while two have been booked for 6pm.
At the time of publication, all seats remained available for the 28 screenings of Melania at the Blackburn, Castleford and Hamilton branches.
The picture was slightly rosier at the Cineworld in Wandsworth, which had sold four tickets, while five backrow seats were also booked at the Cineworld in Broughton. […]
One industry analyst told the Guardian they suspected the underlying strategy was “four-walling”, meaning distributors pay a set fee to each cinema if they agree to play a certain title.
This would explain why so many exhibitors – which usually adopt a revenue-sharing model with distributors – have agreed to take on a movie with such modest financial prospects at a time when award-nominated films are vying for screen time.
“I’d be amazed if box office gets reported on this title,” added the pundit, who wished to remain anonymous.

I’m sure the box office will be reported… it’s just that the report will be a complete lie. The regime is so full of shit about everything else, it’s not going to be honest about this either… It is being shown in Australia, too, but, per Channel 9, it’s doing about as badly here as in the UK:

At its one screening this Friday at Sydney’s Hoyts Warringah Mall, not a single ticket has been sold. In Cronulla, one person is going.
At three cinemas in Melbourne, nobody has reserved a seat. Two tickets have been sold at a fourth.
Most people don’t buy movie tickets several days ahead of time, so the true reception won’t be known until Friday.
But a lack of pre-sales does indicate a lack of interest.

The other thing the film has lacked, apparently, is critic previews, which is never a good sign for any film and is a worse sign than normal for this particular one. And the behind the scenes stuff that’s coming out thanks to Rolling Stone is illuminating, too:

One person familiar with the production estimated that some two-thirds of the crew members who worked on the film in New York had requested not to have their names formally credited on the documentary. A separate person who will be credited on the film said that, after experiencing the first year of Trump’s second term, they now wish they had not put their name on it. “I’m much more alarmed now than I was a year ago,” that person said.
People who worked on the film said they had fewer problems working with Melania Trump herself, who was described as friendly and very engaged in the process, than they did with the director, Brett Ratner. (“She was totally nice,” one person said. “She was the opposite of Brett Ratner.”) […]
“I feel a little bit uncomfortable with the propaganda element of this,” one member of the production team said. “But Brett Ratner was the worst part of working on this project.” That person said they weren’t aware of Ratner’s involvement until just days before filming began, and they would not have accepted the job if they’d known.

Ah, Brett Ratner, the accused sexual predator who hasn’t made a film since 2014 cos he fled to Israel after those accusations… sex pests look after one another, don’t they… That’s another thing putting people off, apart from the film’s subject matter… I do see some comments saying not to write it off, it could do more than the expected $5m the most optimistic prediction was suggesting; that Reagan hagiography a couple of years ago took some $30m at the box office despite the critical drubbing it got because enough of the Cult went to see it out of sacred duty. Mind you, that still wasn’t enough for that film to make a profit, and I don’t see the Melania thing achieving that either… what, $75m allegedly spent on this thing in an industry where a film usually has to bring in three or so times its cost before it’s considered a profitable success? I don’t see a documentary doing that, especially this one, even on Amazon Prime where it will soon be dumped.

But so what, really? What is $75 million to Jeff Bezos, a man with a fortune just shy of $250 billion? Small change at best, three ten-thousandths of his overall wealth. The Melania film will probably do OK on Prime, but will almost certainly never recover its costs cos the Cult isn’t that big, but Bezos will never notice and profit wasn’t the point here anyway: it was only ever a colossal suck-up to the regime, for Bezos to curry favour with Mushroom Cock, and as long as the latter has his monument that’s all that matters. I do suspect, mind you, that a large part of whatever audience the film gets will wind up being liberals hate-watching it; I just hope that, like me, if they do that, they also plan to pirate the thing rather than pay for it…

Insert Carl McCoy here

On a lighter note, Threads (which I still check out most days) has turned particularly silly in the last few hours…

So, the weather in the US has been quite foul lately, even for this time of year, and someone somewhere was inspired to develop the idea that the US “government” has engineered the weather to stop the Biblical Leviathan from awaking and to drive it back into its frozen slumber. This is FUCKING MAGNIFICENT, especially cos no one seems to know how it started nor whether (nearly wrote that as “weather” HO HO) the people who started it  mean it or not. A lot of people do seem to be invoking it sarcastically as a meme, but the funnier and sadder responses come from people not getting the joke (if it is one), e.g.:

Well, in spite of my own education (Matraville Primary 1980-86, Sydney Boys High School 1987-92, University of NSW 1993-97, and two TAFE courses 2001-03), I’ve never seen satellite imagery off the tip of Argentina/Chile before because there’s never been any reason why I SHOULD have done. I generally don’t NEED satellite imagery of anywhere, let alone the arse of South America, my interests and activities generally don’t require that sort of thing. I imagine MOST people are in a similar position to me, in that they don’t take a regular active interest in this sort of thing, but when someone shows them a cool picture like this they’ll say “oh, that’s a cool picture”, they’ll acknowledge it positively despite that… and then some prat comes up and screams at them for not being more interested in science.

Then there’s Paula here:

Here’s something else she seems to be serious about:

I think I’ll pass on that offer, thanks. At least some people are retaining their senses of irony:

And this is hard to argue with too:

As a respite from the horrors, this whole Leviathan thing certainly has been one. And, as a final note, this is also hard to argue with:

Up, up and aw-AI?

This won’t end in catastrophe at all.

The Trump administration is planning to use artificial intelligence to write federal transportation regulations, according to U.S. Department of Transportation records and interviews with six agency staffers.
The plan was presented to DOT staff last month at a demonstration of AI’s “potential to revolutionize the way we draft rulemakings,” agency attorney Daniel Cohen wrote to colleagues. The demonstration, Cohen wrote, would showcase “exciting new AI tools available to DOT rule writers to help us do our job better and faster.”
Discussion of the plan continued among agency leadership last week, according to meeting notes reviewed by ProPublica. Gregory Zerzan, the agency’s general counsel, said at that meeting that President Donald Trump is “very excited about this initiative.” Zerzan seemed to suggest that the DOT was at the vanguard of a broader federal effort, calling the department the “point of the spear” and “the first agency that is fully enabled to use AI to draft rules.”
Zerzan appeared interested mainly in the quantity of regulations that AI could produce, not their quality. “We don’t need the perfect rule on XYZ. We don’t even need a very good rule on XYZ,” he said, according to the meeting notes. “We want good enough.” Zerzan added, “We’re flooding the zone.”

There’s several hundred living human beings on any given plane flight, and I feel like settling for “good enough” in this situation could lessen their chances of making it back to the ground alive. Does Gregory want to potentially “flood the zone” with corpses? I don’t know, maybe we overstate the potential problems of this sort of thing, but then again, maybe we have to so that the problems don’t actually ensue?

…

I don’t want to talk about Alex Pretti, cos that’s such an unspeakable story; it was bad enough when the news started spreading before I went to bed last night and, frankly, it didn’t get any better when I got up this afternoon. I refer you instead to Wiki for a summary of things because I don’t want to have to write about it.

There was a rally at which this was taken:

And… I can’t disagree with that. I’ve said before about how much I hate that this regime has made me a worse person because I’m increasingly OK with everyone in it dying. Now I’m increasingly feeling it’s necessary that they do. It won’t end with Mushroom Cock finally popping his clogs (which I expect him to do before 2026 is over), because he will be replaced by someone probably worse. And those people will be replaced too by even worse people. I don’t see it ending except with the absolute destruction of the entire Republican party and everyone associated therewith; as long as the Republican party exists, this will continue. Abolishing ICE won’t suffice, the whole fucking party and everyone it gives a home to has to be destroyed so that it can never return. Nothing else is going to be remotely enough.

And I HATE that. I don’t WANT these pieces of shit to HAVE to die, and I don’t WANT to be happy when they do even though I’ve no doubt I will be. I don’t LIKE being this person. But it is increasingly the person I am, where I wish nothing but unspeakable evil on MAGA from Trump on down to his individual cultists. And I hate that. I hate that I can barely think of MAGA as people, cos that really just makes me as bad as them. I don’t want to say anything else for now. I’m just done, I want to get back to posting comparatively silly stuff.

I forgot to mention this…

Screenshot from Facebook a couple of weeks ago by my friend Matt who, frankly, had the best response to the news. Another friend commented that she’d heard the song and was initially convinced it was a generative AI parody, so I had to listen to it myself, and GODDAMN genAI parodies should feel insulted by that comparison. It is THAT terrible. But the album is evidently not the one he’s spent years pissing and moaning about how he can’t get a record label to release it; apparently this is another one entirely, and the idea of self-releasing the other one has never occurred to him even though Capitol Records gave back the rights to it.

Still, at least some things in Mozchester remain reassuringly the same: