50 Cent is going from sin to sanctity.

Hot on the heels of his recent Netflix documentary on the debauched downfall of hip-hop mogul Sean "Diddy" Combs, the rapper turned producer is set to release an urban crime drama inspired by the life of fourth-century Ethiopian monk Moses the Black.

Even in our compromised state, saints remain scandalous and alluring precisely because they cut against our deepest desires and despair.

Fans of Fox Nation’s "Martin Scorsese Presents: The Saints" will remember the violent bandit turned desert-dwelling ascetic as one of the series' most fascinating subjects. Officially recognized by Pope Leo XIII in 1887, the former slave has long been venerated as the patron saint of nonviolence and is widely praised as a symbol of the power of peace and repentance.

Out for blood

"Moses the Black," a loose retelling of that story set against the backdrop of modern-day Chicago, follows Malik (Omar Epps), a gang leader fresh out of prison and seeking to avenge his murdered friend.

Complicating his quest his is grandmother, an Orthodox Christian who gives him an icon of St. Moses, whom she describes as a "saint who was also a gang member." Haunted by frustration, loss, and a lifetime of sins, Malik starts having visions of the saint, who warns him that the bloody path he has embarked upon is one he will regret.

"Moses" — which also features hip-hop notables Wiz Khalifa and Quavo — makes for an interesting companion piece to director Yelena Popovic’s previous outing, 2021 St. Nektarios biopic "Man of God." Where that film depicts sanctity as something preserved through obedience and suffering, "Moses" imagines it reclaimed from disorder.

Mean streets

Malik navigates an inner city filled with dealers and enforcers locked into violent criminal lives, casually killing rivals or shooting up funerals over petty grudges. These sequences are among the film’s darkest and do not soften their portrayal of brutality or drug use.

"Moses" is clearly a personal project for the platinum-selling artist born Curtis Jackson, whose own background mirrors Malik's. Raised by a single mother in Jamaica, Queens — herself a drug dealer who was murdered when he was 8 — Jackson entered the drug trade at a young age. After barely surviving an attack by a rival in 2000, Jackson released his debut "Get Rich or Die Tryin'" in 2003.

Although that album cemented Jackson's association with the violence and materialism of gangsta rap, its cover found him wearing a jewel-encrusted cross necklace. The tension between survival and transformation is one Jackson understands firsthand.

As he has said:

I believe in God. I didn't survive being shot nine times for nothing. I didn't claw my way out of the 'hood just 'cause it was something to do. I know I've got a purpose, a reason for being on this planet. I don't think I've done everything I'm supposed to do yet. But I do know this: I ain't going nowhere 'til I've done it all.

Redemption song

There is something unsettling and compelling about the lives of saints. Even in our compromised state, they remain scandalous and alluring precisely because they cut against our deepest desires and despair. The film’s greatest strength is its depiction of how Catholics and Orthodox Christians turn to saints during moments of trial, seeking models of repentance and change — models Malik strains toward but does not easily inhabit.

Steven Ferdman/GC Images/Getty Images

The film’s ambitions, however, exceed its budget. Extensive handheld camerawork — whether a stylistic or budgetary choice — sits uneasily beside green-screen flashbacks and CGI-heavy desert scenes. The rough Chicago footage clashes with these elements, and the film might have benefited from a tighter focus on Malik’s interior struggle. Exaggerated performances from the supporting cast further push many scenes into melodrama.

Despite its "faith-based" trappings, "Moses the Black" is emphatically not a family film. It includes graphic violence, coarse language, and crude sexual innuendo, narrowing its audience to those inclined to receive its warning. Still, its central claim — that mercy extends even to the gravest sinners — lands with force in a culture starved for hope.

"Moses the Black" will be released through Fathom Entertainment on January 30.

Rush reunites. Let the hate begin.

The Rush reunion announcement landed like a Neil Peart cymbal crash heard from two continents away.

For some, it was a benediction. For others, a blasphemy. In America especially, Rush has always been a band that splits the room in two. On one side: devotion bordering on reverence. On the other: a curled lip, a sigh, a muttered word like “soulless” or “show-off.”

Rush endured because they never chased cool. Cool is perishable, but craft is not.

Few great bands inspire such loyalty and such irritation at the same time. Even fewer manage it without changing who they are.

A Farewell to Kings

The power trio we know as Rush formed in 1974 in Toronto, three young men chasing something bigger than barroom rock. They were loud, fast, and committed to mastery. As the years passed, they grew tighter, more disciplined, more deliberate. While other bands burned out or sold out, Rush stayed true.

That mindset carried them for four decades. Album after album. Tour after tour. By the time they bowed out in 2015, Rush had become one of the most reliable live acts in rock history. No scandals (despite a well-documented affection for Bolivian marching powder). The farewell felt final, especially as drummer Peart’s health declined. When he died in 2020, the door seemed closed for good.

Which is why this reunion lands so satisfyingly. It doesn’t feel forced. It doesn’t feel desperate. It feels natural. Two old friends picking up guitars, laughing through familiar songs, and realizing the music still matters to millions.

To others, it matters in the way a neighbor’s power drill matters — piercing, relentless, and likely to trigger a migraine.

Working Man

Rush has never fit comfortably into the American rock myth. The band wasn't blues-rooted, booze-soaked, or born of Southern swag. Geddy Lee sang like a caffeinated banshee. Alex Lifeson mixed power with precision. And Neil Peart — the irreplaceable center — treated drums like an Olympic event.

To rock traditionalists, however, something about this just felt off. Rock, to them, was meant to feel dark and dangerous. Think Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, the Who, AC/DC. Part of the gig was bringing chaos — both on and off stage. Treating hotel rooms like demolition sites and sanity as optional. Consider the late, great Ozzy Osbourne: a man who built a Hall of Fame career out of conduct that would have ended most working lives in a padded room.

Rush never subscribed to that model. And for a certain kind of American critic, that alone was enough to raise suspicion.

Rock wasn’t supposed to sound so organized. It wasn’t supposed to sound like the band had talked things through. So the complaints piled up. Too clean. Too lame. “Cheesy” and “corny” became the easy shortcuts, a way to dismiss what they didn’t want to engage with.

NurPhoto/Getty Images

Limelight

Take “Tom Sawyer,” still my personal favorite. Purists love to pick it apart. The synth line is too bright. The lyrics are too earnest. The chorus too triumphant. It doesn’t brood.

But that’s the point. “Tom Sawyer” isn’t trying to sound dangerous. The aim isn’t menace but momentum. It captures motion, confidence, and propulsion — three qualities rock critics often mistake for shallowness. Look past the childish nitpicking, and what’s left is undeniable. A song that still fills arenas, still hits hard, still makes people feel 10 feet tall.

For some critics, Rush was the band you loved if you owned graph paper and color-coded your homework. Rush's music was for the kids who finished the test early and then checked their answers. Not rebels, not wreckers, but students of the thing itself. In rock culture, that kind of seriousness was treated like a social crime.

Subdivisions

Rush is hardly alone in this. Steely Dan took the same beating, dismissed as music for dental offices, waiting rooms, and people who alphabetize their spice racks, despite writing some of the sharpest, most venomous songs of the era. Yes was mocked as bloated and indulgent. Genesis, especially after Peter Gabriel left, got the same treatment.

America has always had a complicated relationship with genuine greatness. It celebrates brilliance, but only when it looks accidental. Genius is best received if it arrives late, drunk, and a little out of control.

You see this pattern everywhere. Adam Sandler spent decades being treated like a joke because his films made money and audiences laughed until they nearly lost bladder control. Jim Carrey wasn’t taken seriously until he stopped being funny and started looking permanently unwell. Rush refused that trade and paid the cultural price.

Headlong Flight

What the reunion clarifies — especially now, in an age of irony fatigue — is that Rush endured because they never chased cool. Cool is perishable, but craft is not. When Lee and Lifeson talk about laughing while jamming, about the music “dispelling dark clouds,” they’re describing something purists often forget. Music is allowed to be joyful. It’s allowed to be exhilarating without being mystical. It can be thrilling without pretending to be profound every second.

The dark humor is that Rush’s biggest sin may have been optimism. In an era increasingly allergic to it, they believed in improvement — musical, personal, even societal. That’s unfashionable.

Cynicism sells. Rage Against the Machine built an entire brand on permanent fury, screaming about “the system” while cashing checks from it. Nine Inch Nails turned self-loathing into an aesthetic. Nirvana mattered because they captured the feeling that nothing worked and no one was coming to fix it. Misery read as honesty. Anger read as depth. Enjoyment, by contrast, looks unserious.

But why? We’re here for a good time, not a long one. Rush understood that early.

Music doesn’t always need to diagnose the human condition. Sometimes it just needs to move, lift, and hit you square in the chest. Half a century on, they’re back. Not to win over the skeptics, who never wanted convincing anyway. But to reward the faithful and quietly remind everyone else that having a good time isn’t a crime.

How the right got Dave Chappelle wrong

For years, Dave Chappelle has been treated as a kind of honorary dissident on the right. Not because he ever pledged allegiance, but because he irritated the correct people. He mocked pronouns, needled sanctimony, and refused to bow. That was enough. In a culture addicted to easy binaries, irritation became endorsement. Chappelle was recast as the anti-woke jester, the last free man in a room full of rules.

"The Unstoppable..." puts an end to that fantasy.

The right’s long flirtation with Chappelle rested on a misunderstanding. He was never an ally. He was a contrarian whose targets briefly overlapped with conservative concerns.

As the Netflix special begins, Chappelle emerges on stage wearing a jacket emblazoned with Colin Kaepernick’s name across the back, a symbol doing more work than most monologues. It is declarative. Kaepernick, a distinctly mediocre quarterback who parlayed a declining football career into a lucrative role as a full-time political brand, has long functioned more as an abstraction than as an athlete. His protest became performative, his grievance a commodity, his kneel a credential. Before a word is spoken, the audience is told where power, sympathy, and grievance will be placed. Identity is not the backdrop. Quite the opposite. It’s the billboard.

Black and white

From there, the special settles into a familiar groove. Race becomes the organizing principle, the master key, the lens through which every topic is filtered and fixed. America is again framed as a racist hellscape, a uniquely cruel experiment, a place where whiteness looms as a near-mythical menace.

This is not observation so much as obsession. The fixation risks alienating white viewers almost immediately. Some in the audience likely sense it. Others — liberal self-flagellators by instinct — laugh along anyway, even as they become the punch line of nearly every joke.

Chappelle takes aim at Elon Musk, at Trump, at the culture of DOGE-era absurdity, but the jokes rarely travel. They circle. Musk becomes less a human eccentric and more a symbol of tech-bro whiteness run amok. Trump is reduced to a prop, wheeled on whenever the set needs a familiar villain. That might be forgivable — useful, even — if the material pushed somewhere unexpected. It doesn’t. For a comedian of Chappelle’s ability, too much of the set feels curiously unambitious.

Left hook

The most telling moment comes in Chappelle’s account of Jack Johnson. Johnson, the first black heavyweight champion, endured explicit racism. That history is real. That is not in dispute. What is striking is how Chappelle treats that history. Johnson becomes less a man of his time and more a stand-in for black people in the present, besieged by the same “demonic white man.”

And so Chappelle conflates Johnson's struggles with with the lives of rappers T.I. and the late Nipsey Hussle — and celebrates all three heroes for opposing white America.

As BlazeTV host Jason Whitlock recently posted on X:

This comedy special exposes [Chappelle] as highly controlled opposition, the ultimate plant, a fraud. He pretends to be a fearless speaker of truth to power. It's laughable. No one with a brain can witness the Charlie Kirk assassination and then argue/suggest that Nipsey Hussle, T.I., and Jack Johnson were/are the real rebels, the real threats to American hegemony. Dave quoted Jack Johnson as saying his life was dedicated to the pursuit of pleasure. He was a boxer with the worldview of a modern gangsta rapper.

Some kings?

And then comes Chappelle’s praise of Saudi Arabia.

Not cautiously. Not ironically. He recounts performing at a comedy festival in Riyadh, openly boasting about the size of the paycheck. He describes feeling freer speaking there than in the United States. Freer. In a society where speech is monitored, dissent is criminalized, and punishment still includes public canings and amputations.

The audience laughs on schedule, applauding with the enthusiasm of trained sea lions. I found myself wondering why.

There is something almost surreal about hearing a man who has spent years describing America as uniquely oppressive extol the virtues of a monarchy where speech is tolerated only when it is toothless. The contradiction is never addressed. It simply floats past, buoyed by bravado and bank balance.

This isn’t hypocrisy in the cheap sense. It is something more revealing — and easier to miss because Chappelle is such a gifted orator. His moral compass isn’t anchored to freedom, but to grievance. America is condemned because it fails to live up to an ideal. Saudi Arabia is praised because it pays well and demands little beyond discretion.

It would be easier if "The Unstoppable..." were simply bad. It is not. Chappelle remains a master of timing. His cadence still carries. The problem is less talent than trajectory.

Photo by Arturo Holmes/Getty Images

Punching inward

What once felt dangerous now feels dutiful. What once cut across power now reinforces a different orthodoxy. Chappelle no longer punches up or down so much as inward, tightening his world until everything is interpreted through race alone.

The right’s long flirtation with Chappelle rested on a misunderstanding. He was never an ally. He was a contrarian whose targets briefly overlapped with conservative concerns. When he mocked trans men in women’s sports, it landed during a moment of peak absurdity, when the subject was everywhere and ripe for satire. It was easy. It was funny. But it was never a statement of allegiance.

"The Unstoppable..." makes that clear. The jacket, the Johnson parable, the Saudi sermon, the relentless racial framing — all of it points in the same direction.

Comedy, at its best, unsettles everyone. It exposes what our certainties conceal. In this special, Chappelle appears more interested in confirming his own.

Unstoppable, perhaps. But no longer subversive.

Pizza Hut Classic: Retro fun ruined by non-English-speaking staff, indifferent customer service

Pizza Hut Classic is evidence that even if a company gets its branding right, customer service is the oil that keeps the machine running.

Since 2019, Pizza Hut has been spreading its retro vibes across the continent by reintroducing its 1990s decor, design, and dining experience.

'The interior features cozy red booths and old-school Pizza Hut lamps.'

From Warren, Ohio to Hempstead, Texas, the iconic Pizza Hut chandeliers are being rehung, and the fantastic buffet is being put out once again. According to Chefs Resource, some locations have even brought back the beloved dessert bar.

Slice of life

With the return of the 1974 logo and nostalgic appeal, Pizza Hut did the inverse of Cracker Barrel. Instead of trying to modernize and simplify their decor, the pie-slingers retrofitted and cluttered theirs.

A page called the Retrologist dissected the formula and determined exactly what the word "Classic" in Pizza Hut Classic really means. To meet the new (old) standard, the writer pinpointed that each location must include the following:

1. The old logo is used in pole signage as well as at the top of the (usually but not always) red-roofed restaurant. The pole sign features the addition of the word "Classic."
2. The interior features cozy red booths and old-school Pizza Hut lamps.
3. Stickers featuring the long-discarded character Pizza Hut Pete are found on the door.
4. Posters feature classic photos from Pizza Huts of yore.
5. A plaque displays a quote from Pizza Hut co-founder Dan Carney, explaining the concept as a celebration of the brand’s heritage.

While many of the revamped locations have received rave reviews, there still exists a way to make such a fine dining experience awful, even if surrounded by everything that made customers flock to the buffet 30 years ago.

Photo by Andrew Chapados/Blaze News

Word salad

For a Pizza Hut Classic ruined by modern belief systems, look no farther than north of the border, in the Toronto suburb of Scarborough.

While the restaurant did include the iconic chandeliers and some of the retro furnishings, it did not have old soda fountains or the memorable menus spotted at other locations. Instead, this unique eatery represented a new (low) standard of lackluster customer service, coupled with sprinklings of unfettered immigration policy.

These accommodations, or lack there of, will surely split customers down political lines. Yes, there are retro red Pepsi cups, but the waitress who literally speaks no English may fill that cup with Diet Pepsi with ice instead of "water with no ice."

Is there a salad bar? Yes. Is the salad bar limited to plain lettuce and croutons? Also yes. Were there pieces of lettuce dropped in the ranch dressing (the only available dressing) for the duration of the visit? Definitely.

Photo by Andrew Chapados/Blaze News

Meat and greet

A steady rotation of cheese, deluxe, and Hawaiian pizza was only broken up by one couple's complaints about the lack of variety. A manager — also largely unintelligible in her speech — replied first with a refusal to change the rotation. Strangely, about 10 minutes later, she eventually brought out two meat lovers' pizzas, in an apparent act of defiance.

The damaged seating in the restaurant combined with a chip out of the "Hut" portion of the building's exterior revealed years-old paint and, along with it, a yearning for more care to be given. A restaurant that could be so nostalgic, but ruined by the apparent comforts of a district that has voted Liberal in its last three federal elections for a woman from the U.K. who holds citizenship in three countries, including Pakistan.

"I wanted to go to a dine-in, because in most places, including the U.K., you can't do that now," said reporter Lewis Brackpool, who visited the location. He added, "I come to one, and what do you know — it sucks."

In at a massive discount due to the exchange rate, Brackpool could not help but feel like many who are from the area: that what had been promised was robbed.

The experience can be summed up in the words of an anonymous would-be customer who, upon seeing a commercial of what a Pizza Hut buffet looked like in the 1990s in comparison to the location in question, said, "They took this from us."

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Dinesh D’Souza’s new documentary faces anti-Zionism head-on

I must admit to having a complicated relationship with Dinesh D’Souza’s documentaries.

As much as I have enjoyed several of them, I find that they falter in a few ways: They often lack staying power, offering little incentive to return to them after the moment has passed; they are too self-referential — filtering every issue through D’Souza’s own perspective; and they are preoccupied with energizing sympathetic audiences rather than persuading skeptical ones.

Where the film is likely to receive its fiercest pushback is on the subject of eschatology — the theology of the end times.

This last flaw is especially frustrating. Catering to the conservative base is easy, but with D’Souza’s resources and backing, his films could be far sharper — and far more enduring — if they focused on timeless themes rather than re-litigating the 2020 election or attacking whoever happens to be running for president that year.

Chasing the 'Dragon'

It was with this in mind that I went into D’Souza’s newest effort, "The Dragon’s Prophecy." A loose adaptation of the Jonathan Cahn book of the same name, the Angel Studios production examines the fallout of the October 7 terrorist attacks and the subsequent two-year war between Israel and Hamas (which effectively ended with a ceasefire on October 10).

Sharpness, at least, is not a problem this time. The film arrives at a harrowing moment. Tucker Carlson is condemning “Christian Zionism” as heresy; New York City has just elected a mayor who wants to arrest the prime minister of Israel; and bipartisan resentment toward American Jews hasn’t been this pronounced since Pat Buchanan implicitly blamed them for supporting the Gulf War.

Anti-Zionism — and its adjacent anti-Semitism — is enjoying a fashionable resurgence, while support for the Israeli government sits at an all-time low.

D’Souza confronts these trends head-on. He calls out Carlson — as well as the far-left bloc of House Democrats known as "the Squad" — by name, even integrating footage from Carlson’s combative June interview with Ted Cruz. The result is a forthright defense of Israel, one that bluntly characterizes Hamas as rapists, murderers, and terrorists — and depicts the group's atrocities in unflinching detail, including phone calls in which militants boast to their parents about their killings.

Intentional shock

It’s a grisly watch. The film includes insurgents shooting dogs and civilians, and it lingers on the aftermath of violence. But the shock is intentional. As Ambassador Mike Huckabee tells D’Souza, the war is “an eternal battle between good and evil,” with Israel on the side of the angels and Hamas aligned with “the Dragon.”

Amid this devastation, D’Souza wanders the Holy Land and laments that Israel is a place where “nothing is ever solved or resolved,” a region with “no solutions and no idea what the problems even are.” Yet his moral clarity never wavers. He even calls the construction of the Islamic Dome of the Rock on the Temple Mount “the true colonialism.”

His mission is to locate meaning in the conflict. To that end, he speaks with Jewish victims, archeologists uncovering evidence of ancient Israelite history, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who uses the occasion to swat at his American critics and to praise Donald Trump.

Disputed dispensation

Where the film is likely to receive its fiercest pushback is on the subject of eschatology — the theology of the end times.

Because D’Souza’s target audience is predominantly Christian, the most vocal critics may be anti-dispensationalists, whose views have become increasingly common among Catholics and mainline Protestants. They correctly note that dispensationalism is a 19th-century American theological development and that the popular notion of a “rapture” is relatively recent.

As the Protestant theologian Brian Mattson writes, “In the grand historical sweep of Christian theology, Dispensationalism is a new arrival.” He explains that its architects argued that salvation unfolds across distinct dispensations, meaning that God’s promises to Israel remain intact for ethnic Jews even as the New Testament opens salvation to Gentiles. “God has two separate ‘tracks’ for the salvation of humanity,” he writes. Thus the national promises to Israel persist in perpetuity.

This is the framework behind the "Left Behind" franchise — 16 books and five films — and it places the modern state of Israel at the center of Revelation in a way that traditional Christian readings do not.

There are legitimate biblical critiques of dispensationalism, just as there are bad-faith motives for attacking it. Mattson notes that many Gen Z “America First” Catholic converts now regard Israel as an unnecessary “foreign entanglement,” while others deploy “heresy” language as a thin veil for anti-Semitism.

Phelim McAleer

End-times evidence

Still, D’Souza’s film is thoroughly dispensationalist. Israel’s present turmoil is portrayed as evidence that the end times are near, that evil is intensifying, and that God is making Himself more visible through signs and miracles. The fate of Israel, in this reading, is inseparable from the fate of the world.

The film’s second half is a series of interviews with Israeli archeologists who discuss evidence for figures like King David and Pontius Pilate, treating their discoveries as confirmations of Scripture. When combined with commentary from a Messianic Jew such as Jonathan Cahn, the Israeli-Gaza conflict becomes a mystical drama between cosmic good and cosmic evil.

That argument rests on a contested theological system. However one responds to the film’s defense of Israel, it must be filtered through the angular lenses of American dispensationalism — a hurdle many viewers may be unwilling to clear.

Centrist appeal

There are smaller criticisms as well: The film appears to lean heavily on AI-generated imagery, which raises its own questions about execution. But in the main, the film is preaching to the broad American center — those who support Israel without belonging to either extreme.

Despite these theological quirks, the film ultimately does something I have long wished D’Souza’s documentaries would do: It speaks clearly and with conviction about an issue that possesses lasting moral weight.

Israel will remain a defining struggle for decades. October 7 is only one chapter of that broader conflict. In taking it on, D’Souza presents a moral argument to a conservative audience that is increasingly drifting from him. Whether one agrees with his conclusions or not, he is operating on the level of enduring questions of faith rather than the transitory skirmishes of electoral politics. For once, he isn’t simply preaching to the choir.

'The American Revolution' keeps founders at arm's length

If America had an official "documentarian laureate," Ken Burns would be a shoo-in for the job.

Over the last four decades, the filmmaker has devoted his career to capturing the country's history and culture, in works ranging from "Baseball," "Jazz," and "The National Parks: America's Best Idea" to his groundbreaking 1990 masterpiece "The Civil War." And despite his avowed "yellow-dog Democrat" tendencies, he has done so with remarkable nuance.

Those rallying around the American cause are portrayed as a loose collection of criminals, anarchists, slavers, and exiled aristocrats united by high Enlightenment ideals.

Now, just in time for America’s 250th anniversary, Burns has returned with a new six-part PBS series exploring how it all got started.

Fanfare and apprehension

"The American Revolution" arrives with suitable fanfare — and an almost absurdly star-studded cast of voice-over artists. Tom Hanks, Morgan Freeman, Samuel L. Jackson, Paul Giamatti, Josh Brolin, Meryl Streep, Ethan Hawke, Edward Norton, and Michael Keaton are among the luminaries who provide narration.

Even so, there has been a level of apprehension surrounding the show, particularly among conservatives. Could a commemoration of America's founding even work in our current moment — when even mild appeals to patriotism and national unity seem to stir up bitter partisan disputes?

Burns seems to have a found a way around this by making his retelling as clinical and unromantic as possible. He is clearly passionate about the American project, but he is unwilling to embrace the mythological or nationalistic sides of that passion.

Whose revolution?

“It’s our creation story,” historian Rick Atkinson says as he discusses the importance of the Revolution. But most of the experts Burns showcases prefer to focus on the negative, puncturing what one calls the “unreal and detached" romanticization of the founders.

Instead, we're invited to ponder the role that slavery and the theft of Native American land played in the fight for independence — not to mention a fair amount of unsavory violence perpetrated by the revolutionaries.

While the series does a good job of covering the conflicts between 1774 and 1783, it takes frequent detours to discuss the issues surrounding the revolution: the role of women contributing to the war, the perspectives of English Loyalists as they became refugees fleeing the conflict, the madness of the Sons of Liberty’s antics, and the perspectives of slaves trying to survive and find liberty too.

Interim Archives/Boston Globe/Getty Images

Living in the tension

A pronounced classical liberalism pervades the storytelling, one reflecting the secular Enlightenment idealism that a “new and radical” vision for mankind could be found through self-determination and freedom, apart from the aristocratic and theocratic haze of Europe.

This vision acknowledges progressive criticism of the era’s slavery and classism, but tries to integrate those faults rather than use them as grounds to discard the entire experiment. It attempts to live within the tension of history and sift out what is still valuable, rather than abandon the project altogether.

Indeed, Burns is generally good about avoiding any sort of score-settling or modern politicking, shy of a few buzzwords. He constantly uses the word “resistance” and ends with a reflection on the potential ruination of the republic by “unprincipled demagogues,” proudly quoting Alexander Hamilton that “nobody is above the law.”

The show’s consensus is overwhelmingly that the values of the Revolution were greater than the severely flawed men who fought it. To Burns, it was not merely a war, but a radical ongoing experiment in human liberty that escaped the colonies like a virus and changed the world forever. He certainly doesn’t want to throw out the liberal project, and so he constantly circles back on defending the war’s idealism.

Idealism and discomfort

This accounts for the show’s title, focusing on its revolutionary implications. It wasn’t just a war, but a change in the way people thought. The show argues that “to believe in America … is to believe in possibility,” and that studying the Revolution is important to understanding “why we are where we are now.”

Unfortunately, the intervening 12 hours require the viewer to swallow a fair share of dubious and rather inflammatory claims, including that George Washington was primarily driven by his class interests as a landowner, that popular retellings often “paper over” the violent actions of the revolutionaries, and that the founders were, on balance, hypocrites.

Its overall perspective is that it is impossible to tell the nation’s origin story in a way that is “clean” and “neat,” with clear heroes and villains. Those rallying around the American cause are portrayed as a loose collection of criminals, anarchists, slavers, and exiled aristocrats united by high Enlightenment ideals.

"The Revolution" wants both this idealism and discomfort to sit equally in your mind, as you ponder how morally compromised men could change the world. As one of the historians asks, “How can you know something is wrong and still do it? That is the human question for all of us.”

Overall, Ken Burns’ latest proves a very bittersweet watch, hardly the sentimental reflection on Americanism that the country’s approaching 250th anniversary demands, but also too idealistic and classically liberal to comfortably fit anyone’s agenda. It wants to lionize the founding’s aspirational values of democracy, equality, and revolution, while assiduously avoiding praising the people involved.

It's a remarkably watchable and entertaining work of sober disillusionment.

Do we love the 'Wicked' movies because we hate innocence?

As I watched Jon M. Chu's "Wicked: For Good" last week, I kept thinking about another, very different filmmaker: David Lynch.

Specifically, the Lynch that emerges from Alexandre Philippe's excellent 2022 documentary "Lynch/Oz," wherein we discover just how deeply the infamously surreal filmmaker was influenced by one of cinema's sweetest fantasy films: the original "Wizard of Oz."

In the era of #WitchTok ... a story like 'Wicked' has built-in appeal.

Philippe's film includes footage from a 2001 Q and A in which Lynch confirms the extent of his devotion: "There is not a day that goes by that I don't think about 'The Wizard of Oz.'"

The logic of fairyland

And that shouldn't be surprising given how much it shows up in his work. From Glinda the Good Witch making an appearance in "Wild at Heart," to the hazy, dreamlike depiction of suburbia in "Blue Velvet," his films exist in a dual state between the realm of fairyland and the underworld.

Indeed, Lynch doesn't reject either. In proper Buddhist fashion, these two forces exist in balance, equally potent and true. There is both good and evil in his world. Neither negates the other's existence. And when darkness spills over into the light, it may be tragic, but it is also just another part of the world. Like Dorothy, his protagonists find themselves walking deeper into unknown territory. The protagonists of his films truly "aren't in Kansas anymore."

"The Wizard of Oz" is potent because it captures the logic of fairyland better than almost any film ever made. Channeling the fairy stories of J.R.R. Tolkien, Lewis Carroll, and George MacDonald, it transports the mind to a realm that is more real than real, where even the most dire intrusion of evil can be set right according to simple moral rules.

As G.K. Chesterton famously puts it:

Fairy tales do not give the child his first idea of bogey. What fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of bogey. The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy tale provides for him is a St. George to kill the dragon.

Wicked good

"Wicked" and its new sequel reject this comforting clarity for something altogether more "adult" and ambiguous. Instead of presenting good and evil as objective realities that can be discerned and defeated, the films show how political authorities manipulate those labels to scapegoat some and exalt others.

They do so by swapping the original's heroes and villains. The Wonderful Wizard is a cruel tyrant. Glinda is foppish and self-obsessed. Dorothy is the unwitting tool of a corrupt regime. And Elphaba — the so-called Wicked Witch — is reimagined as a sympathetic underdog with a tragic backstory, a manufactured villain invented to keep Oz unified in ire and hatred.

Elphaba exudes a whiff of Milton's Lucifer — an eternal rebel in a tragic quest to upend the moral order. But unlike "Paradise Lost," "Wicked" presents rebellion against its all-powerful father figure not as a tragic self-deception, but as a justified response to systemic cruelty.

Witch way?

"Wicked: For Good" takes the ideas of its predecessor even further than mere rebellion. If "Wicked: Part One" is about awakening to the world's realities and becoming radicalized by them, "Wicked: For Good" is about the cost of selling out — the temptation to compromise with a corrupt system and the soul-crushing despair that follows.

This is where the irony of the film's title, "Wicked: For Good" comes in. Once a person sees the world for what it truly is, they can't go back without compromising themselves. They've "changed for good." They've awakened and can't return to sleep.

It's worth considering why the "Wicked" franchise is so wildly popular. Gregory Maguire's original 1995 novel has sold 5 million copies. The 2003 stage show it inspired won three Tony Awards and recently became the fourth longest-running Broadway musical ever. And the first film grossed $759 million last winter, with the sequel poised to make even more money.

Perhaps it is no coincidence that this outsize success comes at a time when Wicca and paganism have grown into mainstream cultural forces. In the era of #WitchTok, in which self-proclaimed witches hex politicians and garner billions of views on social media, a story like "Wicked" has built-in appeal. It offers glamorous spell-casting and a romantic tale of resistance to authority.

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A bittersweet moral

The temptation of witchcraft is one that always hovers over our enlightened and rationalistic society. Particularly for young women, witchcraft offers a specific form of autonomy and power — over body, spirit, and fate — that patriarchal societies often deny. Many view witchcraft as progressive and empowering; "witchy vibes" have become a badge of identity.

Thus the unsettling imagery of Robert Eggers' 2015 film "The Witch" comes into focus: A satanic coven kidnaps and kills a Puritan baby, seduces a teenage girl, and gains the power to unsubtly "defy gravity" through a deal with the devil.

"Wicked" is all about this power to transcend. Even as its protagonist grows despairing in the second film and abandons her political quest for the freedom of the wastelands, the film presupposes that it is better to resist or escape a corrupt system than submit to it.

Ultimately, the two films leave their audience with a bittersweet moral: Society is dependent on scapegoats. The Platonic noble lie upon which all societies rest cannot be escaped — but it can be redirected. A new civic myth can be founded that avoids sacrificing the vulnerable and overthrows the demagogues atop Mount Olympus. And the witches play the central role in overturning the world of Oz. Their rebellion sets it free.

But because the films blur the clear, objective distinction between good and evil — even while acknowledging that real evil exists — the characters in "Wicked" often drift in moral grayness, defining themselves mainly in relation to power. The world becomes overbearing, radicalizing, and morally unstable.

Sad truth

This is far afield from the vision of Oz presented in the 1939 film, the one David Lynch venerated as vital to his understanding of the world. But it reflects how modern storytellers often grapple with Oz. Almost every sequel or spin-off struggles to recapture the sincerity of the original. The 1985 sequel "Return to Oz" reimagined the land with a dark-fantasy twist. 2013's "Oz the Great and Powerful" comes closest to the original tone but centers on fraudulence and trickery.

"Wicked," too, falls in line with the modern tendency to subvert and complicate traditional stories of good versus evil. "Frozen," "The Shape of Water," "Game of Thrones," and "Star Wars: The Last Jedi" all explore morally conflicted worlds where bravery is futile or where Miltonian rebellion is celebrated.

Of course, seeing the stories of our childhood with a jaundiced adult eye can be quite entertaining; it's perfectly understandable why even those not in covens love these films. They are well-made, well-performed, and especially irresistible to former theater kids (I am one).

Their popularity isn't inherently bad either. They are perfectly fine in isolation. It is only when we contrast them with the clarity and beauty of the original — and place them within the context of our society — that a sad truth emerges: Finding fairyland is hard. Most of us prefer to live in the Lynchian underworld.

'Slam Frank': The Anne Frank musical with something to offend everyone

Ten years ago, I sat in the dark at the Public Theater in downtown New York City, surrounded by a murmuring crowd, waiting for the curtain to rise on a brand-new play called "Hamilton."

At that point in time, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s hip-hop musical had yet to become the behemoth it is now. Quite the opposite — there were no cast albums or Disney+ recordings, and aside from a few regional workshops years earlier and its word-of-mouth reputation as the “next big thing,” no one in the audience had any idea what we were in for.

A pansexual Latina Anne Frank with an Afro-Caribbean tiger mom and a chronically 'neurospicy' closet case for a dad? Now you've gone too far.

Expanding the form

The next few hours were filled with a strange, albeit thoroughly impressive, showing of lyrical prowess. Miranda had somehow managed to turn historian Ron Chernow's 818-page Alexander Hamilton biography into a crowd-pleasing, pop-culture-infused depiction of the earliest days of a fledgling America.

More provocative was Miranda's deliberate choice to cast primarily black and Latino actors to portray the founding fathers. While a few nitpickers balked at the spectacle of "people of color" portraying slave owners, most marveled at the audacious ingenuity of it: What could be more revolutionary than retelling the American story so that it reflects all Americans?

The crowd left the theater excited. There was no doubt that we had witnessed something groundbreaking. If Aaron Burr could be black and Alexander Hamilton Puerto Rican, what else was possible?

Decolonizing 'Diary'

Eight years later, lyricist and composer Andrew Fox stumbled upon an answer. It came to him in the form of a (since-deleted) 2022 Twitter thread hotly debating a never-before-asked question: Did Anne Frank ever acknowledge her white privilege?

As is often the case, the online arguing devolved into acrimonious ad hominem and fruitless whataboutism. Fox realized that mere words would never get to heart of the matter. As with "Hamilton," it would take the power of musical theater to win hearts and minds. And he would do Miranda's non-white casting one better — reimagining Anne Frank herself as a person of color.

And so Fox and librettist Joel Sinensky set out to transform the "Diary of Anne Frank" into "Slam Frank," an intersectional, multiethnic, gender-queer, decolonized, anti-capitalist, hyper-empowering Afro-Latin hip-hop musical.

Originally slated for three weeks at small off-Broadway venue the Asylum, "Slam Frank" has become a massive hit for the theater, which recently extended its run through the end of December.

Piercings and Patagonias

Want diversity? Look no farther than the viewers showing up in droves. At any given performance, you can find a septum piercing, a Patagonia vest, and a pair of bifocals all in the same row.

Yes, even liberals enjoy "Slam Frank," despite the outrage it has provoked in some of their compatriots. “This whole project is head-spinningly grotesque and offensive,” went one post to the r/JewsOfConscience sub-Reddit. “Bringing up the holocaust and not mentioning the current genocide in Gaza just gives me the ick,” lamented another.

The irony of takes like these is thick, since one can imagine these same critics of "Slam Frank" being perfectly open to the idea of race- and gender-swapping other historical characters. But a pansexual Latina Anne Frank with an Afro-Caribbean tiger mom and a chronically "neurospicy" closet case for a dad? Now you've gone too far.

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A real production

The show's earliest marketing attracted attention with a simpler question: “Is 'Slam Frank' a real musical?”

The answer is a decisive "yes." "Slam Frank" is not a social media gimmick or an expertly crafted exercise in long-form rage- bait. Again: It is a full-length show, with a cast, that is being performed on regularly scheduled dates at the Asylum NYC.

I know because I've seen it. "Slam Frank" is not just a real production, but an entertaining one. It is smartly written, balancing humor with sincerity, featuring songs composed and performed with impressive musicianship. Think Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s "The Book of Mormon" or the award-winning puppet extravaganza "Avenue Q" — but with a final gesture of leftist piety that pushes the logic of your average keffiyeh-clad student protester at Columbia to uncomfortable extremes.

The shocking finale is played so straight that plenty will miss the satire, and even those in on the joke may notice how easily it could be mistaken for peak-wokeness agitprop. If there is a clear "message" here, the show's creators aren't about to clarify it. "Slam Frank" is happy to offend each viewer in whatever way he, she, or they wish to be offended. How's that for inclusive?

'Landman': Is Taylor Sheridan's gritty oil drama the last honest show about America?

The days of "The Wire," "The Sopranos," "Boardwalk Empire," "Breaking Bad," and "Better Call Saul" are gone. And they're never coming back.

Instead of quality TV, we get a stream of shallow muck that insults our intelligence and wastes our time. Seth Rogen peddling the same stale stoner humor for the thousandth time. Pedro Pascal starring in a dystopian video-game adaptation so obsessed with gay "representation" that it might as well list Grindr as a co-producer.

Sheridan shows a country held together by early mornings, long shifts, and people who take pride in work most citizens rarely notice.

Then, just as you’re about to suffocate in the hothouse atmosphere of algorithm-driven fake-prestige TV, one show comes stomping in with a pair of steel-toed boots and kicks the door off its hinges. Fresh air floods the place — enough that something real might actually grow again. That show is "Landman."

Drill, baby, drill

Forget "shame"; it's time to drill, baby, drill. Taylor Sheridan's hit is back for season 2, with the TV auteur once again proving that he is one of the few people in Hollywood who actually understands the America he is depicting. Many viewers know him from "Yellowstone," the rare modern hit that refused to treat ranchers the way Hollywood treats anyone who still works with their hands. Where executive elites see deplorables, he sees Americans with stories worth telling.

Sheridan brings that same respect to "Landman." He writes ordinary Americans with dignity rather than derision. He shows them as they are: hardworking, flawed, loyal, funny, and strong enough to carry a story on their backs. "Landman" is no cheap cousin of "Yellowstone." It stands tall: lean, mean, focused, and built with the same skill that made Sheridan’s early work impossible to ignore.

The show moves effortlessly between blue-collar reality and white-collar brutality, revealing the canyon between those who pull the oil from the ground and those who profit from it. There’s a real honesty to that contrast. Sheridan knows this world, and it shows. You feel it in every shot of the Permian Basin. You hear it in the blunt, believable way his characters speak.

Billy Bob at his best

And then there’s Billy Bob Thornton. One of America’s finest actors, doing his best work since he stole "Fargo" as a soft-spoken psychopath who could change the temperature of a room with a single line. As Tommy Norris, a ruthless oilman, he brings back that same menace, just a little more restrained. He’s the perfect Sheridan creation: bruised, stubborn, quick to size people up, and capable of cruelty when pushed.

Season 1 worked best when it put Norris at the center and let everything else orbit around him. The very first scene of the very first episode sets the tone. Norris, blindfolded in a room with a cartel heavy, cracks a dry line about how they both traffic in addictive products. His just happens to make more money. It’s a joke with teeth. Sheridan doesn’t shy away from the darker corners of the oil world, the places where danger, deceit, and obscene wealth share the same bed.

Norris once ran his own outfit. Now he’s a fixer for M-Tex Oil, answering to Monty Miller, a billionaire played by Jon Hamm of "Mad Men" fame. Hamm leans into one of the last great “man’s man” roles on TV. He moves through marble corridors and executive suites with the relaxed confidence of a man who has never had to fight for a parking space or a paycheck.

Norris gets the other Texas. The asylum-adjacent McMansion he shares with co-workers. The long, unforgiving drives that eat up whole days. And the late-night waffle joints where truckers, rig hands, and the down-and-outs swallow bad coffee and brood over worse decisions.

Recognizably real

Sheridan shows a country held together by early mornings, long shifts, and people who take pride in work most citizens rarely notice. He zooms in on communities where faith still shapes daily life, where people curse when they have to, where men bow their heads before a meal and chew tobacco like there’s no tomorrow.

For conservatives, and especially for Christians who are tired of being reduced to stereotypes, "Landman" feels recognizably real. Season 1 had its flaws, including a few moments that leaned too hard into climate panic, but it never lost sight of what matters: good storytelling built on real characters and real consequences.

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Men at work

And yes, the progressive pearl-clutchers will claim "Landman" has a “woman problem,” the same complaint they threw at "Yellowstone." They insist that Sheridan sidelines women or turns them into cardboard cutouts.

The truth is far less dramatic. Both ranching and the oil fields are worlds dominated by men, and Sheridan writes them as they actually are, not as activists wish them to be. That’s not misogyny, but an accurate reflection of the reality millions of Americans live every day. Sure, some female characters could use more lines, but that hardly damages the show. It simply acknowledges that in these worlds, the danger, the decisions, and the dirty work fall mostly on men.

"Landman" also has something most modern shows forget: a genuine sense of place. Not the packaged Americana you see on postcards, but the West Texas that actually exists, where the heat melts your mind and vacation time is something you hear about, not something you get.

Season 2 promises to go deeper — underground for the oil and under the skin of the people who pull it out. More tension between the barons and the boys in the mud. More of Thornton’s world-weary wit. And more of what Sheridan does better than anyone around: crafting TV that wouldn’t look out of place beside the giants of the late 1990s and early 2000s.

If "Yellowstone" was Sheridan’s hymn to the American ranch, "Landman" is his sermon on the American worker. In an age of narrative nothingness, something on TV finally feels worth watching.

Louis CK's 'Ingram': Skilled comic spews self-indulgent self-abuse

For more than two centuries, the great American novel has tempted writers who dreamed of capturing the country’s soul between two covers.

From Melville’s "Moby-Dick" to Fitzgerald’s "The Great Gatsby," from Faulkner’s haunted South to Steinbeck’s dust-caked plains, these novels shaped the way Americans saw themselves. Even in decline, the form still attracted giants. Updike, Roth, Morrison — writers who made words shine and sentences sing. Each tried to show what it means to be American: to dream, to stumble, and to start again.

To compound matters, 'Ingram' isn’t just a story of exploration, but also one of self-exploration, in the most literal and least appealing sense.

Now comes comedian, filmmaker, and repentant sex pest Louis C.K. to try his hand at what turns out to be ... a not-great American novel. In truth, it’s awful.

Road to nowhere

"Ingram" reads like a road map to nowhere — meandering, bloated, and grammatically reckless. The prose wanders as if written under anesthesia. Sentences stretch, then sag. The paragraphs arrive in puddles, not lines. There’s an energy in C.K.’s comedy — a kind of desperate honesty — that, on stage, electrifies. But on the page, that same honesty slips into self-indulgence. The book is less "On the Road" and more off the rails.

To be clear, I love his comedy. I’ve seen him live and will see him again in the new year. He remains one of the most gifted observers of human absurdity alive — a man who can mine a half-eaten slice of pizza for existential truth. But this is not about comedy. This is about writing. And C.K. cannot write. The pacing, the architecture, the restraint — none of it is there.

Rough draft

The story unfolds in a version of rural Texas that seems to exist only in C.K.’s imagination, a land of dull prospects and even duller minds. At its center is Ingram, a poor, half-feral boy raised in poverty and pushed out into the world by a mother who tells him she has nothing left to offer. His education consists of hardship and hearsay. He treats running water like sorcery and basic plumbing like black magic. C.K. calls it “a young drifter’s coming of age in an indifferent world,” but it reads more like rough stand-up notes bound by mistake.

The writing is atrocious. Vast portions of the book read like this:

I couldn’t see my eyes, but I knew what was on my throat was a hand by the way it was warm and tightening and quivering like you could feel the thinking inside each finger, which were so long and thick that one of them pressed hard against the whole side of my face.

Or this:

I sat up, rubbing my aching neck til my breath came back regular, and I crawled out the tent flap myself, finding the world around me lit by the sun, which, just rising, was still low enough in the sky to throw its light down there under the great road, which was once again roaring and shaking above me.

Sentences stretch on like prison terms, suffocated by their own syntax, gasping for punctuation. The dialogue is somehow worse. Ingram’s conversations with the drifters and degenerates he meets on his journey stumble from cliché to confusion, the rhythm of speech giving way to nonsensical babble.

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A gripping tale

To compound matters, "Ingram," isn’t just a story of exploration, but also one of self-exploration, in the most literal and least appealing sense. There’s a staggering amount of masturbation. C.K. doesn’t so much write about shame as relive it, page after sticky page. His public fall from grace plays out again and again, only now under the pretense of art. It’s less confession than repetition — self-absolution by way of self-abuse, and somehow still not funny.

Any comparisons to writers like Bukowski or Barry Hannah are little more than wishful thinking. Bukowski was grimy, but in a graceful way. He wrote filth with style, turning hangovers into hymns.

Hannah’s madness had a tune to it, strange but unmistakably his own. Even Hunter S. Thompson, at his most incoherent, had velocity. His sentences tore through the page, drug-fueled but deliberate.

C.K.’s writing has none of that. He tries to channel Americana — the heat, the highways, the hard men who dream of escape — but his clumsy prose ensures the only thing channeled is confusion. As C.K. recently told Bill Maher, he did no research for the book, and that much is evident from the first page. His characters talk like they were written by a man who’s only seen Texas through "No Country for Old Men."

Don't quit your day job

In the history of American letters, many great writers have fallen. Hemingway drank himself into oblivion; Mailer stabbed his wife; Capote drowned in his own decadence. But their sentences still stood. Their craft was the redemption. With "Ingram," C.K. has no such refuge. The book exposes the limits of confession as art — that point where self-exposure turns into self-immolation. It could have been great; instead, it’s the very opposite. The only thing it proves is that writing and performing are different callings. Comedy forgives indiscipline. Literature doesn’t.

The great American novel has survived worse assaults — from bored professors, from self-serious minimalists, from MFA factories that mistake verbosity for vision. But rarely has it been dragged so low by someone so convinced of his brilliance. There’s perverse poetry in it, though. A man who was caught with his pants down now delivers a novel that never pulls them back up.