the kino park

Marty Mauser is not a very good person. From the deeply insensitive jokes he causally employs in interviews to the sociopathic pursuit of his self proclaimed singular purpose, the cup of Marty’s sins would be sufficiently running over even if he didn’t abandon his pregnant girlfriend, Rachel, in a last ditch gasp for glory. Marty’s actions, all in the name of that lofty aspiration, are frequently despicable and a case might even be made that the platitudes espoused by Marty Mauser represent morsels of the very same grind mindset that echoes across today’s toxic manosphere right wing pipelines. Of course, Marty is hardly the first problematic male ever depicted on screen, yet perhaps his sins are more pressingly identified as the film never really, at least obviously, states that his actions are reprehensible, some even finding them praiseworthy. Yet, in a much discussed and debated moment at the close of the film, one that some have found as tacit support of his pride, a more fascinati...

   you can almost hear how badly film twitter wants to call him unrecognizable here *no spoilers here really, though I guess I mention general ideas related to the movie*           To talk of The Smashing Machine is really to talk of its star. This of course is the wrestler turned actor turned marketing maniac, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, a hulking mass of human muscle whose “films” of the last several years, or perhaps more fittingly brand extension campaigns, are essentially synonymous with the least critically acclaimed movies of the decade. Whether you are thinking of Red One, Red Notice, Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle or Jungle Cruise , these are films about as acclaimed as their titles are diverse. While past movie stars of his luster and caliber were at least occasionally interested in lending their influence to more, to put it bluntly, artfully driven work, for some time Dwayne Johnson has been seemingly deadset on a spiral of increasingl...