Media: The week of WTF?

Last week, across the country, the phrase "WTF" had to be on everyone's lips because it was just one WTF moment after another.

For example, films.  Bruce Haring (DEADLINE) reported: 

 

The power of Taylor Swift compels you. And it’s also worked its ways on producer Jason Blum, who cast out his The Exorcist: Believer to an earlier October release date to avoid a clash with Swift's concert film.

Blum explained his reasoning in an interview with EW.

"The one thing that scares me to death is Taylor Swift!" Blum said.

"We had this amazing Friday the 13th in October, which is the single best day to release a scary movie," said Blum. no doubt shaking his head. He originally paid homage by writing the tag #Exorswift” on Twitter when the Eras announcement came out.

 

Later that same day, things changed. "Look what you made me do," Blum wrote, quoting a Swift song. "The Exorcist: Believer moves to 10/6/23 #TaylorWins."

"Obviously, we moved off that [date] and we bowed our head to Taylor Swift," Blum said. "It was too risky to see if 'Exorswift' was going to take or not. People will still have the Exorswift opportunity, so maybe we got to have our cake and eat it, too."

 

Say it with us, "WTF"?

The film industry supposedly wants to recover.  Yet you'd never know it from the timid and reduced schedules.  Each week, they offer one 'sure thing' that sometimes hits and sometimes crashes and burns.  They repeatedly blink when they should press on.

If a Friday the 13th belongs to any film, it's a horror film.  And if a direct sequel to the all time horror champ THE EXORCIST -- with Ellen Burstyn back in her Academy Award nominated role of Chris MacNeil -- can't stand up to a concert film, is this new EXORCIST just not that good?

That's the message sent.

Taylor Swift is a very popular singer and songwriter.  She does well with live concerts (she's not selling out venues, however, which is why this tour has seen so many upgrades on the night of the concert -- people who bought cheaper seats being moved closer to the stage to fill the empty, higher priced seats that did not sell).  A few years back, NETFLIX had a popular concert special from Taylor.  Popular.  Not break records for streaming, merely popular. 

And that's what concert films are in North America, merely popular -- if they're lucky.

Miley Cyrus and Justin Bieber had two 'hit' concert films -- 2011 and 2009.  They both grossed, in North America, approximately $31.1 million.  

That's a 'hit' concert film.

And that's what caused UNIVERSAL PICTURES to blink?  

Two of the biggest films of the summer, BARBIE and OPPENHEIMER, premiered the same weekend.  

But THE EXORCIST: BELIEVER can't stand up to Taylor Smith?

It's very sad and a demonstration that, yet again, the problem isn't with the ticket buyers, it's with the studios themselves.

The horror film has a built-in audience with a Friday the 13th debut.  UNIVERSAL should have to answer to stock holders if this latest film under-performs.  Part of the answering should include responding to this question: Do you know how to a run a damn business.

Timid is not going to let the film industry bounce back.

 

You can't have WTF without the transphobic, ugly faced trash that is Riley Gaines.  What caused the sewer dweller to come to the surface?

 

Oak Park High School in Kansas City, Missouri named Tristan Young their homecoming queen.  A trans-female, she competed against four female students and the high school body voted her homecoming queen.  It should have been a great moment for her, a special moment for her.

 But Riley had to claw her way in and start trashing Tristan.

No one called that out by the way.  Tristan is a high school senior.  Bully Gaines is an adult.  A bitter, ugly adult who lies and lies again.  

Marcia covered this repeatedly so let's pull from her blogging:

Do you know Riley Gaines?  She's a cry baby Karen whose helped further attacks on transpersons.

Why?  Because she's a loser. Last year, in March, she competed against Lia Thomas.  Lia is a transgender athlete and Riley knew that before the match.  She didn't have any problems with it.  Until she tied for fifth place with Lia.  Suddendly, as a loser, Riley released her inner-Karen on the world.

Someone needs to tell her, Saltine, you lost.  But no one has the guts and she's just an overgrown cry baby.

She started out insisting that she had no ill will for Lia and that the issue was the trophy:

Gaines told ‘The Daily Wire’ in March 2022, that an NCAA representative told her that they only had one fifth-placed trophy and she would have to pose with a sixth-place trophy while a fifth-placed version would be mailed out at a later date.

Gaines said that she argued with the official about why Thomas would get the trophy instead of her. Even though the two swimmers tied, Thomas is listed ahead of Gaines on the official results page, which indicates that Thomas touched ahead of Gaines by less than one-hundredth of a second, according to 'Swimming World Magazine.' 

“It was a bit disheartening,” Gaines said, according to The Daily Wire. “It really was. I left the pool with no trophy. Not a big deal, but it was the goal that I had set all year.”

As Peter mockingly says in the "Roasted Guy" episode of Family Guy, "Oh no, it's not a perfect day."

And Riley insisted no hard feelings:

“I am in full support of her and full support of her transition and her swimming career and everything like that because there’s no doubt that she works hard too, but she’s just abiding by the rules that the NCAA put in place, and that’s the issue,” she told ‘The Daily Wire’ in March 2022.

But as she continued the right-wing circuit, Riley changed her tune.

In April, Gaines spoke to Tucker Carlson on Fox News to discuss the issue further and stated that she thought Thomas had an has an ‘unfair biological advantage’ in the sport due to being born a male.

Oh, poor little Karen, it's almost like you think you tied for first place.  But you didn't, did you?  No, you tied for fifth place.  Which means Lia's not the only woman that beat you.  Lia beat you by a-hundredth of a second but she's only one of the women who beat you, Riley.  Taylor Ruck came in first place.  Did she have an "unfair biological advantage" as well?  Isabel Ivey?  Kelly Pash?

Lia is also much prettier than Riley.

But then, Riley looks like she's on steroids.  That would explain her surprisingly flat chest.   Is she afraid that people in the stands that day thought she herself was the transgender athlete?

Regardless, we don't have time for her living out her fears.  She's a loser.  An ugly loser and a sore loser. 

And now the hate merchant is attacking Tristan Young.  This has nothing to do with athletics.  There was no physical competition.  But it's not about that.  It's about Riley's hate.  She's lied repeatedly and changed her stories over and over.  And we might have thought the sewer rat couldn't claw her way to any lower but now she's attacking a high school student.

Do you get how outrageous that is and what a bully Riley Gaines is?

Saturday, Molly Sprayregen (LGBTQ NATION) reported:

 

Trans high school student Tristan Young has received an onslaught right-wing backlash after her peers at Kansas’s Oak Park High School voted to crown her homecoming queen.

But Young won’t let the bigotry bring her down. She told The Kansas City Star that she’s not the kind of person to let people shut her down.

“I like to stay strong. I don’t really buckle unless something is really wrong. Right now, what’s happening is people are trying to turn a joyous thing into something that I should regret. But it’s going to stay a joyous thing.”

“Jesus says ‘Love thy neighbor.’ Love everyone as they are,” she added. “This is who I am… I’m proud of who I am. You can tear me down all you want. I’m not going to give back the crown.”

For Young, the good outweighs the bad, and so it’s not worth harping on the haters.

Good for her and shame on every adult that has followed this story and has refused to call out the bully that is Riley Gaines.  WTF indeed.

Another WTF moment came with Cenk Uygur.  Who?  If you asked that, bless you, stay innocent, stop reading immediately.

Those of you familiar with the sewer rat should stay with us for the latest.

Cenk bills himself as a "young Turk" but he's not young anymore or even young-ish.  He's 53 years-old and his best years in media are long behind him.  Did we say that last month or the month before?  No.  We had no reason to comment on him.  But now he wants to be president.

You read that right.  He's presenting a run as a big sacrifice on his part and as the huge solid to America to which we reply, "Don't do us any favors."

This wouldn't be the YOUTUBER's first run for office. 

In 2019, he announced his runs for Congress.  WIKIPEDIA explains:

 

 

In mid-November 2019, Uygur filed to run for Congress in California's 25th district, a seat recently vacated by the resignation of Katie Hill, an office also being pursued by Democratic Assemblywoman Christy Smith and former Trump campaign aide George Papadopoulos.^[76][77][78] Uygur ran in two primary elections on March 3: the special election primary to fill the vacant seat through January 2021 and the Democratic primary for the next full term (decided in the 2020 November election). Uygur raised over $100,000 in small donations in the first three hours since announcing his candidacy.^[79] That figure rose to $796,000 in the remainder of the quarter.^[80]

Uygur has positioned himself as left-wing, supporting single-payer healthcare, raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour, and overturning Citizens United v. FEC. In the wake of the 2019 Saugus High School shooting, he supported strict gun control laws.^[81] He criticized his Democratic opponent, Christy Smith, for her opposition to Medicare for All.^[82][83] Uygur's primary issue was to get money out of politics.^[84] He also opposes war with Iran and supports passing the Green New Deal.^[85][86][87] Uygur's candidacy was initially endorsed by U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders who had to retract his support after sexual comments Uygur had made in recent years about women and provocative statements about fundamentalist Muslims and Jews from eight years prior were discovered.^[20][88]

Uygur came in fourth place out of 12 candidates with a 6.6% share of the vote. As no candidate earned 50 percent of the vote or more, the top two vote-earners, California Assembly member Christy Smith and navy officer Mike Garcia, advanced to the runoff.^[89]

 

 

Key points above?  Bernie had to withdraw his endorsement.  Cenk's past is problematic.  He is not a candidate who raises a great deal of funds.  He is not a candidate who brings in a lot of votes.

But he's ready to step into the fray in 2023?  This after the anti-trans propaganda distributed by THE YOUNG TURKS repeatedly in the last months.  In fact, the trans hate has been so bad that Benny Carolla had to resign in July of this year and she has been very clear about the transphobia that has gripped THE YOUNG TURKS.

 

Cenk's doing us a favor?

WTF.

And you can't talk WTF moments and leave out RFK Junior.  Robert Junior is a big whiner.  He wants the Democratic Party's presidential nomination but Democratic voters don't want him.  Nor should they as he pursues one right-winger after another and distances himself from the center -- let alone the left.  His anti-vax for COVID stance doesn't really appeal to anyone outside MAGA.  His statements, since becoming a candidate, that big business can regulate climate change destroy whatever legal achievements he had earlier in his life.  His fawning over Donald Trump is just disgusting.  His own family is ashamed of him and repeatedly distances itself from him.  That's his siblings, that's the grandchild of JFK, that's the whole family.

Recently, Junior thought he had stumbled on a winning campaign tactic: Tax taxpayers even further.

If you missed it, the millionaire had a gun nut (he attracts them by his refusal to advocate for gun control) at one of his rallies.  The gun nut supports Junior and was not there to threaten Junior.  But Junior tried to parlay it into proof that he needed protection.   The natural response to that request from a millionaire is for taxpayers to say, "Sure, hire whomever you wish to pay."  But it wasn't about security.  It was about trying to look presidential.  Barack Obama did that in 2007 -- but he had actual threats against him.  Junior didn't and Junior wanted the US taxpayers to spend money providing him with Secret Service agents for a run for office that people weren't calling for.

Things got worse last week.  Junior is expected, anytime this week, to announce that he will be running for president as an independent.

You read that right.  The man who declared at the start of his campaign that he would not run for the presidency unless it was on the Democratic Party ticket is now supposed to announce an independent run for the presidency (some say a third party run).  

Junior's nothing but a disgrace and a disappointment.  We feel for his wife Cheryl but he's made the bed she's going to have to sleep in.

Most of all, we feel for the country as so many people who are clearly not qualified for the presidency step forward to make vanity runs.  It's as though, in 2016, Donald Trump proved that anyone -- anyone -- truly could end up president and a thousand lunatics were encouraged.