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Trevor Milton’s Pardon – The Easy Con

If you are going to commit fraud in the U.S. make sure you make a healthy donation to the “Trump 47 Committee”. Trevor Milton, who bilked investors out of millions by making phony claims about the performance of his Nikola electric trucks, made the “donation” and just got himself a full pardon.

His investors are sure to be grateful: he is now off the hook for paying restitution as well. That is particularly vile. But not as vile as Milton practically chortling with glee on a video he released, claiming he was “persecuted” by the same corrupt deep state that went after Trump because he was a supporter.

It looks pretty easy to con the supposed genius. Take your pick.

But then, there are so many scandals with this administration. How do you choose any particular one to pay attention to?

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Berube

Update (2025-03-31):  Wouldn’t you know it?  Right after I wrote and posted this, the Leaf power-play went on a tear, scoring in 12 of 16 opportunities, or something like that.  Just devastating, quick passes, constant motion, accurate shooting.  We’ll see if it lasts.

It is very difficult to assess the impact of a coach upon the performance of any particular NHL team.  Scotty Bowman is the most obvious avatar of success in this position after leading Montreal to four consecutive Stanley Cups, and then, after leaving Montreal (due to a dispute with management over promoting him to General Manager), coached Pittsburgh to it’s second consecutive Stanley Cup,  and then Detroit to two consecutive Stanley Cups.

Bowman was not successful everywhere or all the time, but he was certainly among the most successful coaches in NHL history.  But was he really a brilliant mastermind of strategy and player development or did he just happen to inherit teams that were stocked with great players and on the cusp of elevated achievements– no matter who was coaching?  It’s impossible to know.  His success in Montreal led Pittsburgh (and other teams) to want him, but he also knew that Pittsburgh had Sidney Crosby and a host of other very good players and he was able to write his own ticket.  From 1979 to 1987 he coached Buffalo with limited success (1st, 3rd, 3rd, 2nd, 3rd, 5th) and was finally fired after they finished fifth in 1986.  He didn’t seem to have the magic then.  He moved to Detroit in 1996-97, which had Steve Yzerman,  and Sergei Fedorov, Nicklas Lidstrom, Larry Murphy, Brendan Shanahan.  They later acquired Dominick Hasek.  So it was a team stacked with very good players, especially Fedorov and Yzerman, and, later, Hasek ( who replaced Chris Osgood).

Teams have won with brilliant, speedy offense.  They have won with steady, tough defense.  They have won with a combination of both.  There is no one consistent formula.  Montreal, with a mediocre team, made it to the finals a few years ago almost solely on the strength of their goalie, Carey Price.

I suspect that coaching shows up the most in three areas:  the power play, the penalty kill, and defending a lead.  (No amount of good coaching can get you a lead if you don’t have skilled players up front, but a well-disciplined team can frustrate a more talented team if they want to.)  This is where I am least impressed by Craig Berube’s work with the Leafs.  They don’t do particularly well in any of those three areas, especially lately (March 2025).  They have had the lead in five of their last six games and lost five of their last six games.  They keep pulling the goalie and giving up empty net goals (they have only twice scored while 6 on 5 all year).  They persist in believing that Morgan Rielly should get lots and lots of ice time even though he is -19 on a team with most players on the plus side.  Contrary to the evidence, they think Mitch Marner is an effective penalty killer, even while Berube obviously discourages counter-attacks while shorthanded, which I believe is a mistake.  They keep putting Max Domi on the ice though he doesn’t check all that well, almost never scores, and doesn’t even seem to have any idea of what he should be doing out there.  He is getting about $2.9 million a year.  For what?

Why did the Leafs bring Berube on board?  Because he won the Stanley Cup with St. Louis in 2019?  His record since then is rather mixed to say the least: 1st, 4th, 3rd, 6th, then fired.

I don’t see how he was an improvement from Keefe, who actually had one of the best winning records in the history of the Maple Leafs.  Keefe was obviously fired because of the Leafs’ failure to move past the first or second round in the playoffs, in spite of rather good regular season performances.   Berube’s current record is mostly, I think, the result of better goal-tending.  Up to now, Joseph Woll and Anthony Stolarz have been excellent.  They were a big improvement on Frederik Anderson and Jack Campbell and the inconsistent Ilya Samsonov.

Woll and Stolarz were brilliant in goal for a time.  Lately, not so much.  Marner generates a lot of offense but four times in the last two games– 4 times!– he  entered the opponent’s zone during a promising power play set up and gave the puck away.  These were not bad passes that didn’t work: they were bald-faced giveaways, throwing the puck right onto the stick of an opponent.  These happened as the power play squad was taking up positions and so were out of position to deal with a break-out.   They also robbed the power play of crucial zone time.

Nylander scores a lot of goals, because he poaches up by the blue line.  He rarely goes into a corner and emerges with the puck.  He often skates by  opponents with the puck and kind of waves at them.  When he does have the puck, he can be very skilled, and very fast, and he has a very good shot.  I’m not sure how big of a trade-off his defensive lapses are, given his offense.  And I don’t understand why Berube doesn’t demand that Nylander make more of an effort to defend when he doesn’t have the puck.

Matthew Knies gets better and better every game.  Matthews is a thoroughbred, a terrific two-way player.  Tanev and McCabe are okay on defense– not often brilliant but not a liability either.  If Woll and Stolarz can recover their mid-season form, the Leafs have as realistic a chance as any of the other top 8 to advance to the Stanley Cup Finals.

Rielly is the Cal Ripken of the Maple Leafs, and that is not a compliment.  Ripken was  subpar short-stop with limited range who got to play every day because he could be a decent hitter.  But ultimately I think he hurt the team by refusing, as he aged and lost mobility, to move to third-base or DH where he belonged.  Rielly is thought to belong to the number one pair of defensemen on the Leafs but he is clearly a liability.  I would move him down to the third pair and give him a lot less ice-time.  He is -19 at the moment: that is terrible for someone earning his salary.

[As an aside:  while Cal Ripken was in his pursuit of the all-time consecutive games played record, I firmly believed that the Orioles would never win a championship.  They had become Ripken-centric.  He even stayed in a separate hotel when they were on the road.  And, of course, the Orioles remained a mediocre team through the latter years of Ripken’s career.]

I don’t believe in the idea that the Leafs have some fatal weakness that plays out every playoff season.  They have made the playoffs seven years in a row, and they have been very close to advancing several times.  Several times, they ended up losing to a very good team that went on to the finals.  The factors that play into the decisive win are rather random– a bad play in overtime, a lucky bounce, a deflection, a post instead of the corner of the net, playing the eventual Stanley Cup winner in the first round.

One of these times, the Leafs will take the big game, or they may not.  But they are legitimate contenders and in a few years Leaf fans may look back on this era as time of high expectations because they are really quite good, and disappointing achievements because they have been unlucky.

 

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Cuomo’s Franken-sense

With Eric Adams on the outs Andrew Cuomo, former governor of New York State, has stepped in to run in a primary against Adams for mayor of New York City.

Adams is on the outs because he sucked up to Donald Trump in an obvious attempt to extract a shutdown of the investigation into charges of bribery against him which almost certainly would have resulted in conviction, according to insiders at the Attorney-General’s office of New York.

Well, a lot of people have stepped up to demand that Cuomo extract himself from the primary because, well, everybody knows he’s a sexual abuser.

Do they?

Here’s a summary of the claims made against Cuomo:

    • Lindsay Boylan: described several years of “uncomfortable interactions”.  He once “forcibly” kissed her and even compared her to a former girlfriend.  Yes, that’s it.  Cuomo’s former aide Melissa DeRosa claims Boylan never complained about it while working for Cuomo.
    • Charlotte Bennett: Cuomo once asked her about her sex life.
    • Anna Ruch:  Cuomo placed a hand on her back and once asked if he could kiss her.  Yes, that’s it.
    • Ana Liss: Cuomo once called her “sweetheart” and kissed her hand.  (I’m not making this up: this is Liss’ complaint.  Check it out.)
    • Karen Hinton:  Cuomo once hugged her.  “Unethically”.  That’s it.
    • Brittany Commisso: Cuomo once groped her breast.  She told Cuomo that his actions might get them into trouble.  Did she mean the two of them or the two of them.  Either way, this is probably most serious charge levelled against Cuomo, if it is true.
    • Kaitlin (mystery accuser): Cuomo made her feel uncomfortable, more than once.
    • Jessica Bakeman: Cuomo went crazy here– he touched her arms, shoulders, back, and waist and once held her hand for some time.  Again, I am not making this up.
    • Alyssa McGrath: Cuomo “ogled” staff and commented on their appearance.
    • Someone else said that Cuomo, noting a diet drink on the employee’s desk, asked if her goal was to look like a Playboy Bunny.

All of the allegations are evidence of a distasteful personality, immaturity, and poor judgment.  They shouldn’t be dismissed, entirely, as complaints, but, at most, they deserve a very stern letter to the administrator. 

None of these are serious.  None of them really rise to the level of “sexual harassment”.  None of these are sufficient to demand the resignation of  the governor of a state.  But most prominent Democrats– terrified, I think, of offending the feminist wing of the party– immediately piled on.  Biden, Harris, Schumer, Pelosi, and dozens more.  The party must be purified!

All the righteous denunciation of Cuomo by Democratic Party leaders and staffers for these minor offenses plays right into the hands of voters who kind of mostly shrug at this kind of behavior in the real world and don’t respect hard-core feminists for what they perceive to be hyper-sensitivity to minor issues.  It’s plays into the hands of conservatives who describe liberal feminists as snowflakes for presenting themselves as suffering victims of slight offenses.

All of the allegations are in that fuzzy area of “inappropriate” and “uncomfortable”.  None of them are really serious enough to justify the “cancellation” of Cuomo, though they do reveal that he was a compulsive flirt who obviously did hit on women in his orbit.  He was probing, obviously, for a favorable response, to see if one of them might like to go further.  Some of them (who aren’t part of the cabal) might have.

Why is he the target?

Because the Democrats have a habit of forming circular firing squads.  They know they can’t take down the long list of womanizers in the Trump Administration so how do you rally the troops and proclaim your own virtue when the enemy won’t willingly capitulate?  You attack someone in your own party, like Al Franken, or Eliot Spitzer, or Andrew Cuomo, who actually, on the whole, are on your side, but might also be standing in the way of an ambitious woman (like Kathy Hochul) who could use a leg up.

When Cuomo resigned, Kathy Hochul, as Lieutenant Governor, became Governor of New York.  She barely won re-election in 2022.  She has flip-flopped on some major issues (like a congestion tax for Manhattan) and seems afraid to commit to a position on others.

 

 

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The Trump Marathon

There are lots of movies that evoke the character of Trump’s hold on the Republican party and the republic– “The Godfather”, “Kingfish”, “Handmaid’s Tale”, “Succession”, “Peewee’s Big Adventure”– but the one I like the most– though it is a dark, unnerving film– is this one, “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?” (1969). Trump as ringmaster of a dance marathon (they really did have them during the depression), offering desperate, unhappy people, a long-shot chance at money and fame, only to reveal to a contestant that expenses will be deducted from the prize money leaving the “winner” with nothing.

The ending is something only an adolescent could admire.  Heavy-handed, is the word.  It wasn’t necessary to make the point and though it has some narrative credibility the film would have been stronger without it.

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Canadian vs U. S. Health Care

Someone, an American friend of a friend, commented on Facebook:

Some Americans think that the Canadian care is inferior. What I have heard is that there are longer waiting periods. Also, I have heard that Canadians come to the states for more timely service or even better service, i.e. our doctors are better. I don’t know if any of this is true, but one thing I know to be true: we have plenty medical bankruptcies, and you have none.

If the first part was true, generally, then U. S. life expectancy and infant mortality would be a lot better than it is. I am sure that any individual’s experience will vary– there are good and less than good doctors in both countries. There are definitely areas of the U.S. that have lost their hospitals and have challenges finding family medicine practitioners, as in Canada. Canadian hospitals and physicians are generally as competent as their U. S. counterparts. But the difference in the catastrophic impact on personal finance is absolutely astounding. Europeans and Canadians alike just find it shocking that America refuses to adopt universal health care because the advantages we see every day are so, so significant.

The U. S. pays twice as much for the same procedures as we do in Canada. The U. S. system by it’s own principles is supposed to result in more efficient, cost-effective care: it does the opposite. The administrative overhead is colossal, compared to Canada’s far more efficient system.

I have often considered that if the American system resulted in more competition, for price and quality, and resulted in lower costs and better care (for all– not just the rich), it worth considering seriously as an alternative. But in that respect, it has failed.

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The Tide of Prince

You can watch, here, Prince perform a “brilliant” guitar solo at the end of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame tribute to George Harrison in 2004.

One viewer of the Youtube video said this:

This was Prince’s response to being snubbed by Rolling Stone Magazine’s top 100 guitarists. He certainly proved his point here. And the strutting off stage at the end. Priceless.

Well, if that’s your thing.

After Tom Petty, Steve Winwood, Jeff Lynne and Dhani Harrison have played through most of a reverential rendition of the song, Prince emerges from the wings, in a black suit and a red bowler hat, poker-faced, and plays a solo of such intricacy and mournfulness that the other players shake their heads and grin with admiration. On its face, it’s a supreme expression of Prince’s superiority and bravura. But the film gives it a new context.

This is my clue about what is going on here.  Forget about George:  it’s not about the music.  It’s not about Prince’s artistic achievement.  It’s about Prince.  It’s about the drama.  And Sasha Weiss celebrates it.  She’s a fangirl.

As for the music, come on– this is not hard to sort out.  Prince dances and prances and swings his arms and fingers and, yes, he hits more notes than anyone else. That’s what his musical sensibility in this moment– which is supposed to be a tribute to one of the least showy lead guitarists of all time (George Harrison)– calls for: a fucking spectacle about himself.  If your standard is volume, and speed, and quantity, he’s your thing.  If you’re interested in something that matters, he might not be.

And then Prince struts off the stage.  It was the musical version of a bat flip, and just as petulant and petty and banal.  His fans are drunk with pleasure.

I looked up this clip in response to a New York Times Daily podcast in which Sasha Weiss, discarding any pretense of journalistic objectivity, gurgles that Prince was the “Mozart” of his generation.  She raves on and on about the monumental achievements of Prince, awestruck by his decision to change his name to a symbol, blown over by his accounts of just how much suffering he endured in his life, dazzled by his spectacular stage shows, the weeping, the dancing, the emoting!

This is a feminine appreciation of Prince’s identify.  It’s Taylor Swiftian.  It’s all about “telling my story” (about me) and giving my fans an exhibition about me, about who loves me and who doesn’t, about who I love or don’t, about who I am.

It is interesting that this podcast should emerge in the shadow of “A Complete Unknown”,  the terrific film about the early days in New York City and at the Newport Folk Festival of an authentic genius, Bob Dylan.  The contrast of the two is illuminating.  Name one great song by Prince about anybody other than himself, his hurt, his desire, his horniness, his frustration, his monumental glorious self, in all it’s costumed glory?

Sasha Weiss acknowledges that Prince’s legacy has been diminished over time.  She laments that the documentary by Ezra Edelman, which the Prince estate has blocked from being released (they want something more fawning and adoring) will never be released because it would have restored a sense of Prince’s importance and influence.

Precisely what “A Complete Unknown” has done for Dylan.  Well, no it didn’t: Dylan’s influence and importance has never really diminished at all.  “A Complete Unknown” is timely because it resonates so clearly with Dylan’s reputation and esteem in the music industry, and especially among other talented singer-songwriters, including the new generation who know exactly who first established the idea that rock music could be genuinely artistic and relevant and compelling.

Another tell: Dylan had contact with the makers of “A Complete Unknown”, and, as he did for the making of “I’m Not There” by Todd Haynes, gave the director carte blanche to show whatever he wanted.  The result is magnificent for Dylan.  The Prince estate are too stupid to realize how an artistically compelling but honest documentary can do far more for an artist’s reputation than the usual Hollywood sycophancy.

How great is Prince, really?  A sample of the genius’ lyrics:

The rain sounds so cool when it hits the barn roof
And the horses wonder who you are
Thunder drowns out what the lightning sees
You feel like a movie star
Listen, they say the first time ain’t the greatest
But I tell you, if I had the chance to do it all again, ooh
I wouldn’t change a stroke ’cause, baby, I’m the most
With a girl as fine as she was then

From “Raspberry Beret”.

Really?

And from another of his allegedly “great” songs, “Purple Rain”:

I never meant to cause you any sorrow
I never meant to cause you any pain
I only wanted, one time, to see you laughing
I only want to see you laughing
In the purple rain

Impressed?  No, you’re not.  It’s banal.  I am reminded of The Tragically Hip, who also had songs that seemed inspired musically but lyrically fell flat.  The lines are just sequences of images, some striking and some not, but the overall effect is dull.  There’s no build, no narrative context, no real connection to any compelling insight or revelation.

Musically, Prince was amazing– no argument there.  Not my type of music (because it is mostly centered on virtuosity and showiness) but for what he was trying to do, it’s impressive.   But lyrically, he never moved beyond horniness and bullshit– the bullshit part being how he would love anyone forever.  No he won’t.  No, he didn’t.

So one of the things we consider here is weight.  How much does his musical genius compensate for his lyrical banality?  I would argue that you can’t separate the two.  All the bombast and melodic invention and harmonies and inversions are integral to the monotonous repetition of clichés about romantic love.  Songs like Dylan’s “Love is Just a Four Letter Word” or “Don’t Think Twice It’s All Right”, “It Aint Me Babe”, or “Tangled up in Blue” are more interesting musically because they are about authentic insights and experiences.  He explores, reveals, illuminates.  “You just kind of wasted my precious time” is a bombshell, a shot, a blast, that expands your ideas about love and distance and disappointment.  “Someone who would die for you and more” caps an ascending escalator of perception of someone’s confused narcissism.

Springsteen’s “Thunder Road”– musically, far more ambitious than Dylan– has this:

There were ghosts in the eyes of all the boys you sent away
They haunt this dusty beach road in the skeleton frames of burned out Chevrolets

It resonates.  The boys who longed for you but you turned away, and continue to exist as ghostly opportunity; the burned-out car, reflecting the decline of American confidence and yearning.

Leonard Cohen– I can’t even begin to list the number of lyrics he wrote that are powerful, evocative, compelling.  Yes, musically– in performance– he was limited, but his songs were not.  No cover of a Prince song is even close.

Or you have Prince’s (“1999”):

I was dreamin’ when I wrote this
So sue me if I go too fast
But life is just a party
And parties weren’t meant to last

This is a sophomoric conversation.  It goes nowhere.  And all the music in the world can’t lift it beyond it’s triviality.

 

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Nothing New Under the Sun

In regard to here.

It’s about someone named Aaron Renn.

Mr. Renn loves city life, and has lived in Manhattan, Chicago and Indianapolis. Carmel is different. Here, church bells chime full hymns over the town square. It’s a place where it’s easy to forget Mr. Renn’s best-known idea: his warning to Christians that America is in an era of distinct hostility to believers like them, and that they must gird themselves to adapt to, as the title of his recent book put it, “Life in the Negative World.”

I don’t think there is anything new here at all. Christians have a habit of periodically engaging in wildly enthusiastic embrace of some new “reinterpretation” that seems more engaged and relevant and intellectually credible. (Jesus Freaks, Christian Contemporary Music, Blue Like Jazz, and so on.) And then you investigate it more closely and you see that it’s the same old redneck fire and brimstone, pieties and hypocrisies, patriarchy, smugness, and materialism.

And, of course, extreme right-wing politics. No, you’re not smart now.

It’s not really Christian at all.  It’s superstition combined with reactionary politics.  It’s the politics of the rich and privileged, which isn’t all bad, but mostly is.  It’s paranoia and conformity, banality and self-regard.  The same old, same old, same old.  The blah blah blah of middle America.

It’s a sweet, wonderful world, if you’re in the club, of consumer trinkets, antiseptic public life, and space for all those men to get off to Vegas for a glorious weekend once in a while, of gambling and prostitutes and Wayne Newton, because, after all, boys will boys.

 

The Palladium, a proud edifice built in Carmel to demonstrate that even conservative Republicans can have good taste, features acts like Mickey Dolenz, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, Itzhack Perlman, Emmy-Lou Harris, The U.S. Army Field Band and Male Chorus, and an official release party for some country singer named Tege Holt who sounds pretty harmless.

Emmy-Lou Harris and Itzhack Perlman are esteemed but safe choices.  The others speak for themselves.  They remind me of the problem Trump is going to have bringing A-list acts to the Kennedy Centre now that he is it’s chief.

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A Specific and Subversive Beauty

That was far from what those who’d marveled at her mute beauty would have imagined her to sound like back in 1964, but such was Faithfull’s subversive power. She upended the expectations of all sorts of feminine stereotypes.  NY Times

You should not be able to guess that an article is written by a woman or a gay man just from the content of the piece.  But as soon as I hit that paragraph above, I knew that this was a woman writing about another woman and leveraging whatever modest achievements she had into a statement on the secret and unrecognized fantastic achievements of women that have been suppressed and minimized by our patriarchal, sexist society.

Undoubtedly, there are genuine cases.  There is also a lot of bullshit.  Marianne Faithful was a hot looking young ingenue in 1965 when she was spotted by a promoter at a party and chosen to be packaged, promoted, and sold by the music industry.  She got a recording contract, studio time, backup instrumentalists, producers, arrangers, and so on, all by virtue of having a pleasing face and robust figure.  She became an even bigger celebrity by virtue of her relationship with Mick Jagger, and her notoriety as the “naked woman” found in Keith Richards’ apartment when the Stones were arrested for drug possession.

Her “success” and fame and notoriety are all entirely due to the machinery of the pop music industry and celebrity culture.  She was a product of male fantasy and female aspiration.

She could sing a little.  She couldn’t act very well.  She was pretty.  Her most well-known songs were all written by other artists, mostly men.   Lindsay Zoladz would like to have you believe that she caused Mick Jagger to think deeply and write good lyrics and therefore deserves some of the credit for the Rolling Stones success.  That’s a very, very thin line of reason.

Soladz declares that “she upended the expectations of all sorts of feminine stereotypes”.

What she did do was lots of drugs, to the point where her child had to be put into care.  Her most arresting work, “Broken English”, is the product of good  studio engineering and arrangements and the exploitation of her broken voice and reputation.  A curiosity, worth a listen or two, but far from subverting anything it caters to a not uncommon trope of abject surrender:  I am a victim, of drugs, of pop culture, of men, and myself.  I am the spurned woman.  I am fucking mad.

 

 

 

 

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Ethanol

“I may have to spend a lot of time educating him about agriculture,” Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa, the largest corn-growing state, just ahead of Illinois, said of Mr. Kennedy last month. “I’m willing to do that.”  NY Times

That chilling statement from Senator Grassley should remind us that there is only one political party in America and it is the money party.

What Grassley is alluding to is the fact that American farmers in the mid-west grow a lot of corn and they need someone to buy it.  That is why we have ethanol and corn syrup.  There is no good rational reason for ethanol to exist except for the purpose of providing a rigged, locked-in market for corn farmers, who vote in the primaries in Iowa– among the first primary states in the Union– and basically control national policy by holding onto the agricultural dick of the Republican party.   (And the Democrats.)

Mr. Kennedy’s critique is broad and deep. Generous federal crop subsidies of soy, corn and wheat artificially lower their costs, making byproducts like corn syrup cheaper for manufacturers who put it into everything from soft drinks to hot dogs to heavily processed bread.

What should freak most people out is the word “educate”.  It is a very suggestive choice of language.  It is Orwellian.  It is not sufficient to say that we don’t care about the health of Americans or the nutritional value of all the foods processed corn syrup is added to.  You must be “educated”:  you must publicly offer your unconditional obeisance to the mantra.  You must be seen to adhere to the perverse logic that provides massive government subsidies to a useless crop simply in order to keep those “hard-workin’ ‘mericans” juiced and happy.

Most of those farmers probably privately hold nothing but contempt for people on welfare.  It’s one thing to take money for sitting around looking after your kids and quite another to work hard at cheating the system, which most of those corn farmers do.  But you never know: maybe they have no problem with welfare.  Maybe they recognize that government hand-outs are okay, as long as you get your share.  Like Exxon and Tesla and the Tampa Bay Rays.

Fun facts:

      • fructose uses only about 4% of the nation’s corn product.
      • ethanol consumes about 40%.

Think about it:  what if you (as government) decided– correctly– that ethanol was a bad product that should not be subsidized by the government.  How would you make up for the deficit in the market for corn?  What would you do about the corn farmers– who are generally massively in debt– who would be out of work?  How would you deal with the political fall-out: you did something that hurt farmers?  Those paragons of hard-working American virtue?

 

 

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Revenge of the Mistress: Coralie Fargeat

But one of the most impressive feats of all is the way Fargeat subverts and co-opts the male gaze, turning it into something that’s both playful and fierce. The sexy and scantily clad Matilda Lutz initially looks like an irresistible piece of eye candy, and Fargeat knows you’re thinking that. She toys with your expectations of how a woman who looks like Lutz is normally photographed in a film like this before ultimately celebrating her character for the warrior she becomes.

From this review of “Revenge” by Coralie Fargeat.

A woman, Jen, is raped by one of her boyfriend’s hunting buddies while another buddy watches indifferently.  The boyfriend– who is cheating on his wife with Jen– returns and doesn’t seem very disturbed about it.  When she demands justice, she is chased to a cliff by the three men and pushed over so that she is impaled on a tree.  Remarkably, she recovers, and returns to the scene to take brutal revenge.

This reviewer, and others, celebrate this fresh, exciting story because, after all, she was raped: the men deserve to die, and the action sequences are pretty cool.

Maybe they do deserve to die.  That’s for another day, and another philosophical discussion.  Maybe the scenario is contrived to allow you to feel good about watching these men suffer and die.  (That is absolutely true.)    And maybe the transformation of Jen from an air-head exhibitionist potential valley-girl into an action hero capable of astounding acts of athleticism is a puerile fantasy.

It doesn’t matter: the critics fall over themselves to sing the praises of Fargeat.  Why?  Is it because action films that feature male protagonists chasing and murdering males is such marvelous entertainment that a simple role reversal only spikes the tension?  Or is it because those films have become boring and the role reversal makes it interesting again?