From Melania to Kid Rock’s halftime show: why is Maga art so dreadful?

As the right stokes culture wars, their alternatives to ‘woke’ Hollywood prove to be shoddily made and uninspired It’s not fair, what they did to rightwing folks on Super Bowl Sunday. Regular viewers could either take in an elaborate and joyful halftime performance from Puerto Rican recording artist Bad Bunny , one of the most popular music stars in the world, or, if they weren’t interested in football or in Bad Bunny ’s music, they could quietly find something else to watch or listen to. There are a lot of options out there. Those who wanted to prove their Maga bona fides or loyalties, however, may have felt obligated to watch a parade of similar-sounding country singers lead into a performance from a shorts-wearing Kid Rock , jumping around and seemingly lip-syncing to a novelty hit from 1999. For rightwingers who couldn’t stomach the Spanish lyrics to Bad Bunny songs, they could take comfort in the clear English of the man also known as Robert Ritchie: “Bawitdaba, da-bang, da-ban...

The Idiots review – Lars von Trier’s appalling-taste Dogme satire is irritatingly original

Whether intended as a satire of bourgeois hypocrisy or not this tale of boorish nihilists announced von Trier as a consummate provocateur

Lars von Trier’s film from 1998 is re-released as part of the ongoing retrospective dedicated to this director, a film pioneeringly shot on digital video according to the minimalist guidelines of the Dogme 95 collective, which undoubtedly helped create an affordability-revolution in indie film-making. After a quarter of a century, The Idiots looks as cheerfully shallow, smug and manipulative as anything he has ever done, yet revisiting this needlingly insistent and epically tiresome film does bring into focus the way in which the debate around disability representation has changed, and also the subversive prank aesthetic that has to some degree governed the entire career of this unique film-maker.

The Idiots is about people playing tricks, gigglingly pretending to have cerebral palsy or some form of learning disability in order to freak out the uptight bourgeois in their restaurants and workplaces – and, of course, the cinema auditorium. They callously call it “spassing”, or use the English phrase “mentally retarded”. Karen (Bodil Jørgensen) is a deeply unhappy woman, in shock after a tragedy in her life which is explained only at the very end. Dining alone in a restaurant one day, she is intrigued at what appears to be a group of disabled adults there, minimally controlled by their carer and embarrassing the other diners, whose fastidious politeness prevents them from expressing their obvious disapproval and disgust. Karen goes back with these people to their house, where she finds they are simply pretending: a commune-cult led by the charismatic Stoffer (Jens Albinus) whose wealthy uncle owns their HQ and believes his nephew to be house-sitting the property prior to it being sold off.

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