Watch out! Bernie Olaf/The Strasson Group's ghosts-&-evil-spirits 'documentary,' WARX2

Perhaps you've heard of the many, many military suicides stemming from our recent, aged and likely-forever-more wars in the middle east? And, if you follow the news, you'll have also heard of how mid-east terrorist groups --  Al-Qaeda to ISIS -- are recruiting western-world youngsters to perform various terrorist acts. Guess what? These are not results of Post-Traumatic-Stress-Disorder (PTSD) in the first instance, or in the second, of old-fashioned brainwashing on the uneasy and pliable minds of our young. No. It's all because of ghosts and evil spirits.

That's right. And the movie under examination here, WARX2 via a fellow named Bernie Olaf and The Strasson Group -- yes, do click on that link and then try to learn more about the "group." Clearly, they don't want you to be able to do this -- is hellbent on convincing us that all these military suicides (and young suicide bombers) are simply suffering from the effects of ghosts and evil spirits (often lumped together here under the moniker of "jinn"). I don't know about some of these brainwashed kids currently in the hands of ISIS, but certainly those men and women who have fought for our country and now exhibit PTSD deserve better than this nitwit movie for help and explanation.

Warx2 gives us plenty of statistic -- if nothing remotely resembling evidence -- but those statistics have more to do with how many continents and countries exist on earth -- hardly earth-shaking evidence of anything beyond simple geography. So where does any proof of Olaf's thesis come in? How is this brainwashing going on? To answer this, we get an explanation of the brain and the heart and other body parts. So? As for the ghosts, we begin with a single silly anecdote told by a guy who works in a club bar and claims to have seen them. I kid you not.

This is followed eventually by remarks from witch doctors and other men and women who make claims, offering nothing remotely like evidence. Can PTSD really be coupled to spiritual warfare? "Absolutely," declares our Brit-accented narrator, "if you are not rooted in Christ." Uh-oh.

Yes, indeed: What we have here turns out to be one big, fat (two-hour-and-three-minute), pompous, lamebrained commercial for god. At one point we get a complete run-down of all of Moses' commandments, later a partial rendition of The Lord's Prayer, and then, at movie's end, around ten very long minutes of non-stop prayer, in which the same prayer -- "I am asking you, almighty god, please punish all the satan and evil spirits who enter my..." (this same prayer is repeated over and over, first using arms, then legs, then chest, mind, heart, toes, you name it). Following this, we get a new prayer, repeated ad nauseum, using mostly similar body parts, and one brand new one, of which the upcoming is my favorite.  I quote verbatim: "I am asking you, almighty god, please flush and blow all the satan and evil forces from my inside nose."

I think by now, you'll  be able to decide if this is the documentary for you. There is finally something almost childlike, if not utterly childish, about the whole endeavor. Along the way, we're told how "god works just like a bank." If so, the big guy clearly knows little about the machinations of our current banking system.

And yet we're told that god is more dependable that any government and more reliable that anything else on earth. To which my agnostic self rolls his eyes and says, "Tell that to all those, down the centuries, who've died thanks to religion."

Along the way, we're also told that evil spirits can even change the outcome of important soccer games. (And here we've been imagining that this had to do instead with FIFA and all that graft and corruption.) Everything and everyone -- from the military psychiatrist who went on a killing spree to the underwear and shoe bombers hoping to being down airplanes -- were actually under the spell of evil spirits.

The movie's "ace-in-the-hole," however, would appear to be that it provides ways to prevent one's body and soul being taken over by these "jinn." How? Prayer before bedtime (of course), along with avoiding jokes (yes!), avoiding being sad, avoiding Facebook (I'd have to agree with that one on general principle), and -- my favorite -- using bacon and its grease to protect against evil spirits. Gheesh: What's a poor Jew to do?

The movie is actually a not-very-well-concealed call to arms against you know who. As if to counter this, the narrator tells us: "Don't stereotype people, but assume all people, especially Africans and Arabs, use spirits and jinn"  Hello, asshole: don't you realize you are stereotyping even as you speak these stupid words?

Presidents Obama (for whom I personally have little liking or respect) and George W. Bush (whom I would like to see imprisoned for his and his underlings' criminal acts that took us via lies and deception into illegal war) are shown to supposedly understand -- via some cherry-picking of their statements and actions -- all this "jinn" stuff.

Aside from all of the above, how does WarX2 stack up as a piece of filmmaking? Very badly. It's repetitive, telling us the same information over and over, as well as showing us many of the same ordinary visuals again and again. And, since no evidence is offered of anything that would be used in a genuine documentary, let alone stand up in a court of law, all we get is a sermon-in-disguise that does not belong in a movie theater nor even in most churches -- at least those that I'm familiar with.

WarX2 is, however, getting some theatrical play -- in Texas -- at two Alamo Drafthouse theaters: in Houston and Katy, beginning Friday, June 26. More theaters will be added soon, it is claimed.  For a different "take" on this movie, and one with which that I thoroughly disagree, you can check out the blog of one of my compatriots, Avi Offer, the NYC Film Guru. You can read his thoughts on the film by clicking here.

Note: There are no photographs above, 

save one of the poster image, because I could 

find nothing available. And I don't have time, nor does 

the movie merit it, to crib images from its preview trailer.

Again, as with its About the Strasson Group empty page, 

the film's web site pretends to have a gallery of images, 

but when you click on it, you get nothing.

MY WAY: Vanity, thy name is Rebekah Starr, abetted by Vinny Sisson & Dominique Mollee

"Everyone told me this was a stupid idea," notes Rebekah Starr, the producer and star of MY WAY, which, though 2015 be young, wins the up-to-now unnecessary vanity production of the year. "Everyone," it turns out, can sometimes be right. The 'stupid idea' of Ms Starr's that the movie tracks is the road trip from a small Pennsylvania town to Los Angeles, where the lady is bent on making a "kick-ass" video featuring one of her band's songs, which turns out to be the titular "My Way" -- as though the singer/songwriter has no idea that title had already been used, and rather well, by a certain Frank Sinatra, about whom perhaps our heroine knows very little.

Suffice it to say that Ms Starr's "way" doesn't hold a candle to the well-known song penned by France's Claude Francois (aka Cloclo) and made most famous by Mr. Sinatra. But Starr's offering (the performer is shown at right) is indeed the song we hear the most throughout this tiresome movie, by the end of which you're ready to throw up your hands and scream, "Please, not again!" The problem here, to get right to the point, would seem to be that Starr has a huge need to recognized and famous but not, perhaps, any real talent to underpin that need.

So instead we get a terribly slipshod, slapshot little movie that tosses in everyone from Ron Jeremy (above) -- who is identified as a "Sunset Strip aficionado" (with that last word misspelled, above) rather than the famous porn star that he is -- to Rikki Rocket (below), who informs us that "the world needs a kick-ass girl band." Maybe. But I'm not at all sure that it needs this one.

Along the way, Starr, who narrates and is almost always center stage, tells us of her family history and its coal mining business, and her own work experience at same. Here, she tosses in some ersatz feminism (it's actually narcissism passing as feminism), giving us conclusions but almost no details that might help us agree with those conclusions.

We meet her husband (above, and now ex-), who smartly wants no part of this trip, and we meet and spend time with her women friends/band members: Temea, below, who can't accompany Rebekah on her trip, and Annika, shown further below -- who does, and ends up becoming the most interesting of the women we meet, and who for a time, at least, puts up with Rebekah's shenanigans a lot better than would I.

Overall and over time Starr impresses most as the kind of self-absorbed, narcissistic woman who, as we later learn, will spend money having her hair cut and colored but doesn't have the funds for Annika to do the same. Is this unfair, she wonders? (She also might have invested in a proof-reader who could spell Albuquerque, which appears as Albequerque, on the map showing our heroine's progress across country.)

Once in L.A., the pair hooks up with friend and drummer Holly, below, who definitely seems to be the most grounded of the women we meet.

At no time does this band appear to be particularly original or witty or intelligent or talented. Rebekah rarely allows us to see them in performance, and then, when we do, it's very brief. Later, we supposedly watch her go surfing. Except that, again, we don't really see her surf. The defining word here is shallow.

On (and on and on) it goes, one dumb cliche after another, until the movie begins to seem like a mockumentary. Suddenly tempers flare: "I just want to get through with this video and be done with her!" When the girls do finally perform at a the Sunset Strip club, they do the song 'My Way.' And then do it and do it until we're blue in the face.

Finally we discover what our Ms Starr has learned from all this. "The world proved to me that the world wasn't worth pleasing." Not to worry, dear: You haven't come close.

According to the IMDB, My Way originally ran 120 minutes. It has now thankfully been cut down to only 92 and opens this Friday, February 20, at the Arena Cinema in Los Angeles and a week later on February 27 here in New York City at the Quad Cinema.

Want something a little different? Sonia Barrett's dizzy documentary, THE BUSINESS OF DISEASE

If the page after page of written do's-and-don'ts that appear at the opening of this new would-be documentary don't make you a little wary of what will follow, I'll be surprised. First, we're told to take charge of our life and health, and then there's a disclaimer about all the logos we're going to see in the film and how these do not mean that the companies themselves sponsored or in any way financed this movie (as if). No, THE BUSINESS OF DISEASE instead spends its time flipping back and forth between a bunch of would-be "experts" on everything from sound to light to music to health to... I don't even know quite what some of these people's claim to fame is supposed to be. It's as though the documentary, as envisioned by its writer/producer/director Sonia Barrett (shown below) and its "editorial department" (click and scroll way down), offers some weird visual equivalent of the old jokester game of 52 Pickup. That's how bizarre is the entire organization of this film.

The movie begins by quoting from those very au courant folk Hippocrates and Thomas Edison, as visuals of the aforementioned logos fly by to some heavy-handed, pulsating music. Then the "experts"  begin bantering about herbs (better grow your own) and organic food and the body as energy and epigenetics and building a house around "your signature sound."  (Sound is very big here: We also hear about listening to the sound of one's refrigerator as well as sounds from outer space.) But it's all anecdotal, and -- via the manner in which it is presented -- comes off as faintly ridiculous.

Did nobody bother to tell Ms Barrett about the idea of organizing her material in order to make a case for her main idea?  Her thesis -- which seems to come down to "take charge of your life and health" -- is way too broad to begin with, but her examples of how we ought to do this don't begin to coalesce.

So we flip back and forth between speakers (and can't help wondering who gathered these people under the same roof and why they're even that important). One fellow, a certain Hal A. Huggins, DDS, has this immortal line to tell us: The "disease is gonna get more worse."  And yes, I am quoting verbatim.

We learn that sun glasses and sunscreen are bad for us because they don't allow the skin to repair itself. We hear about light and our "age of light," and art in the face of your cat. And I believe, somewhere in the midst of all this, someone tells us that our convictions should be flexible. Flexible convictions? What a great idea!

There are probably a few (very few) good things to be found in this mess of a movie, but I'll be damned if I could ferret them out from all the twaddle on display in this nitwit documentary. Among other oddities, it seems to be thoroughly against Obamacare. (It wants us to take charge of our life but has damn little to say about how we might afford to do that.)

When you keep using mere anecdotes as "proof," you're in big trouble. But, then, I suppose you would have to be intelligent enough to realize this. Instead, the speakers here, and especially filmmaker Barrett, appear to be blithely unaware of this or maybe have been roped into taking part in something from which they expected a lot more.

In the spirit of sparing undue embarrassment, I have deliberately left out any names of our guest lecturers pictured above (except for dentist Huggins, who is not shown), but I will note that the movie ends with yet another disclaimer. Unlike the earlier ones that are left on screen long enough for your to read them five or ten times, this one I think you might actually want to read. But it is gone before you can even do that.

The Business of Disease, which I feel has no business opening in an actual theater and roping in any poor paying customers, hits a New York City screen (the Quad Cinema) this Friday, February 20, and then arrives in Los Angeles one week later at the Laemmle Music Hall 3. Your move.