Movie/TV Reviews - The Reading Junkie

The Matrix Resurrections and the Death of Democracy

January 20, 2026December 26, 2021 by Ian Kummer

The Matrix Resurrections is a boring, sloppy, incoherent mess. But it does offer some valuable cultural insights that we should pay attention to. Despite endlessly talking about “democratic norms” and holding democracy summits, Western liberals don’t like democracy. They actually hate democracy and associate it with weakness, and this attitude is very apparent in their movies.

The Sound of Music, the Cold War, and the Clean Wehrmacht

January 20, 2026December 13, 2021 by Ian Kummer

Hitler tried to take over the world, he failed, and then his country got colonized by a shitty children’s movie.

Threads and the Failure of Satire

March 11, 2026November 13, 2021 by Ian Kummer

I just watched the 1984 BBC docudrama Threads. In many ways, it is typical of a Cold War film at the height of the Red Scare. However, Threads created a new pinnacle of propaganda. The film’s creators deliberately terrorized an entire generation of children and skillfully blurred the lines between truth and fiction. Threads mimics real news reports, presenting a chain of events that are difficult to distinguish from real-life media, especially for a child. Despite all the praise it received in the years since then, Threads is a horrible film that teaches all the wrong lessons, and didn’t even make a nuclear war less likely. If anything, this wave of propaganda has made self-inflicted armageddon more inevitable than ever before.

Alita – The Antithesis of Toxic Feminism

January 20, 2026January 12, 2021 by Ian Kummer

Summary: Alita is fun and beautifully done, and well worth seeing. Feminists’ reviews were savage. Their attacks reveal much about them and the new puritanism (ideological, not religious) sweeping America.

Spielberg Saved Private Ryan and Killed Patriotism

January 20, 2026November 22, 2020 by Ian Kummer

Synopsis: The classic 1998 gory D-Day movie Saving Private Ryan is a triumph of war cinema that lesser filmmakers have attempted to imitate countless times in the following decades up to the present day. Saving Private Ryan practically defined the entire genre of American war films, but also helped destroy it, perhaps irreversibly.