How to Have Fun During the National Shutdown

  Not everything Hollywood does is racial and sexual propaganda F or once it’s the Democrats who are threatening to shut down the Government. Having learned nothing from their 2024 electoral loss, they think the public will turn against the Republicans is the world as they know it comes to an end. Refusing to vote in favor of a GOP Continuing Resolution needed to keep all the agencies and departments and bureaus and NGOs running is an option they believe will paralyze the nation until Trump can be made to see sense. Which could take a long time, because he never has seen sense yet. Brilliant, eh? As we all know, Government Shutdowns don’t stop the checks from going out to recipients of Social Security and Medicare payments, and the troops will still get paid. What always does get shut down is the fun stuff, like National Parks and federally funded and staffed historical museums. What to do with all the free time you have after you’re done for the day with the two or three jobs you...

 It took me two tries to watch this. Episode One is so awful, so cold and humiliating and frightful that I gave up. You see what it’s like having a rape kit taken. Men don’t know about this. We kind of blink it away. Why I felt compelled to go back and see the whole incredibly long ordeal. Available at Netflix. How can the lead actress even do these scenes? As they say, better man than I am.

We watched this one open-mouthed for hours. Kid you not. This is one incredibly amazing air disaster flick. The subtitles don’t even matter. At Amazon Prime. You never heard of anybody in it. Doesn’t matter. All Russian movie stars are gorgeous.

If, like us, you’re a diehard fan of “Die Hard,” the new American Christmas movie, it might be welcome news to you that the Koreans took on that challenge and raised the stakes. This is a fabulous movie. Available at Amazon Prime.

Okay. I’m not going to call it a fight, but there has been, uh, disagreement. In my typically diplomatic way, I have declared Star Trek Voyager the single greatest Star Trek series ever. My better half prefers Deep Space Nine, which doesn’t even have a Vulcan or photon torpedoes. Enough said. Are there problems with Voyager? Yes. But there are problems with all of them. Not for you if you have some kind of hang up with a Starship captain from Katherine Hepburn’s Bryn Mawr school of elocution. See, I have no problem with a female starship captain. It’s comforting to know she’s from the Main Line. What does it have no other ST series does? A black Vulcan, a Borg body to die for, a doomed and lonely mission across the entire universe, and at least twice, the utter destruction of a starship based on principles better than Picard’s Canadian Surrender First and Talk About it Later crapola. Sometimes the Bryn Mawr bitch goes to war. Why she gets my vote. On Netflix. 170 episodes.

Two old hands get it done. Yes, there are good movies out there. Not all of them in English. A couple of the best slam bang action thrillers are in Korean and Russian. We’ll get to those shortly because we don’t have the time for half measures, what with the world about to come to an end and all, but today we’ll start you off easy. With an actually good movie made in America. Surprised? Of course you are. Available right now at Netflix. P.S. Yeah, Bonnie and Clyde were gunned down with extreme violence. By guns. By two old white men. Who killed a woman, back when we knew what a woman was. No wonder the critics yawned at this movie. Don’t believe them.

I had a bunch of other candidate movies. I got overruled. The Black Sox won. Available on Xfinity.