Roger Ebert’s legendary status as America’s film critic is well earned.

He still let his progressive views seep into his signature thumb in his later years. That didn’t diminish his place in movie reviewing lore, nor his legacy.

A contributing critic for his self-named site has taken that progressive baton and run with it. Think “Chariots of Fire”-style running.

The review wastes no time getting to the ideological point.

“One Night Only” … is everything that’s troubling about the current conservative capitalist hellscape that is the United States of America writ large.

Ma’am, this is a rom-com review…

There’s so much more.

It makes nods to the very real horrors of today, like tech bro-backed surveillance capitalism, rampant Big Pharma advertisements, and fascist police and politicians controlling our bodies, without ever taking the time to interrogate any of the sources that have led to our current political climate.

If only “When Harry Met Sally…” had brought up the Iran-Contra scandal, it might have been a classic. Oh, well.

The director of “One Night Only” cut down on the sex and nudity, but even that proves problematic.

That’s progress, I guess, since an earlier iteration of this film made in the ’80s or ’90s would have just been a flurry of t** shots…. Romance, too, is depicted in deeply conservative, heteronormative terms—casual sex is looked down on, open relationships only lead to guilt, etc. 

More “problems?” The movie isn’t kind to “sex workers” and there’s not enough queer sexuality. It’s about a boy and girl who fall for each other.

Darn. Where is that “Heated Rivalry” tribute?

And, when the film does mention gay romance, the critic calls it “straightwashing the history of anti-LGBTQ legislation.”

It’s reminiscent of an old Cancel Culture saw. You can never be woke enough.

This rom-com also fails to give age-of-consent laws the closeup they demand. Again, imagine the rom-com that actually checks some, if not all, of this critic’s woke boxes.

Please read the whole review. There’s more. Much more that will stun.

Here are some of the comments on the site:

• This review is truly the worst I’ve ever seen on this site
• Let me guess, the reviewer just got out of college with their grievance studies degree? Yeah…
• Roger Ebert might have despised this movie, and he’d likely cringe at this despicably unimaginative review. Do better next time.

Now, a critic can let a personal political or cultural view slip in now and then. And, if you’re working for an ideological site, that’s to be expected.

Hollywood in Toto wears its conservatism on its sleeve, and the occasional right-leaning barb slips through.

Sorry not sorry.

Still, HiT still wouldn’t go the full “One Night Only” review.

Should anyone?

The post Is This the Most Woke Movie Review … Ever? appeared first on Hollywood in Toto.

Arctotherium, “The Closure of the Internet: The Most Important Social Phenomenon of the Late 2010s,” Not With a Bang (Aug. 9, 2026).

Grok Summary:

Arctotherium’s long essay argues that the “closure of the Internet” in the late 2010s was the most important social phenomenon of the period. Until roughly 2015, major platforms operated with minimal rules beyond real-world crimes (illegal goods, child exploitation, direct threats, etc.). This open environment was backed by institutions such as the UN, EU, U.S. State Department, and mainstream outlets that treated online speech as continuous with offline liberty and expected it to liberalize closed societies.

That changed rapidly in two phases:

• 2015–2019, linked to the migrant crisis, Brexit, Trump’s election, and the online right;
• 2020–2022, intensified by COVID policies and the 2020 U.S. election.

Platforms built large human and machine-learning moderation systems, invented or radically expanded concepts such as “disinformation,” “misinformation,” “malinformation,” “hate speech,” “toxicity,” and “online safety,” and applied them opaquely and selectively. Network analysis was used to map and suppress clusters of accounts; demonetization, shadowbans, algorithmic downranking, and outright bans became routine. The essay details the process platform by platform (YouTube’s post-2017 “adpocalypse” and policy expansions, Reddit’s successive subreddit purges and quarantine regime, Twitter’s evolving rules and later Twitter Files revelations of government/FBI coordination, Amazon’s book removals, etc.). Offline enforcement (firings, street violence, institutional purges) closed the remaining avenues. The result, in the author’s view, was a shift from a relatively open frontier to “closely monitored playpens,” with tens of millions of accounts affected and heterodox (especially anti-woke or right-leaning) discourse largely driven offline or into smaller, lower-capacity spaces. The piece frames this as a classic slippery-slope case with no stable limiting principle once the conceptual and technical apparatus existed.

Arctotherium, “The Closure of the Internet: The Most Important Social Phenomenon of the Late 2010s,” Not With a Bang (Aug. 9, 2026)

Introduction

In July 2012, the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) unanimously adopted a landmark resolution affirming a simple proposition: “The same rights that people have offline must also be protected online, in particular freedom of expression, which is applicable regardless of frontiers and through any media of one’s choice.” Writing in The New York Times, Carl Bildt, Sweden’s foreign minister [at the time], hailed the vote as a “breakthrough of fundamental importance,” insisting that “the free flow of information on the Internet is a global call and not something pushed only by a few Western states.” For a brief moment, it seemed as if the world’s democracies had accepted that the open Internet would be the nervous system of modern liberty. (The End of the Open Internet)

Until 2015, an optimistic and liberal (in the best sense) ethos pervaded the Internet. Major Internet platforms were open and had little content policy beyond bans on real-life criminal activity (stalking, selling illegal goods, child pornography, etc). Aside from these narrow and reasonable explicit exceptions, anyone could go online and converse with interested people around the world about whatever they wanted in public. These platforms had no real means to control what people talked about on them even if they wanted to, which they didn’t; to the extent an organization can have views all believed in free¹ and open online discourse, which promised to make censorship impossible and end the hegemony of 20th century broadcast media.

In this, they were backed up by major non-tech institutions, such as the UN, the EU, the US State Department, and the New York Times², all of which saw Internet freedom as a corollary of offline freedom, and one which would liberalize the world’s remaining non-democratic states in time. These institutions both supported Internet freedom rhetorically³ and spent hundreds of millions of dollars creating and disseminating technical tools to evade Internet censorship and preserve online anonymity.

Read more>>

TERRE HAUTE, IN — In a wholesome display of innocence, a five-year-old white girl reportedly told her parents how she dreamed of one day growing up to get beaten up in the WNBA.

U.S. — The general public breathed a sigh of relief on Monday after it was revealed that a team of top scientists was hard at work trying to come up with a way to make the iPhone weather app even less accurate.

An Australian budget airline is coming under fire after offering its customers a new way to make flying less stressful.

That new way?

Paying for overhead storage:

Jetstar says the decision followed feedback from both passengers and airline staff, who identified "having bags weighed at the gate and struggling to find room in overhead lockers as the more stressful parts of the airport experience," according to a statement released by the carrier on Wednesday. [bold added]

I don't fly that much, but for a time I did. Trying to use overhead storage was so annoying for precisely these reasons that I tried to confine myself to a computer bag I could fit under the seat in front of me.

Whenever I did have a second carry-on, I usually had to hunt for somewhere to put it (and then remember to take it with me on deboarding) -- thanks probably to the people who went wild with carry-ons and are now getting the most bent out of shape over the announcement:

The move immediately triggered backlash on X, where flyers accused the airline of dressing up an unpopular fee as a customer-friendly option. "Jetstar rebranding a blatant cash grab as "Priority Carry-on Choice" is a masterclass in gaslighting. Hope it backfires," wrote one user.

Others questioned whether the airline should even be allowed to do it. "Seriously? How is this legal?" wrote another. A third vowed to take their business elsewhere: "Well I know who I won't be flying with," a third said.

A masterclass in gaslighting?

Choice is exactly what "free" overhead storage denied me most of the time. I, for one, would have loved knowing I could put any carry-on close to my seat, where I could remember it and get it quickly at the end of my flight. On top of that, on those flights when one might need access to the bag -- e.g., parents traveling with infants -- access would be quicker and there would be no need to plan for the contingency of juggling things at the last second because some clown wants to avoid checking bags.

I'm rooting for Jetstar, and hope its idea catches on.

-- CAV

A new book offers a concise and compelling history.