Vice’s Gritty Multimedia Reboot of “A Christmas Carol” Met With Universal Praise

Christopher Cantwell, praised by critics for his re-imagining of Ebeneezer Scrooge as a cowardly neo-Nazi (YouTube)

By JONATHAN KIM     August 17, 2017

LOS ANGELES – The first chapter of Vice Media’s gritty re-imagining of Charles Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol” was released on YouTube earlier this week. Titled “Charlottesville: Race and Terror,” the take-no-prisoners reboot of the beloved Christmas classic was followed up yesterday by its second half, “Crying Nazi Snowflake Needs a Safe Space.”

The multimedia endeavor has garnered near universal acclaim, with critics and viewers alike praising the filmmakers for so perfectly capturing the texture and relevance of the original work without resorting to cynicism or melodrama. Matt Zoller Seitz, writing for RogerEbert.com, said that the film’s first half “Perfectly re-packages the violence, detachment and hubris of the original protagonist’s worldview; instead of the pleas of street urchins stomped out underfoot by the capitalist greed of Ebeneezer Scrooge, we are witness to the weary humanity of Charlottesville’s citizens as they struggle with the evil and callousness of white supremacy and neo-Nazi violence. The bewildered rage of a bespectacled black man – his spirit crushed by watching James Alex Fields, Jr murder and maim wholesale a crowd of local counter-protesters – bears more weight and truth than a thousand Tiny Tims.”

The film reinterprets Ebeneezer Scrooge as Christopher Cantwell, a man whose hate for immigrants, liberals, and black Americans is matched only by his childlike preoccupation with violence. We watch Cantwell eagerly anticipate violent opposition, his eyes lighting up with glee any time he thinks a counter-protester might push or shove one of his neo-Nazi compatriots, so that he might unleash righteous retaliatory fury. At one point, Cantwell waxes on about the fantasy of someday being forced to kill a dangerous adversary with one of his six different firearms, all of which he puts on jubilant display for the audience in a scene more reminiscent of a child showing off his toy collection. Cantwell’s words barely veil his obvious desire to foment violence so that he might strike down his deadly opponents.

Cantwell’s deadly opponents never materialize. Like most protests in the United States and throughout the Western world, the violence never escalates to the small-arms-fire battle that Cantwell and his friends wish it would. Armed militiamen, coated in tactical armor and sporting semi-automatic rifles, stand as impotent as clusters of carolers might have in Dickens’s original version; full of spirit, but unable to satisfy any purpose.

It is these images of white men, armed and postured for action in the name of their racial superiority, that drives the narrative of the first half of the film, with Cantwell’s disdain and nearly Vaudevillian lack of understanding of the black experience in America matched only by his mania for perceived oppression. It is this total ignorance of American culture, and his narrow, paranoid preoccupation with unnumbered imaginary antagonists that perfectly set up the second half of this masterpiece.

“Crying Nazi Snowflake Needs a Safe Space” is the exquisite followup to the film’s first part, and features a tearful and terrified Cantwell, suddenly faced with the consequences of his actions and beliefs, bawling helplessly at the prospect of being in trouble with the law.

The messaging is obvious: Cantwell shows utter disdain for minorities in the United States, who must face the reality of increased and fatally-disproportionate law enforcement action on a daily basis, but when he himself is suddenly in the position of possibly facing an arrest warrant, his bravado crumbles immediately, and he lacks the basic emotional strength and resolve that the minorities he so despises manage to muster when placed in the exact same situation. One need look only as far as the shooting of Philandro Castille and witness the staunch resolve of Diamond Reynolds as she stared down the smoking barrel of a trigger-happy officer’s gun, and one sees the grimly comic difference. Cantwell shouldn’t be anywhere near the kitchen, because forget the heat… even the thought of an open flame brings him to tears.

Some critics felt that the second half’s outcome was a little too on the nose, but conceded that the raw, pathetic emotion on display more than made up for its rote narrative shortcomings.

While critics fawned over this daring re-imagining of “A Christmas Carol,” they are universally unimpressed with Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin’s half-baked reboot of the Cold War, hoping that the production will fizzle before it reaches completion.

Mike Pence Caught Measuring Oval Office for New Drapes

Vice President Mike Pence caught in the Oval Office on Monday, claiming he totally forgot to grab this folder from the President’s desk earlier (Shealah Craighead)

By ELAINE KULINSKA    August 17, 2017

WASHINGTON – Amidst reports of internal strife at all levels of the Trump administration this week, White House aides report that Vice President Mike Pence has more than once been caught measuring the Oval Office windows for new drapes.

Recent events – including the President’s handling of the Unite the Right demonstration in Charlottesville over the weekend, Presidential adviser Steve Bannon’s erratic interview with the press, GOP allies abandoning the President, and too many de-staffings, falsehoods, and unhinged press briefings to adequately summarize in one article – have shaken the administration from top to bottom. During this intense period of confusion, several White House aides disclosed to reporters that Mike Pence has been spending an inordinate amount of time strolling the halls adjacent to the Oval Office.

“I don’t usually see the Vice President around here,” confided one aide on condition of anonymity, “but this week I’ve already run into him maybe five or six times.”

Pence was reportedly caught with a tape measure, balanced precariously on the sill of one of the Oval Office’s windows, and did not notice when the aide entered the room. When the aide asked Pence what he was doing, Pence nearly lost his footing, arms pinwheeling.

Recovering, Pence told the aide that he was simply using the tape measure to reach a pen that he had accidentally thrown up there, earlier. Pence hastily exited the Oval Office, but not before casually asking if the aide felt that maybe the room could use a different carpet.

Employees at Washington’s local IKEA confirmed that they had spotted Mike Pence and Speaker of the House Paul Ryan hand-in-hand as they strolled through the furniture section.

Remains of James Woods’s Career Unearthed on Twitter

James Woods’s Career at the height of its relevance (left), and some of the remains of James Woods’s Career discovered on Twitter (Universal Pictures/FBI)

By JONATHAN KIM    August 17, 2017

WASHINGTON – The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Computer Forensics Lab confirmed today that the remains of the career unearthed on Twitter earlier this year belonged to actor James Woods.

James Woods’s career was still thriving through the 1990s, but then familiar patterns started to emerge,  explained Special Agent Tia Wong.

“When we first started investigating, we started to look for telltale signs,” said Wong. “Our techs had discovered some fragments of Tweets complaining about millennials and ‘special snowflakes’ and Colin Kaepernick, and those are generally strong indications that we’re following a trail of breadcrumbs left by a career that might be in danger of dying.”

“It’s frequently the case with a lot of these older, whiter, male, North American celebrities that their careers reach a point where the career itself is unable to continue to adapt and cope with new stimulus,” Wong continued. “If you look at the careers of people like Patrick Stewart, Betty White… even more contemporary cases like the careers of Sarah Silverman, and even Louis C.K. – whose career is actually a bit of an outlier, given predispositional factors – you can see a propensity for adaptation and even revitalization at times. The particular form of stagnation we’ve discovered in the case of James Woods’s career only seems to occur in white men, typically from the United States or Canada.”

Wong identified key warning signs to look out for. “You want to pay attention: Is the career starting to falter a bit because it can’t handle differing, emerging viewpoints? This typically manifests itself as attacking ‘safe spaces,’ without really understanding what a safe space is, attacking people as being ‘too sensitive,’ or ‘triggered.'” Wong added, “You’ll also see a fixation on cartoonish, old-fashioned masculinity that rewards stubbornness, an unwillingness to absorb new ideas, or the idea that people around you have somehow become ‘weak.’ You’ll especially see these warning signs in stand-up careers as they begin to disintegrate.”

Wong pointed to James Woods’s case. A white male Canadian actor who found popularity in the 1980s appearing in films like Videodrome, Woods started showing signs of a moribund career by the early 2000s. “We’ve managed to follow forensic trails as far back as 2006, thanks to a fragmented social media presence, but we can only wonder that if maybe people had seriously been paying attention to James Wood’s career, maybe these signs could have been caught, sooner.”

Aside from revealing more odious behaviors – including suing the family of a dead Twitter user for $10 million because the deceased called Woods a cocaine addict – Woods’s Twitter also displayed a few strong indicators that researchers consider red flags for impending career death.

“The big one is this Tweet where Woods complains about ‘political correctness,'” Wong said, indicating a Tweet where Woods whined, “[The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences] is not a club, nor a propaganda platform, nor an exercise in political correctness,” in response to criticisms that the Academy Awards had routinely passed over people of color… a reaction that Wong pointed out, “Implies that only white people are the ones actually worthy of recognition, while people of color lack the necessary talent and skill to excel. It’s symptoms like this that point to inevitable career death.”

Wong elaborated upon the tendency of dying careers to latch onto “political correctness,” saying, “I can’t say for certain why these careers inevitably attach themselves to this notion of ‘political correctness,’ that’s not really my department. A prevailing theory is that the career latches on as a means of sustenance, but ‘political correctness’ has been latched onto for so long that it simply can’t support any more careers at this point. I mean, we’re talking about something that careers have been latching onto for about forty years; you simply can’t whine about ‘political correctness’ over and over and over for that long before it becomes unsustainable.”

“This is where he had a meltdown because Twitter was banning accounts engaged in racist harassment,” Wong said, pulling up a Tweet reading, “Since @Twitter is now in the #censorship business, I will no longer use its service for my constitutional right to free speech. #GoodbyeAll.”

“Bear in mind, this is in response to Twitter banning accounts that had engaged in hate speech,” Wong said. “Even more than whining about ‘political correctness,’ tantrums over private companies refusing to support bullying or harassment – or any threat to those particular forms of ‘free speech’ – are major warning signs of career morbidity.”

Wong said that while in recent years, experts have managed to detect patterns and start to pick out these warning signs of a dying career much earlier in the career’s trajectory, for many the research has come far too late.

“If we had been more acutely aware of these indicators, perhaps we could have saved not only James Woods’s career, but also Dane Cook’s,” lamented Wong.

At press time, the FBI and local emergency response teams had been dispatched to both Adam Carolla and Joe Rogan’s residences.

Andrew Anglin Distracted in Middle of Press Conference by Picture of Taye Diggs

Noted neo-Nazi and white supremacist, Andrew Anglin (left), who promotes the inherent genetic superiority of the white race, and Taye Diggs (AP)

By MIRANDA SAUNDERS   August 16, 2017

WASHINGTON – After the Unite the Right demonstrations in Virginia over the weekend, The Daily Stormer website – the pre-eminent neo-Nazi platform – was refused hosting by both GoDaddy and Google, forcing the white supremacy site to seek a home on the dark web.

Andrew Anglin, The Daily Stormer’s founder and webmaster, held a press conference earlier today to address the groundswell of resistance to the increase of neo-Nazi activity in the United States, but was derailed mid-sentence when his gaze fell upon a headshot of Taye Diggs.

“The censoring of The Daily Stormer from the internet by powerful, pro-Jew and pro-Black interests violates the very foundation and spirit of free speech upon which this country was founded,” asserted Anglin. “Even President Donald Trump has said that those who oppose our views engage in needless acts of violence… acts which have only been exacerbated by these blatant attempts to silence our message of truth about unassailable white genetic superi–” Anglin trailed off at that point, his eyes momentarily distracted by a headshot of Taye Diggs that had been left on a nearby table.

When asked by reporters what Anglin’s plans were for The Daily Stormer, Anglin replied – after a very long pause – that, “The Daily Stormer has been forced to find a home on the dark web. Liberal forces sympathetic to the Jew and the inferior Black are determined to suppress our message of white racial superiority, but rest assured that our readership and our spirit for spreading the truth about–” Anglin again trailed off, his eyes drawn down towards the image of Taye Diggs.

“Just… just… my god, so… so….” Anglin is reported to have whispered through trembling lips.

No one could confirm how the headshot of Mr. Diggs had made its way into the conference room, but having relocated the headshot to his podium, Anglin continued to field questions, though his responses were too disjointed and too distracted for publication.

The press conference drew to a close soon after, without any further questions from the assembled reporters. Anglin appeared not to notice.

At press time, Anglin was badly losing a debate about racial purity against a wall poster of indigenous Hawaiian, Jason Momoa.