Monthly Archives: July 2025

’Locked’ Starts Strong — Then Stalls

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http://childpsychiatryassociates.com/treatment-team/donner-dewdney Locked is the kind of movie that starts like a thriller and ends like a voicemail.

The premise is killer: A car becomes a prison. Bill Skarsgård plays Eddie, a thief who steals a high-end SUV only to find himself locked inside—physically, psychologically, and morally—by the remote voice of the car’s owner, William (Anthony Hopkins). The car talks. It shocks. It records. It punishes. And you’re in it with him.

For about 20 minutes, it works. Beautifully.

The cabin is claustrophobic. The sound design is vicious. Hopkins’ voice—smooth, icy, deliberate—slithers through the sound system like HAL 9000’s bitter uncle. Skarsgård sells every second of panic. Every gasp, every flinch, every gut-punch realization that he’s not stealing a car—he’s on trial inside one.

But then the movie keeps going.

And going.

What should have been a lean 25-minute short stretches into a padded 95-minute feature. The tension that once hummed starts to wheeze. The film flashes back. It tries to build lore. It monologues. It moralizes. It forgets that the setup was the story.

Hopkins is overqualified and overused. Skarsgård, despite being soaked in sweat and desperation for most of the runtime, can’t save the script from circling.

The movie isn’t bad—it’s just bloated. Stylish, sure. But without drive. A haunted house with cruise control.

There are moments when it hints at something bigger: a meditation on justice, on digital control, on grief. But each thread is abandoned as quickly as it’s introduced. It ends not with a bang, but a “wait, that’s it?”

Locked is a strong short trapped in the body of a feature film. Ironically, it does exactly what its title suggests: it locks itself in—and can’t get out.

Trump Can’t Take a Joke, Because Conservatives Can’t Tell One


Here’s the current state of comedy in America:

An AI-rendered video of naked Trump wandering the desert, narrated by his own junk = NOT FUNNY.

An AI-rendered video of Obama being arrested in handcuffs = Certified MAGA Hilarity™.

That’s the bar now. Or rather, the limbo stick. Welcome to comedy under conservatism, where the only thing lower than the approval rating is the punchline.

Trump and his followers have always had a brittle relationship with humor. They love to dish it out—mock immigrants, minorities, trans people, the disabled, and women—but the moment the joke’s on them? Suddenly it’s “fourth-rate,” “disgusting,” “cancel-worthy.” Especially if it’s animated. Especially if it’s South Park.

Last week, the White House threw a fit over South Park’s portrayal of President Trump—naked, delirious, wandering through a digital wasteland while his genitalia offered commentary like a disgraced televangelist. It was profane. It was grotesque. And yes, it was funny.

Too funny.

Which is why the president responded the only way conservatives know how when comedy makes them uncomfortable: he whined. Loudly.

He called the show desperate, irrelevant, uninspired. Which is odd coming from a man whose jokes usually involve pretending to be a transgender bodybuilder or inventing nicknames like a drunk uncle who just discovered Twitter.

To be clear: this is the same president who just days earlier posted a deepfake video of Barack Obama being arrested. No satire. No disclaimer. No joke. Just a wish-fulfillment fantasy rendered in pixels and fascism.

This is what passes for humor on the right. Punching down. Always down. Never clever, never subversive, never aimed at power—because they are the power now, and power hates a mirror.

And let’s be honest: conservatives suck at comedy. Because they don’t understand it.

One, comedy relies on a setup, a tension-build — and unexpected punchline. Conservatives don’t like the unexpected. Plus, comedy is irreverent, a conservative no-no.

Finally, they confuse cruelty with chortles. They think “owning the libs” is a setup. They mistake bigotry for wit. It’s why every time a right-winger tries to launch a late-night show, it crashes faster than Trump’s reading level.

Remember that Gutfeld disaster? Exactly.

Meanwhile, the people who actually know how to land a joke—Colbert, Behar, Stewart, South Park—are being targeted. Threatened. Canceled. Because they committed the cardinal sin of satire: they laughed at the king.

And this king is a jester in denial.

When your entire ideology is built on victimhood and vengeance, there’s no room for punchlines. Only propaganda.

So yes, Trump is mad about a cartoon. Again. But this isn’t just about South Park. It’s about the conservative war on humor itself.

Because the right doesn’t want to be funny.

They want to be feared.

And that’s the saddest joke of all.

Graceless Guests

Georgiyevsk Graceless Guests

We don’t deserve this planet, and she knows it.
She’s watched us pave the orchards,
drain the rivers like warm beer,
name every mountain after a man
who never climbed it.

But still she throws a sunrise like dice
and lets light land
on all of us.
Even the bastards.

The trees don’t fret who planted them.
They just grow.
The birds don’t care who’s listening.
They just sing.

And the dirt?
The dirt keeps catching us
when we fall face-first
from our own cleverness.

She should’ve thrown us out
like cigarette ash,
but she keeps us around—
maybe out of habit,
maybe for the comedy.

Still, every now and then,
a child plants a seed,
a drunk returns a stray dog,
a man writes a poem
without knowing why.

And she sighs,
a little softer,
as if to say,
“Close, kid.
Try again tomorrow.”