March 9, 2026

OLD AND BUSTED: “What is a Woman?”

The New Cluelessness? “What is a Man?”

Posted at 4:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

JOHN NOLTE: Maggie Gyllenhaal’s Ultra-Woke Frankenstein Flick The Bride! Bombs at Box Office.

Useless Sycophants in the Entertainment Media, did you see what we didn’t do? What we didn’t do is what you useless sycophants did with Melania. We didn’t wishcast by writing piece after piece about how Bride! would die at the box office. Why? Because I try not to make a fool of myself, and one of the easiest ways to make a fool of yourself is to predict the box office with such certainty — which is what you useless sycophants did with Melania, something all Normal People thank you for.

So, The Bride!…

Writer, director Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride! cost around $100 million to produce and at least another $60 to $80 million to promote, and it’s about to become an iconic box office bomb with an opening weekend in the $7 to $10 million range.

The Bride! had everything going for it. A big star in Christian Bale, the hottest actress around in Jessie Buckley (who’s about to win a Best Actress Oscar), a massive budget, plenty of promotion, a wide release in over 3,300 theaters, an appealing genre, and a 61 percent fresh rating at Rotten Tomatoes thanks to critics who didn’t really like the movie but found a way to pretend they did to prove their fealty to the Woke Gestapo.

So what went wrong…?

Well, I haven’t seen the movie and probably never will, but unless the title is Barbie, woke equals 100 percent flop rate at the box office.

Many of the critics who pretended to like this mess had the same complaints as those who published negative reviews: 1) it’s an angry feminist diatribe and 2) Gyllenhaal didn’t have a handle on what she wanted the movie to say so she threw a bunch of feminist tropes against the wall and now moviegoers have to sit through watching none of them stick.

Angry feminist diatribe? This woke-Website’s headline implies exactly that: Misogynistic Reactions Can’t Stop Feminist Frankenstein Reinvention The Bride! From Being One of the Boldest Studio Films Ever.

Perhaps Gyllenhaal inadvertently remade the wrong old beloved B-movie, though. Instead of The Bride(!) of Frankenstein, she’s remade the Time Machine instead: The Bride! A Feminist Frankenstein That Plays Like a Lost Remnant of Woke Culture.

Developed in 2023 and early 2024, The Bride! was passed between studios that reportedly disagreed with writer-director Gyllenhaal about budget and creative direction. Looking at the disastrous final product, it’s hard not to come down on the side of executives who had creative disagreements. And no amount of money should have been spent on this mess.

More than anything else, The Bride! feels like the lost remnants of a pre-vibe shift culture, the last vestige of a fully woke world. There are explicit references to riot grrrl culture, and the film’s climax literally involves Ida repeatedly shouting “me too!” at no one in particular.

It would be too easy to describe this as a stitched-together monster of a movie, but at least Frankenstein’s monster had something resembling life.

In any case, the Critical Drinker is succinct: The Bride! It Sucks!

Posted at 4:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

TRADE WAR: Who in China Can Still Afford to Buy Our Stuff? “Chinese consumers aren’t exactly in a buying mood, and Chinese producers seem to be caught in a price-cutting battle for market share both at home and abroad.”

Posted at 3:17 pm by Stephen Green

HEH:

Posted at 3:02 pm by Stephen Green

ITS ORIGIN AND PURPOSE, STILL A TOTAL MYSTERY: Suspected terrorist defiantly flashes ISIS salute after he’s busted for tossing explosive device near Gracie Mansion.

One of the accused terrorists busted for lobbing explosive devices near Gracie Mansion flashed a sick salute honoring ISIS as he was led in shackles from a police precinct Monday.

Emir Balat, 18, was seen holding up his right index finger — a universal salute for the terror group — and grinning at the press while being led by a cop and an FBI agent.

Balat, wearing a black T-shirt and beige pants, made the gesture before one of the officers flanking him slapped down his hand.

Balat, whose parents are reportedly from Turkey but who became naturalized citizens in 2017, was arrested Saturday along with 19-year-old Ibrahim Kayumi after a homemade “Mother of Satan” bomb was thrown at protesters outside New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s Upper East Side residence.

Related:

Posted at 2:22 pm by Ed Driscoll

WE’RE WATCHING DOWNFALL, BUT WITH MASS NOTIFICATION SYSTEMS AND PCs TO CRANK OUT AI SLOP IN THE AYATOLLAH-BUNKER:

Posted at 1:35 pm by Ed Driscoll

JOHN HINDERAKER: Lies, Damned Lies, and Journalism. “So the Tomahawk didn’t hit the school, it hit the naval base. And the video indicates that at that point, the school had already been struck. By what? We don’t know, but the one thing we know for sure is that it wasn’t the Tomahawk. My guess is that the military investigation will conclude that the school was struck by an errant Iranian missile, but by that time the left-wing press will have firmly implanted the assumption that it was ours.”

The Western press happily carries water for the mullahs. You cannot despise them enough.

Posted at 1:28 pm by Stephen Green

GONE IN 60 SECONDS: Noem’s deputy director of ICE bought thousands of vehicles that officers can’t use.

A former Trump administration official wasted millions of taxpayer dollars given to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to purchase thousands of employee vehicles that the agency cannot use to arrest illegal immigrants, according to three sources.

ICE’s top brass are quietly searching for a way to amend the remainder of a massive order of pick-up trucks and SUVs that were ordered last year and slated to be wrapped with the agency’s name, logo, and motto, as well as storing away many vehicles that have been delivered to ICE facilities across the country, the Washington Examiner has learned.

“ICE has never had marked vehicles,” the first person familiar with the purchases said in a phone call. “In talking to people, they’re like, ‘We don’t want to use these, we can’t.’”

The saga is the latest controversial expenditure of taxpayer money within the Department of Homeland Security and speaks to the different ways political appointees at the department have tried to approach operations versus how career law enforcement officials have historically done so.

Over the past year, assaults against ICE personnel have risen 8,000%, according to the DHS, and federal police have opted to hide their faces and identities while working in public. They have frequently switched license plates on rental vehicles to avoid detection by activists, who track the license plate numbers of suspected ICE vehicles in massive crowdsourced databases.

Despite the growing number of ways ICE employees have sought to protect their identities, ICE’s former deputy director, Madison Sheahan, placed a bulk order for vehicles clearly marked with ICE’s logo.

Exit quote: “‘If leadership would have been consulted — leadership being the executive assistant directors, do you need marked vehicles, the people that have done this job would have said, ‘We don’t need marked vehicles, because you’re not going to use them,’ the first person said.”

UPDATE Why would ICE need unmarked cars? Oh, right:

Posted at 1:22 pm by Ed Driscoll

BATTLESWARM: Iran Strikes Day 9. “Back before American journalists became self-licking ice cream cones, war reporting used to include maps, unit movements, logistics, combat reports from journalists embedded with U.S. units, etc. The BBC still seems to do a little of that, but I’m not seeing that from American outlets, maybe because it’s hard work. They don’t even seem to be bothering to tell ChatGPT to do it for them. Hence these roundups to fill the gap.”

Posted at 12:42 pm by Stephen Green