Hill joined Judas Priest three years before Rob Halford and four before Glenn Tipton. Continue reading…

Name one memorable episode of the late-1980s NBC sitcom A Different World. Go ahead, I’ll wait. Sure, the Cosby Show spinoff featured, in the first of its six seasons, both Lisa Bonet and Marisa Tomei, two fascinating actresses heading in diametrically opposite career directions. And yes, the character name Dwayne Wayne will forever ring a bell for children of Ronald Reagan’s America. Having managed to get by on five channels until well into the 1990s, I can tell you precisely where A Different World was set (the fictional black college Hillman) and which of Bonet’s on-screen parents were meant to have been graduates (both). I can even hum the theme song. I just can’t recall a single subplot, joke, set piece, or lesson learned. One could argue, of course, that the series wasn’t intended for white guys like me in the first place. In a recent article plugging Netflix’s just-launched remake of the show, Essence magazine enthused that black viewers of the original “could recognize pieces of themselves in [its] characters.” The same article lauded a 25% increase in historically black college or university enrollment between 1976 and 1994, with “the largest gains occurring while A Different World was on television.” I will not deny that these phenomena are real, nor that black “representation” is as valid a reason as any to enjoy a show. Still, it strikes me as strange that we’re rebooting a forgettable university sitcom at the very moment when people’s disdain for higher education is near its peak. For professors, taxpayers, and the college-going public, the 33 years since NBC’s series went off the air really have produced a different world. I assure you: It isn’t the one that university types would have chosen. Kennedi Reece as Hazel, Jordan Aaron Hall as Amir, Maleah Joi Moon as Deborah, Cornell Young IV as Shaquille, Alijah Kai as Rashida, and Chibuikem Uche as Kojo in “A Different World.” (Courtesy of Netflix) Netflix’s reboot, now streaming in its 10-episode entirety, seems well aware of the changes wrought on campuses over the last few decades. In its first two episodes alone, the series considers a college athlete’s “name, image, and likeness” deal and portrays both radicalized classroom instruction and a student “shout-down” of a disliked administrator. The third and fourth episodes add to that list examinations of hook-up culture and the financial travails now faced even by richly endowed universities. Yet, despite this verisimilitude, the new show seems strangely confused about how college students actually behave. Contra series lead Deborah Wayne (Maleah Joi Moon), they don’t complain about the difficulty of maintaining a 3.0 GPA, grade inflation having long ago blown the lid off that mark. Nor do they speak in quasi-sophisticated legalese — “Those alleged actions were a horrific misstep” — or eschew phone culture to interact with one another IRL. Were Netflix’s A Different World merely a humorous rendering of quotidian campus life, one might accept it as this generation’s Saved by the Bell: The College Years (1993-94) or Undeclared (2001-02). Alas, the show means to be taken seriously, even as it tries, and fails, to show audiences a good time. Speaking to the Hollywood Reporter last month, showrunner and creator Felicia Pride declared herself to be “in the business of illuminating our humanity back to ourselves.” That may or may not be inspiring, but it practically guarantees that we are not in for a profusion of laughs. Indeed, the new show’s unfunniness may well be its most striking characteristic, edging out by a nose its overreliance on original-series stalwarts Kadeem Hardison, who reprises the role of Dwayne Wayne, and Jasmine Guy, who returns as Southern belle Whitley Gilbert. That neither performer is particularly compelling, or even slightly funny, is beside the point. Their job is to provide a nostalgic hook for viewers who recall the pair’s stormy courtship as the original production’s longest-lasting narrative arc. Netflix’s series fares better with its other actors, who, if not exactly hilarious, are at least watchable most of the time. In addition to Moon’s Deborah, the production serves up Cornell Young IV as five-star football recruit Shaquille; Alijah Kai as Deborah’s overachieving roommate, Rashida; and Chibuikem Uche as Ghanaian-Nigerian, by way of Britain, fashion-merchandising student Kojo. Best of all is Kennedi Reece as Hazel, a God-fearing young woman with all the doe-eyed naivete one expects Hollywood to assign to such a person. Given how complicated prestige-TV plots have become in recent years, it’s almost refreshing that A Different World plows ahead with its stock characters. The laundry-folder or dinner-preparer trying to half-watch the show will keep up just fine. ‘FAUDA’S’ NEW SEASON IS A GRIPPING, MOVING TRIBUTE TO THE VICTIMS OF OCT. 7 Netflix’s reboot is at its best when daring to wring humor from black stereotypes — “Condoms!” a male student replies when asked to name his biggest pet peeve. To the show’s real detriment, however, such moments are few and far between, significantly outpaced by Very Important Lessons concerning, say, neurodiversity or gay polyamorous love. It is not the case that comedy must transgress elite norms to land, but it is very much true that “jokes” meant to reinforce the progressive social order tend to fall as flat as a frat-house sofa. By the time the show starts unironically quoting activist Bell Hooks — sorry, “bell hooks” — in its second episode, most viewers will be flipping over to reruns of Friends. Or perhaps I’m wrong, and Netflix’s production will inspire yet another wave of enthusiastic HBCU enrollment. If the new A Different World is accurate, such students will find themselves in a self-serious atmosphere of identitarianism and complaint. They may have a great time there, but I don’t envy them. Graham Hillard is the TV critic for the Washington Examiner magazine.

The near-apocalyptic critical and commercial failure of the big-screen satire Digger should be taken as the most encouraging of cultural indicators. Here is a movie that is so deeply woke in its ideas and attitudes that it deserves to be called pre-woke. Director and cowriter Alejandro G. Inarritu’s outraged portrayal of a venal, lawless, environment-destroying oil tycoon (Tom Cruise’s character, Digger Rockwell) suggests someone who has only recently become acquainted with the news of the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill, and his eagerness to display his own card-carrying climate warrior credentials — the United States’s exit from the Paris climate accords is actually referenced at one point — suggests someone who has just watched the 2006 Al Gore documentary An Inconvenient Truth. In other words, this is the perfect movie for Greta Thunberg, in her “How dare you!” mode, around 2019 or so. In fact, at times, Digger hearkens back to an even earlier variety of baldly anti-American satire, as when Inarritu has the U.S. president character played by John Goodman — modeled, in his red necktie and general bellicosity, on Donald Trump, though in his purportedly low-class religious convictions and utterly unacceptable sympathy for oilmen, George W. Bush seems to be the closer model — refer to the “Russkies.” What is this, The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming (1966)? Tom Cruise in “Digger.” (Warner Bros/Courtesy Everett Collection) That the public has emphatically rejected — that a large portion has, in fact, skipped altogether — this movie’s dumb, dated virtue-signaling and odious attempts at humor is a real cause for hope. One of the ironic benefits of our social media age is that since trends in thought and attitude fluctuate so quickly, the wokeness that might have seemed au courant when Digger was being hatched sometime in the late 2010s has become as dated as an “in this house we believe” yard sign. Let this fiasco be a lesson to the Skydance Corporation, which, the week after the movie’s release, subsumed the studio that made it, Warner Bros.: Movies that present people who work in the energy industry as evil rubes, the president as a belligerent idiot, military leaders as ungovernable hotheads, and Cruise in old-age makeup are not the way forward. And about Cruise in old-age makeup: Since so many of this film’s references are years or decades old, permit me to make one more. While watching Cruise slink around a bit too lithely and speak a bit too smoothly for someone his character’s age, was anyone else reminded of the old TV commercials for Six Flags amusement parks that starred an obviously young, clearly limber performer made up as an old man who proceeds to show off all manner of dance moves? Cruise, despite being given some signs of aging in his face and a mild paunch, does not walk, talk, or act like any known senior citizen. That’s fine for his Days of Thunder sequel but a disaster here. He is too nimble as he holds court in his mansion (featuring, in one of many clichéd touches meant to scream “wretched excess,” huge mirrors accented with antlers). He is too quick on his feet, which are nearly always wearing cowboy boots, even when he is still in his pajamas. Just in case you miss the point. Which is not to say that Digger’s actions are any more credible than his appearance and affect: In the event that sets off the story, Digger is seen expressing total indifference to a disaster of some sort in an oil field in Greenland — an accident that has torn asunder an ice shelf, now wandering ominously toward land, where it is certain to whip up tsunamis and cause further death and destruction. Yet Digger suggests using technology to quash the news through some vague scheme that involves scary words like “AI.” Exaggerated behavior is necessary for satire, but when it is exaggerated to such a degree to become unbelievable — as is the case in the response of Digger and other U.S. officials to this situation — it crosses the line from satire to spite. Simply put, Inarritu must really believe that American capitalists are as crass and callous as Digger, and that American military men are as quick-tempered as the ones here (nuclear weapons are on the table), and that American society in general is one gigantic display of corpulence, literal and otherwise. It is no accident that the president played by Goodman is dying from colon cancer or something like it, a condition described most inelegantly throughout. SKIP ‘THE WHISPER MAN,’ IF YOU HAVEN’T ALREADY As it turns out, Inarritu — whose previous overrated movies include Birdman (2014) and The Revenant (2015) — has a handy solution for this movie’s increasingly rancid ridiculousness. Spoiler alert: It is revealed at one point that the scenes we have been watching of Digger and the U.S. officials contending with the ice shelf situation are excerpts from a play — a stage show! — based on actual people and events. In other words, Cruise is not cast as Digger but as “Digger,” a character drawn from the real Digger, who, I guess, we never really see. As if it were not annoying enough, this is one of those “meta” movies that means to foreground its own artifice. Yet there is nothing feigned about the moviemakers’ pernicious notions about our country. When Digger swaggeringly asserts that he doesn’t “speak Celsius,” or when a general gloatingly proclaims, “Bomb first, questions later,” the writers who penned such over-the-top lines are expressing contempt for the institutions the characters represent. This is a notably unpleasant and incompetent movie. Peter Tonguette is the Life & Arts editor of the Washington Examiner magazine.

The proposed Joint Warfighting Evaluations are envisioned to be something along the lines of the 1941 Louisiana Maneuvers, which showcased the skills of Eisenhower and Patton....but with AI! The post Hegseth Puts Warfighting Skills at the Center of Military Promotions first appeared on Le·gal In·sur·rec·tion.

“We’re currently having trouble finding anyone to accept our capitulation.”

“The history of America, the history of my country, is covered with the fingerprints of antiquity.”

“Advancing alone into the mined area, Col. Mabry established a safe route of passage. He then moved ahead of the foremost scouts, personally leading the attack.”

Judge Leibowitz ruled that the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 is unconstitutional.

Follow NewsClips channel at Brighteon.com for more updatesSubscribe to Brighteon newsletter to get the latest news and more featured videos: https://support.brighteon.com/Subscribe.html