I enjoyed the goofy, funny, balls-out alien invasion movie that was Independence Day (1996). The film was dumber than a stoned golden retriever in a Harvard calculus class, but Will Smith, Jeff Goldblum and, yes, Randy Quaid made the grandiose stupidity somewhat of a blast.

Two decades after the original, Independence Day: Resurgence finally arrives, without Smith, who probably didn’t think the check was big enough.

While the original was a stupid blast, the sequel is the equivalent of a nasty two-hour alien fart. Goldblum, Bill Pullman and Brent Spiner return for alien nonsense that is fast paced yet dull, and utterly void of laughs. It’s evident in the first 10 minutes that the movie will somehow manage to be lethargic even though the editing is frantic, and lots of things are exploding.

Returning director Roland Emmerich is clearly not on his disaster-epic game. It’s a wasteful effort, where camp has been replaced by total ineptitude, and the performers look lost. And, let’s face it, Liam Hemsworth is no Will Smith. Hell, Liam Hemsworth is no Carrot Top. He’s a dud, the movie’s a dud, and the franchise needs to stop now.

Yes, the film calls for a sequel at the end, but Emmerich needs to move on to other things.

Important: My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2 is finally out on DVD so you can enjoy some 2002 nostalgia before the heat and/or monsoon rains decide to kill us all.

Here's your Casa Video Top 10 for the week: 

1. The Revenant
   
   

David Farrier, a New Zealand reporter tasked with finding human interest stories stumbles upon a competitive tickling website and decides to cover the “sport.” Before long, he’s getting threats from an overseas entity both legal and personal. David comes to the United States to investigate further and uncovers some sort of evil fetish tickling ring. It’s been in existence since the mid-nineties and, as he discovers, there are different entities on the Internet that are all tied together. Things get uglier when he traces the whole thing back to a weirdo living in New York, a guy with a lot of money and a law degree.

Farrier and co-director Dylan Reeve deliver a film that’s somewhere in the Catfish mode of documentary moviemaking. It winds up being an interesting story about control, bullying, and to a lessor extent, tickling.

The whole thing is pretty messed up, with a long history of young men being terrorized and, in the case of this particular reporter, being attacked on all aspects of his personality. The whole thing starts out funny and happy, and goes to a surprisingly dark place. This one will make you feel real dirty if you have a thing for tickle videos. 

Hey Tucson, hey. Adiba here, and I'm coming to you with a heavy, 50lb heart. 

Alton Sterling. Philando Castile. 

As someone on Twitter said, "another day, another hashtag," and I can't wrap my mind around this. For some reason these two deaths have hit me harder and deeper than any of the countless deaths of Black men and women that have come before them. I have watched the video of every death prior to these. I've listened to countless audio tapes. I've listened to Trayvon Martin beg for someone, ANYONE to help; his screams heard through closed doors, brick frame homes and transmitted clearly over a telephone line into a 911 operator's ear. I've watched Walter Scott get shot in the back by a police officer as he ran for his life. I've witnessed via the terrors of YouTube as Laquan MacDonald had 17 bullets pumped into his body—execution by legal firing squad. So, watching my brothers die at the hands of corrupt police officers is not new to me—it has come to be part of the narrative of 2013 - ???.

But what was it about these two men? Is it because this time I witnessed the "what happened before" that people are always talking about? Is it because I saw Alton Sterling standing there, not resisting arrest, before being tackled to the ground like a linebacker? It because I watched the police officer put the gun to his chest more than once, watched him pull the trigger, and then watched life leave this man's body? Is it because Philando Castile's girlfriend invited me into her loved ones last moments on this earth, and I watched yet another soul float away? Is it because his 4-year-old daughter was still strapped into her carseat when her daddy was gunned down before her eyes? Or is it because I then listened to this same 4-year-old girl console her mother in the back of a police car, as she mourned the death of her loved one. This baby didn't even get to mourn. She was placed in the role of protector. At 4-years-old she unearthed the role of "saving grace." This shouldn't happen. This should never happen. It hasn't happened here. 

But it can. 

Tucson, I am a Black woman. I live here. I walk amongst you every day. It can happen to me. I have a 20-year-old brother who lives here. I have three nephews that live here, ages five, one and two. My three sisters live here. My mother lives here. 

We all live here. We don't look like the majority of you—only about 5 percent of Tucson is Black. But we are here—which means that like you, WE ARE TUCSON. Collectively. What you do to the least of us, you do to all of us. So I must ask, what are we doing collectively to make sure that my brother, YOUR brother, is not the next Philando Castile? What are we going to do collectively to make sure that my nephews, YOUR nephews, do not become the next Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, and Alton Sterling? What are we going to do COLLECTIVELY to make sure that I, the woman writing this article, am not the next Sandra Bland?

Because if I am the next Sandra Bland, then so are you.  
If you would like to be part of the solution, please join the local chapter of Black Lives Matter on Saturday, July 9 at Armory Park. There will be a vigil and healing circle taking place, starting at 6 p.m. For more information please click here.

I picked up Henry Fielding's novel, Tom Jones, once again after putting it down in the middle and moving on to other things. Back in April, I noted my surprise at finding that the phrases "ass kicking" and "ass kissing" were alive and well in the 18th century. In the part I'm reading now, our hero and others are on the move and stopping at inns along their way, and they frequently drink "punch" in the evenings. I wondered, is "punch" just a random alcoholic concoction in a punch bowl, or does it refer to something more specific? The answer is, it was a specific type of drink in the same way as, for example, a martini. It's of semi-exotic origins, as is its name.

Here are the basic ingredients, according to an online source, which are similar to ones described elsewhere.

In the beginning, punch was a simple mixture of five canonical ingredients: lemon or lime juice, sugar, water, "spice" (which could have been anything from nutmeg or tea to ambergris, a musky whale secretion now used only in perfume making), and, of course, liquor. Batavia arrack, a fiery but highly aromatic molasses-and-rice distillate imported from the Dutch East Indies, was the preferred spirit, but Caribbean rum and French brandy were right behind it. The earliest known reference to the drink dates from 1632, appearing in a letter to an India-bound merchant from an English colleague, who strongly warned against drinking it (if punch has a fault, it's the ease with which one can absorb too much of it).

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has launched a new nationwide ad buy targeting Republican House members who haven't disavowed presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump.

The ad will be running both in the Phoenix market and here in Southern Arizona, where freshman Republican U.S. Rep. Martha McSally is seeking reelection in Congressional District 2. Right now, former state lawmakers Matt Heinz and Victoria Steele are battling it out in the Democratic primary to see who will have the chance to face McSally.

While she captured the highly competitive CD2 by just 167 votes over Democratic incumbent Ron Barber in 2014, McSally is undeniably favored to win this year's race. A former A-10 pilot and squadron commander, she has been one of the loudest voices in the fight to save the Warthog and the jobs it brings to Southern Arizona. She's worked with local officials on efforts such as reversing plans to shut down Tucson's mail-processing operation. She's a rising GOP star in D.C. who regularly lands spots on the cable news nets.

We'll see where Heinz and Steele are on the fundraising front later this month, but neither one has come close to keeping pace with McSally, who remains one of the best fundraisers in the country. 

To sum it up: Few people are betting on McSally losing in November. Nonetheless, the DCCC's willingness to dump money into the region with this buy shows that Democrats aren't completely writing off CD2. Sure, the ads also benefit Democrat Tom O'Halleran in his race for the open and competitive seat in Congressional District 1, but Dems are holding out hope that in the Year of Trump, the national mood might just bring a wave powerful enough to sink even McSally.

McSally herself has continued to keep her distance from Trump. As she often does when facing tough political choices, McSally has neither denounced nor endorsed Trump. Instead, she's said that she needs more time to measure his character, which was certainly on display in DC today.

Republicans have basically four ways of dealing with Trump—and all of them have negative consequences in one way or another. They can go #NeverTrump and outright denounce him, as Jeb and Mitt—who aren't so concerned about having a political future—have done. They can withhold their support, as Arizona Sen. Jeff Flake has done. They can embrace him, even reluctantly, as Arizona Sen. John McCain has done as he seeks to tamp down yet another challenge from the right in this year's GOP primary. Or they can do like McSally and just kind of pretend he's not out there, saying all these crazy things.

But until or unless McSally denounces Trump, expect Democrats to  connect her to his every outrage with spots like these, featuring #NeverTrump Republicans like these:

The Washington Post reports that Donald Trump had quite a showdown with Arizona Sen. Jeff Flake today:

Donald Trump’s private meeting Thursday with Senate Republicans — designed to foster greater party unity ahead of the national convention in Cleveland — grew combative as the presumptive presidential nominee admonished three senators who have been critical of his candidacy and predicted they would lose their reelection bids, according to two Republican officials with direct knowledge of the exchanges.

Trump’s most tense exchange was with Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.), who has been vocal in his concerns about the business mogul’s candidacy, especially his rhetoric and policies on immigration that the senator argues alienate many Latino voters and others in Arizona.

When Flake stood up and introduced himself, Trump told him, “You’ve been very critical of me.”

“Yes, I’m the other senator from Arizona — the one who didn’t get captured — and I want to talk to you about statements like that,” Flake responded, according to two Republican officials.

Flake was referencing Trump’s comments last summer about the military service of Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who was a prisoner of war during the Vietnam conflict. Trump questioned whether McCain was a war hero because he was captured.

According to a press release dated this morning from the office of Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich, 18-year-old terror suspect and Tucson resident Mahin Khan has been indicted on three separate charges: terrorism, conspiracy to commit terrorism and conspiracy to commit misconduct involving weapons. Khan was arrested in here in Tucson on July 1 by agents from the FBI and agents with the Joint Terrorism Task Force after a joint investigation by the Phoenix Field Office of the FBI and the Joint Terrorism Task Force with agents from the Arizona Attorney General’s Office Special Investigations Section.

As previously reported, between mid-last year and continuing until earlier this month, Khan “solicited, incited or induced others to promote or further an act of terrorism to wit: at a Motor Vehicle Division office located in Maricopa County, Arizona,” according to his indictment paperwork. He is being held, without bond, in the Maricopa County Jail pending a trial outcome. The case is being prosecuted by assistant Arizona attorneys general Blaine Gadow and Scott Blake.

Though the investigation into Khan’s action is ongoing, authorities have stated there is not believed to be a further threat from him or his activities.

Newton Knight (Matthew McConaughey), a Confederate army medic, decides he’s had enough, and deserts. He returns to Mississippi where his people are being harassed by looting soldiers. He winds up in the swamps with escaped slaves where they form a pact, and eventually create a militia to rebel against the Confederacy.

Based on a true story, director Gary Ross definitely delivers on the brutality and terrors of the Civil War. McConaughey is powerful in the central role, as is Mahershala Ali as Moses, leader of the escaped slaves. The film stumbles a bit in trying to do a little too much. There are courtroom scenes 85 years in the Civil War’s future where a relative of Knight is in a civil rights dispute. These scenes feel completely out of place, and they sort of muck up the film’s ending (things just come to an awkward stop). It’s too bad, because the movie winds up being good instead of great.

The battle scenes are harrowing, the tensions are frightening and real, and there’s not a bad performance in the lot. Yet, because Ross has overstuffed the film, aspects like the rise of the KKK are almost glossed over.

This project, with its dual storylines and many plot points, probably would’ve worked better as an extended series on HBO rather than a single big budget movie. Still, it’s worth seeing for McConaughey and Ali. 

This remake of the Spice Girl's 1996 "Wannabe" video is just what the world needs.

The original song, released twenty years ago on July 7, has been transformed with international young artists to support the Project Everyone campaign and their U. N. Global Goals initiative. 


The Project Everyone campaign is a United Nations supported coalition of corporate and independent groups who are putting girls and women first when it comes to policies and plans. By listening to the voices of girls and women, the group will be pushing their goals and message to U. N. world leaders in September. 

The group believes in collective power and is encouraging everyone to use the hashtag #WhatIReallyReallyWant and share a photo of what they really, really want for girls and women. 

From the music video's YouTube description:

In 2015 world leaders promised to put girls and women first when they signed up to the Sustainable Development Goals to end poverty, fix climate change and tackle inequalities.
Girls and women are disproportionately affected by these challenges and are key to building resilient communities to withstand them.
That’s why we need to ensure World Leaders and the Secretary General of the United Nations listen to the voices of girls and women and put them first in policies and plans.

The video itself showcases the goals of equality education for all girls, ending child marriage, equal pay for equal work and ending violence against all women. 

So Instead of "get your act together and we could be just fine," how about you join the movement and make a difference. 

Gender should not prevent anyone from achieving their goals, so use your voice and power to tell the world what you really really want.