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Earlier today, about two dozen House Republicans stormed a closed deposition hearing with Deputy Assistant Defense Secretary Laura Cooper. As a reminder, this hearing was not closed to Republicans, just to anyone not on the committees involved. You might think these lawmakers, then, would choose to just confer with their Republican colleagues, but no. They wanted the spectacle and they wanted to disrupt the process.

Not only did the lawmakers crash a hearing they weren’t allowed to be in, but many appeared (based on the fact that they were aggressively tweeting) to have brought their cell phones into the Sensitive Compartmented Information Facilities. That might sound like a technicality, but it’s a BIG deal. I posted part of a thread explaining that earlier, but if you want to know exactly how that’s severely compromising our national security, check that out here.

So when a group of about 25 nearly entirely white men storm a private and protected Congressional hearing, with totally hackable devices in hand, it raises the question: Why the hell weren’t they removed and arrested by Capitol Police?

It’s a fair question since, as many on Twitter were quick to point out, those officers (who were reportedly present today) have been known to arrest protesters and anyone else not being where they’re supposed to be or doing what they’re supposed to do in regard to Congressional hearings.

The protesters arrested around Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing are an especially recent memory for many.

See all these Capitol Police- ready to arrest us for peacefully protesting during the Kavanaugh hearings. Wtf are they??? pic.twitter.com/OZQBNvloBm

— andrea Kline (@andreathekline) October 23, 2019

I don’t have an answer for why there were no arrests made today. A lot of people (myself included) are calling Capitol Police and being forwarded to the Public Information office, where I assume the voicemails are piling up. If I get a response to mine, I’ll update here.

I called the Capitol Police 1(202) 224-0908 (non emergency #). I asked the person who answered,”Why are protesters in wheelchairs dragged out and arrested, but Republicans in a SCIF with cell phones, are not?” She transferred me to voicemail where I left the same question.

— Noel (@Frogerta) October 23, 2019

Just called the Capitol Police to ask why the @housegop members were not removed or arrested. They could not answer my question. Then called my Congressman, Ken Calvert (R-CA), to demand that he put out a statement condemning this lawlessness.

— Jeff Sweetman (@sweetjj4) October 23, 2019

Call Capitol Police at (202) 224‐0908 to let them know ur not happy with “Matt Gaetz” and the “House Republicans” storming into the “SCIF” during “Laura Cooper” testimony with no consequences. They are obstructing justice in real-time. They are breaking the law. We demand action! https://t.co/BHhDF2z8bF

— I,Too, Am America (@ynotjones) October 23, 2019

(image: Alex Wroblewski/Getty Images)
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A few weeks ago, Keith had the pleasure of welcoming to Southern Fried Asian human rights lawyer, policy advocate, and candidate for State Senate in the 28th district of Virginia, Qasim Rashid. With less than two weeks to go until voters go to the polls in Virginia, Keith and Qasim talk about why he’s running […]

Death Row co-founder Marion “Suge” Knight is setting the record straight about reports that he has sold the rights to his life story to William Raymond “Ray J” Norwood Jr.

Early Monday morning, TMZ reported that the notorious music executive signed over his life rights to Ray J, giving him the authority to make decisions about his tumultuous career while Knight is serving a 28-year prison sentence for manslaughter. Ray J’s manager and producing partner, David Weintraub, also told Entertainment Tonight that the deal was finalized seven months ago and that several major film studios, independent financiers, and documentarians have reached out to work with him and Ray J on a documentary about Knight’s life. However, in an exclusive interview with The Blast, Knight, himself, revealed that the reports are erroneous.

“I just heard about the article being released regarding that Ray J has all my rights television, movies, books, you know all that type of stuff,” said Knight during a phone interview from behind bars. “He don’t. Ray J is not just a friend of mine, that’s little brother, that’s family.”

Knight went on to say that the Love and Hip Hop: Hollywood star will be handling the music side of Death Row Records. “I respect Ray J and his business dealings, that’s why I choose him as one of the guys to deal with the music side of the future for as Death Row Records, anything to do Death Row and it’s great to have him cause he will be putting out this incredible album and I heard it before.”

The music mogul added that his fiancée, Toi-Lin Kelly, is in charge of movies, television, and documentaries. “As far as the person who has the power of attorney, which is Toi, who is dealing with the movie, television [and] a documentary,” he said.

Suge went on to reveal that Nick Cannon will be writing his autobiography. “Nick Cannon will be doing the book personally as a writer, I know he has all the potential and the spirit to be a great writer, he is a great writer, he will be doing my book,” he said. “I can say he is a trustworthy guy, I think you should take notice to it, he’s probably one of the most power players in the industry today who is honest and real,” Suge added. “He keeps his word.”

In addition to being the brother of Grammy-winning recording artist and actress Brandy Norwood, Ray J is the first cousin of rapper Snoop Dogg, who was formerly signed to Death Row Records. The 38-year-old RnB singer is also the founder of Raytroniks, which creates products like electric bikes, smartphone fans, smartwatches, and the signature Scoot-E-Bike.

In September 2018, Knight pleaded no contest to voluntary manslaughter in a fatal 2015 hit-and-run and he is currently in prison after reaching a plea deal for a 28-year sentence. 

Listen to Suge Knight’s exclusive interview with The Blast below.

—Additional reporting by Selena Hill.

Before he became a Kubrickian technophile exclusively—and slavishly—devoted for years at a time to his own long-gestating projects, James Cameron established his name, in part, as a filmmaker uniquely gifted at crafting sequels that harnessed the appeal of the original film while launching the series as a whole in a new direction. Aliens is as perfect a follow-up to Alien as it is different from its predecessor, while Judgment Day levels up as much on the ideas behind the first Terminator as it does the thrills. Unfortunately, that absence of directorial clarity—a true sense of ownership not of a franchise, but its mythology—has plagued every Terminator sequel since then, even if some of the films touched on intriguing possibilities or mounted some exciting sequences.

Paramount Pictures

But even if Tim Miller isn’t quite as far along in terms of voice and maturity as Cameron was when he tackled Terminator and Aliens back to back, Terminator: Dark Fate showcases his considerable skill even as it marks Cameron’s proper return to the world he created. Thoughtful and thrilling if slightly overstuffed with physics-defying set pieces, Dark Fate feels like a mostly-graceful passing of the torch from Cameron to Miller with an adventure that crucially breaks the repetitive wheel of canon elements featured in subsequent sequels while acknowledging that the franchise’s loop of fate and causality is both an inevitability and an untapped opportunity to break new ground in narrative and character development.

Like Cameron, original star Linda Hamilton returns to the Terminator timeline for the first time in decades to once again play Sarah Connor, the mother of future resistance leader John Connor (Edward Furlong) who has spent decades chasing down T-800 robots and destroying them to repeatedly prevent Judgment Day. When a young woman named Dani Ramos (Natalia Reyes) is targeted by the Rev-9 (Gabriel Luna), a new Terminator prototype that combines the robotic frame of the T-800 and the liquid metal exoskeleton of the T-1000, she attempts to intervene, but discovers that Dani already has a protector: Grace (Mackenzie Davis), a woman augmented with cyborg technology and sent back through time to keep her safe.

Paramount Pictures

Sarah and Grace immediately clash, but as the Rev-9 pursues her from Mexico to the United States, both soldiers understand the danger Dani faces, and uneasily strike a truce to acclimate her to a life spent on the run. But when a series of mysterious transmissions leads the trio to “Carl” (Arnold Schwarzenegger), a T-800 who has unexpectedly settled into a life of secluded domesticity after being sent back through time decades prior, Dani decides that she will not spend the rest of her life on the run. With the Rev-9 and the authorities closing in on their whereabouts, Dani, Sarah and Grace decide to mount a last stand to destroy their seemingly unstoppable pursuer and determine their own fate—not one defined by Sarah’s past or inherited from Grace’s future, but driven forward by the choices they make in the present.

However inadvertently, one of the most important ideas that Dark Fate touches on is the way that many or most of the events in the Terminator timeline are repeating, and inevitable—that each victory over one killing machine only paves the way for another battle, likely tougher than the last, a few years later. It’s effectively reduced the franchise to a series of chase films that, good as they are, all ring immediately familiar, and after 35 years, has grown slightly too familiar for its own good. Miller’s installment is similar in that regard, but with Cameron shepherding its cabal of screenwriters (including Charles Eglee, Josh Friedman, David S. Goyer, Justin Rhodes and Billy Ray) through his compelling but cyclical mythology, the aim is less to recreate previous thrills than strike out into new territory. Moreover, the film recognizes that the cultural and visual touchpoints of the series are less relevant than reckoning with the legacy and impact of the story; in that regard, Dark Fate is more Halloween ’18 than The Force Awakens, and not simply because both films feature extraordinary, zero-fuck bad ass women who are 60 years old and still effortlessly commanding the screen.

Paramount Pictures

To that end, Sarah Connor is older and wiser but still living with the vigilance, anxiety and resentment of not just being the only person who knows and believes in an apocalyptic future yet to come, but who has carried that burden—and the losses that come with it—for decades. Hamilton—not Sarah Connor, but her in that role, today—is the key missing ingredient (among a handful of others) that the last three films have lacked as storytellers have awkwardly attempted to shoehorn Schwarzenegger into each of them whether he was needed or not, and she elevates this story without, again, simply making it a retread of the version of the character she played before. Her ease on screen, and her authority, is automatic, and it deepens not just the story of this new young woman running for her life, but the emotional substance of someone bitterly fighting to protect a future that keeps reminding her it’s coming.

As Carl, meanwhile, Schwarzenegger finally gets an opportunity to explore the T-800 in a substantive way that challenges him as an actor and doesn’t merely play the same notes we’ve heard before from the “learning computer.” The character anchors so much of what happens in the franchise’s past, but the way Carl evolves touches delicately and provocatively on what themes may (and probably should) be explored going forward. If this is the final outing for that character, it’s a fitting and graceful conclusion to what between the original Terminator and this one as the canonical “third” feels like a real journey.

Paramount Pictures

After Hamilton in The Terminator and Sigourney Weaver in the first two Alien films, it’s hard to watch young actresses evolve from would-be victim to bad ass and declare the transition a foregone success, but Reyes is certainly possessed of the versatility and determination to make Dani’s future role in the human resistance feel believable. Meanwhile, Mackenzie Davis is working on another level as Grace, a young woman-turned-soldier raised in the era of a robot apocalypse but still possessed of identifiable, irrepressible vulnerability. Her initial indifference or hostility to Sarah is a frequently hilarious thing of beauty, but Davis taps directly into what makes Grace’s drive so fierce, and it’s sort of delightfully different than Sarah’s without simply absorbing the one-dimensional clichés of a female character chiefly defined by traditionally masculine ideas of “toughness.”

Miller is still finding his footing as a director, and it’s too soon to call him an auteur in the mold of Cameron (or anybody else, for that matter). That’s less a dig at him than an observation of his relative inexperience; he’s very skilled technically, and handles both the action scenes and dramatic moments with verve and confidence. But the end of the movie gets away from him as it grows increasingly overpowered by action sequences and set pieces where not only does the physics seem wonky, but his sense of space, distance and momentum becomes jumbled. The unfair comparison notwithstanding, Cameron’s clean, carefully-mapped staging of action would have served some of Miller’s ideas better than his own visceral but frequently too-close camerawork. Nevertheless, I don’t mean to damn it with faint praise to call Terminator: Dark Fate the best Terminator film since Judgment Day. Not only is it the most consistently smart and exciting film bearing that name in decades, it’s the first that feels less like a retread than a step into a new, ambitious future that, like Cameron’s exceptional sequels, builds from a foundation—but isn’t beholden—to the series’ past.

4 out of 5

Header Image: Paramount Pictures

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