But enough people remember Cain in blue tights and a red cape so that he’s a regular on the fan convention circuit.
It’s his calling card, so when the Trump administration put out the call to recruit more ICE agents, guess who answered the call?
Big hint: Up, up and a güey!
On Aug. 6, the up until then not exactly buzzworthy Cain revealed on Instagram that he joined la migra — and everyone else should too!
The 59-year old actor made his announcement as an orchestral version of John Williams’ stirring “Superman” theme played lightly below his speech.
Superman used to go after Nazis, Klansmen and intergalactic monsters; now, Superman — er, Cain — wants to go after Tamale Lady. His archenemy used to be Lex Luthor; now real-life Bizarro Superman wants to go to work for the Trump administration’s equally bald-pated version of Lex Luthor: Stephen Miller.
“You can defend your homeland and get great benefits,” Cain said, flashing his bright white smile and brown biceps. Behind him was an American flag in a triangle case and a small statue depicting Cain in his days as a Princeton Tigers football player. “If you want to save America, ICE is arresting the worst of the worst and removing them from America’s streets.”
Later that day, Cain appeared on Fox News to claim he was going to “be sworn in as an ICE agent ASAP.” a role Assistant Homeland Security Secretary Tricia McLaughlin later on clarified to the New York Times would be only honorary. His exaggeration didn’t stop the agency’s social media account to take a break from its usual stream of white supremacist dog whistles to gush over Cain’s announcement.
“Superman is encouraging Americans to become real-life superheroes,” it posted “by answering their country’s call to join the brave men and women of ICE to help protect our communities to arrest the worst of the worst.”
American heroes used to storm Omaha Beach. Now the Trump administration wants their version of them to storm the garden section of Home Depot.
Dean Cain speaks during a ceremony honoring Mehmet Oz, the former host of “The Dr. Oz Show,” with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame on Feb. 11, 2022.
(Chris Pizzello / Invision / Associated Press)
Its appeal to Superman is part of their campaign to cast la migra as good guys while casting all undocumented people as shadowy villains who deserve deportation — the faster and nastier the better. But as with almost anything involving American history, Team Trump has already perverted Superman’s mythos. In early June, they put Trump, who couldn’t leap over a bingo card in a single bound let alone a tall building, on the White House’s social media accounts in a Superman costume. This was accompanied with the slogan: “Truth. Justice. The American Way.” That was the day before Warner Bros. released its latest Man of Steel film.
Even non-comic book fans know that the hero born Kal-El on Krypton was always a goody-goody who stood up to bullies and protected the downtrodden. He came from a foreign land — a doomed planet, no less — as a baby. His alter ego, Clark Kent, is humble and kind, traits that carry over when he turns into Superman.
The character’s caretakers always leaned on that fictional background to comment on real-world events. In a 1950 poster, as McCarthyism was ramping up, DC Comics issued a poster in which Superman tells a group of kids that anyone who makes fun of people for their “religion, race or national origin … is un-American.”
A decade later, Superman starred in a comic book public service announcement in which he chided a teen who said “Those refugee kids can’t talk English or play ball or anything” by taking him to a shabby camp to show the boy the hardships refugees had to endure.
The Trumpworld version of Superman would fly that boy to “Alligator Alcatraz” to show him how cool it is to imprison immigrants in a swamp infested with crocodilians.
It might surprise you to know that in even more recent times, in a 2017 comic book, Superman saves a group of undocumented immigrants from a man in an American flag do-rag who opened fire on them. When the attempted murderer claimed his intended targets stole his job, Superman snarled “The only person responsible for the blackness smothering your soul … is you.”
Superman used to tell Americans that immigrants deserved our empathy; Super Dean wants to round them up and ship them out.
Rapists? Murderers? Terrorists? That’s who Superman né Cain says ICE is pursuing — the oft repeated “worst of the worst” — but Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse found that 71% of people currently held in ICE detention have no criminal records as of July 27 .
I don’t think the real Superman — by whom I mean the fictional one whom Cain seems to think he’s the official spokesperson for just because he played him in a middling dramedy 30-some years ago — would waste his strength and X-ray vision to nab people like that.
Dean “Discount Superman” Cain should grab some popcorn and launch on a Superman movie marathon to refresh himself on what the Man of Steel actually stood for. He can begin with the latest.
Its plot hinges on Lex Luthor trying to convince the U.S. government that Superman is an “alien” who came to the U.S. to destroy it.
“He’s not a man — he’s an It. A thing,” the bad guy sneers at one point, later on claiming Superman’s choirboy persona is “lulling us into complacency so he can dominate [the U.S.] without resistance.”
Nicholas Hoult as Lex Luthor and David Corenswet as Superman in Warner Bros. Pictures’ “Superman.”
(Jessica Miglio / Warner Bros. Pictures)
Luthor’s scheme, which involves manipulating social media and television networks to turn public opinion against his rival, eventually works. Superman turns himself in and is whisked away to a cell far away from the U.S. along with other political prisoners. Luthor boasts that “[constitutional] rights don’t apply to extraterrestrial organisms.”
Tweak that line a little and it could have come from the mouth of Stephen Miller.
Director James Gunn told a British newspaper that his film’s message is “about human kindness and obviously there will be jerks out there who are just not kind and will take it as offensive just because it is about kindness. But screw them.”
He also called Superman an “immigrant,” which set Cain off. He called Gunn “woke” on TMZ and urged Gunn to create original characters and keep Superman away from politics.
Well, Super Dean can do his thing for ICE and Trump. He can flash his white teeth for promotional Trump administration videos as he does who knows what for the deportation machine.
Fine, I’ll say it. I need Superman. I’m craving a hero who stands for truth and justice whether he’s rescuing cats or reporting the news. Cheering for such idealism used to feel corny; all the cool, caped crusaders had ethical kinks. Even his recent movies have seemed a little embarrassed by the guy, scuffing him up with cynicism. I’m with the latest incarnation of Superman (David Corenswet) when he tells Lois Lane (Rachel Brosnahan) that having a big heart is “the real punk rock.”
Director James Gunn’s antsy reboot skips past the origin story of infant Kal-El slamming into Kansas in an escape pod from Krypton. Instead, this “Superman” opens with Corenswet’s savior slamming into Earth again, this time after losing his first fight. Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult) and his bionic minions have batted Superman around Metropolis like a toy, forcing him to flee to his Fortress of Solitude in Antarctica with 14 broken bones and a busted bladder. The starkness of the white snow against his bright costume looks like a blank page asking: Who should Superman be today?
The Superman myth has always been a fable of collision: a near-perfect alien challenged to protect fragile, scared humans who struggle to accept that we’re not the bestest beings in the universe. Here, Kal-El’s parents (Bradley Cooper and Angela Sarafyan) are heard insulting Earthlings outright — “The people there are simple and profoundly confused” — which, for the franchise, is actually going a little easy on humankind. Historically, we tend to let him down, going back to his surprisingly spiky movie debut in 1951’s “Superman and the Mole Men” (note the lack of a “versus”), in which George Reeves protected the outsiders of the title from a rural American mob. “Obviously, none of you can be trusted with guns, so I’m going to take them away from you,” he lectures the townsfolk, pretzeling their shotguns. “Stop acting like Nazi storm troopers!”
Gunn isn’t that punk rock. He’s pop punk; he wants to be liked by a mass audience. Having taken control of the DC Universe, he’s pivoted away from gloom to concoct a Superman who isn’t too sweet or too serious — frankly, he’s a little stupid. After a hasty resuscitation from his adorable dog Krypton and his robot butlers (voiced by Alan Tudyk, Pom Klementieff and Michael Rooker, among others), Superman races back into battle before he’s healed. He gets beaten senseless again.
Stupid is a smart idea for a 21st century reboot. Superman’s stymied do-gooder impulse feels right for an era where you can’t say “Save the whales” without some genius asking why you don’t care about plankton. The goal might have been to make him super naive. But Gunn doesn’t do sincerity, so this Superman comes off as obtuse and overwhelmed — which, even for a Julliard-trained actor like Corenswet, is pretty impossible to pull off with any personality. His dimples and blue eyes are empathetic. But he mostly just looks dazed.
This Superman is all impulsive energy, much like his unhousebroken puppy, who also wears a cape and tramples on things when he tries to help. They’re essentially the same species. Superman gets distracted midfight by his urgent need to protect a squirrel; Krypto spends one brouhaha looting a pet store. Superman’s reporter girlfriend of three months, Lois (a savvy and sensible Brosnahan, kitted in fabulous ‘70s-style threads), is well-aware of his dual identity and the flaws in his hasty reactions to injustice. She points out that physically threatening the thuggish president of fictional Boravia (Zlatko Buric) to stop invading weaker countries is technically torture. “People were going to die!” Superman sputters. Lois’ reticence about him mirrors our own vacillation with the DC Universe’s new direction: We need to see something more from this guy before we commit.
In this script, the lines of good and evil aren’t drawn in black and white or even gray — they’re a tangle of squiggles. There are no neat solutions, no shortcuts and there’s no way for Superman to defend himself when Hoult’s Luthor drums up a dubious sex scandal to accuse the Kryptonian of “grooming” humanity and hires an actual room of typing monkeys to ruin his online reputation. (You may remember that before Gunn was hired to oversee DC Studios, Walt Disney fired him from Marvel when a blogger behind Pizzagate unearthed the director’s old shock-jock jokes about pedophilia and 9/11. Clearly, that grievance is still on his mind.)
The plot is impatient but entertaining enough. The villainous billionaire Luthor, who Hoult plays like a beady techno-zealot, has several schemes up his fancy sleeve. One involves a tent city in the desert that hides a portal to an extrajudicial jail for his enemies, both interstellar and domestic. (He’s got green-skinned babies and a sobbing ex-girlfriend in there.) Gunn has sarcastically tried to make the place look cheery — Luthor’s henchmen are dressed in mismatched Hawaiian shirts — but the sequence might give you the shivers.
Gunn is known for wrangling groups of weirdos (“Guardians of the Galaxy,”“The Suicide Squad”) into blockbuster action-comedies. His instincts are to spray everything with silly string and slap on a wacky soundtrack. Here, there’s actually a very good doom metal electronic score by John Murphy and David Fleming, but the movie stiffens up whenever it needs to get real. When we visit Clark Kent’s family farm, it’s touching to see his childhood bedroom. But his plainspoken Ma and Pa (Neva Howell and Pruitt Taylor Vince) have been made to talk so slowly they sound like they have brain injuries. It’s as though “Superman” isn’t sure how to be earnest without whacking us over the head with it.
The script is way more confident when Gunn gets to scribble in the margins, whisking in Milly Alcock’s party-hardy Supergirl for a fast and fun cameo. (She’ll have her own movie next summer.) Luthor’s main henchwoman, known only as the Engineer (María Gabriela de Faría), is constructed from skittering robotic cells that let her change form like a Swiss Army Knife, while his latest ditzy blonde girlfriend, Eve (a very funny Sara Sampaio), wriggles her way into becoming a memorable highlight. One of the film’s umpteenth kaiju fights introduces the corporate-sponsored Justice Gang, a trio of apathetic superheroes spearheaded by Green Lantern (Nathan Fillion) with Hawkgirl (Isabela Merced) and Mr. Terrific (Edi Gathegi). They dispatch a monster so gracelessly that Superman finally gets some sense knocked into him. “There’s got to be a better way to do this,” he groans.
The movie’s tone shape-shifts just as recklessly as an outer space inmate named Metamorpho (Anthony Carrigan) who can transform into explosive acid. Gunn is compelled to show us his entire vision for the DC Universe. But as he cuts from a slow-burning gag about a garage door opener to a legitimately brutal execution to a whizbang combat scene set to a song that whoops, “Fun fun fun!,” I just wished I was having more of it.
This isn’t quite the heart-soaring “Superman” I wanted. But these adventures wise him up enough that I’m curious to explore where the saga takes him next. Still, I left chewing over how comic book movies can be so popular and prescient, and yet people who’ve grown up rooting against characters like Lex Luthor cheer them on in the real world. Maybe Gunn can answer that in a sequel. Or maybe our stubborn myopia is what this Superman means when he says, “I screw up all the time but that is being human.”
Commentary: Dean Cain wants to join ICE. Forget Lex Luthor, this Superman is after Tamale Lady
There are people who keep reliving their glory days, and then there’s Dean Cain.
The film and TV actor is best known for his work in the 1990s series “Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman.”
He was no Christopher Reeve or Henry Cavill.
But enough people remember Cain in blue tights and a red cape so that he’s a regular on the fan convention circuit.
It’s his calling card, so when the Trump administration put out the call to recruit more ICE agents, guess who answered the call?
Big hint: Up, up and a güey!
On Aug. 6, the up until then not exactly buzzworthy Cain revealed on Instagram that he joined la migra — and everyone else should too!
The 59-year old actor made his announcement as an orchestral version of John Williams’ stirring “Superman” theme played lightly below his speech.
Superman used to go after Nazis, Klansmen and intergalactic monsters; now, Superman — er, Cain — wants to go after Tamale Lady. His archenemy used to be Lex Luthor; now real-life Bizarro Superman wants to go to work for the Trump administration’s equally bald-pated version of Lex Luthor: Stephen Miller.
“You can defend your homeland and get great benefits,” Cain said, flashing his bright white smile and brown biceps. Behind him was an American flag in a triangle case and a small statue depicting Cain in his days as a Princeton Tigers football player. “If you want to save America, ICE is arresting the worst of the worst and removing them from America’s streets.”
Later that day, Cain appeared on Fox News to claim he was going to “be sworn in as an ICE agent ASAP.” a role Assistant Homeland Security Secretary Tricia McLaughlin later on clarified to the New York Times would be only honorary. His exaggeration didn’t stop the agency’s social media account to take a break from its usual stream of white supremacist dog whistles to gush over Cain’s announcement.
“Superman is encouraging Americans to become real-life superheroes,” it posted “by answering their country’s call to join the brave men and women of ICE to help protect our communities to arrest the worst of the worst.”
American heroes used to storm Omaha Beach. Now the Trump administration wants their version of them to storm the garden section of Home Depot.
Dean Cain speaks during a ceremony honoring Mehmet Oz, the former host of “The Dr. Oz Show,” with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame on Feb. 11, 2022.
(Chris Pizzello / Invision / Associated Press)
Its appeal to Superman is part of their campaign to cast la migra as good guys while casting all undocumented people as shadowy villains who deserve deportation — the faster and nastier the better. But as with almost anything involving American history, Team Trump has already perverted Superman’s mythos. In early June, they put Trump, who couldn’t leap over a bingo card in a single bound let alone a tall building, on the White House’s social media accounts in a Superman costume. This was accompanied with the slogan: “Truth. Justice. The American Way.” That was the day before Warner Bros. released its latest Man of Steel film.
Even non-comic book fans know that the hero born Kal-El on Krypton was always a goody-goody who stood up to bullies and protected the downtrodden. He came from a foreign land — a doomed planet, no less — as a baby. His alter ego, Clark Kent, is humble and kind, traits that carry over when he turns into Superman.
The character’s caretakers always leaned on that fictional background to comment on real-world events. In a 1950 poster, as McCarthyism was ramping up, DC Comics issued a poster in which Superman tells a group of kids that anyone who makes fun of people for their “religion, race or national origin … is un-American.”
A decade later, Superman starred in a comic book public service announcement in which he chided a teen who said “Those refugee kids can’t talk English or play ball or anything” by taking him to a shabby camp to show the boy the hardships refugees had to endure.
The Trumpworld version of Superman would fly that boy to “Alligator Alcatraz” to show him how cool it is to imprison immigrants in a swamp infested with crocodilians.
It might surprise you to know that in even more recent times, in a 2017 comic book, Superman saves a group of undocumented immigrants from a man in an American flag do-rag who opened fire on them. When the attempted murderer claimed his intended targets stole his job, Superman snarled “The only person responsible for the blackness smothering your soul … is you.”
Superman used to tell Americans that immigrants deserved our empathy; Super Dean wants to round them up and ship them out.
Rapists? Murderers? Terrorists? That’s who Superman né Cain says ICE is pursuing — the oft repeated “worst of the worst” — but Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse found that 71% of people currently held in ICE detention have no criminal records as of July 27 .
I don’t think the real Superman — by whom I mean the fictional one whom Cain seems to think he’s the official spokesperson for just because he played him in a middling dramedy 30-some years ago — would waste his strength and X-ray vision to nab people like that.
Dean “Discount Superman” Cain should grab some popcorn and launch on a Superman movie marathon to refresh himself on what the Man of Steel actually stood for. He can begin with the latest.
Its plot hinges on Lex Luthor trying to convince the U.S. government that Superman is an “alien” who came to the U.S. to destroy it.
“He’s not a man — he’s an It. A thing,” the bad guy sneers at one point, later on claiming Superman’s choirboy persona is “lulling us into complacency so he can dominate [the U.S.] without resistance.”
Nicholas Hoult as Lex Luthor and David Corenswet as Superman in Warner Bros. Pictures’ “Superman.”
(Jessica Miglio / Warner Bros. Pictures)
Luthor’s scheme, which involves manipulating social media and television networks to turn public opinion against his rival, eventually works. Superman turns himself in and is whisked away to a cell far away from the U.S. along with other political prisoners. Luthor boasts that “[constitutional] rights don’t apply to extraterrestrial organisms.”
Tweak that line a little and it could have come from the mouth of Stephen Miller.
Director James Gunn told a British newspaper that his film’s message is “about human kindness and obviously there will be jerks out there who are just not kind and will take it as offensive just because it is about kindness. But screw them.”
He also called Superman an “immigrant,” which set Cain off. He called Gunn “woke” on TMZ and urged Gunn to create original characters and keep Superman away from politics.
Well, Super Dean can do his thing for ICE and Trump. He can flash his white teeth for promotional Trump administration videos as he does who knows what for the deportation machine.
Just leave Superman out of it.
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‘Superman’ review: David Corenswet is a Man of Steel with a mind of marshmallow
Fine, I’ll say it. I need Superman. I’m craving a hero who stands for truth and justice whether he’s rescuing cats or reporting the news. Cheering for such idealism used to feel corny; all the cool, caped crusaders had ethical kinks. Even his recent movies have seemed a little embarrassed by the guy, scuffing him up with cynicism. I’m with the latest incarnation of Superman (David Corenswet) when he tells Lois Lane (Rachel Brosnahan) that having a big heart is “the real punk rock.”
Director James Gunn’s antsy reboot skips past the origin story of infant Kal-El slamming into Kansas in an escape pod from Krypton. Instead, this “Superman” opens with Corenswet’s savior slamming into Earth again, this time after losing his first fight. Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult) and his bionic minions have batted Superman around Metropolis like a toy, forcing him to flee to his Fortress of Solitude in Antarctica with 14 broken bones and a busted bladder. The starkness of the white snow against his bright costume looks like a blank page asking: Who should Superman be today?
The Superman myth has always been a fable of collision: a near-perfect alien challenged to protect fragile, scared humans who struggle to accept that we’re not the bestest beings in the universe. Here, Kal-El’s parents (Bradley Cooper and Angela Sarafyan) are heard insulting Earthlings outright — “The people there are simple and profoundly confused” — which, for the franchise, is actually going a little easy on humankind. Historically, we tend to let him down, going back to his surprisingly spiky movie debut in 1951’s “Superman and the Mole Men” (note the lack of a “versus”), in which George Reeves protected the outsiders of the title from a rural American mob. “Obviously, none of you can be trusted with guns, so I’m going to take them away from you,” he lectures the townsfolk, pretzeling their shotguns. “Stop acting like Nazi storm troopers!”
Gunn isn’t that punk rock. He’s pop punk; he wants to be liked by a mass audience. Having taken control of the DC Universe, he’s pivoted away from gloom to concoct a Superman who isn’t too sweet or too serious — frankly, he’s a little stupid. After a hasty resuscitation from his adorable dog Krypton and his robot butlers (voiced by Alan Tudyk, Pom Klementieff and Michael Rooker, among others), Superman races back into battle before he’s healed. He gets beaten senseless again.
Stupid is a smart idea for a 21st century reboot. Superman’s stymied do-gooder impulse feels right for an era where you can’t say “Save the whales” without some genius asking why you don’t care about plankton. The goal might have been to make him super naive. But Gunn doesn’t do sincerity, so this Superman comes off as obtuse and overwhelmed — which, even for a Julliard-trained actor like Corenswet, is pretty impossible to pull off with any personality. His dimples and blue eyes are empathetic. But he mostly just looks dazed.
This Superman is all impulsive energy, much like his unhousebroken puppy, who also wears a cape and tramples on things when he tries to help. They’re essentially the same species. Superman gets distracted midfight by his urgent need to protect a squirrel; Krypto spends one brouhaha looting a pet store. Superman’s reporter girlfriend of three months, Lois (a savvy and sensible Brosnahan, kitted in fabulous ‘70s-style threads), is well-aware of his dual identity and the flaws in his hasty reactions to injustice. She points out that physically threatening the thuggish president of fictional Boravia (Zlatko Buric) to stop invading weaker countries is technically torture. “People were going to die!” Superman sputters. Lois’ reticence about him mirrors our own vacillation with the DC Universe’s new direction: We need to see something more from this guy before we commit.
In this script, the lines of good and evil aren’t drawn in black and white or even gray — they’re a tangle of squiggles. There are no neat solutions, no shortcuts and there’s no way for Superman to defend himself when Hoult’s Luthor drums up a dubious sex scandal to accuse the Kryptonian of “grooming” humanity and hires an actual room of typing monkeys to ruin his online reputation. (You may remember that before Gunn was hired to oversee DC Studios, Walt Disney fired him from Marvel when a blogger behind Pizzagate unearthed the director’s old shock-jock jokes about pedophilia and 9/11. Clearly, that grievance is still on his mind.)
The plot is impatient but entertaining enough. The villainous billionaire Luthor, who Hoult plays like a beady techno-zealot, has several schemes up his fancy sleeve. One involves a tent city in the desert that hides a portal to an extrajudicial jail for his enemies, both interstellar and domestic. (He’s got green-skinned babies and a sobbing ex-girlfriend in there.) Gunn has sarcastically tried to make the place look cheery — Luthor’s henchmen are dressed in mismatched Hawaiian shirts — but the sequence might give you the shivers.
Gunn is known for wrangling groups of weirdos (“Guardians of the Galaxy,” “The Suicide Squad”) into blockbuster action-comedies. His instincts are to spray everything with silly string and slap on a wacky soundtrack. Here, there’s actually a very good doom metal electronic score by John Murphy and David Fleming, but the movie stiffens up whenever it needs to get real. When we visit Clark Kent’s family farm, it’s touching to see his childhood bedroom. But his plainspoken Ma and Pa (Neva Howell and Pruitt Taylor Vince) have been made to talk so slowly they sound like they have brain injuries. It’s as though “Superman” isn’t sure how to be earnest without whacking us over the head with it.
The script is way more confident when Gunn gets to scribble in the margins, whisking in Milly Alcock’s party-hardy Supergirl for a fast and fun cameo. (She’ll have her own movie next summer.) Luthor’s main henchwoman, known only as the Engineer (María Gabriela de Faría), is constructed from skittering robotic cells that let her change form like a Swiss Army Knife, while his latest ditzy blonde girlfriend, Eve (a very funny Sara Sampaio), wriggles her way into becoming a memorable highlight. One of the film’s umpteenth kaiju fights introduces the corporate-sponsored Justice Gang, a trio of apathetic superheroes spearheaded by Green Lantern (Nathan Fillion) with Hawkgirl (Isabela Merced) and Mr. Terrific (Edi Gathegi). They dispatch a monster so gracelessly that Superman finally gets some sense knocked into him. “There’s got to be a better way to do this,” he groans.
The movie’s tone shape-shifts just as recklessly as an outer space inmate named Metamorpho (Anthony Carrigan) who can transform into explosive acid. Gunn is compelled to show us his entire vision for the DC Universe. But as he cuts from a slow-burning gag about a garage door opener to a legitimately brutal execution to a whizbang combat scene set to a song that whoops, “Fun fun fun!,” I just wished I was having more of it.
This isn’t quite the heart-soaring “Superman” I wanted. But these adventures wise him up enough that I’m curious to explore where the saga takes him next. Still, I left chewing over how comic book movies can be so popular and prescient, and yet people who’ve grown up rooting against characters like Lex Luthor cheer them on in the real world. Maybe Gunn can answer that in a sequel. Or maybe our stubborn myopia is what this Superman means when he says, “I screw up all the time but that is being human.”
‘Superman’
Rated: PG-13, for violence, action and language
Running time: 2 hours, 9 minutes
Playing: In wide release Friday, July 11
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