Jason Momoa Embraces His Feminine Side in 'Common Ground': Movie Review

The trouble with this movie is that they had way too much virtue signaling. Elaborate on that. That was all infused in through it. So I don't know who financed this movie. I don't know the political inclination of this, but the slaves did not bring farming technology over from Africa. Do you think it's possible for us to go back to everything organic farming? No, we don't have to totally do that. Okay. But we shouldn't just make it into robo-farm. Hello and welcome to The Real Generation Gap. My name is Shane Schuldmeier. And I'm Fred Sottile. And today we're doing something a little different. We're doing a documentary. Fred went to a special screening of this documentary, and I'm going to ask him some questions, and we will be reviewing... Common Ground. All right, Fred, so what's this movie about? Or this documentary, I should say. Right, well, yeah, and it's good that you say that because it's not a movie. Yes. It's just a collection of sound bites and a collection of images. There's no boots-on-the-ground camera filming at all? The message of the movie is so important that all of America needs to see and be aware of this. And these have to become big political issues. Okay. If we don't restore the soil, the country is going to turn into a desert. Okay. We have to... Dirt and soil are two different things. Soil is a living thing, and dirt is a dead thing. Okay. To have living plants to grow our food, they have to live in living soil. And this is the big issue of the movie. Okay. These farmers have come to realize that this chemical style of farming, which was basically after World War II, the chemical companies, they wanted to create chemical solutions to feeding the world. Okay. And they started doing it, but they didn't consider toxic consequences. And so there's a whole... There's many things, other than just soil. Right. So many things are probably going to have toxic consequences. Right, 5G. Yeah. So, a bunch of farmers have gotten together, and this is worldwide. Okay. So this is not just the U.S.? There's a movie just like this, a guy in Australia. Australia's got a lot of desert land. And this guy puts on ground cover so that the water that does come will be retained. Because if you don't have ground cover, the water just erodes the soil away, and you're left with desert dirt. Yeah. So these people are saying there's low water-consuming ground cover that will not only dig down into the ground with its roots, and help the water percolate in and save the water that does rain, but then it will decompose, and it will add nutrients, and after a while, that dirt will become soil. And it's to add desert land to become farmland for feeding the world. This is what needs to be done like crazy. And you can't do it with chemicals. Okay. It has to be done with organic plants, the ground cover. So the documentary follows farmers trying to say, let's fix our soil? That's right. Okay. Now, the problem is that the chemical companies have created hybrid grains that will only grow with their chemicals. So you have to use their pesticide, their fertilizer, and this stuff is expensive. Interesting. So you're saying the grains that the farmers grow will only grow with the use of the pesticides from, say, Monsanto or something. Right. And there's been many documentaries about Monsanto, and rightfully so because they've been sued and sued and sued and sued and sued because they made carcinogenic food. Interesting. Yeah, it's been really terrible. Okay. Now, what's happening to us right now in this conversation is exactly what happens in the movie, and it's what happens in all these conversations. This is such a multidimensional problem. Like, for example, the chemical companies give grants of money to the colleges to teach young people to use their products. It's like in the medical field when you go to medical school and the answer to everything is a pill. Yeah. Right? It's not just you need more sleep and more exercise. Well, maybe you need a couple of these pills and those pills. Or some vitamins. Right, all kind of stuff. Yeah. And they have after effects, and then they have pills that fix the side effects. Well, it's the same thing with this industry. So you have a government that's being bought and sold by the chemical companies. You have a university that's being bought and sold. You have farmers who have no option. They have to do this. Yeah. They don't have the organic seed. The only seed that they can buy is the seed that you need that fertilizer and that pesticide. That's interesting. I've never even heard of that. You think you can grow anything, any seed, put in the soil, take care of it. Well, first of all, you need soil. Yeah. Yeah, it's not dirt. Yeah. So if you go in the backyard and it's like clay, you're not going to. You can eat something that looks like chocolate cake. Yeah. You know? Okay. And that's some beautiful, black, rich earth. Now, I love gardening at my home. I'm more focused on flowers than food, but I have a compost bin. Okay. So when I get vegetable matter, you know, weeds come up, I throw them in the car, they decompose, and it becomes this beautiful black stuff. And this is why I have all kinds of orchids and beautiful flowers of all kinds all over my house. Well, it's the same thing here. And interestingly, I just flew across the country. I went to Washington, D.C. for a week, and you do the flyover. And you look down and you see like a green circle and then a brown circle and then a big green area. And right next to it is a dead zone. Yeah. And it's because they're using this method that creates a dead zone. The rain comes down, it washes the soil away. There's nothing to hold that water and there's nothing to hold that soil. Yeah. And it's the same thing with, and once again, you see how multidimensional and complex this all is. So what you need is grazing animals. Okay. And these great big cows. And this is according to the documentary? Yeah, this is stated extremely well. So how is this message delivered in the documentary? Do we follow a narrator? Just the way I'm doing it. I heard Jason Momoa was part of it. Well, okay, let's talk about, well, let me finish about the cattle. Yeah, look, the most handsome man that ever lived. That's not Jake John Hall. No, that's Aquaman. That's who that is. But when you have cattle, you allow the cattle to come in and do a certain amount of grazing, not eat every single little thing. You have them graze in an area for like one day and they defecate. And that adds nutrients. And so the ground cover is still there to hold the rain, they're adding nutrients, and their hooves smash up the soil. So the surface is all broken up so that seeds that birds bring and everything, weeds basically, seeds will fall in there and grow, and you'll have ground cover. It's free. You feed the cattle, you condition the ground for soil, it's a wonderful thing. It's what you're supposed to do. It works. It's working for the guy in Australia. How is this message portrayed? Is there a narrator? Because you said it's just a bunch of stills and stuff, so I'm trying to get an idea about, yeah. I know you care about the message, but let's talk about the documentary. Right. Is it good? Is it bad? How is the message portrayed? It's bad. Yeah. For one thing, they have a wonderful group of celebrities that have come on to promote this. Woody Harrelson. Okay. Who everybody loves. I love Woody Harrelson. He has a movie now, Champions. Have you seen Champions? No. Everybody go see Champions, a fantastic movie. Look at him. He didn't present well. He even said, I guess I should have dressed better. Yeah. I mean, well, you can go back and dress better. Yeah. It wasn't funny. But Jason Momoa was in there, and he told me he loved me. He says, we've got to fix the soil, and I'm telling you this because I love you. And I'm like, you're Aquaman, dude. You're a big, strong monster guy. Laura Dern. Are they narrating? Or is it like the beginning of the movie? Like, this is important. Is that the end of the movie? Like, Sound of Freedom? No, they're just sort of endorsing it. Like Laura Dern. At the beginning or middle? Yeah, all throughout. It's a mess. Yeah. It's not a really well-constructed persuasive thing. Just the way I had saying like, well, there's the schools, and there's the banks. And the farmers need loans from the bank, and then they're going broke. And so they gave you everything. You need to know everything in the movie, but it was presented badly. And in the beginning, I said I would do two reviews. I said I would do one where I tell about what a fantastic thing it is. Because it's a fantastic message, and you need to know all this information. And you need to promote it and bring it to your politicians and bring it to your schools and bring it everywhere. It just has to be done. Do you think it's possible for us to go back to everything organic farming? No, we don't have to totally do that. Okay. But we shouldn't just make it into robo-farm. Yeah. I mean, some of these farms are vast. They're thousands and thousands of acres. You saw Yellowstone. Mm-hmm. But we're trying to feed the world here. Mm-hmm. And you know, see, it's so hard when you're trying to feed the world, and you're trying to come up with solutions, and the solutions are causing problems. You know? Now, 100 years ago, food was at least two, but closer to three times the cost that it is now. Even today? Yes, yes. Expensive. People used to spend like three days of their work to buy food. Yeah. And it was when, after World War II, when food started to really become cheap, when these techniques first came out, and crop yields were doubled, tripled right away. Yeah. Twice as much corn, twice as much wheat. You know, the same amount of acres. It was phenomenal. Yeah. The output, of course, the food maybe wasn't as good. And dense, and nutrition. Right. Nutrient-dense, right. Yeah. But it was, people were eating it, like how I eat a bag of Doritos. Yeah. It's no good for anything, but I eat it, right? So, yeah, so they produced this, and they brought the cost of food way down. And the fact that people weren't spending money on food, they can now spend it on other things. Mm-hmm. Hopefully education, right? Yeah. But they could spend it, and so it made the economy boom. Just like now, we have an absurdly high cost of fuel, and it's crushing the economy. Mm-hmm. If the fuel costs were cut in half to the reality price, not the contrived price that we have now, then there would be a gigantic boom in the economy. Mm-hmm. All of a sudden, people would have more disposable money, and they would invest in things. You know. Yeah. It would really be great. The trouble with this movie, this is the second review, is that they had way too much virtue signaling. Okay. Elaborate on that. That was all infused in through it. So I don't know who financed this movie. I don't know the political inclination of this, but the slaves did not bring farming technology over from Africa. Mm-hmm. There was no technology. So that's what they were saying in this documentary? Yes. Okay. Thank God that these black women from Africa brought seeds that they tied into their hair, and they came over here because they understood- Did a historian present this information? Yeah. One of the multiple, multiple narrators told all about this, and of course, they told all about George Washington Carver. Yeah. And there was way, way, way too much of that. So why do you think that's virtue signaling? You don't think that's historically accurate? Do you think it's BS? It's not historically accurate, and there's no need for it in presenting the fact that we need soil regeneration. I get that, yeah. Like they said, there's a lot of indigenous people references. So they were like, the indigenous people, they didn't damage the soil. Well, they had no technology. They didn't have any chemicals. They were hunter-gatherers. They ate what was there, and sometimes they starved. Mm-hmm. It wasn't good. Yeah. And so they're like, they didn't do it, and then the Europeans came. And when they say that, they show a nuclear explosion on the screen, literally an atom bomb going off. That's pretty funny. And I'm like, that is so wrong and unfair and just not, I mean, it's, what? Really? I get that. Really? I get that. So there was way, way, way too much of that. Okay. And many times, I wanted to literally stand up at the theater and go like, no, no, come on now, that's ridiculous. One of the things that I found ridiculous was, I am not an expert on this, but I'm going to talk about it anyway as if I am one. Okay. No, I'm going to, a man who was a farmer, might have been the guy with the cape when they had that, the guy with the big overalls who actually died before the end of the movie, that guy, yeah. He died before the end of the movie? Yeah, he had some kind of problem. But he was a nice guy and everything, but what he said was, you see in this, thank you, whoever put this picture up. Thank you. You see how green it is there and how dead it is there? Yeah. That's real life. Yeah. Now he's saying, I did it my way, and this is the Monsanto way. This is the chemical way. Okay. That's the message right there. Now, right. Yeah. Industrial agriculture, regenerative. And I like this. It's unfair, but I like it. What do you mean it's unfair? Well. It could just be. Right. It could just be a dusty field and. Yeah, this is my land. This is somebody else's land. This could be the year that they didn't plant anything. I don't know how this picture occurred, but it's a useful picture, but it's an opportunistic picture. Yeah. Okay. Or they could have just harvested that side and. I have no idea. Yeah. They rototilled it. I don't know what they did. And that's two things. They said tilling is bad. Oh, really? Yeah. They don't want. Because that's how you bring the top soil up, and then it gets washed away, so they don't want any tilling. Another big theme of the movie was pulling CO2 out of the air. Can we balance the air? We're going to get all this carbon out of the air and infuse it back to the ground. And that guy said, I took 96 tons of carbon. Just picture 96 tons of sand. Okay. That's a lot. Yeah. That's a lot. He says, I took 96 tons of carbon out of the atmosphere and put it into the ground with this farming method per acre. How did he do that? Well, because the plants breathe CO2. Yeah. So what's the farming method? They bring it in, and it goes down into their roots, and then it goes into the ground. And that's what he's saying, did it? Well, yeah. He's, well, that is what happens. No, I get that's what happens, but he's saying that much? This is a great picture, too. Right. The CO2, the plants are absorbing the CO2 in the atmosphere, which, you know, which the car makers are all in trouble, all that, right? And then it goes through the plant organically into the ground, and these plants, they go down, you know, six inches, 16 inches maybe into the ground. They're infusing this carbon from the air back into the earth where it belongs because plants need it to grow and everything. We're carbon-based creatures, and it's good. But 96 tons per acre? Now, I did some mathematics on this thing, and it was fun for me. It was incredible. It took me like an hour to come up with a solution that's not even accurate. Okay. But according to my calculation of how much carbon weighs and how much 96 tons, and then if you spread it out, now an acre is about two-thirds the size of a football field. Okay. So now you got 96 tons of something that's been placed according to my calculations, which I guarantee you were wrong. I know the reviewers are not going to do the math because it's not easy. But to me, after working on this for an hour, I felt that it was more than four inches thick of solid carbon. Jeez. Okay. Now, in the past, I was a welder, and you use carbon blocks because metal doesn't stick to it, and the welding won't go through. And it's an incredible heat sink. It transfers heat. Okay. So there's a whole bunch of reasons. So I know a little bit about carbon blocks. I used to buy blocks of carbon and then shape them to the way it needed to be and then weld that thing in there. Okay. And that's a lot of carbon. Yeah, it sounds like it. And then next year, there's like another one, right? Like, I said, no, this couldn't possibly be true. Now, we hear this all the time. They say, oh, your car puts like four cubic feet of... Yeah. It's like, if that were true, on the sides of the road, there'd be like mountains of carbon. Hmm. You don't see any of this ever. No. But... I guess, yeah. Right? Like, all these years ago, like, all these tires that we drive, they disintegrate. The carbon, does it become... How... That little black... How do we go from, like, the air carbon to the physical carbon? Well, you got an ass chemical engineer. Yeah, exactly. So maybe that's why it's not what you think. But it is true. You know? Some of the science in this documentary was far-fetched. Very. Hmm. Interesting. Yeah, very much so. Interesting. And I don't think that... Did you think there was, um, hidden agenda in the movie? Oh, the virtue signaling was over the top. Okay. The virtue signaling was way over the top. It was not part of the story. It was unnecessary. It was a hidden agenda stuffed in there. Yeah. You know? And it's a shame when they do that because this is a very important movie for everybody to see and absorb and everything. But I just don't want them to absorb all of this... Carbon? ...the Native Americans. You know? It's just not part of this situation. Okay. And so, I had real mixed feelings about it as a presentation. Yeah. The message is a hundred percent. So, you give the message a ten. The message is a ten. The presentation of the documentary, what do we give in that? I'm giving that a two because I was actually... A two? Really? I was angry. Really? I was like, why are you infusing this in? And the celebrities just saying... Corny? Yeah, corny, unimportant. Like I said, Jason Momoa who is like... He's a god, right? He's Aquaman. He actually is a god. He's literally a god, yeah. Right. Having him say, I'm giving you this message because I love you. It's like, Jason Momoa got in touch with his feminine side over a cornfield. Alright. Yeah. You know? So, that's a review of the movie or the documentary, Common Ground. And it appears Fred didn't have much common ground with the producers of this film. But it's an important message and I agree with that. And check it out if you're interested. Please subscribe. Please leave a comment. Let us know what you guys think about this message. Are you guys eating organic? Do you guys not care? Are you stuffing the Doritos and the Fritos down your face? I tend to do that. Let us know what you guys think about this review and we'll catch you guys at the next one.