"You Owe Me Your Opinion", She-Hulk: Attorney At Law Edition

 Women being angry at things appear to be an unlimited vein of ore for certain genre cultural artifacts, as evidenced by my favorite hobby horse in this space, Paul Feig's 2016 Ghostbusters reboot, less objectionably Xena: Warrior Princess. Despite generally favorable ratings at Rotten Tomatoes (as of this writing, 87% fresh from the critics, 74% audience score), the preemptive kvetching from outlets that can be counted on to tell us What We Need To Think — e.g. ScreenRant — are busying themselves letting certain audience reviewers Have Wrong Opinions. In particular, they have a beef with IMDB's audience score, currently at 5.2/10 stars.

...[A]s exposed by the review bombs of She-Hulk and other recent projects, IMDb’s intent to offer a credible index of genuine audience reviews has been massively undermined by one of its own rules and by the site’s rise in popularity. The rise in bad-faith IMDb reviews, particularly for projects led by women and/or BIPOC, threatens to render the site’s scores meaningless if the problem is not addressed.

Well, maybe if so much of the film biz (including flacks at places like ScreenRant) weren't aimed at sliming large parts of the potential audience as racists and sexists, this might not happen so much? Regardless of the cheap attempt at mind-reading, De'Vion Hinton has a valid point: IMDB shouldn't allow reviews for products not yet in circulation. But that doesn't mean anybody has to actually like it, either.  He (?) doesn't attempt to break this down by date of review, but the statistics IMDB themselves publish show a certain, um, pattern here:

The plurality of low ratings come from teenage boys. Wow, hoocoodanode? I expect next a soulfully argued piece coming out against calling neighborhood bars and looking for Amanda Hugginkiss.

We’re Gonna Be Doing This For A Long Time: Enola Holmes

 I have had my problems with the social justice types in Hollywood, and mainly because they tend to be entryists. Because they do not have good, original stories to tell, they take up and ruin beloved franchises, viz. Ghostbusters, and to a lesser degree, Star Wars. Enola Holmes doesn’t quite fit that category; it’s more of a cinematic hermit crab, occupying the shell of a beloved franchise. We see almost nothing of her older brother, Sherlock (Henry Cavill), and so the eponymous Enola is mostly on her own when their mother disappears.

The exceptionally talented Millie Bobby Brown plays the title role, fresh off an extraordinary run as the psionically gifted Eleven in the Netflix series, Stranger Things. But as with Hailee Steinfeld’s gobsmacking entry to the screen with the 2010 remake of True Grit, it’s hard not to question Brown’s subsequent choice of vehicles. In this case, much of it comes off as cliché — particularly her willingness to engage in hand-to-hand combat with a larger and older man. She’s an expert in jiu-jitsu, we learn, but it goes on. She outwits her famous brother (who comes off as a bit of a dunderhead). You expect more given the actress, but ... it’s almost a Mary Sue character. There’s too many of those already.

Review: The Two Popes

At the opening of The Two Popes, things are going badly for Cardinal Bergoglio (Jonathan Pryce), so it comes as something of a surprise when Pope Benedict XVI (Anthony Hopkins) summons him to Rome. They are opposites, Bergoglio a reformer, Benedict a conservative, but what unites them is something we discover over the course of the first half of the movie: both wish to resign their posts, but only one can. Benedict, we learn, has run out of options, no longer able to hear God, and so he has invited his harshest critic to take over the Holy See from him. Bergoglio won't have it at first, and so much of the balance of the movie is about Benedict convincing the future Pope Francis to step in.

Another large part of it is finding Bergoglio's catastrophic failure to protect his priests in the aftermath of a 1976 military junta in Argentina. The euphemistically named "National Reorganization Process" murdered and tortured tens of thousands, rounding up anyone who might have even been near a Peronist or uttered a socialist thought. Joe Morgenstern's review in the Wall Street Journal notices that virtually all of the film (or its most important parts, anyway) are "mostly the luscious fruit of [screenwriter Anthony McCarten's] imagination", so it's not to be taken too literally. But it's a visual feast, and a fantastic character study by two actors at the top of their craft.

Review: Harriet

The hazards with Harriet are many, and start with the casting; Julia Roberts at one time was suggested as Tubman (rilly?). This having caused a stir and subsequently rejected, the film eventually got made on what passes for a shoestring budget in Hollywood these days ($17M), quickly earning that back and more (currently at $33M).

The more obvious hazard is that of any telling the story of any larger-than-life figure, and that is the temptations of hagiography. Tubman is in some ways a Joan of Arc figure in that she represented a woman embodying the virtue of action who also had a strong religious component to her motivations. Having grown up on a farm in slave-holding Maryland with the nickname Minty, she learns she is about to be sold further south, never to see her family again. With help from a preacher, her father, and an abolitionist, she eventually reaches safety in Philadelphia (though not before narrowly escaping her former master, and almost drowning along the way).

In Philadelphia, she sheds her given name of Araminta Ross, and takes her free name from which we know her today, Harriet Tubman. After a year, she goes back to fetch her husband (who refuses to follow her, having given her up for dead and remarried), and ultimately, 70 slaves, losing none along the way, as one of the most prolific conductors on the Underground Railroad in its history.

The scenes of slavery and its consequences are horrifying, the movie an unstinting witness to the terrors slaves lived under every day: the beatings, the family dismemberments, the hundred petty cruelties. Where it really falls down — and this seems a common theme among detractors — is that it is so afraid of doing anything wrong it doesn't ever take any big risks. (As Adam Graham in Detroit News wrote, "Harriet often feels in awe of its subject, like it's staring at her through museum glass.") The film slips too often into Joan of Arc mode, with Tubman drifting into religious delirium as a (confusing) way to advance the plot. She's not made out as a plaster saint, thank God, but neither is she fully formed in this telling. Still, I never once felt the urge to check my watch, and as history lessons go, this one's a keeper.

More Link Dumping

• Annie Wilkes, Part 1: Ford vs. Ferrari: now the subject of one of those Annie Wilkes reviews. "Best left dead", sheesh.
• The best thing The Federalist has published all year: "Climate Worship Is Nothing More Than Rebranded Paganism". Excerpt:

  The reality is, of course, completely different. Much less than destroying the planet, climate change isn’t even a settled science. Conservatives don’t disagree that climate is changing. That is a straw man. Conservatives, however, are opposed to hysteria, have skepticism about the rate of the climate change, and would like to see an actual cost-benefit analysis of the radical changes being demanded.
  
  More important than that, conservatives understand that climate change is cynically used by a certain section of people to justify their political goals of steering the West away from its way of life, a way they perceive to be evil and harmful, hetero-patriarchal, and capitalist. How? Appealing to the faith-based part of human brains, the need for subservience, and propping up children as human shields.

• California de facto bans fracking by making all new wells subject to a "scientific" (read: captive of the greens) panel. 
• Annie Wilkes, Part 2: Annie Blames The Audience:  No, really, Elizabeth Blanks has preemptively blamed men if her Charlie's Angels reboot fails.
  

  She stated, “Look, people have to buy tickets to this movie, too. This movie has to make money.” She added, “If this movie doesn’t make money it reinforces a stereotype in Hollywood that men don’t go see women do action movies.”

  This is an odd place to go given recent successes with Wonder Woman, Captain Marvel, and Mad Max: Fury Road. The 2000 reboot took in $125M at the domestic box office, so maybe it's just you, Liz?
• Annie Wilkes, Part 3, Corncob Edition:

  Wow. Nearly 3000 replies because one woman voices her opinion that we shouldn’t be at a point anymore where we just accept media that normalizes patriarchy. Cool cool cool. Everyone’s having a normal one I see. pic.twitter.com/N8vMHJZ09e

  — Anita Sarkeesian (@anitasarkeesian) November 21, 2019

• I am glad to see our courts beavering away at the important question of whether women can consent to a threesome. And to think, this poor man almost had his freedom snatched away from him.
• Elizabeth Warren fires the opening shot in banning cars:

  Traffic violence kills thousands and injures even more Americans every year. On World Day of Remembrance for Traffic Crash Victims, I'm sending my love to the families and friends of those who have lost loved ones. It's time to #EndTrafficViolence.

  — Elizabeth Warren (@ewarren) November 17, 2019

• Sully gets it right again on the intersectional left's long-term political goals:

  Every now and again, it’s worth thinking about what the intersectional left’s ultimate endgame really is — and here it strikes me as both useful and fair to extrapolate from Kendi’s project. They seem not to genuinely believe in liberalism, liberal democracy, or persuasion. They have no clear foundational devotion to individual rights or freedom of speech. Rather, the ultimate aim seems to be running the entire country by fiat to purge it of racism (and every other intersectional “-ism” and “phobia”, while they’re at it). And they demand “disciplinary tools” by unelected bodies to enforce “a radical reorientation of our consciousness.” There is a word for this kind of politics and this kind of theory when it is fully and completely realized, and it is totalitarian.

  Also, homosexuals are now under attack by — wait for it — the woke left, for the crime of not hewing to the trans lobby's worldview:

  Of course, anyone can and should like whatever they like and do whatever they want to do. But if a gay man doesn’t want to have sex with someone who has a vagina and a lesbian doesn’t want to have sex with someone who has a dick, they are not being transphobic. They’re being — how shall I put this? — gay. When Rich suggests that “it’s not just possible but observable and prevalent to have ‘preferences’ that dog-whistle bigotry,” and he includes in the category of “preferences” not liking the other sex’s genitals, he’s casting a moral pall over gayness itself. Suddenly we’re not just being told homosexuality is “problematic” by the religious right, we’re being told it by the woke left.

• I Am Shocked, Shocked That Mothers Want To Be With Their Children, but this apparently is huge news to the New York Times. A study of California, which in 2004 instituted mandatory paid maternity leave, found women worked fewer hours and earned less a decade later, results that are consistent with the results in Sweden, where the labor pool is the most sex-segregated in the OECD.

The Hunt Is This Season's Blair Witch

So, revenge fantasy The Hunt apparently got pulled by its studio Universal, with people clucking their tongues as to why (somehow, Donald Trump subtweeted something or other), possibly due to recent gun violence in the news. But given the paltry $15M budget and the overall contraction of first-release movies to streaming services, what seems more likely is that audiences are being played, and Universal never intended to do a theatrical release at all. This was always going straight to streaming; as with The Blair Witch Project, where the marketing was the smartest thing about the movie, this bears the field marks of a clever promotion, a "banned" movie that will resurface one day on Netflix.

Update: I guess I should say NBCUniversal's not-quite-ready-for-prime-time streaming service, whatever it ends up being called.

Never Speak Ill Of A Woman: Taking When Harry Met Sally Personally

I have fond memories of When Harry Met Sally, at least in part because I saw it in first runs back when Hollywood made movies for actual grownups, ones that didn’t involve the whole cast in gaudy spandex uniforms. The film itself did quite nicely at the time, hauling in $92.8M, and a good bit of critical acclaim as well (viz. Roger Ebert’s contemporaneous review). I have my criticisms of it; Billy Crystal’s excellent comedic acting takes the edge off Harry Burns’ self-absorption. His character in isolation is a real ass, something screenwriter Nora Ephron drew from an early interview with director Rob Reiner after the latter’s recent divorce. Reiner has always struck me as something of a narcissist, so this goes a long way toward my own bias confirmation.

But as everyone knows now, We Can’t Have Nice Things, at least not so long as women come in for any sort of criticism at all, and thus the motive for Megan Garber’s “The Quiet Cruelty of When Harry Met Sally”. I can’t tell if the author is trying to live out Sally Albright’s life as a woman who thinks she’s low maintenance but is actually high maintenance, but she apparently lives in timorous fear of being so labeled. That is, she takes the movie as a 30-year-old attack on her:

What I did think about, though, every once in a while, was whether the text message I was about to send might make me seem high-maintenance. What I did sometimes wonder, packing a carry-on for a week-long trip, was whether I might be, in spite of myself, “the worst kind.” Movies’ magic can take many forms. Their words can become part of you, as can their flaws. Thirty years after When Harry Met Sally premiered, in this moment that is reassessing what it means for women to desire, it’s hard not to see a little bit of tragedy woven into comedy’s easy comforts. Sally may have gotten a happy ending; she waited so long for it, though. And waiting is not as romantic as her movie believes it to be. Maybe there were times along the way when she almost said something to Harry but didn’t, understanding how easily her preferences could be dismissed as inconvenient. Maybe she questioned herself. Maybe she knew that, despite it all, women who just want it the way they want it are still assumed to be wanting too much.

Never mind that the author behind this terror was an actual woman, no; never mind that, maybe, just maybe, being overly demanding impedes actual happiness. Men mansplain, they manspread on subways, and women get awards for designing uncomfortable furniture to suppress the latter. The slings and arrows of life are fine for men, who must comport themselves to women, but women are always and ever above criticism, even the mildest sort, lest they collapse in a heap of neuroses, as the author.

More Internet Troll Ad Campaigns

I’ve written previously about Paul Feig’s stupid marketing campaign for the Ghostbusters reboot, merging social justice nonsense with intentional efforts to annoy potential moviegoers. That effort bombed so badly that the film earned a $70 million loss, and resulted in Sony handing the keys to the franchise back to originator Ivan Reitman. (Subsequent coverage shows that there will be a new Ghostbusters franchise sequel made, with Jason Reitman at the helm, but with no ties to the Feig 2016 cast or plot lines.) The “get woke, go broke” mantra may be overdone, but it’s not entirely without some basis in fact.

This failure does not seem to have dissuaded would-be marketeers from following in Feig’s dubious footsteps, and so we have a couple new examples in late weeks:

• Disney has planned a live-action Little Mermaid reboot starring black actress Halle Bailey. The Washington Post ran a piece by Brooke Newman claiming there was some sort of backlash, based on the thinnest speculation. The only cite she gives is the hashtag #NotMyAriel, but the mentions there are exclusively virtue-signalers in favor of the casting.
• The latest Terminator franchise (they’re still making those?) has its own baffling anti-Internet-troll marketing blitz, because, wasn’t Sarah Connor supposed to be proof that a Kickass Female Character™️ can make box office bank without resorting to slagging on half their potential audience?

 Usually when an auteur starts a marketing campaign, it's for the widest possible audience. These seem aimed at only social justice warriors. Is this a recipe for success? It seems unlikely.

Spielberg As King Canute: The Changing Landscape Of First-Run Movies

It must sting to be Steven Spielberg these days. Not so long ago, he complained of the shrinking market for non-blockbusters in theatrical release:

Steven Spielberg on Wednesday predicted an "implosion" in the film industry is inevitable, whereby a half dozen or so $250 million movies flop at the box office and alter the industry forever. What comes next -- or even before then -- will be price variances at movie theaters, where "you're gonna have to pay $25 for the next Iron Man, you're probably only going to have to pay $7 to see Lincoln." He also said that Lincoln came "this close" to being an HBO movie instead of a theatrical release. [Emboldening mine. — RLM]


George Lucas agreed that massive changes are afoot, including film exhibition morphing somewhat into a Broadway play model, whereby fewer movies are released, they stay in theaters for a year and ticket prices are much higher. His prediction prompted Spielberg to recall that his 1982 film E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial stayed in theaters for a year and four months.

The lack of long runs and the coin-minting that follows might be one reason Spielberg has lately taken to slagging on Netflix:

Less than a week after Netflix's Roma walked away with three Oscar awards, IndieWire reports Spielberg intends to propose an Academy rule change that would disqualify Netflix original films from Oscar contention. He's expected to make his case during the next Academy Board of Governors meeting scheduled for April.

"Steven feels strongly about the difference between the streaming and theatrical situation," said a spokesperson for Amblin, a production company founded by Spielberg. "He'll be happy if the others will join [his campaign] when that comes up [at the Academy Board of Governors meeting]. He will see what happens."

But what I suspect rankles Spielberg even more is the nature of the top grossing movies today. Kaya Savas in the Winter, 2018 issue of The Score, the Society of Composers & Lyricists' quadrennial magazine took a look at the scene twenty years ago, when Spielberg ruled Hollywood, and wondered: what changed?

Of the top 10 grossing films of 1998, only three were either sequels or a remake of an existing established franchise. Also take a look at the variety of production budgets and the different genres all represented here. We even see the Oscar winner for Best Picture of that year with Shakespeare in Love cracking the top 10. The film landscape was so incredibly different.

...

In 2017 we see how much has changed in 20 years. In 2017, our top 10 worldwide films were all sequels or remakes, and all were action tentpoles. Also, only 3 of the films were produced for under $100 million. So what happened? When did this all start...?

It was in 2008 that we saw a shift start to happen. The U.S. economy was in the midst of a recession as were other countries around the globe. 2008 was also the first year to have a Marvel Studios movie released. Iron Man did a respectable $585 million at the box-office worldwide, fantastic numbers for the year. But still, Iron Man placed eighth in worldwide grosses for the year, being beat out by movies like Mamma Mia! ($609.8 million), Hancock ($624.4 million), and Kung Fu Panda ($631.7 million). The top film for 2008 was of course, The Dark Knight, which barely crossed the $1 billion mark.

Savas blamed the singularity of fantasy/spandex movies on audiences (still) lacking the discretionary budgets they had before the recession, and thus wanting a guaranteed good time — escapism. What Savas called "middle class" films — mid-budget stories that don't rely on the power of franchise, fantasy, or both — have all but uniformly changed to streaming distribution.

When Netflix and Amazon began looking for original content, there was a whole generation of storytellers eager to work, but with no place in the current theatrical exhibition space. Directors could direct again, without serving a brand vision. We saw challenging and more unique offerings. Auteurs like the Coen brothers and Cary Fukunaga found a place to exercise their creativity. It wouldn't be surprising to see someone like Terrence Malick follow suit.

Spielberg here pines for the old days of simpler distribution — a business model that made him a fortune. This is a rearguard action that he cannot win. Silver screen's prestige couldn't save the serial business model from television; neither can barring Netflix series from Oscar eligibility bring back theatrical blockbusters with 16-month legs. Just as SAG was eventually forced to merge with AFTRA, the old, bright line between first-run movies and television has more or less vanished, save for the very top. He can work with it, or like King Canute, he can pretend he has the power to change the sea with mere words.

Review: The Post

Is there a movie Tom Hanks has been in that truly stank? I don't pretend to encyclopedic knowledge of his career, but I expect a lot of people might point at Forrest Gump as one. And as much as I enjoyed that film, there could be an argument for such a low rating: it's schmaltz married to some very slick (for the era) CGI, conjured up from an impenetrable, windy novel.

But you would have to press harder, in my estimation. In any case, I'm in no mood to search for examples, coming down as I am off the high of watching Hanks and Meryl Streep chase down Nixon in The Post. Streep, playing the role of publisher Katherine Graham, has only recently taken on that role (as we learn, following her husband's suicide), and needs an infusion of cash from Wall Street to expand what had been a sleepy regional paper. Hanks, as editor Ben Bradlee, gets down the grizzled J. Jonah Jameson act with aplomb and not a little parrying with Graham. The principal actors of the Post, you see, have personal connections to power: Graham knew Robert McNamara, who commissioned the Pentagon Papers and then suppressed them, as a close personal friend and someone with deep ties to her board of directors. Bradlee went drinking with the Kennedys and Johnsons.

These conflicts of interest form the nucleus of the film's drama when Daniel Ellsburg, a former employee of the RAND Corporation, secretly copies and sends to the New York Times McNamara's study. Comprising a history of lies through multiple administrations dating back to Truman, the material makes plain the deceit behind the folly of Vietnam. The Post gets a copy of some of the pages. but before they can publish, the Times scoops them again. Nixon sues the Times and for a time silences that paper. Then Ellsburg slips Post reporter Ben Bagdikian (Bob Odenkirk) a (partial?) copy of the papers — and the tension builds. Does Graham want to publish and invite the wrath of Nixon? What about the institutional investors? If they get buyer's remorse in the week following the offering, the whole deal is cancelled, and the Post is in deep financial trouble.

Of course you know that Bradlee and Graham won the showdown with Nixon, and got an ironclad First Amendment pillar, New York Times Corp. v. United States, written into the Supreme Court's legacy of press freedom. For Oscars voters, it is convenient that Nixon was who he was, and Team Blue largely (if unevenly) sat on the opposite corner. But many partisans must still be reminded that corporations do in fact have First Amendment rights, and that the Obama administration prosecuted and jailed more leakers than any other administration in history under the Espionage Act. If this movie is meant to rhyme with our own Trumpian era, it has a little catching up to do with the previous administration first.

The Importance Of Holding The Right Opinion About Louis C.K.

The general proscription against reading the comments on Internet fora are well-founded, but often enough wrong, as when I was passing through Manohla Dargis' reconsideration of the now-disgraced Louis C.K.'s I Love You, Daddy. As one commenter pointed out, it looks very like she's elected to blunt the praise in her glowing, earlier review, where she wrote, "At heart, the film is a multipronged debate that circles, again and again, around the question of whether it is possible, permissible and morally justifiable to love the art and loathe the artist. Yes, no, maybe so." But clearly, once Mr. C.K.'s apology came to light (one which many simply weren't having), it became necessary to reconsider that calculus.

Mostly, that reckoning spins on the axis of what she calls his "provocations": the character Leslie "even defines radical feminism for China, a scene that mirrors another in which Glen delivers a more generalized feminist lesson." Later, she laments

... how the movies see women. How they use and use up young women, at least until they turn 18 or 20 or so when some moviemaker or some suit deems her no longer desirable and turns her putative lack of desirability on her, as if she were responsible for this lack of interest in her.

These, particularly, appear as so much virtue signaling. Anyone with eyes can observe that half the moviegoing audience is male, which has concomitant effects on female casting. Men having opinions about the contours of sexual equality — that, also, is not allowed. If Leslie's speech was sexist in some way, she never makes the case for it or even bothers to quote it. The charge itself is now adequate to sustain it, apparently. What is important is having the Right Opinions, and being seen doing so.

I'm Entitled To Your Opinion Dep't: Mehera Bonner Reviews Dunkirk

The meat of her criticism is actually apt; the film doesn't appear to have an actual plot, but instead is a series of pastiches of interwoven stories: the older man (Mr. Dawson) piloting a private pleasure boat to rescue Tommies on the Dunkirk beach, the outnumbered fighter pilots taking on relentless Luftwaffe adversaries hectoring ground troops and sinking transports, the young soldier separated from his unit trying against the odds to make it home (Tommy), the commanders in charge of moving the men off the beach and onto the absurdly small (and shrinking daily) numbers of available military transports. That is, she's not wrong in this specific complaint.

But the film itself has earned a great deal of praise, and deservedly so, despite the overall failing of lacking apparent narrative. Part of that is because we already know the outcome: Britain's fathers came to the rescue of her sons, and even a significant number of French troops as well. It is beautifully photographed, flawlessly acted, and rippling with dramatic tension from the opening until almost the close. None of these virtues apparently appeal to Bonner:

But my main issue with Dunkirk is that it's so clearly designed for men to man-out over. And look, it's not like I need every movie to have "strong female leads." Wonder Woman can probably tide me over for at least a year, and I understand that this war was dominated by brave male soldiers. I get that. But the packaging of the film, the general vibe, and the tenor of the people applauding it just screams "men-only"—and specifically seems to cater to a certain type of very pretentious man who would love nothing more than to explain to me why I'm wrong about not liking it. If this movie were a dating profile pic, it would be a swole guy at the gym who also goes to Harvard. If it was a drink it would be Stumptown coffee. If it was one of your friends, it would be the one who starts his sentences with "I get what you're saying, but..."

How terrible — someone makes movies that appeal to men? Her reaction isn't quite "THIS MUST STOP NOW", but you can hear her mentally outfitting anyone who actually likes the film with an invisible fedora (the universal headgear of the MRA). The idea that men died in battle so that someone like Bonner could spout narcissistic and childish opinions is itself cringe-worthy, but as Kyle Smith ably answers in National Review Online, the problem is really a branch of the Annie Wilkes model of culture (emboldening mine):

In a moment of clarity I understood what the two main imperatives of higher education were to Absurd Feminist and to so many of her peers: First, instead of broadening her horizons and taking her outside herself to discover the world, she demanded the educators filter all knowledge through her own experience to make it relatable to her. Second, all learning was to be valued in proportion to how effectively it could be made into a cudgel in the identity-politics war. Dispatches, with its virtually all-male cast, represented a pernicious advance for the patriarchy, even if it was about the agonies suffered by men.

It seems unlikely that Marie Claire’s reviewer, Mehera Bonner, has before her an exceptionally bright career of writing about film. As for a career of writing about feminism, though, the sky, for Bonner, is the limit. Her essay could plausibly have appeared on any number of bristling feminist sites. What is her reasoning except feminism taken to its logical extreme? Feminists often declare to the world that they stand merely for an entirely reasonable proposition — say, that women’s lives are as important as men’s. Who would dispute that? Yet feminist writing usually continues far past this point into a need to prove women and men have been equally important in every context, even in history. If women turn out to be mostly irrelevant to an incident, then it is the moral duty of socially conscious creative artists to ignore the matter. They should retrain their sights on something that will give absurd feminists something they can relate to, something that will advance the cause of feminism in general.

 She doesn't like the movie; fine, we get that. But as Smith observes, "Feminism means constant maintenance of an imaginary set of scales, and she fears Dunkirk adds weight to the masculine side, tipping the culture away from women." What could be more absurd?

The Annie Wilkes Model Of Culture

I had read in various corners about Tim Burton's supposed racist comments in the context of his new film, Miss Peregrine's Home For Peculiar Children, contained in an interview in The Bustle, as to why his movies are so, so white:

“Nowadays, people are talking about it more […]things either call for things, or they don’t. I remember back when I was a child watching The Brady Bunch and they started to get all politically correct, like, OK, let’s have an Asian child and a black — I used to get more offended by that than just — I grew up watching blaxploitation movies, right? And I said, that’s great. I didn’t go like, OK, there should be more white people in these movies.”

This, of course, met with howls of protest from people for whom "diversity" is really code for "must make movies in exactly the way I want them made" — as for instance this:

To add insult to injury, you claim that “things” (movies and other shows?) either call for “things” (diversity), or they don’t. Ok, whatever, I’ll bite. If that’s so, then why did the role of a villain call for a black man? It sends kind of a questionable message. This is the first time you’ve had a person of color in a major role in any of your movies, and according to you, things either call for diversity or they don’t, so you felt the role of a particularly awful villain (we’ve both read the book, I’m sure. That guy is just the fucking worst.) called for a black actor. The only time your films have called for any significant diversity so far has been when you needed someone to be the worst kind of evil? That’s not a good look, buddy. It leaves a horrible taste in my mouth about you that watching “Sweeney Todd” and “Edward Scissorhands” on loop just won’t wash out.

So in other words, it's not enough to cast a black man in his films — no, blacks must be cast in the roles the author wants, have the qualities the author wants, etc. For his part, Samuel L. Jackson appeared to think the whole thing was a nothingburger:

With”Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children,” Samuel L. Jackson will be the first black actor to play a leading role in a Burton movie, according to Bustle.  “I don’t think it’s any fault of his or his method of storytelling, it’s just how it’s played out,” Jackson told Bustle. “Tim’s a really great guy.”

This represents yet another instance of the narcissistic view that creators must make stories for fans in exactly the way the fans want them, and with exactly the right political overtones. As Joss Whedon found out, even tiny diversions from orthodoxy are met with shrieking. We see the echoes of this with the Sad Puppies Hugo slate and the Ghostbusters reboot lynch mob: both involve orchestrated attempts by loud minorities to manipulate public opinion by shaming, and both face titanic uphill battles. The more vicious of these recall Annie Wilkes from Misery: they plan on bludgeoning creators until they get it right, for some value of "right".

California Solons Outlaw Actresses' "Last Fuckable Day"

Or at least, that's what it looks like from here, as Gov. Jerry Brown signed into law a bill forbidding online database websites to publish dates of birth upon the request of the actor.

“Age discrimination is a major problem in our industry, and it must be addressed,” she said in a Sept. 16 post. “SAG-AFTRA has been working hard for years to stop the career damage caused by the publication of performers’ dates of birth on online subscription websites used for casting like IMDb. We are now in the final stages of securing the enactment of a California law that would help combat age discrimination by giving performers the right to request the removal of their date of birth when it’s included on online subscription sites.”

This, of course, is aimed directly at Santa Monica-based IMDb Pro, and the "problem" it seeks to address is the reality that actresses cease to be as much in demand in their 40's as they are in their 20's:

Notably, age is not a problem for men, and beneficial up to a limit. This trend actually reflects male sexual preferences, which always skew to young women; the California law is thus an effort to police male desire. This will prove impossible, as men amount to slightly more than half the moviegoing audience, per MPAA statistics from 2014 (the most recent year available, see p. 14 of the PDF):

Tina Fey and Amy Schumer made this obviously true point (over and over and over) in their famous "Last Fuckable Day" sketch from "Inside Amy Schumer":

 Hollywood is a hard place to make a living for anyone. Susan Sarandon or Michelle Pfeiffer won't be ingenues again because casting agents don't know their birthdays. California bashing the First Amendment by way of third parties doesn't make it right.

Ghostbusters' Lesson: Don't Insult Your Potential Audience

The first industry piece labeling the Ghostbusters reboot a failure comes from The Hollywood Reporter, noting the film's $70M loss, and rescinding an earlier commitment to a sequel (emboldening mine):

As of Aug. 7, Ghostbusters had earned just under $180 million at the global box office, including $117 million domestic. The film still hasn't opened in a few markets, including France, Japan and Mexico, but box-office experts say it will have trouble getting to $225 million despite a hefty net production budget of $144 million plus a big marketing spend. The studio has said break-even would be $300 million.

Sony hardly is alone in suffering from audience rejection of sequels this summer. But film chief Tom Rothman and his team, along with partner Village Roadshow, had high hopes for launching a live-action Ghostbusters "universe." Now they are preparing for steep losses (think $70 million-plus) and an uncertain future for the franchise.

Sony won't comment on whether it has banished a sequel to the netherworld, but perhaps tellingly, a rep says the studio actively is pursuing an animated Ghostbusters feature that could hit theaters in 2019 and an animated TV series, Ghostbusters: Ecto Force, which is eyeing an early 2018 bow. Both are being guided by Reitman, who firmly is back in charge of the Ghostbusters empire via Ghost Corps., a subsidiary with a mandate to expand the brand across platforms. (It was former Sony film chief Amy Pascal who first embraced Feig's vision for the live-action reboot, not Reitman or Rothman.)

Given the early marketing heavily rested on highly politicized narrowcasting, is anyone surprised by this? It's significant that, in recovering its losses, Sony now expects other, ancillary markets (foreign box office and licensing) to take up the slack, and moreover, has handed the franchise reins back to original creator Ivan Reitman. The lesson here seems to be, take your licks and shut up if you drop a turd on screen. Given Reitman's track record, we can pretty safely assert he won't act on Reporter writer Caryn James' analysis that Ghostbusters wasn't feminist enough, i.e. alienating and loud.

Update 2016-08-14: Brad Torgerson:

Wagging your finger at people is never, ever a winning marketing strategy. Wagging your finger at the crowds is liable to have the crowds showing you a collective finger of their own — and it ‘aint the index finger. Because people like what they like, and they don’t like what they don’t like. De gustibus. You want to freight your product with all kinds of social justice ornamentation? Fine. Just be aware of the fact that you’re putting a stone around that product’s neck. Don’t be shocked when it sinks to the bottom, never to rise. It’s not the audience’s fault. It’s your fault for thinking the audience wanted or needed you to shove your politics up their collective ass.

This, also, is the problem with a good number of religious films and other sorts of crank-ery.

Ghostbusters Box Office Declines, Yet Still Meets Expectations

So the latest Ghostbusters franchise is exceeding studio expectations in its third weekend, bagging $10M, declining to seventh place but not out of the top ten, for a cumulative box office of $106M; likewise, the early reports are that the toys are selling well (though whether that holds up after the cubicle dwellers all have theirs remains an open question). I still don't plan on seeing the thing unless it hits cable or something; Mollie Hemingway's question of whether Sony tanked the film's marketing intentionally, in my mind, remains both relevant and insightful.

You're Entitled To My Opinion: Salon's Ghostbusters Head Fake

This is the second thing I've written about the new Ghostbusters reboot (here, and also here, in passing), which I kind of hope will be the last. I expected the movie would have at least a good opening weekend, which it did at a $46M gross, still not enough to dethrone The Secret Life of Pets. Sony has already committed publicly to a sequel; they could scarcely do otherwise, lest it be seen as an admission of failure. The film seems destined for a precipitous decline in coming weekends, but as Yogi Berra allegedly warned, "It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future." But today, I am not here to discuss the Ghostbusters movie itself (which I have not seen), but a recent Salon story about the gender divide among reviewers of that film.

As of the time of writing, the film’s scores from female reviewers are considerably higher, with 84 percent of women giving the movie a thumbs up. Time’s Stephanie Zacharek comments, “The movie glows with vitality, thanks largely to the performers, who revel in one another’s company.” Meanwhile, the New York Times’ Manohla Dargis writes that it’s “cheerfully silly” and Kate Muir of U.K.’s The Times says it’s a “rollickingly funny delight.”

On the flip side, 77 percent of the critics who gave the film a thumbs down are male. Roger Ebert’s one-time sidekick, Richard Roeper, called it a “horror from start to finish,” while David Rooney of The Hollywood Reporter referred to “Ghostbusters” as a “bust.” That disparity has hampered the film’s reception: Currently, there’s a 10 percentage point difference between male and female opinion on the movie. If reviewing were left up to male critics alone, “Ghostbusters” would have a 74 percent approval rating.

In other words, Salon's Nico Lang holds men accountable for some "right" opinion of a film, i.e. the one she presumably holds. She goes on, not to see if there's a general split by sex in films, but to discover heresy:

These gender gaps were static across the board: On average, men were overrepresented in negative reviews by a six percentage-point margin—with 82.1 percent of “rotten” ratings coming from male critics. These films include “Suffragette” (78 percent of negative reviews came from men), “Julie and Julia” (80 percent), “It’s Complicated” (76 percent), “Hope Springs” (78 percent), “Mamma Mia” (80 percent), and “The Iron Lady” (79 percent). The latter was the only film to receive harsher reviews from female critics, in which Streep played Margaret Thatcher. Just 43 percent of female critics liked it.

“Suffragette” (73 percent Tomatometer):
Negative reviews that came from men: 78 percent
Female critics who liked it: 82 percent

“The Devil Wears Prada” (75 percent):
Negative reviews that came from men: 82 percent
Female critics who liked it: 80 percent

“Julie and Julia” (75 percent):
Negative reviews that came from men: 80 percent
Female critics who liked it: 85 percent

“It’s Complicated” (57 percent):
Negative reviews that came from men: 76 percent
Female critics who liked it: 60 percent

“Hope Springs” (75 percent):
Negative reviews that came from men: 78 percent
Female critics who liked it: 79 percent

“Ricki and the Flash” (65 percent):
Negative reviews that came from men: 85 percent
Female critics who liked it: 76 percent

“The Hours” (81 percent):
Negative reviews that came from men: 97 percent
Female critics who liked it: 97 percent

“Mamma Mia” (54 percent):
Negative reviews that came from men: 80 percent
Female critics who liked it: 60 percent

“August: Osage County” (64 percent):
Negative reviews that came from men: 86 percent
Female critics who liked it: 68 percent

“The Iron Lady” (51 percent):
Negative reviews that came from men: 79 percent
Female critics who liked it: 43 percent

Again: the "correct" opinion, and male haters. (Also notice she does not measure the same thing on each side, i.e. what is the actual percentage difference between genders?) Perhaps one day it will dawn on Ms. Lang and her similarly-inclined friends that men are a large portion of the moviegoing public, too, and are entitled to their opinions as anyone; the old saying about opinions being like assholes still applies. That is not to say that there shouldn't be movies tailored to specific audiences. One of my focuses in that regard is that people who complain of specific underserved markets need to go out and fill them, and reap the rewards — and bear the costs. If the 2016 Ghostbusters goes on to long success, I'll tip my cap; that's how capitalism works. Yet it may come to pass that this one becomes a cult film among women, but not well regarded more broadly, i.e. it won't be the blockbuster the original was. That's fine, too. None of us owes an opinion of a particular work to someone else, save in Stalinist dystopias.

Update 2016-07-22: Adding to the list of the impure is Eileen Jones' surprisingly candid pan at the socialist website, Jacobin. Excerpt:

Don’t believe the hype. The Ghostbusters publicity campaign has used puling fanboy misogyny — which is always worth ignoring — to whip up a furious counter-reaction promoting the film as a feminist cause célèbre.

It’s worked like a charm. Earnest think pieces have excoriated despicable “Ghost Bros” for wrecking the dreams of women everywhere by blaming the female leads when the “the worst trailer ever” was released. Platoons of solemn interviewers have asked Feig how he’s weathering the terrible storm surrounding his film, as if controversy doesn’t typically help a movie’s box office returns.

People forget that the Ghostbusters brouhaha is just a pumped-up variation of the same publicity scam that attended the opening of Bridesmaids, 2011’s “feminist triumph,” a women-centered comedy also directed by Paul Feig and starring Kristen Wiig and Melissa McCarthy in a large female ensemble.

 In that, the overall pre-release publicity stunting of the film reminds me of nothing so much as the original The Blair Witch Project, in which bad editing and cinematography substituted for actual plot and writing, amplified by a relentless and visionary PR campaign that defined "viral" before many of its modern appurtenances existed. Say what you want about Feig as a director, he really seems to understand how to knot together the cultural and business aspects of filmmaking.

Star Wars, The Mornings After

A handful of mostly unrelated thoughts on the latest Star Wars installment after reading a number of essays online:

• The Discontents Of Star Wars-Land: Christopher Orr in The Atlantic takes on critical reversal on Star Wars: The Force Awakens (which includes Peter Suderman's meh review, something I touched on briefly here), and earns his paycheck with this one sentence:
  

  Even George Lucas has gotten in on the act, complaining that the movie is all recycled ideas, and that his experience of selling the franchise to Disney was akin to selling his children to “white slavers.” (Which mostly raises the question: Who’s worse? White slavers, or the person who sells his children to them?)

  Ouch. Thanks, George. You're now allowed to buy a small tropical paradise and disappear from our cultural landscape. (I guess he must have gotten a call from someone at Disney.)
  
• Mary Rey? In the context of such a play-it-safe approach, it seemed likely Rey would be held up as a feminist icon, Abrams having already addressed "will the fans embrace this episode?" questions. The issue of whether she is a sort of Mary Sue has come up in multiple corners, with Charlie Jane Anders at io9 wrestling with definitional problems:
  

  “Mary Sue” is one of those terms that had a useful meaning in fan culture at one point, long ago, and has now become both vague and toxic. Originally, a “Mary Sue” was an author surrogate, inserted into fan-fiction. The “fan fiction” thing is important, because part of the fantasy of the “Mary Sue” was the fan-fic author getting to live at Hogwarts or travel on board the U.S.S. Enterprise. And this thinly veiled copy of the story’s author is incredibly good at everything, to the point where all the established characters marvel at her (usually it’s “her”) wonderfulness.
  
  The “Mary Sue” is a very specific wish-fulfillment fantasy, in other words. It’s about getting to hang out with Harry, Ron and Hermione, and having them admire you. There’s nothing wrong with that kind of fantasy—we’ve all had it, when we get especially invested in a particular universe—but the term acquired a pejorative meaning because people felt it made for bad stories. Fair enough.
  
  Over time, the term “Mary Sue” has broadened until it means “any female character who is unrealistically talented or skilled.” Which is insane for a couple of reasons: It makes this “trope” so vague as to be meaningless, and this is also purely a way at tearing down female characters who are good at stuff.

  Rey isn't perfect — she manages to get captured (conveniently!) by Han Solo and Chewbacca — but she's plucky and resilient. Rey is indeed many things female fans have longed for since the opening trilogy — a heroine in her own right in a heroic story. Nevertheless, the familiarity of the arc leads us to wonder just how much of her story isn't Luke Skywalker in drag.
• Whose Feminism? The Atlantic's Megan Garber takes on the broader subject of feminism as it appears in The Force Awakens. There's a great deal that's positive to be said about Rey's handling of herself; as Garber writes,

  Rey’s feminism does not protest too much. It is not insistent; it is not obvious. It is, instead, that most powerful of things: simply there. Rey, tellingly, is not an archetype, but rather a fully realized character, subtle and nuanced and human. She, as a character, luxuriates in her own subjectivity.

  I'm not entirely sure what Garber's trying to get at with "luxuriates in her own subjectivity", but it sounds like writerly fan service. Yet Rey as a new feminist model can only come too soon. As with Miss Piggy, whose martial arts exploits go underappreciated, it would represent a step up from many of the modern acolytes operating under that label.
• Slave (Leia) To Fashion: I guess it was inevitable that Carrie Fisher would catch a bunch of sniggering about her 30-years-older visage, since the last time we saw her in the series, she was wearing a metal bikini. Consequently, awful people are on Twitter (and elsewhere) saying awful things about her appearance:

  Please stop debating about whetherOR not👁aged well.unfortunately it hurts all3 of my feelings.My BODY hasnt aged as well as I have.Blow us👌🏼

  — Carrie Fisher (@carrieffisher) December 29, 2015

  Fisher apparently had a fairly ambivalent relationship with her role as a sex symbol in the series, on the one hand warning Daisy Ridley, "Don’t be a slave like I was… You keep fighting against that slave outfit." Simultaneously, she recently mocked people objecting to the bikini as failing to see the whole picture (which is that she was about to kill the "giant testicle" that had imprisoned her). Live by the sword, I guess.
• Laurie Penny Is Still A Horrible Person: Witness what limitless self-pity and identity politics yield:
  

  This isn’t just about "role models". Readers who are female, queer or of colour have been allowed role models before. What we haven’t been allowed is to see our experience reflected, to see our lives mirrored and magnified and made magical by culture. We haven’t been allowed to see ourselves as anything other than the exception. If we made it into the story, we were standing alone, and we were constantly reminded how miraculous it was that we had saved the day even though we were just a woman. Or just a black kid. Or just - or just,whatever it was that made us less than those boys who were just born to be heroes.
  
  The people who get angry that Hermione is black, that Rey is a woman, that Furiosa is more of a hero than Mad Max, I understand their anger. Anyone who has ever felt shut out of a story by virtue of their sex or skin colour has felt that anger. Imagine that anger multiplied a hundredfold, imagine feeling it every time you read or watched or heard or played through a story. Imagine how over time that rage would harden into bewilderment, and finally mute acceptance that people like you were never going to get to be the hero, not really.

  The sense of entitlement involved in telling others how they need to tell the stories you want in the manner you want and with the characters you approve of — STFU. Really, what this is about is whether you get to operate the machines of culture while forcibly annoying others.
  
  Update 1/1/2016: It occurred to me that Penny here embodies a great deal of what's wrong with modern feminism: it's not enough to simply enjoy a movie with a strong female hero. A good bit of Penny's enjoyment comes from sticking it to men. There's no small irony in that, given who Rey is and what Penny is not. In Penny's telling, patriarchy is a suffocating conspiracy to suppress women like Rey. Rey is about doing; Penny is about kvetching, a permanent, dull narcissism that rejects even the idea of empathy between the sexes.

The Amoral Landscape Of Star Wars

Collin Garbarino nails it: everybody lies in Star Wars, or at least, all the major Jedi do: Obi-Wan lies to Luke about his parentage, his father's actual occupation, and more. Yoda lies about Luke's readiness as a Jedi, or at least is badly confused (and possibly tired). Vader, unlike every other Jedi we encounter (save possibly Luke), actually tells the truth, but is a sociopath. It's an analysis that fits nicely with my view that the Jedi are in fact corrupt as hell, but because the story is told from their perspective, they get to be the good guys. A good short read.

Star Wars And The Naked Fascism Of Ben Domenech

I find alternate Star Wars plot analysis fascinating, as for example Keith Martin's classic from 2005 in which Chewbacca and R2D2 are the principle actors, the drivers behind their more visible agents, Han Solo and C3PO. It's a plausible retelling of the story that makes a good amount of sense, particularly in its handling of the Luke/Leia relationship.

But where I think it falls down — and the Star Wars films more generally — is in its misapprehension of the nature of power. In particular, one conceit of the Star Wars universe I almost never see questioned is how the Jedi somehow always manage to be good guys, Darth Vader notwithstanding. This seems highly unlikely. Think about it: possessed of enormous and effectively unlimited mind control powers, they would have no incentive to restrain themselves, and no one to restrain them. Male Jedi could (and certainly would) seduce every desirable woman imaginable (and perhaps not a few men). No property would be safe with a Jedi in the area. With women mysteriously, constantly turning up pregnant (and infected), and possessions missing daily, society would shortly be thrown into chaos. The only hope would be a turncoat Jedi or Jedis who would somehow assist with the project of their extermination, i.e. Darth Vader (who is in fact a good guy, or at least is less awful than his corrupt brothers), the Emperor, and the Sith. That is, the entire series is a colossal lie of omissions, told by the power-mad, narcissistic Jedi themselves.

What, then, of the Empire's brutality? Innocents like Aunt Veru, Uncle Owen, sand people slaughtered by the score, the entire population of Alderaan, Ewoks and Gungans (ugh) — surely, if we read those deaths at face value, the Empire itself is still corrupt, murderous, and evil. It may well be. Nietzsche's proscription seems apt: "He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster." Faced with such an existential crisis, it's all too easy to imagine an Empire that takes on the character of its enemies.

With this in mind, it's interesting (if repulsive) to read The Federalist's Ben Domenech recent, open advocacy for such an Empire as a force for good. There are times when it's hard to tell if he's kidding, but not when he starts to wind up his essay (emboldening mine):

If you have no idea that Vader turned, that he carried out a final act of redemptive courage in the face of destructive evil, what do you think happened on the second Death Star? You basically think the Rebel Alliance, a group of anarchist terrorists led by believers in an inhuman cult, destroyed the lives of millions, murdered your supreme emperor, and to add insult to injury, defiled Darth Vader’s corpse. It’s like Pearl Harbor II, and this time they killed FDR too.

In the face of such calamity, would the Galactic Empire, a supremely powerful organization spanning systems and planets of countless millions, guided by the Sith belief that those with the capacity of vision and the ability to lead have a duty to do so, and to make the hard choices about the destiny of the universe, simply disappear? Of course not. The Sith understand that the arc of history is long, and it bends toward barbarism and chaos – and that those who understand this and have the capacity to change that arc have a duty to do so in the interests of order, for the benefit of all creatures. They should not merely sit around in monkish robes intoning about balance, controlling passions, refusing to intervene, watching history happen with the dispassion of an ascetic.

For the Sith, the setback at Endor would not destroy them. They would be more inspired than ever to crush the rebellion and its little destructive furry moppets.

In Domenech's telling, order is the only good choice. It doesn't matter how brutally applied that order is, it doesn't matter how many collateral deaths there are, the only thing that matters is suppressing "barbarism and chaos". One gets the sense, especially reading the comments, that a great number of conservatives chafed at George Lucas' earlier ham-handed attempts to tie in Bush/43 foreign policy to the franchise. If so, it was because they were so clearly on the wrong side. The Jonathan V. Last alt-universe story errs, not in its reading of the Empire, but in its witless, soulless mania for power. Someone who could write the words, "Palpatine is a dictator--but a relatively benign one, like Pinochet" has not lived in a state where people could be taken from their beds, never to be heard from again. That Domenech does not realize this (and apparently looks on approvingly) shows he makes the same mistake all who pretend to dictatorship do: they imagine themselves in power indefinitely, and exclusively.

2021-09-22: Fixed the Jonathan V. Last Empire link (the Weekly Standard is a thing of shreds and patches).