The decline of good Hollywood movies

April 5, 2016 • 9:45 am

In my post on Stephen Fry, several readers took issue with my claim that Hollywood was being taken over by blockbuster action movies, usually connected with franchises, and that was a sign of declining standards. But the turn of Hollywood to reliably profitable “action” movies is a real phenomenon, and I recommend that readers have a look at an engrossing new piece in The New Yorker, “The Mogul of the Middle” by Tad Friend (access free).  It’s about the uphill attempt of one man, Adam Fogelson, to buck the trend by creating a new studio to make non-blockbuster movies (what I’d call “good” movies). And the piece really does show that although Hollywood has always produced some blockbusters (in the past, they were movies like “Ben-Hur” and “The Robe”, or even some cowboy movies), there’s a very real decline in higher quality stuff.  (Yes, that’s my personal judgement.) It’s now all about getting people to come to movie theaters when there’s a whole bunch of competing stuff they can see on the Internet.

I have no objection to the existence of movies like the “Mad Max”, “Batman,” or “Jurassic Park” series, though I don’t go see them.  (I have enjoyed some of the Pixar movies!) To each their own. But I would claim two things.

First, maybe people are missing something in their penchant for blockbusters movies—a kind of gratification that you get not from watching people being blown up, but by watching people live their normal, difficult lives, and stepping into their shoes. As I noted in a comment on the Stephen Fry post, some of the Hollywood studio execs in the article say that movies like the great ones of the recent past just wouldn’t get made any more:

The average teen-ager, the moviegoer of the future, sees six films a year in the theatre. Movie theatres are no longer where we go for stories about who we are. That’s become television’s job. We go to the movies now for the same reasons that Romans went to the Colosseum: to laugh, to scream, and to cheer. Comedy, horror, and triumphs of the human spirit still play better in theatres than at home. What plays best of all, of course, is a spaceship going kablooey all over the screen. Extravagant computer-generated imagery is the hallmark of blockbusters that are carefully formulated to avoid being “execution dependent” or “review sensitive”—to avoid needing to be good. One studio head told me, “Movies may not have gotten better over the years, but they’ve gotten more satisfying. A generation ago, execs made movies that they wanted to see. ‘Kramer vs. Kramer’ was a really good movie, but it’s not satisfying to a global audience. Whereas the ‘Harry Potter’ series and the ‘Lord of the Rings’ trilogy weren’t great movies, but they were very satisfying.” The director Billy Ray traced the phenomenon to the economic collapse of 2008, and to the decline of the DVD market. “That’s when corporate timidity gave way to terror,” he said. “Studio people actually said to me, ‘Don’t bring me anything that’s good, because I’ll be tempted to buy it, and I can’t.’ ”

In the same way, I’d argue that people who limit their reading to detective novels or the Harry Potter series are missing something if they don’t essay Tolstoy, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, or Joyce. There are greater depths of humanity in those books than can be found in any “Mad Max” movie. Now maybe that’s not what people go to the movies for, but it seems to me that a life spent watching endless cars blow up and aliens battle Tom Cruise is not as rich as one that includes movies like “12 Angry Men,” which I’m sure wouldn’t get made today.

And I find the line in bold below (my emphasis) immensely sad:

The studios’ turn to spectacle to transfix a restless audience is not new. When TV became popular, in the nineteen-fifties, the studios responded with such CinemaScope behemoths as “The Robe” and “Beneath the 12-Mile Reef.” (Billy Wilder suggested that the widescreen technology might be best suited for filming “the love story of two dachshunds.”) What is novel is the studios’ heavy reliance on the string of sequels known as a franchise. Shawn Levy, the director of the “Night at the Museum” series, said, “We have projects at six studios, and ninety per cent of their attention goes to the ones that are superhero or obviously franchisable. And every single first meeting I have on a movie, in the past two years, is not about the movie itself but about the franchise it would be starting.” Twenty-nine sequels and reboots came out last year, many of them further illuminations of a comic-book universe. One senior studio executive told me, “As a moviegoer, I don’t like seeing all these sequels and franchises. But we have to do justice by the shareholders, and from a marketing perspective it’s a lot easier: ‘Star Wars’—Gee, I wonder what that’s about?” Getting any movie right is hard, so why not make one that can bring in five hundred million dollars?

Second, this blockbuster mentality is driving out the kind of movies that appeal to people who go to movies for reasons similar to those that draw them to good literature.  Have you seen the wonderful movie “The Best Years of Our Lives”? Or “The Last Picture Show”? Or “Make Way for Tomorrow”? Or “On the Waterfront”? I doubt that movies like this would be made in today’s Hollywoood. And we’re the poorer for it.

And I’ll say this at the end, knowing that some will be pissed off by it: I simply don’t understand the appeal of movies like “Mad Max: Fury Road,” which involves one long chase scene in a post-apocalyptic world. I found it tedious. The critical acclaim of that movie (it was nominated for a Best Picture Oscar) also eludes me. Thank Ceiling Cat that the Oscar went to a really good movie, “Spotlight.” But as the New Yorker article notes, movies like that are getting harder and harder to make, for they don’t bring in the big bucks, and you can’t franchise them. And there are no car chases.

But I do disagree with Fry on baseball caps and sugary soft drinks. Though I don’t wear hats, and drink only diet sodas, that was a bit out of line.

Many miss the boat on cultural appropriation of bagels

April 5, 2016 • 8:30 am

I was very surprised at the number of readers who read yesterday’s post on the cultural appropriation of bagels as a serious critique, and taking me to task for not seeing that cultural appropriation was mostly beneficial.

The fact is, the piece was clearly satirical, and if you didn’t know that from the “satire” tag at the bottom, you’d know it if you read the site even semi-regularly. For I’ve long criticized those who cry “cultural appropriation” when people simply adopt aspects of other cultures that they like.

These comments were mostly by newbies, but really, shouldn’t you read a site for a while before you start going after its host (the names I was called are legion)? I’ve let some of those comments through, but have deep-sixed ones that were particularly nasty. The lesson I’ve learned from this is not to presume that commenters know anything about the site. (I already knew that a subset of commenters are simply nasty, and will call people names of they don’t like their posts.)

The rude people won’t be commenting here any more. Those who took the piece seriously but didn’t get nasty about it will, of course, be allowed to keep commenting. I don’t mind disagreement, but I do mind name-calling.

Tuesday: Hili dialogue

April 5, 2016 • 6:30 am

Happy Tuesday: the cruelest day of the week.

On this day in 1614, the native American woman Pocahontas married English colonist John Rolfe. On April 5, 1922, the The American Birth Control League, was incorporated; it later became Planned Parenthood. And, on this day in 1994, Kurt Cobain committed suicide. Notables born on this day include Joseph Lister (1827), Booker T. Washington (1856), Spencer Tracy (1900), Bette Davis (1908), Gregory Peck (1916; it’s a good day for actors!), and astronaut Judith Resnick, the first Jewish person in space (born in 1949, she was nearly my age and one of my youthful hearthrobs, sadly killed in the Challenger accident).  Numbered among those who died on this day are Douglas MacArthur (1964), the geneticist Alfred Sturtevant (1970), Allen Ginsberg (1997), Gene Pitney (2006), and Peter Matthiessen (2014).

Meanwhile, Sanal Edamaruku, the noted Indian rationalist who can’t return to his country (India has an arrest warrant out on him for exposing fraudulent “miracles” and therefore “hurting religious sentiments”), is paying a visit to all the beasts of Dobrzyn. Hili, having not met any Indians, engaged him in conversation:

Hili: What’s the difference between a rationalist from India and a rationalist from Europe?
Sanal: There isn’t any. Rationalism is not a religion; there are no local varieties.
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In Polish:
Hili: Jaka jest różnica między racjonalistą z Indii a racjonalistą z Europy?
Sanal: Nie ma żadnej, racjonalizm to nie religia, nie ma odmian lokalnych.

And out in Winnipeg, Gus’s box has nearly collapsed from his relentless chewing. Here are  “before” and “after” photos; it’s now a tunnel rather than an enclosure:

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Stephen Fry on the Rubin Report: the “deep infantilism of our culture”

April 4, 2016 • 2:00 pm

Dave Rubin, a comedian and now video podcast host, produces some of the best interviews around, and you should keep abreast of his YouTube channel, “The Rubin Report.”  His secular-themed show gets some of the most interesting guests around, and Rubin is a thorough and often combative (but always affable) interviewer. In his latest segment, only eleven minutes long, he talks to Stephen Fry about political correctness. (Fry objects to being interviewed for longer than that.) The take-home message, to quote Fry, is “one fears that the advances of the Enlightenment are being systematically and deliberately pushed back.” He also points out that the most rational countries of the world are those that have kings and queens: constitutional monarchies like Sweden and Denmark (they’re also the most atheistic, even though many have state religions). Curiously, he doesn’t explain these empirical observations.

The conversation then turns to what Rubin calls the Regressive Left.

I love Fry’s beef about adults going to see “superhero” movies, as I wholly agree. I find those movies tedious and superficial, yet they’re the only thing that draws Americans into theaters these days. I still maintain that the recent and highly lauded movie “Mad Max: Fury Road” was basically tripe.

But I digress. We need people like Fry, established liberals and rationalists, to speak out against the cancer of infantilism. I find it amusing that those who promulgate that tendency now seem to realize what they’ve done, but instead of thinking hard about it, they just ratchet up their authoritarian rage.

h/t: Bryan

Gentiles must cease their relentless cultural appropriation of bagels

April 4, 2016 • 11:00 am

There is much talk about cultural appropriation these days, as oppressed groups are waking up to the great harm that has been done to them by PoPs (persons of power) who simply steal aspects of minority culture. This shameless theft has involved everything from mis-prepared General Tso’s chicken in college cafeterias to Americans being allowed to try on kimonos for fun—and even to dreadlocks being worn by white people.

It’s distressing that this rampant borrowing of foods, clothing, hairstyles, and behaviors from their proper cultures isn’t merely done, but done without acknowledging the oppression that historically weighed on the offended groups. The fact that General Tso’s chicken, for instance, is not a real Chinese dish should not distract us from the fact that it’s regularly enjoyed by Westerners wholly ignorant of the atrocities committed by the Japanese on the Chinese during World War II.

But one oppressed group has been the victim of rampant cultural appropriation without the slightest acknowledgement, recognition, or opprobrium. I am referring, of course, to the Jews.

Although cultural theft from Jews is rampant (look at the Yiddish words and phrases like “oy vey,” “nosh”, and “schmuck” that regularly litter the language of oppressive Christians), I want to mention perhaps its clearest instantiation in America—the pervasive consumption of bagels.

I’ll be brief, but I need to establish three things: Jews are an oppressed minority, bagels are a Jewish food, and borrowing foodstuffs from Jews is clearly cultural appropriation. That appropriation is, by the way, defined in its most Sophisticated Form as follows:

. . . a particular power dynamic in which members of a dominant culture take elements from a culture of people who have been systematically oppressed by that dominant group.

And let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about Jews not being oppressed, regardless of your take on Israel. Historically, Jews are probably the most oppressed religious group, driven from land to land—and pogrom to pogrom—by Christians who viewed them as killers of Christ. Jews were, of course, nearly exterminated in Europe by the Germans, and still experience discrimination everywhere, including the U.S. Remember that only 0.2% of the world’s population is Jewish (in contrast, 22% is Muslim and 5% is Buddhist), and even in America Jews make up only 2% of the population. (I estimate that at least 94.7% of Americans have eaten a bagel.)

Therefore, any element of Jewish culture taken over by non-Jews is cultural appropriation, pure and simple. One might call it Gentile Entitlement.

I thought of this a few weeks ago when I was in a campus coffee shop and observed several students noshing on bagels with cream cheese—students who were clearly not Jewish. And as they shoveled the snack into their maws, they were just as clearly ignorant of the history behind that donut-shaped bread. How dare they be?

Bagels are an Eastern European Jewish food, and combining them with cream cheese and lox, while a later invention, is clearly a Jewish comestible as well. In an article in the Independent on the offense commited by white people who wear dreadlocks, author Wedaeli Chibelushi notes that the real problem is not just cultural theft, but ignorance of the oppression experienced by the co-opted group:

As the black actress Amandla Stenberg says, “appropriation occurs when the appropriator is not aware of the deep significance of the culture that they are partaking in”. By wearing dreadlocks without acknowledging their symbolic resistance, Goldstein reduces cultural power to a “cool” trend.  As part of the oppressive culture, he emulates minority tradition while bypassing the discriminations that comes with it.

But as far as that criticism goes for dreadlocks, it goes ten times farther for bagels. After all, not many white people wear dreadlocks, but nearly every goy eats bagels. Not only that, but even the concept of bagels as Jewish food has been stolen by Gentiles. Take, for example, the offensively named “Einstein Bros. Bagel” chain, a name conjuring up Jews (after all, it brings to mind the world’s most famous Jew after Jesus). But it’s a name that’s wholly confected. There are no Einstein Brothers: the name was made up by the Boston Market corporation to sell bagels.

It’s time to bring this to a halt. If you find yourself craving or ordering bagels, at least be mindful of the two millennia of oppression and bigotry weighing on the people who lovingly shaped each ring of bread. And think about how the genuine article, a small chewy circle, has been completely transformed by goyim into a large circular and tasteless pillow of dough. (The use of steamed rather than fried meat in General Tso’s Chicken pales before such corruption.) If these thoughts don’t occur to you as you have your bagel, you don’t deserve to eat it.

As genuine bagel eaters might say, “Hent avek aundzunder beygelekh.” (“Hands off our bagels.”)

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This is Jewish.

Charlie Hebdo on Brussels bombings: “the first task of the guilty is to blame the innocent”

April 4, 2016 • 9:30 am

The online Charlie Hebdo posted an editorial about the Brussels bombings, “How did we end up here?” They’re not much bothered to single out a cause, even one involving religion, merely noting that everyone will choose their favorite provocation. Instead, the editorial points out the not-so-subtle ways that Islam is discouraging criticism of itself. Take Swiss Islam-apologist Tariq Ramadan—please:

All the while, no one notices what’s going on in Saint-German-en-Laye. Last week, Sciences-Po* welcomed Tariq Ramadan. He’s a teacher, so it’s not inappropriate. He came to speak of his specialist subject, Islam, which is also his religion. Rather like lecture by a Professor of Pies who is also a pie-maker. Thus judge and contestant both.

No matter, Tariq Ramadan has done nothing wrong. He will never do anything wrong. He lectures about Islam, he writes about Islam, he broadcasts about Islam. He puts himself forward as a man of dialogue, someone open to a debate. A debate about secularism which, according to him, needs to adapt itself to the new place taken by religion in Western democracy. A secularism and a democracy which must also accept those traditions imported by minority communities. Nothing bad in that. Tariq Ramadan is never going to grab a Kalashnikov with which to shoot journalists at an editorial meeting. Nor will he ever cook up a bomb to be used in an airport concourse. Others will be doing all that kind of stuff. It will not be his role. His task, under cover of debate, is to dissuade people from criticising his religion in any way. The political science students who listened to him last week will, once they have become journalists or local officials, not even dare to write nor say anything negative about Islam. The little dent in their secularism made that day will bear fruit in a fear of criticising lest they appear Islamophobic. That is Tariq Ramadan’s task.

We’re all too familiar with intimidation of this sort, which only works for Islam because of fear of retribution. The editorial gives more examples of Taria-ism (sadly, neither Glenn Greenwald nor Reza Aslan are mentioned), and then the writer affixes some blame for terrorism on its victims:

And yet, none of what is about to happen in the airport or metro of Brussels can really happen without everyone’s contribution. Because the incidence of all of it is informed by some version of the same dread or fear. The fear of contradiction or objection. The aversion to causing controversy. The dread of being treated as an Islamophobe or being called racist. Really, a kind of terror. And that thing which is just about to happen when the taxi-ride ends [the ride of the three bombers to the Brussels airport] is but a last step in a journey of rising anxiety. It’s not easy to get some proper terrorism going without a preceding atmosphere of mute and general apprehension.

Umm. . . I’m not so sure about that. It all has to begin somewhere, before there is fear, and the modern spate of Islamist terrorism preceded the fear of criticizing it. After all, you don’t become shy of criticizing a religion until people have killed in its name.

And the peroration:

The first task of the guilty is to blame the innocent. It’s an almost perfect inversion of culpability. From the bakery that forbids you to eat what you like, to the woman who forbids you to admit that you are troubled by her veil, we are submerged in guilt for permitting ourselves such thoughts. And that is where and when fear has started its sapping, undermining work. And the way is marked for all that will follow.

Presumably, the point is to inform us of the terrorists’ message: violence will stop as soon as we stop criticizing Islam—or pointing out some of its incompatibilities with Enlightenment-informed democracies.

Charlie Hebdo is right that we should never, ever, stop criticizing irrationality, even if it puts us in danger. But even if we did, would that stop the terrorism, as the editorial implies? I don’t think so. The beef of Islamist terrorists isn’t criticism of their faith, but the incompatibility they see between their religion and modern secular society.

h/t: Jószef