Coming to a Theater Near You

I was watching a movie from the 1980s (Moonstruck) with Camera Girl tonight.  I’ve been busy with book marketing for the last month and it’s been a grind.  So, I sat down after dinner and we just enjoyed the show.  It’s a ridiculous romantic comedy with Cher and Nicholas Cage as the couple and a veteran cast of character actors with New York City as the backdrop.  It’s an absurd movie but it’s genuinely funny and it means no harm.

And I found myself enjoying the movie immensely.  Afterwards I tried to figure out why.  First off it was about 1980s America; a place where normal life proceeded and people were generally happy.  And secondly, the movie was well made.  It wasn’t deathless prose.  It wasn’t profound.  It was silly.  But it was good-hearted and the script, the acting and the production were professional and enjoyable to watch.

But why should that be such a big deal?  And then it hit me.  Nothing that has come out of Hollywood in the last five or ten years has been any good.  Everything is poorly made and poorly written and poorly acted.  Nothing makes you laugh or cry or even think.  It’s all dreck.  And that’s crazy!

And it occurred to me that this won’t go on forever.  Someone is going to step forward and make something good.  And I think what they’ll do is break the rules.

Someone is going to refuse to only hire DEI writers and DEI actors and DEI directors and instead they’ll hire the old white guys who used to make stuff in Hollywood and used to make us laugh and cry and think.  It’s a cinch those guys haven’t all died in the last ten years and I’m sure they could use the work.  I’m sure they haven’t forgotten how to ply their trades.  All it will take is someone with enough money to put together a production crew (outside of Los Angeles) and has the nerve to make a movie about the America we used to make movies about.  And it doesn’t have to be a period piece about the 1950s when everyone was white.  There can even be some immigrants in the cast.  After all the problem isn’t having non-white people in a movie.  It’s about the writer and director hating white men so hard that they have to make believe they don’t exist.

It’s a funny thing.  The eastern and southern European immigrants who came to this country at the beginning of the twentieth century didn’t look like the English and northern European people who were already established here and from whom the movie characters were selected.  Blond haired, blue-eyed stars weren’t them.  But they could be stand-ins for the dreams that those immigrants had about being prosperous and happy in their adopted country.  They had enough imagination to realize that the American dream was transferrable to people who chased the American dream.  Work hard, follow the rules and dream big.  It was aspirational to watch Jimmy Stewart or John Wayne as a cowboy saving the day and winning the girl.  Hating on Anglo-Americans made no sense.

Well, that’s what needs to happen again.  Aspirational movies with Americans acting like Americans and not apologizing for being smart and successful is what we should be seeing on the screen.  And there shouldn’t be any DEI box checkers making sure there are the correct number of interracial couples or black lesbian brain surgeons in the story line.  Of course, 2026 is the year that Christopher Nolan is casting a black woman as Helen of Troy in his Odyssey.  Well at least it wasn’t a trans-woman.  But I guess I’ll have to wait a little longer.  I can wait because I know it’s coming to a theater near me soon.