Tag: entertainment

Where is the Good Stuff

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The crazies are coming out of the woodwork everywhere you look.  The Left has fired up the bat signal only it’s the bat-crap-crazy signal they’re flashing.  Honestly, we need a vacation from this.  We need something good to think about instead.  In normal times maybe we’d be excited to watch the Super Bowl.  But of course, these are not normal times.  I read somewhere that the half-time entertainment is someone calling him(?)self Bad Bunny.  And not knowing anything one way or another about said bunny I’d say, “Okay, why not?”  But then it said that in honor of all the “queers” he’s going to wear a dress.  So that’s the end of the Super Bowl.

I guess that means it’s up to me to figure out a way to cheer up normal America.  So I looked around and saw an article that said Sydney Sweeney was marketing a line of lingerie by wearing lingerie.  Well, that sounded hopeful but on further reflection I thought, “You know, she’s really better off doing the jeans commercials with her clothes on.”  Plus, Camera Girl will think I’ve become a dirty old man so that’s not so good.  So back to the drawing board.

So, I turned on the tv.  Holy cow.  All there was were police shows.  There were “COPS” style reality police shows and cold case shows and then there were tv series about make believe police.  Camera Girl watches a couple of these, one of which is Chicago PD.  But based on what I could see most of the Chicago police department is made up of women with a few men thrown in for the sake of romance with the few non-lesbian members of the force.  After watching a few minutes of this hyper-realistic police drama, I started mocking Camera Girl for watching this show.  I said, “Doesn’t it seem odd that five foot nothing women are arresting six foot something men who weigh three times what they do?  And how do they manage to keep their hair, make-up and fingernails looking so good during that knock down brawl on the mean streets of Chicago?”  Her only rebuttal was a really nasty scowl.  So, then tv wasn’t the answer.  At least not what’s on today.

Maybe that’s the clue.  We’re currently living in a happiness desert.  TV, the movies and books are in awful shape.  The only way to find amusement is to carefully curate (what a pretentious word!) your sources of entertainment.  Luckily for me, that’s always been something I did.  Currently in my movie rotation are a few very unusual films.  I have a 1958 movie called the “The High Cost of Loving” that starred and was directed by Jose Ferrer.  It’s about a fellow in middle management at an American company that is simultaneously dealing with his wife having a baby, the company being bought by a larger company and several signs that he’s about to be fired.  Small roles for Jim Backus, Edward Platt and Richard Deacon give the whole production a very familiar, late fifties, early sixties tv feel.  Watching Ferrer play a very decent man panicking over his comfortable life falling apart is excellent stuff.  And to round out my happiness quest I added two other movies I felt like watching; “A Man for All Seasons” and “This Happy Breed.”  These two are both based on English plays and despite the amount of disaster that both stories delve into, both leave me feeling very optimistic about the world.  Apparently, the movies don’t have to be upbeat or comedic to make me happy.  They need to be about people I can admire or at least relate to.

And sure enough, after partaking of these movies over the last few days I’ve forced myself into a good mood.  This despite the massive quantities of snow removal I’ve been subjected to.  So that’s the answer.  Find a vision of the world where good people do good things and you feel better.

It Might be Good Enough

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I was watching a video on YouTube that discussed the cratering of movie attendance after 2020 and how even after COVID was no longer a thing, how movie attendance has never recovered to pre-2020 numbers.  But the truth is that even before COVID the movies were steadily losing ground since around the year 2000.  So really COVID just hastened a trend that was already under way.

Well, that clarifies things somewhat but I think there are things to consider about this whole trend.  It’s not just a situation where a change in technology is disrupting an old business model.  Without a doubt that is happening.  But there is another phenomenon at work simultaneously.  And that factor is ideology.  For at least the last ten years there has been a concerted effort on the part of the movie making industry to restrict films to what they consider “acceptable” themes and characters.

And I think the drop in ticket sales reflects this change.  A solid thirty five percent of the country consists of people who aren’t motivated to see these types of movies, at all.  And this accounts for the drop in attendance and box office.

I guess the question that must be answered is, can the industry survive without this segment of the population?  The jury is still out but I think the answer is no.  Theaters have already become a low margin industry and without the enthusiastic patronage of key demographics financial viability won’t exist for much longer.  Then, what are the possibilities going forward?

One possibility is for some newer players in the movie making industry to modernize their operations to lower costs to the point where profits can be made with niche projects that can depend on a reliable demographic to support them.  This could work for the superhero films if the movies cater to the expectations of boys and young men to be entertained with an adventure story that appeals to their instincts.  By the same token a film that caters to the expectations of an LGBTQ audience or a young female audience or a baby boomer audience could also make money if its budget doesn’t swamp out its box office.  And so that could be the future.

I guess it’s possible that Hollywood could become so frightened by what has happened to their profits that they decide to do an about face and start making the kind of movies they made twenty years ago; ones that appealed to the bulk of Americans without trying to divide them by race and sex.  But somehow, I seriously doubt they’d succeed.  I don’t think they still have the wherewithal to recognize what goes into a movie like that.  Even if they tried to recreate that kind of movie making their instincts would betray them and the same woke tropes and characters would appear.  So the first scenario with new players seems more likely.

But I do not think any of this will happen quickly.  The entertainment industry is currently in turmoil.  Video games are currently the most popular form of entertainment for the younger generation.  Super hero movies in the last two or three years have bombed at the box office pretty consistently.  It will be a little while before the new money from Silicon Valley has had a chance to completely usurp the crown from the old Hollywood studios.  It’s definitely already happening but it’s not there yet.  When it does, I think we will start to see some very interesting changes.  It will never look like what we had.  Because we are not what we used to be.  But if it provides products for all of the larger audience types it might be good enough for my movie viewing pleasure.

The Throne of Hyperborea

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The way books and movies have degenerated is extremely dissatisfying for me.  All of the futures they draw are unattractive.  It’s not even that they are inordinately dystopian.  Instead, they are boring and lame.  I think this is because they are directed at women.  It goes without saying that male and female sensibilities differ significantly.  And because publishers and movie studios have decided that their primary audience is women, they have stopped making stories that interest men.  We’re supposed to adapt to the sensibilities and conventions of plots aimed at female readers.  Well, I think we’ve all had enough of that.

I believe we are waiting for the first post-feminist movie and book to come out and reach a mass audience.  Perhaps it will be a remake of some older intellectual property like Conan the Barbarian or a James Bond who isn’t crying all the time.  A male character who talks and acts like he isn’t afraid of being canceled by the longhouse for projecting the male gaze at some attractive woman.  Preferably one of the major themes of the story should be the hero just doing whatever the hell he feels like doing and it upsetting as many women in the story as is theatrically possible.

But you know, I think I’d prefer if the story were completely new and original.  The Zoomers need their own myths and their own heroes.  It would make sense that these new stories are of this time and don’t need to harken back to the actual stone age.

Maybe a good framing for such a myth could be a post-collapse world where the niceties of the feminist project just have no place in the scarcity and violence of a devastated landscape.  Humanity returning to an environment of tribes and survival of the strongest.  So, it doesn’t have to be Conan in the Hyperborean Age.  It can be the day after tomorrow and somewhere between Iowa and Arkansas.  New stories based on timeless truths.

And you know what?  I don’t think it will be too long before we start seeing books and movies going in this direction.  It won’t be the big five publishers or the Hollywood studios.  It’s going to come from someone who controls a platform that is popular with the young men.  Some “influencer” who has tens of millions of followers and can monetize a property that he can sense will be popular.  And after the first break out it will be copied by a bunch of wannabees and before you know it the big players will be drooling for a piece of the action and everything else will blow away in the wind.

And this is not because we want this to be so.  It’s because its opposite has been pushed on the population for decades and it has proven destructive.  A pent-up force representing human nature held back from its natural course is about to sweep away many of the feminist projects in a raging flood of normalcy.  One thing.  I think Sydney Sweeney’s career will be in the ascendancy.  Conan needs a curvy woman to drape over his shoulder as he ascends the throne of Hyperborea.

Guest Contributor – Tregonsee – 01JUN2025 – Future of Entertainment

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There was a concept a while back of Narrowcasting (as opposed to broadcasting) where you would aim for certain smaller markets via directed media like the internet. To some degree we see this happening with youtube and tiktok. The monetization would be direct from the consumers and perhaps via pre subscription schemes.

It seems that Hollywood got the narrow part but not the monetezation part. In an analogy to the misquote of Pauline Kael they don’t know anyone that voted for Donald Trump. Their audience is boomers who grew up in the late 1950s and early 1960s and are nostalgic for their college days and the protests against the Establishment. The boomers have not processed that they are now the Man. Meanwhile, Hollywood keeps churning out $200-400 million blockbusters aimed at that tiny (perhaps 5-20%) market demographic. Hollywood depends on the old 80s-2000s mix of movie theater, marketing of merchandise and resales for income. The thing is their little stunt of 2020 killed the theater, the Merch was for kids (or perhaps grand kids) which the boomers do not have, and residuals on the various streaming platforms residuals are bupkus compared to VHS/DVD sales. The big Studios are like the last of the dinosaurs standing around in a swamp in Louisiana on the day of the KT boundary impact saying “Hey Ralph whats that pretty light in the south it isn’t sunrise yet…” They’re dead they just haven’t figured it out yet, and the mammals are crouching in a variety of holes trying not to be eaten.

 

Comment by photog:  I guess I’m waiting for the mammals. It’s a lonely vigil but, “Ya gotta keep da faith.”

 

reply by Tregonsee:

Indeed Photog I’m rooting for the mammals too. Like the Mammals of the Tertiary (now called Paleogene) it may take a while for the producers to get organized. In publishing the transition seems well under way. Most Authors of more plot based SciFi either are at Baen or publish independently. Even giant authors like Brandon Sanderson (Mistborn, Way of Kings, etc.) are tending to eschew the big 5 publishing houses.

Music has been going to self publishing too. What it takes to have a GOOD studio is probably 2 orders of magnitude

Part of it is that for visual SciFi even though special effects are easier than 20-40 years ago (e.g. I’ve heard tell of a copy of the Death Star run in star Wars done totally with effect in CGI in a couple days that is VERY close to the original that took weeks in physical models) it still takes time and money. You still need actors and good ones are expensive unless you’re doing something they want to take a chance on. And even doing minimal sets things get expensive fast, and acting to things and characters that aren’t there on green screen is really hard to pull off believably even for first rate actors. The other part is that the current media seems to fight these efforts tooth and nail.

All that said there are signs things are improving. A movie called Flow (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(2024_film) about a black cat and an odd bunch of animals in a post apocalyptic world got the 2024 Golden Globe and Oscar for long form animation. This was published by a 6 person group out of Latvia. I love animation and even though the premise is straight up green nude eel catastrophe the story and animation rival the best of Classic Disney or Studio Ghibli

 

The Coalescence of the Not-Stupid

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So, what if it’s true that Hollywood as an industry is more or less done?  Suppose that there won’t be ten or twenty somewhat-good movies coming out every year anymore.  What if instead there are a couple of decent mini-series by Netflix and Amazon and maybe one or two summer “blockbuster” fantasies and all the rest is just low budget dreck?  How would that affect the entertainment habits of the population?

Well, let’s think about what the population is.  Currently the populace is divided into several different divisions.  But overall, there is a demarcation into two larger groups.  First there are the boomers and GenX contingents.  They both grew up when entertainment was big business and they are used to paying for entertainment that they consider “good.”  They would go to a good movie or buy a music album if they consider it worthwhile.  These are the people who are most distressed by the current state of American entertainment.  Someone my age looks at television or what is currently considered good cinema or popular music and is horrified by the low quality and overall stupidity of the art.

The second grouping is everyone younger; millennials and the Zoomers.  For the most part these people don’t buy music or pay for movies.  They stream everything and are willing to watch and listen to low quality content if they can pay next to nothing for it.  Not being part of this group I’m not completely sure whether this strategy is a byproduct of their poverty or whether they simply don’t care what kind of entertainment product they consume.  Nevertheless, the outcome either way is that the future will be determined by this paradigm.  Entertainment businesses will not be making the kinds of profits they made from the boomers and GenX from the new kids.  Okay, that’s what we are seeing.  Entertainment will become mass marketing of the lowest common denominator at the lowest price.  In other words; garbage.

But that will not be the whole story.  The bell curve is a fact of nature.  Most of humanity is very average, and lately that average seems to have sunk a bit.  But the right side of the curve exists.  There is a segment of the population that is intelligent and they need entertainment that isn’t always the lowest common denominator.  And they tend to be more prosperous than their less intelligent brethren.  And whereas they will join with everyone else to celebrate whatever moronic pop star or whatever mindless video game happens to be in vogue this month, they will occasionally need something more nutritious for the mind and soul.  And how will this work?  After all there isn’t a pipeline for intelligent entertainment.

What I think will happen is organizations; whether corporate or individuals, will spring up to curate what’s out there and arrange for venues and opportunities for these people to enjoy this better entertainment together.  Now maybe the “together” isn’t physical.  Maybe they’ll be doing this over the internet with chat functions used to allow the patrons to share their reactions to the content.  But I think renting a theater to play old movies (or new movies that have been made expressly for a specialized audience) would make perfect sense.

The power of the internet to connect smaller but focused groups is already very well known.  What still needs to happen is for a larger group of intelligent people to coalesce around a commercial entity that is willing to provide them with entertainment that exceeds the lowest common denominator on a consistent basis.  But I think it will happen.  Some day soon, the not-stupid will band together and find out just how strong they are.

No Brainer

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Do you know what movie is the front-runner for Best Picture and Best Actress Oscar Awards?  It’s a musical called Emilia Pérez.  It’s the story of a Mexican cartel kingpin named Manitas Del Monte who decides to undergo a sex change operation and become a woman named (you guessed it) Emilia Pérez.  And as you might imagine problems crop up.  He wants to keep tabs on his wife and children (who think he is dead).  And when his wife resumes an affair with one of his henchmen well, that’s going to be a problem.  Eventually everyone ends up dead, so it’s kind of a cautionary tale about sex changes I guess.  But it’s a musical so I’m sure it’s a lot of fun.

Now of course the best bit is the “actress” playing Emilia Pérez is, of course a man who has had his manly bits hacked off and now wears a dress and wig.  So, this is the year when a man will win the Best Actress Award.

Another milestone!

I guess you’re asking yourself where is he going with this?  What is there to say?

It’s a fair question.  After all this is just the logical conclusion to the progression in Hollywood for the last twenty years or so.  The proportion of movies that are strictly message movies and lack any entertainment value has been increasing steadily for two decades to the point where whole years can pass without anything appearing in theaters that general audiences can enjoy.  Of late even the superhero and Star Wars movies have been saturated with gender and racial equity messaging to such a point that these once bullet-proof box-office money makers have been crashing and burning.  Disney has had a string of flops that instead of making billions as they used to aren’t even breaking even.

Well, I think with Emilia Pérez we’ve reached the edge of the cliff.  If Hollywood gives the Best Picture and Best Actress awards to Emilia Pérez they will have passed into self-parody and forfeited any hope of recovery.  I have seen outtakes from this film.  There is a whole song devoted to vaginoplasty.  This is not the work of sane people.  This makes “Springtime for Hitler,” the farcical play within a play from Mel Brooks’ “The Producers,” look like Shakespeare.

From what I’ve heard, Mexico is up in arms.  Apparently, the honor of the narco-trafficantes has been besmirched by the premise of the movie.  I’m amazed that the producers don’t fear that they may end up as heads in a duffel bag somewhere in a cartel stronghold in Mexico.  And personally, I don’t see how we could blame them for taking offense.  After all it’s kind of like misgendering in a way.  And we all know how bad that is.

But seriously, if there is still any doubt that conservatives could easily make excellent money by opening up a half-decent movie studio and provide the public with even mediocre entertainment, this is the proof.  The idiots in Hollywood have lost their damn minds and nobody wants to watch what they are producing and awarding.

Right now, a studio using ten-year-old CGI technology and century old plots could be picking up most of the billions that Marvel and Lucas Films are leaving on the table by being woke.  Something like Dune or any space opera from the 1940s would sell tickets all day long just by providing teenagers with a hero saves the princess plot.  After all that’s what Star Wars was based on and they printed money for forty years until they screwed it up with the woke crap they had to inject into it.

Let me recommend that you not go to see Emilia Pérez.  In fact, let me recommend that you not watch this year’s Oscars (not that you would).  But who I am really talking to is Elon Musk and other deep pockets guys who have the wherewithal to take advantage of others’ mistakes.  Hire a few of the better movie screenwriters and tell them to write a Star Wars rip-off.  Except make it for normal people.  Then film it and make a billion dollars.  No brainer.

Nature Finds a Way

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In this creepy world we live in where children are targeted by “educators” to redefine their genders and pushed away from the behaviors and activities that they enjoy it’s hardly surprising that things like adventure books for boys have essentially disappeared.

Of course they’ve vanished.  All the authors are women and they have to toe a very definite line if they want to be published.  You can’t have adventure for boys.  You can’t leave the girls behind.  You can’t even have them following along.  They have to be in charge.

So, boys stopped reading books.  Instead, they went to superhero and Star Wars movies.  So, what did the movie studios do then?  They hired female directors and studio bosses and turned the Jedis into girl-bosses and turned Captain Marvel into a girl, of course.

So now the boys are giving up on superheroes and concentrate on video games.  And of course, the game manufacturers are feminizing and queering the video games.

You see the pattern.

Now, there is the flip side of this progression.  First the book industry began to fail when the publishing houses dictated a leftist and feminine slant to books.  No one bought their books.  Now the movie studios are foundering because even their summer blockbuster superhero movies are tanking.  If the video game makers succeed in eliminating the things that males enjoy in video games, they will kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.

So far, the trend in entertainment has been all in one direction; female.  And the trend in their fortunes has also been all in one direction; down.

Well, I think that is beginning to end.  There is a development in the world of entertainment that seems to be diverging from the pattern.  And it even involves elements of each of the media I mentioned above; books, movies and video games.  And it involves the part of social media that I found the least promising; “influencers.”

Apparently teen-age boys and young men are finding community inside the YouTube channels of influencers who write fan fiction around some popular video games.  These sites have tens and even hundreds of millions of viewers.  And the clout that this kind of following produces even allows these influencers to have their stories turned into movies.  Think about that.  Some guy who writes plots around some popular first-person sci-fi video game can get a movie made from his stories and it has a built-in audience of millions.

Look at how this short circuits the whole woke female industrial complex.  You avoid the woke publishing industry, woke movie industry and woke video game industry by tapping into a ready built audience of young men and boys looking for adventure and violence.  As Jeff Goldblum’s character, Dr. Ian Malcolm said in Jurassic Park, “Nature finds a way.”

I find this both fascinating and encouraging.  These kids have broken out of the feminist struggle session hell of modern entertainment and escaped into the wild.  That is an immensely encouraging thing.  And if it continues to advance it will wipe out the alternative.  No one wants to see Girl-Boss Jedi Knights making the universe safe for middle aged lesbian Jabbette the Hutt.  No one will pay to see She-Hulk bust out of her clothes and rampage through Manhattan’s theater district to catch a performance of Hamilton.  No boy wants to play a video game where his character has to be in drag.

Of course, the powers that be may try to squelch this latest attempt at non-feminist entertainment.  But at this point even Google is probably seeing which way the entertainment dollar is moving (and where it’s not).  I could be wrong but I think there may finally be a reaction brewing in the entertainment world.  And it might be that the future isn’t female.

Sony Entertainment is Building a $1.8 Billion Movie Studio in Las Vegas

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Makes perfect sense.  Compare all the ways that Nevada is cheaper to work in than California.  I can only imagine how the exodus of non-acting talent will rejoice to escape from the high cost of living and low quality of life in California.

$1.8B Sony movie studio backed by Mark Wahlberg approved for Summerlin

It wouldn’t surprise me at all if other studios follow suit.  What also wouldn’t surprise me is if SONY begins dropping the ridiculous representation and inclusion standards for Oscars eligibility that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences requires for Oscars eligibility in the Best Picture category.  After all, outside of California those standards might be considered racial discrimination.

But either way, whatever hastens the death of the Hollywood monopoly on cinema is a good thing in my book.

Now of course the hard-core Wokesters will bewail this abandonment of beloved Los Angeles but a lot of actors haven’t been getting those multimillion dollar paydays lately and secretly might consider moving to a cheaper locale a pretty good idea.

Well, baby steps.

16MAR2024 – And Now for a Message from Our Sponsor

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Saturday dawns sunny and brisk.  Very refreshing.  So much so that I resent sitting here to write.  But yesterday was a clamorous and dreary day of work.  So as Bob Cratchit observed, “I am behind my time.”  So here I am and I will take the time to provide cogent analysis on whatever it is that demands comment.  But “demands” is a stretch here.  I refuse to write further on Trump’s many legal battles.  When and if they reach a critical juncture, meaning, when they actually drag him off to the gulag, then I shall say my piece.

As for the latest political polls; yes, yes, we all know Trump’s winning.  Even a Democrat shill like Nate Silver is openly admitting that Biden is losing significant minority voters along with other important components of the Democrat coalition like the young and women.  But that’s all been said.  Sure, I’ll mention it in passing if it seems especially pointed.  But we are months and months away from even the conventions and by then, Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny may be the Democrat candidate.  So, no, let’s put that aside for now.

I’ve already spoken about cannibal migrants this week.  Check.

Camera Girl has complained about the ruinous price of food including the corned beef for her birthday celebration this weekend.  Check.

Russians killing Ukrainians and Ukrainians killing Russians.  Check.  Check.

So, what, what, what?

Well, truth be told, I don’t feel like talking about any of that crap right now.  It’s been said and we can take a break from saying the same things again.

If you notice I’ve been putting up some stuff from movies and books.  I find this stuff makes me feel better.  And I’m looking for more of it.  This kind of stuff makes the day better and reinforces the things I think are good and healthy to think about.  And I openly encourage anyone who has anything that they want to share with the rest of the readers to link it and I’ll put it up.  Even Weird Al Yankovic (within reason of course).

Inevitably because I’m old and because a lot of what’s new stinks, the things I’ll point to will be old.  And the amount of high definition will be limited.  I hope my younger readers will forgive this.  But honestly watching some black and white footage won’t hurt any of them too badly.

I was thinking the other day that Shakespear died more than four hundred years ago and yet his English is still ninety percent understandable by even average readers.  Newness isn’t really a very good selection criterion for entertainment or really much of anything outside of technology.  Humans are still humans.  What needs to be done is to attempt to reintroduce the younger audience with their cultural heritage.  Whether it’s Shakespeare or the Marx Brothers, the human condition is pretty constant.  Iron Man and Odysseus are similar characters with similar problems.  Thor is just Achilles with CGI added in.

So, I apologize in advance if I stop banging away quite as often on how the end of Western Civilization is approaching and instead put-up examples of why we should care if Western Civilization is saved.  I’ll try to strike the right balance of outrage and fond remembrance so that your experience here is stimulating.

On with the show.

Untruth as Fiction

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Camera Girl loves reading crime fiction and things like crime fiction.  Harry Bosch is one of the characters in her books and lately we started watching some tv series about him.  So today we sat down to an episode and in this story one of Bosch’s associates, a cyber security professional/hacker is being investigated by the FBI to try and get him to become a confidential informant against Bosch.  The FBI uses a woman who is a rising star in hacker circles to entrap this Bosch associate.

So, Camera Girl sees this woman working for the FBI and says, “She’s working for the FBI and trying to entrap him.  That’s awful.”  And I started laughing.  I said, “Hon, if only that were the extent of what they actually do.”  And I was about to go into a diatribe about J6 and the “plot” to kidnap the Michigan governor.  But then I thought, why should I make her depressed about how our country is really run?  It’s bad enough I have to know.  So, I just let it go.

The old saying is that truth is stranger than fiction.  And that’s absolutely true now.  I mean if you think about it, since 1945 our military arsenal contains devices that were the stuff of science fiction right up till Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  And in 1968 when “2001: A Space Odyssey” reached the theaters, artificial intelligence was a homicidal computer named HAL that was obviously an impossibility.  And now we have AI stealing our jobs and insulting us in the comments sections.  And just three years ago we probably saw the first large-scale event featuring a bio-weapon.  Granted, it was a pathetic one but it caused a lot of damage to the world economy and destroyed most people’s faith in the honesty of the WHO and the American government.

So, stranger than fiction isn’t really surprising.  What is surprising is how wrong fiction gets it.  When Hollywood scripts the United States being threatened with a military coup it was always a crazy general who wanted to go to war with the Russians and blow up the world.  But he was always a right-wing religious zealot played by Burt Lancaster.  Instead, we get General Milley who wants to conquer Russia with drag queen special forces.  And now there is this Civil War movie and currently they’re keeping the plot details under wraps but it’s pretty obvious that the president who is serving his third term will be a dead-ringer for Donald Trump.  So once again they’ll trot out the old right-wing president who becomes new Hitler.  That one was already old when Heinlein had the “Prophet” seize control of the United States and turn it into a Christian theocracy.  And a while ago there was “The Handmaid’s Tale” which once again was an America as dystopian theocracy but added in the ever-popular sexual subjugation of the last few fertile females in the world.  Sheesh, those feminists really do worry an awful lot about being forced to have sex.  Just from a cursory analysis I think their problem tends to run in the opposite direction.  Sexual offers seem to be few and far between for most of those gals.

Well, all this is leading up to a question.  Does anyone think there will ever be a motion picture that accurately portrays the political and social dynamic that actually exists in the modern world?  To make it interesting, I think it should be a dark comedy but with a redemptive ending.  Lots of people are always saying that there is a large market for entertainment that doesn’t have a social bias.  But I’m advocating for a right-leaning bias.  I’d love to see characters that I can sympathize with.  I remember when Tim Allen’s show “Last Man Standing” first came out.  It was obvious that his character was a right-wing individual and it was very enjoyable and very funny.  But then Disney put a stop to that and neutered the character and the show.  Well, there’s a proof of concept.  All anyone has to do is copy what was done in that show.  They could even hire Tim Allen to star in it and as long as the writing is funny it would make money hand over fist.

And finally, how about a civil war movie where we win?  The outcome is we let them live the way they want to and we live the way we want.  We could have a postscript where we get to see what the two Americas look like in 2124.  Blue America would look like Idiocracy with broken down wind generators and disheveled poor people dressed in rags and eating crickets.  Red America would have nuclear power plants providing almost limitless energy, a thriving society based on meritocracy and well-maintained borders complete with 100-foot-tall fences.