Tag: Hollyweird

The Library is Full of Them

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As I mentioned in an earlier post Disney (and by extension Hollywood) realizes that they’ve alienated the male half of the human race.  And as I gleefully mentioned this is all their own fault and it’s hilarious that it’s a surprise for them.  And after torching two of the most valuable male-oriented intellectual properties (Star Wars and the Marvel Cinematic Universe), instead of trying to fix the problems and repair the damage to these brands they’ve decided to bury their losses and start from scratch with brand new franchises.

Well, you’ve got to admire their optimism.  Maybe they haven’t heard the old saying about the definition of insanity being doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.  But it’s their money (or their stockholders anyway).

But in a sense, they’ve got it half right.  Half of their problem is that sequel after sequel has drained all the life out of their franchises.  So new stories and characters is a good direction to go in.  People like to be entertained and meeting new characters is part of that entertainment.  And even though there are only a few overarching plots to an adventure story it helps to change the names of the heroes, villains, magic rings, super-weapons and princesses from story to story.

So far, so good.  But now comes the tricky part.  Listen up Disney:

DON’T MAKE THE HERO A GIRL-BOSS.  THE GIRL IN THE STORY IS THE LOVE INTEREST OF THE HERO.  SHE IS THE REWARD FOR THE HERO SAVING THE DAY.  SHE MAY TAKE UP A BOW OR A DAGGER IN A PINCH BUT SHE’S NOT THERE TO SAVE THE HERO AND SHE’S NOT SUPPOSED TO BE IN CHARGE.

I hope I was clear there.  Use the traditional hero saga as the backbone of the story and find a writer and a director who can work with such a story in a creative and entertaining fashion and you will make billions of dollars.  Just as a for instance Joss Whedon directed the first Avengers movie.  It made $1.52 billion worldwide at the box office.  That’s a lot of money.  And part of the reason for that enormous sum is because Whedon knows how to make likable characters in a movie.  He blends humor, action and drama in the correct proportions and at the right moments.  In other words, he’s not a hack like all of the DEI directors that have bungled the last several years of your franchise flops.

Now, granted he is demanding and sometimes slightly abusive toward the “talent.”  But they’re getting paid millions of dollars to dress up in spandex and fool around in front of a green screen.  The least they could do is take a little hectoring from a prima donna director to earn those millions.  So anyway, my advice for Hollywood is to find the few creative talents out there; directors like Whedon and Christopher Nolan.  And purchase the film rights to books that millions of people love.  And don’t mess with the stories and characters.  Put them faithfully on the big screen and then instead of trying to recreate success with endless sequels move onto another story!  Did you know there is more than one book in the library?  There are several.

I know it’s a radical departure. But it’s just so crazy it just might work!

A Light Bulb Turns On at Disney

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According to Variety magazine:

Disney’s Boy Trouble: Studio Seeks Original IP to Win Back Gen-Z Men Amid Marvel, Lucasfilm Struggles

Disney has realized that young men are tired of their girl-boss inhabited movies.  And now it’s a problem because Disney needs their money.

And I quote:

“Numerous studies show that Gen Z men in particular are a lonely, gaming-obsessed group who were hampered in their formative years by COVID-19 lockdowns — not the easiest segment to grasp.”

So even when their desperate to attract an audience they can’t help but mock and belittle men and boys.

Rather than rant on my own I’ll borrow the Critical Drinker’s rant.  He is much more amusing than I am.

 

 

Tom’s World – 31MAY2025 – More About Movies

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TomD

Of the book based Sci-Fi movies of which I’m aware, the one that was most true to the book was the original 2001. Both Jackson’s Lord of the Rings and the latest version of Dune at least try but both are handicapped by intricate and massive substrates that are almost impossible to set up and capture in the context of 2 hour +/- videos.

Although Blade Runner was barely related to it’s source material, “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep”, by Phillip K Dick, it succeeds on it’s own as a brilliant piece of work.

Though the Star Trek movies will never be mistaken for serious or brilliant work, I still remember my disappointment when the 1st episode without the Shatner/Nimoy cast or the Picard group, offered a close to continuous series of chase scenes in lieu of a plot.

The 1st several Star Wars movies sucked as Sci-Fi but succeeded as entertainment. A decrepit and distorted Hollywood morphed the extension of that series into something bizarre.

I’m almost terrified that Hollywood will take my all time #1 favorite movie, Master and Commander and remake it as a multicultural, multi racial, LGBTQ+ crew fighting for racial equity.

Have I Got a Story for You

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I’ve been so busy lately with a lot of annoying stuff so it’s been hard to concentrate on what to write my posts about.  I don’t feel like talking about current events today.  Let’s talk about the movies.  I feel I’m unqualified to discuss the state of cinema because in the last five years I’ve gone to so few movies.

But I do think I can talk about what direction science fiction and fantasy movies should go in.  I guess I’ll start with where it shouldn’t go.  And that would be the way it’s currently proceeding.  What we see for the most part are movies that provide a science fiction setting (interstellar civilization, advanced technology, humanoid robots) but uses it as a backdrop to play out sociological scenarios of interest to the film makers, specifically, wish fulfillment about various sexual and race grievance issues.  A good example is Disney’s decision to turn their various Star Wars productions into propaganda films for why women and blacks are the only acceptable heroes in the galaxy far, far away.

This is a really dumb strategy.  They took a wildly popular and lucrative franchise and tanked it in the name of race and gender equity.  And this with a franchise whose primary market were white boys.  Let us say this was ill-advised.  So, there is the counterexample; what not to do.  Now what would be popular and lucrative?

Well, it probably doesn’t take a genius to say write a story that plays to the people who like science fiction (boys and men) and make it imaginative and exciting.  Look at the original Star Wars movie for a simplistic and not highly original plot that allowed the audience to get lost in the likeable characters and impressive special effects and smile along to the space opera that followed.  And there are hundreds of old pulp stories from Barsoom to Dune that do exactly that.  Whether it’s weird aliens or human galactic empire or some combination of the two we want to see the same story dynamic that’s been around since the Odyssey.  We want to see the hero on his quest to:

  1. Find his way home.
  2. Or, save the princess.
  3. Or, defeat the evil sorcerer.
  4. Or, invent the FTL drive.
  5. Or, whatever! As long as it’s not boring and doesn’t involve girl bosses and racial grievances.

And it’s about time that someone put together another science fiction (or fantasy) franchise to replace the tired ones that are currently limping along.  Star Wars is tapped out.  The Republic, the Empire and the Rebellion have become stale and boring.  Nobody cares.

As have the superhero movies.  We’ve used up everybody’s interest in Marvel’s and DC’s stables of 1940’s to 1960’s spandex wearing heroes.  It’s enough.  Nobody is clamoring for more Captain America or black Captain America or Gay Hispanic Spiderman or She-Hulk or any of this.  It’s now a bore.

And it doesn’t have to be legacy space opera.  Although I wouldn’t mind a Doc Smith or a Heinlein storyline.  It could be anything as long as it appeals to the male audience that enjoys this genre.  It needs action, adventure and maybe a pretty girl that needs saving from some fate worse than death (like middle-management cubicle captivity).  Add in some lively music and lots of cutting-edge special effects and you’ve got a billion-dollar hit.

Hey Elon Musk, if you want a trip to Mars make a movie about a trip to Mars that gets people excited about it.  You’ll even make a pot of gold while doing it.

What Have They Done to Tim Allen?

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I used to enjoy Tim Allen’s show, “Home Improvement” on ABC back in the 1990’s.  Then in the twenty-teens he had another show on ABC called, “Last Man Standing.”  It was a funny show.  He played a conservative guy who lived in Colorado and he railed against his liberal daughter and her hippy-dippy Canadian husband.  But then in 2016 he made a few jokes against Hillary Clinton and for Donald Trump and they cancelled the show.  Eventually, Fox TV decided to bring the show back but it never recovered.

Now Allen is back on ABC with a show called “Shifting Gears.”  He’s the owner of a high-end auto shop with a divorced daughter with two kids.  It’s incredibly bad.  It’s full of stereotypes.  He even has a black paraplegic mechanic who “keeps it real.”  All the dialog is awful and the characters are predictable and inane.  From time-to-time Tim gets off a funny line or bit.  Who knows maybe they’re adlibbed.  You can tell he’s still as funny as he ever was.  They just don’t give him anything at all to work with.

So Hollywood is dead.  There’s just nothing left.  The studios have a racial and sexual quota system for almost every function in the industry.  I can’t even imagine how stupid and programmed the writers must be.  What I saw tonight looked like a parody of what a sit-com would be if woke writers followed the dictates of the DEI mandates.  It was unimaginably bad.

But I’m going to take this as good news.  ABC is owned by Disney.  And Disney has produced a string of bombs over the last couple of years that can’t have escaped the notice of Wall Street.  There will be a reckoning one way or the other.  Either they will course correct and produce entertainment that people want to pay to see or they will lose money and the stock holders will sell and they will lose many billions of dollars in equity and the Board of directors will bounce Bob Iger out on his ear.

Iger was brought out of retirement when the former CEO got in a pissing contest with Ron DeSantis in Florida over the rainbow people that Disney has adopted as their most important constituency.  Since then, they’ve doubled down on gayness and it’s had a very serious negative effect on their business.  It’s made their latest Star Wars television production, “The Acolyte” so unwatchable that they had to pull the plug on it after the first season.  And now their latest live-action remake of the classic cartoons of the 1930’s, “Snow White” is predicted to lose hundreds of millions of dollars.

I think 2025 may be the year that Disney has their epiphany.  They destroyed Star Wars.  They chloroformed the, “Indiana Jones” franchise and now even their Marvel movies have been infected with boring woke characters like, “The Marvels” and are losing money.  If they can’t even make a decent princess movie for little girls they’re cooked.  I’ve been following the reviews and the industry gossips and it seems like everyone thinks the reckoning is imminent.  We’ll see.

So, farewell Tim Allen.  “Home Improvement” and “Last Man Standing” were funny and sometimes heartwarming too.  But you’re not going to get anything worth doing at ABC until they really do switch gears at Disney.

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.

One Small Step in the Right Direction

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As all of the regular readers here probably know from my recent incessant whining, I’ve been horrendously bogged down with work.  Even on weekends, there is stuff I have to get done and it will only get worse for the next month or so.

Woe is me; woe is me!

But at the same time, I’ve been wanting to go see Matt Walsh’s movie “Am I Racist.”  I asked Camera Girl if she wanted to go with me and she rolled her eyes and shook her head.  So that complicated things because just abandoning her on a weekend to trek across state lines and eat up half a day seemed a little selfish to me.  So, I was shocked when on Thursday she asked me if I wanted to go see the movie.  Apparently, she figured it might cheer me up ahead of my marathon work schedule to go to this movie over the weekend.  I guess she really does like me.  So, I went on line to see what hours it was playing.  Well, it wasn’t.  The movie had gone from about a thousand theaters, down to something like four-hundred.  And since Dunwich really is in the middle of nowhere, there wasn’t a single theater within a hundred miles of me.

Woe is me; woe is me!

When I stopped shaking my fist at the sky, I looked up the box office history for the movie.  The movie was only banking twenty- or thirty-thousand dollars a day at that point but it had earned over twelve million dollars over the course of its run.  And when you consider that the movie only cost a quarter of that to make, I was quite impressed by Walsh’s accomplishment.

Last year Walsh made a documentary called “What is a Woman” that was very effective at highlighting the insane and dangerous transgender movement that has convinced most of the medical establishment that it’s okay to treat children with puberty blockers and sex hormone therapy as a precursor to amputation of their genitalia.  And this documentary was watched by many millions of people on-line.  But this new movie was different.

This was something that people had to go to a movie theater to watch.  They had to plunk down cold hard cash.  And for that money they expected to be entertained.  And they were!  The reviews and rating by the people who actually went to the movie were extremely high.  It was a hit with the people who went to see it.  But the mainstream media boycotted reviewing it.  And this was after it opened in the top four box office spot.  And not against other documentaries.  This was against all the movies in theaters.  It was a financial success, but they refused to review it.

So, I didn’t get to see it.  Well, eventually I’ll see it online.  So that’s okay.  But the bigger story here is that finally, finally, someone is making movies for our side of the street.  And I hope the Daily Wire makes a ton of money doing it and I hope that gives ideas to a bunch of other “creative” people who want to make money but can’t seem to get people to go to the stuff Hollywood has been putting out lately.  Who knows maybe it’ll inspire Disney to make the imaginative leap and think, “Didn’t we used to make money hand over fist with that traditional stuff back in the stone age?  It looks like people still like that racist, sexist stuff.  Maybe we could do that again and make money for a change.”

Well, calm down!  Small steps, small steps.  Okay, now I’ve got a grip again.

But I have to confess I am encouraged.  This is the sort of stuff I’ve been waiting years for.  With the entry cost for making professional-looking motion pictures at historic lows and good writers, directors, actors and other movie trades unemployed because of DEI it doesn’t seem that it should be that difficult to make a profit if you give people a good story and stick to entertainment instead of hectoring them.

It’s a start.

Lights, Camera, Action!

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Today Matt Walsh of the Daily Wire has a movie out in pretty wide distribution called, “Am I Racist?”  I’ve seen some of the coming attractions and it’s in the vein of a mocumentary where he interviews various anti-racism experts disguised as one of them.  In this guise he gets them to say the most absurd things about racism and American society.  It looks like it might be interesting and potentially very funny.  And I say this after watching his first movie, “What is a Woman.”  It was very effective at exposing the incoherence of the various transgender hucksters and their victims.  I hope this new movie gets lots of attention and makes lots of money for Walsh and the Daily Wire.

This movie opening got me thinking.  It shows that stuff is starting to appear from our side of the street on a more regular basis.  But the problem is that it takes an outfit like the Daily Wire that has its own built-in readership to provide publicity.  What’s needed is an honest search engine that would act as a substitute for Google.  Of course, X is already beginning to provide a social media locale for everyone but the bias that Google uses against the Right is a big deal and can’t be overstated.  Maybe it’ll take the government busting up Google’s monopoly to finally even out the playing field.

In addition, it would be nice if someone would provide the same kind of integrated entertainment and media presence for the Right that Time-Warner provides to the Left.  Now I’m not crazy.  Amazon has decimated the book and movie businesses with its Kindle and streaming businesses.  And whatever is left of the movies is limping along under Disney.  But an underserved niche like traditionalists seems like a safe way to make money in the present environment.  Just look at Disney.  They own all the most successful franchises in the entertainment world but because they object to the traditionalist aspects of these intellectual properties, they routinely sabotage the success of the movies they produce in these franchises by injecting woke plots and characters.  Competition, any real competition is bound to make money by just following time honored precedent; sell sex!

If someone purchased existing stories in these same genres and just told the stories the way they were written fifty or a hundred years ago, they would be equally successful to the earlier movies like the original Star Wars or the earlier installments of Indiana Jones or the Marvel superhero stories.  All of these earlier works are just variations on the theme of the western hero that fights the monsters or villains and wins the girl.  This is as old as Odysseus or as new as Spiderman.  All anyone has to do is make sure that the man acts like a man and the girl is really good looking and falls into the hero’s arms in the last act.

It really isn’t that complicated.  But for whatever reason no one has attempted to build a lean, mean studio to do just that.  There are plenty of people; actors, directors, producers who have been cut out of Hollywood for the simple reason that the studios now have a quota system that excludes white people.  Hire a few of the better people, probably at a discount, and most importantly hire some of the best writers and put out movies at a reasonable price (not in Hollywood obviously) that tell stories that people want to hear.  And make money.

Well, eventually it will happen.  But will it happen in my lifetime?  Ah, well.  Where’s my fedora and bullwhip?

Au Revoir Lesbian Space Witches of Color

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Over the last decade or so it has become obvious that Hollywood and specifically, Disney is more interested in producing content that adheres to a social justice message than they care about making money.  Examples of this are plentiful.  Every recent installment of the Star Wars movies and their spin-off television series has suffered heavily from this policy.  And recently the fans have reacted to this decision by abandoning the franchise.  And to a greater or lesser degree similar results have been seen in the other Disney entertainment franchises; Indiana Jones, the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) and even things like the Toy Story movies.  It’s gotten so bad that Disney has been forced to fire directors, cancel series and scale back earnings estimates.  Which is something no CEO wants to do.

I have heard that Hollywood is claiming that they’ve heard the message and they will rededicate themselves to producing entertainment that is actually entertaining to regular people.  Now if that happened, I would be ecstatic.  Seeing Hollywood learn its lesson and focus its significant talents into putting out original and entertaining movies would be phenomenal.

But it won’t happen.

The people who run Hollywood are social justice extremists from the soles of their feet up to their eyebrows.  They would rather see their companies go broke than give up their message.  They will keep pumping out Star Wars movies that feature lesbian space witches of color as the main characters until Disney has to shut down the studio.  The idea that the ticket buying public wanted to see Luke Skywalker rescue Princess Leia with the assistance of Han Solo and that all three were white, sexually normal characters is completely unacceptable to them.  They have the same message as the Harris campaign, “We won’t go back.”

So that means the future of entertainment won’t be Hollywood.  And we’re already seeing the alternatives.  I’ve been informed by one of my grandsons that movies are being made based on the fiction produced by YouTube influencers who write stories based on video games.  So, a space video game has an audience of tens of millions of boys and young men.  And one guy writes a narrative story as an adventure in that game and millions of these gamers read the story and because of this immense popularity a movie studio (Amazon or Netflix) produces a movie from this story.

Well, there’s nothing wrong with that.  Eventually that will replace Hollywood nicely.  Someone said to me that this won’t avoid the social justice activists because all the studios are the same.  But there are indications that isn’t true.  A couple of years ago Netflix produced Dave Chappelle’s comedy series that was pretty strongly critical of the transgender agenda.  When Netflix employees protested the series, they were told overtly by Netflix that if their consciences wouldn’t allow them to work for a company that produced the Chappelle series, they should work somewhere else.  And that put an end to the protests.  I suspect that a home will be found for content that has an enormous built-in audience even if there is an extreme shortage of lesbian space witches of color in the script.  Maybe it’ll be Netflix that steps in or maybe it’ll be a new company that an entrepreneur like Musk founds.  But at this point it’ll happen because people are still people and they want to be amused and message fiction isn’t entertaining.  It’s boring so something will have to give way. Au revoir lesbian space witches of color.