I was watching a movie from the 1980s (Moonstruck) with Camera Girl tonight.\u00a0 I\u2019ve been busy with book marketing for the last month and it\u2019s been a grind.\u00a0 So, I sat down after dinner and we just enjoyed the show.\u00a0 It\u2019s 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.\u00a0 It\u2019s an absurd movie but it\u2019s genuinely funny and it means no harm.<\/p>\n
And I found myself enjoying the movie immensely.\u00a0 Afterwards I tried to figure out why.\u00a0 First off it was about 1980s America; a place where normal life proceeded and people were generally happy.\u00a0 And secondly, the movie was well made.\u00a0 It wasn\u2019t deathless prose.\u00a0 It wasn\u2019t profound.\u00a0 It was silly.\u00a0 But it was good-hearted and the script, the acting and the production were professional and enjoyable to watch.<\/p>\n
But why should that be such a big deal?\u00a0 And then it hit me.\u00a0 Nothing that has come out of Hollywood in the last five or ten years has been any good.\u00a0 Everything is poorly made and poorly written and poorly acted.\u00a0 Nothing makes you laugh or cry or even think.\u00a0 It\u2019s all dreck.\u00a0 And that\u2019s crazy!<\/p>\n
And it occurred to me that this won\u2019t go on forever.\u00a0 Someone is going to step forward and make something good.\u00a0 And I think what they\u2019ll do is break the rules.<\/p>\n
Someone is going to refuse to only hire DEI writers and DEI actors and DEI directors and instead they\u2019ll hire the old white guys who used to make stuff in Hollywood and used to make us laugh and cry and think.\u00a0 It\u2019s a cinch those guys haven\u2019t all died in the last ten years and I\u2019m sure they could use the work.\u00a0 I\u2019m sure they haven\u2019t forgotten how to ply their trades.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 And it doesn\u2019t have to be a period piece about the 1950s when everyone was white.\u00a0 There can even be some immigrants in the cast.\u00a0 After all the problem isn\u2019t having non-white people in a movie.\u00a0 It\u2019s about the writer and director hating white men so hard that they have to make believe they don\u2019t exist.<\/p>\n
It’s a funny thing.\u00a0 The eastern and southern European immigrants who came to this country at the beginning of the twentieth century didn\u2019t look like the English and northern European people who were already established here and from whom the movie characters were selected.\u00a0 Blond haired, blue-eyed stars weren\u2019t them.\u00a0 But they could be stand-ins for the dreams that those immigrants had about being prosperous and happy in their adopted country.\u00a0 They had enough imagination to realize that the American dream was transferrable to people who chased the American dream.\u00a0 Work hard, follow the rules and dream big.\u00a0 It was aspirational to watch Jimmy Stewart or John Wayne as a cowboy saving the day and winning the girl.\u00a0 Hating on Anglo-Americans made no sense.<\/p>\n
Well, that\u2019s what needs to happen again.\u00a0 Aspirational movies with Americans acting like Americans and not apologizing for being smart and successful is what we should be seeing on the screen.\u00a0 And there shouldn\u2019t be any DEI box checkers making sure there are the correct number of interracial couples or black lesbian brain surgeons in the story line.\u00a0 Of course, 2026 is the year that Christopher Nolan is casting a black woman as Helen of Troy in his Odyssey.\u00a0 Well at least it wasn\u2019t a trans-woman.\u00a0 But I guess I\u2019ll have to wait a little longer.\u00a0 I can wait because I know it\u2019s coming to a theater near me soon.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I was watching a movie from the 1980s (Moonstruck) with Camera Girl tonight.\u00a0 I\u2019ve been busy with book marketing for the last month and it\u2019s<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,239,237],"tags":[4881,335,43],"class_list":["post-36262","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-current-events","category-movie-reviews","category-reviews","tag-dei","tag-hollywood","tag-movie-review"],"yoast_head":"\n