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Darren's Replies
Yeah, structural racism. In this case, a kind of virtue-signalling racism by writers who, in their actual lives, <i>consistently</i> display the soft bigotry of low expectations. These are the same people who buy into the idea that voter ID requirements are inherently racist, as if black and Hispanic people are too stupid and childlike to be capable of going to their nearest DMV and getting an ID like anyone else.
It wasn't always this way. Back in the 1960s, Star Trek had an episode where one of, if not the most brilliant scientists in the Federation was Dr. Richard Daystrom. He was the man who designed the <i>Enterprise's</i> central computer. He designed an even more advanced computer in the episode -- a true artificial intelligence, but both he and it kind of went of the rails. This portrayal was nuanced, and utterly non-racist. Daystrom was shown to have become too emotionally invested in his latest creation, and he kind of broke down when he was confronted with the fact that it had become homicidal. But that's human: a realistic human character with flaws, while at the same time, his superior <i>intelligence</i> is never in doubt -- and intelligence and mental health are not the same thing. Dr. Daystrom is a flawed, relatable, brilliantly intelligent character who just happens to be a black man. It's never mentioned that he is a black man, no one cares that he is a black man, and he's revered for his accomplishments without any regard at all to his race, because 1960's Star Trek embraced MLK's vision of a society made up of people who cared about character, not skin color.
Contrast that with today's <i>obsession</i> with race. So, in a doubtless deliberate act of tokenism, the writers of The Boys make the world's smartest human, not just a black woman, but one who will <i>not shut up</i> about being a black woman, who <i>endlessly</i> reminds us that she is a black woman, and who is also yet <i>another</i> tiresome, flawless girlboss.
Convicted felon on totally fabricated charges that are unprecedented in the history of this country, and clearly politically motivated. They'll undoubtedly be overturned on appeal, but actual, at-the-end-of-the-road jail time wasn't the point; the point was so that, on election day, credulous fools like you could shriek "CONVICTED FELON! <i>REEEEEEEEE!!!"</i>
Congratulations on being one of the "sheeple" who'll mindlessly parrot any line your party masters feed you.
How is "hate watching" even a thing? This is a serious question. If you hate something, <i>why the <b>FUCK</b> would you waste a single minute of your time watching it?</i> If I think something sucks, I change the channel. So does literally <i>everybody</i> I have ever known.
The closest thing I can think of is, if I'm being told something is <i>really</i> bad, as in epically bad, I <i>might</i> tune in briefly to see if it's honestly as bad as all that. If it is, there's no way I'm sitting through a whole episode. I've tuned out of many a crappy movie or TV show, right in the middle of a story, because it was terrible. There is nothing that will induce me to sit through the entirety of something I find excruciatingly boring, or which insults my intelligence, or which offends my sensibilities. Not happening. And I can't conceive any reason why anyone else would do it either. There's a word for this kind of behavior: masochism, and it's considered a legitimate mental disorder.
Time is the one truly irreplaceable commodity anyone has. If you lose money, you can make more. If you lose things, usually they can be replaced. If you lose opportunities, you can usually find or create more. But a lost minute is something that even Elon Musk, with all his billions, can never buy back. So why in the name of hell would anyone ever voluntarily spend any of that irreplaceable commodity on something that bores them, insults them, or makes them angry? That sounds literally insane to me.
Oh I don't much care about Disney. I cancelled my Disney+ subscription when they fired Gina Carano for wrongthink. I won't give my money to organizations that demand ideological conformity and punish dissenters. I consider Disney Star Wars to be pastiche, not canon. I haven't seen more of The Acolyte than what I've caught on YouTube clips, but that little bit looks awful, and more importantly, awful because it's so overtly political, and written by hacks who want to push an agenda, not tell a good story.
Disney ruined Star Wars, so I tuned out a while back. I'd like to believe the franchise could be rescued someday, but I won't hold my breath.
13% now. The rate of descent has slowed, but it's <i>still</i> sinking.
There's a key difference between infusing your <i>entertainment</i> with a moral, ideological, or political message, and making the entertainment come in a very, very distant second to pushing the message. As I've said elsewhere, woke messaging is not the only kind that's guilty of this: explicitly Christian movies have the exact same problem, just a different message.
When you are message-driven, instead of prioritizing plot, character development, and all the other things that go to make good storytelling, you skew the whole thing, and usually end up making the same kinds of mistakes. Rather than letting the message definitely, but unobtrusively play out through the story, never overwhelming the entertainment, the writers become preachy and very in-your-face. The plot suffers because the writers aren't nearly as concerned with it as they are with pushing the message. The heroes suffer because, as characters who have to represent the "correct" worldview, the writers are afraid to give them human flaws, and redemptive story arcs, and all too often make them unrelatable Mary Sues, not to mention blatant author self-inserts. The villains, as representatives of wrongthink, often go way over the top and become laughably cartoonish caricatures.
And of course, the biggest difference, when you bottom line it, <i>good</i> entertainment that promotes a message is thought provoking, makes you question your assumptions, and consider different ideas and points of views you may not have before. The bad sort -- which The Acolyte most definitely is -- tries to tell you what the correct opinions and beliefs are.
Star Wars took off because Luke Skywalker was a classic mythological hero, and it resonated on a deep, subconscious level. He was modeled on Hercules, Perseus, Cú Chulainn, Beowulf, Sigurd, and many more. Luke Skywalker reached back to something we feel in our bones, and which is represented again and again and again in the heroic tales of all the world’s mythological traditions.
Woke SJW’s can’t do this. The can’t come up with anything that resonates like the original Star Wars did, because they aren’t even trying to tap into the bone-deep cultural influences Lucas did. They <i>reject</i> the past, and think they have the map to a utopian future. But their shallow and nouveau ideas simply don’t resonate. People don’t buy into it, the way they feel a great truth about Luke Skywalker’s hero’s journey.
So they <i>can’t </i> create new ideas – not ones that will work, at any rate. What new things they try fall flat. So the best they can do is try to hijack classic heroes and stories, and turn them into vehicles for their nihilistic, woke ideology.
(This site restricts post size, so I have to break this replay in two)
Simple. They're not talented or creative enough. Whatever talent they might have is warped by their ideology. When your job is to create entertainment, but you're <i>driven</i> by an ideology, it will stifle you creatively. The Message becomes the priority. The protagonist of your story is almost certain to be an ideological self-insert into the story, and because he has to be a hero for The Cause, you'll likely not allow him or her to have significant flaws -- the character will all too likely be a Mary Sue. The plot, the story, the characters, they will all come in second to The Message.
Back when George Lucas created Star Wars, he wasn't pushing an agenda, he just wanted to tell the kind of stories that he had loved as a kid watching movies and movie serials. He tried to buy the rights to Flash Gordon, but he couldn't get them, so he and Gary Kurtz (with whom he'd worked on American Graffiti), decided to make something in the sci fi genre that was all their own. They bounced ideas off each other, and came up with a broad outline for an epic saga, and decided to film what became Star Wars/episode IV "A New Hope" because that was a part of the whole thing that could work as a standalone story -- in case it flopped and they never got the chance to finish telling the rest.
But Star Wars not only didn't flop, it didn't even just become a hit, it became a <i>phenomenon</i> like nothing anyone had ever seen. There had been blockbusters before, but this was next level.
And it all worked because George Lucas just wanted to tell a great story. He deliberately mined classic mythological tropes that date back to antiquity. Jos. Campbell, who wrote "Hero with a Thousand Faces," cataloguing these ancient myths, called Lucas the best student he ever had.
Because the universities these clowns went to indoctrinated them. Now they really believe they are on "the right side of history," and they're saving the world.
You have to understand, they are basically religious zealots.
I lived through the 80s. The girls then were no different than girls of any other decade; and Flashdance is just a chick flick, no worse than any other.
But the girls of the 80s had one advantage of those of today: they weren't covered in tacky-looking tattoos.
The teenage girls who made it a big hit when it came out, and all started dressing like Jennifer Beals' character once they saw it. That's who it was made for.
15% now. I wonder if audience scores can get into negative numbers.
Another series falls to the god of "representation."
We have 16. 16 ladies and gentlemen, who'll go 15?
Not even close. Madonna had a great body when she was young, I'll grant you that. I never thought her face was particularly attractive though. Not ugly, to be sure, just... meh.
https://preview.redd.it/susanna-hoffs-of-the-bangles-v0-6qiehh5sf9dc1.jpg?width=902&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=3bebb9d771fedad87813853c109b0df186a86415
https://imagez.tmz.com/image/de/16by9/2021/09/15/dea7512c1b24402fa683a9f0578f59fa_xl.jpg
https://saratogatodaynewspaper.com/media/k2/items/cache/498c14f1a149e52705d52e204b1913d8_XL.jpg
You think <i>this</i> woman is ugly?
And that last picture is maybe ten years old, when she well into her fifties. Still looking pretty damn fine if you ask me.
She's now 63; here's a photo that's only about a year old
https://www.newbeauty.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/susanna-hoff-skincare-1.jpg
Not only was she objectively good-looking in her prime, I'd say she's aged remarkably well too.
Yep. The show sucks because the story is a totally unoriginal mediocrity, the writing and dialogue are embarrassingly bad, and the acting is wooden. Now on top of that, throw in the fact that the creators were clearly obsessed with "representation" over everything else, and put a bunch of "diverse" self-inserts into the show. This means their priority was off. Priority <i>should</i> be to put out entertaining stories about interesting and relatable characters. That priority firmly takes a backseat to pushing The Message. So the show is just the latest in a string of politically correct bad-to-mediocre shows that Disney has been churning out since it bought Star Wars from George Lucas. That they are bad or at best mediocre would be bad enough, but add in the woke agenda, and they haven't just failed to entertain the audience, they've pissed the audience off, because people are sick of being lectured, scolded, and told what are the correct opinions and attitudes to have.
But Lucasfilm, with Kathleen Kennedy in charge, just won't change its approach. And honestly, in this case, it's like they took that South Park episode as a playbook, rather than mockery, so they <i>really</i> set this one up for failure. And sure enough, they've already started doing what woke Hollywood has been doing at least since Lady Ghostbusters from 2016: when it bombs, accuse the audience of being -ists, and -phobes, and call it "toxic fandom."
These hacks <i>deserve</i> to fail.
Now 17%. Burrowing lower every day.
19% now, just a few hours later.
Actually, you're wrong -- I can say that because we did. There were plenty of American movies about non-American adventures and heroes. Gunga Din (1939), for example, an American adventure film, from RKO pictures, about about three British sergeants and Gunga Din, their native bhisti (water bearer), who fight the Thuggee cult, in colonial British India. "Beau Geste" (also 1939) is an American movie about three English brothers who enlist in the French Foreign Legion. Or Paths of Glory (1957), and American film, directed by Stanley Kubrick, adapted from a novel by Humphrey Cobb, but the actors are all playing WWI French army soldiers. Or the 2002 version of "The Count of Monte Cristo," which also takes place entirely in France, with French characters. There are other examples, but these are just the ones I can think of off the top of my head.
Yes, it's far more common for American movie studies to make historical movies with American heroes, and leave stories about foreign heroes to the movie studios of those heroes' respective countries, but it's <i>not</i> unheard of for them to make movies that tell the stories of non-American heroes, in non-American settings either.
And let's not pretend this kind of cinematic ultra-nationalism is a trend unique to American movie studios. "A Night to Remember," which is a 1958 British film (and to date the still the best one about the sinking of the <i>Titanic</i>) several characters based on American passengers, were depicted as being British. When questioned as to why he perpetrated this deliberate historical inaccuracy, director Roy Ward Baker stated that "it was a British film made by British artists for a British audience".