Tag: movies

They should have listened to Bill

Bill Murray knew the feminist parody of Ghostbusters was going to be a disaster and tried to stay out of it, but Sony persuaded him to do it:

RE: Ghostbusters/Murray – Litigation Counsel [CONFIDENTIAL]
Email-ID     104704
Date     2013-11-01 00:30:57 UTC
From     mailer-daemon
To     steinberg, david, venger, leonardyankelevits, daniel

RE: Ghostbusters/Murray – Litigation Counsel [CONFIDENTIAL]
I think you are fine to stay out.  Am sure len has it on his list for us to discuss at his 1-1 tomorrow

From: Steinberg, David
Sent: Thursday, October 31, 2013 5:29 PM
To: Venger, Leonard; Weil, Leah
Cc: Yankelevits, Daniel
Subject: RE: Ghostbusters/Murray – Litigation Counsel [CONFIDENTIAL]

FYI, apparently AG has some ideas (Harrison, of course).  I’m trying to stay out of the middle of this one but let me know if there’s anything you need me to do.

From: Venger, Leonard
Sent: Tuesday, October 29, 2013 3:18 PM
To: Steinberg, David; Weil, Leah
Cc: Yankelevits, Daniel
Subject: RE: Ghostbusters/Murray – Litigation Counsel [CONFIDENTIAL]

 I have some names in mind but will wait until we speak with Leah.
 
From: Steinberg, David
Sent: Tuesday, October 29, 2013 3:06 PM
To: Venger, Leonard; Weil, Leah
Cc: Yankelevits, Daniel
Subject: Ghostbusters/Murray – Litigation Counsel [CONFIDENTIAL]

In order to more fully evaluate our position if Bill Murray again declines to engage on “Ghostbusters”, AG requested that we identify “aggressive” litigation counsel with whom we can consult to evaluate our alternatives and strategize.  [Harkening back to his prior employer, of course, raised the name of David Boies.]

Personally, while I’m fine with aggressive, I think we are in much worse shape if this goes public so seems to me we should look for someone who isn’t seeking the spotlight.

Can we discuss at some point soon to provide a suggestion or two?

Thanks.

Oh, it sounds as if they’re in pretty bad shape across the board at this point. I won’t issue any spoiler warnings, because it appears it would be impossible to spoil this movie.

Even Hollywood can be further converged

Who knew that SJWs could make it even worse than it was? Milo observes that the feminist Ghostbusters is going to be an SJW-inspired disaster:

At this point, everyone who isn’t a Women’s Studies major realises that Ghostbusters is probably going to be a terrible movie. But who’s responsible? To anyone familiar with incompetence in Hollywood, the answer should be obvious. It’s Amy Pascal, of course.

Pascal is the former chairman of Sony Pictures Entertainment. She oversaw production of dozens of blockbuster titles over the years, until she was hoist on her own progressivism. A series of  embarrassing emails in which she cracked some not-funny racial jokes about President Obama clashed with her public image as a good feminist progressive, and Pascal promptly exited the company.

“Should I ask him if he liked DJANGO?” asked Pascal in a leaked email to a colleague on the topic of meeting President Barack Obama at a then-upcoming fundraising event. Her colleague, producer Scott Rudin, replied simply with “12 YEARS”, referencing ’12 Years a Slave’: another slavery film.

The two then proceeded to jokingly list numerous films concerning African-Americans. It wasn’t funny, and, considering Pascal’s public image as a Hollywood feminist, it wasn’t clever either. It was this series of emails among others that resulted in Pascal’s forced resignation from Sony.

But cinema still isn’t safe: Pascal is taking a producer role in a handful of upcoming films, including Ghostbusters. Pascal, SJW-watchers will note, is the producer behind the mooted Zoe Quinn biopic Crash Override: How to Save the Internet from Itself, which I’m sure will be at least as successful as the all-female Ghostbusters. (By which I mean: an utter disaster.)

It’s obvious Pascal is trying to recover her progressive credentials. But her movies are visibly suffering as a result.

Despite her self-proclaimed feminist values, Pascal has proven hilariously bad at pandering to her own tribe. After allegations of a pay gap at Sony, Pascal was quick to offer a tone-deaf rebuttal.

“I run a business. People want to work for less money, I’ll pay them less money. I don’t call them up and go, can I give you some more?” said Pascal in an interview at the Women of the World event in San Francisco. Pascal said actresses should learn to “walk away” if they weren’t satisfied with their jobs. “People shouldn’t be so grateful for jobs,” she said.

In a final, desperate attempt to make herself likeable again, Pascal is now producing rancid films dressed up in social justice-friendly narratives. And it’s working! Progressives are rallying to her defence, crying “MISOGYNY” whenever moviegoers object to the garbage Pascal is trying to feed them….

I suspect the film’s defenders are also aware that the movie is an
impending disaster, which is why they’ve rushed to the web to brand its
critics misogynists. There’s a lot on the line for them. If Ghostbusters
flops, it will be yet further proof that feminism and social justice
don’t sell.

Addendum to Veblen. We’re going to need a new theory to account for this new form of virtue-signaling conspicuous consumption.

SJWs ruin Watership Down

This sort of cultural and creative degradation is why I will never show even a modicum of mercy to SJWs. This is why there is no place for them in any civilized society. They are pure hraka. They are pollution. They infest every organization they are permitted to enter and they infect everything they touch.

It was the film that traumatised a generation of children, with its much-loved rabbit characters slain on screen in graphic and memorable scenes. But the story of Watership Down is to be remade for a new era, as programme-makers promise to tone down its most brutal images.

The BBC has teamed up with Netflix for one of the most expensive mini-series ever made for the small screen, and the first animated four-part drama of its kind.The show’s executive producer told the Telegraph the 2017 version will not just tone down the levels of on-screen violence to make it more appropriate for children, but give a boost to its female characters.

Female rabbits including Clover, played by Gemma Arterton, Strawberry, played by Olivia Colman, and Hyzenthlay, played by Anne-Marie Duff, will get a dose of doe power, as it were, to allow them to display their own heroics alongside their male co-stars.

This is why we need our own institutions. This is why we need to keep every single SJW out. They destroy everything in the interests of convergence. That is their sole objective and their primary activity.

This is also why I will never sell the movie rights to my books. I won’t risk putting them in SJW hands. In time, we will build our own studios. Castalia is just the start.

An impossible conundrum

It’s rather remarkable that in this long article about female fans doing to the new Star Wars what female fans always do – which is turn literally everything into sordid romance – that the author can’t possibly figure out why nearly all of them are intent on putting Rey together with Kylo rather than with the nominal hero of the piece:

In those days, as now, fan-fiction was a hobby largely undertaken by women; though solid data is sparse, most of it shows cisgender men in the minority by a wide margin. There’s no single agreed upon answer to the question of why this is, but one common explanation cites the desire to create narratives outside the male perspective that has historically ruled the entertainment world. Interviewed by Fangirl Chat in 2014, Maggie Nowakowska, a prominent member of the early Star Wars zine scene, recalled that this was an explicit goal of hers: “We wanted to make sure we got some female Jedi in there because we were afraid the boys would get on it first and the next thing you’d know women were never Jedi.”

Not all fan fiction centers on romance, but a good portion of it does. In many fandoms (The Force Awakens included), “slash” stories about men getting with men tend to be very popular: perhaps for some of the same reasons lesbian porn is popular among straight men, or because pop culture generally tends to create more (and more fleshed-out) male characters than female ones, or because media has historically lacked for queer love stories. Even when the subject of a story is a heterosexual relationship between leading characters, foregrounding romance can be a transgressive move depending on the source material. At one point in the ’80s, Lucasfilm broke with a policy of mostly ignoring fan fiction by sending publishers warning letters because of a story that featured love scenes between Han and Leia….

 “There’s a curve as to which ships are the most popular and which are the least. That Reylo is bigger than Finn and Rey is surprising to me.”

It’s true: Stories by fans about The Force Awakens’s two lead heroes falling in love are far outnumbered by ones about the movie’s heroine and its village-slaughtering villain doing so. One common explanation for this says that Rey and Kylo are simply the most fascinating people on screen. J.J. Abrams has talked about his philosophy of movies being “mystery boxes,” and certainly both of these characters, with Rey’s unexplained backstory and Kylo’s hazy motivations, fit that description.

There’s also a level of moral unsettledness that make them stand out. Kylo is visibly tempted to turn back to good; Rey has more pressing concerns than the fate of the galaxy. Ricca explained it to me in terms of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. Rey’s focused on the bottom, on survival, while Kylo highmindedly obsesses over being the best Dark Sider he can be. “Having the two meet as equals is bizarre, and hints a lot of things,” Ricca said. “Some of those things are explored in Interstellar Transmissions, and a lot of them aren’t, because there’s so much potential.”

The problematic fact that they are attempting to avoid mentioning is that Finn is black. The reason so little fan fiction is written about Finn and Rey is because, despite being under constant barrage by Hollywood and the advertising industry pushing miscegenated propaganda, the vast majority of white women simply don’t find black men to be as attractive as white men. Like calls to like, as it has always done and as it always will do.

However, the article does indicate the primary problem with science fiction and fantasy today. Most of it simply isn’t genuine science fiction and fantasy, it’s merely professional fan fiction.

When Man forgets his Creator

He forgets how to create. Once you read this, you will know why John C. Wright’s review of Star Wars: The Force Awakens was the only one I was actually interested in reading. One should not read this being wary of spoilers, but rather of having one’s ability to mindlessly enjoy the cultural detritus of Western decline irretrievably hampered. As always, Mr. Wright cuts to the chase by stating an obvious fact that has nevertheless escaped most of the movie’s critics and fans alike:

How can this movie both at once be a really enjoyable return to a beloved childhood favorite, and be a bland and dull, and in places offensively stupid and politically correct, piece of trash?

Because it is a remake, not a sequel.

Oh, I know that technically it is a sequel, allegedly taking place decades after the close of TEDDY BEARS OF THE JEDI, but the story follows the same plotline, except that the roles of Han, Luke and Leia are all played by Junkyard Girl, since she is the cynical rogue, the innocent novice, and the girl with the McGuffin needing rescue all at once. Except she escapes on her own. The rollerball robot is not as cute and sassy as R2D2, because he is not given as much to do, and the Exhenchman and the Ace Pilot don’t actually do all that much.

There is a way cool scene when the X-wings come screaming across the lake to the rescue. The hollow star-eating weapon-planet with forests and snowy mountains and atmosphere above its hull was a convincingly impressive weapon, but, again, there was no moment where the impressiveness was played up, no moment when someone whispered, that’s no moon…

So it is a fairly good remake as remakes go, and it does what it sets out to do, and recapture some, or almost some, of the energy, cleverness, craft, excitement and innocence of the original.

So why is this not the review I wanted to write, with me dancing jigs on the steeple, painted with woad with bells on my toes, yodeling for joy? Because the jerkwads of Hollywood had to take a favorite movie and crap it up with political correctness. Because this film is critic-proof. No matter how bad it is, everyone and his brother will go see it.

And the political correctness is subtle. It has to be subtle, because if the poison tasted of poison, the victim would spit it out: so it is sugar coated to go down easy. Do you think controlling the myths and dreams of a generation has no effect on the generation? Story tellers are the secret legislators of mankind.

The scene where Luke tosses his lightsaber away rather than using it in righteous wrath to smite the evil Emperor may have only been a scene in a kid’s space opera flick: but the majority of the American public regards exactly that same maneuver, preemptive self-disarmament,  as the only moral and right thing to do in the face of the appalling evils of our present war, a war they dare not admit exist, lest they feel a split second of anger, and like a lightswitch being flipped, turn entirely evil themselves. That is what they think will happen if we fight back. If you smite a Sith, you become a Sith.

Why can’t the modern Leftist tell a decent story? Even when he is copying a good and healthy-minded original scene by scene in a paint-by-numbers fashion, it turns out sick-minded.

The answer is ultimately where all ultimate answers reside, in the deep places of the soul.

When we forget God, we forget how to tell tales. I submit that when a man forgets his Creator, he forgets how to create.

It is rather remarkable, when you think about it. Abrams is no different than Brooks is no different than Scalzi. They are not only “creators” who cannot create, they are parasites who, regardless of their technical skills, cannot even successfully execute a paint-by-the-numbers imitation. Like a colorblind painter, their moral blindness renders them fundamentally incapable of utilizing a full moral palette.

This is, I think, the best realistic outcome for Star Wars fans, and one that is pretty close to what I assumed would be the case. Abrams is a technically competent remaker, and he was never likely to resist the conventional SJWisms. Better a competent and mildly poisonous remake than an incompetent or virulently poisonous one, but all the same, it is a remake, not a genuinely new story.

For that, you’ll have to turn to the Expanded Universe, or, later next year, to an entirely different science fiction universe entitled Faraway Wars: Embers of Empire.

Merry Christmas….

The true lesson of Star Wars

Markku helpfully summarizes the Star Wars Saga:

The plot so far:
-Empire builds a Death Star
-Empire builds a bigger Death Star
And now… Wait for it…
-Empire builds EVEN bigger Death Star

And
the movie knows how silly this is. When the rebels hear, they basically
go “Oh come on, not this shit again? *sigh* Ooooh-kay. Where’s the
shield generators? There. Where’s the weak spot? There. Ok, guys, let’s
go blow this up.

Now, it’s really nice that the movie is
forthright about how much the central plot element sucks, but I wonder
if the alternative occurred to anyone, to make it NOT suck and not have
to apologize for it.

That’s the real weakness of the movie.

The third one burned down, fell over, then sank into the swamp. But the fourth one will stay up! And that’s the true lesson of Star Wars, kids, just keep building bigger and better Death Stars until one finally survives the arduous construction and beta testing process and you rule the galaxy.

Settle down, ladies

La, such a catfight! It’s always a bit amusing to see when a disagreement here moves to rhetorical metargument, where instead of arguing about the actual point of disputation, the argument is transformed into who can generate more feelbads in the other side.

It is readily apparent that “you’re arguing like an SJW” has become the new “that’s a logical fallacy”, pseudo-dialectic that is both rhetorical and ineptly applied. It’s not quite as irritating, of course, as SJW is a more recent and less perfectly defined term; it used to make my teeth itch to see people use “logical fallacy” as a synonym for “statement with which I disagree”.

I stomped that inept rhetorical device out by the simple tactic of always asking the individual a single question: what was the logical fallacy? Was it the Undistributed Middle? Denying the Antecedent? Ignoratio elenchi? The fact that they could neither identify nor even describe the “fallacy” they had decried usually sufficed to teach them their error in a sufficiently embarrassing way to prevent them from again resorting to the rhetorical tactic.

Now, who is “arguing like an SJW?” Neither “the new Star Wars is a great movie everyone should see” nor “the new SJW Wars sucks and I wish I hadn’t seen it” crowd has, as far as I can tell, lied. Neither side has decried the other’s right to hold its opinion, or made any attempt to shun, discredit, or disemploy the other. Neither side has attempted to claim that the other side is intrinsically immoral, racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, or bigoted.

Both sides have indulged heavily in rhetoric, but while SJWs are limited to rhetorical communication, so are most non-SJWs.

So, it’s simply not true that anyone is “arguing like an SJW”. And the fact that someone could imagine the other side doing so is not reflective of anything but the individual’s own imagination. I could imagine that JJ Abrams might one day make a movie that I want to see, but that does not indicate that he has actually done so, or that he will do so in the future.

I knew I wouldn’t bother seeing the Disney movies as soon as I learned he was the director. Mr. Abrams has had a long, distinguished, and successful career in Hollywood, during which he has not made a single movie or television show that interested or entertained me in the slightest. Considering that I saw one of his Star Trek movies when it was on TV one night, I was not surprised to learn that he has delivered what is essentially an repetitive remake of one of its predecessors. He may be a master of lens flare, what he is is not is an original story teller.

And to turn the old saying on its head, while history rhymes, it does not repeat. The absurdity of what Abrams has produced, from a story perspective, can perhaps be best understood if one applied his storytelling technique to a hypothetical remake of Lord of the Rings.

Imagine the Shire. Imagine a party, not a birthday party, but a 50th wedding anniversary for Sam and Rosie Gamgee. In the midst of the party, they disappear, and leave behind them a mysterious piece of jewelry for their daughter, Frodette Gamgee. Then, one day, a grey-bearded, dark-skinned stranger appears; it is Gandhi the black dwarf, warning Frodette that it is a shard of Morgoth Bauglir’s iron crown, in which the fallen Ainur had imbued with his immortal essence. The shard had escaped notice in the War for the Ring, but now that Sauron and the One Ring are gone, it is the key to ruling Middle Earth.

A new power, an evil power, an invisible power has risen in the East, and the King of Gondor, Aragorn’s son Sarugorn, has been acting strangely of late. Frodette must bring the iron shard to Aglarond, where the King of the Glittering Caves will know what do… but beware, the Knight Riders of the Invisible Empire are hunting for it!

Personally, the only movie review in which I am genuinely interested in is Mr. John C. Wright’s. Those who have read Transhuman and Subhuman: Essays on Science Fiction and Awful Truth
 will understand why.

The Farce Awakens

A reader posts a scathing review of the new SJW Wars episode at Alpha Game:

You’ll be glad you didn’t see Star Wars VII: The Farce Awakens. The glaring questions it begs are projections of the female imperative. Darth Vader, Luke, Kylo Ren, Obi Wan Kenobi, and all other force using experts in any previous Star Wars story, needed training based on years of apprenticeship with a 24/7 mentor to master the force. The entire premise of Jedi powers, like all martial skills, is that they must being “learned” and they develop over time with practice. Our heroine Rey, hinted heavily as being Luke’s daughter, instantly and without training or foreknowledge gets abilities with the force that took all other Jedi, Sith, decades to develop. So with no Jedi’s around, how does she even know the force can control weak-minded storm troopers, much less use the old “you don’t need to see his papers” shtick.

There is more, and none of it is good. The usual spoiler warnings apply, although the review doesn’t so much contain spoilers as it calls into question the core conceit of the film.

It occurs to me that there is probably a market for books, and even films, that “continue” the story of SJW-infested properties in a traditionalist manner. What should the Star Wars prequels have looked like? How should the post-Jedi story actually proceeded?

I shall have to think on this further… about Star Lords battling for power in a galaxy far, far away.

The evil of the Rebel Alliance

Or, as Milo calls it, Space ISIS:

There’s so much wrong with Star Wars that it deserves a book-length treatise to cover properly. After all, the famous Red Letter Media takedown of The Phantom Menace is longer than the film itself. For that reason I will focus on three of the worst mischaracterisations: the Rebel Alliance as good guys, the tragically misunderstood Jabba the Hutt, and Palpatine’s supposedly evil Empire.

This is going to upset some diehard fans, but who do you trust more? Milo, who always tells you the truth while being witty, charming, handsome and having great hair, or the filmmakers who tried to tell you that Jar Jar Binks is a hero?

THE REBEL ALLIANCE
The Alliance is a ragtag band of fighters from many different cultures bonded together by a hatred of the Empire, fighting an asymmetric war resulting in massive collateral damage and loss of civilian life. They take their lead from mystics hiding in caves and swamps, and want to return the galaxy to a primitive religion that hasn’t changed for 600 years. That’s right nerds: the Rebel Alliance is ISIS.

The Jedi are a typical wishy-washy Mother Gaia-style progressive cult. Their most obvious failing is not using the real Force powers. Force lightning is actually quite humane; it’s like hitting a bad guy with a taser instead of cutting him in half with a lightsabre.

Same thing with force choke: do we really need to shoot a criminal resisting the will of the Emperor? Why not subdue him with a choke–or the term we use in the Sith community, enhanced persuasion techniques? Besides, in the far-flung future of Star Wars, SJWs have ensured force-sensitive individuals get affirmative consent every 10 seconds while using their powers so there’s really no big deal.

The Jedi are sick bastards. They use the Force to cloud the minds of others. The movies show this being done to stormtroopers, but you just know Luke uses it on dates at the cantina.

You can argue about the details. But the core thesis that the Star Wars film franchise is garbage? As much as it pains me, a former fan who once successfully collected the entire blue-card set, who saw the original film seven times in the theater as a child, to say it, he’s right.

You see, I saw The Phantom Menace. “Garbage” is too kind.

Professional note: Milo is a master, no, he is THE master of social media PR. This is perhaps the most epic large-scale trolling in the history of social media. You can’t imitate him. Unlike Mike, you can’t even learn anything from him; it would be like trying to take lifestyle advice from an exploding supernova or trying to pick up a few composition tips from Mozart.

Sorry, make that Wagner. As we are reliably informed, Mozart, too, is garbage.

Sometimes, all you can do is sit back and admire the incandescent artistry.

Star Wars justice convergence

The LucasFilm president explains her vision for Star Wars:

They are really, really making a huge effort across the company to put more focus around casting women and putting women in positions of responsibility, with directing and various other positions inside, different lines of business in the company. It’s not just about casting female protagonists. It’s gotta be across the board throughout the industry.

I think Hasbro, who’s making toys for a while, they were perhaps a little reluctant to move too quickly with something that’s been such a successful boys line. I think they’re recognizing that selling to girls is just as effective as selling to boys. More and more the lines are being blurred as to deciding ahead of time that some things are for boys and some things are for girls. I think that’s a big part of the conversation. It’s all of these areas that are contributing to change really happening.

Over the last several years that I’ve been in the business it seems to me that this has been a topic of conversation every few years. Then everybody thinks it’s a trend or that it’s a significant change. And then it doesn’t really move the needle. I think that’s — hopefully— what’s going to begin to happen now. It’s going to be real change. And not just perceived change.

Among those “real changes” are going to be declining sales, frantic PR spin to explain away the declining sales, and eventually some bitter diatribes about how the market is not worthy of their brilliant, progressive, and socially just products.

It’s at times like these that I am very, very happy that I was able to convince myself that Star Wars ended with The Empire Strikes Back. (I put Return of the Jedi in the same category as The Star Wars Christmas Special, which I also saw and was rather confused by, what with the Wookies living in trees and all. In retrospect, that should have been our first sign that George Lucas just go lucky, he didn’t actually know what he was doing.) I did give the Phantom Menace a go on opening night; I remember how we all felt almost as if we’d gone back in time, we were so excited that the future we’d imagined when we were kids was actually upon us!

And then, after about five minutes, we all realized that our imaginations were now rather preferable to George Lucas’s. I walked out of there and never again gave any subsequent Star Wars-named product another thought.

Anyhow, as Jeffro observes, this is classic SJW entryism at work. They’re essentially cargo cultists, they have no understanding of what made Star Wars valuable in the first place, and so they will further destroy what has already gone far, far past tragedy and is now well into self-parody.