Comic book fans are among the most loyal fans. Few things run them off of their favorite books. For some reason, Marvel decided to do three of the most likely things to cost them fans: remove their favorite characters, tarnish the histories of those characters, and insult the fans who complained. The latter proved most insidious because the insults accused fans of racism, sexism, homophobia, and bizarrely resorted to stereotypes about comic book fans.
As Marvel did this, their new politically correct fan base proved not to be fans at all. As Marvel published book after pandering book, the books enjoyed initial high or good sales only to drop most of their audience within the first quarter. The prime example of this is the recent Black Panther book, which lost 70% of its audience in one month.
As far as I’m concerned, they have permanently lost me as a reader. Both DC and Marvel have gone too far off the deep end to ever get me back. They may dial it down a little bit for a while but I don’t believe for a second that they’re going to abandon trying to push The Narrative.
When the audience is young, suspension of disbelief is much easier. I watched some abysmal movies and TV shows up into my teen years that usually didn’t bother me.
Whether the movie is good or bad, though, the fight scenes are almost always laughable. Once you begin paying attention, it’s hard not to notice the cheesy aspects–like Western Union Punches, for instance.
See if anything bothers you about the clip below:
Now, granted, this fight scene is from a comedy. But what’s sad is, films we’re supposed to take seriously are just as bad.
Notice the Adam Sandler character, who has been a brawling goon up to this point…how he just stands around waiting to be hit. It’s in the script for him to lose the fight to Bob Barker, so he just plays crash dummy.
Maybe I’ll post an example of a good one some day, if I can find one…
The grandfather of this latest Magnificent Seven movie was Akira Kurosawa’s classic The Seven Samurai.
Set toward the end of the feudal period in Japan, the plot blossoms out of a small village ravaged by “brigands.” The villagers’ livelihoods are being progressively wiped out by succeeding raids, and their very existence will soon be threatened. A wise villager proposes a plan to pool what remaining resources they have, and use it to hire samurai to protect the village. Seven alienatied warriors, for various reasons, answer the call. What follows is, in effect, a suicide mission, in which the samurai face overwhelming odds with inferior weapons and equipment (the brigands have horses, armor, and even firearms while the samurai have nothing but their swords and the clothes on their back).
In 1960 the story was transposed into the Old West, in a film directed by John Sturges, starring Yul Brynner, Steve McQueen, Charles Bronson, James Coburn, Robert Vaughn and Eli Wallach. The samurai are replaced by gunfighters, of course. The remake is not without its flaws, but certainly has some memorable lines.
In 2016 the latest update hit the screen. I was not even aware of it, due to how hectic personal life has been lately…until a few days ago.
Some character types have survived the evolution of the story, and the core of the plot remains the same. But the SJWs in Hollywood just could not help but conform it to The Narrative.
The Japanese original suffered no obligation to ethnic diversity; but the new Seven is composed of mostly minorities (one each: black; Asian; Mexican; native American), and none of the white ones survive. (OMG! Is this a metaphor of WHITE GENOCIDE?!?!?!?!?) Denzel Washington is a great actor, who has been believable in every role I’ve seen him play. Furthermore, there were some black cowboys and soldiers on the frontier. But the Chisolm character is the de facto leader of the Seven and nobody (even among the bad guys) so much as mutters under their breath about it. Granted, 19th Century America was not the racist holocaust SJWs tell us it was (when they’re not trying to convince us that the USA was founded as the secular welfare state it is now, where illegal aliens are treated better than our veterans/citizens; it’s “legal” and even mandatory in some cases to discriminate against straight white males; and the only people with inalienable rights are sexual deviants). But there certainly were bigots who weren’t afraid to speak and act on their prejudices.
As if the suspension of disbelief weren’t strained enough, the film makers just had to insert a Brave Womyn Warrior into the message film. She is the de facto leader of the townsfolk during the war against the cutthroat army (led by an Evil White Male, of course).
Yeah, okay…
Despite all the social engineering, Magnificent Seven 2016 is an entertaining 133 minutes. There are plenty of dramatic scenes and fun action sequences to keep your attention. Technically the acting and direction is Grade A.
If you have the time and inclination for a movie marathon, you could do worse than watching this one back-to-back with the 1960 film and the original (and best, IMHO) Seven Samurai.
Recently I organized a little media blitz for my debut shoot-’em-up, and ran a 99 cent promotion. The results have been encouraging.
I’m not a full-time author (I still work a “real” job, drat the luck), so I’m not able to sit at a computer all day and track rankings. The best I saw was that Hell & Gone hit #1 bestseller in war, pulp, and men’s adventure, and reached #70 on the top “paid in Kindle store” on Tuesday night. It was inside the top 50 in some other categories, too, but I don’t know where it peaked. Could a healthy number of reviews/increased visibility be forthcoming? You can bet I’ll be paying attention, when I can.
I’m not sure how many sales I’m getting on Kobo, Apple and Barnes & Noble, where it’s also on sale for 99 cents. (BTW both Hell & Gone and Tier Zero are also available as Audible audio books.)
I also have a 99 cent promotion scheduled to start Saturday (November 5) for False Flag, the third book in The Retreads series. I don’t have the same level of media blitz lined up, and it’s a darker/more controversial storyline, so I don’t expect the same caliber of spike. However, Election Day happens right in the middle of the promo, and approximately 40% of those who go to the polls will be voting to make this speculative dystopia a reality. So it’s kinda’ fitting.
UPDATE: The sales reports are trickling in from other stores, starting with Barnes & Noble. Don’t know where it put me on their algorithm, but I see a boatload of sales. I need to do this again.
…So claims the latest review of The Greater Good, my “satire-tastic” lampoon of SJWs, superhero/action-adventure tropes, and The Narrative in general.
“However,” she warns, “it’s heavily packed with sarcasm.”
I have no idea where she got that notion. In fact, I take umbrage that she would even imply I’m capable of such vulgar behavior at my hallowed keyboard.
Fellow author Kia Heavey says, “The pages are packed with witty, pointed mockery of today’s Progressives that actually made me laugh out loud. Spot-on and silly at the same time, The Greater Good is written in a heroic, propagandist tone to match the artwork on the cover.”
This masterpiece now has a whopping FIVE REVIEWS!!! Another 195, plus a couple billion sales or so, and surely this literary diamond will be propelled up through the rough to a page where Amazon shoppers might actually discover that it exists. From there, of course my meteoric rise as an author follows a predictable trajectory: bestseller lists; the lecture circuit; world domination.
If you act RIGHT NOW, you can be the first one on your block to get your very own copy for less than the cost of…well, pretty much anything. Even the cost of a bottle of friggin’ water fer cryin’ out loud. (Unless you buy water in bulk from Costco, Big Lots or Sam’s Club, I suppose, if you insist on splitting hairs.) Time is running out, and these e-books are going fast! I can’t guarantee there will be any left unless you ACT NOW! (It’s obvious ebooks are in very limited supply–just look at the prices charged by the Big Five publishers!)
In the Silver Age of comics, when Marvel became a serious competitor for DC, there was a distinct contrast in the storytelling styles of the two publishers, especially in the team titles (DC’s Justice League of America and Marvel’s Avengers, primarily). While DC spent most of its comic panels on plotting, Marvel’s approach was something more like: “Forget this silly script treatment–let’s have somebody fight!”
The “Marvel Misunderstanding” subplot became an inside joke with comic book readers–when there were no supervillains handy, excuses were dreamed up to have Marvel’s heroes duke it out with each other.
The difference between Marvel’s characters on the silver screen and in comic book pages is almost as drastic as the spy novels of Ian Fleming compared to the cinematic James Bond in the Roger Moore days. Still, we got a little “Marvel Misunderstanding” throwback in the first Avengers flick.
As the title of this movie (“Civil War”) suggests, most of the screen time is dedicated to fraternal conflict among Marvel’s big screen pantheon. But not due to a misunderstanding–because of a fundamental disagreement about “oversight.”
Collateral damage caused in the previous Marvel movies has caused various globalist interests to call for “hero control” (my term, thank-you).
Iron Man, at one point a free market capitalist hero, is now more of a corporatist bleeding heart who believes the answer is for the Avengers to be leashed by the United Nations. Now there is a brilliant quantum leap in logic: collateral damage caused by saving the planet from despotic monsters must be curbed by putting the good guys under the direct control of an organization with a horrific track record, run exclusively by unelected bureaucrats who don’t believe in representative government and are not accountable to any people anywhere in any way.
Introducing, in the red, white & blue corner: the Title Character! With him are Scarlet Witch, Bucky (AKA the Winter Soldier), Hawkeye, Falcon and Ant Man,
On the other side is Captain America. He doesn’t spell it out like I did, but amazingly, he senses the danger in such an arrangement, that would make the problem they’re trying to solve even worse (which is pretty much the de facto purpose of the United Nations).
Interesting analyses can be drawn from this scenario. It can be a metaphor for the whole “gun control” struggle or, more broadly, the march toward police statehood, and the belated reaction to it by Americans who prefer to be free men, partly represented in the Trumpening. Again, it’s amazing how accurately Tony Stark and Steve Rogers represent their respective sides, considering Hollywood’s blatant myopic axe-grinding in every other movie touching on the subject.
Marvel’s done a great job with characterization and humor in their movies, and that continues here, even though this might be their most somber one yet. Suddenly there is a whole subplot regarding Stark’s parents which affects his frame of mind in this movie. Robert Downey Jr. pulls it off with his usual panache.
…And, in this corner…the Invincible Iron Man, with a record of one knockout, one not-so-bad sequel, and one idiotic swan song! Backing him up is Black Widow, Black Panther, the Vision, and War Machine.
There’s a lot of character tweaking I found annoying, as a one-time comic afficionado. Of course, I quit reading comics as they became 100% SJW converged, so a lot has probably changed since then. Black Widow is about 20X more badass than in the comics I read, but she has been that way in all the movies, because vagina. It was cool to see Black Panther on the big screen, but he punches way above his weight here, too. But the most annoying is Spiderman.
Apparently the webslinger is getting yet another reboot. This time Peter Parker has a younger, attractive Aunt May, and is given his costume by Tony Stark who, somehow, has discovered his secret identity without ever having met him. Normally Spiderman would be the heavy hitter of all the heroes in this story (when the character was introduced by Stan Lee originally, only Thor, the Thing and the Hulk were stronger), but he is reduced mostly to comedy relief. The way he was brought in, and dismissed, makes him seem like just an afterthought in the script. Too bad, because the actor played him better than any other has, IMO.
…With special guest cameo by Spiderman 3.1! Or is it Spiderman XP? Spiderman Vista?
Physical prowess is treated inconsistently in every superhero adaptation for big and small screen. Of course part of this is necessary to conform to the feminist aspect of The Narrative. Much of it is no doubt contrived to make scenes more dramatic. Then there is the star clout of Downey Jr., who frankly got more attention in this film than the title character did. Spiderman and Captain America are not played by actors worshipped to the degree he is; therefore the characters must be depicted as inferior to his, one way or the other.
In any case, most moviegoers don’t know much about the source material anyway, so this should be a fun diversion for a couple hours.
Rocky did to boxing what The Fast and the Furious did to street racing and motorsports, unfortunately.
People who have never boxed, know nothing about boxing, and would probably never voluntarily watch a fight, have all seen at least one of the Rocky movies. And because of that (plus “boxercise” and similar fads) a whole lot of them think they know something about the sport.
But I’m not here to knock the Rocky movies or the mythos they built. How can you not appreciate an underdog who overcomes much adversity; who fights on when there’s no realistic hope of success; who beats astronomical odds to achieve the most preposterous victory, yet never stops being a humble, decent guy even when on top of the world?
The franchise is full of masculine and heroic themes that resonate with red-blooded Americans–especially young men. Certain scenes from the movies are universally remembered; and certain dialog has become household cliches.
Rocky I is probably the “best” of all the franchise. My personal favorite is Rocky III. And now, even in his advance years, Rocky Balboa is still appealing to our primordial masculine instincts–this time by taking the son of Apollo Creed under his wing. The old imparting wisdom to the young–a Biblical concept that is all but forgotten as every living generation has become increasingly selfish, foolish, and mercurial.
Adonis (“Donny”) Johnson is the byproduct of an extramarital affair Apollo Creed once had. Apollo died before Donny was born. Donny’s mother did about as good a job as the average single mother in the real world does: her son has been in trouble all his life–most likely on a road to drugs, violent crime and prison or premature death.
Settle down, ladies, because it’s a woman who steers him off that path. Apollo’s widow (the one he cheated on) takes Adonis in and becomes his mother, giving him the love he needs to turn him away from self-destruction. Now this is a female role model our culture needs to see more of, instead of the obligatory amazon superninja (or action hero with tits).
The old teaching the young–as it should be.
But no matter how saintly a mother figure may be, she can never fulfill the role of a father. A young man craves a positive father figure, and anyone who says different is pushing an agenda. Absent a father and lacking wise council to focus their masculine instincts, some boys will pursue a career in sports; some will join gangs; some will join the military; some will abandon masculinity altogether and become feminists, sodomites, or gender-bent freakshows.
Adonis Creed is consistently stupid through most of the film. He endangers his girlfriend’s career and reputation by attacking some headlining rap star for calling him “Baby Creed.” He loses his classic Mustang on a sucker’s bet that he can’t be hit by a fighter with much more experience than he has. One of the first and worst moments of stupidity is when, after just getting a promotion in a some white collar job presumably with career-to-retirement potential, he flushes it down the toilet (and breaks his adopted mother’s heart, incidentally) to pursue a professional boxing career.
I can relate to that bonehead move. As a young man I turned down all the military specialties that promised an easy life and skills which translate to civilian occupations…and insisted on the infantry.
Both me and Donny’s choices were idiotic from a strictly objective viewpoint. But, silly as it sounds to put it in words, boys and young men (especially those lacking a father figure) feel a strong compulsion to immerse themselves in a masculine milleu and reclaim their lost warrior heritage (if they had one; or to start one if they didn’t).
Some boxers have died as a result of a fight, but it’s pretty rare. According to the characters in the movie, though, it seems to be commonplace. Even a trainer at Apollo’s old gym refuses to let Adonis train there, for some unexplained reason. All the possible reasons are dubious, but the audience is left to assume it’s because the trainer just knows Creed Jr. will be hurt or killed if he laces on the gloves.
While I’m on the subject of silly crap, I might as well address the fight scenes. All cinematic fight scenes are full of overly dramatic choreography, and most of the ones in this movie are no exception. What makes it stand out worse here is that some scenes show an actor throwing fundamentally sound combinations…and then in the very next shot he’s sending Western Union roundhouse Hollywood haymakers, which is the first habit a competent trainer (at the amateur level, no less) will get you to break.
In one shot an actor will slip punches, bob and weave like he’s been schooled in the sweet science. In the next shot he’s just standing there waiting to get clocked by one of those aforementioned haymakers. There would be a lot of deaths in the sport if professional fighters routinely absorbed the kind of punches that get eaten in this movie (probably all the Rocky movies, truth be told). In the scene below, it looks like they just had the actors spar, and the result was so much more believable. The movie would have benefited from more scenes like this (and this is all one shot, BTW).
Also, once Rocky begins to train Donny, the kid quantum-leaps from raw brawler to contender level. Come-on now, Hollywood, give him some experience, first. At least some tune-up fights. Even if you have to reduce it to a montage. The overall film would be no less dramatic, and would be far more credible. You can save screen time by cutting out some of the window dressing–the romantic subplot, for instance. There’s not enough substance there to be meaningful, anyway.
And then there’s old Rocky. He’s even more likeable as a has-been than he was as a Cinderella Story. But while it’s hard not to like him, it’s also hard to respect a guy who is so easily, and frequently, persuaded to do things he is dead-set against. Either he doesn’t believe his own words when he says this or that is a bad idea; or he is too weak-minded to follow his convictions. Either way, this is not the kind of man you want to be.
Like any other flick in the Rocky franchise, Creed is not a great movie for a boxing fan. But it is a memorable (perhaps even inspirational) myth for the Everyman.
Character reboots are commonplace these days. In a pop culture spectrum so bankrupt of creativity that the only movies produced anymore are remakes, sequels, adaptations (often of old TV shows that weren’t so good to begin with), thinly-disguised ripoffs of other movies (the Fast & Furious franchise started with a Point Break knockoff set in a fantasy streetracing scene; Avatar was Dances With Wolves in outer space, etc.) or an attempted fusion of previous successful movies; and the bulk of TV programming is some sort of lame “reality show” because the industry lacks the imagination to conceive anything more interesting, re-forming an established character in one’s own image is lauded as some sort of seminal breakthrough. Seems like comic book characters (one of the ores constantly mined by Hollywood) are revamped, and their histories revised, every 3-5 years.
The Social Justice League of America celebrates diversity. The blond-haired Aquaman just wasn’t inclusive enough.
Wonder Woman is a character whose essence needs no revamping to fit the current Narrative being rammed down our throats incessantly. She fit that Narrative from her very debut in the 1940s. She was probably the very first Amazon Superninja to appear in American pop culture, and from the very beginning was intended to be a social conditioning propaganda tool. But despite all this, her inclusion in Dawn of Justice doesn’t bother me much.
Wonder Woman has been a member of DC’s superteam the Justice League going way back; and was a founding member of the “Justice Society of America” before that. She was good-to-go for the leftist pop-culture svengalis already, so they didn’t have to feminize an established male character or otherwise ruin the work of earlier creators.
Perhaps it is fitting that an exotic beauty was cast to play the Amazon. After all, she comes from “Paradise Island,” an all-female society closed off from the rest of the world since ancient times. So it’s appropriate that her accent sounds different from ours, and that she doesn’t look like a WASP. (However, it appears that DC/Hollywood also intends to ethnicize the Flash and Aquaman, which is getting annoying.)
Do you imagine it’s an accident that the female is shown on point when physical combat is imminent; or that the males are merely guarding her flanks?
At some point after I quit reading comics, I guess Wonder Woman took to carrying a Bronze Age sword and shield, in addition to her golden lasso. This only makes sense, if she’s going to be fighting gargantuan baddies like Doomsday. What doesn’t make sense is that her ancient bronze shield can withstand a Kryptonian’s heat vision without a scratch, when heat vision slices through every other form of matter except other Kryptonians. Because vagina, I guess.
Another development is that her red, white and blue colors have been replaced by some muddy red-brown metal flake scheme. This also makes sense. First of all, those colors represent oppression (college girls being forced to pay for their own birth control, for instance). Remember: WW was never an American in the first place. And all the big screen superheroes wear costumes with drab color schemes. Even Superman, who has never needed camouflage or to avoid attracting attention, wears a costume that looks like it’s gone a few months without being washed.
Might be hard to see here, but the dude just to the right of her looks a lot like a Native American. Explain THAT one.
I don’t know if this ties in with comic book revisionism, or is original to this screenplay, but Wonder Woman is apparently a WWI veteran now. Bruce Wayne/Batman finds an old photograph from 1918 that shows her with an odd assortment of guerillas (in Belgium, if memory serves).
Diana Prince looks even better in the red dress when Bruce Wayne first meets her…but I couldn’t find an image of that.
Maybe the most interesting thing about Wonder Woman in this movie is how Gal Gadot’s performance fits into a red pill socio-sexual understanding. Gadot is far more attractive as Diana Prince than as the Amazon heroine. Upon reflection, it’s obvious why: she is very feminine when incognito in the secret identity, as opposed to her super-identity as an extremely masculine brawler with tits.
“I just don’t understand why I can’t get dates!”
Only fetishists, white knights and sexual deviants find such a gender-bent individual even remotely attractive; no matter how much skin she shows or how well she fills out a skimpy costume.
And I do mean “epic” in the classic sense. The Lex Luthor character (more on him later) can’t stop reminding us that Superman is a god; that he must battle against man; and Lex makes repeated references to Greek mythology that must have also been on the minds of Siegel and Schuster when they dreamed up their “super-man” some 80 years ago.
By the end of the movie, the last son of Krypton does prove himself to be a Messiah figure of sorts…again.
Mythology was certainly on Frank Miller’s mind some 30 years ago when he set about changing the Batman mythos forever. Big-screen Batman adaptations have paid homage to The Dark Knight Returns since 1989. But none more than this one. The showdown between the Man of Steel and the Caped Crusader was ripped almost directly from Miller’s mini-series. Both the catalyst and the result were different, and the Batman was determined to win this time (rather than intentionally taking a dive and faking his own death as in Miller’s yarn).
Retro Batman costume on the left; powered armor on the right which he wore to battle Superman in this movie and in Dark Knight Returns.
Also, having been something of a superhero afficionado up until the time of Dark Knight Returns, I am pretty confident that Miller was the first one to overtly depict Superman as an earth-bound god.
Dawn of Justice is a symphony of spectacular destruction with a lot going for it. First of all, as desperate as they must be to duplicate the success of their rival, DC did not cut-and-paste the Marvel Studios formula and insert their own characters. I was a little worried that a Justice League flick might be a thinly-veiled Avengers clone (and the next one might very well prove to be), so kudos to DC for telling their own story about their three all-time most stalwart characters.
Second, although there were smatterings of action along the way, the director opted for a slow, tense build toward the epic finale. It reminds me somewhat of how Akira Kurosawa paced some of my favorite samurai films, driving viewers to the edge of their seats, begging for an explosive, violent extravaganza to settle the conflict. (And boy, this movie delivers, with the stunning visuals and rip-snorting special effects comic book fans want in a film adaptation, but were simply not possible technologically until relatively recently.)
My reaction to the casting leans positive. Superman/Clark Kent was portrayed well–it’s a darker, edgier Superman than the historical model, but the actor pulls it off adequately. His physical movements do seem a bit stiff, however. The actress who plays Wonder Woman/Diana Prince also did quite well, though she is such exquisite eye candy that her acting is something of an afterthought to a red-blooded heterosexual male. I have a lot to say about her (the character, more than the actress) that I’ll probably reserve for a seperate post. And the hot topic ever since casting was first announced, of course, is Batman/Bruce Wayne. It’s really not as bad as some might fear. I would have preferred someone other than Michael Keaton in 1989; and I would have preferred someone other than Ben Affleck in 2016. However, Affleck did OK. He was much less situationally aware (especially during fight scenes) than the Batman of comic book canon…but really, all the screen versions of the character have been.
I already mentioned that the tension builds quite nicely to the climax; but the plot is not without its weaknesses. The whole thing seems like a forced contrivance if you examine it too closely. And the flashbacks/dreams/visions were a touch overdone–with the Batman, particularly. Superman does undertake a successful vision quest in the midst of the film, which I would have appreciated more, had I not already been overexposed to the unnecessary (and at one point, confusing) visions/nightmares/flashbacks of Bruce Wayne.
There were some impediments to the suspension of disbelief. For instance: if nuclear weapons work differently in this alternate universe (where masked vigilantes and “meta-humans” exist) than they do in our universe, then that should really be established beforehand.
Every director wants to put his/her “own stamp” on the material s/he’s adapting, and this movie was no exception. This is unfortunate with regards to two characters in particular.
ALFRED: Certainly the character has evolved. Again, the first and biggest step may have been in Miller’s mini-series when he revealed that the Wayne’s butler was a “combat medic” who apparently was a Wayne household staple all Bruce’s life, instead of coming on the scene after the war on crime began and discovering Bruce’s nocturnal activities later. The Gotham TV show took it another step by making Alfred a former British Commando who teaches young Bruce how to fight. And this movie picks up from there, basically turning Alfred into Batman’s command center, and at times the brains of the operation. Yawn. Maybe the transformation of Alfred into Jarvis will be completed in the next character reboot and he’ll simply be an artificial intelligence in the Batcomputer with a British accent. Neither comic book writers nor Hollywood directors ever tire of fixing what’s not broken.
MARK ZUCKERBERG I mean LEX LUTHOR: I’m not sure if the actor was trying to channel Heath Ledger’s Joker performance or Jim Carey’s abysmal Riddler interpretation. Whatever he was going for, it was lame. Luthor has historically been an evil genius, and that is how the character works best. Some left-wing “visionary” in the 1980s turned him into an evil capitalist caraciture from Karl Marx’s dystopian fantasies, and over time the criminal genius aspect of the character has been forgotten. With this movie the next step has been forced in his devolution, so that now he is an evil capitalist LUNATIC with an abusive father, tortured childhood, blah blah blah. Certainly there are supervillains which this cliche fits. Lex Luthor is not one of them.
Oh yeah: there’s also another bad choice in this category.
SOME SENATOR WITH A WEIRD VOICE: A character made necessary only by an unnecessary subplot that was tacked on and is redundant of the Batman’s motive for opposing Superman. She’s a Democrat who is the opposite of any real-life Democrat (she’s concerned about individual rights, Constitutional limitations on power, etc.) but exactly the image Democrats attempt to portray to the gullible electorate. And the masquerade usually succeeds, with the abettment of the press, academia and pop culture (including/especially Hollywood).
There’s a lot more I could say about Dawn of Justice, but this should be enough information for you to decide whether it’s worth the time and ticket price. Wonder Woman will get her own post.
Captain Capitalism is confident the latest gyno-reboot (titled Ghostbusters) will flop:
For those of us who aren’t in the echo chamber of Hollywood and the media, we see this movie for what it is – a truly inferior, slipshod affirmative action piece that is so blatant in its pandering towards “team woman” it’s pretty much insulting everybody. It’s so bad even avid consumers of “Round House Kicking Chick Cop Shows” aren’t swallowing it, as evidenced by its trailer receiving more downvotes than a Hitler speech in a synagogue.
Not only does Hollywood lack the imagination to produce anything that hasn’t already been done, but they are compelled to feminize or sodomize it in the process. I wonder if Cappy’s right about its rightful failure, though. The Force Awakens is nothing but a remake of A New Hope, feminized and with updated special effects; yet sheeple poured into theaters by the millions to further their feminist indoctrination. Same with the so-called Mad Max movie, wasn’t it?
Yes, your average American is an idiot. And yes, your average American woman can be sold a bill of goods if you merely slap the label of “rah rah female” on it. But what Sony did was take a hallmark of American culture, a genuine apolitical cinematic classic that young and old hold dear to their hearts, and shit all over it with politics.
Here I slightly disagree: the original Ghostbusters movie, if you analyze it carefully, celebrates the free market with a strong capitalist message: A team of hardworking entrepreneurs recognize an unmet need in the market; launch a business tailored to meet that need; perservere through a dry period, at first, getting the business off the ground; find their big break via a client desperate enough to try something new and radical to solve his problem; their business explodes into insane profits…then some self-important government bureacrat strangles the industry with regulation and the entire city is plunged into violent chaos as a result.
There is no way Hollywood could leave a message like that intact, even when most people fail to recognize it.
Red-Blooded American Men Examine Pop-Culture and the World
