Unfortunately most movies these days are more about "the message" than a coherent story.
But GOOD NEWS!
This weekend I actually found a use for Netflix and watched "Hustle". Adam Sandler's latest offering for the platform. It is an astoundingly good movie. Even more so because normally I'm not really into basketball.
But it was WELL written, intelligent and there were plenty of challenges for them to overcome, right down to the very last 30 seconds of the movie. Edge of the seat stuff that keeps you engaged every moment.
The thing missing from many movies these days with "the message" is that the protagonists generally have no obstacles. No problems to deal with. No hurdles to cross. No challenges. There is generally no danger to the heroes. There is just a lot of ass kicking without any preliminaries.
And that's the reason why movies mostly suck these days. It's a shame really. It's all about politics these days and making sure there is some race/gender/cultural representation (I'm saying this as a black guy).
Someone's been watching The Critical Drinker - but I totally agree with him as well :)
The lack of obstacles to overcome and the general saint-like presence of protagonists these days is miserable. It's the same thing you see in political discourse these days; if you're not COMPLETELY with us on every issue, you are a fascist devil. Can't have that in your movies so you end up with perfect moral beings with no flaws.
That's why the new Top Gun is such a monster at the box office. It's a "woke zero" movie in which you believe the characters are actually competent because you watch them train. They're believable and you want them to succeed. It's just a fantastic action movie and is even better than the original. A great reminder of what Hollywood can do when it's firing on all cylinders and isn't distracted by trying to do ideological brainwashing.
I think you're right. A lot of times in modern movies, the plot, setting, and characters exist solely to advance the ideology it is trying to push. Because ideology is a ideal of real life that almost by definition is incomplete, the plot/setting/characters feel inconsistent, and the illusion of internal logic is broken. For example, a character might do or say something that is inconsistent with reality purely in order to push a certain message, and it's really obvious what's happening. It's like if you're watching an action flick and the actor suddenly turns to the camera, smiles, and says "and that's why kids shouldn't do drugs". It pulls you out of the story -- even if you agree with the ideology.
Oh what I would give to be able to experience a world where the movie flopped. The same people claiming it was successful because it didn't try to be woke would have said it failed for being too woke (female pilots, multi-ethnic crew, unnamed enemy, etc).
That's a curious inversion of cause/effect. You're suggesting people have latched onto this movie specifically and are trying to "claim" it as non woke even though it's not? There are plenty of movies that do well at the box office yet get panned for being super woke, why this one specifically?
No no, that's all wrong. A typical Hollywood woke Top Gun Maverick would have looked very different. The movie would be oriented around a female hero who is constantly being harassed or undermined by jealous men, who then get told they're dinosaurs and a relic of a previous non-woke era. At some point a frustrated white man would attack one of the women who would inexplicably turn out to be a black belt in karate (never previously mentioned), and the much larger and stronger man would thus end up on his back within three seconds. The commanders would all have been black (instead of just one in a relatively minor supporting role), and Maverick himself would either have been Chief Dinosaur, relegated to a loser's watching position at the end for his white male crimes, or - just as likely these days - replaced by a black actor without comment.
Top Gun Maverick is being more or less universally described as a non woke film. The fact that it has women and black people in it doesn't change that, because - and this is really important - anti-woke people are not racist nor sexist. That's the core reason for the whole culture war! The racism and sexism comes from woke people who are really open that they hate "white men", yet who claim it's everyone else animated by racial/gender hatred. That's why you're struggling to understand why a film can be hailed as non-woke yet still feature a mixed cast.
Maverick is non-woke for a whole bunch of reasons. Firstly, the cast is realistic. The US military is primarily made up of American men, and most American men are white with a large minority of Latino and African-Americans. Maverick depicts this reality accurately, or at least, accurately enough for film goers to accept it as such. Most of the pilots and Navy staff are white men, with a minority who aren't. They are usually married and if they aren't, they'd quite like to be married. Likewise, although women are now allowed in historically that wasn't the case and so it seems realistic that there's only one. None of them are inexplicably better than the others for identity reasons.
Secondly, the script lacks ideology. The characters don't make speeches about how the world should be. They don't try to remake the own world in a 'better' image, mutiny for moral reasons or any other of the stock clichés of woke storytelling. The characters are just professionals who focus on training, and ultimately just soldiers, so they complete the assigned mission without asking too many questions.
This lack of ideology is not merely replacing woke ideology with another. It is a genuine lack. Although the military in question is without a doubt the American military, there is almost no USA! USA! rah-rah. Baseball talk is kept to an absolute minimum. It's not a woke leftist film, but it's also not a Republican dream movie either. The pilots just ... train and fight. It's thus very interesting that you picked the unnamed enemy as a woke script aspect because it didn't seem that way to me at all. Woke people are never shy about naming the groups they hate! It's a slightly jarring stylistic choice, at least at first, but I don't think the script could have worked any other way. For the story to make sense you have to believe they're (a) not in the middle of WW3 (b) they're fighting an enemy that doesn't have nuclear weapons and won't start WW3 if their airspace is violated and yet also (c) has more advanced fighter jet tech than the USA. There are no countries that match this set of criteria. The best match for the unnamed enemy is IMHO clearly Iran: the extreme tactics used to prevent uranium enrichment, the mountainous terrain etc. But it's unbelievable that they'd have military tech than the USA. Someone else I talked to who saw the movie thought it was clearly meant to be China. The enemy ends up being a blank slate because filling it with details would have reduced the movie's focus on the action and created irreconcilable plot holes, not because woke people are so caring and reluctant to pick a fight!
Dr Who is a good example. There has always been a message in the shows but the story took precedence. Now the message takes precedence and the story and show suffers. It's unwatchable even with the audio muted!
Terry Pratchett's work is a good example of progressive ideas told so well that the story is all that anyone cares about.
I'm actually a bit sad about Doctor Who, I've not watched it since the Capaldi era which really wound me up because he's a fantastic actor who was dealt a crap hand with crappy scripts that have crawled entirely up their own arse.
I made it through Capaldi and a season of Whitiker before quitting. How can a show keep hiring such talented actors and wasting them with such consistently garbage material? No wonder they're talking about rebooting the whole thing.
>>No wonder they're talking about rebooting the whole thing.
I am pretty sure to most fans the current era is the "reboot", and they would prefer them to go back to just before Capaldi era, start from their and pretend Capaldi/Whitiker era shows where another universe.
To me, the show's nature completely changed when Stephen Moffat took over. I really enjoyed the Ponds' story arc, but it felt like Moffat had just thrown out all of the other characters and stories that I'd grown to love before the 11th Doctor showed up. The monster-of-the-week show with the occasional through-line had become (for better or worse) a show about a multi-episode, multi-season plot. It was almost a new, different show with the same basic premise.
And then Clara came along. It's kind of like how Capaldi and Whittaker went; Jenna Coleman seems like a pretty good actress given a vacuous role. Even the character started out as an interesting twist with lots of potential for good story telling, but it seemed like Moffat couldn't quite figure out what he wanted to do with her but couldn't let her go, either. I don't remember exactly how long she was the primary companion, but it felt like an eternity (and I guess in canon, it sort of was).
Moffat wrote some of the best episodes of the Davies era. It felt like when he was put in charge of whole seasons, he applied his same writing technique to the larger scale of whole seasons. Which resulted in each individual episode being too sparse.
>Terry Pratchett's work is a good example of progressive ideas
For their day, sure. If told today, the humanising of, and sympathy with, police would get him removed from "polite" circles as surely as the creator of a wizarding franchise.
This comment reminds me a lot of The Critical Drinker on YouTube. Sometimes a bit biting, but often accurate in analyzing what went wrong in some movie's plot. One of the most egregious and frequent is having characters who basically have zero or backsliding character arcs.
He likes to do alt right click bait and I mainly ignore him these days.. like I would tag him as a leftie and I mainly agree with him in terms of how obnoxious and cynical corpo-hollywood is in its execution of inclusion and diversity (to be clear: I want more diversity in entertainment) but he does play it up quite a bit and exaggerates “the message” thing he pushes. Months ago, I watched a ten minute video/rant on Loki where he complained about forced inclusion and gender politics ruining the show.. though I finally saw the show this week and I found it to be very good and no where near as annoying as he made it out to be.
He’s part of an alt right baiting group of youtubers like Nerdroitic who all flirt with this notion of white culture being under siege. Like I don’t believe any of these guys swing that way (as in MAGA) but they like the views on their channels.
For some time YT was convinced that guy was the main thing I needed to watch (other than cooking), so I have seen a fair amount. He's generally right about plots. I wanted to think some of the more obnoxious stuff was mostly a joke, but eventually I decided he's serious about it. He may not actually be a racist, but he has convinced me he is actually a sexist. Given that, his judgment seems a bit less accurate than I thought initially.
Others may disagree. The last straw for me was his review of "Captain Marvel". Granted, that is not a great movie. I watched it after seeing one or more of his five reviews of the film (at this point I'm not sure which it was?), however, and his complaints didn't really seem to apply. Or maybe they applied, but not really in the emphatically gendered way he seems to think? Annoying male characters are just annoying, but somehow annoying female characters are the downfall of society? Really? You do realize that typically the same writer is writing characters of both sexes?
Yeah I find myself agreeing with him when it comes down to studio meddling or missed opportunities but his commentary on anything related to feminism or gender related issues/casting is a mixed bag.
Like his whole thing about “the message” misses the forest for the trees. Yeah, Hollywood, in particular the gatekeepers controlling content for Science Fiction and Fantasy, are obnoxious and breaking many beloved franchises but the real problem is that mainstream entertainment could never become the hero we need to advance culture because the industry is inherently corrupt and greedy anyways and, in the main, disinterested in high art and culture. How could the engineers of disposable, crowdpleasing entertainment ever with a straight face pretend to be educators and philosophers? Anyone who finds hollywood lacking should consider moving on to art house cinema and literature. The endless whining peppered with unaware sexism is pretty lame. If the critical drinker really cared he’d use whatever cultural cache he has to steer his audience towards good things.
He just posts what gets him views. Most of his criticism is way blown out of proportion. I think you're looking too much in it. When someone has an opinion, it doesn't mean he is left or alt right..
It seems like these creators and others like Tim pool, have found a sizeable niche audience that really supports them (in part they are alienated by the mainstream and the alt right welcomes them).
It’s weird how hippies have become conservatives if they didn’t go woke.
>>It’s weird how hippies have become conservatives if they didn’t go woke.
Except they dont... Conservative has a very specific political meaning, and to consider everyone that is "not woke" either conservative or alt-right shows a massive ignorance of the political landscape
Classic Liberal, or libertarian people still exist, we are here. The 1990's and 00's the battle was against conservatives wanting ti suppress speech, blame violence on video games, and all other manner of BS.
Today it seems the far left has also taken up the mantra of speech suppression, and blame video games for all manner of social ill's,
It is the Horseshoe Theory of politics manifest in reality..
One can be "not woke" and at the same time, not conservative...
the " sizeable niche audience" is actually the sane people, the middle of the road people, the people that think both Extreme Conservatives, and Extreme "Leftists" are crazy....
As a bike riding, pot smoking, liberty minded hippie, perhaps becoming was the wrong word, but I have more in common with conservatives than the progressive activists.
When you say “except they don’t” and I am part of that group that has, my existence proves you wrong. But perhaps it was just my poor use of language
The key is in the way you're looking at it:
"I have more in common with conservatives than the progressive activists"
You didn't compare conservative activists with progressive activists, or conservative activists with progressives.
If you're comparing the mainstream views of one side with the extremes of the other, (or worse: a caricature of the other side that you've been told about) then of course you're going to find the other more extreme.
No I’m seeing the mainstream left get bullied into becoming the activist left and the moderate leftists like myself are now suddenly closer on the spectrum to moderate conservatives, because the bulk of the left wing went to the left extreme.
Leftists, following Marx, have material concerns. They DGAF about video games or pronouns. Perhaps "progressives" is the word to use, because there certainly is a noisy group of identity politicians who have sold what little dignity they once possessed to Capital, and we do need something to call them. Selling one's dignity to capitalists and war pigs is not a leftist thing to do, so they certainly aren't "far left".
you are correct in that they are a distinct group, however even if they are "selling out to capital" which I don't think they are, they are still very much Authoritarian Socially, and "left" Economically
So while they "Cultural Marxists" or Identity Marxists as they call themselves, may be different from your preferred economic marxism, they are still IMO part of the "far left Authoritarian" quadrant of say the political compass
Does anyone call herself an "Identity Marxist"? I suspect actual cultural Marxists like Lukács, Gramsci, Benjamin, or Hall would be quite interested in studying the phenomenon of applying that label to people who have never considered the ownership of the means of production.
This is a problem with this whole line of thinking. We should be able to criticize identity politics as it is, for its excess and harmful effects. (Likewise, we should be able to praise it, for any praiseworthy qualities it might be observed to have.) Shoehorning in an association with Marxism is either a rhetorical crutch or a baseless slur. Marxism isn't a synonym for "bad"; it is a particular school of criticism.
I might be able to live with the term "Identity Stalinists"...
He makes some decent points but I can't watch his content without cringing at the persona he makes use of. I find it very painful, but I guess it has an audience. I can also imagine people saying the same thing about redlettermedia, which I do enjoy.
He ruined movies and series for me. I now keep seeing horrific mistakes. like: The team of heroes has 1 character without a back story so he was designed to die.
His zone is mainstream hollywood action movies, for every brilliant action movie that gets it you’ll have like 100 BS ones. I think what really annoys me about the critical drinker, and others like him on youtube, is that his essays focus on complaining about the most common denominator mainstream entertainment with very little awareness of art house films or international cinema. It seems that all he wants are cooler action movies.. which, yeah me too for sure but the criterion collection/channel is a thing as well.
I’m not feeling his complaining in general. He’d be easier to love if he would champion some cool underground films like Film Comment or whatever will.
But GOOD NEWS!
This weekend I actually found a use for Netflix and watched "Hustle". Adam Sandler's latest offering for the platform. It is an astoundingly good movie. Even more so because normally I'm not really into basketball.
But it was WELL written, intelligent and there were plenty of challenges for them to overcome, right down to the very last 30 seconds of the movie. Edge of the seat stuff that keeps you engaged every moment.
The thing missing from many movies these days with "the message" is that the protagonists generally have no obstacles. No problems to deal with. No hurdles to cross. No challenges. There is generally no danger to the heroes. There is just a lot of ass kicking without any preliminaries.
And that's the reason why movies mostly suck these days. It's a shame really. It's all about politics these days and making sure there is some race/gender/cultural representation (I'm saying this as a black guy).