The End of Hollywood

There is a new moviemaker on the block and it's called Seedance.  Just a few minutes of watching what it can produce shows that $100 million movies are not long for the world.  Sure, there are clunky bits, but imagine what it will be like next year, or the year after.  We are on the cusp of where anyone can make a blockbuster quality film with just the correct series of prompts.  Behold the possibilities.  Any actor in any setting with crazy effects and essentially a limitless budget.

Academy Awards for Obscure Movies

Yes, it is that time again and the academy has nominated the best films of 2021.  The runaway winner in pure number of nominations is that blockbuster film: The Power of the Dog.  As I'm sure everyone knows, this stellar film has earned nearly $55,000 at the box office.  No, that is not a misprint.  Just 55 thousand dollars and it has garnered 12 nominations.  Impressive.  Of the 10 movies nominated for best picture, I have seen two.  Best director: 0.  Best Actor: 0.  Best Actress: 0.  What is the point of watching an award show about movies I didn't see?  In fact, most people didn't see.

According to Box Office Mojo, here are the rankings of the best pictures by ticket sales:

The top twelve films don't merit recognition from the academy.  Even among the chosen few, the dwindling audience share is dramatic.  Three times as many people have seen Dune compared to West Side Story.  Twice as many have seen West Side Story compared to King Richard.  Despite these numbers, the champ on this list is at the very bottom with virtually no audience beyond the academy itself.  The biggest movie of the year, Spider-Man: No Way Home, received one nomination: Best Visual Effects.

I enjoyed Dune.  I didn't enjoy Nightmare Alley.  The rest are a mystery to me.

Cancel Culture on the Brink

Though no fan of Sean Penn's politics, he had some choice words for the current trend in casting.  Regarding his role as Harvey Milk, he commented:

Today, almost certainly, I would not be permitted to be cast in that role. We’re living in a time where if you’re playing a gay lead character, you would have to be a gay man. And there have been these casting issues. In terms of finding the balance — you have a period of evolution that certainly has an opportunity for people who have had less opportunities to move forward, that has to be supported.

Yes, it has progressed far enough that a Hugo Chavez cheerleader is having second thoughts about identity politics.  Here's the key quote:

And yet, in this pendulum-swinging society that we’re in, you wonder at some point if only Danish princes can play Hamlet

That's both funny and illustrative.  However, it isn't true.  We have seen plenty of off-type casting in these cases.  Anne Boleyn has recently been played by a black actress.  Lancelot was played by a black actor.  The atrocious Mary Queen of Scots (2018) was filled with anachronistic casting.  It was entirely okay, even commendable, to have black and Asian actors portraying historical figures who were white, but it was racially insensitive for a white actor - Hank Azaria - to merely voice a fictional Indian-American cartoon character, Apu.  This is a one-way street.  Sean Penn is on the wrong side of that street or he would, even now, not have protested.

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019)

Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio) is a B actor whose career is starting to fade.  His one time staring credit in a popular western TV series - Bounty Law - now gets him guest appearances as the bad guy du jour.  His long time stuntman, Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt), serves as his driver, handyman, and best friend.  It just so happens that Rick lives next door to Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate.

The movie reminded me of Hail Caesar!  The setting is the main character and all the actions just offer more details of a specific time.  Tarantino is celebrating late 60s Hollywood in this movie, offering a deep dive into the era through the main characters.  Behold the nostalgia.

Pitt and DiCaprio are excellent in their roles and, though most of the movie has little to nothing to do with the climax, it is always fun and engaging.  After watching this, I wanted to go rent the 14 Fists of McCluskey and check out a couple episodes of Bounty Law.

Definitely worth seeing though I'm not sure I'd say anything here is Oscar material.  Well, set design is pretty impressive.

Thumbs up.

Comrade Detective

This Amazon series tells the tale of a pair of Romanian detectives investigating a murder.  The murderer wears a Ronald Reagan mask.  It is presented as a remastered and dubbed version of a 1980s TV show from the other side of the Iron Curtain.  It plays as communist propaganda, often hilariously so.  In one episode, the detectives tangle with an insane cult: Christianity.  In another, women run wild through the streets trying to get Jordache jeans.  A capitalist tries to explain Adam Smith's invisible hand and sounds like Gordon "Greed is good" Gecko from Wall Street.  Pepsi, VHS tapes, pop music, and more litter the series.  The sympathetic American character says she loves America despite the fact that everyone has AIDS, the violence, the starvation, the poverty, etc.  Oh, and she is really going to miss the wonderful food in Romania and the super sexy men.  It is the sort of ham-fisted propaganda one would expect from the Communists, which is why it is funny.

 

The makers were inspired by 80s movies where Soviets and Communists were frequent foes and decided to make a show from the other side of the Cold War.  What is sad is that, silly as it is, the faux makers have an abiding love for Romania and Communism.  Modern American filmmakers don't show anything like this love of country.  That's sad.  Modern movies are far more likely to focus on America's warts and scars than celebrate its beauty and achievements.  As an experiment, I typed 'pro-American Hollywood movies' to see what returned and picked the first result.  The Majestic - a movie where the House Un-American Activities Committee is the bad guy - made the cut as pro-American.  Okay.  The Kingdom, a movie that draws a moral equivalence between Islamic terrorists and the FBI Agents who hunt them down, made the list.  Shooter, a movie about corrupt government officials framing a patriot for a political assassination, made the list.  Black Hawk Down, a movie about a disastrous military engagement in Somalia, made the list!  By that standard, Midway - a movie about America defeating the Japanese navy during World War II - could be on a pro-Japanese movie list.  Ha!  The pool is SO bad that these qualify as pro-American.

 

It is tragic that the anti-Americanism and pro-Communist propaganda that is played for laughs in Comrade Detective is played seriously in Trumbo.

Safe House

I recently saw the 2013 movie and was less than impressed.  The story opens with Tobin Frost (Denzel Washington) being pursued by unknown assailants in South Africa.  He manages to escape into the US Embassy.  It is here that we learn he is an infamous traitor who has sold US Intelligence secrets for a decade.  A team is sent to interrogate him but they first transfer him to a safe house that is maintained by Matt Weston (Ryan Reynolds).  Weston questions the legality of the interrogation when Frost is water boarded.  The interrogation has hardly begun when the very assailants who chased Frost into the embassy attack the safe house.  The interrogation team is all killed and it is left to Weston to escape with Frost and find another safe house.  Of course, Frost is less than keen on resuming the interrogation at another site and escapes.  Disgraced and his career likely over, Weston ignores orders to stand down and starts tracking Frost.

 

The movie is entertaining as it goes along.  There are exciting action scenes, filled with instances where Weston and Frost become allies in the face of the unknown assailants and then enemies again.   It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that there is a mole in the CIA who leaked the location of the safe house.  The movie offers several potential leakers though it is pretty obvious all along.  And that leads to the moral of this movie: American Intelligence is evil and Tobin Frost was a hero for his treason.  Yes, the traitor is the hero.  And Matt Weston follows in his footsteps to become the new Tobin Frost.

 

Why must we have movies where the United States is the bad guy?  Sure, I understood that Hollywood would have the US be bad guys during the Bush Administration; Hollywood is populated by Democrats.  However, we've had Obama for years and still America is portrayed as bad and corrupt.  The best thing that a patriot could do for the country is to commit treason.  It sometimes appears that Hollywood is the propaganda arm of a hostile foreign power.