David Ellison races to rebuild Paramount's mountain of content [i.e., disrupting Woke Hollywood]

I spend a lot of time sifting through the streamers’ catalogues to find the occasional nugget amid all the dross. It’s a slog but sometimes rewarding.

Good question. Even without WBD, the new Paramount Skydance is big enough to shake things up. There’s no assurance that Ellison will be able to acquire WBD, and Davis Zaslav was already moving towards breaking up WBD and spinning off the weak links. The art of that deal would have been to shift as much debt as possible onto the spinoff, freeing cashflow for Warner HBO. We’ll have to wait and see.

A relative outsider swooping in to snag a couple of the industry’s giants would be big, but the new company will still be subject to many of the same dynamics that have turned the streaming experiment into a debacle. It will still be a huge company that is fundamentally in the subscription business and chasing content for global audiences. Ellison already bought the rights to UFC matches because that’s what companies with synergies on their minds do.

I long for the days when the people running movie studios were laser focused on making movies and selling tickets to real theater audiences, not channel surfing couch potatoes. And when NFL, NBA, and college football and basketball rights weren’t the corporate Holy Grail. Ellison seems to want to make movies that don’t alienate everyone to the right of woke, but that’s just a start.

We’re looking forward to it.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt31495504/

I think “Woke Hollywood” is forever lost to political insanity...

My biggest concern, since I haven’t wasted time at the movies since Godfather II, is whether we will ever get the Doctor back to acceptable sanity...

“Der Tiger” looks quite interesting.

I’m one of those content to watch the golden oldies. There are so many of them out there I’d never seen in all kinds of genres.

The cell phone screen IS the culture now, and as Malcolm McLuhan so famously coined “The medium is the message”. In its relentless struggle for clicks it just keeps getting weirder and more violent. No thanks.

I would not for an instant dream of criticizing anyone’s personal viewing preferences. Each to his own. The culture war question, however, is much broader. Adults are watching a lot of sketchy material, but they are at least adults. The bigger question is what are the younger people watching? They are glued to screens, large and small.

I wish we could find a way to put that genie back in the bottle. Maybe we should at least prohibit access to smartphones until the age of 35, though I don’t know how we could enforce that. Maybe we should accept that government, or Google or Microsoft or whoever is standing up the next generation of AI should be the gatekeeper, censoring all online content ... uh, on second thought, maybe not. But given that the rising generations, for better or worse (a rhetorical aside; it’s a catastrophe), are spending more time immersed in the pixelverse than in any other domain, the question is important. WHAT are they watching, and WHO is guiding/manipulating/corrupting them?

If we approach those questions as Certified Right Wing Culture Warriors, we become critics. And critics really should actually watch the content that they are applauding or denouncing.

It’s an ancient question: “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” And Juvenal surely was not the first to whom the question occurred; he just wrote it down in a pithy way.

Would you trust a pastor who had never read the Bible and was entirely unaware of the classic objections, differing interpretations, and the orthodox responses — i.e., who was totally oblivious to apologetics? He might have spent six months in BillyBob’s Bible College and be filled with the spirit, and he might thunder from the pulpit, but that doesn’t mean that he knows what he’s talking about and is a reliable guide. How far back do we want to track that argument? How about radical subversives like Martin Luther, who thought the hierarchy of the Church had fallen into deep corruption, and that everyone should be able to read the Bible for himself and make up his own mind? But to do that, one actually has to read the source material and form an independent judgement. That leads to many potential pitfalls, and we are off to the races.

Would we trust a history teacher (beyond the elementary grades at least) who refuses to look at source material, takes Howard Zinn as authoritative, and simply regurgitates lesson plans handed to him by the woke educrats in the state Propaganda Ministry?

This is central to the culture war. In the last century, “fascist” became Stalin’s term of anathema for anyone who disagreed with the party line, which could turn 180 degrees overnight and get you a bullet in the back of the head if you didn’t get the change order in time. In the U.S., “racist” took over the heavy lifting, and anyone who disagreed with the current democrat race hustling grifter got branded a racist.

The rainbow coalition saw the opening and took it. If the SPLC could brand anyone as a racist and have government, academia, and big corporations take it on faith, why not annoint the Human Rights Campaign as the gatekeeper and enforcer?

These aren’t abstract and arcane questions. Right now, LeftWorld is full of people celebrating or at least rationalizing Charlie Kirk’s murder because he was hateful, racist, advocating genocide against trans people, etc. ad nauseum. How do they know this? Well, they read it online and feel no need whatsoever to engage with anything Charlie Kirk actually said, beyond a sentence here and there yanked out of context and grotesquely misinterpreted by some professional liar.

We have a boomlet of support for socialism among young people who think AOC and now Zohran Mamdani are reliable authorities, so they never need to engage with anyone on the other side. Europe, and to a lesser extent the U.S., are being overrun with Islamic invaders who listen to mad mullahs who preach beheading infidels and putting women in burqas lest they excite lascivious thoughts among men. (Maybe the Saudis could buy Disney and put the mullahs in charge ....)

Yes, there’s a very long way between that and the Hays Code, and I’d be comfortable with the Hays Code. At least the Hays Code people actually watched the movies they were evaluating, which is more than some of our current conservative Christian gatekeepers seem to be willing to do. The Hays Code, let us remember, largely overlapped the Hollywood Golden Age. But I’m not a Puritan zealot who would shut down the theater entirely and ban Shakespeare because drama can be corrupting. Heck, we’d have to get rid of all them dead Greeks and Norse mythology as well.

What people choose to watch themselves is their business. But people who jump into the public forum, which is now online, and start to anathematize movies and shows they’ve never watched are edging into problematic territory. A year or so after I started the movie ping list, I made a New Year’s resolution to actually watch something before I criticized it. I’ve watched a number of things in the spirit of opposition research. Sometimes I’ve discovered that the online chatter is missing something. Other times, said movie or show has lived down to my expectations. But I’m going to aim before I shoot.

I don’t have any delusions of grandeur about my status as a critic. But I understand the principle ... and I cringe at self-styled critics, some writing for prominent online sources (the Rotten Tomatoes critics’ list, for example, has gone entirely off the rails), who have clearly missed major plotlines and the subtext of movies that I really liked and they obviously don’t understand. Sometimes, it’s pretty obvious they’ve not even watched it themselves; this comes up especially when they’re covering a film festival and have just done 15 films in four days. Some of them start cheating and cribbing from other people’s reviews.

I know I’m stretching the comparisons to the limit to illustrate the issue, and you will probably respond that movies and tv shows aren’t important enough to be worth the effort. And for you, they might not be. But they are molding the next generation. If we are going to critique them, we have to have scouts out on patrol to assess them, and if we don’t want to do that ourselves, we should at least read a range of reviews, enough to see what the fuss is about. But since the reviewers will disagree ....

And since politics is downstream of culture and movies, shows and online content of all descriptions are important molders of culture today, we need to recognize that we can’t beat something with nothing. We need to build a strong, compelling counterculture that can hold until the tide turns. To do that, we need situational awareness and engagement.

Mainly, on FR, I just wish we spent more time recommending good shows and movies, as opposed to flaming flaming stuff based on online chatter. The saving remnant in the industry who are doing good work need viewers and support if they’re going to survive in a Netflix-Disney-Amazon-Apple dominated world.

I’m sorry, with all due respect, that is way beyond the scope of the discussion.

Willfully and intentionally exposing yourself to pornography / sexually explicit materials and in effect encouraging others to do so is generally not regarded as reflecting Christian centered beliefs and values, and this article is written in that context with the leadership of a supposed Christian organization both watching and promoting said materials. How “good the story is”, etc. is rather irrelevant.

That is the entire point of the article.

Before you are confused by the above, I was tagged here as a response to what was posted here: https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-religion/4340955/posts