Hollywood Goes Hollywoke—And Pays The Price

At a time when parents are waking up to the threat of critical race theory in schools, Hollywood is doubling down on it.

In fact, they’re eating their own. Just read the primary criticism of the latest work of Lin-Manuel Miranda—a man who literally cast black and Hispanic actors as America’s founding fathers in Hamilton: the actors playing Dominican characters aren’t dark enough.

After catering to a smaller and smaller group of coastal elites, La-La Land is finally collapsing into itself under the weight of the political left’s own contradictions.

It’s not enough for the left to set the agenda. They also have to rewrite the past—even some of the finest work Hollywood has ever produced.

Gone with the Wind? Removed from streaming services for its depiction of slavery.

Peter Pan, Dumbo, The Aristocats, and Swiss Family Robinson? Disney blocked them for users younger than seven years old.

Of course, when an industry caters to a smaller and smaller group of political radicals, they lose most of their customers.

Even before the pandemic, box office revenues were declining. Take away the handful of superhero sequels, remakes, and reboots that studios release and it gets ugly fast.

Hollywood’s premier event, the Academy Awards, used to be a night on which studios, stars, and the rest of us shared a common cultural moment.

But it has morphed into an unwatchable, self-congratulatory, virtual-signaling, leftist rally in which critics and corporations alike fall all over each other to win “Wokest of the Year” awards.

After drawing over 20 million Americans last year, fewer than 10 million Americans watched it this year.

We've gravitated to foreign films, mostly Asian like Korean and Japanese.

Good point. I've been using the term "Hollywood" generically to refer to the film industry. That's sloppy on my part, although the industry is now so globalized in terms of financing, production and distribution that national labels are getting tricky. The streaming networks now dominate distribution. They are competing as global platforms for global audiences and they are buying up content from around the world. The question becomes how much control the distributor asserts over writing, casting, direction and editing. How far do the Borg's tentacles extend? That will depend on how early in the process Netflix or Amazon or one of their competitors gets involved. Do they get in early and get involved in greenlighting the project and influencing production decisions, or do they buy a well developed or perhaps even finished product off the shelf? It happens both ways. I'm not going to go look up the figure now, but Netflix earlier this year announced a staggering sum for production acquisition. It will be vacuuming up content from around the world and presenting it as "Netflix originals." What exactly that means will vary on a case by case basis.

I'm not interested in bickering with other freepers on this topic. Not so long ago, I was among those who had pretty much written off Hollywood and was as apt as many here to go off on rants about the culture war provocations churned up by the usual Hollywood suspects. Then I followed some links -- starting pretty far afield, on non-film topics -- and came across a reference to the effective use of Columbus, Indiana's modernist architecture in a film.

I grew up about 50 miles away from Columbus. I had taken the Columbus tour many years ago, back when my parents thought my horizons needed expanding. I know the backstory, which is quite interesting. My first reaction was "how the heck can someone get a movie out of Columbus' architecture?" My second reaction was, "How does a movie this good get made -- on a subject that interests me -- and I've never heard a whisper about it?" And as a Hoosier expat who has always regarded Hoosiers and Breaking Away as the two best "Indiana movies," I wanted to check it out for parochial reasons. I have never been more surprised by a movie in my life.

That led to the thought that maybe I had been looking in the wrong places. I followed more links, read some reviews, started checking the "most overlooked" and "most underrated" lists, started watching trailers, and gradually came to realize that there are far more good films being made than I had realized. Hollywood's publicity machine is so heavily oriented towards sensationalist garbage that the industry is effectively hiding its best stuff.

That's a marketing and branding issue, and I wish I had a solution for it. I think the pendulum will surely swing back, but in the meantime, it's important -- in film and elsewhere -- to support the good stuff that is still being made. There are conservatives in Hollywood who need all the support they can get. But hanging a scarlet C around someone's neck and being openly political isn't the best way to fight back. Whatever their personal politics, there are many filmmakers and actors who don't want to be turned into propaganda bots by virtue signaling, PC twits in the executive suite. They want to make intellectually and emotionally honest films. If they can do that, our perspectives will get their innings. Honest liberals can make tonally conservative films.

My hope is that people will get into the habit of doing a little research; at least watch some trailers and read a few reviews. Start with the films mentioned in this thread. Several people have mentioned some films of which I've not heard. I keep a list. I will at least watch a trailer and see if I like the characters and tone.

Here's the trailer for Columbus. Fair warning: there are no explosions, car chases, zombies, Nazis, terrorists, sex scenes or comic book superheroes in spandex tights, and nobody dies. If you can handle that, you will see a lovely, thoughtful movie (deliberately slow paced and beautifully shot), with one of the most magical acting jobs you will ever see. Columbus

I offer this as an example because Columbus was my "hey dummy" moment. If you're an adrenaline junkie, start with Death of Stalin. Or Chernobyl. Or whatever. Explore a bit.

What kind of people make movies like this? Glad you asked: Kogonada Rotterdam Film Festival interview

Since I've thrown down the gauntlet, I will promise to invest two minutes to at least watch a trailer for any serious recommendation any freeper wants to make.

Netflix is a content firehose. Some of it is good. The problem is finding it. What is pumped at me on the landing page is usually dreary, repetitive, and too often burdened with Hollywood PC nonsense. If I know what I’m looking for, it’s easy enough to search for it, but I have to know it’s there first. That’s the branding and marketing problem. The good films are often hiding in plain sight, obscured by the clouds of lowest common denominator junk being pushed at mass audiences.

I never bothered to explore good search engines until I started reading reviews and trying to track down more obscure films. That led to Roku and the information box on Letterboxd that tells where films are showing. They don’t show everything, but they have certainly extended my field of vision significantly.

Even if a film isn’t available for free through a subscription, it’s usually a cheap rental. There have only been a couple of films in the last two or three years that I have not been able to find anywhere. It’s a whole new world once one has the ability to search across platforms.

Is there any particular service that you use for the Korean and Japanese films? And where do you find good recommendations? There are also good films coming out of Eastern Europe, which could educate Hollywood about communism if Hollywood would pay attention, but how much of it is picked up for the U.S. market, I don’t know. Even in a global streaming environment, someone has to decide a foreign film is worth dubbing or providing subtitles, and that it will have enough appeal to be leased for a foreign market.

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