Friday, May 27, 2022

Jar Jar Abrams or Jew Jew Binks?

Although Jar Jar Abrams seems to be the go-to reference to him among the pseudo-squishy pop culture commentariat on YouTube, e;r has the much more biting Jew Jew Binks nickname for him. In any case, it appears his charmed career may be coming to an end, and he's been thrown under the bus by the Hollywood Reporter. I saw this first on Overlord DVD, who was positively gloating over it, but Clownfish TV has done a report on it as well. Here's the article, for those who missed it a day or two ago:

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/demimonde-on-the-bubble-as-warner-bros-discovery-puts-pressure-on-j-j-abrams-1235153965/

Whatever a "Demimonde" is supposed to be. Overlord DVD, who's a pretty good source for this kind of thing—although his histrionic anger comes across as showmanship moreso than genuine, and he has the squishy, obnoxious habit of constantly have to make caveats to establish his bonafides with leftist morality, which he clearly accepts without question—calls Abrams nothing more than a con man or a grifter and compares him to Harry Hill selling defective band instruments. While I appreciate the much older pop culture reference and think its cool that he thought his audience might catch it, I do have to point out that Abrams and his teams of Bad Robot people aren't totally talentless. Alias, when it came out, was a pretty decent show, and I suspect that it still holds up relatively well were you to try and watch it again today. The Kurztman/Orci Hawaii 5-0 reboot was pretty cool too, at least for the first few seasons. While I don't love movies like Cloverfield or Super 8, I don't think they're terrible either.

To be fair, I'm not really much of a TV guy. Keeping up with long-running shows is a lot of effort for not enough payoff for me, although I do admit that that's a personal affectation. And even Abrams' "good" movies just don't really play to my tastes.

It's also true, as Overlord says, that much of the more recent product from Bad Robot has been terrible. They can be directly saddled with having ruined both Star Wars and Star Trek as viable franchises, although I suspect that if they hadn't done so, that someone else would have anyway, because Kathleen Kennedy and her Paramount counterpart are terrible people who would have engaged someone else just as terrible. Matt Reeves, another Bad Robot alum, made The Batman which, while competently and in fact artistically and stylistically extremely well made ultimately didn't attract me, and in fact pissed me off and turned me off of future projects involving DC. Not because the movie was bad, but because it deliberately had a ham-handed subtext of hatred and vitriol towards white men.

The real question to me is; what triggered this perception of weakness at Bad Robot that allowed the SJW piranhas to start a feeding frenzy on them and have them thrown under the bus, as opposed to circling the wagons and attempting to defend them?

UPDATE: As an aside, and speaking of YouTube commentariat, I have never once had any interest in any Minecraft video of any kind whatsoever. Why in the world is Youtube convinced that I must really want to watch some stupid Minecraft "I built XYZ in hardcore mode" video? They just never go away no matter how many times I click "never recommend this channel." The algorithm just can't seem to believe me that I don't want to see anything Minecraft related. Oh, and by the way, just because I've watched Street Fighter or SWTOR videos doesn't mean that I care about Minecraft, or Elden Ring, or any other video game at all whatsoever.

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