Movies

Because I was traveling last Friday, and because my wife loves movies and had the day off, she spent the entire day at the theatre watching movies that mostly I wasn't interested in. See, actually I love movies too, but I've become very jaded and cynical about most movies made in the Woke Era, and I've actively been turned off from seeing franchises like Star Wars or Marvel anymore. So, she gambled that I wouldn't want to see any of the movies that she had slated, except maybe the last one, which I actually had time to finish driving, get home, and go meet her at the theatre to see with her. Her itinerary, annotated by me.

Elvis. I'd actually heard relatively good things about this movie, and wouldn't have minded seeing it. She thought it was pretty mediocre and won't want a repeat viewing, however. Granted, she doesn't really like any kind of musical all that much on principle with the exception of animated Disney movies. And even those have mostly disappointed her in the last several years, although she's loath to admit it. It's possible that I'd appreciate this movie more than she did. Possibly. But maybe not. My excitement was more along the lines that I'd heard good enough things about it that maybe it was a movie I could see with her and not hate myself for watching. If she doesn't even want to see it with me, then there's not much point in me watching it just for me.

Thor: Love and Thunder. She didn't like this. I didn't expect to like anything at all about it either. For all of the reasons that nobody else is liking it; it tries too hard to be funny all of the time without actually being so, Thor himself is a big, dumb character who goes through the exact same story arc over and over again movie after movie, and nobody else is likeable either. And the plot is stupid beyond all reason.

I don't think she even caught the post-credits scene where Jewish Hercules is introduced. Ironically, he's supposed to be the likeable dumb jock of the Marvel Universe (who is now inexplicable gay in the comics... but who reads those anyway?) Thor has been unexpectedly saddled with Herc's personality in the movies, but Herc will probably not suffer indignation after indignation like Thor has had to; i.e., he'll get the more classic Thor personality. After all, Thor is white and Herc is Jewish and was raised in a strip club, so he's clearly morally superior. Nevermind that the actual ancient Greeks weren't nearly as Levantine genetically as the current ones are, and Homer constantly describes blond and red haired Greek heroes. Meanwhile, Jewish Herc didn't even have to bulk up to take the part. He looks like a piker compared to Chris Hemsworth. Sigh.

Where the Crawdads Sing. While I appreciate the correct usage of the word crawdad, I expect is was deliberate to evoke a bumpkin Southerner outlook by the smug author. That said, my wife said that this was a more interesting than expected murder mystery. Where I expected a chick-flick, that's not what she described, or what a viewing of the trailer suggests either. Maybe it's a murder chick-flick like Fried Green Tomatoes? I dunno. I might actually sit down and watch this with her at some point later.

Minions: The Rise of Gru. We were both pleasantly surprised when we went to see Bad Guys (I mean, I'm 50 and she's 49, and our youngest kid is 18.) It was actually quite charming and well done. We're not too proud to watch a movie made for kids if its charming. We'd always enjoyed the Despicable Me series so far well enough, but she said this one doesn't really live up to the legacy; it's pretty mediocre.

The Gray Man. This is the one that I saw with her. It'll be available for Netflix streaming in a couple of days, so when my 20-year old son is back in town briefly between college semesters, I'm going to sit down with him and watch it. It's a Russo Brothers production, and my son does follow Hollywood specific people and the Russo Brothers are on his very narrow watch-list. I think he'll enjoy it. Ryan Gosling plays the titular Gray Man, a super-spy of sorts who ends up on the wrong side of a corrupt CIA director. Chris Evans plays himself, just as he did in Knives Out, except this time more violent. Ana de Armas is completely unconvincing as an American agent with a super-strong Cuban accent; although I will say that the action scenes, while over-the-top, didn't make me roll my eyes at her stronk wamman approach; I was able to suspend my disbelief as well watching her beat people up as I was watching Gosling to the same. I actually quite liked this movie, and recommend it, in spite of my flippant comments here. 

My favorite moments, and minor spoiler alerts for the rest of this paragraph here, were watching Chris Evans get his fingers blown off with a flare gun fired by a 13-year old girl, watching Chris Evans get his head smashed into a giant flower pot, watching Chris Evans getting choked out, watching Chris Evans get shot and watching Chris Evans' dead body floating in a fountain.

While there's still obviously lots of garbage in the pipeline coming from Hollywood, because the lead-time for a movie is many years, I think the tide has turned on Wokeness in movies. There has developed a wide-spread acceptance of the idea that woke movies are big flops now, and everytime one does, normal people everywhere point at it and laugh (Lightyear) while notably non-woke movies like the Top Gun sequel are making super-huge bank, even without catering to the Chinese market. It'll take some time for the ship to turn, but I think in general, the "powers that be" have started spinning the wheel at least in an attempt to start the process.

Or maybe that's just wishful thinking. Hollywood is, after all, merely a mouthpiece for the greater Cloud People cult of hating the Dirt People and wanting to see them suffer in any way possible.

UPDATE: As an aside on the Love and Thunder debacle, which is about pagan gods getting their comeuppance in a not very transparent swipe at religion overall, I tend to like the Survive the Jive channel on YouTube, but he hasn't done much lately, and he seems to be talking more and more about paganism rather than history and prehistory. He posted a conference speech he gave, which I watched a few minutes of, and it was curious to see him specifically thank Ing and Woden, his two patron gods, for making it all happen. The modern neo-pagan movement is, to me, somewhat bizarre. I get it and yet don't at the same time. I understand people; especially frustrated, increasingly disenfranchised and dispossessed white men, wanting to get in touch with their ancestors and their beliefs, but the idea that we can create a meaningful pagan belief system out of what little we know about what the pagan Anglo-Saxons (or even the pagan Vikings) actually believed is ludicrous. It'd be like trying to recreate Christianity with a few dozen scattered pages from the Bible. It's hard for me to believe that modern neo-pagans like Rowsell from Survive the Jive honestly believe in the existence of the same pagan gods that their pagan Anglo-Saxon ancestors supposedly prayed to, and if they do, then they certainly know very little about what those ancestors thought or believed about them, or how they related to their lives. Neo-paganism is a somewhat desperate and pathetic attempt, well-meaning in some ways though it may be, to connect with our ancestors in a society that constantly attempts to villainize our ancestors. It's little more than ancestor worship by proxy; repeating rituals and phrases and boutique beliefs without any understanding of whatever context our ancestors may have attached to them (to the extent that we have anything to repeat, and aren't just making stuff up anyway.) Embracing a pagan identity today seems more about making a political and social statement that you reject modernity and it's sterile hatred of anything white than it does about having a real spiritual belief system such as what one expects from a normal religion.

It's kind of the opposite situation of the other pagan movement of the last few decades, the Wiccan and Wiccan-like movement. Those pagans were merely very low-status weirdos looking to create a community where they could be as weird as they wanted to be and still find acceptance, of sorts, in a group of like-minded people. They basically rejected normal, healthy, functional society because they wanted to continue being weird, unhealthy and dysfunctional. The neo-pagans who are into Viking paganism or whatever, on the other hand, aren't necessarily high status, but they're more normal people who are rejecting the weird, unhealthy and dysfunctional modern society, which has changed a lot since the 80s or 90s, but they're throwing out the baby with the bathwater. I'm kind of sympathetic to them, but at the same time, I don't think creating a religious identity from scratch and a few references from Beowulf and stuff appropriated from Saxo Grammaticus or Snorri Sturluson is really the answer.