51 lines
3.4 KiB
Plaintext
51 lines
3.4 KiB
Plaintext
Out of the Frame
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<p><em>Movie ticket receipts in North America dipped by six percent in<br />
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2005 to nine billion dollars,</em> comes today’s report on the status of<br />
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the film industry.</p>
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<p>The most hyped movie of 2005 was a depressing, pokey flick about<br />
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gay sheepherders. The Oscar nominations were otherwise dominated by<br />
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one movie that flogged us all for our supposed racism in a wearisomely<br />
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familiar way, another that rehashed left-wing grievances against a<br />
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minor and ineffective demagogue who’s been dead for pushing fifty<br />
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years, and a thriller that made an Islamic suicide bomber out to be<br />
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a saint and Americans parasitic villains.</p>
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<p>Call me crazy, but I can’t help but think there might be some tenuous<br />
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shred of a hint of a connection here…</p>
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<p><span id="more-274"></span></p>
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<p>Hollywood is still capable of producing a decent flick now and<br />
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again (I think the last really good one I saw was<br />
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<cite>Firefly</cite>). But if George Clooney was right when he said Hollywood should be<br />
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proud to be out of touch, it’s got more and more to be proud of every<br />
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year. I’m no conservative and no prude either, but I have not even<br />
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the slightest interest in a movie about two sad losers with penises<br />
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compulsively buggering while their lives and marriages fall apart<br />
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around them. Cripes — if you held a contest to come up with a<br />
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story concept that would repel the heterosexual 96% of males, and<br />
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people of both sexes who go to the movies to be <em>entertained</em>,<br />
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you couldn’t do better than that.</p>
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<p>Don’t bother telling me what I’m <em>supposed</em> to feel about<br />
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<cite>Brokeback Mountain</cite> or what a philistine I am for dismissing<br />
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it out of hand, or why it would be good for me to see it. That’s exactly<br />
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my point; I don’t want to pay $9.00 to see a movie because somebody else<br />
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thought it would be good for me. I buy entertainment from Hollywood, not<br />
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moral prescriptions, and if Hollywood now thinks its job is to improve<br />
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my character it can just fuck off.</p>
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<p>It happens that in America in 2006, Hollywood is trying to pound<br />
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wacky left-wing political correctness down our throats, but my<br />
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complaint would be identical if the movie industry were taken over by<br />
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Christian evangelicals and persisted in cranking out edifying tales<br />
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from the Bible. Fuck <em>all</em> that noise; the harder you try to<br />
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‘uplift’ me in either direction, the more I’ll gravitate to the simple<br />
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thalamic pleasures of gratuitous nudity and big explosions.</p>
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<p>Actually, I expect Hollywood’s drift to get far worse. All<br />
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indications are that the people who greenlight films live so deep<br />
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inside the bubble world of elite bicoastal left-liberalism that<br />
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they’re barely aware anything else exists. And to the limited extent<br />
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the are aware, they feel little but contempt for people on the<br />
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outside. This kind of problem tends to be self-reinforcing.</p>
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<p>But it’s difficult to serve customers that you feel little other<br />
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than contempt for. Sooner or later, they tend to notice the contempt.<br />
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And go elsewhere. I expect those box-office receipts to keep falling;<br />
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the interesting question, now, is when Hollywood’s narcissistic,<br />
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dysfunctional culture will break under the resulting strain.</p>
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