My guess is the founders of The Intercept, Omidyar, Greenwald, Scahill, even Laura Poitras as well as the guy who made them famous, Edward Snowden, all display some fairly alpha male masculine behaviors that made the Intercept succeed, but who in other people would be critiqued by Maass.

"The time has come for Hollywood to turn away from war movies that, while satisfying to both a studio's bottom line and a flag-waving concept of patriotism, perpetuate a model of masculinity that does violence to us all."

This looks exactly like the sort of thing the John Birch Society used to warn us about: the defeat of America through feminization and the promotion of instant gratification. What a sorry life such a whiner must live, perpetually aware that nothing he or she has done indicates in any way an ability to cope with the most minor of adversities.

What a serious tragedy it must be for them to lose cell service.

Here's the reality of that there "toxic masculinity", bucko: it produces status based on ability - but you wouldn't know that from behind your wall of "Participant" trophies.

The sort of thing you're trying to avoid is actually to show the public what is possible. One in five sub sailors didn't come back from the Pacific in WW2. More bomber crews over Europe died than Marines on Pacific islands. These guys went on to get the job done.
Today, it is vitally important to cry, and to be and stay a victim so that Mommy can console you.

Misery loves company.

The movies are a business, not a social justice worker-run college lecture series.

Well.. Disney is doing a series of Star Wars-based Diversity lectures on how to run a franchise to the ground.

> "The time has come for
> Hollywood to turn away
> from war movies that,
> while....

Okay, movies. 'Turning away now...'

Because "The time has come" (!)

Anyone announcing such passages in so pompous a tone probably has ideas about the books authors should "turn away from" and the newspapers reporters should "turn away from" and the music composers & performers should "turn away from" and websites that bloggers and social media enthusiasts should "turn away from" as well...

Because, we will presumably be informed, "the time has come."

PS Kurt Schlicter has been in actual, you know, wars.

Great point from Sean Parnell:

https://twitter.com/SeanParnellUSA/status/957422492947279873

"The time has come for Hollywood to turn away from war movies that, while satisfying to both a studio's bottom line and a flag-waving concept of patriotism, perpetuate a model of masculinity that does violence to us all."

Has the time come for Hollywood to turn away from TV shows and movies in which a 120lb woman beats the crap out of a 250lb man? If we're going for strict realism, here, those gotta go. Those movies perpetuate a model of femininity that does violence to us all, teaching women that they can, with little or no training, physically dominate any man.

...such movies are almost never about women....

The biggest movie of last year was about that. Didn't Wonder Woman win World War I single-handedly?

Ugh, I hate it when they change the book a lot. I will NOT be taking my kids to see Peter Rabbit. I hate when they take sweet stories and turn them into something garish and vulgar... why base it on the sweet book at all?! Just make up a new story.

I know my opnion will be unpopular, but I'm on team fuddy duddy.

Conan, frankly, yes. I'm sick of movies where there's just a token female character who for some reason has superpowers. I'd rather see movies where women get equal representation as a range of characters from hot to goofy.

> Kurt Schlicter has been in
> actual, you know, wars.

He bought me a drink once, unbidden.

How many sacrifices does it take to see that we're talking about a hero?

> I'm sick of movies where
> there's just a token female
> character

And I'm tired of movies where a female character has all the heroism in the world delivered to her life simply because she has high cheekbones and a tight, fertile backside.

See what I'm getting at?

Anything today that celebrates masculinity becomes a target of ridicule.

I'm trying to think of an "historically accurate" war movie that didn't take some liberties to make it look right.

- In Patton, events were presented out of historical order, or several events were compressed into a single event for dramatic clarity.

- In Memphis Belle, the eponymous B-17 gets the hell shot out of it, whereas in real life it suffered minimal damage.

We could go on and on, of course. And I don't think that was Maass's problem in the first place.

It’s not so clear to me that American Sniper is a pro war movie as seems to be implied in the quoted portion.

I'm sick of movies where there's just a token female character who for some reason has superpowers. ~ NicoleK at January 28, 2018 6:33 AM

That's just a super hero movie. Peter Parker gets bitten by a spider. Wonder Woman is an Amazon. They're just silliness; and the only profitable genre left in the movie industry.

And, in them, both sexes are required to wear ridiculous costumers for the jobs they're expected to do. Unless you think Conan the Barbarian (distant cousin) really does fight better with a giant sword and no armor. Or that milquetoast Clark Kent suddenly becomes the buff and hunky Superman thanks to a gym hidden in a phone booth.

I'd rather see movies where women get equal representation as a range of characters from hot to goofy. ~ NicoleK at January 28, 2018 6:33 AM

Those movies don't do well at the box office. And Hollywood is, at heart, a business.

And since so many of those movies are simply remakes of movies with a range of men from hot to goofy (Ghostbusters, Oceans 8), they come off as derivative and unoriginal.

> They're just silliness; and
> the only profitable genre

☑ ☑ ☑ Affirmed, so very affirmed

A couple weeks ago McArdle did a tweetstorm about this; paraphrasing, "Golly, it's like we're all trying to enjoy movies made for twelve-year-old boys."

And I thought of all the dozens of times I've written to her and every other movie-goer more than twenty minutes younger than myself: You're a grown up! You're a freaking adult (woman)... And Fucksake, it's like you're trying to enjoy movies made for twelve-year-old boys! Why? Why?

It began with Star Wars, which premiered the month (week?) I graduated high school. By that age I was able to enjoy it as an hour and a half of colorful, kinetic bullshit.

Listen, I have been a twelve-year-old boy in the postwar United States... And let me be clear!: It was fucking FANTASTIC. No matter what they say in the movies, the schools, the magazines or the Bible, it's apparent that *some* fraction of your life is going to be built from indulgent food, blissful mayhem, sunsets in glorious exotic locations, flyin' titties, and horrible come-on lines that work perfectly... THIS IS THE PROMISE THAT HOLLYWOOD MOVIES MAKE TO TWELVE-OLD-BOYS. And America delivers.

But by thirteen, you're already bored with the tropes of screenwriters, and ready to build the life you want to collect your fair share.


Yet it seems that the next generations, no matter how bright or generously educated, were inexplicably entranced... [Robot voice:]

We younger people have been told that this series of films is important and enjoyable, so therefore we WILL uncritically enjoy it too; and even though it's been known for forty fucking years that its narrative sacrifices adult feeling and the insights of American integrity in pursuit of foreign ticket sales in despotic Hellholes, we will nonetheless sustain a pathetically vacuous pretense of intellectual engagement.

Fuckin' kids, with their long hair and flip phones....

“Journalist Argues For Making Factually Nutritious Movies That Not Very Many People Will Want To See”

Target audience: the very small subset of teenagers who actually liked Michlelle Obama’s school lunches .

Ugh, I hate it when they change the book a lot. I will NOT be taking my kids to see Peter Rabbit. I hate when they take sweet stories and turn them into something garish and vulgar
_____________________________________

Garish and vulgar aren't the only qualities to avoid.

I don't know if this is still in print, but, in 1987, there was a Ladybird edition of Peter Rabbit that watered it down for cowardly parents. That is, in the original, Old Mother Rabbit tells her children not to go to Mr. McGregor's garden because "your father had an accident there; he was put in a pie by Mrs. McGregor."

But, in the 1987 edition, it says "...he doesn't like rabbits...he will try to catch you."

Honestly.

> Anything today that celebrates
> masculinity becomes a target
> of ridicule.

Anyone today who deploys the word "celebrates" in the contemporary media sense deserves ridicule.

The harsh stuff. 180 proof.

He's in town this weekend, so I'm extra-enthused. With Twitter, he can call a bar-crawl at any minute, and a hundred of us will instantly appear, in good cheer. I have a fresh pair of Chinos and Uber money standing by near the door,

You're a grown up! You're a freaking adult (woman)... And Fucksake, it's like you're trying to enjoy movies made for twelve-year-old boys! Why? Why?
_____________________________________

Because it's getting harder and harder to find movies for adults?

While it may be true that for more than ten years, TV has become better than the movies (and MUCH better than TV used to be), that doesn't mean adults who don't like juvenile movies should have to stay home and accept the void out there - or the void on Netflix, for that matter. There USED to be plenty of movies that appealed to thinking adults, after all.

From Bill Maher's 2006 book "New Rules" (keep in mind that he was a teen in the early 1970s and was 50 when he wrote this):

"Somebody make a movie I want to go see. If you're asking why movies have gotten so bad, I'll tell you why: It's because Hollywood studios now get 60 percent of their money from DVDs, all of which are bought by the young,dumb male demographic, the same one that's given us Maxim magazine, attention deficit disorder, and George Bush.

"When I was a teenager, Hollywood didn't give a damn about me-and that was good! Good for the movies and good for me because I was challenged- to smarten up instead of dumbing down. Besides ruining movies, we've also managed to ruin our kids by making everything be about them. And now if I want to see a movie, I had better like loud noises, things blowing up, and Colin Farrell.

"Movies suck because Hollywood has figured out that Mom and Dad don't spend their money on movies anymore; they give their money to their kids and they spend it on movies- to break up their shopping sprees at the mall. It's like American parents are on one long date with their kids- no, it's even worse; it's like Robert DeNiro in Casino, helplessly trying to buy the love of a shopaholic hooker with no heart, played, of course, by Sharon Stone.

"Before I die, could someone please make one more movie I want to go see? I'm not asking for the moon here, and I'm not some film snob with a ponytail who only likes subtitled Albanian documentaries. But to middle-aged people like me, a good movie is like good sex-you don't have to put one out every day, but when whole seasons go by without getting one, you do start to get a little horny for entertainment."

I thought Guardians of the Galaxy II was a thoughtful depiction of the dangers that come with making technology too easy to use. Everyone was functionally retarded. The main character was retarded. The villains were retarded. Heck I'm pretty sure the tables had mental issues too. Which is why they needed space ships you can build with a spray gun. If you required more mental activity than waving a spray wand around these guys were doomed.

Via Cosh this A.M.

Looking at that, you can hear the GD oboe.

Fuckin' kids, with their long hair and flip phones.... ~ Crid at January 28, 2018 10:26 AM

A lot of this has to do with the desire in modern society of adults to be the children they were not when they were children.

They weren't fashionable and cool then, but they can be now, if they dress in the latest styles, watch the latest movies, and listen to the latest music.

Adulthood is dull. It has responsibilities and rules - and involves telling people to take the trash out and brush their teeth. It involves being ... gasp ... uncool.

So, revert to childhood. Embrace the superhero movie, breathlessly await the next Harry Potter novel, color, wear flip-flops to work, smoke dope in the living room.

When I was a kid, we wanted to be the adults we saw around us. We may not have embraced their Beach Boys music and movie musicals, but we sought adulthood. We admired the childish character on TV, but we instinctively knew he needed to grow up. We were helped along in that realization by the beautiful woman at his side who told him to grow up. So we knew, to get the beautiful woman, grow up.

Somewhere along the way, the world flipped. The buttoned down character on TV and in the movies became the butt of derision. The perpetual man-child became the hero (without growing up in the process). The adults around us stopped being adults and started adopting our music, our clothes, and our movies.

Now, politicians look to inexperienced teenagers to determine how they should govern the world. Hollywood looks to twelve year old boys to determine what movies to make. And music celebrates perpetual hedonism with an endless supply of liquor and women.

No wonder Hollywood is sunk in a sex scandal. The twelve year old boys in charge were told they could have al the sex they wanted and no adult-level thought was given to how the toys might feel about being used and thrown away for a newer, shinier model.

WRT the current unpleasantness; Hwood has made some losers with thud and blunder and shooting and macho guys. But they sank with nary a trace.
What the journo moron is really sayingis that we need movies that make Americans look like the bad guys.

I wonder who Peter Maass wants to fuck that he is going on like this?

Because the guys who deride masculinity are gents who...to be delicate...were kind of shortchanged in that category when they went through the assembly line and never felt the desire to develop any for themselves.

His only intersections with masculinity were probably while he was impotently watching some girl he wanted to bang drive off with his 'intellectual inferior' who was masculine.

Why are all the pro feminist men weenies and the anti body shaming women heifers?

One would think society smart enough to put some caveats on their 'objective judgments'.

Hollywood has shown itself capable of making excellent war movies (think “Three Kings,” “Paths of Glory,” and “The Best Years of Our Lives”), but most are problematic.

The best war film of the last year, “Thank You for Your Service,” based on the nonfiction book by David Finkel, quietly focuses on the troubles of a group of soldiers after they come home from a deployment in Iraq.

Most of the "war" movies Maass is favoring are anti-war movies; the rest are post-war movies that argue the futility of war.

Might as well add Born on the Fourth of July to his list.

He doesn't want Hollywood to make better movies. He wants Hollywood to make movies in line with his political philosophy.

--------------------------------------------------

I watched Geostorm last night. It was an overly intellectualized Armageddon. In Geostorm a US senator is chastised by a scientist for saying the US built something when the US merely funded it and ran it; but the world contributed scientists and engineers to the project. I guess the US led the project from behind.

In the epilogue, the movie took great pains to make sure we understood, the survival of the planet was a diverse concern, of all the people living on it. And that women can be kick-ass Secret Service agents. Compared to the flag-waving rah-rah of Armageddon it came off as flat and preachy.

Yes, Armageddon was hokey and stupid, but it was at least entertaining on some level and lacked the self-righteous preaching and diversity clichés that robbed Geostorm of any entertainment value it might otherwise have had.

Man, how about that Jordan Peterson guy?

Interesting, right? Yeah!

But what's he all about? What's going on in that frosty Canadian mind of his? Mysterious!

If only someone in the media, whether professional or social/amateur, would try to get inside his head, dig around and find out how he really thinks aboot stuff!

One…

…Two.

"The time has come for Hollywood to . . ."

Sure, finance a new type of movie yourself then.

☑ charles at January 28, 2018 5:49 PM

A serious question if anyone is still looking. Are movie reviews participation trophy style these days? GoGII got 83% on Rotten Tomatoes, 4/5 on CSM, 7.7/10 on IMDb. "Perhaps not quite as fresh or fun as the original, but still very much a triumph of the Quill." ~Chris Hewitt of Empire.

I wasn't joking about every single character in the movie suffering from mental retardation. You even had such great scenes talking about how you shouldn't use your mind and instead just use your feelings instead. No wonder he had a tragic ending. Even the big bad guy who had god level powers and recognized the MC was a one in a trillion resource he desperately needed lost everything due to verbal diarrhea when he just had to comment 'Sorry about giving your mom brain cancer, dude.' The idea of just not saying anything didn't occur to him.

I'm not siding with Maass. He would just make things worse. And I don't have the energy or skill to create my own movies as Charles suggests. But Conan is right that Hollywood seems to bend to two extremes these days. Either they are morally incoherent and preachy about it or mindless flashing lights and 80s nostalgia. So I've just moved on to other forms of entertainment.

Lenona I hate that too.

I hate that they decided to edit the Little House books to make the characters less racist. I hate it because it was in re-reading them as an older kid I had an "aha, they are so racist" moment that was a learning moment that taught me about racist attitudes being pervasive in the culture, and not just a few bad guys. I hate that they take the learning moment away.

Crid did you read the rest of my sentence? I hate the female character who is perfect at everything. She's boring. And feels like she's thrown in there to appease the mes of the world who wonder why there aren't female characters who have characters.

I think I misread crid's post before I answered.

But I hate that too.

Nah, Conan, a lot of time they make the one female character a million times more competent than the male characters. It's just dumb.

Leftists never complain about how Oliver Stone rewrites historical events in his movies to suit a leftist (or even strangely personal) worldview. Anyone who doesn't understand that movies are entertainment shouldn't watch war movies or documentaries. However, even with "poetic license", many war movies give a good feeling of what actually happened--e.g. Midway. Likewise, sports movies like 42 or Miracle (hockey) can be true to events and exciting. The idea that all movies should be anti-patriotic and pure SJW pap is sure a great idea as propaganda but not as either truth or entertainment. Hollywood keeps putting out SJW movies like the female ghostbusters and they keep being flops.

Without manly men to defend your country, you would be overrun by countries that did have manly men. Manly men are also the ones who built everything and provided for their families for the last million years. I was reading about fishing villages in Portugal in the 1500s and later. The men would sail away in their fishing boats. The Atlantic storms could be fierce. Sometimes a whole fleet would sail off and never return. Hundreds of widows in one fell swoop. They sure had privilege.

I hate that they decided to edit the Little House books to make the characters less racist.
______________________________________

I didn't hear about that. What edition was that?

Even in the original, there are things that seem contrived. First of all, we all "know" lovable Pa would never do anything wrong, government-sanctioned or not, so why, at the end of the chapter "The Tall Indian," does Laura question what the white adults are doing? (That scene likely never happened, because in real life, Laura and her family went back to Wisconsin when she was three.) See here:

“When white settlers come into a country, the Indians have to move on. The government is going to move these Indians farther west, any time now. That's why we're here, Laura. White people are going to settle all this country, and we get the best land because we get here first and take our pick. Now do you understand?”

“Yes, Pa,” Laura said. “But, Pa, I thought this was Indian Territory. Won't it make the Indians mad to have to—”

“No more questions, Laura,” Pa said, firmly. "Go to sleep."

Two, why does Ma, of all people, feel "so let down" when the Osages leave? Or Pa, for that matter? (I do think, though, that one reason Ma hated them so much was that it was just easier for her to be angry at them for acting as though they had any human rights, than to be angry at Pa for moving them into an obviously dangerous place.) Especially given that the next chapter starts with "After the Indians had gone, a great peace settled on the prairie."

Btw, in real life, Laura's family didn't get kicked off the land by the government - they just went home because they couldn't sell their Wisconsin house. (There may have been more to it - I don't remember.)

Some books I found just now, when I searched for the above scene between Pa and Laura (in order of relevance, according to Google):

A Political Companion to Herman Melville by Jason Frank - 2013

Constructing the Little House: Gender, Culture, and Laura Ingalls Wilder by Ann Romines, 1997.

Laura Ingalls Wilder and Rose Wilder Lane: Authorship, Place, Time, and Culture by John E. Miller - 2008

Laura Ingalls Wilder: American Writer on the Prairie by Sallie Ketcham - 2014

As for women heroes in action movies: Did anyone notice that when Anakin killed Padme in the Star wars movie, the daughter they saved was sent to grow up as a princess and the boy (Luke) was sent to a desert hellhole to basicly be slave labor for a farmer? And in the recent movies Kylo Ren is just jumping into being a powerful Jedi with no training and not even any motivation to fight for good, whereas Luke had to struggle to learn it and to control the dark side? Yeah, male priv.

And in the recent movies Kylo Ren is just jumping into being a powerful Jedi with no training ... whereas Luke had to struggle to learn it and to control the dark side? ~ cc at January 29, 2018 9:23 AM

There's a streak in modern feminist thinking that high-level skills are innate and require no training, skills development, or struggle to acquire. The idea that girls may not want to put in the time to learn higher math or engineering never enters their thoughts; the dearth of women in math and engineering is entirely due to patriarchy, social pressure, and discrimination.

Rowling's Harry Potter is the worst of the lot. When he needs a skill, it appears. No training, no struggle, no mistakes, just a new skill expertly wielded. Need to play quidditch? Boom, he's an expert quidditch player, despite having shown no inclination toward athletics up to that point.

[What does it say about us that the spell check on my computer recognizes "quidditch" as a real word?]

"He doesn't want Hollywood to make better movies. He wants Hollywood to make movies in line with his political philosophy."

This. I saw Darkest Hour a few weeks ago. Here is a good war movie without a single battle scene! But it presents Churchill as a hero, which I'm sure will be problematic for Oscar voters.