What do you feel is the biggest problem with modern entertainment

Side note - back to the Capitalism strand.
The received wisdom I had heard over the years of the history of Hollywood is part of the rise of the B-Movies in the 60s was due to Hollywood features getting ever increasingly bloated budgets that they couldn't sustain/financially justify, especially after a few flops.

I've always figured the big studios would eventually get a string of financial disappointments with the superhero franchises and things would finally cause the movie industry to start scaling down again. While admittedly I never really had a sense of time of how long that would take, I would say, we're quite a ways into it all, and I don't see the decline in sight, so, maybe that assumption was horribly wrong.

lol you mean giving stand up specials to two of the best comedians the last 30 years? What a reaction. Next you going tell me this new Saudi Golf league will throw boat load of cash at people like Mickelson to get eyeballs.

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I came here to do two things, drink some beer and kick some ass, looks like we are almost outta beer - Dazed and Confused

101 Favorite Movies (2019)

So, racists like movies with white people? Conspiracy theorists like movies with conspiracies?


Should we agree with The Hollywood Reporter's David Rooney that Top Gun: Maverick is overflowing “with patriotism curdling into white supremacy”? Is Maverick Ultra-MAGA? Who decides these things? If the best evidence we have is someone's personal concern that "the wrong people" might like it, frankly that's not good enough.

As the makers of Morbius would remind us, how a text is received and memed is not in the hands of the filmmakers.



Without objective evidence of ill-intent and direct incitement, concerns about how the text "may" be appropriated are specious. Any text may be appropriated for just about any purpose.

So, we're left with alleged dog whistles. Stuff that is there, but not there. And chasing down dog-whistles involves accusations regarding what most cannot hear (otherwise it would be a "regular" whistle) and, therefore, runs into wild speculation into private intentions and hidden codes (put on your They Live glasses!).

Casting Jodie Turner-Smith as Anne Boleyn isn't color blindness. Color blindness implies a two-way street. If BBC did a race-swapped production of Fences, or just race-swapped Troy Maxson and left the rest of the family black, people would lose their minds and cry racism while gathering pitchforks and torches. This "color blindness" only goes one-way. A character that was written as white can be played by anyone. A character written as black, however, must be played by a black person. And gingers are totally fair-game at this point.

I definitely had exactly that feeling with the latest Jurassic mess. It seems like "they" had no sense of plot, no idea how to make episode 6 of a trilogy, so they just made bigger dinosaurs. We all know, of course, that, with enough PR, product links, etc, the "true fans" will materialize and somehow they will manage to make a profit, until tax time at least when those profits will turn into losses for a moment.

Unfortunately, what this really does it to make me realize that I'm just not cynical enough. I bought a ticket, so did a bunch of people, on opening night. I'm about done with superheroes, but apparently not with dinosaurs. Sadly, I don't really know what the answer is. I see some interesting "little" movies, have several theaters that specialize in this, but they are in a different universe. We have to realize that, after all, movies are an investment, not an art. Art is the cover story.

Agreed - good point. What shocks me as someone who’s worked in the media all my life is the constant inclusion of Twitter comments in otherwise legitimate articles. “Twitter users have expressed their disappointment… etc.” It’s insane as we all know this is a tiny, no, minuscule proportion of the “public”. I would understand (just about) if this only happened with articles on backlash as in your example, but it’s everywhere, even if the article is on someone simply joining the cast of whatnot.

There's that old joke that a baby is an object lesson in minority rule. If so, Twitter is the internet equivalent of a fussy baby. "Fussy baby is angry about representation in a genre it doesn't care about or spend money on!"



It's the pop-cultural version of referring to anonymous "reliable sources" in the White House who just happen to exactly agree with the pundit. "Look, it's not just me saying it, but it's reliable sources, like people on Twitter!" -- and when you spell out it out like this in explicit terms that the logic becomes laughable.

It does, yes, and the White House source really is a great analogy. But yeah, I guess it’s also the assumption of hegemony among said sources and the entirety of “the internet”. That must be why said articles are careful to reference Twitter instead of “the internet”, because as touched upon above, we wouldn’t want to excite any white supremacists on 4chan, oh no, can’t go there. Sometimes, again, as someone who works in the media and whose team sifts through this shit for a living, I almost wonder whether the 4chan crowd isn’t… less of a minority than the woke Twitter mob? This could be phrased better, but I’m not sure that there is an equivalence in terms of both extremes being “the minority”. I think a few, shall we say, societal developments in the recent decade, from Brexit to Trump, cast doubt on that idea.

And in that sense, yes, there’s the review fallacy in that you’re more likely to leave a negative than a positive review (God knows I’m guilty of that), but I think if you think on a much, much bigger scale, then the idea of pandering to any online mob is an even more creepy one, because what if in, say, fifteen years someone just decided to pander to the other online mob? Anyway, the sort of thing I would genuinely like to know and for data to be able to tell me objectively (which I doubt it can for now) is which of the two online mob extremes is in the majority.

This is your area, so I'd imagine you'd have the best guess.

If the the writers of The Boys have it right, it's not about having majority anymore:


Or if we borrow from Game of Thrones we might say,



I'd better stop here before I post a "Hang in there" poster of a kitty dangling in the air.

At any rate, I don't think the point is to have an actual majority or even "majority-minority.: Rather the idea, I think, is to have your sheepdogs barking at the flock to get it to move in your direction. And even if different sheepdogs are competing in terms of messaging, it's surprising what their competing messages have in common, either by design or effect:

1. Demonization of the Other (making civic dialogue pointless)
2. Catastrophizing Problems, which leads to
3. Apocalyptic Thinking, which justifies
4. Instrumental Justification of Immorality (no bad tactics, just bad targets). And if you're playing for all the marbles,
5. Refusing to Give One Inch (because the other party is acting in bad faith and would do the same to you).

A lot of these online mobs are bots, trolls, and shills. 4Chan is great at this stuff. They got the whole "It's OK to be White" thing going and got mainstream news to report that milk was white supremacy. And the effects of all of this are that

1. We don't know who to trust.
2. We think that the other side is idiot-town.
3. We're in a perpetual state of agitation.
4. We're cognitively fatigued by an environment super-saturated in bull***t.
5. We're primed to attack unorthodoxy as indicative of "the baddies" (i.e,. wrong think).

I am more interested in how many of these fussy babies are grass-roots realities and how many are phantasmagorias engineered by powerful lobbies. With social media it's really hard to tell where the person ends and the image-filter begins. You don't have to buy into any particular conspiracy theory to recognize that we're simply having our chain yanked all the time. I am most curious about the various parties yanking our chain and why.

Don't patronise me. I used to be a fan of Chappelle's - someone who has considered Chappelle's Show a favourite TV show and even saw him perform live once, but I basically gave up on him after his Sticks and Stones special made it clear that he was actively leaning into the worst aspects of his material (and from what I've heard about his subsequent specials and performances he's only gotten worse in that regard). As for Gervais, I've never even bothered with watching his standup because nobody's ever convinced me it's genuinely worth watching (though to be fair that's because nobody has ever even tried), so I only really have a couple of his shows to go on and even then I think they're so-so affairs at best (and then there was his limp attempt at hosting the Globes a couple of years back and if that's supposed to be the kind of outrageously funny stuff I can expect from the man's live performances then you can keep it).

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Iro's Top 100 Movies v3.0

Chapelle's material is pro-trans if you're listening to his message.

He just so happens to also stand up for (what he thinks are) biological women's rights on some points and that is verboten; if you're not 100% pro-trans all the time and in all particulars, you're a baddie. That's weird. The cultish red line of "thou shall not offend trans" is really out of control. As Gervais states in his latest special, he'll make fun of trans, because he really does believe they're as good or bad as anyone else. And Gervais is pretty funny sometimes, IMO. I mean, he created The Office. His latest special has some good material, IMO.



I have found myself personally offended and disgusted by the comedy of both these comics over the years (IMO, there were a few skits on The Chapelle Show that were over the line). However, I don't have a right to not to be offended. And I have seen these comics take shots at everyone. That's what comedians do. The comics I don't like are the "roast-masters" who just say endless nasty things as a punchline. Chapelle and Gervais and Seinfeld and Burr, however, are cultural observers. They're our court jesters, some of the few who can experiment with dangerous ideas, and are, therefore, our canaries in the free speech coal mine.



I think you're taking the right tack, though. If you don't like it, don't watch, right?

Eh, the offend-everyone-equally rhetoric doesn't work for me because it relies too much on a presumption that there is equity between all societal demographics and, if there isn't, then it can be achieved by the implementation of such humour as an attempt at creating balance. Either way, is that really the best way to go about it? It sucks that the material in question isn't funny anyway, but that's obviously a matter of personal preference.

Horror Movies are not horror any more.

The alternative, to have sacred, unspeakable demographics, does not really work for anyone, IMO. If we cannot even refer to touchy issues in comedy, then we cannot negotiate and explore assumptions, norms, different experiences, etc. We will walk on eggshells in our day-to-day discourse, because we won't have a sense of which lines invite play and which do not. Instead, we are left with dangerous Kinjite ("Forbidden Subjects" for those of you who do not speak "Bronson").







I don't think it relies on any such presumption. On the contrary, communication comes from a place of need, of things which need to be said (e.g., speaking of inequalities). If we were to reach the woke utopia of perfectly equal outcomes (Why should we want this? Have we really thought about what this implies?), however, we would have reached perfect milquetoast thermal equilibrium of everyone being exactly the same (and thus there being nothing that needs to be said). Not only is this impossible, it's undesirable. Why would we want to live in a world of a perfectly distributed oatmeal mush of outcomes. Congratulations, everyone is vanilla now (white supremacy wins, afters all?).





What is the point of trying to achieve the impossible? At best, we can only fragment power, and keep the conversation going. When any group gets too much power and becomes tyrannical, our comedians are there to deconstruct their imagined superiority. Comedy keeps the conversation going - the universal folly of humanity being a great leveling device.

To @Little Ash, I don’t have a problem with Brad Pitt/whoever not losing a fight. It’s certainly along the same lines, but fights are arbitrary: don’t get me wrong, I’m all for graphic violence, regularly lament lack thereof and wish every other film was a Kill Bill. But even if the Bride lost a fight or two or was killed, that wouldn’t have made the film worse in my book. So to me, it’s not the same. Not everyone has those contracts. Don’t hire Jason Statham and you’re all sorted. (As an aside, what is it with the style of argument that basically goes “this other issue is also detrimental to creativity”? Yes, there are a shitload of issues detrimental to creativity, but to me forced diversity is the biggest problem. That’s just me. Wasn’t the whole point of the thread to say what you felt was most detrimental to creativity?).

But having to have “diversity” in a production about medieval Poland (I’m looking at you, The Witcher)? To me that is a massive red flag. It would ruin my enjoyment in advance (by dragging me out of the story). It would distract me where Brad Pitt not losing the fight probably wouldn’t (what if he was bigger than the villain, and why would he lose that fight anyway?). And before people go out of their way to call me a racist bitch, I would generally support the argument that instead of having a Black Bond (who was born in Scotland according to canon), we should just make more Black entertainment from scratch. To echo @ScarletLion’s point to an extent, it’s not my problem if people lack the originality to come up with Black entertainment from scratch. You want it, you go and rack your brains and create it. Again, Jordan Peele is living and breathing evidence that it can be done.

Well, I’m beginning to think that the 4chan gang are less of a minority that some would like to think. The extreme incel self-expression aside, I think it would be interesting to set up a social experiment where people would purportedly talk to themselves in private/write in a diary/whatever, with minimal feedback loop, and see what as many people as possible actually think, in the privacy of their own mind, about feminism, diversity etc. To encourage as genuine feedback as possible, it could be anonymised, sealed for 10 years like that Margaret Atwood-supported Future Library time capsule, whatever. I’d like to know whether your average person actually cares about diversity: how many women with speaking roles in the film, are the women strong, are they weak, do they get laid (and I include women here: how many of them give a ****)? I for one honestly couldn’t care less, and moreover (admittedly I’m exposed to the conversation more than some through my work), I can feel this “diversity push” radicalising me. I’ve felt it very strongly over the years. I’ve always studied/worked in/been very involved in politics, but the more I see or hear of the diversity narrative, the more I long for one, just one really old-fashioned non-pc film where women are half-naked all the time with heels and makeup and where the protagonist is a macho who defeats his enemies by physical force and then screws the prom Queen into oblivion.

I agree that this is a legitimate concern. However at the same time, I do think some of these things boil down to individuals/individual groups, rather than necessarily “powerful lobbies”, which to me both makes it less nefarious and more, well, hopeless basically. To revert to the representation conversation, I’ve earned money all my life by understanding “both sides” of an issue.

In many ways in my litigation comms work, it has always been about being able to sell the “other side” of the story, any side, alongside the fact that the “demonised” side (the apparent “bad guys”, “villains”, take your pick) is usually more desperate to have its story out there, being told and heard and processed. I’ve had clients that had absolutely 0 chance of winning the actual case, but still dropped millions in the PR bucket because they were desperate to be heard, to explain their thinking, even if they lost the legal battle. Which is to say, it’s part of my professional skill set to understand “both sides” of pretty much anything.

But I have never been able to relate, in any way, to the representation conversation. I am white, yes, but when it comes to the disability representation, for example, I had a condition which meant whenever I entered the room (okay, spoke or taken to the stairs, usually), I would be noticed, not in a good way. People would wonder (and ask) what was wrong with me. I couldn’t walk into a school, a bus, an office, a restaurant, etc. etc. etc. ad infinitum without having people ask what was wrong with me.

I suppose theoretically I understand the idea of me potentially feeling better after watching a few Hollywood movies where Gwyneth Paltrow/Nicole Kidman/Uma Thurman (been told I look a bit like them in my lifetime) plays this weird ****ed up quasi-asthma sufferer who eventually does what? Gets happily married? Manages to hold down a high-stakes client-facing job with lots of public speaking where no one ever asks what’s wrong with her? Makes a billion dollars?

What is that supposed to give me, ****ing hope that I/freaks like me “deserve to be on TV”? Are ****able? Which proves… exactly the opposite, just as with people asking why you’re breathing like that, that you’re not anonymous or normal or “deserve representation”, but actually that you draw attention to yourself by your otherness.

The idea of “blindness” (won’t go into colour-blindness, but (invisible) disability-blindness, difference-blindness), where no one is out to “represent” you because they can’t tell you need it, is a privilege. And I say that as someone who spent decades thinking about this in an extremely personal way. I realise there is probably a massive oversight here somewhere on my part, but I see all this discussion about people being represented, little girls seeing (not seeing) themselves on TV as president, CEO, SAS soldier, and I just do not see the value. That wouldn’t really make them CEO, and in terms of “showing them that’s possible”, for the love of God, get out of here; the whole point of TV is that shit you see on TV ain’t possible, baby, it’s a movie (not necessarily a philosophy I entirely subscribe to, but if we don’t believe anyone except James Bond would survive that jump from 500 feet height, then why do we believe that little girl can become CEO just because the TV girl can?).

If anything, in a way I cannot quite communicate coherently, I find the idea insulting. Personally, I also absolutely don’t want to be represented on TV (not least because by nature of the film industry, it is never going to be anything like real life, so why, for the sheer myth-making, “This Girl Can?” (where can I vomit?)). Hell, no. The whole idea of representation is a big fat lie. It doesn’t affect “attitudes”, and ultimately it doesn’t matter. In a kind of ultra-meta way, to me the fact that you are now being “represented” is in itself the most othering thing out there. Because if you were the norm, you wouldn’t need that, right? So on a personal level, to me The Northman and that sort of good non-diverse entertainment comes out on top even more if you look at it like that, because it’s showing it’s sort of above all this petty ********.

TikTok has turned brains to mush. If it can’t be digested in a 30 second clip then it didn’t happen, it’s not worthy of discussion, and why should I even care?

That’s the sentiment of today’s youth. Good luck getting soup brains to sit still long enough for the trailers much less the main feature.

Depressing but true.

I think there's room for a middle ground/alternative aside from "be offensive" and "don't say anything at all ever" - just because I take specific issue with these individuals' approach to certain subjects doesn't mean I think those subjects are necessarily off-limits, but I have the right to judge on a case-by-case basis and that is why I singled these people out in this discussion.

Making it a question of what needs to be said seems like it should put a person's words under further scrutiny just to be certain. Besides, I don't think a "woke utopia" has perfectly equal outcomes by definition since it would exist in opposition to those who would deny it - perhaps this is what you think is already implied. Even if I accept the idea that this "perfect" world would ultimately be undesirable, that doesn't mean I have to accept every single flaw in the current status quo by default.

The emphasis here being on "imagined" superiority - do we assume every comedian who targets a group through their material is automatically punching up at that group by default?

It's exactly the long running stability of the current model which is unique. There has always been periods, especially in Hollywood, where pure entertainment or spectacle prevails. Or in the case of what happened in the 60s, over budgeted fluff no one even wants but keeps being churned out. Yet eventually audiences tired of what they were given. Within the decade. And art, as it should do, morphs to accomodate different ideas and different voices.


But, like you, I've been waiting for this to happen with modern cinema. And exactly how long has this particular dominance of superhero movies gone on? Now, I'm no great fan of these films. But I also don't have anything inherently against them. But after twenty years of it, one has to start to wonder if either the studios have now got this all down to a science where they never have to evolve or people just simply don't care about film in the same way anymore. That it is okay if it just remains stagnant and they always know what they are going to get when they go to a theater.


Now, maybe we can argue that it doesn't matter, because movies are just movies ( we shouldn't, but I get film isn't going to be that important to a lot of people. Or maybe we can see this as a greater sign about the growing power of marketing and online persuasion, and a mass audience that is completely apathetic to ever being challenged. And that should be a concern to even people who couldn't give a **** about the studio system

I think I agree, in principle. It's not just the joke, but how you're joking, right? A joke should, in some sense, come from a place of love. Being offensive for the sake of being offensive is not social commentary, but roast master edge-lord stuff and I don't (personally) stand by it. It's hard to say where to draw the line, however, as we disagree about your preferred cases. I happen to recommend erring on the side of freedom and let people vote with their pocket books. I don't watch the roasts because I think they're simply mean, but I have no campaign to get Comedy Central to end them.




I don't think the metaphor of "punching up/punching down" is useful. It just points us to a hierarchy of victimage in which we cannot joke, as member of group "B" about the more marginally oppressed group "C" and so on. The metaphor assumes difference and due-deference and fragility of the group being joked about. Punching down is allegedly this horrible thing, but all comedy is punching down, taking down, dragging down. The butt of the joke is always taken down a notch, deflated, tragedy punctured into comedy. That's what comedy does.



The real question, I think, is whether the evident intention and reasonable evaluation of the bit bespeaks a brother lovingly punching you in the arm or an enemy punching you in the face. Either way, you're being taken down a notch, but the former signals love and the latter signals hate. And no, it's not about "impact" which implies we have no agency over how we receive/interpret a joke. There is always a set of the audience (hecklers, white knights, people who don't know what jokes are) that will receive jokes poorly -- to elevate the cries of the few over what a reasonable person of goodwill would infer about the intention of the joke is create an impassable "veto!" of those who cry "foul!".



These matters are complicated by the fact that the boundaries of appropriateness are, in part, negotiated by comedians, and they need some space (especially when playing small clubs and calibrating their material) to make mistakes and occasionally not "stick the landing." Their job is to cleverly navigate the "no man's land" of civic discourse, so they're required to take risks to perform their function. Again, I prefer to err on the side of freedom and creativity and only call in the social cops when someone has egregiously crossed the line, and even them to leave them with the path to move on in their careers telling jokes.