Show Announcement: Last night was the third episode of the award winning livestream that you can watch on Rumble and YouTube.
The Academy Awards show was this week and outside of the bugmen on YouTube, there was not much interest in the program. They claim it drew 19.69 million viewers, but they also claim that it is a five-year high, even though the number they claimed last year was slightly higher. Like everything else about the entertainment business, television ratings are mostly fake. There was a time when this award show was a big deal, but now it is mostly fodder for critics and comedians.
There are a lot of reasons why people have stopped caring about the awards shows, but one big reason is the product is dreadful. The nominees for best picture were a who’s who of films no one watched. The winner for best picture was a film called Anora, which appears to be a low-budget Slavic version of Pretty Woman. One of the runners up was a film called The Brutalist, which is about hideous architecture. It was also a low-budget, low-interest film that went straight to home video.
According to the bugmen who follow this stuff, the winner was supposed to be a film called Emilia Pérez, but the people who decide these things changed their minds at the last minute because the transvestite star had once held unapproved opinions about blacks and Muslims or whatever. Apparently, there is a hierarchy of degeneracy that the carnies are required to respect. It is Hollywood, so who knows if any of it is true, but it gets to why these awards show are floundering.
The Oscars used to be a popular topic because people were curious about how their opinions of the films stacked up with the insiders. Women liked watching the stars parade on stage and do their act in a social atmosphere. That only works when people watch the films and recognize the so-called stars. A Spanish man dressed as a woman, who is totally unfamiliar to Americans, lumbering on stage to get an award is not going to be a big draw for an American audience.
The fact is, Hollywood no longer serves the American audience. You see it in the box office for this year. The top grossing film is comic book movie that is popular with non-English speakers because it is mostly special effects and stupid dialogue. Half its gross is from overseas and you can be sure that a big chunk of the domestic box office is from people who are on the lookout for Tom Homan. Remove the nonwhite box office and Hollywood does out of business.
Of course, the dependence on foreign sales and non-English-speaking domestic customers is driven by the general decline in quality. Who is the biggest male lead in Hollywood these days? If you do not know, you are not alone, but it is probably a homosexual or a nonwhite. The same is true for female stars. The days of Hollywood stars being glamourous and recognizable are gone. Instead, it is a freakshow of random carnies picked from the diversity lottery.
Starting about ten years ago, Hollywood began to see a steady decline in revenues in North America, for both movies and television. Every year the gross declines, with some years seeing double digit declines. The remedy is to make an increasingly offensive product, which drives down the numbers further. Even easy things like remakes of classics turn into fiascos. The live-action Snow White has been repeatedly delayed because the diversity loons turned it into a punchline.
The funny thing about the collapse of Hollywood is that it is a good proxy for what we have seen in society as a whole. Unlike the government, colleges or the media, Hollywood needs to move product and that means they have to provide a product that the audience wants to buy. It is the ultimate test of the social fads pushed by the radicals over the last ten years. The fact that it was a disaster in the market should have been a clue to what was coming.
Things are about to get worse for the entrainment rackets. AI will soon make writers obsolete as software will generate scripts. Given that we know there are a finite number of plots and character types, and there is data on how these combinations appeal to audiences, it is easy to see what happens. Software will generate scripts that have the highest probability of success that year. That means all the experts on what is trending will be working at Home Depot.
Of course, the content itself will soon be generated by robots. You can now generate believable audio conversations using hints and suggestions. Businesses are already doing this for training and development. Video is coming online next. This not only will replace the actors, but it will lower the barrier to entry of filmmaking. Soon, teenagers will be making feature films that they find interesting. Just as digital audio killed music sales, AI will kill the Hollywood production studio.
To fill this out a bit, imagine you want to watch a film and you want something like the old spy thrillers of the past. You talk to your television about what you have in mind and it creates a feature film using your suggestions. Maybe it first suggests content made by others who had the same idea. Or maybe it recreates a James Bond film using period correct actors, but with changes based on your inputs. This is something that will soon be possible with AI.
What all this points to is that the woke lunacy that has raged for the last decade may have been the last effort at ideological control of the culture. The slow and steady erosion of the control mechanisms coincided with the woke rage. Perhaps the blue haired rage head was a reaction to the steady disaggregation of the culture that has been brought on by the technological revolution. She was not the vanguard, but a desperate rearguard action that has failed.
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I don’t watch t.v. I don’t watch movies. I despise actors. I couldn’t identify any singer’s voice or computer-generated myuzyk over the past 15 years. I recognize some names because I scan headlines. What does Taylor Swift sound like? I couldn’t tell you. Latest krapper? No clue. Any awards’ show or charity ball or extravaganza is merely a showcase for the freaks – the ugly – the evil. They can (and do) celebrate themselves and their twisted reality but I have better things to do – like cooking for my husband or feeding the deer. My life has never been… Read more »
“Feeding deer” is a bad ideer:
(I know – less so for a rustic than a townsman…)
Odocoileus? There ain’t enoughofus
Willing to blast the lot for their meat and hides:
Exterminate the brutes!
(As for cooking dinner, tho… ; -)
Before I swore off Counter Currents for good, during the period what I now realize in hindsight was Greg firing & replacing all of my favorite writers, someone wrote an article waxing poetic about modern music. It was one a handful of moments of me realizing that I’m clearly not the intended audience for the site anymore. Now to be fair I don’t know who the audience for discussing modern music specifically is because the comments shared my sentiment. Dude was writing about & analyzing taylor swift & others like it was Bach lol. The only reason I know swift… Read more »
Celebrity worship is one vice I’ve never had. Frankly, I’ve never been able to comprehend why anyone would take anything said by a celebrity of any kind seriously unless directly related to their “talents” Recently a bunch of CBD oil scams have been making the rounds. One of them involved falsely claiming Dolly Parton created and endorsed a particular CBD miracle cure. This was confusing in the extreme to me. Why anyone would take their medical advice from a singer is just beyond my ability to comprehend. A vice I do have is nicotine. I was in the vape shop… Read more »
Tars – well said. Yes, I too, have never suffered from celebrity worship.
Celebrity-branded liquor is another thing to avoid.
Absolutely. Billy Beer was complete mule piss.
For years I have been slowly assembling a collection of BOOKS and DVD’s as there is very little I actually watch on TV and I stopped listening to music 20 years ago. I accidentally heard Taylor Swift once and she had a screechy off tune weak second soprano voice, never did understand her appeal until I realized she was the product of the “next Brittney Spears” and “the next Justin Bieber” school which only selects and grooms/promotes for the under 13 crowd, then discards them when they hit 30. British films currently hold the most appeal simply because there’s no… Read more »
If music is any indicator, movies are not likely to get better as technology advances and gets more democratized/accessible. It appears this is a cultural issue, not a technological one. Putting cheap music technology in the hands of the masses didn’t produce more Donald Fagen, Tom Petty, Roger Waters, Pete Townshend, Michael Jackson, Prince et al. And jazz is basically dead as a genre. Putting cheap video technology out there won’t create classic movies either. An environment of mass mediocrity, vulgarity and conformity won’t produce art.
All too true!
uh, no, jazz is not dead. white people like me are keeping it alive.
Jazz died by becoming an academic subject and the default genre of music school. The hip new thing there is still “genre-mixing,” which peaked—reached total aesthetic exhaustion—forty years ago. All that’s left is irony. We have the best-trained players of all time, supposedly, and they produce absolute garbage, interchangeable widgets of corporate ideology (and novelty covers on YouTube). Thinking it used to be better back when it sounded better, like when Coltrane and Dolphy did it (and the average listener hated it, but millions didn’t), is white supremacy. The highest art black people ever produced is a casualty of diversity.… Read more »
Great analysis. Amazingly, rap crowded out jazz among the blacks. This is a great example of the democratization of “art” causing degeneration. Millions of jokers can rap but Miles and Coltrane were multi-generational talents.
There’s a strong argument for going back to the patron system – Medici and Brandenburg Concerto style (although not stiffing the artist this time).
It’s called TikTok.
When people think of movies, over 30s anyway, they think of a story that unfolds over 2 hours. New media is killing the attention span, so it’s likely that what us Gen Xers thought was a chore – reading Shakespeare or Tolstoy – will be like how Zoomers or Alphas approach watching The Godfather. Perhaps even having to sit through Titanic or Million Dollar Baby will matter the same way as a 50-year old bragging about having read Infinite Jest.
Marko-
Anecdotally, what you posit is already happening.
I know a Zoomer that is a big Tom Clancy fan that has listened to all the audio books.
I suggested he watch The Hunt for Red October (1990).
He tried, but said he had to turn it off after 20 minutes because the pacing was too slow and he didn’t like the lighting.
Ok, Zoomer.
To be fair to your acquaintance, Hunt for Red October is definitely one of the more boring Tom Clancy movies. People who weren’t alive for the Cold War won’t feel some of the beats either.
Zoomers don’t do narrative. This is both a blessing and a curse. They are less susceptible to bullshit, but it’s hard to make sense of the world without it.
Even in the cynical antihero era we still had Snake Plissken, The Omega Man and Jonathan E.
“a big Tom Clancy fan that has listened to all the audio books.”
Not the same experience as reading the book. The only way I can listen to an audio book is to read along with it while listening to it. Really, this is a decent experience and helps a bit with focus in the boring parts.
you can’t beat reading War and Peace and then seeing the Russian 1960s, think, twelve part series. Repeat that for other classics Russian or not and both media gain in effect and understanding …
It’s funny because on the one hand you have these 10 second Tiktok videos but on the other hand you have 3 hour podcasts that are popular. Apparently there’s still a market for longer stuff if it’s good.
Those long podcasts typically have a narrow and specific audience, niche markets, not the mass-market of the Hollywood filmmakers.
I know! That’s the irony. I think podcasts or videos should be an hour max, yet I’m OK with films and books being long. Zoomers are OK with videos being meandering and interminable.
Some of my favorite podcasters produce shows 3 or 4 hours long. Great for diehards but I’m like you, an hour is about my max.
It’s not that they should be limited to an hour, it’s that all the bad parts need to be stripped out. I don’t like videos or podcasts that have been stretched out or made artificially short. They should be as long or short as they need to be. Shorts should be banned.
people only listen to the first 10 minutes of that 3 hours
“Apparently there’s still a market for longer stuff if it’s good.”
I see this in recommendations a lot, and not just Zooms. There is a large and I’m afraid growing cohort that are drawn to narratives that confirm their biases. I’m not an exception there, either. Every time I read Sailor or especially Unz, I realize, “There’s an hour of my life I’m not getting back.”
What is sorely missing, IMO, is the development of ideas. We get instead the same, often trite ideas, from a greater number of “influencers”.
That’s why I like our esteemed blogger. I’ve been reading him for years, and he’s always making me think about something a different way. That is golden. You don’t get that from a lot of commentators. Usually you know exactly how the writer will frame a Happening, and most people want their biases confirmed, and the popular writer knows this, so writes accordingly. The better writers are at least amusing when they do it. I don’t think Zman is writing to confirm anyone’s bias. He wants us to think laterally about things, which is the white man’s gift to world… Read more »
I dunno, as a 50-year old my attention span is shot as well. The last time I was in a theater I thought the film I was watching was really good, and while I stayed to watch the whole thing I was done watching it after 15 minutes.
Part of the problem is that their seasoned hands are OLD and crazy (See De Niro screaming “F Trump!” from the dias.)
On the young side, we’re told we’d better believe that Zendaya is Helen of Troy reincarnated. (the Face that sunk 1000 franchises).
OTOH, the Weinstein metoo and P Diddy scandals pretty much showed the world that, male or female, if you want to succeed in that world you have to do unspeakable things.
When I see a nominee or a “winner”, it’s best to feel pity for someone who sold their soul.
Yes, they sold their souls – but for what? Fame? The adulation of the crowd? Strangers they despise and fear? They have millions of dollars to waste, but no functioning families, serial relationships, addict and trannie kids. I cannot imagine putting my private life on display – and if I had the kind of money they do, I wouldn’t spend it on botox and nipple pasties. They have no genuine sense of self which is why they spend their lives playing pretend. Any pity I had has long since been replaced by contempt.
Like so many other things in our society, Hollywood seems to have imploded around 2008. It nearly completely lost the ability to make a great film. You can see it in the Oscar winners and nominees. Most of the winners of the past 15 years are pure dreck. A movie about a woman who falls in love with a fish won for heaven’s sake. Obviously we didn’t know it at the time, but the 2008 recession and the subsequent five years – Obama election, OWS, Great Awokening, GamerGate, etc. – marked the end of American culture. It’s been shuffling along… Read more »
I was thinking about endless remakes, reboots, and “back stories”. Please, show, don’t tell. Show me Darth Vader is evil. Don’t do a three movie story arc that establishes WHY he is evil.
And really, a giant planet killing battle star? For the THIRD FREAKING TIME after one was blown up in two previous movies? What, did you literally believe “Third time’s the charm?” 🤦♂️
I recall thinking are you kidding, the battle star AGAIN? Couldn’t take five minutes to conjure something else?
Sorry friends – while it impressed the 11 year-old me (as it was designed to do!), I recognized by the time of the intitiaI sequals that Star Wars was “falsch und Zwei,” through and through.
(I truly DO NOT understand the appeal…)
That is probably the right time frame, M. And it just isn’t movies. I used to be a voracious reader and around the early 2000’s I noticed that when I bought books… the chances of getting a good read dropped like a stone. The best seller lists were a waste of time. Then the mainstream type writers started going woke and I probably stopped buying books altogether in around ’08. Probably stopped with the movies a short time later. Hopefully wokeness begins to die soon too. There are encouraging signs… I see that bint that faggotified Disney productions has finally… Read more »
If it’s mass market books you’re talking about, they weren’t anything great fifty years ago either — writers like Harold Robbins, Arthur Hailey, Robert Ludlum, and Alistair MacLean. There are still good writers turning out good books, even superb books, both fiction and nonfiction. But you have to search for them.
I was a big fan of John Sanford’s crime audio books (long commutes). They were free of wokeness, just story — well woven and often very funny. Then, at the time (maybe mid 2000’s), I got out his latest for listening. The abruptness of his going full speed woke in chapter one, when none existed before, was like a two-by-four to my face. I mused to myself his publishers must have told him “get with the program, change or die”. That was the end of that love affair.
A guy on Fedi noted all the winners since 2004 (when Return of the King won Best Picture) and how mediocre the lot was. I think the only one I’d even seen was No Country for Old Men which wasn’t awful-awful but I still wasn’t a big fan of (oh, I’d seen Hurt Locker too, ditto).
(Actually just scanned the nominees too but that only added 11 to the count, and mind you that’s over 20 years and they had expanded the nominee pool for about a third of that time).
The point’s been made six million times, but go onto the streaming services and try to find something that’s not either Negro-centric, LGBTQ/whatever, or about the Hall-of-Cost. Maybe you can locate some “Mannix” reruns, if you’re lucky.
‘Perhaps the blue haired rage head was a reaction to the steady disaggregation of the culture that has been brought on by the technological revolution’ The blue haired rage head was a reaction to a century of the increasing legal and cultural power of women, and a century of increasingly emasculated American men. Feminism and gynarchy were firmly established in America before the Silly Con Valley ‘technological revolution’ got going. ‘What all this points to is that the woke lunacy that has raged for the last decade may have been the last effort at ideological control of the culture’ Woke… Read more »
Yes, excellent post.
If I could make an AI movie it would be an adaptation of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness but set in Vietnam.
That was Apocalypse Now.
it was a joke 🙂
No, it was a biographical drama of the life and times of John Kerry!
kerry was actually in AN. he was the guy water skiing bare assed!
”The horror, the horror.”
Now there’s an embryonic idea — set “Heart of Darkness” in the USA, along some river, maybe going along some multi-culti cities — the horror, the horror!
it often fells like of much of National Review content is written by AI. They are so boring and obvious.
You are 100% correct. To be precise NR content is now written by children. The only reason I even click on a link to them nowadays is to see who the article’s author is and it is almost always some “intern” of this or that. It’s probably very likely that these same interns are using some kind of ChatGPT application to write content just like they’re using it to do their homework.
Just train a model on 5 or 6 economics books, (Rothbard, Mises, Friedman, Hazlitt), a few decades of articles by the Mises crowd, throw in a few decades of Hitler hysteria and then a directive to always just parrot progressive dogma from 10 years prior and you probably have the National Review LLM. You just need some time function to accelerate the lag between the adoption of progressive dogma. Call it The Fresh Prince Acceleration Function. Heck you could probably just feed it the Rand Corp’s web site and it would suffice. That is actually an interesting social experiment. Train… Read more »
The not-very-subtext is “Americans are mean to Jews.” They literally have the (male) American millionaire rape the (male) Jewish architect for no reason other than hate.
It’s so tiresome.
It has never been easier or cheaper to write and edit scripts, cast actors, scout locations, mix sound, or shoot and edit video. And yet everything is shit.
I think the vaporization of attention spans is more important than the fertility crisis, and likely has something to do with it.
I agree, mon ami(e).
Movies have never been cheaper to make, yet movie budgets have never been higher. Independent production has never been easier, yet no independent films break through like they used to.
People read all day; literacy is down. Almost all human knowledge and experience is right here on the tubes (for now); nobody looks at almost any of it.
Many such cases—one for almost anything you can think of.
Two things are happening at the same time. The bigger, stronger, darker one is unacknowledged.
Yesterday NoName gave us “egregore.” Of those two things, here’s what I suspect:
The zeitgeist is being retuned. If White people, retuneable by their exposure to the aurora borealis, were the combination necessary to open the pinhole in the eggshell, that is, begin the populating of the “Heaven”, the immaterial panspermial Sporing layer…
Then are the JQ attempting, or necessary for, an alternate copy of this process?
That is, pushing a physical cybernetic form capable of surviving space travel? That seems to be what the transhumanist vision is for.
A Borg vision for leaving the nest behind.
There is no room for art of any kind in The Brave New World.
The personal is fully political.
Or humour, for that matter…
who needs art when you have soma
I’ll repost what I posted at another site about the Oscars: Ah, The Oscars. We were on the phone talking with my wife’s good friends who live in England when the show started. We watched the opening act (A Wicked/Wizard of Oz mashup), Conan’s intro, and then when we hung up to end the call she turned to me and said “Okay, we can turn it off now, it’s too weird for me” after Conan’s intro. We switched to a music channel. She agrees with me that Hollywood hates people like us, polite White people who live in the Midwest and aren’t raging Leftists.… Read more »
This is progress. As sad as it is, this is necessary to get our people to wake up and move through to the other side.
I’m down to watching Japanese samurai and monster movies from the 1960s and South Korean gangster films because at least there is no diversity and somewhat coherent plots. All the old movies I used to love have become unwatchable for some reason.
Yeah me too… but it’s amazing because the pozz isn’t just in America. It’s tearing up Japan and Korea and some of the other Pacific Rim countries too…
I don’t find it coincidental that Hollywood product mostly became garbage around the same time that popular music did. 2000-ish, give or take a few years. It happened sooner in most of the visual arts. I have this notion that cultural decline precedes artistic decline, and is manifested in the arts some time after it has already happened culturally. Decades even. Art is a lagging cultural indicator, both on the way up and on the way down. Thus, the creative zenith in the arts may have occurred some time after the cultural peak. Because the artists themselves were formed by… Read more »
The current popular music scene is utterly bizarre.
In 2025, millions of people are listening to songs from the mid-60s to mid-80s on a daily basis.
In 1985, no one was listening to anything from the mid-20s to the mid-40s on a daily basis.
‘First time listening to’ podcasts are popular now because the ‘music’ of the past 30 years — (c)rap and whiny corporate-produced wimmin — sucks so bad. Young people are recognizing that the music of the Fifties – Seventies was vastly superior.
‘I can’t believe this song!’ or ‘I wish I had lived back then’ is a typical podcast comment.
Oh come on Oldsters. Let’s stop with the coping. Please, go spend some time observing and listening to the world outside of your home. Go up and down the FM dial today while driving. Or look on Spotify at the top 40 songs. Find your 1960s and 1970s music on there. It’s not. Go to a Food Court at a remaining mall in an upscale area. Listen to what’s being played by the high school age kids. They are not listening to your music and they are definitely not watching your films. Edit: Why must you do this? Your generation,… Read more »
My FM dial is packed with music from the past. Now maybe that’s a sign of how outdated terrestrial radio is, but even online and in music apps, pop music of the past has a strong presence.
And even if our culture was garbage, that doesn’t negate the fact that today’s dreck has upped the ante.
The music — and more latterly, films — of your generation suck. Pretty much everybody but you, mr. teen zeitgeist, seems to know it.
Wah de wah wah.
What you don’t understand about old people is: We’ve seen a lot of entertainment and judge what we see in the present against the very best of what we’ve seen in the past. A CGI sequence where a 95 pound girl beats up on a 250 pound man just looks silly when compared to the action in, say, The French Connection.
“Listen to what’s being played by the high school age kids.”
There is some, sure, but the overwhelming majority are some simple I-IV-V-IV progressions or something equally bland. Music that resolves itself in 3 chords is trite.
Mixolydian? Andalusian? “Git yer damn ferriners out of here!”
Eh, I’ve actually started to notice just how much old music (and yes 1990s music is old at this point) is being pumped through public spaces these days.
Ray I hate to break it to you, and I’m of your generation so I sympathize, but those “reaction” videos you’re speaking about are frauds. It’s just another grift for blacks who have no marketable skills. I love a lot of the music they’re reviewing, but they don’t. These people are actors pretending to be floored by the music. It isn’t their music, they’re just pretending to like it even though it really is great music and maybe some of it really does impress them. The important thing is they aren’t introducing a new audience to the music. When you… Read more »
Willing to stipulate that some of the reviews may be cynical frauds. But I see the reaction on faces, and I seriously doubt your contention is broadly valid.
‘It’s just another grift for blacks who have no marketable skills’
Many of the reviewers I watch are younger, white folks. One markets themselves as college kids. Dunno why you think they’re all black. Do we have to insert politics into everything? Part of the point of these podcasts is to transcend that and just share the music.
These videos are one more discouraging sign of how deeply white people want blacks to like them.
Nothing can make an older white person happier than hearing a black person praise Reagan-style conservatism or 1970s rock. Nothing!
So incredibly tiresome.
“I’m finally allowed to like Freebird because Q’Antavious gave it a thumbs up!”
There’s a fellow Z links to (Kairos) https://www.kairospublications.com/blog who posits that 1997 was “Ground Zero” for the cultural decline that you speak of. His theory is that the consolidation of things like radio stations, record companies, etc. reduced the number of creative outlets to a few and less and less new and unique acts were appearing. Plus “big data” was starting to become available to allow creative businesses to tailor music or movies to a specific audience. How so? Make it bland, inoffensive, easy to listen to or follow.
Yes. You also have the introduction of massive amounts of compression as a primary production technique in music. What this meant was that the dynamic range of the song is taken away by compressing the high and low dynamics closer together. This has the effect of making the song much louder. That louder forces everyone to make their song louder, (and also lacking dynamic spacing and depth), in order to compete. The loudest wins on a first listen. Why? Listening to the song with greater dynamic after those with less requires more effort. Also after being blasted with volume, the… Read more »
‘In terms of pop music, the true genius of Les Paul was probably the high point’
He was the real deal, no doubt.
It’s definitely true that a lot of the music starting around there fell to the Loudness Wars, but the simple fact is that almost all people think louder sounds better. It doesn’t even have to be a lot — turn the same chorus up 2dB and at least 90% will prefer the latter. And I don’t think that’s a conditioned response — I think its probably innate.
In other words, music shifted from what the artists and labels wanted to what the people wanted.
RR-
Great post.
There are other popular technologies that have degraded music as well.
Auto-Tune for the purpose of correcting a singer’s pitch is probably the most egregious example. This technology was heavily abused in the late 00s and early 10s. I doubt there are many people listening to the popular singles of that era.
I’d buy that theory, for sure.
Another factor for artistic decline is simple demography: less white people w/less hope.
White population continued to grow up until at least 2010 or so. There were more whites alive then than ever before. May have tapered off slightly since. It’s just that non whites grew a lot more. A LOT more.
I felt the same way; it “ended” somewhere around the 2000s. I think the Maguire Spider-man (cgi crap) was a sign of end of hollywood. Crazy thing, is that Britney Spears stuff is GENIUS compared today’s so-called musical offerings!
Last great Oscars was Jack Palance doing push-ups!
Hollywood movies today are purely ideological as written and directed by retards; they are completely without craft.
So you either watch a holocaust/racist/homo/transo movie OR an idiotic superhero movie with some steroided-up actor in front of a green screen punching out alien Hitler.. Make no mistake, the superhero is ABSOLUTELY the modern form of IDOLATRY.
As for today’s “great” director Chris Nolan. . .all his movies are mediocre, muddled, well-marketed crap.
Here’s an Oscar nod to Ricky Gervais trashing the baizuo to their faces!
Not a contemporary movie fan either. I prefer the old stuff on TCM (plus there’s no insidious commercials!). However, there was one recent movie that was really a throwback to the action-packed alpha male movies of the 60s and 70s, probably because it was a period piece from the 60s – 2019’s “Ford v Ferrari”. Great movie w/ no retconed minorities. In fact the only black in the movie was the janitor in the garage and he made only one 2-3 sec appearance. Amazing that it was made just six years ago. Would never pass muster now without at least… Read more »
A fellow named Unwin wrote a book called Sex and Culture where he examined 86 cultures over time. According to him, sexual liberation killed the culture of any society in three generations. Sound familiar? “the data revealed that the single most important correlation with the flourishing of a culture was whether pre-nuptial chastity was required or not. It had a very significant effect either way. Highest flourishing of culture: The most powerful combination was pre-nuptial chastity coupled with “absolute monogamy”. Rationalist cultures that retained this combination for at least three generations exceeded all other cultures in every area, including literature,… Read more »
Corporate America embraced White erasure and mass immigration because its sole goal is to grow the consumer base. Of course, there is never one faction. This faction of soulless ghouls fused with equally demented people who think White genocide will rid the world of evil and oppression. Of course the corporate ghouls, being simple minded dolts and psychopathic money grubbers, also saw this latter faction’s mission as the ultimate moral good. It lent weight and gave a moral sanction to their doing the ultimate evil – abandoning their own people, destroying their homelands, and targeting them for total erasure –… Read more »
you touched on something that is more significant than you give it credit for. and that is the “long tail” effect. we have all the wonderful things made in previous times, without the need (or desire) for AI slop.
also, there will be user directed AI, and all it will be used for is scatalogical ends. think “Ow My Balls” and you are there.
there will be user directed AI, and all it will be used for is scatalogical ends. think “Ow My Balls” and you are there.
I’ve always liked Star Trek and had little difficulty suspending my disbelief to enjoy the plots. Except for one thing: the Holodeck in TNG. They always showed us people using it to simulate whitewater rafting, Gilbert and Sullivan operettas, or Sherlock Holmes and noir mystery plots. We all know that if such a thing existed, it would be used almost exclusively to produce porn fantasies.
“We all know that if such a thing existed, it would be used almost exclusively to produce porn fantasies.”
Just say what you mean. Jeri Ryan and Marina Sirtis on endless loop. 😉
Uh, there is already a significant cottage industry of people on YouTube making AI-modified trailers.
Go search for something like, “Star Trek as a 40s film noir,” and see what is returned.
I can hardly wait to see the AI reboot of Idiocracy. How could it possibly be improved upon? The original had it all – morons, tech gone wrong, strong anti-White male overtones, diversity on ‘roids. All that needs be done is recast the [White, male] protagonist as a sassy, crippled, gender-fluid negress with an IQ of 180 and Hollywood will fall all over itself at the Academy Awards, sucking its own protuberances.
I’m not sure if it’s a symptom or a contributing cause to the death of Hollywood, but the disappearance of physical media has to be another nail in the coffin. They’ve created all these streaming services in a desperate attempt to nickel and dime you for access and nickel and dime you even further if you want to tune into an old Bond movie and as part of the desperation it seems that they’re trying to deny you access to a physical copy of your entertainment so you always have to go through them to watch something. It’s ultimately going… Read more »
Yes, but…
I think it’s probably the other way around. And for pretty good reasons. While much of the older content is worth re-watching, the younger generations realize they never want to watch the new stuff ever again. Why pay $20 for a Blu-Ray that will just gather dust in their already too-small apartment when you can just rent it for a buck?
My wife works at Home Depot and does not want any of those fuckers anywhere near her store.
A review of “The Brutalist” which appeared in the Unz Review… https://www.unz.com/ejones/the-brutalist-america-turned-upside-down/
I’m looking forward to AI Bond films starring “Sean Connery,” with the plot and vibe of Goldfinger and Thunderball and the villains Blofeld and Spectre. As Trump said, it’s a Golden Age.
Well Amazon just bought the rights to James Bond. It remains to be seen if Bezos, who has taken notice that there is a cultural shift and began to rein in his employees’ fanatical hatred over at the Post, might decide that making a “classic” Bond movie might do far better than gay transgender Black Bond. If they were smart, they would reset James Bond back in his historical context and make them period pieces, because James Bond can’t be James Bond in Clown World, yet. I’d set the very first one in 1945, and have James doing his thing… Read more »
That’s the problem with some of these franchises and using them as period pieces. I used to enjoy reading espionage novels set in the 1950s -but I read them in the 1970s. Anything pre-2000 is ancient history to most of AINO’s diverse population, and the last thing I want to do is continue to focus any attention on hollow victories in brother wars that never should have happened.
what’s the over/under bezos casts himself as the new Bond? :p
I guess casting himself as a Bond Villain would be a little too on the nose.
Ernst Stavro Bezos. 👨🦲
When does he buy a secret underground lair beneath a volcano?
He already has one
Inside the mountain where billionaire Jeff Bezos is building a clock that will last longer than us – CyberGuy
I’m not an artsy person, but I would love to see real movies and literature again. It doesn’t even have to be American.
In the long term, the dumbing down of the population through the “robot revolution” will be self-limiting. Eventually so much of the population will be ignorant savages that they will be unable to maintain the technology bequeathed to them by previous generations. The end game will look a lot uglier than Idiocracy.
You know, that’s a good point. The Bible warns against idleness in many places. If machines start doing everything for you, your skills deteriorate, you’re learning through trial and error also deteriorates. Just look at people’s math skills since the advent of the calculator.
An advantage of becoming older than rust is that I’ve forgotten most plot lines of old movies. “Ben Hur” captivated my attention for about three hours just last week, and at the finish, I was thinking “They just don’t make ’em like that anymore.”
Next on the chopping block, after movies nobody watches:
Auto makers manufacturing cars nobody wants to drive;
Utility companies closing power plants and replacing them with systems that consume electricity; and,
Schools/ hospitals/ churches/ governments which eat taxes and produce…expenses?
My children study math, science, literature and history. Unfortunately, the most important skill I’ve taught them is how to field strip small arms.
Auto makers manufacturing cars nobody wants to drive;
Z Man needs a car rant for us to comment on, or a Friday podcast dealing with the frustrations and foibles of new cars.
And another Xirl Science Friday Podcast Z!
Great!! Next up – reloading.
There is a partial explanation on the fake ratings in this DW article. The total number is calculated by adding the Nielsen measurement of viewers on ABC to live streaming viewers watching the ceremony on Hulu. The streaming services start you on a program they think you will be interested in when you open them. They just defaulted people to the Oscars whether they wanted to watch it or not and then counted them as viewers. A good guess is that half of these 19.69 saw less than five minutes of the broadcast. I have heard no one talking about… Read more »
“One of the runners up was a film called The Brutalist, which is about hideous architecture.”
Uh… I think it was about a little more than just that. LOL
A notable entry in the new America’s Holocaust genre.
I shouted out, “Who killed the Edelsteins?” After all, it was you.
A bunch of different things going on here. I will just list my pet peeves and you can agree or disagree. 1. Ugliness of the so-called stars. Watch any old movie and there is always somebody in there who catches your eye. I don’t know what it is about movies these days, but the women they cast in these movies, even the white ones, just don’t have anything about how they look that interests me. Not everyone, of course. Occasionally, someone will catch my eye, but not like they do in the older movies. 2. Too many trashy people in… Read more »
The uglification of women on screen had a lot to do with women casting directors trying to feel better about themselves. And women ticket buyers trying to feel better about themselves too.
It’s not that I demand actresses be drop dead gorgeous. Back in the day, many weren’t either. Just don’t stick some horse face up there and tell me she’s the most beautiful woman in the world.
I’m not an artistic person so I have no sophisticated critiques to offer, but I do have a personal theory about why our stories are so poor – aside from the usual (((problem))). I think it is because Westerners now, to an extraordinary degree, lead boring lives and therefore have nothing interesting to say, simply due to lack of experience. To use a film reference, in the old Blackhawk Down movie there’s a scene where the warlord character says to the captured pilot something like “None of you Americans smoke anymore. You all lead dull, uninteresting lives.” I think that… Read more »
Thank goodness for Turner Classic Movies. Most of the stuff was made in the before times, and features heartfelt stories, or terrific set dance pieces, or beautiful white people, or all three.
I can’t think of anything made in the last ten years that I would waste my time watching or didn’t regret watching.
I hate to say it as I like classic movies too, but the notion that they were not a bunch of degenerates back then is just not accurate.
Why do I have the feeling that the technological possibilities discussed in the last few paragraphs of the z-man’s post will appear first in the pornography industry?
Let me guess. No mention of Villeneuve’s Dune II on the Oscars.
Okay, Zman, you suckered me into googling the Oscars. Anora actually looks interesting…very “with” the modern zeitgeist. The mummies are trying to get one last drop of nostalgia-laden adrenochrome out of their victims. Emilia Perez? Jeebus. The last gasp of the Kamala era. Sicario this ain’t. And at least, consolation prizes for Dune II. They are definitely afraid of based. Did anybody notice the unique aspect of Dune? Not a whisper of abortion or “women’s rights.” Women in the far future are back to wielding power as only women can do. And, the unnamed subtext: the ultimate prize was not… Read more »
I love these threads. Boomer breakfast time. Half the comments: “I haven’t watched a film since Aught-One and it’s gonna’ shtay that way, dadgummit!” Like your grandparents weren’t saying the same in the 1960s and 1970s. Oh but they were wrong, aesthetic heights were crested by titans like Robert Plant and Don Henley, kid!
The thread definitely shows the age of Zman’s average reader. Thing is, I didn’t watch that many movies or listen to the radio even when I was a teen. Friends in the ’60s swooned over Bobby Sherman and I had no idea who he was. Yes, I’m familiar with music I heard all around me or that friends and siblings listened to, but on my own I couldn’t be bothered. I know some late ’70s music because I had a mad crush on a guy in a band when I was a college junior/senior. I watched a lot of movies… Read more »
Listen, whipper-snapper. I never said I haven’t watched anything since 2015. I said I have, and it’s all C-R-A-P. Now get off my lawn!
Hollywood is also aging. Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt are both in their sixties, and Cruise’s face for sure reflects the effects of plastic surgery, with it’s weird Gumby-like reflexing of the skin. The thing is, Hollywood *wants* to be white, and male. The all-female Ghostbusters 👻 remake and the you go grrl Captain Marvel’s were half-hearted attempts by almost all-male production teams to pander to wahmen, and wahmen weren’t paying. What Hollywood used to do was throw in an all-male ensemble cast with ONE token slot reserved for the bishes in the audience. Pulp Fiction, with Uma Thurman playing… Read more »
As others her have mentioned, the polite thing for you to do, Greg, would be to stop using this site to promote your blog.
Asking him politely hasn’t worked.
Screw you guys.
I’m gonna start selling steak knives and pocket fishermen here… 🙂
Don’t listen to naysayers. Selling steak knives on other writers’ blogs is an example of making America great again. I am sure Trump would approve.
Filthie and My Comment:
Hilarious. It’s worth scrolling to the very bottom of the comment section.
Dude! I still have a working Ronco Tadpole.