{"id":274,"date":"2006-03-10T03:50:54","date_gmt":"2006-03-10T08:50:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=274"},"modified":"2006-03-10T03:59:53","modified_gmt":"2006-03-10T08:59:53","slug":"out-of-the-frame","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=274","title":{"rendered":"Out of the Frame"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>Movie ticket receipts in North America dipped by six percent in<br \/>\n2005 to nine billion dollars,<\/em> comes today&#8217;s report on the status of<br \/>\nthe film industry.<\/p>\n<p>The most hyped movie of 2005 was a depressing, pokey flick about<br \/>\ngay sheepherders.  The Oscar nominations were otherwise dominated by<br \/>\none movie that flogged us all for our supposed racism in a wearisomely<br \/>\nfamiliar way, another that rehashed left-wing grievances against a<br \/>\nminor and ineffective demagogue who&#8217;s been dead for pushing fifty<br \/>\nyears, and a thriller that made an Islamic suicide bomber out to be<br \/>\na saint and Americans parasitic villains.<\/p>\n<p>Call me crazy, but I can&#8217;t help but think there might be some tenuous<br \/>\nshred of a hint of a connection here&#8230;<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>Hollywood is still capable of producing a decent flick now and<br \/>\nagain (I think the last really good one I saw was<br \/>\n<cite>Firefly<\/cite>).  But if George Clooney was right when he said Hollywood should be<br \/>\nproud to be out of touch, it&#8217;s got more and more to be proud of every<br \/>\nyear.  I&#8217;m no conservative and no prude either, but I have not even<br \/>\nthe slightest interest in a movie about two sad losers with penises<br \/>\ncompulsively buggering while their lives and marriages fall apart<br \/>\naround them.  Cripes &mdash; if you held a contest to come up with a<br \/>\nstory concept that would repel the heterosexual 96% of males, and<br \/>\npeople of both sexes who go to the movies to be <em>entertained<\/em>,<br \/>\nyou couldn&#8217;t do better than that.<\/p>\n<p>Don&#8217;t bother telling me what I&#8217;m <em>supposed<\/em> to feel about<br \/>\n<cite>Brokeback Mountain<\/cite> or what a philistine I am for dismissing<br \/>\nit out of hand, or why it would be good for me to see it.  That&#8217;s exactly<br \/>\nmy point; I don&#8217;t want to pay $9.00 to see a movie because somebody else<br \/>\nthought it would be good for me.  I buy entertainment from Hollywood, not<br \/>\nmoral prescriptions, and if Hollywood now thinks its job is to improve<br \/>\nmy character it can just fuck off.<\/p>\n<p>It happens that in America in 2006, Hollywood is trying to pound<br \/>\nwacky left-wing political correctness down our throats, but my<br \/>\ncomplaint would be identical if the movie industry were taken over by<br \/>\nChristian evangelicals and persisted in cranking out edifying tales<br \/>\nfrom the Bible.  Fuck <em>all<\/em> that noise; the harder you try to<br \/>\n&#8216;uplift&#8217; me in either direction, the more I&#8217;ll gravitate to the simple<br \/>\nthalamic pleasures of gratuitous nudity and big explosions.<\/p>\n<p>Actually, I expect Hollywood&#8217;s drift to get far worse.  All<br \/>\nindications are that the people who greenlight films live so deep<br \/>\ninside the bubble world of elite bicoastal left-liberalism that<br \/>\nthey&#8217;re barely aware anything else exists.  And to the limited extent<br \/>\nthe are aware, they feel little but contempt for people on the<br \/>\noutside.  This kind of problem tends to be self-reinforcing.<\/p>\n<p>But it&#8217;s difficult to serve customers that you feel little other<br \/>\nthan contempt for.  Sooner or later, they tend to notice the contempt.<br \/>\nAnd go elsewhere. I expect those box-office receipts to keep falling;<br \/>\nthe interesting question, now, is when Hollywood&#8217;s narcissistic,<br \/>\ndysfunctional culture will break under the resulting strain.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Movie ticket receipts in North America dipped by six percent in 2005 to nine billion dollars, comes today&#8217;s report on the status of the film industry. The most hyped movie of 2005 was a depressing, pokey flick about gay sheepherders. The Oscar nominations were otherwise dominated by one movie that flogged us all for our&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=274\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Out of the Frame<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-274","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/274","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=274"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/274\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=274"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=274"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=274"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}