The Hollywoke Meltdown

 The Hollywoke Meltdown - The American Spectator

"Diversity quotas replaced filmmaking merit. And it got much worse much faster. You couldn’t just be a black, female, or gay writer-director-producer, you had to be anti-white or anti-male or anti-heteronormative." 

 "I’ve been writing for years about the steep decline of cinema — in fact all art and media — this century. My very first article for this fine publication (fortunately for my integrity, a true statement rather than a transparent bid for a raise) a shocking six years ago explored how even a moderately good action picture like 2008’s Taken was beyond the capability or intent of 2018 Hollywood. Because the idea of a loving tough-guy dad rescuing his helpless teen daughter with manly “certain skills” while his gorgeous ex-wife frets realistically became anathema soon afterward. Hollywood had not yet fully mutated into Hollywoke, but it devolved fast.

"Today, most people recognize the film industry as the creative wasteland it has become. A brand new Rasmussen poll shows Americans by a two-to-one margin think movies have gotten worse in the 21^st Century. The poll found 54 percent believe motion picture quality has deteriorated in the last 20 years. Only the usual 27 percent of unshakable zombies assume the opposite. What happened to the screen trade during this time period is a tale perhaps not worthy of Edward Gibbon (The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire) but a lot more justified.

"Most of the great auteurs and producers either retired or expired, and the studio system they enriched became a vacuous shell. Academia-spawned progressives took over, minus the talent to extend, duplicate, or simply maintain their marvelous inheritance. All they knew how to do was implode artistic truth with leftwing fantasy, reducing a once beloved industry into a pedestrian liberal message factory.

" 'If you want to send a message, try Western Union,” Frank Capra once said about blatant preachiness on film. Yet Capra was a master at instilling moralistic philosophy into his pictures, except he did it with heartwarming stories about virtuous people in some of the greatest films of all time. Modern filmmakers both dismiss that aspect of the craft and lack the skill to create anything close to It Happened One Night, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Meet John Doe, and It’s a Wonderful Life.

"But in 2001, they found a loftier goal than the genius director who immortalized the year, Stanley Kubrick with 2001: A  Space Odyssey, which was attacking the War on Terror and the American men fighting it. They made an unprecedented number of antiwar pictures slamming those heroes as ignorant pawns or psychopaths — American Soldiers, Redacted (about the rape and murder of a 15-year-old Iraqi girl by U.S. soldiers), Stop-Loss, The Mark of Cain, Home of the Brave, Green Zone, In the Valley of Elah (a peacenik bridge too far for director Robert Redford) — while our guys were in harm’s way." . . .