Tag: Burn Hollywood Burn

We Live In A Cultural Vacuum


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

The interesting thing about the modern era is, well, we’re not in an era. I guess the argument could be made that we’re in either the post-Trump Era or the pre-autocracy era or even modern Antebellum era. But, really, when it comes to culture none of those are true.

We’re not in just a cultural wasteland, we’re in a cultural vacuum.

The current era began, I would posit, with the introduction of the first iPhone. In a broader sense, I guess, we’re still in the post-9/11 Era. I thought Rona would do something to jiggle our culture, but that really hasn’t happened.

If I want to make myself feel better, I would get all excited and say we’re one unexpected hit in music, movies or TV for some sort of major shift in our culture perceptions to occur. That’s usually how such eras begin. Some young outlier produces a song, or an album or whatever that is so unexpectedly popular that it shakes everything up.

I guess, in a sense, I am looking forward to a new Nevermind or Pulp Fiction to pop out to really rattle hyper modern pop culture. In a sense, maybe, you might say that Tik-Tok is a precursor to what I’m talking looking forward to. Tik-Tok is making new era stars in a currently unnamed era.

Tragically, of course, the Something Big that changes everything might be some huge news event that is the Day The Earth Stood Still, like 9/11. We’re just about due for something like that to happen.

But I can’t predict the future. I have no idea that is going to happen.

Taylor Swift Will Never Be A Movie Star


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Taylor Swift is one of the best entertainers of her generation. She has millions of rabid fans who analyze and debate her every statement and action. Swift has all that and will likely have it for the rest of her life. But there’s one thing she will never have: a movie career.

The reason for this is simple — Swift is never going to do a sex scene and she’s never going to show any T&A. Never. Never. Even in this post-#MeToo era that we live in where mainstream Hollywood movies seem more interested in screeching about lesbian sex positions than entertaining an audience, someone as drop dead gorgeous as Swift would inevitably have to drop trou to get the type of movie role she might want to start a serious Hollywood career.

Given what most of her fan base is made up of — liberal white girls and women — the idea that she would do something as out of character as do a sex scene in a movie to further her Hollywood career is just not applicable for Swift. I’m not saying this is a bad thing — you do you, Tay-Tay — but Swift definitely seems like the type of ambitious young woman who would otherwise have at least a chance of having a serious Hollywood career.

The only out for Swift on this front is when she is in her 40s and she’s had a 20 year residency in Vegas and even the youngest members of her fanbase are in their 30s, she probably could get away with a traditional Hollywood sex scene. Her fan base will be so jaded by this point that they, at last, won’t care. And Swift herself will be old enough that she will want to prove she’s still got the goods.

As an aside, I will note that Swift is in the exact middle of pop culture. She is the center of pop culture. She never went through any kind of wild, crazy period in her career where she came out as bi and dated a woman or a rapper or whatever. The thing about her music career that I have noticed is she apparently has decided to do exclusively fan service from here on out. She’s never going to challenge her fans, or change, or mature or anything. Another thing about Swift is she’s hot but not sexy. She’s about the most chaste pop star out there. She never, ever has ever had an accidently on purpose nip slip or flashed a bit of butt crack on Instagram.

She’s training bra music and will spend the rest of her life producing some variation of that theme.

Let’s Address The Quentin Tarantino Comment About Chevy Chase Verses Bill Murray Movies


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Quentin, I love you bro, but this time you’re full of shit. The reason why his statement that Chevy Chase movies are better than Bill Murray is personal to me is I remember when the movies in question came out. For someone who is so attune to the nuances of storytelling, Tarantino is strangely totally wrong on this issue.

What’s worse, his very bad hot take on this subject is gist for Chads who want to get all worked up about how Cancel Culture is depriving us of a good Star Wars franchise or some such. The idea that Chase movies are better than Murray movies because Chase’s characters are “allowed” not to redeem themselves by the end of the movie is nothing more than horseshit. The whole point of a good movie, generally, is there is some redemption or change on the part of the protagonist. Something has to change.

There’s just no excuse for such a bad hot take on Tarantino’s part. Also, in general, Murray movies are just better, period. I mean, Chase’s career was very scattershot in quality, while Murray has, over the years, been in classic movie after classic movie.

Why Tarantino would make such a weird, erroneous observation about the two men’s careers is very curious. The weakest Murray movie between 1980 and 2000 is far, far better than Chase’s strongest movie between when he left SNL to when his movie career fizzled out in the late 80s. I mean, when it comes to cultural relevance the first Fletch movie is probably all Chase has. I think there may have been a Chase movie or two in the 70s that was pretty good, but they’ve faded into the historical shadows.

Edit: I totally forgot the Vacation movies that Chase did. Which, I think, tells us how bad, in real terms, they were.

Anyway, lulz.

Axis Of Red Pill Derp — Joe Rogan Interviews Quentin Tarantino


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I’m a huge Tarantino fan. I think he’s one of the last great auteurs out there, but he can also sometimes be tone deft when it comes to cultural issues. I haven’t watched all of his interview with Alt Right Lite hero Joe Rogan, but what I have seen is very interesting.

As expected, there was a lot of Red Pill derp going on between these two guys. I don’t think the average person appreciates how a huge swath of the young adult male population has grown alienated from the existing media narrative. In fact, on YouTube, there’s an entire on-boarding system designed to hook such individuals into getting “Red Pilled.”

So, while in Tarantino’s mind, he was just dropping truth bombs in the context of how he’s one of the last great Hollywood directors, a lot of young men see his interview as validation for their “women and minorities control everything” narrative.

Thing about all of this that is so aggravating is how difficult it is to pin down in concrete terms what things like “cancel culture” even mean. One person’s “cancel culture” is another person’s “well, we live in a new age where audiences really aren’t as accepting of the gratuitous sex and violence that Tarantino is know for.”

Red Pilled young men are a lot like most MAGA people — they are spooked by abstract changes in modern American society. Both groups can’t really articulate what bothers them, they just know they hate liberals. Red Pilled young men hate things like Kathleen Kennedy and love the earnest masculinity of Joe Rogan.

A lot of the problems in American culture are so nebulous and abstract and yet so powerful that they’re even more intractable than they would be otherwise. As such, I suspect they’re only going to be solved when the United States finally becomes a MAGA autocracy — or we have a civil war.

Either way, a lot of difficult-to-pin-down fears that people on both the center-Right and center-Left may have will become very, very moot.

A Modest Proposal: End The Superhero & Woke Hollywood Movie Era


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Movies are a reflection of our collective fears and hopes. As such, the last 20 years — a whole generation — of movies has been dominated by the superhero trope. The general consensus, it seems, is the rise of superhero movies is a response to the tragic events of 9/11: as part of the grieving process we all want to believe that 9/11 could have been prevented if superheroes were real.

But it’s been 20 years, guys, give it a rest.

It’s time for us to move on. We need to stop having two options when we go to the movie theatre: a big budget superhero movie or a “woke” movie that preaches to us.

We need to start thinking about telling human stories like we did between say, Midnight Cowboy to about The Shawshank Redemption. We need to turn the page on superhero movies and start telling stories that don’t involve people running around in capes.

Now, it’s possible this is just not possible anymore because of issues with the marketplace and not the audience — all the types of stories I want to see are now on a streamer. Or, more ominously, it could be that just like rock and pop music are no longer one and the same, audience tastes have changed for whatever reason and this is The New Normal.

We’re never going to have another God Father, or Dear Hunter or Deliverance or whatever. From here on out, we’re stuck with Woke Hollywood that alienates audiences with strained efforts to cram a liberal-progressive agenda down our throats.

It could be possible that audiences from here on out will be subjected to movies like Book Smart where unattractive people screech about lesbian sex positions and that will be that. Once traditional Hollywood stars like Tom Cruise shuffle off this mortal coil, we’ll just have Woke Hollywood producing preachy movies that only serve to alienate us into Blue and Red echo chambers.

Do I have any hope that I’m wrong? Nope. Rock is dead and, so, too, it could be that, in a sense, Hollywood is dead too.

An Update On The Novel I’m Working On


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

The novel is shaping up to be an even bigger creative project that ROKon Magazine which totally consumed my life for about eight months in late 2006 to early 2007. I’ve been working on this novel for what feels like forever, but I think it’s probably close to about three years.

Finally, finally, things have clicked.

But I still have a huge amount of work to do. I’ve learned a lot about how to structure a novel over the last few years and one thing that’s becoming clear is you need to read your stuff as you write it. If you do that, then you catch problems with pacing before you show it to other people.

I’ve spend all day today getting the sequence of events in this novel just right. It’s been exhausting, but well worth the hard work. I really feel like how I felt with ROKon Magazine at its height when I was lugging a backpack full of magazines around Seoul. It felt as light as air.

So, spending about 12 hours throwing myself at this novel today was a breeze. I know why I was working so hard — I have something I need to do and I was avoiding doing it by working on the novel.

Another thing I’ve learned is you need to map out scenes. At least I do. Mapping out individual scenes before you write them is a great way to force your characters to do what you want them to do. They don’t have any opportunity to do anything unexpected.

The key thing I’m focusing on with this novel is readability. I want these two novels to be such fast, easy reads that you zoom through them. I want you to look up from reading these two novels and realize it’s 4 a.m. on a Thursday morning and you’re willing to stay up all night to read them.

The last time I felt that way was while reading the book I’m using as my “textbook:” The Girl Who Played With Fire, by Stieg Larsson. The two novels I’m working on are so different from Larsson’s stuff in some ways that you would be hard pressed to believe there’s any connection between what I’m writing and what he wrote

He was a better storyteller than I am (at least at the moment). But I’m getting a lot better. I still think I might need to do some character studies to make what I understand about my characters to be more concrete. Right now, everything is pretty much in my mind. This lends to a huge amount of flexibility, but it also leads to problems of canon management.

Anyway, I hope to get into the second act of the first draft pretty soon. Hopefully, in the next few days. I’m trying to write these two novels as one big story that just happens to be told in two self-contained novels. Then it will be easier to sell both books.

The Fate Of Yahoo


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I’m so old I remember when Yahoo first burst on to the public consciousness. It was probably around the same time as blogs like Suck.com took off. Those were wonderful, revolutionary times. My biggest regret is I wasn’t able to take advantage of them to do something more…productive…with my life.

Anyway.

Yahoo is kind of circling the drain right now. But it does have two big things going for it — eyeballs and a namebrand. Yet there is a major problem going forward: it’s kind of been bought simply to have all the money squeezed out of it while it slowly dies. For Yahoo to mean anything again, you would need someone with big bucks and a lot of vision to wrestle control of it and completely think outside the box.

If I had a few billion on me, here are two ideas as to what to do with Yahoo.

  1. Social media
    While I know social media is not very hot right now, if you really wanted to save Yahoo, what you do is completely re-imagine it. You lay off a big chunk of its workforce and then rebuild it from the ground up to be something akin to a mixture of Twitter and Facebook. I have thought this out to an extreme, absurd degree. But, in general, what I would do is bone up on the old Usenet news of 25 years ago, updated it and make the site sort of like Reddit but with more features.
  2. A Modern TV Guide
    You might also turn Yahoo into a TV Guide of sorts for the all the streamers people now use. Turn Yahoo into an entertainment portal for streamers with content connected to them.

    Otherwise, I got nothing.

Golden Globes: Goodbye & Good Riddance — It’s Time For The Streamers To Step Up


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

The Golden Globes, if you think about them, have always been something of a grift. What happened was, over the years, as the Oscars grew more powerful and our society began to grow more modern, The Golden Globes kind of came along for the ride.

They became a part of the Oscar voting season because they gave people some sense of who was leading heading into them. But, at their center, there was a problem: they were nothing more than the votes of the Hollywood Foreign Press. That’s it. Nothing particularly special about them.

As such, it definitely seems at the moment that their era has ended because of changing expectations on the part of Hollywood. In the end, their demise may be historically value free.

Having said all that, it’s past time for the major streamers to join forces to have their own awards shows. They’re so powerful in Hollywood now, it makes sense that they would have some sort of awards show of their own. Something big and flashy for Hollywood types to get dressed up for. If MTV can have its own movie awards, then the streamers can, too.

I have no idea what is going to happen. Maybe the Golden Globes will come back after some existential thought. Who knows.

The Curious Case Of Modern American Pop Culture


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Now that the COVID19 pandemic is gradually beginning to abate, at least in the United States, it makes one wonder What’s Next. It would be nice to think that we might be entering a post-Rona world tan, ready and rested. That there might be the shock of the new in some respect on the cultural front.

And, yet, it definitely seems as though that’s not going to happen.

It definitely seems as though we’re going to continue to go through the paces. No new musical genres will burst forth. No new publications will stir new points of view. No new movies will will shock and delight in new, innovative ways. Something pretty big would have to happen for this not to be the case.

I can only speculate that maybe because the Internet is mature and Silicon Valley is thinking way too small that this is it. For the foreseeable future, American culture will continue to be in a vague neutral.

What’s so frustrating about this is I know, given the opportunity and resources, that I, personally, could do something really cool. I do have a novel I’m working on, and I’m pleased with how that’s shaping up. But it would be so nice to be able to work on a successor to Gawker or something. Something that would shake the media landscape up.

I think I’m just going to have to be content with pinning all my hopes and dreams on the novel.

New Scifi Franchise Idea: Reboot ‘Timebandits’


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

As I’ve said before, all the major Hollywood movie franchises are either dead from being creatively strip-mined or so bloated as to be unwatchable. It seems to me there’s room for a new franchise because of this and the perfect movie for it would be the classic 80s comedy Timebandits.

The thing about Hollywood is, “Nobody knows nothing,” as the old saying goes. Everyone — even the best — are simply thrashing around, looking for the next big hit.

All I’m saying is, it’s within the realm of possibility that if you gave Timebandits the Star Wars treatment that there might be a pretty big audience. What Star Wars did for space travel, a Timebandits franchise could do for time travel. Or something.

This is an example of how Hollywood has lost its way. It’s so busy sucking it’s own cock via “woke” movies that it totally misses the point of what they’re supposed to be doing — making money telling great stories.

I think some of all of this is an indication of the economic dynamic of modern filmmaking. Either you make a huge tentpole superhero movie in the context of a franchise, or you make a small “woke” movie that nobody watches.

It’s possible that whatever dynamic is causing modern pop music to suck is also at play with Hollywood.