Tag: Hollywood

‘Hustlers’ Is A Major Flex By J.Lo

Shelton Bumgarner

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

I was really impressed with J.Lo’s performance in Hustlers. I was also impressed with her flex when it came to showing a woman at 50 can still be stunning. Da-ham girl.

She has a body that women half her age would die for. One thing I liked about the movie is how sly it was on its agenda. Men are not portrayed very well in this movie. In fact, the only really sympathetic male character to pop up during the second act gets prompted hung up on when our Heroine learns he’s married.

In a sense, the movie pulls men in with the prospect of T&A then promptly portrays that portion of the audience as either pieces of shit or fools easily distracted by the prospect of booty.

The Case For Tay-Tay To Do An Answer To Britney Spears’ ‘Blackout’

Shelton Bumgarner

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

Now, let’s get some things out of the way. Taylor Swift is demonstrably a very awkward, sensitive and gentle soul. She also has a strangely turbulent romantic history. Also, Swift at least outwardly seems reasonably rock solid in her mental stability.

The case could be made that her being so “normal” is both a boon and a bane to her creativity. It helps her with maintaining her fanbase of absolute-center of pop culture grown up tweens who still need training bra music. Creative people, the ones who make a difference in culture are almost always completely bonkers. The thing about Tay-Tay is she is growing older and as such more self confident.

Either she gets married and drops a few kids or she risks alienating her fan base who are going through that particular significant change in their lives. The older women get, the more raunchy they become. There’s a good chance that the disconnect between Tay-Tay’s public persona and her fan base may grow so large that there’s going to be a pretty dramatic snap. To put it another way, Tay-Tay risks not seeming very…relatable.

So I propose that Swift let her hair down a little bit. It’s would have to be a strategic move on her part. She would need to do it on her own terms from a position of strength not weakness caused by being completely bonkers.

As such, sooner or later, she’s going to have to shake things up. She’s going to have to do an album like Britney Spears’ “Blackout” or Nelly Furtado’s “Loose.” In the short term it would alienate a lot of her fanbase. But long term it would definitely help her career. You can only be the definition of American wholesomeness and purity for so long before it grows tiresome. Or, put another way, if she wants a serious Hollywood career she’s going to have to change how people perceive her. I mean, I see Margaret Qualley as a serious actress because she seems like a normal human being who thinks about sex. Tay-Tay just isn’t very sexual. She’s the girl your mom wants you to settle down with, not the girl you meet a bar and think you actually have a chance of hooking up with.

She’s obviously very ambitious. Swift’s pretty safe for the time being. But as she approaches 30, things are going to change. Even her youngest original fans will be, like, women now. Swift is master of the sly discussion of her personal life and maybe it’s time for her to be a bit more aggressive with her lyrics.

But, meh. She serves her purpose in pop culture, I guess. She may simply always fill the niche of being the pop star that fits the MAGA dream but in her personal life is far more progressive. You do you, Tay-Tay.

The Difference Between Being A Hack & A Storyteller

Shelton Bumgarner

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

One thing I noticed about the most recent IT movie is they used the old “use a glance to show relationships” technique. While obviously this is useful, at times it can be a bit ponderous.

I know why they did it — they wanted to compress a huge book down to something useable. But I would much rather they told a great story in movie form than insult viewers. Ok, we get it, you want to establish a love triangle really quick.

Meh. Give me character development. Instead of creating a choppy, muddled mess, write a screenplay “inspired by” a portion of IT. A lot of great movies are good movies first and attempt to tell the story of the original novel second.

Why is it so hard for people in Hollywood to stop being hacks and actually tell a good story?

A Message To Hollywood Hacks Who May Want To Steal My Novel’s Premise

Shelton Bumgarner

I thought I was going to undelete a lot of the posts I’ve deleted, but it didn’t work out.

This is the video I was going to replace all the videos with.

You Just Have To Believe, Redux

Shelton Bumgarner

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

I have been deleting a lot of the videos I did about the novel I’m writing because they’ve garnered too much attention. I just don’t feel like having to worry about some Hollywood screenwriter somehow cribbing enough from the videos to write a screenplay inspired by what I’m working on.

Now, I know this is rather paranoid. But only the paranoid survive. All I have is my belief in myself. I would prefer they come out with a hack rip off of my novel’s concept sooner rather than later so I can at least not have wasted a lot of time on it.

But if this were to happen, I’m sure it would come out just about the time I want to sell the book, if not later. That I’m this paranoid is even crazier given that I have spoken in rather vague terms about what exactly I’m working on.

I just can’t handle seeing a lot of people looking the videos in my Webstats. It makes me extremely uneasy because I don’t know _why_ they’re looking at a post, just that they’re looking at it.

Anyway. The last few days I’ve kind of been resting my mind. I think I’m going to finally get back to working on the novel very soon. No later than tomorrow, maybe. It’s just the entire country is on vacation and I think I sense that enough to not feel like doing much work, either.

The Plan

Shelton Bumgarner

By Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

Things are moving faster again with the novel. At the same time, however, I find lingering frustration. Something happened recently that left a bad taste in my mouth. I suddenly find myself interested in writing a screenplay. As such, I’m probably going to buy FinalDraft sometime in September. I also hope to buy a few screenwriting books as well.

In the past, my biggest problem has been thinking up plots. I have plenty — plenty — of great ideas for movies. But I’ve always struggled with plots. But using the skillset I’ve developed from working on the novel, I believe I have a better chance at writing a successful (relative to me) screenplay. Or two. Or three.

I’ve vowed to myself that whenever I finish a screenplay, I’ll give myself permission to head to LA for a few days to poke around. But I won’t do so without a least one screenplay I can show people. While I’m quite pleased writing a novel and that’s my main creative project right now, I want to at least attempt to write a screenplay as well.

The issue is I have numerous ideas for movies because they lend themselves to something visual, something seen on the big screen. Add to this that I natively have a very extroverted personality, I believe if I put in the hard work of writing a screenplay or two, I might have at least a slim chance of being able to find someone in LA willing to take a look at it.

But, of course, I realize this is being extremely naive. Given my age, where I’m from and pretty much everything else about me, the possibility I would actually manage to pull this dream of is, in real terms, slim to none. But, if nothing else, it gives me something productive to do with my spare time as I work on the novel.

‘Hobbs & Shaw,’ A Political Review

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

When I was living in South Korea, I once found myself near the DMZ at a English Camp designed to give a young Korean the experience of living in an English speaking nation. While I was there, I saw in a waiting room a video of a kid’s show. What was notable about the cartoon was the name of the villain — Darwin.

This little bit of creatist propaganda has lingered with me over the years. That the show’s writer thought they could get young, impressionable minds to associate Darwin and by extension evolution with villany was both extremely annoying and impressive.

Before I begin, I would also like to note the “explanation” of Top Gun in the movie Sleep With Me.

Anyway, let’s get the point — the deeper political meaning in the otherwise summer popcorn movie Hobbs & Shaw. It has taken me a few days, but I feel as though there is a lot more going on with this movie than initially meets the eye. There’s a lot of sly politics in the movie that is so open to interpretation that it might leave one scratching their heads.

Let’s talk about the general plot. — spoilers ahead.

The plot, as much as there is one, is about a nebulous “deep state” type of company that wants to use its Snowflake programmable virus to kill off the weak and do a very Thanos-type restructuring of society. Two guys who ostensibly hate each other — The Rock (Hobbs) and Jason Statham (Shaw) join forces to defeat the bad guys and save the day. From what I saw of the movie, the only reason why I don’t think this movie’s politics is quite what you might this is comes from the people involved.

Given the fan service the movie does to The Rock’s WWE fandom, I’m led to believe the producers of this movie see its market as center-Right. At the same time, given how liberal-progressive Hollywood is, I am reluctant to believe that there aren’t air quotes around the movie’s superficial politics. I don’t know The Rock’s politics, but I struggle to believe he’s anything more than closer to center-Left than center-Right

Let’s break down some of the plot to see what’s going on.

The McGuffin is a woman — the sister of the Shaw character (22 years younger than he is, natch)– who has shot the virus into her bloodstream. If you REALLY wanted to get deep about the politics of this movie, you could say that it’s supposed to be, in a sense, about the “special relationship” between the United State in post-Brexit, post-Trump geopolitical world. I only say this because The Rock obviously represents America and Statham the UK. They are alone in the world and have to work together to save the day. (That a Russian helps save the day is an interesting twist to all of this.)

Anyway, there are some other things I noticed. That the programmable super virus is called “Snowflake” can be interpreted two ways. Either we’re meant to think of that obviously the Bad Guys are evil liberals (snowflakes) or we’re meant to laugh that the thing that could end the world is a bunch of snowflakes.

The reasoning that the villain gives for ending the world a very conservative-interpretation-of-the-liberal-worldview. Hollywood these days they find themselves having to square the circle. They want to appease a center-Right audience (to make money) but they also have to do so in a way that allows them not to hate themselves. That’s why, I feel, the politics of this movie are extremely muddled, but obviously there.

And, yet, I simply am not prepared to accept that this is Brad Bird Hollywood conservatism. For starters, Bird’s work is much more nuanced than this movie and has a stronger idology. This movie, meanwhile, seems to want it both ways. It wants to appease its center-Right audience, while at the same time looking slant eye at center-Left people in the audience in a way that suggests, “Can you believe what we have to do to appease the Right?”

I liked this movie because it did want it set out to do — entertain you in a cool theatre for a few hours on a hot summer day. I find it interesting, however, that the corrosive politics of the Trump Era has even seeped into what might otherwise be just a dumb summer movie.

Anyway, I probably will never know how close to the truth I am on this subject. I would like to believe I have dug up something interesting, however. There’s no way they would name the super virus “Snowflake” without there being an ulterior motive.

Shelton Bumgarner, a writer living in Virginia, is working on his first novel. He may be reached at migukin (at) gmail (dot) com.

Why I Walked Out Of ‘Booksmart’ (But You Should See It)

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls
Instagram: WriterShelt

I hated Booksmart.

I hated it — and hate it — so much that I begin to seethe with rage at the idea of it. And, yet, it’s nothing personal against Olivia Wilde and the movie itself is probably pretty good — if you’re a woke, bi curious Generation Z girl taking your SATs for the first time.

I walked out of the movie at just about the inciting incident because first I despised that clueless rant about lesbian sex, I hated how bad some of the acting was obviously going to be — Billie Lourd, sigh — I hated how much of an updated rip off of Heathers the movie was and I hated the entire premise of what I was expected to sit through for the next hour and a half.

So I bounced.

This is coming from a person who bounced from an equally critically acclaimed Bird Man. I hated that movie and walked out of it, too.

Now, the reason why I even talk about any of this to begin with is while movies like Booksmart serve an admirable purpose and help proto-lesbians see representation in film, they also have a corrosive effect overall. What I mean by this is Booksmart is a prime example of how Hollywood — or at least a woke subset of it — apparently has completely given up on 48% of the audience and just wants to suck its own dick (to quote The Mooch.) There’s a reason why Sniper was such a huge hit — there’s a pretty big untapped market for center-Right heteronormative storytelling. (Not to cast aspersions on non-heteronormative stories, just to observe what’s going on.)

Again — I was not the audience of this movie and only went because I keep seeing ads for it in my center-Left social media echo chamber. It was like I was being guilt-tripped into seeing it. I did not want to see it, knowing I would likely hate it. But I decided to give it a chance. And, guess what?

I fucking hated it.

The great sin this movie committed is it allowed its ideology to take over and warp the narrative of the movie to such an extent that I couldn’t get pass the inciting incident and left the theatre altogether.

But given that I was not the audience and I did not see the entire movie, I still feel comfortable recommending it to other people. If you’re younger than me, or more of a Leftist, you probably really will love the movie as much as the entertainment-industrial flack complex tells us you will.

Anyway, I’m writing a novel that deals with a lot of the same issues as Booksmart. But, given that I’m a smelly brutish male, I’m sure even if I’m as empathetic as possible to the stories of people don’t look like me, someone, somewhere, will discount the novel as simply another member of the patriarchy exploiting the lives of women, minorities and members of the LGBQ+ community for their own gain. (I’m being a bit sarcastic, dummy.)

All I can do is keep my head down and try to tell the story I want to tell. I think Wilde did a great job, you should go see Booksmart and ignore everything I just wrote.

Who would listen to me, anyway?

V-Log: My #Novel, #Hollywood, Lisbeth Salander, Natalie Portman & A Summer Tent-Pole Movie

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

As I enter the second act of the scifi novel I’m writing, I’m dwelling on the big ideas this story addresses. The story itself is kind of weighty and cerebral and deals with some issues that don’t see all that obvious to the average person, but I hope if I insert enough drama, action and innate conflict into it that someone, somewhere will find it entertaining enough to finish.

Two books I may read and reference a lot in this novel are The Clash of Civilizations and Harold Bloom’s Shakespeare and the Birth of the Human. A lot of this novel deals with the critique of the Western tradition from both the Left and the Right and how Humanity would deal with the innate conflict associated with an outside force’s decision to “pick a winner” in the clash of civilizations. I have been thinking about this concept for the better part of five years, so really most of my thought is going into character development at this point.

The series I really want to replicate the success of is the Millennium series. That was a really entertaining, really accessible series that you just couldn’t put down once you got into it. But I have extremely low expectations. I’ll be happy if I can just get, like, one person I don’t know personally to read the first book and ask me when the next book is coming out. That’s how low my expectations are at this point.

As it stands, what I’m interested in, what my goal is, is to write a female character as interesting as Lisbeth Salander. My character would be a little bit older, maybe about Natalie Portman’s age, but she still would be compelling. It’s urgent I have at least one character who draws people in given how otherwise cerebral the story is in general.