Reaction Shots: Pointless Culture War Cinema
Where were you during the battle of LadyBusters and American Sniper?
The trial of the Ghostbusters (2016)
Picture a year that has seen twists and turns in the political realm, with an important election also happening. A movie is released in the midst of it, political candidates went out in force to condemn it before the general public can see it. On a larger scale, it’s a proxy for a culture war that is tied to the election and is a battle of brutes, rather than wits. Those brutes dominate the landscape and any conversation about goodwill ceases to exist because they don’t want it to happen. It’s also intentionally derivative, with the original already beloved by a large base.
Ghostbusters, the gender-swapped remake of the beloved original, that inspired short term anxiety (as well as a response from Donald Trump). Not because of its qualities, but who will consume it. Culture wars at the cinema often revolve around this trope. It didn’t begin with Mary Whitehouse and Tipper Gore, who crusaded against video nasties and songs about masturbation, yet it remains irrelevant to the most important question. Are the people watching with such aversion to the concept, bad people?
The answer would be… kinda unless you’re willing to conflate those critics with Milo Yiannopoulos, whose Twitter presence got swiped out, when his followers went out to harass Leslie Jones with alt-right memes. James Rolfe, aka the Angry Video Game Nerd, chose not to watch or review the movie as a fan of the original, and film critics were livid enough to take their knives out. I was also on that camp for a different reason: this battle is trivial and the movie looks dumb, regardless. Four years later, I watched it out of curiosity, and my expectations have been met.
The casting is wrong because I don’t buy that some of these actresses are ghostbusters. Kristen Wiig and Melissa McCarthy are both talented actresses, but their characters are empty vessels. So is Leslie Jones, who is reduced to being the ‘loud black woman’ archetype. Kate McKinnon is a genuine exception since she channels the energy that this kind of movie wants and needs, combining her youth and brains, in contrast to the dry and sardonic generations in both the original and remake.
In a nutshell, that’s the film’s problem. Who is the audience? The writers who delude themselves into thinking that this whole thing makes for a civil war mock up? Because there is no possible ideology under the microscope. Not even the ‘nasty comments from white male basement dwellers’ strain that is devoted to a scene or two, in order to build some sort of conflict.
Narratively speaking, it’s by the numbers, with a CGI and up-to-date soundtrack being so sorely aged. The jokes are less smarmy that they fit in the current rendition of SNL. When this came out, it was a box office bomb and it’s tempting to say ‘go woke, get broke’. But with Ghostbusters: Afterlife coming soon featuring the original cast, it will be seen as a toxic footnote for Hollywood to get some point across. It didn’t need to drown with it.
I Was Wrong About American Sniper
Speaking of getting a point across, I revisited American Sniper because I felt like I got it wrong. A box office hit, the film was quietly released at the end of 2014, before becoming a political football at the beginning of 2015. When I first saw this in theatres, I could not take it seriously, nor did I understand why it was even successful, compared to many of Clint Eastwood’s other films, which weren’t big critical and commercial reasons. I’ve presumed the reason being ‘conservatives being so persecuted that they went to see the movie to own the libs’. It didn’t help that Chris Kyle in the film was vastly different when in real life, he was probably far more hawkish. The infamous scene with the prop baby made me laugh so hard, that the couple sitting in front of me felt disturbed.
I chose to revisit this for several reasons. My political outlook has changed, and my opinion of latter-day Eastwood improved after seeing how masterful Richard Jewell was. There is also a change in conservative wisdom on the Iraq War, once Donald Trump was the first in the Republican Party’s primaries back in 2015, to express any regret of America even participating. Now, most conservatives nowadays believe that America should no longer be involved in unnecessary conflict, and Trump has proven to not go into an endless struggle with any other country. But my viewing was catalyzed by two reviews from The Film Mufti (whose Letterboxd I’ve recommended as a person to follow) of this movie and Gran Torino, another film by Eastwood featuring a flawed character, who inevitably has to battle his own mental demons to achieve a certain sense of peace.
There’s gonna be a longer piece I’m planning to write about about the dumb cultural battles American Sniper was embroiled in and what they’ve missed out in this masterwork, but what I thought was detrimental about it - the restrained visual outlook and Bradley Cooper’s muted performance - was in fact intentional and was very effective in conveying how war calibrates individual purpose, in a way that the person controls and masks every possible trauma. Cooper’s body language is sturdy and on the surface, it looks as though he's capable of getting through the burdens of touring in Iraq and scoring lots of kills. His motivations are clear, but they stick towards the personal, and often Chris Kyle’s efforts to take down snipers, are based on
I always wondered if there was ever a thing as conservative cinema, but specifically, a conservative anti-war movie. After all, there is a false conflation of anything vaguely related to the military with conservative ideas. American Sniper is the closest one could have to that category because it focuses solely on the individual, rather than the institution he chooses to put himself in.
Movie of the Week: Ed Wood (1994)
Ed Wood is Tim Burton’s greatest film by a wide margin featuring the most outstanding performance in Johnny Depp’s career. Depp plays Ed Wood, considered one of the worst directors who ever lived, with such masterpieces like Plan 9 From Outer Space and Glen vs Glenda. Here is a guy, who makes Z-grade movies, but are passionate about the process, even if the results never go accordingly. Depp conveys a blazing eccentricity that Burton adds a surprising poignancy to it, something you don’t see in the rest of his catalog. Aside from a stripped-down production, rather than taking the elaborate and gothic direction, the authenticity of the film is something to take behold off. The power of cinema mattered to Ed Wood, because he believes in his own vision, at the cost of some artistic delusion. It’s worth just for the line reading of “haven’t you heard of suspension of disbelief?”
The Noah Berlatsky Award for Terrible Take
In defense of the Feminist Frequenter, it could have been worse.