* Put Morgan Freeman in every movie and make sure the credits proclaim ‘This film is based on a story’ by a Dontravious or Shaneeka along with ‘technical assistance’ provided by some other minority and you are in the clear.
* Any chance of seeing that on basketball teams?
* To the list of people I’m considering performing my upcoming heart surgery I’ve added the names Tiger Woods, Kanye West, Shug Knight, and Rachel Dolezal.
Mind you, they’ll also be the first names I’ll scratch off the list. But they’re on the consideration list, and that totally makes up for the fact that they have zero chance of making the cut.
* Where do people get this idea that groups should reflect the racial or whatever makeup of society at large? Except to the people who’d directly benefit from it (not counting those of us who get to enjoy diversity and vibrancy), what is the motivation? Seems like pure madness. Might as well say your family should be 18 percent Hispanic.
* As a young guy trying to make it in the worst job in Hollywood, the amount is reverse discrimination towards men of pallor is pretty staggering. It’s literally the least visible major player in a production, so much so that nobody really knows what even really successful screenwriters look like unless they are also directors. But god help you if your invisible, unappreciated creative generator is melanin deficient.
Take a look at the new Ghostbusters tripe, ye mighty, and despair for the bottomless chasm that is “diversity in Hollywood.”
* I don’t know if intellectually is the right word, but there is a body snatchers feeling behind superficially entertaining J.J. Abrams films. They are less stories than they are a series of things happening, most of which are reminders of other movies you’ve seen before. What is the point, I ask, of Star Trek Into Darkness (has there been a blander title, outside of “force awakens?”) turning suddenly into Star Trek the Wrath of Khan, other than that it was the second in the new series and second Star Trek movies are The Wrath of Khan?
Abrams is the perfect moviemaker for this era of Hollywood, which aside from kiddie and horror films doesn’t know how to sell tickets but by spending wads of money on repackaging things we’ve already seen before. At least with his movies it’s not merely the title you’re buying. He tries hard to give you the actual old experience, or in the case of Star Trek, more the Star Wars experience with characters named Kirk and Spock. But it’s a terribly soul sucking experience for me. I’d rather theaters be ghost towns.
* JJ Abrams is well-placed to be the most famous film-maker of all time.
His two great strengths are mindless PC conformity and mindless, derivative re-makes.
In these days of #OscarSoWhite, it’s obvious what his career path should be…
Remake all famous Hollywood movies with casts that “reflect America.”
For example, DeMille’s The Ten Commandments with Mestizo Moses… Moses takes a really, really long time on the mountain and leaves the trash from his picnic lunch at the top… whether the Pharaoh in this case should be played by a black man or a white man is a hard call…
Gone with the Wind with Rhett played by a Bollywood actor. At the end of the movie, rather than walking off, Rhett starts singing about love with Scarlet and the entire cast comes on for a choreographed dance scene set to Indian music…
Citizen Kane with Orson Welles replaced by an East Asian actor… “Losebud, Losebud!”
* So far in his path of pop-cultural destruction, Abrams has produced a lot of crap [Alias and Lost both sucked, if all will pardon the mild vulgarity and insult to majority taste] and has killed both Star Trek and Star Wars for me.
[Yes the last couple of Trek movies before him also sucked in a different way; but he produced a couple of millennial-style action-comedy high-gloss parodies and called them ‘Star Trek’. His Star Wars was actually less well-written or acted than the originals. Mark Hamill and Carrie Fisher aren’t exactly Olivier and Leigh, but they did a better job in 1977-83 and even in 2015 than the wooden puppets and hysterical emoters of the new cast. Hamill’s facial expression in his one scene carried more weight than Daisy Ridley’s entire performance. Personally I read his eyebrows as saying ‘who are you to be carrying that lightsaber, you punk kid?’]
Rant over.
J.J. Abrams is the most overrated writer/director/producer of the century to date. I am impressed by his lack of shame, at least.
