Okay, Wait

Here’s a headline which literally stopped me in my tracks — twice.  See if you can see where:

Actress cast as Richard III?  I thought casting men as women went out in the seventeenth century, but since when did casting women as men become a thing?  (As an aside, how will Dickless III play the seduction of Lady Anne in Act I Scene 2 without the audience breaking into uncontrollable laughter?)

And no, by all means play the hunchbacked king as a non-impaired man, which will make the “poisonous bunch-backed toad” line (among many other such insults in the play) completely meaningless.  Fucking hell;  why not just play Richard III as a frog, and have done with it?

Then again, this is Britishland, home of The Bard, where I once walked out of a dreadful performance of Macbeth (at the Barbican Theatre, by the Royal Shakespeare Company) at the halfway point.

So anything’s possible.  Expect to see a guest appearance by Willy Wonka or David Beckham in footballer kit during the final battle scene, where “Richard” utters the immortal line:

“A purse!  A purse!  My queendom for a purse!”

 

Cutting Out The Middle Man

I have to admit that I’ve never listened to a Taylor Swift song all the way through — when I’ve tried to do so, the first couple of minutes have been sufficient for me to get the message that while’s she’s reasonably attractive:


…her music sucks.

Nevertheless, it’s clear that I’m very much in the minority when it comes to appreciation of the Plastic Princess’s output.

So this article at Breitbart got me thinking:

Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour broke box office records last weekend, and left-wing Hollywood didn’t make a dime. Not one red cent. Nothing. Nil. Nada.

Ha ha.

Swift Inc. knew it had a hot property on its hands with this concert film, and rather than work through a Hollywood studio to distribute this hot property, Swift Inc. made a deal directly with theater chains like AMC. The result was astonishing. Eras Tour opened like a Marvel movie — well, like Marvel movies used to open before Marvel went woketard: $93 million domestic, $124 million worldwide. That is the second-best October debut in history. After three days, Swift Inc. already captured the title of the highest-grossing concert film in history.

Eras Tour was and is, by any measurement, a smashing success, and Hollywood was shut out completely.

Did I mention ha ha?

After the theaters took their cut, Swift Inc. got all the money. Hollywood got zippo. Had Swift Inc. gone through a studio for distribution — which is how things are supposed to be done —the studio would have eaten up anywhere from 10 to 25 percent of whatever was left over after paying theaters as a distribution fee.

The message this success sends is obvious. Why not go the Swift Inc. route if you have a no-brainer box office hit? Why not produce it yourself and cut a deal with theaters to distribute it? That way, the producer keeps all the money.

I feel the same way about Hollywood as I feel about the music recording studios — “exploitative scum who should suffer a daily mass scourging” would be a decent summary — although it must be said that Hollywood’s wokism has only been a recent reason for my loathing, which goes back decades.

Aside:  I should also mention that the Eagles did the same thing with one of their albums, striking a distribution deal with Wal-Mart and cutting out the foul studio, although I seem to recall that the album sucked green donkey dicks compared with their earlier albums.

Anyway.

So as soon as the Taylor Swift movie appears on a streaming channel, I’ll give it a look.  Maybe I’ve been wrong — hell, there has to be some reason why TS is so immensely popular worldwide — and she’s the new Beatles or something (although I seriously doubt it).

Open-minded, that’s me though;  and I’m willing to learn.

(A baby-blue Gibson?  Oy vey.  It’s not a promising start.)

Writer Loses Balls

…and to his own daughter, no less:

Four Weddings and a Funeral writer Richard Curtis says he was ‘stupid and wrong’ for the way he wrote about women and joked about people’s size in his films after he was confronted by his own daughter.

Curtis, 66, says he regrets much of his work and he was ‘unobservant’ and ‘not as clever’ as he should have been.

The comedy screenwriter poured scorn over many of his films and said he would never use the words ‘fat’ and ‘chubby’ again.

Oh FFS.  One of the best parts about the achingly-funny Four Weddings  movie was that I could recognize every single one of those appalling female characters in girls of my own acquaintance.  I had also been to weddings of similar ilk several times — okay, nobody actually died of a heart attack during any of them, but someone in the bridal party did noisily puke her guts out during the groom’s speech, which surely qualifies.

Also, one of the main attractions of Four Weddings  was the realistic dialogue — once again, I’ve heard people say things precisely as they were uttered in the movie, only with a South African accent.

Four Weddings And A Funeral  was of its time, people actually spoke, thought and behaved like that, and it saddens me to no end to think that its creator has forgotten the whole point of the satire he so wonderfully wrote.

All because his pissy little woke daughter objected.