Quote Of The Day

An excellent analysis by this guy:

“Donald Trump is like a shark, in that he must always swim forward or risk suffocation. He, his administration and the media ecosystem that has grown up around Trump’s political persona depends upon action and controversy. In fallow news cycles, Trump steadily loses the initiative and two things happen:  First, the media establishment and the leftist activist machine begin gathering their own critical momentum.  Second, the vast MAGA-adjacent social media sphere must turn to other controversies to keep the clicks and the ad revenue flowing. Both of these work against the forty-seventh president and his purposes.”

Read the whole thing, because I can find no fault with his thesis.

Quote Of The Day

Via Insty:

“[Kathleen Kennedy] gambled some of the biggest franchises in Hollywood history on the modern audience. And wow, did she lose big. To paraphrase Chris Gore, she took boy brands that everyone could enjoy and turned them into girl brands that nobody enjoyed. Men felt excluded and disrespected, and women felt patronized and pandered to. The modern audience had failed to show up, and the existing audience was abandoning ship. Kennedy’s greatest gamble had failed, and inevitably it all finally caught up with her.”

Can I be frank here for a moment?  I grant you that the destruction of these comic-book “franchises” leaves me totally unmoved because I have never been in the target audience for these infantile fantasies.  So to Star Wars, Star Trek, all those ur-Nordic fairy tales, Justice League and all the nochschleppers… good bye, fuck off and good riddance.  Ditto to the directors and producers, and indeed likewise to the actors and actresses, all of whom have made billions of dollars from filming this silly, inconsequential oeuvre  of fluff and nonsense.

A pox on all their houses.

Let me add to that the opinion that I will be really, really glad if none of these fantasies see the light of day for a generation or two so that maybe, just maybe some of those bloated production budgets might instead make their way into the production of decent movies with grownup storylines, good acting and productions that don’t rely on the deafening of their audiences.

But I risk being as naïve as the franchises’ audiences if I truly believe that any of this will ever happen.

Thank goodness for my DVD collection, which grows monthly.