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Entertainment Companies Start Dumping Woke Content As Viewership Tumbles

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Julian

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Aug 15, 2022, 1:18:53 PM8/15/22
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They'll never admit to it openly, but getting woke makes companies
broke. Hollywood has been overtly progressive for decades, but this is
nothing compared to the social justice invasion since 2016. After
around five years of an unprecedented leftist onslaught on the
entertainment industry we are finally starting to see the rampage lose
oxygen. There's a weakness within woke productions that the alternative
media has been pointing out for a long time – They don't make a profit
because they are designed to appease a minority of leftist zennials that
don't have any money. This is the wrong crowd to rely on for cash flow.


It is fair to say that the entertainment industry was partially conned.
First, there are those tantalizing ESG loans that can be easily had as
long a company loudly declares their fealty to the social justice
agenda. Then, of course, there is the fact that many corporate CEOs and
marketing people track Twitter trends with the ignorant assumption that
Twitter is actually a reflection of the real world. The woke mob on
Twitter is amplified by the company itself, while most contrary voices
are stifled and buried. Anyone using the Twitter echo chamber as a
marketing gauge would be led to believe that leftist ideology is the
prevailing ideology of the nation. It's not even close.

Some companies are finally realizing this fact and are taking action to
reduce their exposure to woke content, or otherwise perish from loss of
viewership. Here's the thing – Leftists could take over every platform
for media distribution (they almost have), but they still can't force
the public to consume woke content. Eventually, the loss of viewers and
profits is going to hurt their bottom line.

Warner Media (now owned by Discovery) seems to be on the forefront of
the purge of leftist content. Under chief executive David Zaslav,
Discovery is aggressively dissecting Warner to understand why a company
with so many iconic brands and franchises is continually failing at the
box office and on streaming. Zaslav is now dumping far left content
like the poison it is.

Most notably, Zaslav was behind the torching of news service CNN+ after
less than a month of operation when it utterly failed to pull in
subscribers. Now, he has shelved the $100 million 'Batgirl' movie, a
woke travesty with woke directors which test audiences hated. He is
also reportedly cutting the impending Supergirl movie, which rumors
indicate was designed to replace the beloved Superman franchise with a
female version played by a race swapped actress of Colombian descent
(the original Supergirl is supposed to be white and blonde).

Another event that shocked leftists was Netflix taking an ax to "First
Kill," a lesbian vampire series that no one asked for and apparently no
one watched.

This was after Netflix canceled a host of woke programming in the past
couple of months, including a show called “Anti-Racist Baby” written by
well known Critical Race Theory propagandist Ibram X. Kendi, and another
animated show called “Q-Force” (Queer Force).

HBO Max recently canceled their "Gordita Chronicles" after only one
season; the show based on a Dominican immigrant family heavily pushed
leftist narratives of victim group status and depicted America as a
racist and oppressive nation. No mention of the fact that millions of
non-white people try to sneak into the US every year even though it is
supposedly “bigoted.”

The examples of purged woke programming go on and on. This is a smart
move by the entertainment media as audiences make it clear with their
dollars and their viewership that they don't want to watch leftist
garbage. However, is it too little too late?

Some companies like Disney have chosen to foolishly double down on woke
content (after numerous box office failures) and others like Warner have
lost a lot of good will from their customers. Corporations and
marketing people have long sought to entice customers by researching
what audiences want. But, the new model is to simply TELL customers
what to buy, and shame audiences into compliance with a product if they
don't like it. Since 2016 the strategy of media has been to ATTACK
customers in response to criticism rather than listening and learning.
This hasn't gone over well. Today these businesses are paying the price
for their trespasses against the free market.

It is unlikely that they will be able to win back audiences anytime
soon, if ever.


TD

Wilson

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Aug 15, 2022, 2:53:24 PM8/15/22
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I haven't watched a new movie in over a year.

Julian

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Aug 15, 2022, 3:31:54 PM8/15/22
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I haven't been since I was taken to this complete and
utter tripe. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5083738/

The last film I liked enough to download and watch
again at home was over a decade ago.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1340800/

Wilson

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Aug 15, 2022, 4:52:00 PM8/15/22
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2011 is about when things in the movie industry really started going
downhill.

Wilson

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Aug 16, 2022, 4:44:45 PM8/16/22
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On 8/15/2022 3:31 PM, Julian wrote:
“You know, in the 90s when I heard that a movie had a lesbian scene in
it, I was definitely going to see that movie. Today, if someone tells me
that a movie has a lesbian scene in it, I am definitely going to avoid
that movie. If they can ruin that, they can ruin anything.”

Julian

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Aug 16, 2022, 5:41:57 PM8/16/22
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:D :D :D

Wilson

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Aug 17, 2022, 11:42:13 AM8/17/22
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On 8/15/2022 1:18 PM, Julian wrote:
> ...
> Some companies are finally realizing this fact and are taking action to
> reduce their exposure to woke content, or otherwise perish from loss of
> viewership.  Here's the thing – Leftists could take over every platform
> for media distribution (they almost have), but they still can't force
> the public to consume woke content.  Eventually, the loss of viewers and
> profits is going to hurt their bottom line.
> ...


The Northman got a lot of attention when it was released, mostly because
the usual suspects were scandalized by the lack of diversity. There are
no black people in the film and the protagonist is a man. Worse yet, the
female characters are feminine and the male characters are masculine.
There are no homosexuals, transgenders or people speaking truth to
power. In other words, a crime against the faith.

Of course, this became the story rather than the fact it is one of the
best made moves in the last ten years. It is a film made by adults for
adults, which has become such a rarity that reviewers struggled to
describe it. Compounding it, the film requires some cultural literacy,
which is rare among the movie reviewing community. Most of the reviewers
think comic books are adult literature.

The Northman is a classic tale. A wronged man commits his life to
getting revenge on those who wronged him. He sets out on a journey to
exact his revenge, but the journey turns into something else. The black
and white world of his imagination gives way to the moral ambiguity in
which all of us exist. The story of revenge becomes an exploration of
the deeper themes that define the human condition.

In this film, the story is based on the legend of Amleth, which comes
from Scandinavian sources that have been lost. What we have comes from
the Saxo Grammaticus, a 13th century Danish theologian. Amleth is the
young son of a king. He sees his father killed by his jealous uncle, who
takes both the crown and his brother's wife. The son escapes only to
return as a man who then gets his revenge on his uncle.

That is pretty much it for the plot of The Northman, but that short trip
is one fantastic ride that reminds you that movies do not have to be
lectures. They can be incredibly well done stories that leave the viewer
thinking about the larger issues raised in the movie, but never
explicitly mentioned. That is art. It holds a mirror up to you and your
world so you can see things from a different perspective.

It is fair to say The Northman is art. We see Amleth as a young boy,
full of curiosity and wonder until he witnesses the murder of his
father. Next, we see him as a fully grown man, but more beast than man
as his rage makes him a killing machine. We are left to guess what
happened to make him into a berserker, but in a few minutes, we have two
important plot points of his character arc.

Amleth takes part in a raid in the Kievan Rus and after the fight, he
meets a Seeress who tells him that he will take his revenge on his uncle
and that his path is intertwined with a Maiden-King. Now we have an
important element. Amleth is not just a man on a revenge quest, but a
man following his destiny. He no longer has a choice and must wrestle
with this as he sets off on his journey.

This is not something you expect to see in a modern movie. Instead, it
would have been filled with emotive exposition. Half the film would have
been taken up explaining the back story and his emotional state. This
film assumes you are mature enough to fill in the blanks and understand
the bigger meaning of the story. This is not just a story about a man,
but a story about man and his relationship to the world.

One of the clever things about the film is that it blends the dreams and
visions with the live action in such a way that you are not always sure
if what you are seeing is real or the imaginings of the hero. Toward the
end, Amleth faces his mother and comes to realize her role in his
father's death. The way it is shot suggests it could be all happening in
his head rather than in the real world. You cannot be entirely sure.

What really makes this movie stand out is the bigger themes. Amleth
starts as a man with a lust for revenge. Then he learns that he will get
his revenge, but that it is part of a bigger story of which he is only
one part. His struggle is in accepting his fate and fulfilling his
destiny, even when he seems to have other options and it comes at some
cost to those he loves.

This is a theme that comes up often in our literature. If man can have a
destiny, does he have free will? If you cannot escape your destiny, then
why think at all about the choices that are presented to you? On the
other hand, if your revealed destiny is one of many possibilities, are
you obligated to fulfill it? Is the revelation part of the calculus or
is it a challenge?

This gets to the biggest question of all. What is the point of life? Is
it better to live a long and unimportant life or live a short and
consequential life? Would you rather die a broken down old or die a
young hero? Our nature is to live, but to live for what? This is the
choice presented to Amleth. He could have remained a berserker. He could
have abandoned his quest for revenge for a simple life. He could accept
his destiny.

The Northman is about the oldest questions of human existence. What is
the point of our lives and how should we use the time we have? For men,
the choice is always between the long quiet life and the short exciting
one. If it were only up to men, the latter would be the easy choice, but
men cannot be men, or even exist, without women and women naturally want
a man to choose the former.

That is what makes The Northman a great film. It presents a classic tale
in a way that allows the intended audience to think about the big
questions. It is not a lecture or an escape from reality, but a well
told story. It is up to the adults in the audience to make of it what
they will. That is probably what upset the critics. They no longer have
the adult capacity to appreciate this film, so they flung their poo at it.

https://thedissident.substack.com/p/the-northman

Love

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Aug 18, 2022, 7:05:22 AM8/18/22
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In article <tde4n2$3ogp9$2...@dont-email.me>, Wil...@nowhere.net says...
We haven't gone to the theatre at all since they re-opened,
despite being in possession of over $100 in gift certificates
for theatres. I think it's not just the explicit woke
preaching that is being injected into them; it's also the
exclusion of humour and uncomfortable insights into human
nature (or just our own natures).

Every 350 lb. muscle-bound man finds a 110 lb. anorexic young
woman an equally-challenging fighter. The difference comes
from "inside". Yech, ptooey!

I have kept my Netflix account, though. Every weekday
Comet treats us to two hours of Farscape, two hours of
Buffy, then three hours of X-files. (Even though all three
of those are pretty woke, they aren't insufferably so.)
Then Comet switches to Quantum Leap (yuck) so if we still
need something to watch, Netflix often fills the space.
Despite its new non-censoriousness, it still has a lot of
content that is ruined by the wokeness that has infected so
much of the industry, but there is so much to choose from
we can usually find something. (Norsemen, for example.)

I think I am detecting an improvement across the board in
both entertainment and informational content. Twice
recently I have seen CBC (yes, CBC!) reporters nail some
mouthpiece to the wall because he or she was trying to
talk around the questions trying to be politically correct.
They both happened to be women but they were no Cathys.
It's too early to say that things are looking up, but at
least the woke cultural nosedive we've been in is showing
signs of levelling out. If we aren't there to reward it,
we have no way of, um, rewarding it...


--
Love, speaking out of turn

Sanford Manley

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Aug 18, 2022, 8:41:32 AM8/18/22
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On 8/18/2022 7:05 AM, Love wrote:
> Every 350 lb. muscle-bound man finds a 110 lb. anorexic young
> woman an equally-challenging fighter. The difference comes
> from "inside". Yech, ptooey!

Thighs that defeat lies!

https://twitter.com/UncleWilberfor1/status/1560245198067847169?s=20&t=meV_yewKqNz4dMmdOAP_Uw

--
The AnsaMan
Pod Brother and
Evil Right-Wing Militarist

Sanford Manley

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Aug 18, 2022, 9:39:19 AM8/18/22
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On 8/18/2022 7:05 AM, Love wrote:
> Every 350 lb. muscle-bound man finds a 110 lb. anorexic young
> woman an equally-challenging fighter. The difference comes
> from "inside". Yech, ptooey!


This is no mere girl!

https://twitter.com/UncleWilberfor1/status/1560245198067847169?s=20&t=0LscWtd03V4sFnDfgrYy5Q

Julian

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Aug 19, 2022, 6:59:04 AM8/19/22
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Identity politics is in retreat in Hollywood


The Sandman might have seemed cutting edge five years ago but
there's a new mood in American TV



The Sandman
Netflix


‘Diversity is woven into the very soul of the story.’ If those words of
praise from a rave review in a left-leaning journal sound to you about
as inviting as a cup of cold sick, then my advice would be to stay well
clear of The Sandman.

Neil Gaiman’s epic graphic novel series (launched in 1989), set in the
world of dreams, was relentlessly inclusive long before it became the
norm. ‘I wanted to change hearts and minds,’ Gaiman has said in an
interview. ‘I had trans friends and still do, and it seemed to me that
no one was putting trans characters into comics. And I had a comic.’

If this TV version had been made five years ago, it would probably have
been considered very cutting edge. But thanks to recent developments in
the world of screen comic book adaptations, it looks awkwardly dated.
There’s a new mood in TV and Hollywood, exemplified by the shock
cancellation of a $100 million superhero movie called Batgirl, which is
widely being seen in the industry as part of a backlash against identity
politics.

The man leading this backlash is David Zaslav, new studio boss of Warner
Bros Discovery. Zaslav has reportedly had enough of the orgy of
political correctness which has overwhelmed the superhero genre, in
which Superman, Robin, Wonder Woman and Aquaman were all turned gay or
bisexual, and where Batgirl was race swapped. ‘The best way to protect
your job for the past 11 years in Hollywood was going woke. Now,
overnight, it’s how you get fired,’ an insider tells me.

Well, good! And I’m not just saying this because I’m a reactionary old
duffer. My real beef, from a critical perspective, is that whenever a
filmmaker prioritises finger-wagging over aesthetics, the end result
inevitably is a flawed product.

Take the opening episode of The Sandman, set partly in the spectacularly
realised dream world (a walled city with phantasmagorical architecture,
Game of Thrones meets Harry Potter) inhabited by the sleepy-voiced chief
protagonist, Morpheus (Tom Sturridge), and partly in Edwardian England,
where an Aleister Crowley-like magus (Charles Dance) is attempting to
conjure up and capture Death himself.

Dance gets his spell a bit wrong and ends up kidnapping Morpheus
instead, with terrible consequences for the daytime realm. With the King
of Dreams gone awol, a sleeping sickness besets the land, illustrated by
a scene of an upper-middle-class black family looking perturbed that
their crinoline-dressed daughter will not wake up. The standard defence
of this kind of in-your-face anachronism is that in the fantasy genre
anything goes. But I’m not so sure. For the fantastical bits to work,
surely everything needs to be grounded in verisimilitude. That is, if as
a viewer you’re going to invest yourself emotionally in a drama’s
otherworldly vision, the last thing you need is to be jerked back into
reality with quibbles like: ‘Well hang on. That doesn’t look like any
version of Edwardian England I can believe in.’

There’s also a problem with some of the casting. When you’ve got actors
of the calibre of Charles Dance and David Thewlis performing
naturalistically and convincingly, it really doesn’t help when one or
two of the other performances scarcely rise above decent school play
level. Again, it brings you up short. I shan’t name names, that would be
cruel. But the feeling I get is that if this production had been a bit
more versed in casting basics, all this distracting unevenness could
have been avoided.

Even then though I think The Sandman would have been hard to endure for
more than a couple of episodes. As someone else has noticed, Gaiman is
much more interested in ‘world building’ than he is in developing plot
or character. Not unlike in a real dream, it’s more a series of
vignettes and grotesques and weirdnesses and impressions than it is a
compelling, properly realised story. I felt this especially in the scene
where, for some tortured reason or other, Morpheus goes to visit a cute
gryphon resembling the bastard offspring of Dobby the House Elf and a
creature from the ineffably tedious How To Train Your Dragon.

The gryphon is owned by a disturbing Tweedledum and Tweedledee comedy
duo called Cain and Abel, whose schtick (spoiler alert) is that Cain
keeps killing Abel. It reminds me of the turgid whimsy of a Tim Burton
movie crossed with late-period Doctor Who. About as involving and
welcome as the words: ‘I must tell you about this extraordinary dream I
had last night.’ No thanks.


James Delingpole
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