Sadly, we live in an era where politics has infested just about everything. 25 years ago, politics was just about politics, and political discussion stated in its own lane. Today, everything is about politics. Financial advice is about politics. Dating and relationship advice is about politics. Cooking shows are about politics. Friggin’ sports are about politics. And of course, movies are about politics.
This infestation of viewing everything from a political lens is making a lot of people say very stupid things. Recently we’ve seen a stark example of this regarding two movies two movies in particular, Black Panther and Death Wish. I’ve seen both movies. Both movies are okay. Not great, but okay. They’re decently crafted, reasonably entertaining movies without being anything special.
Yet, the Rotten Tomatoes score for Black Panther is an astoundingly amazing 97%. The score for Death Wish is an astonishingly horrible 16%.
What the hell? Again, they’re both okay movies, but critics are reacting to Black Panther like it’s up there with Lord of the Rings or Citizen Kane, many of them saying it’s one of the best movies ever made. It’s not. It’s just okay.
At the same time, they’re reacting to Death Wish like it’s one of the worst movies ever made. It’s not. It’s perfectly okay.
This is not my opinion. You can tell with the audience scores of these movies on the same website. With Black Panther, it’s only 78%, and with Death Wish, it’s 85%. Audiences actually like Death Wish more than they like Black Panther(!). (I did too. Again, they’re both “okay” movies, but if I had to watch one of them a second time, I’d probably choose Death Wish.)
How can all of these critics be so obviously and amazingly wrong?
Answer: politics. Specifically, the left-wing politics that is prevalent in both Hollywood and the news media.
The media is worshipping Black Panther because it’s a black movie about black people being awesome. Guilty white left-wingers love that stuff. They eat it up. So they see an okay movie but think it’s mind-blowingly amazing because the movie is all about black people being amazing, and give the damn thing a 97% rating, when it should be around 60%.
Death Wish, on the other hand, is about a rich white doctor who takes the law into his own hands and starts shooting (with guns!!!) bad guys without the police. And, OMG, some of those “bad guys” are Hispanic!!! It’s full of everything left-wingers hate: guns, rich white people, portraying poor people or foreign people as evil, and so on.
So the left-wing journalist watches Death Wish, and since he/she can’t get politics out of their head, they see an okay movie and talk about how utterly dreadful it is, giving it a 16% rating, when again, it should be around 60%.
The moral of the story?
POLITICS MAKES YOU STUPID.
I don’t mean it actually lowers your IQ or anything. I mean that when you permanently install the lens of politics over your eyes, and view everything you see through your political views, it makes you behave stupidly. It makes you do and say stupid things. All of these media folks who are jizzing over Black Panther and shitting all over Death Wish, when they’re both decently okay movies, are behaving like idiots. You’re supposed to judge a movie based on whether or not it’s a good movie, not whether or not it accurately reflects your political views, particularly if your fucking job is as a professional movie critic.
Politically, I’m a libertarian who disagrees with both left-wingers and modern-day right-wingers on the vast majority of issues. Yet, I’ve watched many movies that were blatantly left-wing, with politics I completely disagreed with, that I thought were fantastic because they were fantastic movies. A few movies off the top of my head like this would be Malcolm X, Assassins, Born on the Fourth of July, A Time To Kill, and many others.
I’ve also seen some blatantly right-wing movies, again with strong political or religious messaging that I disagreed with completely, that I really liked, because they were well-crafted movies. Examples would be The Patriot, American Sniper, Gods and Generals, and Passion of the Christ.
This is because I’m not stupid and I’m not insane. I can watch a movie and judge it on its merits (or faults) as a movie, rather than on my personal biased politics.
It’s not that hard.
Too bad less and less people are able to do that these days.
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Jack Outside the Box
Posted at 03:23 pm, 11th March 2018What do you make of the social justice hypocrisy in regards to Black Panther, which condemns white nationalism and white separatism for being racist and “Nazi” while praising a movie about black nationalism, black xenophobia, and black racism?
The SJWs aren’t even hiding their anti-white racism anymore!
Caleb Jones
Posted at 05:35 pm, 11th March 2018I don’t care.
CTV
Posted at 07:02 pm, 11th March 2018The MSM and Hollywood have pretty much infested us with Leftist politics. They haven’t gone full blow Progressive yet, but in increments they’ll eventually get there. If you don’t agree, like Guns, don’t think that the Patriarchy is a problem, or agree with (insert Marxist, 3rd Wave Feminist Extremist Position, Microaggressions, ETC.) you’re a Fascist and any career if you’re within their reach.
If (WHEN) California gets Gavin Newsom as Governor it will get worse for he wants to put California on Single Payer Healthcare and jack taxes way up in the process.
Caleb Jones
Posted at 09:15 pm, 11th March 2018Oh man, I can’t wait for that guy to be Governor of California, and I can’t wait for them to actually enact government health care there. Ha! I will be laughing for a year.
California is almost as bad as Europe in terms of being the tip of the spear into Western collapse. It’s going to be a very fun state to watch over the next 10 years.
Investor
Posted at 02:26 am, 12th March 2018Are you also going to make reviews on games?
CrabRangoon
Posted at 08:28 am, 12th March 2018I haven’t seen Black Panther but I knew based on these glowing reviews that it was all because it was a mainly black cast and any negative reviews would immediately call for cries of racism. I figured it was just ok, same deal as Wonder Woman which everybody was shitting themselves about. No way this comes close to a movie like the Dark Knight.
The Last Jedi was the same deal I think given the huge disparity between critics and audiences.
I don’t go to the movies any more honestly-I just wait till I can stream it for free these days. Nothing seems worth going to the theater to see these days. I’d much rather throw on an old classic like Predator, Wrath of Khan, Aliens, etc…to get my action fix.
oops britney
Posted at 09:44 am, 12th March 2018This is the only sensible stance, for caring for something (a victim group let’s say) when they want nothing but being victimized would be silly.
There’s no other sane choice but not caring (unfortunately).
joelsuf
Posted at 10:02 am, 12th March 2018I’d argue that it actually does, as well as many other things. As well as reduces one’s ability to be productive. If I were a lawmaker, I would have a yearly “political post” limit on social media and would issue a fine for people who went over that limit. That limit would be 12, averaging out to one political post per month.
Every post from the 13th on and you get fined. Go past 20 and you get doxxed. Only it wouldn’t be government who hires white hats to do this, it would be a small group of former black hats who choose on their own how much the fines are and if they want to dox you after that 20th post. And the fines they collect would go towards paying for fines they got while being black hats. This would be perfect for Ascendia =)
It doesn’t surprise me and now I hope you now see that the SJDubs aren’t fighting for Justice they want Vengeance. I’m gonna get you to start calling them SVDubs if its the last thing I do, homie. Justice = Vengeance. Never forget that. Post THAT on a courthouse wall. But if we had a department of Vengeance instead of a department of Justice…
But yes, they are fighting racism and sexism WITH racism and sexism, but this is a several hundred thousand year old story that is just human nature. Its OBW at its finest. We ALL want power on a large scale and the ability to tell large groups of people what is best for them. Its a legit psyop that has been in place for the last 5-6 millennia. First it was religion, then it was government, and now its collectivist groups.
And if you do not think that sometime in the 2030s you’ll be forced to donate to some of these collectivist groups as part of your taxes, then…well…its your wallet, not mine. As an above poster said, they’re already probably gonna start doing that in California and hoo boy I cannot WAIT to see the shitstorm that takes place when that happens.
Caleb Jones
Posted at 12:28 pm, 12th March 2018No. I don’t play enough. The game I’ve been playing over the last few months is the old Morrowind, a 15+ year old game. I don’t think anyone gives a shit about me talking about that. Though I admit I could be wrong.
Good god, what’s with all these authoritarians on my blogs?
Caleb Jones
Posted at 12:30 pm, 12th March 2018The problem is that while SJW’s are insane hypocrites, the anti-SJW’s are just as insane and hypocritical, particularly when it comes to Trump. That means we’re in a yet another “which side is less horrible” discussion, and I have zero interest in arguing about which of the two insane groups of people are less insane. I want real solutions, and if I can’t have them, I’ll just leave. Problem solved.
kevin
Posted at 11:25 pm, 12th March 2018Hey BD…
let me try out this definition
politics is the shared sentiments of a group and the cliches you must stomach to remain part of that group …it is divorced from any actions
is this close to your definition?
Caleb Jones
Posted at 12:00 am, 13th March 2018No, because politics does result in action. It involves the actions of putting warmongering corporatists into power like Trump, Obama, Bush, etc.
kevin
Posted at 12:50 am, 13th March 2018Ok that is an outcome
could it have still happened no matter what slogans were used?…not being tied to any particular person or party as long as the desired result happened?
Investor
Posted at 04:48 am, 13th March 2018In this particular case I’d love to read article about that, especially would be interesting to read one from someone playing this gem now.
Jared
Posted at 06:18 am, 13th March 2018It’s worth noting that the Rotten Tomatoes rating system is inherently flawed, and does not represent the average of how critics actually felt about the movie. All it does is register a review as “good” or “bad” (“fresh” or “rotten”). So the fact that Black Panther got 97% is simply because almost no one said it is a bad movie. There were probably a lot of mediocre reviews that were registered as “fresh”. (The same is true for The Last Jedi. Many reviews marked as “fresh” had serious criticisms, talking about how “the magic is gone from Star Wars” and so on.)
Caleb Jones
Posted at 11:23 am, 13th March 2018Perhaps.
Perhaps, but unlikely. Almost all of this is personality driven, beyond even tribal or identity politics, as I talked about here.
I’ve considered making a series on this blog called “Nerd Time” or something like that, where I talk about uber-nerd stuff (like playing Morrowind), but I need strong indication from many in my audience that they would be interested in reading about that stuff. I haven’t quite seen it.
Very good point.
Michael Rodriguez
Posted at 01:00 pm, 13th March 2018Hey blackdragon. What are your thoughts on Noam Chomsky? Now before you immediately reply that he is an insane socialist that wants to take your hard earned tax dollars and give it to the lazy low iq’d, really think about it. His brand of libertarian socialism overlaps with your beliefs more than you think. He recognizes that society exists in a prison, is a critic of wage slavery, believes that the government and media manipulate the population, and is a critic of US imperialism. His political remedy is a form of a democratically worker controlled company as opposed to the CEOs, shareholders, and the military industrial complex essentially running the planet. His philosophy is quite different than a Marxist government owning the means of production.
Caleb Jones
Posted at 01:12 pm, 13th March 2018That’s his problem. Democracy is anti-freedom, as I explained here, and he wants democracy on overdrive. Fuck no.
Big government is bad, regardless of the happy label you slap on it.
Michael Rodriguez
Posted at 02:04 pm, 13th March 2018Read the article. Interesting take. Would you mind just explaining a little more why you feel that abolishing the last remnants of democracy we have in the USA and only allowing the wealthiest 25% of the country to vote will make the country a better place to live?
Caleb Jones
Posted at 02:30 pm, 13th March 2018That is not my view. The USA is beyond repair, so abolishing democracy in the collapsing USA in 2018 as it stands now wouldn’t help anything, but neither would expanding democracy in the USA to more people or “fixing” it. The USA, at this point, is fucked no matter what we do.
Rather, if you were to design a new country from scratch, you would never establish democracy in the first place. Done correctly, that would provide the most amount of prosperity for the most amount of people over the longest period of time (as places like Singapore and Hong Kong have shown). Read this.
David
Posted at 12:19 am, 14th March 2018“Yes they deserved to die, and I hope they burn in hell!”
Great movie, but revenge killing is murder and homeboy belonged in jail.
joelsuf
Posted at 10:43 am, 14th March 2018I will admit, that is authoritarian-ish. But I’ve never measured authoritarian beliefs on principle but rather in action. Take a look at the punishments I listed. I mentioned that they would be fines. So if you want to be a social vengeance warrior (for any side) on social media and wish to publish lots of social/political based posts, then its cool, just get ready to pay a bunch of fines. And I also said that the people monitoring this would be a private group of former black hat hackers who wish to repay their debt to society.
This is a little different than the authoritarianism we have seen in the last century or so where you would just get thrown in jail or killed if you did anything wrong, where the only people enforcing the rules are soulless police.
That actually IS Marxism aka Anarcho-Communism. Little history lesson of sorts here, Marx never wanted a ruling class to begin with, at least when he wrote the Manifesto. His ideal was that the proletariat had the ability to share wealth and means of production among each other and that this kind of governing was better than what Europe had at the time.
The Marxism everyone demonizes was Lenin’s idea. Lenin (and later Stalin) took Marx and Engels’ theories etc, combined it with dictatorship stuff, and it became what we know as Communism. Then Churchill took what the USSR was doing, combined it with classic trickle-down economics but keeping the same kind of governing system and it became Socialism. THEN the US took this idea, worked it into their “democracy,” created stuff like the New Deal, and it created the Corporatist environment we have today.
Before the early 20th century, Marxism was pretty much Anarcho-Communism. No ruling class, the citizens rule themselves and each other. This was Marx’s utopian ideal.
Mark Larkin
Posted at 02:44 am, 5th April 2018I came here from Black Dragon after reading the Fury Road review. While we might not agree on everything, we do on a lot. Until now at least. When it comes to Black Panther. First of all, the reason it has a low audience score is because of people that maliciously down voted it. It’s the internet, anyone could have voted, even those that didn’t see the movie. You want an accurate audience score, go to Cinemascore, they poll people that have actually seen a movie. Also, more importantly, if people don’t like a movie, they don’t watch it. Black Panther is the highest grossing superhero film of all time in North America, third highest worldwide and the highest solo origin story. I highly doubt that these SJWs somehow powered the movie to such heights. Don’t forget that it performed phenomenally in other international markets, for an origin story or otherwise, I also doubt it was wholly the work of SJWs. People like the film, period. Numbers don’t lie. My peeve is that there are guys somehow tying the movie to the SJWs that they are protesting. Now, I don’t think it’s a perfect movie, my favorite MCU movie still remains the Winter Soldier. But this is a movie from a third-time 31 year old director that is being compared to The Dark Knight. It might not measure up, but no one is comparing it to Batman and Robin and that by itself is commendable. Taste in movies is meant to be subjective, but I still think giving the movie a 60% is being unnecessarily unfair, but hey, it made 1.3b worldwide so it hardly matters. You keep saying that it received great reviews because people were afraid of being called racists, again, look at the damn numbers. Breitbart of all other places gave it a good review, so your conclusion is moot on just that one regard. An accurate number would be the average critics rating. If they had given it a 10/10, then maybe we could argue their bias. I also don’t really think that the somehow SJW film critics number 97%. A Wrinkle In Time was a fiercely feminist movie from a black director. That didn’t stop it from getting a 41% on Rotten Tomatoes. Subjectively or objectively, BP wasn’t the best superhero film of all time (The Winter Soldier), but it was one of the best. Just because you didn’t like those batting for the movie’s success doesn’t mean that the movie gets the flak for it.