Unlike, for example, the shiny dolts who control Hollywood, this column prides itself on its capacity to learn.
For example, last week’s Five Quick Things led with a condemnation of Alan Ritchson, the beefy buffoon who plays Jack Reacher in the Amazon Prime series of that name, for his double-down offensive leftism that began with a libeling of police and continued in several different stupid directions. And all week long I’ve noticed that column has been sitting atop the chart of the most-trafficked posts at The American Spectator.
So OK, fine. On Fridays, you guys are interested in reading about showbiz and the dimwits it spits out. I’m happy to oblige.
As a relevant aside, by the way, I noted in that column the likelihood that Ritchson’s attacks on police would have a negative effect on box office receipts of The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare, the Guy Ritchie action movie in which he costars. Ungentlemanly Warfare opened on Friday of last week and through Wednesday it had pulled only $10.4 million, a very slow number in a week without a great deal of competition (the top movie last weekend was Civil War, the pointless Alex Garland film almost nobody wanted to see). With a budget of some $60 million, that’s a painfully weak showing.
I suggested that investors and producers of Ungentlemanly Warfare might consider suing Ritchson for driving audiences away from the opening week and negligently trashing their expected return. It seems like they might have a case.
It isn’t just Ritchson who’s busily driving away film audiences. Here’s something else:
And there went whatever chance that movie had of making a profit.
This is of a piece with The Critical Drinker’s review of Rebel Moon 2, the Zac Snyder Netflix vehicle that dropped last week (warning: the Drinker makes liberal use of Not Safe For Work words):
The Drinker is not wrong, but he doesn’t quite emphasize enough what makes these two Rebel Moon movies, which start off fr0m a premise that isn’t actually all that bad — if perhaps a bit tired — so awful.
He calls it Strong Female Character, jokingly, and describes the lead character, Kora, played by Sofia Boutella, as a “complete charisma vacuum.” By now, everybody knows what he’s talking about as well — the sullen, angry, faux-masculine, emotionally vacant Female Action Hero character that virtually no moviegoer can stand, and yet Hollywood cannot stop making movies whose lead characters fit this trope.
It’s maddening to see them tank film after film with this poison. Especially because it’s so completely unnecessary.
I’ve now written five novels — Animus, Perdition, Retribution, and Quandary in the Tales of Ardenia series, and now King of the Jungle, my latest. Every one of them features a “strong” female character. None of them has a Strong Female Character the way the Drinker is referring to the trope-y lead in the Rebel Moon movies. Writing a likable, believable female character the reader or viewer can identify with and respect is actually not all that hard — you simply have to recognize that you can’t avoid some level of vulnerability with a female character that you can get away with ignoring in a male character. That vulnerability, and the creative and nuanced ways women mask and overcome it, is what makes female characters relatable, likable, and alive, and what makes the reader or viewer celebrate her achievements so much more.
But these people simply refuse to go that extra inch for audiences, mostly because woke pieties — including the stupid idea that there are no meaningful differences between women and men — are more important than good storytelling. Well, so be it — but nobody is watching your crappy shows, and that’s only getting worse.
You know, Tuesday was the finale of the most celebrated show on TV at present, that being FX’s Shogun. And the character of Mariko, who isn’t necessarily the lead but is nonetheless the pillar of the story that everything else ultimately revolves around, was utterly and totally fascinating. Why? Because she’s thoroughly vulnerable. She even seeks her own death, for reasons of honor and morale. And how she leverages it is central to the plot of the series.
Compare that to the “charisma vacuum” the Drinker is talking about, and you see the difference between a job done well and hackery the studio money men should have punished and banished a long time ago.
I can put on my tinfoil hat here, and I can once again reference that now-famous stat about how single women are D+37 and how the Obama Democrats who run these cultural institutions are desperate to preserve and grow that demographic, and I can point out that giving girls these “charisma vacuum” characters as role models is a fabulous way to use those cultural institutions to make more unmarriageable, miserable, D+37 women, but I won’t. Because this Quick Thing is about entertainment, not politics. And those ought not meet too often, right?
Maybe someday we’ll have an alt-Hollywood that understands these lessons. These things we complain about are opportunities, you know. They aren’t just problems.
No, I’m not going to wax all optimistic about the election in November. I know that isn’t the mood of TAS’ readership right now, and it isn’t really my mood either. We can all read the polls, but we’re all expecting lots of shoes to drop between now and Election Day — er, Election Month.
Still, there is this:
⬇️Must Watch⬇️ DEMOCRATS NO MORE !! —New York Union Leader and Life Long Dem Bob Bartels: “𝘈𝘧𝘵𝘦𝘳 𝘸𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘩𝘢𝘱𝘱𝘦𝘯𝘦𝘥 𝘪𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘭𝘢𝘴𝘵 4 𝘺𝘦𝘢𝘳𝘴 𝘪𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘤𝘰𝘶𝘯𝘵𝘳𝘺 , 𝘋𝘦𝘮𝘰𝘤𝘳𝘢𝘵𝘴 𝘩𝘢𝘷𝘦 𝘱𝘶𝘴𝘩𝘦𝘥 𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘺𝘣𝘰𝘥𝘺 𝘵𝘰 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘰𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘳… pic.twitter.com/3id2QzKUHM
— AGNEWSLIVE (@AMErikaNGIRLLL) April 25, 2024
There’s a lot of that out there. It’s real. Is it enough? We’ll see.
I’m just as perplexed as Becket Adams is about the lack of recognition/remembrance of the fact that Hamas is still holding some number of Americans as hostages as these atrocious demonstrations pop off on college campuses and elsewhere. I’m old enough to remember when taking Americans as hostages was a good way to earn the perpetual enmity of the American people — an enmity that was actionable in voting booths as well as bombing raids.
But now?
Hamas is out here releasing proof-of-life videos featuring American hostages with missing limbs, and … this barely merits below-the-fold coverage/treatment from media and the Biden admin?
— T. Becket Adams (@BecketAdams) April 25, 2024
Big takeaway is that I should claim I'm a Canadian while traveling abroad.
— T. Becket Adams (@BecketAdams) April 25, 2024
Kind of reminds me of when the State Department abandoned American citizens in Afghanistan after the withdrawal. Insane situation that the WH and major networks sort of just accepted as a "thing that happened."
— T. Becket Adams (@BecketAdams) April 25, 2024
Exactly.
I said this:
This thread is a sad exposition of reality.
But I'll go a little further. It isn't that this government can't protect Americans abroad, it's that they've got such contempt for average Americans that they couldn't be bothered to. https://t.co/nDsJxN5rCQ
— Scott McKay (@TheHayride) April 25, 2024
And I would add that the contempt for average Americans isn’t just present within the government. It’s absolutely endemic in the media, which formerly would sensationalize the barbarism of a Hamas toward American hostages as a means of generating ratings and selling newspapers but now can’t be bothered to cover it at all.
Somehow this refusal to engage in honest capitalism is related to the Critical Drinker’s Strong Female Character complaint. I’ll let you guys work that one out in the comments.
I had a post earlier this week at the Hayride about the Left’s unbridled caterwauling here in Louisiana over a fairly simple, straightforward anti-bureaucracy bill moving through the state legislature. It’s a good example of how utterly moronic the Left is when it comes to public policy.
HB 156 is a bill by freshman state representative Roger Wilder, who is a member of the Louisiana Freedom Caucus. Wilder also owns a bunch of Smoothie King locations in Louisiana and a couple of other states. As such, he generally employes a lot of kids. Smoothie King is more or less a fast-food place, though what it sells is a bit different than what you get at most fast food places, and everybody knows who works at fast food joints.
College kids. Sometimes high school kids.
It turns out that the law in Louisiana says that if you have kids under 18 working at your place, you have to force them to go off the clock for 30 minutes so they can take a lunch break. You don’t have to do that for the 18-year-olds who work at your place. And in Mississippi, there is no requirement that 17-year-olds go off the clock for lunch.
Generally speaking, if you’re just grabbing a bite to eat you don’t need 30 minutes. You need 10 minutes, 15 tops. So you’re actually wasting time not getting paid if you’re forced to go off the clock for 30 minutes. It’s maybe three or four bucks every shift that you’re losing. Which might not seem like much, but work 22 days a month and that’s enough money to pay your cell phone bill or it’s beer money or enough to fill up your gas tank. And this is money that the government is forcing you not to make.
In testimony supporting the bill, Wilder notes that most of his managers don’t even take the “adults” (meaning, the 18-year-olds) off the clock if they’re just going to run into the break room and eat something really quickly. There’s no need to do that, particularly if the restaurant isn’t all that busy and there is somebody to work the cash register, so they let the kids grab a bite and they save the time that would be spent punching in and out.
That sounds right. Easy record-keeping is mother’s milk for franchisees and small businesses, and every corner they can cut on bureaucracy is great not just for the bottom line but for sanity.
So he brings a bill to get state government out of the hair of people like him and lots of other businesspeople who, again, don’t have to deal with stupid requirements like this in our neighboring states.
I won’t include all of the crazed reaction to Wilder’s bill here; the Hayride post has it. But naturally one of the Soros-funded lefty internet rags picked up on the bill and called it “an attempt to weaken child-labor laws.” And now there are idiots on Twitter attempting to organize a boycott of Smoothie King locations because Wilder, one of the franchisees, has brought this bill.
When the effect of it will be, in more cases than not, that the kids will get paid on their lunch breaks simply so that the employers can avoid the pointless paperwork of clocking them in and out.
The Left is full of people who have no idea how the economy works, for various reasons, and the effect of this is that they see every employment situation through the prism of a 19th-century steel mill or coal mine. Even modern-day steel mills and coal mines, much less QSR outlets, struggle to maintain their staffing based on the finicky nature of the workforce. The idea that you can starve your 17-year-old employees and thus squeeze out every last minute of their vast productivity while on the job, without those dedicated, self-sacrificing waifs immediately quitting, displays an ignorance utterly disqualifying on the public policy front.
And yet we’re told the Left owns the future? I have my doubts.
But I know that optimism is to be held back owing to the current mood, so I’ll stop.
HB 156 is going to pass into law fairly easily, by the way, and Louisiana will then treat those hungry 17-year-olds with the same disdain Texas, Arkansas, and Mississippi, and most other states, do.
As I am in book-hawking mode once again, which is the fate of any author wishing to put food on the table, I’ll just pass along a few reactions to King of the Jungle that have turned up on Amazon…
Scott McKay does a masterful job of having the reader experience an all too possible scenario, based on current events populated with “fictional” characters whose actual identities are well-known. As with his “Tales of Ardenia” series, principled, honorable people triumph over the corrupt and unscrupulous; all seen through the eyes of a main character whom the reader easily identifies with. If events do not turn out as they do in McKay’s books, they should!
Reading his stories – where the righteous overcome evil – offers the reader not only an excellent adventure but provides hope that the problems our nation faces will in fact, turn out for the best eventually. Whether that’s true or not, his books are fun, tell a great story, and provide a most-satisfying degree of hope for the future of our country.
A great adventure, a main character that immerses the reader, and hope for the future for a world currently in turmoil. What’s not to like?
And…
This book was a hoot. The author mixed the personalities of current political figures with a fictional, though not implausible, invasion of a South American country. The plot twists and turns as those characters act just as they do in real life, instead in a high adventure story. Very clever.
Also…
Scott McKay is a brilliant writer who weaves unique, invaluable lessons into each of his novels. King Of The Jungle is no exception. It is one of those books that will keep you hooked from start to finish.
And one more…
A unique story; very interesting. This author is talented.
Not too shabby, eh? Everybody who reads King of the Jungle loves the thing. You will, too.
As it happens, I have some paperback copies that just made it in, and I’m happy to sign and ship them to you for the low price of $24.95 — which is the Amazon retail price. I’ll cover the shipping if you’ll promise to put up an Amazon review. Just click here and we’ll make it happen.
I know some of you have already read it. You had 10 weeks to do so when it was serialized here at The American Spectator. But now we’re going to make this thing a bestseller. Read it, and you’ll know why — next to Kurt Schlichter’s The Attack, it might be the most timely book on the market.
So anyway, that’s the pitch. Happy reading!
