Ah, the curse of confirmation bias! So determined are conservative pundits and bloggers to condemn the New York Times as being a full conspirator in the effort to wokify U.S. society and culture that it missed the paper’s movie critic admitting that the movement wasn’t working. Wesley Morris, who is clearly Democrat, progressive, and an African American, began his review of the already controversial live action version of “The Little Mermaid” thusly:
The new, live-action “The Little Mermaid” is everything nobody should want in a movie: dutiful and defensive, yet desperate for approval. It reeks of obligation and noble intentions. Joy, fun, mystery, risk, flavor, kink — they’re missing. The movie is saying, “We tried!” Tried not to offend, appall, challenge, imagine.
“Dutiful and defensive, yet desperate for approval. It reeks of obligation and noble intentions.” That’s a perfect, if incomplete, description of what political correctness and the cultural fascists of the Left have wrought. But because the critic appended “kink” at the end of “joy, fun, mystery, risk, flavor,” the qualities he felt the movie was missing, that word was all the critics of the critic could see. “NY Times ripped for piece lamenting lack of ‘kink’ in new ‘Little Mermaid’: ‘The left sexualizes kids'” Fox News announced, and it was typical.
I have no idea what Morris meant by “kink,” but it was a single word that the Right allowed to blind them to the fact that his review laid out, if reluctantly, the cultural and philosophical flaw in Disney’s lurch to “diversity” over entertainment. He wrote, for example,
This remake injects some contemporary misfortune (humans despoil the water, we’re told). It also packs on another 52 minutes and three new songs, trades zany for demure and swaps vast animated land- and seascapes for soundstagey sets and screensavery imagery. They’re calling it “live-action,” but the action is mostly CGI. There’s no organic buoyancy. On land, Ariel can walk but can’t speak, which means whoever’s playing her needs a face that can. Achieving that was a piece of cake in the cartoon. Ariel could seem bemused, enchanted, bereft, coquettish, alarmed, aghast, elated. And her scarlet mane was practically a movie unto itself…Racially, the whole movie’s been, what, opened up? Diversified? Now, Ariel’s rueful daddy, King Triton, is played by a stolid Javier Bardem, who does all the king’s lamenting in Spanish-inflected English. Instead of the Broadway chorines of the original, her mermaid siblings are a multiethnic, runway-ready General Assembly…The prince, Eric.. is white, English… his mother, Queen Selina [is] Black…The script.. informs us that the queen has adopted the prince (because somebody knew inquiring minds would need to know)…The brown skin and placeable accents don’t make the movie more fun, just utopic and therefore less arguable…“The Little Mermaid” is more a moral redress than a work of true inspiration.
Sure, Morris works in the obligatory nonsense about Disney having to “atone” for ignoring or degrading non-whites in its classic works; he does work for the Times after all. But on the whole, what he is saying is, ‘What’s the point of this remake, if it isn’t as magical and entertaining as its animated model?’ The point, of course, is politics and societal engineering. He’s saying that isn’t Disney’s job, and worse, he’s saying that Disney’s not very good at it anyway. Disney’s job is entertaining kids, and making life for fun for everyone….like the number from the original, above.
Ethics Alarms 
It’s my understanding that part of Ursula’s song has been edited to remove the generalization of how men don’t want to be around girls who talk, just attractive ones with good bodies and pretty faces.
Despite the fact that
1. Ursula is the villain
2. She’s evil.
3. Because she’s evil and she’s trying to pressure Ariel to sign the contract, she’s lying
If the critic is writing that this remake was pointless, I would agree. Most of the Disney live-action remakes are pointless. So are the endless sequels to most of their animated classics.
I suspect his tossing in “kink” was tantamount to tossing a random, “but of course, Orange Man Bad” and “Of course, Trump is an existential threat to … everything,” to signal he’s not a conservative.
Gotta stay right in the middle of the reservation.
You may be right. I took it to mean there might have been some innocent fun to be had when the story involved a romance between a human and a fish-girl. “Splash!” flirted with a little of that.
**rant alert**
The problem with Disney remakes of their animated fare is the animals. Honestly, I can’t bring myself to care about the ethnicity of the actors and actresses when the animal portrayals are just abhorrent. How can the same company (Disney) produce a fantastic, emotional Raccoon (Guardians of the Galaxy) and the most unemotive animals (Jungle Book, Little Mermaid, Lion King)? Like, take a page from your own book – don’t go all in on making it “super realistic”. It’s the same problem with making CGI humans – their faces just ain’t right. That’s why Pixar did so good – their humans weren’t shaped like humans – they had distortions and flaws – which made them relatable and interesting. There’s nothing interesting about a flawless perfectly proportioned face – Botox patients proved that.
I liked The Jungle Book te-make.
If I saw the original, it was so long ago I don’t remember it.
I have not watched much of any of the others because of lack of interest. (The kids like The Jungle Book for several weeks, so that is what got me involved.)
I have no interest in them for the movies I have seen and especially for the ones I haven’t.
-Jut
As I mentioned a few posts back, I’m done with Disney. Beyond not wanting to help finance their woke agenda and progressive propaganda crusade, I don’t find their products entertaining anymore. If you look at the Marvel franchise, I suggest the early productions were vastly superior to what is being produced now. Admittedly, part of the reason for the degradation of the product line is that typically, sequels grow progressively worse with each iteration. Regardless of this truism, Disney seems to think it is desirable to put more money and emphasis on CGI and make the production look like a video game than on the storyline and actors’ performance. Wakanda Forever comes to mind.
The Little Mermaid was written by a white 19th-century author for a white European children’s market. In 1989, Disney adapted the story as an animated film for the US market. Both naturally had the mermaid as white. Had Hans Christian Anderson’s story taken place in the Sea of Japan, or the Africa Gulf of Guinea, Ariel’s ethnicity would likely have been different.
Making the Little Mermaid’s cast a hodgepodge of multiculturalism makes as much sense as Biden’s “check the box” appointments. Would making the casts of Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, The Sound of Music, The Godfather, The Tuskegee Airmen, or Fiddler on the Roof multicultural work for anyone? Ironically, Disney, an iconic American cultural institution, is destructing itself and transforming Disney into a real-life version of The Emperor Has No Clothes.
You would be amazed, or maybe you wouldn’t, at how many professional stage productions of “The Sound of Music” in the last decade had multi-racial Von Trapp kids. You saw the EA post a a while back on the controversy over the “woke” Fiddler, right?
Sorry, I missed those. To paraphrase Rudolf Abel in Bridge of Spies did it work?
“Ah, the curse of confirmation bias! So determined are conservative pundits and bloggers to condemn the New York Times as being a full conspirator in the effort to wokify U.S. society and culture that it missed the paper’s movie critic admitting that the movement wasn’t working.”
Is it entirely conservatives problem here that mainstream media outlets are reliably almost to the point of certainty, not going to publish something that conservatives might agree with?
It always the listener’s problem if bias makes him or her stupid. I read that review expecting a deranged far-left screed after the right’s headlines about it. It was mostly thoughtful, and, if one could be open-minded, was a pretty damning critique of diversity-driven drivel.
I would guess, given the rest of the review, that the writer meant kink as a synonym for quirky. I wouldn’t have used kink, given its currently more popular definition. It’s a good example of how little it takes to shift something into negative territory on the cognitive dissonance scale. If Mr. Morris had said quirk instead of kink, the article would have been picked up by the right as an example of Disney losing even staunch leftists.
Bingo. As it should have been—the conservative media literally freaked out over “kink” and declared it evidence of more “grooming.” The review IS an example of Disney losing even staunch leftists, and they missed it.
I didn’t. “I’m smart! I’m not dumb like every body says!”