1. Variety: “West Side Story Falls Flat at Box Office With Disappointing $10 Million Debut”

Of course it did, as I sagely predicted when the project was announced nearly two years ago. First, American musicals are a niche genre for an increasingly elite and rarefied audience. Second, the efforts of critics to hype the movie—it was the creation of two Super Stevies, Spielberg and the recently departed Sondheim, so it had to be brilliant!—rang forced and false as they detailed the oppressive politically correct re-writing of the book by Tony Kushner, like placing the rivalry between the Jets and the Sharks in the context of gentrification and urban renewal, as if anyone inclined to watch a musical cares. Third, the well-publicized decision not to have subtitles for long scenes where the characters spoke Spanish was a red-flag: this is a pandering effort, not a musical. Finally, as Sondheim said in various ways in interviews over the years, making a show of any kind requires a good answer to the question, “Why?” This project had none: “Because the director wants to prove how versatile he is” isn’t one. “Because every movie made in the Sixties is racist, sexist and offensive” really isn’t one. Neither is “Because it’s crucial to remake a movie classic that won 10 Oscars.“

This is a lesson in hubris. Another one.

2. Washington Post op ed: “I hate Christmas. And you should be okay with that.”

Oh, I’m fine with that; I’m especially fine with a Chritsmas-hater writing such a revealing piece of signature significance. The whole thing is an open admission of bitterness, envy, hate and misanthropy. Here’s the crux of his complaint:

I didn’t like Christmas in part because the steel mill where my father worked had closed. That news did nothing to stop the commercials with shiny, happy, children opening reams of colorful paper to reveal the things that they’d always wanted. The ads seemed to suggest that the more stuff you got, the better person you were. I learned through those commercials that good people got presents and that my family was trash. I took it into me every year like communion.

Sometimes, I wonder what essential part of me is missing. I know that Christmas is supposed to be about family. But as I grew to adulthood and became my own person, I found that family can be challenging when thrust upon you all at once.

Each year around this time, I find it more difficult to balance the awful things we see happening the rest of the year with the joy I’m supposed to drum up near the end of it. With age, it’s harder for me to reconcile the good will we’re supposed to feel toward each other at the holidays with the horrible way we treat each the rest of the year. It just feels fake.

Not surprisingly, he is a committed social justice warrior who is angry about the American cream that doesn’t hand out its bounty in carefully measured equal portions. “The stores where I buy my meager Hungry-Man frozen dinners now explode with silver and red in a gaudy celebration of unchecked, poinsettia-riddled capitalism,” he grumbles.

So he doesn’t get Christmas. I feel sorry for him. But why would the Washington Post decides that this guy’s pathology is worthy of an op-ed?

Continue reading →

Oddly, at my local CVS (about which I will be filing official complaint #6 today, with all previous filings stalled and ignored by what is obviously an intentional stonewalling policy) there are three Santa avatars on sale ranging from 4 feet to 8 inches, and all of them are black Kris Kringles. Maybe, as my wife suggested, the white Santas sold already…or maybe Santa is on the way to joining Captain Marvel, Jake from State Farm, Mikey of the Life cereal commercials, Magnum, P.I., Bobby of “Company,” Perry Mason’s investigator Paul Drake and other once familiar white fictional characters in turning female, black or “of color” because…well, just because. Meanwhile, my informal month-long survey of TV fare (including 2021 streamed movies and TV ads) showed more than 50% of all couples portrayed were interracial. That’s almost three times the actual demographic number, so all of those “look like America” demands should be taken with a grain of rock salt. I don’t care, except that I resent having my arm being pinned behind my back by culture dictators in Hollywood and Madison Ave.

1. How did I miss this vibe in the Jussie Smollett fiasco? Before Smollett was convicted of 5 of 6 charges, Jonathan Turley interpreted his weird and defiant defense as a deliberate effort to get a jury nullification verdict. The Professor concluded that Smollett was following the lead of social justice anarchists like Georgetown professor Paul Butler, who wrote in the Washington Post in 2016 that “confronting the racial crisis in criminal justice, jury nullification gives jurors a special power to send the message that black lives matter.” Racist African-American pundit Elie Mystal has advocated the same: black members of juries should refuse to convict black defendants. Turley concluded,

Smollett is the very definition of a race-baiter seeking to use our racial divisions for his personal aggrandizement and advancement. If successful, he would reduce the court to the same narrative-driven reality of our politics and entertainment arenas.

In that sense, Smollett is still playing to his audience. He knows reality is not what is true but what an audience wants to be true.

In politics, Vice President Harris, Speaker Pelosi and others proved that with their protestations over his “attempted lynching.” In the media, not only his story but questioning of his story were cited as evidence of a viciously racist society.

Now that Smollett has been convicted, none of the journalists, pundits and politicians that immediately assumed his ridiculous story was true because bias makes you stupid have had the integrity to apologize or admit that their lack of objectivity helped Smollett advance his hoax. John Kass argues that we need to remember this…you know, as with the Nick Sandmann episode, or what the news media did to Kyle Rittenhouse.

2. Presumed racism?  A black couple was shocked when a California appraiser valued their Marin County, California, home nearly $500,000 less than previous appraisals. Suspicious, they asked a white friend to pretend to be the homeowner for a different appraiser, and “whitewashed” their house by removing their family photos and stripping the walls of their African-themed art.  The new appraisal came in at $1.48 million, nearly a half-million more than the previous estimate. Based on the discrepancy,  the couple filed the suit December 2, along with Fair Housing Advocates of Northern California, alleging that the first appraiser,gave them a lowball valuation because of their race. They are seeking financial damages and asking the court to order the defendants to ensure they won’t discriminate when appraising houses Continue reading →

Jerry Herman wrote a Christmas song; his arch rival Stephen Sondheim never did. Too mundane? No inspiration? One non-ethics related revelation I got from watching the remarkable Peter Jackson Beatles documentary was how the group tried to spark its creativity with collaboration and improvisation: this is an excellent analysis that dovetails nicely with mine. An ethics-related observation: What a rude, selfish jerk Yoko Ono is, and how disrespectful of his colleagues John Lennon was to tolerate her conduct. As a director, I would never allow a spouse or significant other to exercise that degree of interference with the creative process. It distances the cast member involved from the rest of the team, and creates an inherent distraction. Generally I don’t like any bystanders or audience in rehearsals, and never any I would consider hostile, which Yoko obviously was. The other three Beatles did an amazing job feigning disinterest, neutrality and blindness, usually acting as if she was invisible, like a ghost.

1. Look! I have something almost nice to say about the New York Times! Ross Douthat, of late the boldest of the Times conservative columnists, was given the prime editorial slot for his piece, “Can the Press Stop A Trump Restoration?” I assume that he didn’t compose the title, which misrepresents the thrust and tone of what he wrote, though it wonderfully accurately expressed that “enemy of the people” vibe of the Times and the mainstream media generally. The press has no business asking the question, because the press has no business to try to help or hinder any political candidate except by reporting news, facts and the truth, and allowing the public to make its own choices.

Douthat obviously agrees, writing, “A journalism that conspicuously shades the truth or tries to hide self-evident realities for the sake of some higher cause will inevitably lose the trust of some of the people it’s trying to steer away from demagogy — undercutting, in the process, the very democratic order that it’s setting out to save. I think this has happened already.”

Gee, Ross, ya think? The essay was obviously inspired by a column by The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank who made the risible claim that President Biden’s media coverage has lately been as negative as or even more negative than Trump’s coverage through most of 2020. Like everything Milbank writes, it’s a deceitful comparison at best: Trump received negative coverage regardless of whether his policies were working or not, regardless of what he said or the exaggerated attacks against him. Biden has been criticized because his first year in office has been virtually unspinnable, just one disater after another. Never mind, argued Milbank: with a Trump resurgence looming, reporting the facts means that “my colleagues in the media are serving as accessories to the murder of democracy.”

That position is as unhinged and blind as it is frightening. Criticizing a President who has enabled mass violations of the Equal Protection clause, assisted attacks on free speech, tried to recruit the news media into even more blatant state propaganda, proposed neutering the Supreme Court, attempted unconstitutional mask mandates, persecuted one set of rioters over another due to race and party affiliation and other abuses and threatened parents who dissent from leftist indoctrination by public schools with FBI harassment is anti-democracy? Ironically, the Times, by highlighting Douthat’s evisceration of Milbank, is also attacking its own announcement during the 2016 campaign that it felt obligated to tilt its coverage to help elect Hillary Clinton.

Maybe, in addition to the fact that the Times enjoys exposing its rival’s weaknesses, it is finally realizing that Douthat is right, as he notes,

[T]he essential problem with the idea that just a little less media neutrality, a little more overt alarmism, would put Trumpism in its place [is that]…[Y]ou can’t suppress a populist insurgency just by rallying the establishment if suspicion of the establishment is precisely what’s generating support for populism in the first place. Instead, you need to tell the truth about populism’s dangers while convincing skeptical readers that you can be trusted to describe reality in full.

Unfortunately for the Times and the Post, that ship has sailed. Continue reading →