Other than Sergei Eisenstein, we don’t remember many Stalin-era filmmakers, and we only remember Eisenstein because, along with Dziga Vertov, he a) created, pre-Stalin, the concept of the film montage and b) he successfully battled Stalin to preserve his subversive vision in a few of his films, so these are movies that actually have something to say.
Other than that, while we can sometimes admire the photography and style, Stalin-era movies are stiffs; they feel like homework because they’re all propaganda, all ideological, all pedantic, and all personally approved by Stalin himself (a notorious micromanager who sometimes wrote dialogue and song lyrics). Stalin was a tyrant who understood the power of film and who made damn sure no filmmaker’s personal vision got anywhere near a moving camera.
Worse still, on top of being a propagandist, Stalin was a moral prig who would censor out something as anodyne as a passionate kiss. “What are you running, a brothel?” he famously asked a filmmaker, who was probably shot later.
Stalin-era movies are so tiresome that Stalin, who was himself a film lover, hardly watched them — except for work. Most every night, especially after the end of World War II, Stalin would watch movies in his private screening rooms and what he sought most were American movies, Hollywood movies, most especially Westerns and gangster pictures.
While it is true that all art is political, it is also true that propaganda is not art, that laying a political template over art destroys the art because it replaces that which makes great art — inspiration.
Sometimes the inspiration can be political. One of my all-time favorite movies is Oliver Stone’s JFK. One of my all-time favorite directors is Oliver Stone. He and I agree on nothing and JFK is pure left-wing wishcasting. But it is also brilliant and compelling art because it is not the created from a slide rule.
In America, in America of all places, we should not only understand this but appreciate, embrace, and protect this ideal.
But the Wokesters…
The goddamned Wokesters who are — yeah, I’m going to say it — infesting the media…
Quentin Tarantino is one of the most exciting and original filmmakers America has to offer. And he is more than that… He’s not a one-shot wonder. For nearly thirty years, he has been writing and directing movies that do exactly what movies are supposed to do. Outside a couple of clunkers (Death Proof, Hateful Eight), he’s entertained, transported, thrilled, and enthralled us. If you love movies, if you love art, even if you don’t like the man personally, you have to love Tarantino…
Most importantly, this is an artist whose way you get out of. The last thing you want to do is interfere with whatever special relationship Tarantino has with his muse. If you love art, you have two jobs when it comes to Tarantino: shut up and wait for the next one.
That’s it. That’s all we are supposed to do.
But, no… Not the fascist media… Not the Stalinist media… Not these anti-art Wokesters… Because all they are interested in is anti-art, is worstethan a template — these monsters have quotas.
Quotas!
These assholes are watching Tarantino’s latest masterpiece, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, which I plan on seeing for a second time tonight, and like the godless censors they are, like the Stalinists they are, they’re making hash marks on a piece of paper so they can judge art based on their artless quotas.
I am not exaggerating. This is what is literally happening at the far-left Time Magazine:
We counted every line in every Tarantino movie to see how often women talk. This involved me seeing Once Upon a Time… two nights in a row, furiously making hash marks in a notebook in the dark while getting intermittent death stares from my seat neighborhttps://t.co/bT2nU23TMn
— Elijah Wolfson (@elijahwolfson) August 6, 2019
Wait, it gets worse… This is how Time judged all ten of Tarantino’s films, complete with snazzy graphs.
And what inspired Time to do such a thing? A so-called culture writer at the New York Times, who also made hash marks during a screening of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
And here is one of Time’s obscene conclusions:
The data show clearly that men have gotten the majority of dialogue in Tarantino’s films. In part that’s because most of the director’s films have male leads as well as a majority-male cast. But even Tarantino films with female leads and more female characters tend to give more dialogue to men: in Kill Bill: Volume 2, for example, the share of lines going to male actors was 17.5 percentage points higher than those given to women; in Jackie Brown, it’s a startling 39.8 percentage points higher.
Did you get that?
These petty tyrants are not even happy when Tarantino makes a woman the lead in his movies, as he did with Kill Bill and Jackie Brown. Even though, respectively, Uma Thurman and Pam Grier own those movies, are the heroes, and command the screen … they are not verbal enough to satisfy Time’s malevolent censors.
See how they keep moving the goal posts…
It’s no longer enough to make a woman the star of the movie, she has to be the most verbose person in the movie, she has to have diarrhea of the mouth.
Jackie Brown is about a put upon woman who has been screwed by men all her life, and now she is finally going to get some payback. While the men swagger and brag and monologue, Pam Grier uses her brain, she plots and schemes, and in the end makes a fool of them all.
Jackie Brown is one of the all-time great roles for a woman and without question the greatest ever in a noir picture. She’s not the femme fatale, she’s part Jake Gittes and part The Man with No Name… It’s an iconic role, a career role handed to an under-appreciated middle-aged black actress on a silver platter — but, boy, if only she had talked as much as Michael Keaton’s character — then she would have had some real agency.
So now the fascist media are targeting Tarantino, bullying and shaming one of the few original voices left in filmmaking to fill their Woke Quotas.
Screw individual freedom, screw artistic expression, screw inspiration… We got a quota, you better fill it.
And if you think this hash mark art criticism is going to stop with gender, you have not been paying attention. We’re gunna see these monstrous counts based on race, sexual preference, and God only know what else.
Woke has already killed Star Wars and the comedy genre, and like the cancer it is, it will now seek to kill all genres.
Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC. Follow his Facebook Page here.
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