Is the New York Times Shaking Off Woke?
For ten years, half of them in this magazine, I have rung the death knell for Hollywoke. Earlier this month, the unlikeliest source joined the bellringing — the New York Times. And when the Gray Lady backs up a conservative outcast like me, you know it’s the end of Hollywood as we know it, and I predicted it.
But the current James Bond is just the ultimate manifestation of the dying art of cinema.
As a movie writer and critic, I understood that once leftist ideology sublimated art, the whole business would collapse like the Soviet Union. Because it required driving out true artists, including the liberal kind who value storytelling over messaging, then replacing us with feminist hacks that despise normal men and traditionalist women.
Most of my peers in the screen trade cheered my expulsion, a good number of them my former friends. They forgot the unspoken rule of their philosophy, “You can never be woke enough.” When the grim reaper came for their jobs, it didn’t matter that they’d cursed Trump and supported baby murder. They were straight white males, thus personae non grata. Now they can’t find work. Though, to add to their pain, Donald Trump did — 47th President of the United States.
The feminist women and beta males who displaced us in the last two decades had little of our talent, only a mandatory anti-man, anti-white, pro-queer agenda. But they inherited one enormous advantage from liberal weaklings: Centuries of narrative art they could never have created yet now control, a treasure trove of epic heroes and romantic heroines to corrupt and exploit — the legacy of Hans Christian Anderson, the Brothers Grim, J. R. R. Tolkien, Walt Disney, Ian Fleming, Stan Lee, Gene Rodenberry, George Lucas, and countless others.
And despoil them they have, in a long dissembly line of minority-inclusive woke garbage: The Little Mermaid featuring a black starlet, The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power de-Christianizing and confusing Tolkien’s masterpiece, the sexless Avengers movies (the stars of which humiliated themselves in a cringeworthy political ad for Kamala), fake female-driven mutations of Star Wars, Star Trek, and Indiana Jones, and the forthcoming embarrassment Snow White, starring the most obnoxious actress of the century, Latina Rachel Zegler.
All of these travesties are meant to reorient fans of the original properties to the new matriarchy. In advancing such an idiocy, their caretakers deny normal boys and girls the fun their predecessors enjoyed from the initial versions. Yet they keep expecting kids, parents, and grandparents to subsidize their garbage. Naturally, they have stayed away in droves, except when conned by a pretty bauble like Barbie.
As I’ve stated for years, no fictional icon has been more emasculated this century than the greatest male hero of the Twentieth, James Bond. In my review here of the last 007 atrocity, No Time to Die, starring overrated asexual mope Daniel Craig, I chronicled every politically correct subtraction of the character. And now even the leftist New York Times agrees with me — and my long communicated view on the screen trade — in a recent piece, “Is the Awkward ‘Diversity Era’ of Hollywood Behind Us?”, sub-headlined The past decade’s clumsiest attempts to cram new faces into old stories now feels like a moment, and a genre, of their own. Article writer Kabir Chibber echoes my criticism of the James Bond devolution via the wretched No Time to Die.
Other films tried too hard to correct the past, judging their original white male protagonists far more harshly than anyone in the audience did. In the final James Bond film from Daniel Craig, “No Time to Die,” Bond has been replaced as Agent 007 by a Black woman, played by Lashana Lynch (can you remember her name or her drink of choice?); he obsesses over girlfriends dead and alive; he is unable to seduce. (A much younger Ana de Armas laughs at the thought.) By the end, you’re just happy that this poor man, now totally out of time, has been put out of his misery. The old Bond films are distinctly of their era but feel timeless; what’s surprising is how quickly this one, in its desperation to be modern, has come to feel dated.
I had to read the last line twice to make sure I hadn’t written it. The old Bond films are distinctly of their era but feel timeless; what’s surprising is how quickly this one, in its desperation to be modern, has come to feel dated. In fact, I have written the very same thought many times. The magnificent, enduring film creation of producers Albert Broccoli and Harry Saltzman, director Terence Young, and brilliant actor Sean Connery fell into the hands of Broccoli’s untalented feminist daughter Barbara Broccoli, who couldn’t have imagined such a hero, and has done much to destroy him. She actually killed him off in the last film, to no real fan’s regret.
But the current James Bond is just the ultimate manifestation of the dying art of cinema. The sad woke lot killing it off have no idea how to resuscitate it and wouldn’t if they could, because it would mean going against the Message. That women are no physical match for men, don’t wish to be, appreciate real ones, and desire to be romanced by them.
The Pre-Woke 1980s
Past filmmakers knew these truths to be self-evident. Practically every movie shown on Turner Classic Movies (TCM) has more human insight and verve than any dark anti-human effort made this century. And many of their writers were women who understood the world, and didn’t dream about reshaping it into something impossible. Some could even write fine Westerns validating male camaraderie, as Leigh Brackett did in two of the best, Rio Bravo and El Dorado.
I remember how wonderful moviegoing was shortly after Reagan got elected. In 1982, my friends and I went to the movies every night. We saw E.T., the Extra-Terrestrial, Tootsie, An Officer and a Gentleman, Rocky III, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Poltergeist, Diner, Conan the Barbarian, Blade Runner, The Thing, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, The Year of Living Dangerously, First Blood, and The Verdict. I knew then it could never get any better. But who knows? Maybe with another revolutionary conservative President, and the end of Hollywoke, it will be.
READ MORE from Lou Aguilar:
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