Barbenheimer Whiplash

Now that Barbie has sold more than ONE BILLION dollars of tickets at the box office worldwide and our beloved Greta Gerwig has become the #1 commercial female director in movie history, it’s time for the complaints.

Oh, but wait.

Now that Oppenheimer has sold more than $600 million dollars of tickets at the box office worldwide and proven there is no ceiling to how popular, acclaimed and profitable THREE HOURS of dark, dramatic filmmaking can be, it’s time to eviscerate Christopher Nolan and IT into the cinematic equivalent of swiss cheese.

Boo hoo, right?

I know.

Nevertheless, this is why we can’t have nice things.

As life goes on you get to the point where you not only realize you can’t please everyone, but that you really don’t give a sh-t and stop trying.

In reality, the only person you can actually please is yourself.

And even that is unlikely.

Especially when you are doing something artistic.

Actually, the arts are no different than life in that regard so let’s amend that thought to include everything. When you try to be (or do or create) all things to all people you wind up with not much of anything worth spending time with.

I tell writing students that it doesn’t matter if a subject they write about has been done before because:

a. Everything (and everyone) has been done before, and

b. If you dig deep and tell the story in a personal (Note: But necessarily autobiographical) enough way, it can’t help but be original because no one has exactly your take on the world (Note: Clones, accepted).

It only took me decades of therapy to get to this point but here I am preaching what the most truly evolved of us knew far earlier in life.

Still, better late than never.

I was a movie critic at Variety for many years, many decades ago, and the most astute remark I ever heard about critics came from my colleague Jim Harwood, a really smart guy who sat at a desk to the left of me and used to write for the Wall Street Journal before covering show business and writing short clever columns about people like Ted Turner and Kirk Kerkorian long before that was popular.

When someone asked him once what qualified him to be a critic, he turned tartly to them and without missing a beat, said:

Because I have an opinion and a place to print it.

Now, of course, EVERYONE does.

Including me.

God (Note: Or whoever you imagine Her to be) help us all.

See, what Harwood, as we all called him, got before any of us and is worth reminding all of us of at this moment, is that critical thought is nice but it’s not an absolute and there isn’t a right or wrong.

There’s simply an opinion.

There are a lot of boys (Note: Well, adult males acting like little boys) up in arms about what they perceive as the small-mindedness in which they are ALL being portrayed in a film about a doll.

Just as there are lots of conservatives foaming at the mouth that a short sequence where little girls toss aside their Betsy Wetsy-like infant dolls in favor of a hip, curvaceous, fashion -forward plastic version of young women, means motherhood is in peril and the very future of society as we know it is being put at risk.

Oh. My. Goddess.

The complaints about what was going on in the mind of the genius man who supervised the invention of the first nuclear bomb and enabled it’s launching is a bit more complicated but nevertheless operates on the same principle.

Choosing to show a genius of the 1930s, 40s and 50s working in a boy’s club of mostly men (Note: Despite the fact that far less than 5% of the scientists working with him at Los Alamos were women) must mean that the filmmaker, not the math genius, ignores (nee marginalizes) women. And the idea that the two primary sexual partners shown in his life were a female biologist and a female psychiatrist is further proof that the guy who made this movie can only see women as his own personal sexual receptacles.

Worse yet, is the clear racism employed by not showing re-recreated or existing documentary footage of the actual atomic bomb going off at Hiroshima and Nagasaki and getting to literally view the faces of tens of thousands of Japanese people being ripped away.

That couldn’t be an artistic choice to center the film on the man’s existential crisis of good vs. evil and not the literal enormity of the bomb. It can only be the means by which one gets to negate every achievement that came before it and dismiss the film, in its entirety, as a relic of storytelling of the white male privilege kind.

Well, I mean, Chris Nolan IS a white guy who is a bit of a genius just as Greta Gerwig IS a feminist with a passion for the color pink and cheeky comic irony.

What else could, or SHOULD, their movies be???

Oh, OF COURSE I get the complaints and where they’re coming from.

I’m not a TOTAL moron. (Note: Even though it might be easier to dismiss me as such.)

But to accuse the films as either a whitewashing of history or a too woke view of men and/or women-hood is truly a bit reductive.

I was tempted to use the word self-serving but that would be a putdown to anyone else’s viewpoint, which I don’t seek to do (Note: No matter how tempting). It’s merely to suggest that no one work or person or place can be 100% inclusive of everything and/or everyone.

And even if they could, guaranteed a bunch of the rest of us wouldn’t like the result of that either.

So instead, here’s a thought:

If you don’t like what’s out there – do your own film. Or, get a group of friends together who think like you do and have them do it.

Or write it. Or sing about it. Or paint it. Or rhyme it in couplets.

And then disregard anything I, or the world, has to say. Especially if other people, but most importantly you, like it.

Billie Eilish – “What Was I Made For?” (from Barbie)

03.28.21

by notesfromachair

Why Don’t You Just Blog About It?

It was hard to know what to write about this week. Not because there wasn’t enough but because there was too much in too many areas.

This happens when you have a weekly column or, in this case, create a weekly column for yourself.

Many people have asked me over the last ten years –

So Chair, why do it? Why put this pressure on yourself? And us?

Not a picture of me on Saturday night writing this blog… not at all

My stock answer is to quote Jim Harwood, my late colleague at Daily Variety, when asked what qualified him to review movies:

Because I have an opinion and a place to print it.

Glib as this answer was and still is, it’s only partly true.

Discourse, disagreement and the inevitable didacticism it evokes, are how we survive.

It’s how the world survives. And, in turn, how it thrives.

I never much liked the word didactic, probably because I feared it applied too much to me and wasn’t quite sure of it’s true definition.

To be didactic – meaning to be inclined to teach or lecture to others too much, and often in too boring a way, is not something to aspire to.

Especially in a self-created weekly column.

When it’s an opinion you don’t want to hear or one with which you vehemently disagree, most of our knee jerk reactions are to feel talked down to and/or lectured to. We want to turn the channel, scroll past or, more often than not, simply tune out and/or walk out of the room.

This isn’t good nor is it healthy for ourselves, our country or the world.

It’s a behavior that was enabled by the Reagan Administration when it did away with the Fairness Doctrine, which in many ways privatized the news business, stripping it of any real legal responsibility to be fair.

When you are not required to present opposing viewpoints in some way, shape or form, especially when speaking and writing about the events of the day, you are NOT being fair. You are giving opinions that masquerade as news and getting people to believe you without knowing all the facts.

Still, it’s a start.

This is where writing a column, okay A BLOG, comes in.

Oh come now, the Chair ALWAYS has something to say #bloggingrightnow

None of what’s here could readily be classified as news coverage even though it does speak to what’s going on in the world during any given week.

Sometimes the goings on have to do with pop culture. Other times it’s a treatise on bad drivers (Note: Everyone else) or the blissful simplicity of a plain white shirt. And more than I realized in the last four years, it’s been a serious condemnation of racism, sexism and homophobia – in other words, a repudiation of Trumpism.

For this writer, and often the readers, it’s a way to externalize the internal emotions, often a mix of passion and anger, which drives one crazy to keep in. An avenue to put it out into the world where it can be:

1. Identified

2. Seen

3. Discussed

And, most importantly –

4. HEARD

To get all of the above is the jackpot and it doesn’t often happen. The discourse equivalent of a singer who gets a four-chair turn during the blind auditions on NBC’s The Voice.

But you don’t need ALL FOUR coaches to want you on their team in order to win a singing competition. Just like you don’t need everyone, or even the majority of people, to agree with you in order to ultimately win an argument and begin to change the world. (Note: Or at least make yourself feel better).

You just need ONE coach or ONE person to listen. Then you continue to
“sing” and convince a few more. And then more. Until, well….you get what I mean.

It might not mean you’ll become The Voice but as they say in Oscar season, it’s a honor to be nominated.

Or at least on a list that was considered to be nominated.

I think of a blog, a column, or even the vocalizing of a song or a viewpoint as a way to sing a song that needs to be sung. If this sounds a little 1960s, well, why not?

That was a turbulent time but an era that provoked more social change than any decade since.

For example, here’s what was churning me up inside this week:

– SEVEN mass shootings in SEVEN days in the U.S. Yeah, there were TEN people killed in Boulder, CO at the King Soopers Supermarket on Monday, March 22. This followed the EIGHT people gunned down, including SIX Asian women, at three spas in Atlanta on Tuesday March 16.

But did you know that between those two days there were TWENTY-THREE more people shot, killed and injured en masse in Stockton, CA, Gresham, OR, Houston, TX, Dallas, TX, and Philadelphia, PA?

And that almost all of the major mass shootings in US over the last several decades were done with variations of a single weapon – the AR-15 rifle?

– EIGHT white guy legislators, led by Georgia Governor Brian Kemp, had a behind closed doors bill signing that SEVERELY curbed the right to vote statewide. Among other things, it is now a CRIME to provide WATER to those standing in line to vote. The bill also removes the MAJORITY of drop boxes for MAIL-IN BALLOTS, sharply cuts back on the amount of polling places TO vote and DRASTICALLY reduces the number of hours the remaining polling places will be open, particularly in areas with majority Black and Brown voters.

Interesting enough, this PRIVATE bill signing was done under a PAINTING of one of the state’s most notorious SLAVE PLANTATIONS right there in the governor’s office. And when Georgia State Legislator Park Cannon, a Black female, knocked on the governor’s door to witness said signing she was promptly handcuffed, arrested AND dragged away TO JAIL where she was charged with TWO FELONIES?

– Elsewhere, a group of EIGHTEEN Republican members of Congress in HUNTING GEAR patrolled the Texas border armed with RIFLES, presumably for protection against an army of gun-toting drugs lords illegally entering the U.S. In truth, that border overwhelmingly features unaccompanied CHILDREN floating via INNER TUBE to escape thugs in their native Honduras, Nicaragua or El Salvador trying to either kill them or make them their drug runners.

– It now costs a whopping $19.95 to stream new-ish Oscar-nominated movies like The Father on platforms such as Amazon and Google because desperate theatre owners like AMC want to make up for all the business lost during the pandemic. No, this isn’t earth shattering but it pissed me off nevertheless.

Any one of these could’ve been the subject of a “column” and now, in some small way, all of them are. What’s eating you and how can you get it out of your head? Where do you discuss it? Who disagrees with you and why? Do they have a point? What broader questions does this bring to mind and can you at least read about it AND the opposing opinion?

Before you know it, you’re not so alone in your thoughts and you’ve created a column of your own. Or at the very least, prevented yourself from imploding.

And have the pressure of each week figuring out what else is on your mind.

#DoItForDemocracy.

You’re welcome.

Bo Burnham – “Rant”

Check out the Chair’s newest project, Pod From a Chair , now available on Apple Podcasts and Spotify!

TWO PART EPISODE ON OSCAR NOMINATIONS NOW LIVE!

notes from a chair

Tag Archives: opinions

Barbenheimer Whiplash

Why Don’t You Just Blog About It?