Walt goes to the movies - "Zootopia 2"

In "Zootopia 2 Proves All Box Office Failure Excuses are Lies" Breitbart News' John Nolte reports that over the Thanksgiving weekend, the Disney Grooming Syndicate’s Zootopia 2 grossed $556 million worldwide, $156 million domestically. A pretty amazing counterpoint to what entgertainment industry "experts" call "the ongoing collapse of the box office".

The "experts" say that people are shunning Hollywood's shoddy slop not because of appeal or quality, but for reasons completely unrelated to the fact that the industry is run by political leftists determined to push the DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusivity) agenda.

They're producing movies filled with political messaging, obnoxious girlbosses, gay stuff, and woketard record scratches, and all sorts of other loony liberal propaganda. As Walt found out yesterday, Disney has its own "Diversity and Inclusion" team, which gets a credit near end of the length scroll following Zootopia 2.

The libtards running the show seem totally unaware that the not-so-liberal general public -- people like you and me -- are fed up with the DEI crap... sick, sore and tired of it. So when a young lady of whom I am quite fond asked to be taken to see Zootopia 2, I asked myself; why should I go and see another lousy product from a tired and out-of-touch bunch of  wokesters.

But (I thought) the original Zootopia was pretty good, in spite of the DEI sub-text, and if "Flash" (the sloth who works at the DMV) is going to be in the sequel, he'll be good for a laugh. So I watched the trailer...

... and decided to give it a chance. I'm glad I did. Zootopia 2 is better (IMHO) than the original. Of course it's still all about equity and inclusion, celebrating our differences, working together for a woke new society yada yada yada, but the main story line is strong enough that you aren't bothered by the quiet propaganda. There's lots of action, a plot which is simple enough to follow (maybe not for pre-teens), and the animation and characterization are excellent! 👍👍👍👍 (out of five)

We return then to Mr Nolte's article. "If Zootopia 2 can make $556 million over a single weekend (he writes), why can't everything else? That’s not a sarcastic question, and the answer is an easy one: because not every movie has the same broad appeal as Zootopia 2. That’s not a criticism. It’s just a fact. 

"The answer to so many box office bombs, however, is decidedly not these relentless lies and crybaby excuses of: COVID, streaming, theatrical window, whine, whine, whine, whine… No, not every movie can deliver the same broad appeal of a Zootopia 2, but…and this is important…enough people all over the world obviously, obviously still want to go to the movies if the movie holds some appeal for them.

"The problem is that Hollywood removed sex appeal and sensuality (unless it's gay sex appeal and sensuality). The problem is that Hollywood chose divisive political messaging over universal appeal and themes. The problem is that Hollywood chose to alter and poison human nature with so much woke, no one can relate to the characters or their relationships. 

"Movies like Zootopia 2...prove one thing: Americans still love going to the movies, and what’s stopping them is not StreamingCOVIDTheatricalWindow. What’s stopping them is a a smug, spoiled, bigoted, and insulated industry that hates its own customers."

Noted in passing:

- Being a cheap SOB, I went on a Tuesday afternoon when admission at the Fort Mudge cinema is half-price. Even so, the auditorium was no more than 20% full. Maybe it''s because it was a school day.

- The aforementioned cinema doesn't have a ticket window any more. If you haven't booked online (a buck extra for the "administration fee"!) you can get your ticket at an ATM-like machine in the lobby, or from the pimple-faced kid who sells you the popcorn-like snacks.

- The lobby of yesteryear has been transformed into an arcade where the slack-jawed yokels can play more-or-less violent games like Exterminator and Transformers until their thirst for flashing lights and loud noises has been quenched. Not recommended for those prone to seizures.

- The cinema now offers a gadget -- a tiny screen mounted on a flex pipe that fits into your cup-holder -- which displays subtitles in English or ??? for those who can't keep up. The screen is low-light, green-on-black, quite unobtrusive, and a good idea. 

That's Walt's one-and-only movie review for this year. I just might go again next year, by which time I'm sure there'll be a Zootopia 3!

A sad commentary on American arts and entertainment

My grandkids, or the younger ones anyway, were been bugging their parents to see Dumbo, the latest Hollywood remake. My recent illness gave me an excuse not to be part of a family outing, but when they descended on the ole homestead and mentioned that the movie was playing in nearby Fort Mudge, and they thought I needed to get out of the house, I was trapped. Trapped like a rat. So I went. Great modern animation and special effects, kind of a lame, PC (pro animal rights and "inclusivity") version of the original story. Harmless, gormless entertainment.

When I see movies like this and the remake of Alice in Wonderland, well done though they may be, I can't help but wonder if no-one in Hollywood has any new ideas. It seems today that all we see is remakes in movies and remakes on TV. And some of them, extensions of franchises that are well past their best-before dates (Hello Star Wars!) are truly dreadful. Where's the creative talent, the imagination that begat the original movies, which were themselves adapted from stories that some truly talented writers devised a hundred years ago?

This is hardly a new thought. Here's what Brooks Atkinson, one of America's leading drama critics, had to say, nearly seven decades ago.

Something elusive and intangible seems to have drained the vitality out of the theatre and perhaps out of American arts as well. No one knows the reason exactly. But could it be that the spiritual climate in which we are now living smothers art that is really creative, and that the emphasis on public expression of all kinds is toward meekness and conformity? [My emphasis. Walt]

People are playing safe. They hesitate to say what they think. The intellectual and artistic life of the country has been flattened out. ...ignorant heresy-hunting and...bigoted character-assassination are succeeding. The hoodlums are in control here as well as in Russia, and the theatre begins to look as insipid in the one place as in the other.... We cannot expect to have vital art in our theatre if we emulate totalitarian countries and yield the control of cultural life to the Yahoos and hoodlums.

Quoted in William Shirer's Midcentury Journey, 1955. That was well before Mr Atkinson or Mr Shirer had heard the expression "political correctness", but political correctness is what is described in the emphasized words. Political correctness is killing not only political thought but also our collective imagination. We have become a society where original, non-conforming thought is the greatest of all sins. Sad.

Postscript: I can't get over how, the older Danny DeVito gets, the more he looks like me!

How embarrassing! Rovi gets "Fantasia" still caption wrong

Ever heard of Rovi? Neither had I. But Wikipedia informs us that Rovi Corporation is a US company, known previously as "Macrovision", whose patents, products, and technologies include copy protection, software licensing and "search recommendation" on devices such as set-top boxes, digital video recorders, TVs, and mobile and tablet devices.

We're told also that companies such as consumer electronics manufacturers, cable operators, websites, and social networks use Rovi’s entertainment metadata -- a collection of in-depth information on movies, television shows, celebrities, music, games, and books -- in their efforts to organize and enable the consumption as well as hinder the duplication of the digital entertainment they provide.

So... "in-depth information on movies", eh. The kind of "in-depth information" you might find in an article like "50 incredible animated movies", which appeared on MSN Entertainment today. All captions (the blurb on the landing page sez) were provided by Rovi. Here's Walt's screen cap of one of them.

Fans (like Walt) of the original Fantasia, released in 1940, will know immediately that the cell pictured is not from Fantasia, but from Fantasia 2000, released by Disney in 2000 [Duh! Ed.] to slow applause.

Nasty letters to MSN and Rovi are being drafted by Disney's legal weasels even as we speak.