As IF Times

Source: The Post (2017) – Rotten Tomatoes

Observing the massive conflagration of liberal properties has been entirely amusing of late.  We refer not to the California fires of course, but to the majority of news outlets that purport to offer straight up reportage.

When I first began to make comments on the subtleties of bias that permeated most of the popular media’s offerings of news, those threads of bias were not always obvious.  As the years have passed and with the widening political divide in America, any pretext of objectivity has yielded to full blown whoppers and knee slappers on the part of many heretofore unimpeachable sources.  Like him or not, the election of Donald Trump has poked through the thin veneer of credibility of such outlets as CNN, NBC and ABC, not to mention the more foamy at the mouth MSNBC and the Washington Post.  He has exposed these outlets for their nakedly partisan skews.

It’s not that all of this now properly labeled “fake news” originates from these outlets.  Sometimes, it’s just a matter of reporting on the crackpot utterances of someone famous.  However, the fact that they give voice to the rants of the more logically challenged people of society, mainly ‘celebrities’, makes them complicit in their dissemination of fake news.  Just the other day, Chelsea Handler (who?) expressed that the massive fires in Southern California were somehow orchestrated by Donald Trump.  Of course, that’s preposterous.  We know that only Kim Jong Un can control the weather.

Recent revelations of galling hypocrisy and malfeasance within their own ranks is the most rapturous bit of schadenfreude that could be offered to the rational public, now hopefully awakened to the dangerous tilt that these outlets have all subscribed.  This tilt was recently best depicted by David Frum who recently opined in an interview that:

“…The mistakes are precisely the reason people should trust the media. Astronomers make mistakes all the time because science is a process of discovery of truth. Astrologers never make mistakes or at least they never own up to them because what they are offering is a closed system of ideology and propaganda…”

It hardly gets more Orwellian than that.  By the way, replace the word Astrology with Global Alarmists next time someone brings up that bit of fantasy.

It is therefore all the more galling that an upcoming film depicting the noble activities of the Washington Post will soon be offering their version of moral courage to the unwitting public. More amusingly, Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks, those two pillars of liberal  sanctimony are cast as the sympathetic protagonists.  That would be like a film on how Pravda provides the truth and exposes corruption to the Russian people.  It’s assured that the film will be reasonably successful, if only because of the fan base of the title stars. It will however, compete with that other blockbuster film, also in the fantasy space, only slightly less believable,  the next installment of Star Wars.

Source: Students at Lena Dunham’s college offended by lack of fried chicken | New York Post

The great gulf between what is depicted in the movies and what you observe in real life is laughingly wide to those that pay attention to these things.  Whomever said that life imitates art hasn’t been paying attention.  The majority of movie trailers today tease filmgoers with chaotic scenes of violence and action: well coiffed heroes with guns ablaze performing superhuman acts of courage and daring while cavalierly dispatching bad guys.

There is no angst expressed during  the decimation of faceless thugs and evil despots; nor in the property destruction that is typically a horror show for insurance adjusters.  All of this visceral action and mayhem is undertaken ostensibly to benefit the greater good of mankind.

Movie depictions are truly created out of the most improbable adolescent fantasies.  Given today’s cultural zeitgeist, there is zero chance that such alpha personas exist other than as portrayed in cinema.  Kids on college campuses can barely withstand the horrors of name calling much less take a roundhouse to the temple.

It’s comical to imagine that 20-somethings today could possibly handle a multi round automatic weapon when the mere image of one sends them scurrying away to their self declared safe zones.  If they can’t handle the odd verbal slur, they aren’t going to like their nether regions being slammed by bolo balls while tied naked to a chair like 007 in a recent Bond movie.

While film has always been about creating idealized escapism, they may want to make movies that can more identify with today’s real world.  Conflicts between despotic villains can be resolved by earnest discussions without resort to violence or name calling.  Climactic scenes will include the peaceful surrender of evil doers by the marshaling of opposing protesters holding placards instead of the generic gun battles with infinite bullets.  Instead of stylized mano-a-mano kung-fu fights, they can instead be filmed as intense rock, paper, scissors scenes.  There will always be lawyers accompanying covert operators as they parachute into enemy territories on missions.  Perhaps in a delectable bit of rapturous fantasy, they can all be sacrificed for the good of the rest of society.  Meh, that’s probably too much of a stretch.

If you think about it, Star Wars as a concept couldn’t exist.  Societies would never be allowed to continue shooting and slashing in their struggles.  More likely, the conflicts would be determined by bands of lawyers huddling over canapés and scotch while the fearful masses sit huddled nearby anxiously awaiting the results like waifs in a Dickens novel.

Yep, the entertainment of today is mislabeled.  It’s not action/adventure; it’s all fantasy.