always pay attention who you hire, especially in HR. Woke and activist HR hires woke and activist people, woke and activist people will cause you trouble and can wreck your whole ship. This is true for every industry but especially for media, just look what happened to the once so prestigious news outlets, all taken hostage.
Does this tend to improve the company's financial performance, or is this simply worth doing if you have certain political goals for your company that outweigh financial results? i.e., is this "smart companies" as in those with good financial ideas or "smart companies" as in those who want to build a non-woke world for the next generation?
It seems like most SJW-converged companies have been doing just fine as companies, otherwise the invisible hand of the market would have put a stop to this long ago.
The ironic part is that even the most liberal anti-republican types are made miserable by woke employees. I worked at a tech company that went through the exact process you described. Liberal Democrat types used to keep politics out of the workplace for the most part. Then they started hiring woke brainwashed college students who aligned with them ideologically but not procedural. Now instead of the daily chat at the water cooler, we have employees screaming at meetings about the latest outrage, taking days off because something happened in the news, and crying when being woke doesn't help their performance reviews. Everybody is miserable and managers are fleeing.
The problem with notion this is that 'woke' or 'activist' values are actually pretty reflective of mainstream values in 21st century society. I would worry more about the legal exposure of people who express opposition to diversity/equity/inclusiveness, as these are very likely to be the people who would end up behaving inappropriately and getting the company mired in harassment and discrimination suits.
The very fact these value are called “activist” and “woke” means they aren’t mainstream values.
And it’s not the values, it’s the disruption. If you had anti-abortion Republicans doing the same would everyone be saying how the company should “tread lightly”.
The labels 'activist' and 'woke' are generally applied derisively by people people who don't share these values. To the mainstream these traits are generally not even labeled, they're just what we consider common decency in this decade. When my parents were my age it was 'activist' and 'woke' to be in favor of mixed race marriages. Times change.
> And it’s not the values, it’s the disruption.
People want to feel like they're in a career that aligns with their values, and the more in demand your talent is, the more you're able to make demands of your employers to have them be values-aligned. If employers don't need top shelf talent, they're free to ignore that and be less competitive in the market for talent. However, successful companies usually tend to compete. We're talking about Spotify because they competed for and hired high-grade talent, and that high-grade talent wants their company to be values-aligned.
It's absolutely mainstream on all sides to try to silence people you disagree with, and it always has been. Republicans tried to silence Nike and the NFL over Colin Kaepernick, Democrats tried to silence companies for doing business with the apartheid regime in South Africa, Republicans are trying to silence Coke and Delta for their support of voting rights, civil rights era people tried to silence racist bus companies, evangelicals are constantly trying to silence all manner of businesses all the time. It's a long-standing American tradition at this point.
Sure you can find specific examples, but thankfully the US still has some semblance of celebrating free speech.
And your examples of silence seem fuzzy. Who was trying to “silence” (suppress speech) of South Africa? Suppress their racist political system? Sure, but I don’t recall anyone saying they can’t talk.
That whole premise is flawed. First, they often describe themselves as activists. Second, they are clearly not for diversity and inclusion. It's about conformity and exclusion. They are anti-free speech, pro censorship and bully those who don't conform. You can't square that intolerance with any desire to be diverse and inclusive.
I agree with another poster that Spotify employees should stand up on principle in opposition to the internal employees that are now running the asylum.
I listen to JRE on Spotify and am not happy about the decision. Actually the first episode I listened to was an Alex Jones + Tim Dillon episode (Tim being a comic I like) that is now gone. And while I don't agree with Alex Jones, I listened to it because I expected it to be controversial or nutty.
There are people who say once you give in to the woke mob they won't stop there, I wouldn't be surprised if now they know they can get other targets canceled if those targets don't consume their orthodoxy.
It should be named what it is, and has always been: anti-free speech.
The line is when you take actions designed to prevent someone else from ever speaking, or people hearing their speech, instead of (as is your right) loudly calling them a *ist.
My personal preference is for Spotify to leave Rogan's content on their platform with disclaimers, so I can best decide if/how I listen to it. However, this is not a free speech issue.
"free speech" only makes sense in the context of government regulation (vs individuals/corporations), because governments have a monopoly on violence. As soon as two non-government entities are "regulating each other", it is a matter of mutual free speech. e.g. what about the free speech of Spotify?
Rogan sold his intellectual property, i.e. his speech, including the speech of his guests, to Spotify. Now depending on the contract (I do not know what the exclusivity clauses look like) Rogan might be able to host that content on other platforms, or he might not. Either way, on Spotify's platform, legally the speech is Spotify's not Rogan's nor the guests.
FWIW, if recorded conversations/speech cannot be considered intellectual property, that can be bought and sold, all current media will be impacted as it cannot be run as a business.
This trope is everywhere now. I see this so often now where high profile substack writers are constantly being smeared as transphobic. It's a tactic, and defense and offense strategy and I'm tired of it. Can't take anyone serious anymore how writes something like that.
Or you could be charitable to the author and at least try to understand their view instead of assuming that it’s some cold political move.
Machine learning detection of people’s gender in the real world is anywhere from annoying to distressing to trans people because all the training data is cis people and so they get matched with their AGAB. Can you imagine how terrible it would be to already hate and be super self-conscious about your voice only to have Spotify start telling you via recommendations that you don’t pass well enough. Yikes.
> Can you imagine how terrible it would be to already hate and be super self-conscious about your voice only to have Spotify start telling you via recommendations that you don’t pass well enough.
Although the patent may be creepy...
The text of the patent refers to media recommendation (not advertising) - contrary to the sibling comment where you claim it will result in ads for Dollar Shave Club, the patent does not once use the term "advertising". Sure, it could be used for that, but I don't think that's the main intention at all.
How are you going to know that Spotify has recommended you a song based on your gender? Are we assigning genders to songs now? Straight white cis males can like Aqua's "Barbie Girl", too.
> Are we assigning genders to songs now? Straight white cis males can like Aqua's "Barbie Girl", too.
This is an absurd take. Do you see no difference between Spotify recommending songs to a trans woman based on what men with similar music tastes in her area and age group are listening to and "assigning gender to songs?"
Spotify also typically recommends you playlists rather than songs and my home page is extremely gendered. I get playlists like "You Go Girl", "Girls Like You", "Women of Rock", "Fierce Femmes." A trans guy getting these kinds of recommendations would be ... well odd.
You don't need to be a woman to enjoy a "Women in Hip Hop" playlist. Spotify isn't about what it thinks you are. It's about what it thinks you want to listen to.
> It's about what it thinks you want to listen to.
At the moment, but I think the idea behind this patent is that it can factor in your mood (and other factors, such as gender) into the recommendation engine as well as what you already like.
Though I don't see gender being much of a signal. My GF and I have exactly the same taste in music (well, she doesn't like Classical that much, and I don't like Musicals, and she's more into Goth/Industrial/Metal than I am, but it's a 90% match). Anecdata, but that's all I have.
And what it thinks you want to listen to is based on what it gender it thinks you are. Gender is a strong signal about what your music tastes will be but obviously it's not absolute. If the algorithm is so pure and unbiased then why would it even want to determine your gender with this patent?
Like recommendation engines aren't magic -- they look at what people "like you" listen to where "like you" has all sorts of random demographic data as well as your personal patterns/history.
yeah, that bothered me too. If it's a pseudoscience then why should I care. I hate it when such campaigns with very concrete objectives try to drag everything possible into them.
This inevitably muddies the water and leads to semantic overload, where everything is racist.
Muddying the water is phrasing it well.
Don't get me wrong. I think pseudoscience and racism etc. are all bad things that need to be solved as well.
However adding them on one big pile does not make your cause better or make the problem go away.
Actually it scares people like me away, because it shows you're on a emotional slander campaign instead of solving a problem.
Honestly, it feels a bit 'counter-intelligence'-y to me. Like, it's so over the top that I almost suspect Spotify did it themselves.
The Whois on the site says that it was registered on April 5th of 2021 for 1 year and the customer is based out of Ontario, Canada. Tucows was the registrant, and they seem to be a generic handler of web domains, based out of Toronto. https://tucows.com/
Other than that, I can't really find out any additional info about the site or who is running it.
I'm sure other HNers are more adept at searching for these kinds of things, and I'd love to know more about the paper-trail of it.
It's also a successful tactic, sadly, to just call everyone a racist, the worst thing you can call someone nowadays, and hope they cave. I'm simply not having it and will never engage in something like that.
This behaviour is normalized for a while, the wall street journal wasn't an outlier back then, but now it seems to be also expected when working for big media outlets, just look at the recent Georgia debacle. Activists disguised as journalists pressure companies to act in their favour or they will throw a fit.
I'm about half-way through Chomsky and Herman's propaganda model laid out in "Manufacturing Consent". Corporate ownership of media houses is said to be the first censorship filter that determines which angles of a policy debate get highlighted and which ones don't. Along with reading Matt Taibbi's "Hate, Inc.", where Chomsky's model is extended to post-internet US media, I can't begin to describe how much of the US media coverage of these issues has begun to make sense to me.
As Chomsky points out, propaganda is still useful information, since the angles being portrayed in a debate tells us what a societal elite wants us to see (and conversely, not see)
Of course this will get weaponized, if it isn't already.
We've seen time and time again that a vile old tweet in the wrong hands can be very powerful, it's a ticking time bomb. Think 5 or even 10+ years down the road, some of the kids who are edgy on twitter today might go in to politics or hold some other high level position.
I don't think the current climate is going to cool down anytime soon, but maybe something like this will either lead to mutually assured destruction or, what I'm hoping for, old tweets losing their power in the long run.
I suspect that as a larger and larger percent of the population has a cringey internet past to look back on, the power of old tweets will fade somewhat. It'll take a while though, and of course depends on how vile the past actions are.
I feel like this is an optimistic take. I know a strong number of people that have never thought up a controversial opinion in their life. They will always have that power over the rest of us.
I see it sort of like pot smoking. In about a two decades, we went from "probably the most dangerous drug in the United States today" (Reagan), to "I smoked but I didn't inhale" (Clinton) to "Of course I inhaled, that was the point." (Obama).
It's not that pot suddenly epically skyrocketed in the voting-age population, it's just that enough people either had smoked pot, been around those who did, or watched media that made light of it to realize it wasn't a 100% mark of evil.
High level position? What about automated scrapers and personality algorithms selling profiles to your future employers and insurance companies 20 years later? “This person used to swear a lot, which means they are more likely to be hiding <some condition> that <the data purchaser> is concerned about.” In the gig economy, everyone is a brand that has to be built up and that can be torn down
On the bright side it will be an interesting way to analyze how people's views change over time, seeing how they tweet over a long period. Note that the same tool that can condemn a person can also exonerate them: if they were once upon a time filled with hate an ignorance, and then over time changed, you can show this path convincingly with a full tweet history. But yeah I hope the power to quote out of context to hurt people fades, and quickly.
Look at the media today. Very little is reported in full context. It's carved up, and presented in little snippets to imply something different, often with the intent to provoke outrage in the audience. No confidence that this will change; it is only going to get worse.
But the root of the problem is not the technology, it is the people and the culture.
I have no doubt, using tweets to cancel people is a deliberate tactic of the far left activists to win the culture war. And they are winning, a lot.
After a few more decades, cancel the First Amendment and put people in prison bc of wrong speech is not impossible. Right now the focus is race, gender, identity politics, but it can be easily switched to economic issues. Dark days are ahead of us.
although I hate the aspect of cancel culture where someone's tweets from several years ago are pulled up to destroy their career, I think a lot of the stuff around race, gender, ect. is headed in the right direction. We are at a point where hating on an group of people is simply not o.k. and I think the repercussion are fair (although it is socially acceptable right now to hate on white people, I view this as an overcorrection that will go away soon)
Well I'm not sure what propaganda you see here. I find it a difficult subject to discuss here, how to elect the president rather than have him dumped from the sky, and it seems that there's always a more urgent patriotic crisis to solve before we discuss direct popular representativity of the executive.
If it's propaganda to ask the communists to give us the right to vote, then the country has progressed :D
In general, but the risk-reward ration is now way off, as the author of the article mentions, so why risk it if you potentially face harsh repercussions.
If you've been thoughtful in your reply, there should be no risk of repercussions. Post your message publicly. If you were thoughtful, no reasonable person should be able to look at your communication and fault you. If you weren't thoughtful, you deserve the scorn for proving the point of the person who called you out. If you're not confident that you can be a decent and empathetic person in your communication with others, then yes, I suppose that's a good reason to avoid putting yourself in a position where your foot can enter your mouth.
This reminds me of the idea of physical risk for someone with a lifespan of a 1,000 years. If you're 60 with an average lifespan of 70, your actions are risking 10 years of life. If you're 60 with a potential lifespan of 1,000 years, you're effectively risking everything and might be inclined to be more risk averse.
When public discourse magnifies the risk of your comments, you'll tend to be risk averse also. Once upon a time, your opinion would be spoken almost all the time, and perhaps put in a letter rarely. The effort for anyone to raise hell over a minor quibble would involve spreading the word, and doing so enough to find the rare people with a tendency to join you. Go back decades and that is infinitely less likely.
Now, chances are your comment is in writing or recorded, and even if it isn't, the quibbler can broadcast their version of events to increasingly wider circles in seconds, at no cost and with virtually no effort.
I delete half of the comments I start writing online, thinking "What's the point? At best, one person appreciates it. At worst, thousands want to argue."
Yeah, that's often raised in the hypothetical. Typically, older people with the least remaining life to risk are the least rash with their decision making!
> "If you've been thoughtful in your reply, there should be no risk of repercussions."
"If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him.", attributed to Cardinal Richelieu.
> If you've been thoughtful in your reply, there should be no risk of repercussions.
I agree that there shouldn't be, but as life advice this is a bad thought to operate from. If someone doesn't like you or what you've said, there's always a way to put you in a bad light. With discourse that contains a lot of risk, it's probably better to just avoid it.
You are projecting your own thinking style onto the "other" person with this. There are many people who have a pathological sense of responsibility (that is, they have NONE) and will always react defensively to any feedback.
Thoughtful is the keyword here. If it’s not a thoughtful person they might spread close to lies. For example: -masks help! -no what helps is distance!
This is what my doctor said. A non thoughtful person would say that is antimask, and it might imply it, but until you ask the person that directly, you don’t know and there is so extremely much bad faith articles online that spring from polarized anger.
I think it's now essentially a risk-reward decision, like the author said. And the potential risk of being ousted after being accused of something weighs very high.
This trend isn't going away anytime soon, In fact I think it's just ramping up and is accelerating, especially with the racism narrative the main stream media outlets started to heavily push ~2 years ago and the big identity movement. It will continue until there is consensus, that this climate is bad, for everyone involved. I don't see that happen anytime soon, the cancelations will continue until moral improves.
I saw some improvement in the Netflix movies getting less extreme over time. Emily in Paris was the first movie where the woke Netflix made fun of itself using French people / culture as props. Disney and Netflix had to lose billions of dollars to understand that the loudest voices may not represent the majority of the people.
There's a small cottage industry of Youtubers making up "fake" news about how Star Wars movies and Star Trek shows are all getting cancelled and going out of business for "being too woke" and losing the audience. These Youtubers invent secret inside scoops about how the executives at Disney and other companies are constantly in turmoil and losing money.
My guess is the person you replied to doesn't realize these shows are fiction and doesn't' realize he or she is in a information bubble. However I know nothing about that poster so could easily be mistaken.
Hmm, how do you figure this narrative is fiction? I'm not exactly sure one can be objective about this sort of thing, as obviously the success of a film is hugely multivariate. But I think a good place to start is box office from the new trilogy and subsequent films.
SW VII (2015) – $2,068,223,624
SW VIII (2017) – $1,332,539,889 <-- loud complaints by "YouTubers"
SW IX (2019) – $1,074,144,248
The downward trend is honestly pretty extreme. Of course you can blame this on fatigue, yet if you do the same analysis with the Marvel Avengers films (which have not had the same "too PC" criticism directed at them), you will see the opposite trend towards the story's climax.
You can also look at the Star Wars films that are not part of the new trilogy: Rogue One and Solo.
Rogue One came out in 2016, after VII and before VIII. VIII was widely considered (especially by the YouTubers you refer to) to be the most egregious re-writing of Star Wars lore, establishing (as the argument goes) the main character as a clear "Mary Sue" (ridiculously over-powered character with no flaws) and otherwise shitting all over established canon in the name of "subverting expectations" (in the director's own words). Meanwhile, Solo came out after Episode VIII, and focused on (I would say) the male-favorite character in all of Star Wars, devilish rogue Han Solo. So I think the reasonable expectation before the release of either film was that Solo would be the more likely to succeed. But again, Solo came out fresh off the heels of Episode VIII, the main film that received most of the backlash you claim is "fake". I will let their respective Box Office numbers speak for themselves.
For all the moaning and complaining out there - for me it can down to this: I saw 7 and it was meh but I gave 8 a chance. I’ve never seen 9. They needed to write a compelling story and at least make it entertaining - the prequels had faults but they were fun to watch.
Agreed. It's not about anything "woke" in the movies. It's about they were horrible movies or so enough people thought so they avoided or told their friends to avoid or didn't see more than once.
For me personally, I saw EP9 on opening day and with my brain off I managed to enjoy the spectacle while constantly having tell myself to just ignore all the issues and enjoy the ride. But on immediate reflection once it was over it was impossible to ignore all the issues.
I tried to watch it again 6-8 months later and had to turn it off after about 10 minutes it was just so much nonsense.
I think the claim here though is that part of the reason the story is incoherent and that you have a lot of the other problems is because they weren't focused on making a good Star Wars trilogy. If you listen to basically anything the head honcho for these films (Kathleen Kennedy) has said, you get the distinct feeling that she had a different objective than "make good cinema".
As noted, this also seemed to be Rian Johnson's goal as well. It was not "make a compelling story within the Star Wars universe", it was "subvert expectations". Which in the end basically meant turning all the male characters into whinging losers / arrogant assholes while turning all the women into wise sages / over-powered wunderkinds who need no training and make no mistakes, even when they literally do: Leia and Holdo were the ones in charge when literally the entire rebel fleet was destroyed except for one ship with like 10 people on it, and the script gives them zero flack for this. And then of course you have the script letting said terrible leader become an awesome and amazing martyr by single-handedly destroying the huge and menacing enemy flagship in a way that was visually stunning (loved it in the cinema) but broke Star Wars canon in honestly a pretty staggering way (realized once my brain caught up with my eyes).
This actually seems to rhyme a bit with the OP – you can't point out what terrible leaders they were in VIII because the leaders in question happened to be women (I say "happened to be", but it is also clear that the decision to put leadership of the good guys in the hands of women while leaving the leadership of the bad guys in the hands of men was a pretty deliberate move).
Contrast this with The Mandalorian, which has strong and compelling female characters and is adored by audiences of all genders. Why? Because the agenda was not "subvert expectations", it was "make a good Star Wars story".
The goal is never to make good cinema because the companies are not owned or run by filmakers, they are owned by MBA types.
It isn't some startling gotcha to point that out. "Good cinema" is subjective and meaningless, money can be quantified and is objectively reported as a number.
Anyone claiming the goal is something other than money is projecting.
I didn't like The Last Jedi but it got good reviews which shows how meaningless it is to argue about what is a "good Star Wars story" from a business perspective. Audience exit polls were also positive.
As far as I can tell the goal was to make Star Wars stuff as quickly as possible, presumably set by the Disney CEO not Kennedy. Presumably because he cared more about showing he was making back the money buying Lucasfilm than quality.
So they hired three writer directors and had them start banging out scripts immediately, instead of hiring a writer to outline movies in advance.
And the movies (except Solo) made a ton of money and 2 out of 3 had good reviews and good exit polls. So they are "good" by any "objective" metric.
I guess they've also been "good" for reactionary youtubers so the money trickles down.
None of us know what Kathleen Kennedy's involvement was in private office meetings or what notes she gave. The Youtubers version of Kathleen Kennedy is a fictional character. People are projecting meaning into PR statements about diversity.
This is what Kathleen Kennedy had to say about the production of the Mandalorian, of which (thankfully) she played very little part in:
> In March 2018. Kennedy added that the series was an opportunity for a diverse group of writers and directors to be hired to create Star Wars stories, after the franchise's films had been criticized for being written and directed by only white men.
You don't need closed-room meeting comments to just look at her public comments and infer the motivations from there. Literally, go and look at any public comments she has made.
By that logic I guess if an Apple executive states they are hiring a diverse group of people and improving their hiring practices in response to criticism (I bet they have stated this?) your conclusion is Apple doesn't want to make good phones.
You might unpack why you see hiring a diverse group of people as the opposite of "making good product" but the long and short answer is you are the sort of reactionary I was talking about.
Never mind the fact that all Star Wars directors so far have been white men, or facts at all, you are angry and upset because someone told you to feel that way and told you that article should make you angry.
You might be projecting a bit here. I'm neither angry nor upset. Nobody told me to feel any which way. I also don't think you can point to anything I've actually said and honestly categorize it as "reactionary", unless to you "reactionary" just means... reacting to the behavior and words of others. And if you want to talk about facts, I'm the only one that has presented any in this conversation: box office results and Kathleen Kennedy's own words. What have you provided?
And no, I don't think hiring a diverse group of people and making good product are opposites or at all mutually exclusive. I never said that, so please don't misrepresent me (as you seem very keen to do). What I do think is that people have priorities and if your priorities are out of whack then that is going to have an effect on your outcomes.
If Apple says that their goal is to have phones be made with as (racial and gender, not neuro) diverse a group as possible, rather than "we want to make the best phones", then yes, I absolutely would be concerned about the future quality of their phones. I don't care who designs/makes my iPhone, and so my priorities and Apple's priorities would be misaligned. In fact, probably the best signal for the future of Apple design recently (for me) was when they parted ways with Jony Ive, a white man. But that was not a good signal to me because of his race or gender, but rather because I think Jony Ive without Steve Jobs to curb his worst impulses was bad for Apple products.
Likewise, I don't care if Star Wars is directed by a straight white man or a pansexual black woman (my two favorite episodes of The Mandalorian S2 were directed by a woman and a black man) – I just want the focus to be on quality storytelling, which is clearly not Kathleen Kennedy's primary concern, if you (again) look at any of her public comments on the subject. Luckily it is Jon Favreau's concern, which is why with The Mandalorian we got both: compelling storytelling with strong characters (of all types), directed by a diverse set of directors.
You do know Kathleen Kennedy has worked on many successful, beloved movies and was hired for that reason by George Lucas, right? Whatever imaginary version of Kennedy lives in your head strikes me as not particularly plausible.
It doesn't even matter if the characters in Star Wars are white or black or brown- they appear to live in a society with no human concept of race- so I don't even know why you keep bring up the topic of diversity? Human races have zero to do with the plot of any Star Wars ever.
From what i've seen of it Mandalorian depicts a color blind, gender blind social world just like the sequal trilogy, they are sort of the same, so why go on about it?
I don't know why you keep bringing up diversity? It has nothing to do with the characters or why Mandorian is different from the movies so who cares?
The fact you enjoy Mandolorian but not the films just suggests you like one thing and don't like another. It says nothing about gender, diversity, artistic intent (artists tend to try to make good art even if they fail at it. Business people tend to try to make money.) so I don't know how else to explain your posts other than reactionary.
It's cool you like the Mandalorian but you don't actually know the motives of anyone involved, you just know you like the art they made.
For the last time, just go listen to Kathleen Kennedy talk about Star Wars. She makes her motives clear. I really don't know what else to say to you. The fact that she has worked on other films does not impact what her goal with Star Wars was when she took the helm. It's not an imaginary version of her in my head, it's the version of her in my head which is entirely based on her public comments. Not sure how else you want me to form opinions of people. I have quoted her saying something to the effect of "wow this is great because we can have non-white-male directors" – if you want to provide a single instance where she says something like "our goal here is just to tell a good story", then have at it.
This entire post is about diversity and gender issues, so, um, what else would we be talking about? In fact, I think the intersection of gender with the new Star Wars films is hugely relevant to the OP.
Perhaps the reason Rey was a Mary Sue is because nobody felt comfortable saying "hey, maybe this character should have some like, flaws she needs to overcome or something", because they were worried people would see that as wanting the female lead to be weak, and get pilloried for the suggestion. Sure, maybe gender had absolutely nothing to do with this poor storytelling decision, but based on the actual comments of the creatives involved, that definitely seems like the less likely reality.
I plan for this to be my last post on this so feel free to have the last word.
There's nothing about wanting to hire diverse staff that implies she wants to make bad movies or doesn't want to make good movies or anything at all. So your quote says nothing that needs to rebutted. It's just a non sequeter.
Your argument stems on the movies being bad. Who is to say the movies are bad? Critics loved Force Awakens and Last Jedi and exit audience polls were positive. (Arguing over whether Rey is a Mary Sue is so 2016. Who cares? So she's a Mary Sue, cool. The reviews were positive so maybe she is and movies with a Mary Sue are the greatest cinema in the world?)
I didn't like Last Jedi but the exit polls were positive (I looked them up at the time). And the professional reviews were positive as well.
Who are you or I to say Disney made bad movies, let alone spin some tale of wokeness ruining Star Wars?
I would hope you could dislike a movie without stating reactionary sounding talking points.
You ask how this related to the topic? You seem to think the goal of diverse hiring is some sort of damning statement so I shouldn't have to draw you a map of how you sound like a reactionary.
In no particular order because you kinda keep repeating yourself and rehashing strawmen I've already answered:
- I didn't ask how this is related to the topic, you did. And I answered you.
- The 42% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes says the movie is bad. The -$700M box office difference between VII and VIII says the movie is bad. The < 5 user score on Metacritic says the movie is bad. The fact that lots of people felt the need to make videos about how bad it was says the movie is bad. The fact that you didn't like it says the movie is bad. The fact that I actually enjoyed the spectacle of the film in the cinema but found it borderline unwatchable when I tried to rewatch at home says the movie is bad. Is most of this subjective? Of course. Does that mean we're not allowed to try to figure out what went wrong? Um, no? Is your stance really "shhh don't ask why the movie was bad it's not for you to know"?
- It's still unclear what you mean when you say "reactionary", so it kinda just sounds like you're trying to use that as some sort of putdown / dig and honestly it's not working.
- I don't "seem to think the goal of diverse hiring is a damning statement". I don't think that hiring diverse staff (which is not even what I was criticizing so...?) means you don't want to make a good movie. I merely think when your primary goal (evidenced by repeated public statements on the part of Kathleen Kennedy) is to make your movies "woke", that will inevitably be the thing you are most likely to succeed at. I honestly can't believe you're trying to make the argument that a split focus does not negatively impact your likelihood of succeeding in one particular area. That's a given. You can't be good at everything, so if your focus is "being woke" it invariably means you will be worse at executing on other things, like telling a good story.
But they failed at making money. The box office revenue went down. Just because you can't easily quantify 'good cinema' doesn't mean it doesn't exist, and is correlated with monetary success.
There had not been a Star Wars movie starring Harrison Ford, Carie Fisher, Mark Hamil and the rest for over 30 years. Perhaps people were excited at seeing these characters again and not so exited about every movie being about killing them off?
It doesn't have much to do with wokeness, though, killing parent figures (Uncle Ben, Obie Wan, Yoda, etc.) is what the original trilogy did too. It just wasn't very original.
I feel like the simpler explanation here is that these movies did not have a coherent story and had poor character development, not that they were the victims of "being too woke" or whatever the current most popular explanation that said internet reactionaries like to claim.
Yes, but the question is why didn't they have a coherent story?
Is it really just "some movies have coherent stories, and some don't ¯\_(ツ)_/¯".
I think if you listen to Kathleen Kennedy talk about her vision for Star Wars, it becomes pretty clear that her goal was not "make good cinema", it was "push (racial and gender) diversity-for-the-sake-of-diversity agenda".
I mean, her contribution to The Mandalorian (which luckily was entirely conceived outside of her influence) was:
> In March 2018. Kennedy added that the series was an opportunity for a diverse group of writers and directors to be hired to create Star Wars stories, after the franchise's films had been criticized for being written and directed by only white men.
As far as I heared (from youtube ,,conspiracy theorists'') the companies hired outside advisors whose whole role was to see if the movies / series were politically correct, or needed some change. When the pandemic hit, it was a loss quarter for Disney: both the films flopped, and Disney-land had to be closed at the same time. There's a story that the leads got together on a video conference call and decided that it's time to kick out the advisor, and I saw Netflix's stance change at the same time.
I was really sorry about Mulan for example, because it's one of my favourite cartoons, and I was really really looking for the movie remake. They made it politically correct for the US and cut out all the sex scenes and humor because of the Chinese government. I think it's one of the worst remakes of all time at this point.
The new Mulan is also much less feminist than the previous. The last one had a great lesson: It is thought only men can be warriors, but it turns out that through hard work and wit, a woman can be the best warrior.
The new lesson: If you're a woman with magic powers you can overcome sexism and become great.
I don't think a trend can get much bigger than primetime TV. Watch Bush era TV and you will find obsession with topics we now find irrelevant. We are getting to the top, I think.
