Manohla Dargis says it all. I could have written every word of this. From The New York Times:
What I know from a life of watching and reviewing movies is that outrage is tedious, and exhausting. Sometimes it is just easier to go with the flow, though much depends on what’s happening onscreen and off. Sometimes, I don’t want to let a movie’s banal, casual sexism ruin my good time. So, I make expedient and strategic bargains with myself, glossing over some of the sexism and ignoring things that bother me (or trying to). I decide that the absence of female characters is acceptable or not too bad and maybe narratively justifiable. I want to keep grooving on the virtuosity of the directing, keep loving the (male) characters, the camerawork, gripping story and mysterious light.
I might just send this link to every fanboy from now on who wails about how I’ve ruined his life because because I don’t adore unreservedly the movies he loves, or — oddly conversely — how I’m a hypocrite for not being a raging SJW lesbian cat lady all the time.
Good stuff.
And of course a bias in favour of me is “just the way things are” and “what the audience wants”; a bias in favour of you is “making everything political”.
And demanding what the fans DON’T want is “just you” eh Roger ?
Aaaaand, this is why I couldn’t do the job you do.
I have a very hard time making bargains like this. I mean, I can make one with my frontal lobes, but my brain stem will be nauseated. Astoundingly, the sexism I encounter, I can deal with more directly and I don’t need to make any nauseating bargains. (Doesn’t mean there are NO bargains, just that the ones I’ve got don’t make me queasy.)
The bargaining isn’t about my job. It’s about watching and enjoying movies as anything other than a straight white cis able-bodied man. If you’re doing that, you’re bargaining.
Twaddle. Ranting against Aquaman because it was too masculine and didn’t bore the pants off viewers to please the tiny self-obsessed “metoo” feminazis
“How dare a film called Aquaman be about Aquaman and not what we rant about ?”
You’re gone.