JACKASS rules and MOONFALL drools as we look at last weekend's releases

Plus some thoughts on the ongoing culture wars

It’s Monday, February 7, and here’s where we are…

Let’s start with a little housekeeping, because if there’s one thing people love, it’s housekeeping!

The next three Tuesdays will all be part of my 2021 Best Of celebration. I’ll be publishing 30 Reasons 2021 Didn’t Totally Suck Part 2 on the 8th, Part 3 on the 15th, and a sort of runners-up/honorable mention piece on the 22nd. I’m setting those on a Tuesday schedule so I can also keep publishing other things this month and not get completely bogged down with the list.

There are, after all, other things going on. We’re already digging into February, with plenty of new films coming out, and there’s plenty of stuff streaming that’s worth a conversation, and I’m burning through some pretty great books recently, too. In short, I can’t give up a whole month on one topic, no matter how much I want to do it.

I’ve been thinking about this one a lot lately. How did we ever share a mainstream culture? I suspect the answer was always “We just drowned out the voices we didn’t want to hear,” which is discouraging. I’m as tired as anyone of the culture wars that get fought daily on a variety of fronts now, but I suspect the reason has less to do with social media stirring up trouble and more to do with social media leveling the playing field in terms of which voices we actually hear. When someone complains that they’re not allowed to do something that used to be perfectly fine, ask yourself why that standard has changed. Is it because people have suddenly grown irrationally sensitive? Or is it because there was no consistent way for people who have been traditionally marginalized to reach the mainstream with their complaints? There are plenty of problems with social media, but changing the balance of power in terms of who has their finger on the volume control isn’t one of them.

I’m at the point now where I don’t believe we have any way back to a mainstream in the sense we understood it in the past. Even the places where people share a common cultural experience, like big event superhero films or Star Wars movies, have become weaponized spaces for people to continue to slug it out over every single aspect of what they see onscreen. There are great conversations to be had about movies that we are simply not having anymore because we are so busy screaming at each other about basic definitions of things and crazy ideas like people’s fundamental right to exist.

When I was first writing about movies, I operated under the belief that I could write about movies and leave all of my personal politics at the door. I told myself that no one knew what my politics were, which is laughable, because if you are truly engaging with movies when you write about them, you are transparent. Writing about movies is, at its heart, writing about everything. Movies touch on every aspect of human experience, and you have to really dig into how movies make you feel if you’re going to write about them in a way that matters. I’ve never bought into the idea that criticism is a form of consumer report, designed to tell you what to see or not to see. Criticism is about curation and context. It is about explaining things, describing them, and you can’t be afraid to dig into any subject.

Self-reflection can be painful. Right now, there is a podcast that is being released weekly called Downlow’d: The Rise of Fall of Harry Knowles and Ain’t It Cool News, and I have profoundly mixed feelings about it. I think Joe Scott, the show’s writer/producer, is doing careful work, working hard to set the events he’s discussing in a larger context, and he’s done as much legwork as he could, talking to everyone and anyone who was willing to talk to him. My mixed feelings come more from listening to the events and really thinking about the choices that were made and how many things I would do differently at this point.