In the Heights is a box office bust...so let's ban the box office!

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 47 seconds

Whenever the woke diversity and inclusion agenda fails a test, it’s always the test’s fault – never the test-taker’s.

It started in 2020, when the Academy Awards put new rules into place that required future films to be diverse and inclusive in order to qualify for nomination. Now, to bolster that diversity and inclusion agenda, the woke enemies of merit in art and entertainment have set their sights on eliminating box office receipts as a measure of cinematic success.

In the Heights, a musical with an Asian director, Latino writer and all-minority cast, made a measly $11 million at the box office in its opening weekend, instead of the $25 to $50 million some delusional fools were projecting. It’s looking as if it will make considerably less in week two (it ultimately came in 6th on its second weekend with a paltry $4.3 million), but, apparently, we need to ignore its failure to sell tickets and laud its inclusivity aims.

In an LA Times article titled ‘How Hollywood’s box-office parlor game hurts movies like “In the Heights”, writer Ashley Lee declares that the film industry “will have to learn to define the ‘success’ of a film more broadly than in dollars and cents” if it wants to fix its “intractable diversity problems”.

This idea is reminiscent of colleges dropping the SAT and elite high schools dropping difficult entrance exams to boost diversity, or when the military or fire department weakens its physical entrance test to accommodate women.

This ‘equity’ approach, which is meant to result in equality of outcome, as opposed to equality of opportunity, beautifully sums up our narcissistic, petulant and coddled era, in which, if anyone fails a test, then it’s the test’s fault and not the test-taker’s.

As for Lee’s idea of dismissing the box office, it makes perfect sense, according to woke illogic, as once diversity and inclusion become the most important things about a movie – which the Academy Awards now claim they are – then, of course, box office receipts as a metric for success become obsolete.

To the woke, if a movie checks the right identity boxes, it’s already a smash, regardless of whether it makes money, is a highly crafted work of art or is entertaining.

Of course, this is all just more hypocritical woke preening, pandering and virtue signaling, as Lee and her ilk use the box office as a bludgeon as much as anybody when it suits them. For example, in a glaring case of ‘physician heal thyself’, the article bemoans the “parlor game” of box-office projections and expectations that, when not met, set a negative narrative around a minority-led film, but plays the same parlor game, linking to another piece that claims ‘“In the Heights” is the rare Latino blockbuster. Three Times writers on what that means’. That headline ran the day the movie opened and made presumptions about how it would be received that ultimately failed to materialise.

The box-office success of Black Panther, which made over a billion dollars, and female-led movies such as Captain Marvel and Wonder Woman are often used as evidence by those who say diversity is the ticket to prosperity. Hell, In the Heights only exists in its current form because director Jon Chu had a blockbuster with Crazy Rich Asians, with its all-Asian cast, and writer Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton, with its majority-minority cast, raked in wads of cash.

Not surprisingly, considering its fatally flawed philosophical foundation, the rest of Lee’s vapid article is peppered with vacuous declarations about diversity and inclusion problems in Hollywood – most notably, “the vanishingly rare major studio movies with nonwhite leads”. I wonder if she actually watches movies, given, over the past 30 years, Denzel Washington and Will Smith were two of the biggest movie stars working in Hollywood, and, in the past decade, Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson, Michael B. Jordan and the late Chadwick Boseman have dominated major studio films.

In addition, in 2020 alone, Tenet, Sound of Metal, Soul, Minari, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, One Night in Miami and Judas and the Black Messiah all had “nonwhite leads” and were nominated for Oscars. And Will Smith’s Bad Boys for Life and Jumanji: The Next Level, starring Dwayne Johnson and Kevin Hart, ranked first and fourth, respectively, at the US box office for the entire year. This proves that, contrary to Lee’s inane claims, Hollywood’s use of “nonwhite leads” is neither “vanishing” nor “rare”.

I’m a cinephile who prefers the arthouse to the cineplex, so box office is not exactly something I hold up as a symbol of cinematic virtue. But, in the case of In the Heights and other examples of mainstream Hollywood entertainment that are designed to rake in money, using box office receipts to measure their success or otherwise is the only viable and logical metric. In La La Land, the only color that truly matters is green, so the notion of eliminating that particular measure of a film’s success would go down like a lead zeppelin…and definitely not like Led Zeppelin.

The reality is that the woke can rig the system to honour their trite version of ‘diversity and inclusion’ with Academy Awards, but if they want lasting power in money-hungry Hollywood, their movies had better make bundles of cash or their whole house of politically correct cards will come tumbling down right on their empty little heads.

A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

Chadwick Boseman Saves His Best for Last in the Middling 'Ma Rainey's Black Bottom'

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 32 seconds

Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, which stars Viola Davis and Chadwick Boseman and is based upon the August Wilson stage play of the same name, premiered this past Friday on Netflix with much fanfare.

The buzz surrounding the film, which tells the story of legendary blues singer Ma Rainey and her band as they endure a tumultuous recording session, proclaimed that Boseman, the famed star of Black Panther who died of colon cancer this past August at the age of 43, would win a Best Actor Oscar for his final film role.

I went into my viewing of Ma Rainey skeptical of the voracity of Boseman’s supposedly Oscar worthy work. In the wake of the tragic death of an artist, particularly a young one, critics often succumb to sentimentality and overlook skill. I assumed the same was true of critics praising Boseman, who plays Levee, the combustible cornet player in Ma Rainey’s band who’s blessed with prodigious talent and equal ambition.

I also brought my own personal history regarding Boseman’s past acting work to my viewing. I know it is blasphemous to say now…but I ‘ve never been impressed by Boseman as an actor. I always felt he was a safe and comfortable screen presence but lacked charisma as a movie star and depth as an artist.

After finally viewing Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, which currently boasts a 99% critical score at Rotten Tomatoes, I can report two things… critics are right about Boseman, who gives a superb performance, but they are terribly wrong about the film itself, which is thin cinematic gruel.

In fact Boseman’s performance is all-the-more-noteworthy because it overcomes the inept direction and flimsy filmmaking that surrounds it.

Boseman’s death unquestionably brings a profundity to the film that would otherwise be lacking. It’s impossible to watch one of Boseman’s scintillating monologues as Levee where he rants and raves against God, without the uncomfortable acknowledgement that the actor was grappling with his own tenuous mortality at the time of filming, which was about a year before he died.

In the film, Boseman’s usually safe and comfortable screen presence is replaced by a pulsating existential energy that frantically emanates from his every pore. Boseman’s nice guy persona is used as a subversive weapon in Ma Rainey, as it lulls the audience into a false sense of security, and that deception adds a powerful depth and dimension to his character.

Unfortunately, the rest of the movie has nowhere near as much meat on its bones as Boseman’s feast of superb acting.

The blame for the film’s failure falls squarely on director George C. Wolfe. Wolfe, a stage director with minimal and dismal film credits, is desperately out of his league on Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.

The film feels rushed and dramatically unmoored. It has the aesthetic of a made-for-tv movie, so much so that I was half expecting, if not hoping for, commercial breaks. It also lacks any narrative rhythm and is as visually stale as it is awkwardly staged.

Viola Davis plays Ma Rainey and she too is garnering critical praise and Oscar buzz, but her performance is forced and ineffective. Davis is an actress that seems to want audiences to like her, and her Ma Rainey lacks genuine grounding because of it, or to put it another way, her Ma Rainey’s bottom isn’t big enough or black enough (in a metaphysical and symbolic sense - not a physical or racial one) to convince.

Davis’s performance, and in turn the film, also suffer greatly because her lip-syncing is so distractingly devoid of any believability or vitality.

It is terribly unfortunate that the work of August Wilson, one of America’s greatest playwrights, has yet to be successfully adapted to cinema. Wilson’s classic Fences hit the big screen in 2016 and garnered similar critical praise but that too felt undeserved and fueled by something other than honest critical assessment.

The truth is that establishment critics often critique racially themed films made by minority directors featuring minority casts using paternalistic kid gloves and on a pronounced curve. For example, critics swooned over the middling and mundane Marvel movie Black Panther.  So I have no doubt that the current critical adulation for Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom is due to the film’s racial politics rather than its supposed cinematic worthiness.

The reality is that Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom is the height of middlebrow mediocrity, but it will still attract copious amounts of fawning from poseurs and pawns eager to signal their anti-racist virtue. One of the worst consequences of our current racial moral panic is that film and film criticism has become so politically correct and socially delicate as to be rendered artistically irrelevant and intellectually impotent.

Fortunately, those heaping praise and adoration on Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom will only reveal themselves to be shamelessly pandering philistines rather than studiously sophisticated cinephiles.

Unfortunately, in these hopelessly woke times this sub-par film is guaranteed to garner a plethora of Oscar nominations, but none will be deserving except for Boseman’s.

The bottom line is that it’s a tragedy that Chadwick Boseman’s greatest performance came in his final role and that it had to happen in such a muddled misfire of a movie as Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.

My Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

My Recoimmendation: SKIP IT/SEE IT. A very poorly made film, but Chadwick Boseman gives a truly terrific performance - his best ever.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2020