Looking California and Feeling Minnesota - Episode 39: Cruella

On this episode Barry and I get dressed up for our date with DISNEY's Cruella, starring Emma Stone. This barn burner of an episode contains discussions on topics as varied as wasting $200 million on CGI dogs, the lost opportunity of a lady Joker and the Disney classics The Great Locomotive Chase and The Mandalorian.

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota - Episode 39: Cruella

Thanks for listening!

©2021

Cruella: Review and Commentary

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. Really not much of interest in this big budget misfire.

Cruella is the perfect kid’s movie for a culture that celebrates cruelty and malignant megalomania

Disney has discarded the old princess narrative and under the guise of self-empowerment are now teaching generations of young girls to embrace self-serving toxicity.

In the new Disney movie Cruella the Rolling Stones classic Sympathy for the Devil plays over the film’s final scene, which felt a bit too on the nose for the origin story of a notorious character that will go on to attempt to skin puppies for the sake of fashion.

Cruella, of course, is Cruella de Vil, the infamous arch villain of the iconic animated film One Hundred and One Dalmatians. With this new, live-action, reimagined reboot starring Emma Stone we discover why Cruella hates dalmatians so much and how she rose to power.

What we really learn though is that the suits at Disney will go to any lengths to plumb the depths of their intellectual property vault to make money and corrode the culture.

Cruella, whose real name is Estella, is at first set in a sort of Dickensian London, where we learn of her troubled childhood. The film then magically shifts into the stylishly swinging London of the 60’s and 70’s where Estella graduates from good girl gone bad to bad girl grown up.

The soundtrack, which is easily the best part of the movie, reflects that time period as it features an abundance of classics from The Doors, Queen, Nina Simone, ELO, Tina Turner, The Clash and the aforementioned Stones.

Unfortunately, like seemingly all Disney films, Cruella is a shameless money grab in the form of a two hour and fourteen-minute advertisement for Disney’s vast catalogue of past movie hits and its newfound woke politics.

Director Craig Gillespie has experience making movies about cartoonishly villainous women, as evidenced by his terrific film I, Tonya, about disgraced figure skater Tonya Harding, but on Cruella he seems desperately out of place.

The film’s star, Emma Stone, doesn’t fare much better. Stone is a likeable screen presence, but she is all bark and no bite as Cruella, as the thread bare script makes little human sense and reduces her acting to histrionics.

The lone bright spot in the cast though is Paul Walter Hauser who is glorious as always as the bumbling buffoon Horace Badun. The rotund Hauser is quickly becoming one of the best scene stealers and actors in the business.

The film’s massive $200 million budget doesn’t translate into stunning visuals either, as the film looks just ok and lacks any remarkable cinematic moments. It’s also painfully derivative, generously borrowing from other, much better films like The Devil Wears Prada, Joker, The Thomas Crown Affair and V for Vendetta.

The biggest problem with Cruella though is that it can’t quite figure out what exactly it wants to be. It’s too dark to be for kids and too silly to be for adults. Yet despite the movie’s PG13 rating, it would appear from the movie’s rather ludicrous plot and minimal character development that the target audience is impressionable pre-teen girls, which is unfortunate since the film’s moral perspective is less than idyllic.

Even though there are shades of Cinderella in Cruella, there are certainly no princesses to be found. The old days of the Disney princess are long gone and some may say good riddance, but now the corporate behemoth Mickey Mouse built is pivoting to not just churning out generic girl power movies, but with Cruella, bad-girl girl power movies.

This is a bad girl versus bad girl movie, a battle of the bitches if you will, where Cruella (Emma Stone) faces off against her fashion designer nemesis Baroness von Hellman (Emma Thompson – doing a second-rate Meryl Streep imitation), with the most-cruel and conniving female fashionista winning the stylish bad girl championship crown with belt to match.

I’m old enough to remember when Joker came out in 2019 and hysterical establishment critics shrieked in horror, declaring it dangerous because Joker was the “patron saint of incels” who’d inspire white men to violence. Joker was rated R and obviously geared towards adults, but Cruella? It’s for 10 year-old girls is designed under the guise of self-empowerment to encourage the selfish, bitchy and viciously toxic behavior of brats of all ages.

And don’t be fooled, Disney knows exactly what it’s doing as it clearly understands full well the power of pop culture to persuade, which is why it wouldn’t allow Stone to smoke as Cruella despite that being a signature trait of the character.

God only knows what deleterious effect Cruella will have on generations of girls in a nation already filled with a plethora of narcissistic Karen De Vils.

Of course, Cruella is inoculated against that sort of moral and/or cultural criticism from mainstream critics because it has the “proper” woke perspective and a “diverse” and “inclusive” cast where most of the “heroes” are women, minorities or both.

Among these heroes are Cruella, a genius taking on the small-minded patriarchy, Anita, the black female gossip columnist defiantly helping Cruella’s cause, Artie, the gay fashionista who fights for all things fabulous, and Jasper, Cruella’s right-hand person of color.

Ultimately, there’s nothing wrong with telling a story about an anti-hero or villain. These stories can have great value in that they help a culture assimilate its shadow and ultimately find catharsis. Joker is a perfect example of this, and so could be Cruella if it were made for adults.

Cruella though is a sign of a culture intent on destroying itself as it’s a kid’s movie that teaches young girls to identify with and have sympathy for this undeniably immoral and malignant megalomaniacal she-devil, all while it celebrates cruelty.

I guess a corrosive kid’s movie like Cruella was inevitable since we live in a popular, political and social culture populated with so many cruel, immoral, malignantly megalomaniacal adults. As the saying goes “you get what you pay for”…which is why I definitely wouldn’t recommend paying for Cruella.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

Woke Hollywood Gets Burned By Charlie's Angels Box Office Bomb

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 28 seconds

WOKE HOLLYWOOD GETS BURNED BY CHARLIE’S ANGELS BOX OFFICE BOMB

The new Charlie’s Angels movie is more proof that woke feminist films are box office poison.

Charlie’s Angels, a reboot of the old 70’s tv show and the early 2000’s movies that stars Kristen Stewart, of Twilight fame, along with relative unknowns Naomi Scott and Ella Balinski, hit theaters last weekend with blockbuster ambitions and a defiant “girl power” message. Not surprisingly, the film opened with a resounding thud and fell decidedly flat as evidenced by its paltry $8.6 million box office.

Elizabeth Banks, who wrote and directed the movie, unabashedly declared it to be a feminist enterprise filled with “sneaky feminist ideas”. 

Banks says of Charlie’s Angels,

“One of the statements this movie makes is that you should probably believe women.”

The films star, Kristen Stewart, said of the movie, “It’s kind of like a ‘woke’ version.”

Charlie’s Angels’ failure is just the most recent evidence that woke feminist films are box office poison. The film’s financial floundering comes on the heels of the cataclysmic, franchise-destroying performance of another big budget piece of pro-feminist propaganda, Terminator: Dark Fate, which sank at the box office like an Austrian-accented cybernetic android into a vat of molten steel. Hasta la vista, woke baby.

There have been a plethora of like-minded girl power movies released in 2019 that have produced similarly dismal results at the box office.

One issue with many of these ill-fated woke films is that, like previous feminist flops Ghostbusters(2016) and Ocean’s 8, they are little more than remakes of male movies with females swapped in. These derivative films are the product of a craven corporatism entirely devoid of any originality or creative thought.

For example, the social justice geniuses in Hollywood decided this year it would be a good idea to remake two movies that no one wanted remade, Mel Gibson’s What Women Want (2000) and Steve Martin and Michael Caine’s Dirty Rotten Scoundrels (1998), except this time with female leads. To the shock of no one with half a brain in their head, What Men Want with Taraji P. Henson, and The Hustle, with Rebel Wilson And Ann Hathaway, resoundingly flopped.

This year’s Book Smart, directed by Olivia Wilde, was little more than a rehash of the 2007 Jonah Hill and Micheal Cera smash-hit Superbad. Replacing Hill and Cera with two teenage girls as the protagonists in the formulaic film did not inspire audiences, as indicated by the film’s anemic domestic box office of $22 million.

Original movies with feminist themes fared no better than their re-engineered woke cinematic sisters. Late Night, a feminist comedy/drama starring Emma Thompson and Mindy Kaling, made a paltry $15 million domestically, while the painfully politically correct Charlize Theron vehicle, Long Shot, raked in a flaccid $30 million.

As evidenced by these failures, audiences of both sexes are obviously turned off by Hollywood’s ham-handed attempts at woke preaching and social justice pandering. The movie-going public is keenly aware that these woke films are not about entertainment or even artistic expressions, but rather virtue signaling and posing within the Hollywood bubble.

The female stars involved in these failing feminist projects, in front of and behind the camera, have a built in delusional defense though that immunizes them from their cinematic failures…they can always blame misogyny!

The woke in Hollywood are forever on the search for a scapegoat to relieve them of accountability, as it is never their fault that their movies fail. In the case of these female-led movies, the women involved never have to own their failures because they reflexively point their fingers in horror at the angry, knuckle-dragging men, who out of misogynist spite don’t shell out beaucoup bucks to go see their abysmally awful girl power movies.

Elizabeth Banks got an early start in the men-blaming game even before Charlie’s Angels came out when she told Australia’s Herald Sun,

“Look, people have to buy tickets to this movie, too. This movie has to make money. If this movie doesn’t make money it reinforces a stereotype in Hollywood that men don’t go see women do action movies.”

Of course, men will go see women in action movies, Wonder Woman and Captain Marvel being two prime examples of highly successful female action movies, but fear not, Elizabeth Banks dropped some feminist knowledge to counter that uncomfortable fact when she said,  

“They (men) will go and see a comic book movie with Wonder Woman and Captain Marvel because that’s a male genre.”

So even when men go see a female led action film, they are only doing so because it is a “male genre”, got that?  What a convenient way to avoid responsibility…with Elizabeth Banks it is heads, she wins, and tails, men lose.

Banks preemptively blaming men for not being interested in seeing Charlie’s Angels is also odd because she has also openly stated that “women…are the audience for this film” and that she wanted to “make something that felt important to women and especially young girls”. And yet it isn’t just men staying away from Charlie’s Angels in droves, but everybody…including women!

What the feminists in woke Hollywood need to understand is that men and women will go see quality female-led movies, but they need to be good movies first and feminist movies a very distant second.

The problem with Charlie’s Angels, and the rest of these feminist films, is that their woke politics is their only priority, and entertainment value and artistic merit are at best just an after thought, if a thought at all.

My hope is that Hollywood will learn from the critical and financial failure of Charlie’s Angels and the rest of 2019’s feminist flops and in the future will refrain from making vacuous and vapid woke films and instead focus more on quality and originality and less on political correctness and pandering. Considering the continuous cavalcade of Hollywood’s atrociously dreadful girl power movies this year, I am not optimistic.

A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2019