What I hate is how they've made their presence a political matter.
That's why popular entertainment has been slop for the past ten years, and somehow, no one has actually learned.
My whipping child for all matters related to identity politics is Ghostbusters 2016, where there should have been giant blaring klaxons going off about how literally every move they made surrounding this movie is exactly how you do
not create and market a movie, nor engage with the audience.
Once you make a movie political when it is not supposed to be (particularly if it is off a brand, property, IP, or a story that has existed for centuries to millennia) and people know this, you have basically poisoned the well for that movie. With GB2016, you didn't need to know nor care about the plot. All it became was "Feminism, the Movie". And we had enough of that in 2016 when people were talking about Hillary Clinton being elected President, never mind micro-level politics. Now you're asking me to pay for getting lectured in a theater when all I wanted was to laugh at a dumb movie about ghost exterminators? The fuck kind of teacher's pets are running Hollywood anyway?
So the second I hear about a movie playing up the identity politics thing, it's just the same: the story and any entertainment value are subsumed into whatever "lesson" I'm supposed to take from seeing BLACK BLACK BLACKITY BLACK WOMAN on screen. It's no longer "hey, look at this talented person being best for the role" (something almost nobody would have given a second thought to 25-30 years ago), to "Gee, I wonder what I'm
supposed to think based on seeing a black woman in a traditionally white role, rather than what the story on screen is".
It's distracting, it's irritating, and it's turned the entire entertainment sphere into a gnarled mess of meta-commentary no matter what side you land on in the debate. I'm tired of the concept of somehow
needing some level of pseudo-intellectual "media literacy" bolstered by interviews from the creatives to make sense of what a movie is supposed to be saying. Just let the movie speak for itself. Let it be internally consistent. Don't ask me to accept a premise that doesn't make sense. Don't make me go online to chase down a rabbit hole on the filmmakers' intent.
I'm so tired, boss.
