OPINION: Cultural Decline at the Movies
Cultural decay dominated The Washington Post’s Sunday Style section this past Spring. The paper was interviewing a woman named Charlotte Gainsbourg, an actress and singer who recently starred in a movie released back in March called Nymphomaniac, which is drawing most of its buzz from a series of very explicit sex scenes, one of them between her and former Transformers star Shia LaBeouf. Apparently, to the filmmakers, this wasn’t pornography… it was “art”. Texas billionaire and far-left bombthrower Mark Cuban financed the film, which is directed by Danish filmmaker Lars Van Trier. If you don’t know who Mark Cuban is, he’s the co-founder of the now-defunct Broadcast.com website, which he later sold to Yahoo! during the dot-com bubble. Since then, he has financed films that drive a far-left narrative. Two of the most notable films he has financed are Redacted, a film that portrays the US military as murderers and rapists, and Food, Inc., a one-sided documentary attacking the agriculture industry. For some reason, Cuban has a huge grudge against traditional values, and Nymphomaniac is apparently an example of what is probably his contempt for social conservatism.
Predictably, this film is receiving praise from elitist movie critics, most notably the media elites at The Hollywood Reporter and NPR. The Reporter’s Todd McCarthy wrote a gushing review of this piece of filth, saying it “represents an intellectual male artist’s arduous, wayward, idiocentric, blunt, naughty-boy attempt to address Freud’s famous question: “What does a woman want?”” If you ask me, women would not want to see this piece of garbage. That’s exactly what this film and all other movies that focus on sex are. Trash. Nothing of value! As my mother Kim would say, “garbage in is garbage in”, this especially implies with stuff like Nymphomaniac. Even Richard Roeper of the Chicago Sun-Times was disgusted about this film. If this is what truly passes for greatness when it comes to entertainment, then it just goes to show you how much further down the drain our culture is going.
For those who appreciate a time when sex and violence didn’t dominate the movie theater and TV screen, there are great alternatives that I personally enjoy. Last year’s 42, based on the life of baseball player Jackie Robinson, and Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln, are good examples of good live action movies that have a great story told without the need for sex or violence. Sure, there’s minor profanity in the latter, but there was no use of the F word or anything like that. Plus, for all you animation geeks out there, the animation field has always been very family-friendly when it comes to movies. Take offerings from Disney and Pixar for example. Most of their movies have great moral lessons in them, ranging from family being first (Disney’s Frozen and Pixar’s The Incredibles) to putting others’ needs before yours (Disney’s Aladdin). Plus, in what is sure to have Hollywood in for a shock, a new CG-animated Peanuts movie done by Blue Sky Studios – the animation division of 20th Century Fox – is set for release in November of next year. The potential success of that film – which is based on the late Charles M. Schulz’s comic strip of the same name – will indeed take Hollywood by surprise, but the reasons for it will go over their heads.
It’s time that we as conservatives vote with our dollars. In order to truly bring traditional values back to our culture, we will need to have films like the upcoming Peanuts to become a big financial success. Back in March, Fox had similar success with the film Son of God, a movie based on the even more successful miniseries The Bible that tells the story of Jesus’ death and resurrection. That film is now available on Blu-ray and digital download. These are the kinds of films that should win awards, because they please the American public, rather than their Hollywood elite peers.
