MOVIE REVIEW -- My Intro

MOVIE Review: A New Segment
Introduction

I love film, and have from an early age. I may not be unique in that way, especially among my generation. Growing up, I had a natural gift for memorizing movie lines, and I would frequently quotes these lines for the entertainment of my friends, often times teaming up with friends to reenact scenes to entertain larger crowds. This habit continues to be a source of enjoyment for my friends and family. I have also come to appreciate film as a teaching medium, as it can be used to illustrate the blessings of good and moral principles, the consequences of evil or immoral principles, as well as different points of view in usually a detached fashion (as the audience is made the observing third party). Theater and role-playing share similar benefits in this point. As a side note, I think the keeping up with the media and movies consumed by one's children can be an important way for parents to keep up with the culture of their kids, which I think helps with the generation gap.

It is no mystery that the members of Hollywood lean overwhelmingly to the Left politically. It has actually been shown that the holding and expression of conservative thoughts and viewpoints are suppressed within the Hollywood bubble. People with conservative views struggle to succeed in Hollywood because of this prejudice. This is important because art helps shape culture, and the inundating of nearly exclusively Left-leaning television shows and big-screen movies can over time cause public opinion to become more Left-leaning, a stance which does not typically include appreciation for normative American values such as small government and belief in individual liberty & natural law. With the prevalence of TV and movies in our culture, the bombardment of almost exclusively Left points of view will have a lukewarming effect on or evangelize people away from traditional American - conservative - Constitutional - Judeo-Christian values, especially young people. I think therefore that it would be important to explain when certain elements presented are liberal or Leftist, and then either refute the misleading information in the case of misconception, or offer an alternative point of view in the case of preference or position. Hollywood films and TV shows reach such a wide audience, and tend to provide a fairly narrow view of the world in terms of ideas or politics.

For more information about this, I have included below, for your consideration, a video from C-SPAN2's BookTV (but taken from Youtube) of conservative speaker/columnist Ben Shapiro discussing his then-new book Primetime Propaganda: The True Hollywood Story of How the Left Took Over Your TV. What is most interesting about this video are the recordings of interviews from various 'high-ranking' members of Hollywood, including directors, producers, writers, and actors, who attest to the conscious propagation of liberal thought, with the intent to influence and/or mainstream less popular liberal political opinions, and at the expense (and in many cases, the conscious suppression of) conversative opinion. I would call the book propaganda, possibly conspiracy theory, myself if it weren't for these recorded confessions.

You might ask, 'how did Mr. Shapiro get these people to speak so openly about these things when he is a conservative?' This is an interesting story: Mr. Shapiro explains in the video (8:57 - 10:19) that he reached out to these Hollywood figures, indicating that he was "writing a book about the history of television, that [he] was profiling the biggest names in it, and that [he] was looking at the changes in social messaging from Dick Van Dyke to Sex in the City[.]" He then offered two possible explanations to his Heritage Foundation audience for these figures' agreeing to participate: 1) "Ego kills" -- each figure wanted to be included as one of the "biggest names in [Hollywood]" aforementioned sought, and 2) They never bothered to Google him -- Mr. Shapiro had had a nationally syndicated conservative column for 10 years prior to his Primetime Propaganda project, but they assumed Mr. Shapiro was liberal because his last name was Shapiro (of Jewish descent), that he attended Harvard Law School, and (as Mr. Shapiro joked) "liberals stereotype on a regular basis, especially on the base of race and ethnicity." On the last point, I have not encountered enough evidence for myself to assert that all liberals stereotype in this way, but given that his book was completed, I find it difficult to explain the compliance of these Hollywood figures outside of stereotyping in this case.

A New Segment

With these ideas in mind, I thought that it might be productive to start a new segment on my blog called the "MOVIE Review." This may at first sound like an effort to try my luck at being a movie critic, using my blog as a vehicle. This is not my intention, as there are a plethora of movie critics out there on the Internet, especially on Youtube. While I have my opinions regarding films as films, I'm not confident that I would have anything to say new or better to say that isn't also already said in that arena. (That view may change in the future, but it is not a priority for me right now.) So, to be clear, I do not intend to play the critic, or to 'review' the movie in the traditional sense, with this segment.

For my MOVIE Review segment, I will focus on the storytelling choices of a film that appear to be influenced by Left-leaning political principles. Film in this segment will provide examples upon which we can have a discussion. I anticipate that, since Hollywood tends to lean more liberal, that many (if not most) of the Reviews I do will involve pointing out the Left perspective presented in the movies, clarifying how it differs from my understanding of various topics, which I imagine will involve explaining why I feel that it is wrong as I elaborate on what I consider to be the correct understanding. For improved comprehension, I hope to be able to find the movie segments being discussed (maybe on Youtube), and include them in the corresponding post for your reference as you read.

As a matter of "house-cleaning items," let me clarify some other methods. I will not participate in the convention of producing a 'spoiler' and 'spoiler-free' review for the same film, as I do not feel that I have the time to do so currently. I will produce a single Review where Spoiler elements are not off-limits to the discussion, but will only be included when pertinent to the discussion. I will comply with the convention of including Spoiler warnings where appropriate. To recap, my Reviews are not critiques, but political and philosophical discussions intended to illustrate aspects and misconceptions of individual freedom, be it political or economic, as they are displayed on the screen.

Also, I do not currently have the intention of adopting the critic's schedule of seeing every movie ever made as it comes out, and producing new posts for this segment every week. I still feel that the most important work I'm doing with this blog at this time is with with the Found Father's library for my BOOK Review segment.

I hope you enjoy the posts from this segment. My first MOVIE Review will be the film that inspired this segment, Spider-Man: Homecoming. I say that Spider-Man: Homecoming inspired this segment because it was the first film where certain parts jumped out at me as elements stemming from a Left-leaning understanding of the world, and I got the idea of talking about these things that I noticed on my blog.