Movies For Men - On the Passing of Roger Ebert

A time and a "career" encapsulated in one moment:

I had been feeling a tad guilty for loathing Ebert in lieu of his recent death.

This is just the tonic I needed.

You want to be nice because the dude just died but then you realize he had real influence and used it to promote excrement.

The guy did damage. Cheerleading for all the crap that has led to the emasculated "films" we are inundated with today.

Perfectly captured here:

- Boring, full of itself beyond all hell psychobabble Platoon is an unquestioned masterpiece. That goes without saying.

- Full Metal Jacket, the movie that has really lasted the test of time, is an insipid cliche.

Of course, it is laughable today to think that Oliver Stone even belongs in the same conversation as Stanley Kubrick but you could have a field day going back and reading and watching critics like this go on and on about similar movies in the '70s and '80s.

They were legion.

Platoon quote:

"I think now, looking back, we did not fight the enemy; we fought ourselves. And the enemy... was in us."

BRILLIANT! AMAZING! OSCAR! OSCAR!

Full Metal Jacket quote:

"The Marine Corps does not want robots. The Marine Corps wants killers."

JOHN WAYNE CRAP! B-MOVIE BRAVADO!

One has to only recall the tyranny of all that Alan Alda, wimpy, "thoughtful" BS that came out back then to understand my lack of compassion for Ebert. It was suffocating and it led directly to the estrogen-soaked movies of 2013 America.

Despite the universal praise it received when it came out, I didn't see Platoon until years later yet all along I instinctively knew that it was not worth my time.

And when I finally got around to watching it the only thing that surprised me was that it was even worse than I thought it would be.

This really strikes a nerve.

The very ones who were presented to us in the pre-Internet age as "sensitive minds" pushing their "intelligent" films were the dumbest SOBs by far.

And the dumber they were, the more "enlightened" they became in the mainstream media machine of the day.

Poseurs, frauds and femmes.

They made a major contribution to the destruction of masculine film.

They will not be missed.