While I agree with a fair bit of what's being said there, I found it to be a bit too 'all or nothing' - e.g. men as either silent blocks of stone ("good") or babbling cry babies ("bad"), or writing off the Daniel Craig era of Bond because they dared to make the character more complex and conflicted and beaten up by the world that he inhabits and the job he does. There's a bit of a downward spiral of closed-loop thinking going on with certain movies (such as "No Time To Die") within some critical circles, and I don't believe it's particularly fair or broad minded.
Now, yes, there are annoying styles of how men are written these days, but for instance, the 'constantly talking to fill silences' thing has sprung out of the Judd Apatow school of comedy where everyone's gotta be talkin' all the damn time, and it infects all characters, not just the male ones.
Also, I think it's pretty narrow-minded or simply ignorant to suggest that men in general don't have deep emotions. In the past men weren't allowed to express emotions, so it was always suppressed (surely some cinematic moments of explosive emotion were reflecting that very constraint?). Now, do I also think that there has been a decided over-correction? Definitely, because there's no such thing as a gradual correction these days, flip-flopping with all the subtlety of the BBC during a crisis. However, just allowing male characters to have more emotions and explore their feelings isn't a bad thing. Has it been handled well in recent cinematic years? Not always, that's for sure, but there's also been some added complications to male characters that have provided a greater breadth of character development.
After decades of Bond, to just do the exact same thing all over again - yet again - wouldn't have been all that great. The likes of Casino Royale and Skyfall really pack a wolloping punch, both in terms of traditional Bondian tropes, espionage, and action, but also in terms of the depth of the character. Sometimes I feel the folks slagging off No Time To Die have either not watched it at all, or half-watched it once and then formed their opinions based on the reaction from their personal echo chamber, or indeed, they're so caught up in the politics of identity themselves, that they're seeing about as clearly as the biggest proponents of extreme identity politics (ironically enough).
Now, is there also truth in how men are increasingly being portrayed negatively? Absolutely. I've seen plenty of adverts on telly that show the men as bumbling fools fucking something up or being silly or idiotic etc, and there's been an awful lot of presentations of men in mainstream films that, if they had been applied as such to female characters, they would (justifiably) be hammered for being misogynistic - so why not for being misandrist? The example of Janine Melnitz vs the exasperatingly stupid Kevin from GB2016 is a perfect summation, in many ways.
There is a problem in cinema and TV in recent years of a decline in male heroes and role models, with too many 'positive males' in movies and shows actually being nothing to aspire to at all. How refreshing it was to see Maverick back in the new Top Gun movie, and that style of character, just goes to show how the zeitgeist has shifted poorly - but at the same time, the Maverick we get in TG2 is much deeper as a character by comparison to the first movie ... ... in fact, upon recently re-watching Top Gun, Maverick is a bit of a fucking cocky prick, always grinning and skirt-chasing, while Ice Man is quite sensibly concerned with things like safety and the cost to the taxpayer (not risking their machinery), rather than the bastard he's often been considered to be. Top Gun is a bloody good like of 80s cinema, no doubt, but I think TG2 is the superior movie, not just in terms of story and character depth but also in terms of action and how it was shot.
Is there also a problem with how women are written? Oh, yeah, that's a big YES on that one - just as Emily Blunt was pointing out. Female characters have too often been reduced to half-assed male clones in many ways, their femininity torn away from them, reduced to being smug, arrogant, actively horrible and spiteful arseholes with no moral compass, characters who can never do wrong and even when they do it's either ultimately the fault of a man (who's also usually white and also usually 'old') or it's okay because they suffered something so making extremely poor decisions or torturing a whole swathe of innocents (*cough* WandaVision *cough*) is totally fine.
The idea of a complex character seems to have gone missing to most of cinema and TV lately, be they male or female. The best female characters in the past have always been complex, had emotion, balanced their femininity with their needs & wants, saw them overcome hurdles, learn from mistakes, and struggle towards a hard-won but entirely justified win.
People can and do get on board with that and have done so for generations. Now the template seems to be one-note arseholes or morons, or thinly-veiled fan fiction and self-inserts ... with a franchise-destroying, fan-hating cherry on top.
Gosh, I wonder why such projects continually fail to make money? 
|
Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. [click for more]
Posting Permissions
Reply With Quote
Bookmarks