Birds of Prey and the Identity Politics Fan/Critic War for Who Gets to Ruin Movies

Sometimes, I like to jump in my car and just drive. I turn off the radio, point myself toward the backcountry and just go. It gives me time to be alone with my thoughts and work shit out.

Watching Birds of Prey and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn or Harley Quinn and the Birds of Prey (or whatever the hell we're calling it this week), I kinda got the same feeling I get when I'm out on one of my drives. I was present enough to understand what was going on but not engaged enough to prevent me from thinking about other things. Huh. Now that I think about it, I probably shouldn't drive when I'm only partially engaged in what I'm doing. It's unsafe.

Anyways, Birds of Prey gave me a whole 109 minutes to think about all kinds of stuff. I found my brain stuck on a couple of issues that are going on in movie culture. I present those thoughts here. But first...

Was Birds of Prey worth watching?

Umm.. no. That's the short, sweet answer. It's a disjointed, ugly pink-colored nightmare full of unlikable characters, boring action scenes, and a desperately inconsistent tone. It lacks the character depth and thematic material one finds in movies made for more mature audiences and instead substitutes cartoonish violence and a boatload of curse words. It's like a PG-13 kiddie flick that sooo desperately wants to hang out with an older crowd and thinks that saying "fuck" a lot will make them seem cool. There's a lesson in that last statement that I should probably learn, but I probably won't...

SJWs, Anti-SJWs and Identity Politics. OH MY!

I don't generally get too pissed about "forced" diversity in movies, gender-swapping in remakes, and that kind of thing. For me, that's less an indication of a political agenda and more an indication of marketing strategies. It's still pandering, but I don't feel like all that harmful.

"SJW bullshit" in movies also doesn't usually bother me too much because I don't drag a sensitivity to that shit into the theater with me. It's kinda like those ghost-hunting shows like Ghost Adventures. They go into those situations expecting to see ghosts, so of course, they're gonna see and hear stuff that confirms what they went in there to find. Same thing with the SJW stuff. If you go in sure to see it, you WILL see it.

On top of that, my attitude toward the whole SJW/anti-SJW war probably influences how I see movies. That attitude is that neither side is right and both sides are essentially doing the same thing. From my perspective, both the SJWs and anti-SJWs are whining like a bunch of aggrieved, butt-hurt little bitches about the fact that they don't like the way the people they disagree with talk. That's it.

That said, every once in a while, a movie goes so far off the rails into identity politics that it even pops me out of the story. As disengaged from Birds of Prey as I was, the movie managed to push me even further. Consider the scene where Black Mask, played by the usually awesome Ewan McGregor, forcibly disrobes a female onlooker at his club. Ostensibly, it's there to show that Mask is one evil sonuvabitch. But considering his behavior and the way the rest of the characters have reacted to him up to that point in the flick, I feel like it was sufficiently established that he's a real dickbag who deserves to get smacked down. 

So why is it here?

Since the scene is kind of redundant and unnecessary, it sure feels like the only reason it's here is to make a political statement. The statement seems to be that white dudes suck and they should be punished. It's not the only man-hating moment in a movie that's obsessed with proving women can kick ass as well as men and look cooler doing it. 

Look, I love movies where a woman goes all engine of destruction on legions of scumbag thug dudes. Atomic Blonde? Awesome. Haywire? Bitchin'. Kill Bill? Totally badass. But those films are able to feature ass-kicking women without trying to make every guy on the planet out to be a perverted, entitled shit-sipping troll. And is that really too much to ask?

Movie Fans v. Film Critics

As I type this, Birds of Prey is sitting at an impressive 79% fresh rating with critics and audiences alike on Rotten Tomatoes. I'm not sure what movie these cats watched but it wasn't the BoP I sat through. However, it's nice to see critics and audiences agreeing on something.

That does bring up another issue because nobody I know who's actually seen this flick likes it. That makes me wonder how genuine the audience rating is. It also highlights something about critics that's really been pissing me off lately. They don't actually seem to judge a movie by the quality of the story and filmmaking. They seem to judge it by whether it adheres to their socio-political beliefs. 

For example, when Last Blood, the most recent Rambo movie, came out, critics shit their pants about how it was a Trump movie, like the Alt-Right's wet dream of what a movie should be. There was certainly some ammunition there, as Rambo spends the last act of the movie slaughtering Mexican thugs in the bloodiest ways imaginable. 

But the fact that the movie was in development long before Trump came down that escalator and announced he would seek the presidency and always featured bad guys from south of the border kinda takes the wind out of the sails of that argument. Yeah, the rednecks I assume were conservatives who I watched the movie with enjoyed it, but that doesn't make it a political statement.

It's kinda the same way with Birds of Prey. Critical praise for the way the movie soars on the wings of action-packed female empowerment and its diverse cast of strong women seems like code. What they really seem to be saying is "It doesn't matter whether the movie is actually good. It's a movie about women that was directed by a woman and that should be all you need to love it."

I hate that shit. I hate when anyone, ANYONE, tries to dictate how I should react to a movie or the reasons I should have a particular reaction. I am not alone. Most people I know hate this shit. And this erodes the trust the film audience has in critics. No wonder so many people choose to consume any reviews they consume on YouTube.

This is a pretty bad situation because most YouTube reviewers don't know jack fucking shit about the art and craft of filmmaking. That's something you need to possess if you're gonna be a reviewer who's worth consuming. Otherwise, you're just spouting off about what you like or don't like and not adding any knowledge beyond that or providing sound reasoning to buttress your opinions. All that makes filmgoers less informed and in the long run, hurts film culture.

But they don't have a better option when so many professional critics choose to review a film's identity politics messaging and not the craft and performances of the film. That isn't doing your job as a critic as far as I'm concerned. A film critic's job is to honestly articulate his or her experience with a film in as entertaining and informative way as possible. I get that one's politics influences how you view a film, but you should be able to separate yourself from your politics enough to watch a movie with the least biased eye possible.  

Anyway, this is getting waaaaaay too long, so I'll sum up. Birds of Prey sucked opossum ass through a straw, SJW stuff is bullshit, but not as much bullshit as people who can't stop arguing about it, and movie critics need to do their fucking jobs.