Submitted by Anonymous
Taking the Red Pill with regard toward male-female relations makes you look at movies in a whole new light. You stop seeing the story the director thinks he wants to tell and start seeing what the director actually believes. You gain an appreciation for what you may have previously dismissed and perhaps a disillusionment toward what you had previously appreciated uncritically. You start asking exactly how realistic the scenarios actually are and how they’d likely play out in real life. You get a feel for how other critics are going to rate it before they do. So, given that I prefer to praise rather than criticize, one of these three will get my Stamp of Realistic Manliness Approval: The Expendables, Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, and The Other Guys. SPOILERS AHEAD!
Movie the First: Breaking all box office records for actually showing manly men doing manly things, The Expendablesis still #1 at the box office. Sly, Statham, and Stone Cold would have been enough, but the movie gets bonus man points for having what I consider to be the real Old Spice guy: Terry Crews. (His Old Spice commercials were hilariously over-the-top in true Powerthirst fashion, and actually served to mock the lengths that Testosterone Poisoning could go without being as contemptuously dismissive of actual men that the insufferably overexposed New Old Spice guy is.) Big Hollywood, my designated conservative movie critic collective, loves it.
Movie the Second: Hyped much but making little money, Scott Pigrim vs. The Worldis about a guy in Toronto whose world operates by video game logic. It’s also directed by the guy who made Hot Fuzz, so it’s extremely watchable and intermittently hilarious. I suppose the retro-8-bit asides and overuse of the Link to the Pasttheme were meant to appeal to people like me (I was 11 when hearing and seeing them for the first time, so I’m right in that demographic,) but I couldn’t shake the feeling that the rest of the movie was more meant to appeal to….hang on, where was the first place ever I heard about Scott Pilgrim? <Rifles through memory banks> Oh, that’s right, in Kick-Ass. As one of two comic series, along with Shojo Beat, that are ‘casual entry-level girl-friendly comics’ specifically meant for girls new to this mangathing all the boys were talking about. Edgar Wright needs to eat as much as the rest of us, but this is one movie whose source material I’m not bothering to check no matter how well it’s presented and how much of a nerd I am. Moviebob, my designated liberal hipster critic, loves it.
Movie the Third: The Other Guys. Will Ferrell, Mark Wahlberg, Samuel L. Jackson, and The Rock do a comedy by playing a, 80s buddy cop movie comedy semi-straight, which almostescapes the twin universal critic curses of ‘it’s been done before’ and ‘it’s only a parody.’ Both Moviebob and Breitbart offered muted praise and political criticism based on theme and story.
So which movie portrays males both sympathetically and realistically?
Well, if you haven’t guessed already, The Expendables Scott Pilgrimboth fail the MRA test for being exactly the same movie, dressed up differently to appeal to different demographics. Both Sly and Scott are larger-than-life heroes who slaughter many of their fellow men for no other reasonthan to save a woman they barely know who may or may not be worth saving. (Using the word ‘fellow men’ is no exaggeration; the men both heroes have to fight to the death! have easily been in their circle of friends and acquaintances without the conflict insisted on by the woman.) Both movies openly claim their protagonists are simply this close to being evil themselveswhen they start talking angrily (aka: truthfully) about why exactly they’re fighting for the woman in question. And both make lame backwards rationalizations before the big boss battle that they’re actually fighting for self-respect, or their own soul, rather than for a woman of questionable moral character and little propensity to forgive any wrongdoing on the part of the men close to her. (In bothmovies, the Big Bad actually makes overtures ofpeacewhen he catches the good guys! “Gallantry” was not always a word with unqualified positive connotations, and simple thought experiments on where the respective ‘final confrontation’ locales are going to go now that their major income sources are gone show that the heroes mainly did a nice job breaking it.)
Neither of the two movies gets one of the biggest reasons why a large number of men go to war or play video games in the first place-to get away from female-dominated society completely. Trust me, no man reads reams of military hardware and tactical manuals for their wives’ sake, and no man ever played through the original Zelda just to rescue the princess. “I go to war for my wife and family’s sake” is almost always a lie or at best a half-truth, “I go to war because it’s really, really FUN and inspiring and challenging compared to whatever else I might be able do with my life!” is far closer to the truth, though seldom heard. Thus spins the rationalization hamsters at speeds greater and greater in both male and female heads, and we despair of hearing any unmixed truth.
And then The Other Guys along and tells so much truth it’s like Roissy, Vox Day, EW, and the entire Manosphere just decided to sneak in a movie that tells the truth about men and cops SO effectively that the mainstream movie critics all miss the point completely.
Theoretically, The Other Guysis a send-up of the buddy-cop genre. But Will Ferrell is in it, and Will Ferrell has been increasingly using his comedies as a less and less subtle means of telling hard, unvarnished truths about whatever their subject matter was. Those subjects have all recently been ‘how different types of men from alpha through omega react to the same environment.’ Or: “How Will Ferrell goes from crazy isolated comic relief to the only sane man in an increasingly insane world.”
The Rock (once again parodying an action career that he never really had) and Samuel L. Jackson play the hyper-macho alphas, gleefully and openly engaging in dangerous high-speed pursuits of small-time crooks while causing millions of dollars in property damage, and getting away with it through sheer masculine effrontery and crowd-pleasing media exposure. Damon Wayans and Rob Riggle (POW!) play the greater beta alpha wanna-be’s, chasing the next big career-making cases. And finally, Mark Wahlberg and Will Ferrell play the ‘other guys’ of the title, the bottom-dwelling gammas who nevertheless get 90% of all the real non-glamorous police work done.
Beyond all the silliness of the premise, the greatest affirmation of Game as its own status comes when we meet Eva Mendes as Will Ferrell’s wife, and Mark Wahlberg’s increasingly disbelieving reactions. And then the realization that Will Ferrell used to be a pimp, (albeit a somewhat beta pimp) and it’s stated flat-out that that’s all Eva Mendes needed to know to fall in love with him. (After this turn in The Other Guysand her new sex tape, you may as well check her off it the ‘gets it’ column of the very small number of Hollywood females with both a realistic view of women and a willingness to portray it on-screen. )
Two other notable turns by Michael Keaton and Steve Coogan not only round out the cast, but give a sort of melancholy retrospective on where the protagonists of films like The Expendablesand Scott Pilgrimwould end up in real life. Imagine Jason Statham’s workaholic Expendables character all growned up and living a respectable life as a police chief by day and an Bed, Bath and Beyond manager by night, and you’ve got Keaton. Imagine Scott Pilgrim having turned his creative side into an entrepreneurial career where he gets passed around by his domineering wife as both a moneymaker and a scapegoat for various financial interests, and you’ve got Coogan. (Also imagine the American turning Brit and the Brit turning American, but I digress…) Both offer a far more understated yet far more effective picture of what really happens to the creative and the motivated when they hit the expectations and corruptions of feminist society. Keaton repeats the disbelieving line “My son is bisexual” far too often for it to be a one-off comedic affect.
And now all Will Ferrell needs to do is make a comedy on family court that’s as good or better than Liar Liar.
