Ocean's 8 Actresses Are Blaming White Men For Bad Reviews
Ocean's 8 has received mixed reviews and almost immediately some of the lead actresses are blaming white men. They said that the media hasn't shifted towards gender equality and that the reviews are a sign of not understanding or liking things that women like.But this is not likely the case as the same reviewers loved The Last Jedi and hated Deathwish. So what is the real reason for the bad reviews and is it possible its just a bad movie?SUPPORT JOURNALISM. Become a patron athttp://www.patreon.com/TimcastSupport the show (http://timcast.com/donate)
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Ocean's 8 recently came out, and so far the reviews are mixed.
This movie is basically just a rehashing of the old Ocean's Heist series, like Ocean's 11, but they've gender-swapped the characters.
So I can't say that I'm too surprised to see it's getting mixed reviews, because we saw something similar with Ghostbusters back just a couple years ago.
They rebooted the series, made all the characters female, and people gave it mixed reviews.
What is also not really that surprising is that following this, several of the lead actresses in Oceans 8 are blaming critics for the bad reviews because they're white men.
Clearly, they can't understand gender equality, and that's why they're getting a bad review, and thus the movie will likely perform poorly because reviews are everything.
It seems like in the culture war, you can't just have something be good or bad.
If the movie isn't doing well, it must be because there's some kind of political reason having to do with identity politics.
So, what is actually going on?
Is the movie actually doing bad?
And is it true that the reason the reviews are bad is because white men don't want to give women a chance?
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First, we're going to head over to Rotten Tomatoes to check out the actual critic reviews and how the audience feels.
The tomato meter is at a 68%.
That's not bad.
That's what, like a C+, you know, so the movie is worth watching.
That's how it seems.
But the audience score is at 50%, and the audience score is typically the general public.
You know, you can come to Rotten Tomatoes and you can add your own rating, give it as many stars as you want.
So among critics, it would seem like, for the most part, they kind of like the movie.
And not just that, from USA Today, Ocean's 8 makes off with $41.5 million and number one at the box office.
So not only are the reviews actually skewing to positive, but they're number one.
They're making a ton of money.
Why is it then that we're hearing some of these actresses are unhappy?
Well, from The Guardian.
Ocean's 8 stars blame dominance of male critics for films' mixed reviews.
Mindy Kaling and Cate Blanchett echo Brie Larson in calling for greater diversity among
reviewers.
In the Yahoo! movies, Mindy Kaling called the dominance of white male reviewers unfair.
If I had to base my career on what white men wanted, I would be very unsuccessful.
So there is obviously an audience out there who want to watch things like Ocean's 8, what I work on, what Sarah
Paulson works on.
Co-star Cate Blanchett concurred, saying the media had failed to make the mind shift the movie industry had when
it came to gender equality.
The conversation has to change, she said, and the media has a huge responsibility.
So first off, it's rather interesting to see them taking such a critical view Of the critical response, when, as I pointed out, 68%, hey, that's not bad.
So I don't think the issue is the white male critics who are not giving you a fair shake, because it looks like they kinda did give you a fair shake, especially when you compare that to the audience score, which gave it only a 50%.
A study by USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative was released earlier this week examining the gender and ethnic profile of US critics who wrote about last year's 100 most successful films.
Found 80% were men and 82% were white.
Such makeup was well known, says Blanchett, but only belatedly being raised.
When you start pointing that stuff out, you realize there's a certain gaze that looks at women.
Kaling referred to Meryl Streep's attack on reviews aggregate site Rotten Tomatoes, which she felt prioritized the views of men.
Promoting the film Suffragette in 2015, Streep said she felt the ratio adversely affected ticket sales for female
skewed films.
I submit to you that men and women are not the same. They like different things, she said.
Sometimes they like the same thing, but sometimes their tastes diverge.
If the tomato meter is slided so completely to one set of tastes, that drives box office in the United States,
absolutely.
On the subject of Ocean's 8, Kaling said, And the thing about so much of what this movie is, I think
white men, critics would enjoy it, would enjoy my work, but often I think there is a critic who will damn it in a
way because they don't understand it.
Because they come at it from a different point of view, and they're so powerful, rotten tomatoes.
I just want to point out, I can barely decipher that last sentence, but I think what she's trying to say is that,
given the opportunity, people would actually consider seeing her movies, whether or not they're white men or
otherwise.
So, before we move on through this article, because it does go into greater detail about criticizing white men and how they're critics, I want to talk about some other films that were reviewed by basically the same critics and got dramatically different responses.
So, if what these actresses is saying is true, we should see white men basically attacking many different movies.
Which kind of is true, but it's not really the way they're saying it.
And first of all, something that many people have known is that Star Wars The Last Jedi is certified fresh among the majority white male reviewers.
It has a 91% critic score.
However, the audience, the general public, has given it only a 46%.
This is a very dramatic divergence.
How is it that these critics, who, as we're hearing, are mostly white men, really liked this movie, but the general audience Pretty much hated it.
And then there is the inverted example of Death Wish.
The Tomatometer is giving it an 18%, but the audience score is 77%.
How is this possible that, according to them, this overwhelmingly white male critic base hated this movie so much, but the general public liked it?
You would think that if the issue was gender equality and understanding films, These people who supported Star Wars The Last Jedi, which was criticized by the public, and who hated Death Wish, which was loved by the public, would also side with their film.
Honestly, I think that is the case because, as I mentioned earlier, going back to their Rotten Tomatoes scores, they get a 68%.
The article from The Guardian goes on and talks about what Brie Larson said.
She flagged the box office flop A Wrinkle in Time.
Ava DuVernay's fantasy drama based on the novel by Madeline L'Engle.
as a victim of the lack of critical comprehension.
She said, I don't need a 40-year-old white dude to tell me what didn't
work about A Wrinkle in Time, said Larson at the Women in Film Crystal plus Lucy Awards
in Beverly Hills.
It wasn't made for him.
I want to know what it meant to women of color, biracial women, to teen women of color.
So it needs to be said.
Sometimes movies are just bad.
Sometimes the marketing is just bad.
In my opinion, if people don't go see your movie, it's because your marketing is bad.
There's a reason that Star Wars The Last Jedi made so much money, even though the audience hates it.
It's because it's a Star Wars film, and they market it as such, and people are interested in the Star Wars series.
So when you announce a Star Wars movie, people say, hey, I'm gonna check it out.
But what happened with Solo?
Well, Solo flopped.
Why?
Not because Solo is a bad movie.
Solo flopped because The Last Jedi was a bad movie.
First, I just want to give you a quick citation.
From The Ringer, Solo flopped at the box office.
Now what?
The spinoff's relative failure won't cause Disney and Lucasfilm to completely change their approach, but they will need to reconsider how they make Star Wars movies and when they release them.
I just want to show you that because, yeah, Solo didn't make money.
But, according to Rotten Tomatoes, the audience score is actually 65% and the tomato meter is 71%.
This means that both the audience and the critics thought, hey, it wasn't that bad.
Not the greatest movie ever, but hey, it's worth watching, right?
It needs to be pointed out that a movie sells based on its marketing and its predecessors.
If you're doing a series, like Star Wars, and you make a movie that's not bad, but the movie before it is overwhelmingly disliked by the audience, they're not going to pay to see your next movie.
It has nothing to do with racism, it has nothing to do with sexism, it barely has anything to do with politics at all.
It just has to do with, look, when I went and saw The Last Jedi, I almost walked out of the theater because I thought it was terrible.
It had nothing to do with gender politics or gender equality.
I just thought the plot made no sense, and I was really, really bored and frustrated with a movie about a slow-motion speed chase through outer space.
I thought it was awful.
I thought it made no sense.
So when Solo came out, I said, I don't know if I want to go see it.
I mean, I'm hearing that people think it's okay, but...
I don't know, man.
The Last Jedi was really bad.
So, The Last Jedi makes a ton of money.
Solo makes no money.
It has nothing to do with politics.
But I do want to point out the danger that the culture war is bringing to our creative content.
When Brie Larson says this movie wasn't made for a 40-year-old white dude, and that she wants to know what it means to women of color, I have to say, hold on, man.
You are now creating dividing lines.
We don't want to separate people.
We want movies to be for everyone, no matter who you are or where you come from.
I think it would be great to have a more diverse set of critics, both ideologically and otherwise.
Because, yeah, having a bunch of feminist far-left white men is probably not a good thing.
It's funny that the actresses from Ocean's 8 believe that these critics are causing them harm when these same critics are praising other movies for their left-wing politics.
Death Wish got bad reviews because people thought it was a gun rights movie.
They didn't care about the story.
They didn't care that the main character was actually illegally obtaining guns.
They just thought that it was a, as one reviewer called it, a gun nut masturbation film, so they gave it a bad review.
These critics are on the left.
So it really isn't an issue of not understanding gender equality, more so that they did actually like your movie.
They didn't give it bad reviews.
So the main point of all of this is that, look, if you don't like something, don't go and see it.
If you don't want to play the video game, don't go and buy it.
Everything doesn't have to be political.
Sometimes movies are just bad, and sometimes video games are just bad.
And that's what it is.
But because of the culture war, it seems like we can't even have an honest conversation about the quality of our content.
People don't like movies because of the message they perceived, and people don't want to see a movie because the critics were white.
None of this makes sense.
So let me know what you think in the comments below, and we'll keep the conversation going.
