Ocean’s 8: see Bullock and Blanchett try to rob old, white, straight guys of their voice

It is a measure of the crippling identity madness that is gripping Hollywood that one of its premier piñatas, Sandra Bullock, has recently complained the wrong sort of people were reviewing films wrongly. What? How, you might ask, can any reviewers be the “wrong” sort of people? Or how can anyone even review anything rightly or wrongly? An opinion’s an opinion, a person’s a person.

But apparently Bullock thinks it’d be “nice” if children reviewed children’s films, and I’m sure she’d also like it if only women reviewed women’s films, only black people reviewed films about black people, only trans people reviewed trans films, and only Sandra Bullock reviewed Sandra Bullock films, because it’s a good idea, she claims, if “reviewers reflected who the film is for”. Instead of reflecting the views of the worst group in the universe: the “60-year-old man”, as Bullock put it.

Never mind that you’d rather die than read a review by a five-year-old — or, for that matter, Sandra Bullock. Never mind that good writing is ageless, sexless, genderless and without colour. Never mind that good films shouldn’t really be “for” anyone, unless they’re empty money-making exercises aimed at patsies and zombies — of which more later. But I didn’t expect a self-obsessed film star to see any nuance here.

What I did expect Bullock and her co-star Cate Blanchett to see is how bitter and ridiculous they both came across by complaining, in effect, that not enough women had reviewed their own film, Ocean’s 8. Nearly 80% of film critics are male: their vision, sighed Bullock, is “skewed”. Men see films through a “prism of misunderstanding”, according to Blanchett, whatever that is. But why would female reviewers review a film such as Ocean’s 8 any more favourably? Perhaps Blanchett and Bullock thought their silly little lady brains would be taken in by the hype.

Because there is no prism of misunderstanding about a film such as Ocean’s 8. There is only a prism of utter, utter clarity. It is a pathetic marketing ploy, tested over many, many months with many, many audiences, featuring a recycled idea that wasn’t even good in the first place, acted out by committee-picked stars who mostly can’t act. The cast are there for the money, and you don’t need to be black, white, bisexual, cisgender or trans to work that out. By asking us to take Ocean’s 8 seriously as art, Blanchett and Bullock are essentially asking us to give a good review to the results of a survey.

Ocean’s 8 is a dud, not because it’s a bad film or has bad acting or a silly premise — most Hollywood blockbusters are all of these things and big successes. It’s a dud because the viewers, and particularly reviewers, have seen it for what it is. They may have screen-tested every last second, asked every last viewer, but somehow no one asked the right questions — namely, do you want to see women in a heist movie? No. Do you want to see Anne Hathaway again? No. And now they haven’t asked the right questions, Bullock is asking what she views as the right questions herself, discrediting the oldest target in the universe: the old, white, cisgender male, in a craven attempt to look like the “good” one, the victim.

I don’t particularly love angry men who choose to sneer at female work and I am sure some of these critics love a dreadful George Clooney film much more than they do a Sandra Bullock. What I’m more worried about is how easily people with the “wrong” views can be so quickly dismissed.

The truth is Ocean’s 8 is worse than a bad film; it is a marketing error, a vast failure to monetise “otherness”, quite an achievement when cinemas are bursting with movies such as Black Panther: a similarly contrived, middling, patronising film that is, in contrast, now the ninth highest-grossing film to date. Black Panther was a success not because it was particularly funny, or visually splendid, or well acted — it worked because it was successfully sold as a black film by and for black people, even though it wasn’t and couldn’t ever be, because nothing in Hollywood is. Let us never forget “diversity” is our age’s most powerful marketing phenomenon.

Last week the artist Banksy showed exactly how enthusiastically people will buy into nothing if you get it right, especially when they think others approve of it. He recently submitted an artwork to the Royal Academy summer exhibition under a pseudonym. It was rejected. Grayson Perry, the exhibition’s co-ordinator, later contacted him to resubmit it, and “It’s now hanging in gallery 3,” wrote Banksy.

What Bullock and Blanchett were angry about wasn’t the fact they’d failed to please people — they were angry they’d failed to dupe them like this.

Originally Posted By ausbrit⏩

Originally Posted By nvrstopworking⏩

Originally Posted By BostonRockets⏩

Originally Posted By PatheticPeter⏩

Originally Posted By QuickNutkus⏩

Originally Posted By ausbrit⏩

It is a pathetic marketing ploy, tested over many, many months with many, many audiences, featuring a recycled idea that wasn’t even good in the first place,acted out by committee-picked stars who mostly can’t act. The cast are there for the money, and you don’t need to be black, white, bisexual, cisgender or trans to work that out. By asking us to take Ocean’s 8 seriously as art, Blanchett and Bullock are essentially asking us to give a good review to the results of a survey.

Originally Posted By lolXlol⏩

Originally Posted By coast2coastam⏩

Originally Posted By coast2coastam⏩

Originally Posted By ausbrit⏩