Rose "was the first fleshed out companion" and other shit

[cyberhat]

Kermode's been blocking people who bring up Medialens's critique of his Top Gun:Maverick review:

"When the state-corporate culture of a highly aggressive imperial power produces war films that deliberately blend fiction and reality, there are real-world consequences. Actual high-tech death and destruction are made to seem ‘cool’, ‘fun’ – an impact that no serious reviewer can ignore. Assuming, that is, we reject the idea that a review in a corporate viewspaper is mere ‘entertainment’ that has nothing to do with the real world it so clearly impacts. Assuming, further, that we reject the idea that we should function as passive, apolitical, amoral consumers manipulated by powerful elites who are not themselves passive or apolitical at all, but who work relentlessly to extend their influence, wealth and power.

As though spoofing, Kermode concluded his review:

‘Personally, I found myself powerless to resist; overawed by the “real flight” aeronautics and nail-biting sky dances, bludgeoned by the sugar-frosted glow of Cruise’s mercilessly engaging facial muscles, and shamefully brought to tears by moments of hate-yourself-for-going-with-it manipulation. In the immortal words of Abba’s Waterloo, “I was defeated, you won the war”. I give up.’

Kermode gave up. In reality, the outcome of his personal ‘Waterloo’ was never in doubt. As Noam Chomsky famously told the BBC’s Andrew Marr:

‘… if you believed something different, you wouldn’t be sitting where you’re sitting’.

Kermode’s review bowed down to an intellectually and morally castrated version of what it means to be a film critic, one that casually waves away the appalling, real-world impact of propaganda efforts like ‘Top Gun: Maverick’. It’s a version of film criticism that just happens – ‘My, my!’ – to align itself with the agenda of the consistently pro-war Guardian newspaper and wider corporate media system that makes him wealthy and famous for the back-breaking task of writing a few clever, filtered words every week."
www.medialens.org/2022/damned-fun-top-gun-maverick-and-the-military-entertainment-complex/

[cyberhat]

Thinking about the title of this thread. What also irks about this supposed 'depth' of New Who, is at the same time it boasts of taking drama to new heights of insight of character study, it is brazenly, proudly anti-intellectual. A show that wants you to hate people who think too much.

Seeing all scientific language as technobabble, worshipping celebrity culture, not thinking the audience can handle a complete story over 45 minutes.

This was never true in the old show, even at it's Aunt Sally nadir. Didn't Pip and Jane Baker say on Open Air, in response to someone complaining about the complicated dialogue, that they didn't want to dumb down the show? Which puts "the catharsis of spurious morality" in a completely different light. If you told RTD/Chibnall/Moffat that was your ambition as a writer, they'd fire you on the spot for being a saddo.

It's now a show that loves the mob (as long as the mob loves them), hates the outsider and despises the nerd.

[burrunjor]

Jun 23, 2022 18:32:41 GMT cyberhat said:

Thinking about the title of this thread. What also irks about this supposed 'depth' of New Who, is at the same time it boasts of taking drama to new heights of insight of character study, it is brazenly, proudly anti-intellectual. A show that wants you to hate people who think too much.

Seeing all scientific language as technobabble, worshipping celebrity culture, not thinking the audience can handle a complete story over 45 minutes.

This was never true in the old show, even at it's Aunt Sally nadir. Didn't Pip and Jane Baker say on Open Air, in response to someone complaining about the complicated dialogue, that they didn't want to dumb down the show? Which puts "the catharsis of spurious morality" in a completely different light. If you told RTD/Chibnall/Moffat that was your ambition as a writer, they'd fire you on the spot for being a saddo.

It's now a show that loves the mob (as long as the mob loves them), hates the outsider and despises the nerd.

Oh god that open air interview demonstrates why I hate organised fandom. It is both self loathing and sneering and superior. One of the little shits says that if they can't follow Trial of a Time Lord what hope does your average person have. 

Ordinary people can follow sci fi and fantasy just fine, hence why things like Planet of the Apes, a thought provoking sci fi movie did really well. People love that kind of thing actually, but the fandom types think that everybody is stupid except them, yet also want their approval because ironically they are shallow at their core. They are the type of people, as demonstrated with Paul Cornell and Steven Moffat who care about social standing, who think if you're not out having lots of affairs then you are a sad worthless loser, hence things like the "shagged my way around the office like a mechanical digger" comment from Moffat. They feel they have to dumb down something like DW to be successful. Hence the popular phrase "the not we" on Gallifrey Base, which is both sneering and self loathing at the same time. 

I think the problem we see with New Who is that it is an example of how the elites want to control entertainment they don't understand. 

I'm always going on about it, but it's true. The elite can't stand entertainment that isn't predictable, that they can't market and that might make people think. 

We saw it with comedy. Things like the Young Ones, Bottom, Monty Python etc would never happen now. It's all panel shows that only go after media approved targets. An edgy comedian these days is Frankie Boyle who will bully Kerry Katona, a pleb the public is supposed to hate in a really vicious way, but will say all the right things about the media approved shallow politics and never truly question the mainstream media's narrative. Let's see him do an episode of New World Order about Julian Assange for instance? Would never happen in a billion years.

We saw it with music. Again old axe to grind for me, so I won't spend too long on it, but Amy Winehouse was obviously not the traditional type of person that shot to the top of the charts. She looked unusual, she did old music, (disproving the modern audiences find old music boring myth. She outsold all of the manufactured crap.) The media couldn't mould her to be their typical little pop princess however so they attacked her viciously, until she died. Once she was dead however, then she can be approved of as they could mould her image as the tragic little lost starlet that nobody could protect. At the same time however they also want to rewrite her story, make out that she was never popular until she died and they could control her image, that she was a total joke etc, so that their narrative isn't challenged. I once saw a TV Tropes and Idioms article that said Amy Winehouse never sold a single record outside of the UK until she died! Back to Black was the best selling album of all time in France prior to her death LOL. 

Doctor Who and sci fi meanwhile was exactly the same thing. The elites despise sci fi because it is a bit more unpredictable. It appeals to people's need for imaginative fiction and can therefore be successful in all kinds of different ways. Who would have thought that Classic Who would have been successful? A show with an old geezer as the lead and not your traditional hunky man.

Who would have thought a show with such involved plots would be a big hit? Who would have thought that sci fi which the elite tell us is only for sad basement dwelling boys, would be a hit beloved by fathers, mothers, grandparents, little boys and little girls? Who would have thought that it would have such a huge female audience in America. "That's not what women and the plebs are supposed to like! Our research shows us we can win round female audiences and the working class with Jersey Shore, not an imaginative sci fi show!"

Added to that sci fi always did have a bit of a left wing bent to it, and could actually make people think and therefore it had to go as a mainstream genre, hence all the attempts to undermine it and destroy it in the late 80s and the 90s and early 00s. However when that didn't work as the need for imaginative fiction was too great, they decided to rewrite it to being something they could predict. 

That's all modern sci fi is. New Who, we can say it was popular among women because it has a sexy lead and is about kissing. We can say it's popular among the plebs because Jackie Tyler eats chips and it rarely takes place on a far away planet, which would blow their tiny little minds up, and has to have working class characters in it. In terms of being political, well don't worry we can fill it full of SJW crap and that will make people think we are being really radical and daring when we're not at all. (Hence things like Kerblam and Chinballs kissing the BBC's arse in that recent interview and his producer despising Jeremy Corbyn.)

Much like Amy Winehouse history gets rewritten so that now Classic Who was never actually popular at all and that it was a total joke. Much like Amy, I see lies that True Who was never popular outside of the UK. That it was only something little boys liked. This is despite the fact that the biggest DW fan club in the world was in America in the 80s and over 80 percent of its fans were women in America! It also got higher viewers over there, over 9 million, compared to 7 million here. Yet people including even Nerdrotic will still write that it finally caught on stateside in Matt Smith's time. I guess Matt's 1 million viewers on average was greater than 9 million? 

Same is true for other sci fi series like the MCU. Superhero movies have to be formulaic, can never stray from the MCU formula. Hence any film that tries to has to be sneered at, or made out that it is pandering to those awful misfits, like Joker. The media hated it, said it was going to inspire copy cat killers, because the plebs are so stupid they can't handle a movie that actually questions how awful society is. Meanwhile the public actually ate it up and loved that it made them think. 

The public aren't stupid. They are sadly influence by the mainstream media because it uses propaganda tools and has all the power, though even then I think a lot of people are just indifferent as they are concerned with their own lives. That's why it is always important to challenge the media in every way. Not just with politics but with what type of entertainment it says people should like. Sadly however the shallow fanboys who desperately want acceptance will always do what the media says they should do, which is what has led to the awful state of the genre and other forms of entertainment too. 

[burrunjor]

To further back up my post's point of the Fitzroy types being an awful combination of self loathers and thinking they are smarter than everybody else, take a look at these quotes from Paul Cornell and Moffat. This was taken when they were part of the clique that was taking over the DW books and the like.

Paul: The defining factor for our critics seems to be 'how like bad television is it?' It really pisses me off. There was a review in TV Zone recently of Kate Orman's new book which was entirely based on that premise, how like bad television is this book?

David: And it failed.

Paul: Well of course it failed.

David: Set Piece is not bad television.

Steven: But that's not what you want. My memories of Doctor Who are based on bad television that I enjoyed at the time. It could get me really burned saying this, but Doctor Who is actually aimed at 11-year-olds. Don't overstress it, but it's true. Now what the New Adventures have done, sometimes successfully, is to try and reinterpret that for adults, which has involved a completely radical revision of the Seventh Doctor that never appeared on television. That is brilliant.

Paul: There are big sections of fandom that I appreciate and love... Female fandom in all its forms has been consistently more intelligent than male fandom across the globe. Gay fandom in all its forms has, again, been consistently more intelligent than straight fandom. There's a liberal, American, college-based fandom too. When you come down to it, our central audience doesn't read. And that's a major problem for us... how do we address a new series of books to an audience who don't know what good books should be like?

God any f*cking reason not just to write DW eh Paul? First it's that we're just thick because we watch bad tv and don't know what a good book is, then it's all change is good, now it's we are all sexists unlike you.

[Deleted]

Jun 26, 2022 10:56:30 GMT burrunjor said:

To further back up my post's point of the Fitzroy types being an awful combination of self loathers and thinking they are smarter than everybody else, take a look at these quotes from Paul Cornell and Moffat. This was taken when they were part of the clique that was taking over the DW books and the like.

Paul: The defining factor for our critics seems to be 'how like bad television is it?' It really pisses me off. There was a review in TV Zone recently of Kate Orman's new book which was entirely based on that premise, how like bad television is this book?

David: And it failed.

Paul: Well of course it failed.

David: Set Piece is not bad television.

Steven: But that's not what you want. My memories of Doctor Who are based on bad television that I enjoyed at the time. It could get me really burned saying this, but Doctor Who is actually aimed at 11-year-olds. Don't overstress it, but it's true. Now what the New Adventures have done, sometimes successfully, is to try and reinterpret that for adults, which has involved a completely radical revision of the Seventh Doctor that never appeared on television. That is brilliant.

Paul: There are big sections of fandom that I appreciate and love... Female fandom in all its forms has been consistently more intelligent than male fandom across the globe. Gay fandom in all its forms has, again, been consistently more intelligent than straight fandom. There's a liberal, American, college-based fandom too. When you come down to it, our central audience doesn't read. And that's a major problem for us... how do we address a new series of books to an audience who don't know what good books should be like?

God any f*cking reason not just to write DW eh Paul? First it's that we're just thick because we watch bad tv and don't know what a good book is, then it's all change is good, now it's we are all sexists unlike you.

Bunch of f*ckwits. 

[cyberhat]

Much as I agree with you all, I am eternally grateful to whoever wrote that all down. Proof of their insufferable arrogance and cliquishness that no court in the land would disagree with.

I've only read a couple of New Adventure books. Funnily enough, I don't feel that guilty about not reading more. It might have something to do with me spending the time I might have read more reading George Eliot, James Joyce and Tolstoy instead.