This is a charming children's movie, my friends, that scrubbed out every trace of Roald Dahl and put the American sensibility of 2023 in his place. Some parts of that sensibility are good. For example, the frontier mentality of a persevering individual is at the core of the movie. It's like a Wild West flick but cute and for kids.
On the negative side, there are the now obligatory racial hangups as the movie populates the Europe of 120 years ago with crowds of African-Americans. No explanation is offered for how they got there in such numbers. As with the Claudine Gay story, the blacks chosen for the parts in the movie are extraordinarily talentless. The lead part is played by an unattractive, overweight girl with a speech impediment and the affect of a dead fish who should have never gone into acting. (No, I'm not being mean to a child. I'm expressing my opinion about a product I paid for). I'm sure a crowd of mega-talented black tweens was available but DEI doesn't like brilliant non-white people. They spoil the savior fun.
Timothée Chalamet is delightful, as always. He's the perfect example of why it's dumb to equate very feminine masculinity with gayness. Not the bougiest of gays can affect Chalamet's easy and natural femininity. And it's only because he's so girly that his on-screen friendship with a child doesn't seem creepy. Just a touch of masculinity would have made the movie weird and uncomfortable.
We have such a terror of discussing things relating to "diversity" that many people believe that gay men are wannabe women. This is utterly stupid, as gay men don't want to be women at all and are not particularly feminine. Some affect femininity but it's a parody, and not usually a very kind one. The proportion of feminine men among gays is the same as among straights because you've got to have the physique for it.
Going back to Chalamet, the phenomenon of women being attracted to very feminine men has always existed and is historically well-documented. I've seen no equivalent of men being attracted to masculine women. Maybe Xena, the Warrior Princess had some male fans but this was not a character aimed at a female audience. I find the outrage of men against the fact that Chalamet is a sex symbol to be very funny. They've been reacting this way back in the 1550s, as well, and it just goes to show that for all our sexual liberation we have not advanced much in our understanding of sexuality. We swapped one bunch of prejudices for another and arrived in the same place.
I didn't go to the movie for myself, obviously, but if I have to sit through a children's film, I want to get something out of it. So I got these musings about sexuality.
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