My wife and I went to see Oceans 8 last week. Yes, I know, but sometimes we just endure things good naturedly for the ones we love.
Do you have any idea how long I spent playing with He-Man and Skeletor dolls? How many hours watching mostly incredibly boring gymnastics meets? Well, three of you do. The rest can only imagine.
To my surprise there has been a lot of talk about the movie, a female version of the Oceans franchise.
There have always been chick flics. This one is a little different. We are presented with a group of women, most of whom are attractive, some of whom have very substantial acting credentials and all of whom are playing criminals.
Not just criminals, inexplicably brilliant criminals. We have no idea how they acquired their various skills except for Ms. Oceans, whose entire family tree is apparently composed of criminals and an Asian pickpocket who learned her skills from a wayward uncle as a child.
In my opinion the movie is ok if you are willing to overlook the many times it has to rely on tricking the audience to succeed. If not, it is a really bad movie. Having watched 100's of really bad movies over the years, I know whereof I speak. This is a bad movie.
Apparently the ladies are unhappy with the reviews the movie has received.
"Speaking to Yahoo Movies, Mindy Kaling called the dominance of white male reviewers “unfair”."
Approximately 80% of credentialed reviewers are white males according to the article.
It is, theoretically, a perfectly reasonable assertion. Except when it is not. Here it is not.
If this was a romance movie the assertion would not only be theoretically reasonable, it would be actually reasonable. Reactions among men and women would be expected to be different.
The movie is a crime/adventure movie. It is a female copy of the male genre and must be judged by the same standards (equality and all that, right?) regardless of the gender of the reviewer. By those standards it is a bad movie.
There is one aspect of it I think is unique and would not be tolerated if the cast was male.
These criminals steal a fortune in diamonds from Cartier and a much larger fortune in historic treasures from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. These criminals steal from the good guys and get away with it. Has that ever been permitted to happen before? I cannot recall a single instance.
There is an interesting social parallel with respect to the ladies complaints about reviewers being overwhelmingly male and white and the White Privilege movement. (I know, I can't help it.)
Rather than looking for the organic reasons for the poor reviews the ladies default to blaming the gender of the reviewers. Rather than looking for the organic reasons for the catastrophe that is black urban culture, black people blame white people.
Much easier to hold yourself blameless in both cases.
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