After considering giving up writing reviews on this blog I was compelled to come out of retirement (Tom Brady style) to weigh in on the controversy surrounding Pixar’s newest heaping of meh known as Turning Red.

The fact of the matter is, despite the usual gushing praise heaped on this movie for its identity-politics and feminism, this film is just pain dull. Well, it sure seems dull to me and I would presume it to be dull to most, but perhaps it’s dull to those with a Y chromosome. The big question is whether it’s really possible for something written BY women, ABOUT women, and FOR women to be accessible or engaging for men. I would say the answer is a qualified no.

In the same reason women struggle to get into big dumb actioners like the Expendables franchise, it’s a lot to ask boys and men to get into a movie that is about menstruation and girls geeking out over boy-bands. It’s especially difficult to be engaged when the movie takes place in canada, ground-zero for woke culture, where, despite the early 2000s setting, tweener boys seem to almost always wear earrings on both ears.

What makes it boring? There is a profound lack of conflict and stakes.

Conflict is the essence of drama. This movie is so intent on portraying positive portrayals of its diverse cast that its characters lack the sort of flaws necessary to drive drama. Our protagonist is compelled to excel and, outside of a handful of grades no lower than C-ish hidden under her bed, she achieves just that. The closest she comes to rebellion is going to a boy band concert. We’re not talking about falling into a pit of drugs or anything truly existential here. The stakes are LOW, LOW, LOW!

Despite the fact she transforms into a red panda, the reaction of the community is one of mostly curiosity and exploitation. She could have been treated as a freak or a danger to society but that aspect is barely touched upon.

For the most part, what you get are lots of scenes of girls bonding in sisterhood. I’m not saying nobody should get along, but watching characters constantly hug each other and validate each other is BORING. It’s also a hallmark of woke storytelling. There is so much of an agenda to validate and present positive role models that nothing of any consequence happens.

I do wonder whether this style of storytelling is a fundamental aspect of the female perspective, though. Just the thinnest veneer of conflict ala “meeting parental expectations” is enough to cause women to tear up? Are girls geeking out over boy bands really enough for millennial young women to flip out over their nascent nostalgia? Seriously?

But the worst aspect of all this is that a whole new front has opened up in the culture-wars. Some movies are now rendered REVIEW-PROOF by virtue of their agenda. If you don’t like it for any reason, you risk cancelation. It means somehow you are a broken human being. It just seems like we’ve now passed the next inflection point in the slippery slope into a woke dystopia of aggressive thought-policing where likes and dislikes are being scrutinized to the extent that now professional reviewers will have to self-censor their viewpoints to avoid cancelation.

I don’t demand that women love war movies and I don’t want women (who dominate film criticism and are increasingly dominating Hollywood itself) to demand that I love rom coms or other light frivolity such as this. They are free to see things in this which I don’t and vice versa. But this dictatorial imposition of taste is a dangerous assault on personal freedom.

Nevertheless, I fully expect to see more of this. It feels especially absurd to see this controversy make the rounds when out in the real world we have just gone through another COVID surge and are now hoping to avert World War III. The way western society picks these nits really does make me almost wish Putin nukes us and puts us out of our self-bickering narcissistic misery.

–othreviewer