March 22, 2025

HISTORY:

Posted at 10:05 pm by Glenn Reynolds

OPEN THREAD: Party on, dudes and dudettes.

Posted at 9:30 pm by Glenn Reynolds

REASON MAGAZINE’S PETER SUDERMAN: Forget Woke Snow White. Disney’s Remake Is More Like Socialist Snow White.

[Snow White] is indeed a trainwreck. The problem isn’t that it’s woke. It’s that it’s awful—and lamely, bluntly socialist.

The remake’s big idea was to twist the idea of the word “fair.” See, in earlier versions of Snow White, an evil queen asks a magic mirror, “Who is the fairest of them all?” It’s always the queen, until one day the mirror responds that it’s actually her stepdaughter, the Princess Snow White. The question, “who is the fairest,” in other words, has always been a question about beauty. But in the remake, there’s something else going on. The movie goes to great lengths to demonstrate that the queen isn’t fair because she’s not a socialist. I am not kidding.

The film doesn’t quite use that word. But early in the film, Snow White encounters a handsome thief named Jonathan in the castle. Jonathan is the leader of a group of bandits who live in the woods and survive by stealing food. He feels justified in stealing because he and other ordinary people have very little while the queen has a lot and she won’t share.

This isn’t just a generic lesson in being kind. Later, after Snow White takes up with seven computer-animated dwarfs in the forest, one of the dwarfs explains that the bandits in the woods are “only there because of the queen’s greedy economic policies, which forced them there into a liminal space where ethics are harder to define.” This might not be a precise word-for-word quote—the line gets spat out so fast I am not certain I transcribed it exactly right—but it’s pretty close. This is a movie about how stealing is justified because of the evil queen’s economic policies. She’s not fair, you see, because her privilege and selfishness have impoverished ordinary people. It’s Snow White by way of Occupy Wall Street.

And now we know why Disney cast arguably Hollywood’s most prominent Jewish actress in the role of the Evil Queen. Or as Jim Treacher tweeted:

Though to be fair, between Zegler’s hatred of Israel, and the casting of Gadot as the capitalist Evil Queen its all pretty on-brand for Disney:

UPDATE:

The slow speed it takes both to produce individual movies and for Hollywood to jump on new trends has long bedeviled the industry. One of the themes of Peter Biskind’s classic Easy Riders, Raging Bulls look at how the Young Turks such as Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, John Milius and ultimately George Lucas and Steven Spielberg got their feet in the door is that in the mid-to-late 1960s, the aging original Hollywood moguls were all in a doomed quest for a repeat of the mammoth box office of 1965’s The Sound of Music, even as audiences were growing increasingly sour on traditional musicals. When Antonioni’s Blowup, Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde and Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey became surprise hits, the old moguls scrambled to find people who had some clue what those crazy “young people” in the audience wanted to see. (The trend would repeat starting in 1977, when now-corporate-dominated Hollywood was caught completely flat-footed by film that had unexpectedly massive legs: Star Wars.)

But moviegoing was still an ingrained habit in a world before VCRs, let alone streaming. In 2025, there will be lots more woke-era product dumped out by studios. But what comes next in an industry full of TDS, in thrall to the CCP, and conversely, a loathing of flyover country — but not their cash?

Posted at 6:55 pm by Ed Driscoll

JOE NOCERA: The Luxurious Death Rattle of the Great American Magazine.

When he became the editor of Vanity Fair in 1992, [Graydon] Carter could have put a stop to the spending culture he inherited from his predecessor, Tina Brown. That would have made the magazine much more profitable. (David Remnick did exactly that when he replaced Brown as editor of The New Yorker in 1998, turning a money-losing magazine into a profitable one.) But Carter liked the lifestyle too much to let go of it. He liked flying on the Concorde when he went to Europe (round-trip ticket: $12,000). He liked having two assistants instead of one. He liked having his own personal driver, and he liked presiding over Vanity Fair’s uber-expensive Oscar party.

And so, Carter set the tone. “At Vanity Fair in those early days, anyone on the editorial floor could take out pretty much any amount of reasonable cash just by signing a chit,” he writes. “Flowers went to contributors at an astounding rate, sometimes just for turning a story in on time.”

He cites approvingly how his deputy, Aimée Bell, gamed expense accounting at Condé Nast: “She figured out early that the accountants budgeted your expenses based on what you spent the previous year,” he writes. “That meant that what you needed to do was set a high bar early and build on a large amount of expenses.”

He adds: “And I was fine with that.”

“This, in its essence, was Vanity Fair.”

Of course, Vanity Fair spent money on journalism, too—gobs of it.

He paid Dominick Dunne $500,000 a year to cover the O.J. Simpson and the Menendez brothers trials, “plus generous expenses and months of free and continuous accommodation at the Chateau Marmont or the Beverly Hills Hotel.” He recruited Michael Lewis and a half dozen other brand-name writers who were paid at least as much. He even proudly recounts the time Vanity Fair pursued a major story about Lloyd’s of London, the insurance company, “which may have been the most expensive per word magazine story ever written.” And it never ran! To hear Carter tell it, this is what you had to do: To get the best stories, you needed the best writers, and to get them and their stories, you had to spend lots and lots of money.

And it couldn’t last forever. 

After five years working for Art Cooper, I moved to Time Inc.’s business magazine, Fortune. For the first half of my tenure, the good times rolled. Because Time Inc. was a public company, the editors were more conscious of profits than Condé Nast editors, but we flew business class, had staff retreats in the Virgin Islands, and sometimes spent months reporting stories, without thinking too much about it. Unfortunately, the other thing we weren’t thinking about was the prospect that the internet was about to eat our lunch.

In a non-paywalled article from 2009, John Podhoretz talked about his salad days at Time magazine in the 1980s as if it were something out of the Court of Versailles:

Time Inc., the parent company of Time, was flush then. Very, very, very flush. So flush that the first week I was there, the World section had a farewell lunch for a writer who was being sent to Paris to serve as bureau chief…at Lutece, the most expensive restaurant in Manhattan, for 50 people.So flush that if you stayed past 8, you could take a limousine home…and take it anywhere, including to the Hamptons if you had weekend plans there. So flush that if a writer who lived, say, in suburban Connecticut, stayed late writing his article that week, he could stay in town at a hotel of his choice. So flush that, when I turned in an expense account covering my first month with a $32 charge on it for two books I’d bought for research purposes, my boss closed her office door and told me never to submit a report asking for less than $300 back, because it would make everybody else look bad. So flush when its editor-in-chief, the late Henry Grunwald, went to visit the facilities of a new publication called TV Cable Week that was based in White Plains, a 40 minute drive from the Time Life Building, he arrived by helicopter—and when he grew bored by the tour, he said to his aide, “Get me my helicopter.”

The pre-Web era of mass media also allowed old media to be bottle up a story rather tightly. The dismantling of the Condé Nast empire, and other slick glossy magazines has implications beyond merely fashion, as Lee Smith wrote in his perceptive October 2017 article on the fall of Harvey Weinstein, “The Human Stain:”

A friend reminds me that there was a period when Miramax bought the rights to every big story published in magazines throughout the city. Why mess with Weinstein when that big new female star you’re trying to wrangle for the June cover is headlining a Miramax release? Do you think that glossy magazine editor who threw the swankiest Oscar party in Hollywood was trying to “nail down” the Weinstein story? Right, just like the hundreds of journalists who were ferried across the river for the big party at the Statue of Liberty to celebrate the premiere of Talk—they were all there sipping champagne and sniffing coke with models in order to “nail down” the story about how their host was a rapist.

That’s why the story about Harvey Weinstein finally broke now. It’s because the media industry that once protected him has collapsed. The magazines that used to publish the stories Miramax optioned can’t afford to pay for the kind of reporting and storytelling that translates into screenplays. They’re broke because Facebook and Google have swallowed all the digital advertising money that was supposed to save the press as print advertising continued to tank.

Look at Vanity Fair, basically the in-house Miramax organ that Tina failed to make Talk: Condé Nast demanded massive staff cuts from Graydon Carter and he quit. He knows they’re going to turn his aspirational bible into a blog, a fate likely shared by most (if not all) of the Condé Nast books.

Si Newhouse, magazine publishing’s last Medici, died last week, and who knows what will happen to Condé now. There are no more journalists; there are just bloggers scrounging for the crumbs Silicon Valley leaves them. Who’s going to make a movie out of a Vox column? So what does anyone in today’s media ecosystem owe Harvey Weinstein? And besides, it’s good story, right? “Downfall of a media Mogul.” Maybe there’s even a movie in it.

At the Yale Review this month, Bryan Burrough also writes about “Vanity Fair’s Heyday: I was once paid six figures to write an article—now what?”

Without straining, Graydon nicely positions his Vanity Fair in the flows of its day. Its ethos and popularity in the 1990s and 2000s were a sort of coda to the “New Journalism” perfected by Esquire during the 1960s and 1970s, when writers like Tom Wolfe and Gay Talese produced long, probing articles and in-depth profiles. Their style of writing went beyond the staid reporting and hard facts that readers had come to expect in print. Instead, they imbued their pieces with the stuff of novels: immersive stories, lyrical writing, vibrant descriptions, pacing on a par with the best propulsive fiction.

Vanity Fair embraced New Journalism, but as Graydon puts it in his book, it also “had an asset that no other magazine had in Annie Leibovitz. Annie was already a legend, a photographic visionary of huge gifts.” Leibovitz pushed the boundaries of what made a newsstand cover, from the arresting group photography showcased on Vanity Fair’s annual Hollywood Issue to its iconic image of a pregnant Demi Moore. The magazine mattered, especially in Hollywood and New York.

In more recent years, after her glamorous photoshoots led to the death knell of Robert “Beto” O’Rourke’s presidential bid and caused many in America to question Volodymyr Zelensky’s seriousness, Iowahawk quipped, “Whom the gods would destroy they first make pose for Annie Leibovitz.”

Posted at 6:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

SAVAGE:

Posted at 4:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

THE CRITICAL DRINKER: Snow White — It’s Even Worse Than I Expected.

Posted at 4:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

THE INSTADAUGHTER HAS SOME TURKISH FRIENDS AND WE WERE TALKING ABOUT THIS:

Posted at 4:04 pm by Glenn Reynolds

A LITTLE ON-THE-SPOT TWITTER-JOURNALISM:

I should note that as we approached this rally we saw several Chinese couples and one woman with a stroller moving away quickly and looking worried. I don’t know if they were afraid of violence or that it might hurt their visa status to be seen there.

Posted at 2:53 pm by Glenn Reynolds

SHOCKER:

Posted at 2:52 pm by Glenn Reynolds

ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: The carbon footprint of a burning Tesla.

So the sum is that the vandals, the climate alarmism that boosts Tesla sales, the subsidy pushers in the federal government, and the owner-victims are all on the Left. Fewer Republicans have the money to buy such expensive vehicles, and anyway, they don’t want to switch from their internal combustion engine. They can mostly stand aside and watch incendiary lefties attack each other.

One consequence is that Tesla owners now festoon their cars and trucks with bumper stickers bearing such slogans as, “I bought this car before we knew Elon was crazy,” and “Vintage Tesla, pre-madness edition.” The stickers serve two purposes, one boastful and the other appeasing. They signal that the owner is of a liberal and tolerant ilk, hates Musk and Trump, and is thus on the side of the angels (and the fire bombers). They are also a sort of defensive manifesto, implying to the vandals, “Don’t wreck my ride; I’m on your side.”

A further irony is that incinerating a row of Teslas or Tesla charging stations surely pumps more carbon dioxide and other acrid pollutants into the air than the vehicles would save if allowed to live out their working lives unmolested.

Ready for more ironies? One is that spray-painting swastikas is an odd way to suggest you are against Nazis, which is how many on the Left, and certainly the vandals, characterize Trump and Musk.

As this meme from today’s Power Line Week in Pictures highlights, for those of us who are non-Tesla owners, it’s fascinating to watch the left’s war on Teslas, particularly in light of their decades-long war on normal, gas-consuming cars:

But this will likely turn far uglier, and possibly quite soon:

Posted at 2:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

SNOW WHITE REVIEWS FROM CRITICS ARE MOSTLY NEGATIVE: ‘So Bland It Barely Registers.’

Disney’s live-action remake of the 1937 classic “Snow White” was released on Friday, and so far, the reviews from critics are not great.

There has been a lot of controversy and speculation about the film in the months leading up to its release. Questions about casting, creative decisions, and the outspoken views of the film’s leading lady have all led to a lot of negative press and a scaled-back premiere event in Los Angeles.

So far, “Snow White,” starring Rachel Zegler and Gal Gadot, has a 46% Tomatometer rating on Rotten Tomatoes, a percentage that reflects the ratings from professional critics.

“Gloss prevails over heart in nearly every scene, and plot beats feel contrived,” a reviewer from The Wall Street Journal wrote.

The New York Times said of the film: “Neither good enough to admire nor bad enough to joyfully skewer; its mediocrity is among its biggest bummers.”

There have long been rumors that studios have used astroturf to prop up their new releases’ ratings on IMDB, where a movie with a 7.0 rating is quite watchable, 7.5 is considered a very good film, and anything above 8 is an enduring classic. How much of a fortune did Disney shell out to get Snow White such a high rating there this weekend?

Posted at 1:45 pm by Ed Driscoll