GEORGE MF WASHINGTON: The Death of a Star System.

The Hollywood star system is dead, now. It happened very slowly. It didn’t wink out all at once, like someone throwing a switch. There was no cataclysmic supernova that ended all life on planet Movie Star as we know it. Rather, it happened so gradually that we hardly noticed it was dying at all… until it was gone.

For years I threw around phrases like “there are no movie stars anymore” just like everyobody else. But I never really thought about what that meant until I sat down one night to stream the 2017 remake, sorry the reboot, of FLATLINERS. A movie I had somehow (rolls eyes sarcastically) forgotten to go and see in a theater.

If you haven’t seen it, don’t bother, it’s not very good… just like “updated” versions of WHITE MEN CAN’T JUMP and FATAL ATTRACTION, it is very much the reboot no one on Earth was asking for. But the most striking thing about the reboot, for me, was the cast. There isn’t a genuine Movie Star anywhere in it, not even Elliot Page who was, once upon a time, something very much like a movie star… before he transitioned to Elliot and, like Spinal Tap, made his appeal “more selective.”

The choice to become “more selective” has cost Hollywood more than COVID shutdowns ever did.