I think it is Glenn Reynolds who remarked that while the left wants conservatives to shut up, conservatives want leftists to . . . keep talking! Take the case of Ford vs. Ferrari, the high-octane movie tearing up the box office with the same brio as the original Ford Shelby tore up the Le Mans track back in the 1960s. The left hates the movie because it celebrates white male testosterone and individualism. Even worse, the film is climate pornography!
Check out some samples from Grist:
‘Ford v Ferrari’ is the climate change horror film nobody needed
. . . director James Mangold never once even winks at the negative environmental effects of combusting all that gasoline, he has unwittingly managed to create a striking cinematic allegory for the climate crisis.
The critically acclaimed Ford v Ferrari, currently the No. 1 movie in the country, is a celebration of all the American values that got us into the climate emergency and a repudiation of the values we’ll need to get out of it. . .
All the greatest hits of American exceptionalism are baked into the script. Individualism? The central tension of the movie is between Shelby’s desire to do things on his own and the auto company’s habit of succeeding via collaboration. (“You can’t win a race by committee,” Shelby tells Ford at one point, articulating the film’s thesis statement.) . . .
White masculinity? There is not a single character of color in the film, and only one female character with a name: Ken’s wife Mollie, played by the appealing Irish actress Caitriona Balfe. In lieu of interiority, Mollie is given a lust for speed to match her husband’s, at one point zooming the family car around a winding suburban road, careening past other cars, while Ken yells at her to slow down. (Ford v Ferrari’s idea of feminism: Women 👏 can 👏 pollute 👏 and 👏 endanger 👏 people’s 👏 lives 👏 too 👏.)
It’s clear that Ford v Ferrari is the wrong movie for 2019. It would have also been the wrong movie for 2009, 1999, and 1989. . . Ford v. Ferrari feels like a stinking relic dug up from the bowels of the earth and endlessly refined until it acquired a nice plastic sheen. It should have stayed in the ground.
Should be pretty obvious by now that if the climatistas ever get in power, they won’t stop with taking our cars and barbecues away: they practice censorship on a wide scale. Do please keep talking, climate warriors! Meanwhile, I have a movie to go see.
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