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NO ARGUMENTS.
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JM McNab
Not all movies were made to stand the test of time, and we're not just talking about those that can't afford to copy-paste Christopher Plummer over every star who's been outed as a sexual predator. A shocking amount of beloved films aren't able to hold up to modern (sober) viewings, starting with ...
Uh, the ones from our previous article. But continuing with ...
Demolition Man Predicts That America's Problem Will Be "Not Enough Guns"
Despite the woefully inaccurate action figure line, Demolition Man was a damn fun movie back in the day. Sylvester Stallone and Wesley Snipes starred in a sci-fi action movie -- not a cyberpunk romance between two star-crossed tough guys, as the poster might have you believe.
Watching it now, though, Demolition Man is remarkably off in its predictions about the future, with a central message that offers essentially the opposite of what we need in this, the actual future. The whole thing plays out like a paranoid right-wing fantasy, beginning with the prophecy that the sin-filled hellhole known as Hollywood will be engulfed in flames by ... 1996?
We're supposed to admire Stallone's character because he's a cop who doesn't care about rules. But he, like, really doesn't care about rules, to a dangerous degree. To arrest a lone Wesley Snipes, he destroys an entire building. A thing he does so often that they've nicknamed him "Demolition Man" instead of "That Inept Cop Who Acts Like A Goddamn Maniac."
Both Snipes and Stallone get thrown in cryosleep as punishment. When Snipes escapes in the future, they defrost Stallone to track him down. Stallone is then horrified to find that the future has been taken over by the most nefarious threat you could possibly imagine: PC culture. Yup, Stallone can't swear or eat red meat, and most jarringly, this movie proposes that one of the problems with future America is that there aren't enough guns around. Even the cops don't carry guns, because they were outlawed after the "urban wars" of the 20th century.
Of course, Stallone's character doesn't learn a lesson or change. Instead, his role is to change the minds of the people living in this Utopian future. This is especially troubling because this movie came out a mere two years after Rodney King was beaten by police, and one year after the riots that resulted from the cops' acquittal. Someone saw all that and thought, "Hmmm, cops should be more violent."
The movie ends with Stallone teaching the PC police that it's good to have guns and demolish the occasional building. The moral here is that cops shouldn't have to follow the rules, or be held accountable, or make sure they have consent before macking on co-workers.
Demolition Man also predicts that all restaurants in the future will be Taco Bells, and toilet paper will be abolished -- so hell on Earth.
Crocodile Dundee Grabs Women By The, Uh, Crotch
Before Marvel movies dominated the box office (back when Robert Downey Jr. was less Iron Man and more mall food court bully), the '80s had some very embarrassing blockbusters. Take Crocodile Dundee, the surprise hit of 1986. It was the second-highest-grossing movie that year, handily clobbering classics like Stand By Me and Aliens, presumably because 1980s audiences thought it was about a Godzilla-sized Aussie with the power to bend skyscrapers.
The movie is actually about a journalist who travels to Australia (because in the '80s, people in print media lived like kings) to write a story about the rugged outdoorsman who survived a crocodile attack. When "Crocodile" Dundee takes the journalist, Sue, on a tour of the outback, she proves she's as tough as him by trekking out alone -- and he proves he's a big perv by creeping on her from behind some bushes.
Croc journeys back to New York City with Sue, where he has a hard time adjusting to city life. Yes, somehow, watching a guy learn what escalators and bidets are made hundreds of millions of dollars. But there's something even worse than a middle-aged guy puzzling out how to spritz his butthole. While out drinking at a bar, Crocodile Dundee is chatting up a "Sheila" when his new drinking buddy points out it's really "a guy"...
Obviously, it's not surprising that a movie from 30 years ago would lack sensitivity in its portrayal of trans people, but even so, the protagonist's reaction is cringey as hell. Instead of using words or make any attempt to, you know, treat this character like a human being, Dundee decides to get to the bottom of things by grabbing her by the crotch.
She leaves, angry and humiliated, and bizarrely, the bar cheers for this oddly dressed stranger like his hate crime just won the Super Bowl.
Later in the movie, there's even a callback to this terrible scene. Crocodile Dundee attends a swanky dinner party where the hostess has a deep, masculine voice. So again a suspicious Dundee grabs her genitals, in what we now have to assume is some kind of ceremonial Australian greeting.
The problem is there's never any comeuppance for these actions. The wealthy hostess even acts turnedon by it -- probably because the screenplay was co-written by "Crocodile Dundee" himself, Paul Hogan. Which also explains why most characters are either charmed by or want to bang Croc, despite the fact that he looks like mannequin made of old leather belts.
The Mummy Treats Women And Arabs Like Literal Garbage
It's hard to be angry at a franchise that gave the world Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson as an unconvincing CGI grotesque scorpion monster. Still, 1999's The Mummy doesn't really hold up today. A throwback to an old-school Hollywood adventure story, The Mummy updates the special effects but forgets to update the blatant disregard for basically anyone who's not a white dude.
When we first meet Brendan Fraser's character, the hero of the movie, he's in jail, and immediately forces himself on Rachel Weisz like ... well, a lot of men in Hollywood, we now know.
She's horrified, but in the next scene he has a new haircut, so suddenly she's super into him.
Throughout the entire movie, Fraser's character (we're 90 percent sure his name was Handsome McMummy) treats her like absolute crap, ostensibly for comedic effect. Keep in mind, there's no arc for Fraser wherein he learns not to do this, because acting like she's an object is rewarded at every turn. When their boat is attacked, he saves the day by hurling her into the water without so much as asking:
And despite the fact that she's an accomplished Egyptologist and Fraser is a dummy with a bunch of guns, he doesn't want her help tracking down the titular mummy. In fact, he's so against the one expert in the group coming along that he violently hauls her into the bedroom and locks her inside.
It's not just women. (Sorry, woman. There's really only one.) The Arab characters are exclusively comprised of offensive stereotypes. They're either greedy and bloodthirsty ...
... or sniveling and treacherous (and played by a white guy) ...
... or generally non-people. When the Mummy shows up, almost everybody with brown skin falls under his spell.
So what do Fraser and the gang do? Keep in mind that these are all regular folks who are presently under a mind-controlling curse. Nevertheless, Fraser decides to mow them all down with his goddamn car.
Say what you will about the terrible Tom Cruise remake, but at least it didn't end with Tom hosing the blood and viscera of a bunch of innocent people off of his convertible.
Peter Jackson's King Kong Shows Pacific Islanders As ... Less Than Human
After making the Lord Of The Rings trilogy, it seemed as though Peter Jackson could do whatever he wanted. And what he wanted to do was remake King Kong, out of a childhood love for the film and, you have to imagine, partly because he's friends with Andy Serkis, and pretending to be CGI apes is pretty much that guy's jam.
The movie retells the already-problematic story of the original -- a bunch of Westerners journeying into a scary dark island full of primitive natives. But, bafflingly, Jackson somehow makes his movie even more racist than the 1930s version. Which, in a way, is impressive. The sequence in which they first encounter Skull Island's indigenous inhabitants is shot like a straight-up horror movie, with a little girl who inexplicably acts like a zombie.
An old woman then angrily hisses at Jack Black as if she'd just finished watching Gulliver's Travels.
When the rest of the natives show up, they're even more animalistic and murderous, seemingly for no reason. Jackson films these people as though they were literal monsters. Hell, filmmakers infused more humanity in the Xenomorph.
The tribe later infiltrates our heroes' ship and kidnaps Naomi Watts so they can sacrifice her to Kong -- not out of survival, as in the original, but because they seem to be getting some kind of voodoo high off of it.
Again, this regressive colonialist fantasy was made in the 21st century, meaning that turning The Hobbit into a bloated, bladder-testing trilogy of cartoons wasn't even the worst thing Peter Jackson has done in his career. (It's close, though.)
The Breakfast Club Suggests Groping And Verbally Abusing Teen Girls Is The Path To Romance
The years haven't been kind to a lot of John Hughes' catalogue -- like how Sixteen Candles is unabashedly racist, Beethoven is creepy as hell, and we're pretty sure Weird Science's assertion that magazines plus computers equal your very own supermodel probably doesn't hold up to modern technological scrutiny. Recently, Breakfast Club star Molly Ringwald wrote a piece about how difficult it was to watch the movie with her daughter in 2018. Specifically because of her unlikely beau, the John Bender character.
Bender doesn't even ease into his awfulness. Like five minutes into the movie, he suggests that they lock the door to rape Ringwald's character, Claire. How the hell did a Simple Minds song convince us this guy wasn't a monster?
The bulk of the movie consists of Bender harassing and verbally abusing Claire, cruelly embarrassing her for no reason.
The worst moment, which Ringwald highlights in her essay, comes when Bender is sneaking under the desks then stops to look up Claire's skirt, complete with a POV upskirt shot filmed in glorious Perv-O-Vision. This would all be bad enough, but then, one-upping the cringe factor, he shoves his damn face in her crotch.
The fallout of this scene? She calls him an asshole and, bizarrely, the only other female character thinks it's funny. As Ringwald points out, despite the fact that Bender faces no comeuppance for this and seemingly learns no lesson, his strategy of being a sociopathic turd works, and "he gets the girl in the end."
We haven't even mentioned the part where Claire gives Allison a complete makeover in order to impress Emilio Estevez ...
... which implies that women should completely overhaul their identity just to please some Coach-Bombay-like guy. It's also flat out ridiculous, because her pre-makeover look was objectively way cooler than that debutante shit she's made to wear.
You (yes, you) should follow JM on Twitter, or check out the podcast Rewatchability.
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For more ways Hollywood used to be ... questionable, check out 5 Movie Scenes That Aged In Unexpectedly Horrifying Ways and The 6 Most Accidentally Creepy Movie Romances.
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