Of ‘The Slap,’ Zoe Kravitz & The Mainstream Zeitgeist


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Now, let me be clear — I’m trying to pick my words very carefully so I give maximum empathy to the African American community as a middle aged CIS white male. And, honestly, in an ideal world, I wouldn’t even touch this subject, but The Slap has now officially transcended pop culture to enter the mainstream zeitgeist.

As such, it’s a subject that is both very touchy and something that we need to talk about.

Ok, here’s what I believe is happening with The Slap. From what I can tell, the African American community wants to handle this event themselves. They want to process what happened in their own way and at their own speed. And, yet, at the same time a lot of white people are using The Slap to make points, some of them racist. This aggravates and antagonizes the African American community that is still in shock and doesn’t need the help of white people to figure out what it all means.

So, in a sense, I know The Slap may now have legs because a similar dynamic to the OJ Trial has begun to swirl around The Slap. The white community’s take on what happened and the African American community’s take on what happened are now beginning to diverge greatly.

While not all of the white outrage as to what happened is racist, a lot of it is. What’s more, a lot of fucking racist MAGA New Right assholes believe they can get away with using their outrage over The Slap for a blanket indictment of not just the African American community, but the white liberals of Hollywood, too.

Another sign that we’ve entered a new phase in the discourse around The Slap is people like Zoe Kravitz have come out in support of Chris Rock and Black Twitter has attacked her, pointing out her perceived hypocrisy on assault. I think it has something to do with Alexander Wang.

Zoe Kravitz

The nuance of Black Twitter’s anger towards Kravitz is something I continue to struggle with. Or, put another way, there’s something going on that I as a white CIS male don’t really have the right to root around in.

But, unfortunately for everyone in envolved, now that we’re in a new phase of Slap discourse, things are going to get more and more corrosive and divisive because white America is beginning to see what happened in a totally different way than African American community and people like Ms. Kravitz are stuck in the middle.

Or something. What do I know.

Anyway, I think The Slap is now going to simmer on the pop culture front and the law of unintended consequences is going to kick in. It will be interesting to see what the ultimate endgame for The Slap will be.

My Hot Take On ‘The Slap’


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

It takes a lot to shock me, but I was honestly shocked by Will Smith smacking Chris Rock. I was “watching” the Oscars via Twitter and when I first heard about it, I assumed that the two men were standing next to each other on stage when it happened.

When I realized that Smith had walked up, approached Rock and smacked him full on the face…oh my God.

After losing a lot of sleep staying up all night looking at Twitter, I assumed when I woke up this morning that things would be a lot worse than they actually turned out to be.

Twitter was not full of bad What Does It All Mean hot takes that saw everything through whatever political point someone was trying to make. So, I guess we can all be thankful for minor miracles.

But, in general here’s my hot take on this situation. The joke that Chris Rock said was tone deaf, but it wasn’t bad enough to deserve to be smacked in front of tens of millions of people. The risk of escalation was too great, if noting else. Now THAT would have been a disaster.

So, in a sense, I guess we can be thankful for once that we live in an era of post-accountability. It seems we’re just going to move on as if none of this happened, just like we do whenever we learn something shocking about Trump.

It’s interesting how all the dire predictions last night of 36 hours worth of takes dominating the public conversation have not come to be. We all wake up today and it’s a big meh. What that says about modern America, I don’t know.

An Unfilled Media Niche Exists


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

This little blog gets about 100 views a day, many of them from people apparently stalking me for some reason. But one thing seems to be true — the traffic for all my political ranting pales in comparison to my occasional showbiz observations.

As such, I have a hunch that there’s an unfilled niche — an aggressively snarky celebrity blog. Now, there are some caveats to this observation. The blog market is mature and the blog media sector is already awash in celebrity gossip and news. What’s more, you would have to compete against Instagram and Tik-Tok for people’s attention when it came to such things.

And, yet, if you were really unique in your hot celebrity gossip hot takes and kept a close on on Tik-Tok, I think you *might* be able to grow such a site organically. But, again, given how mature the blog industry is, it’s possible this is all a moot point.

I just needed to get that off my chest.

Kristen Stewart Looked Amazing At The Oscars


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Despite being an Old, I still long to get into fashion photography in some way before I finally shuffle off this mortal coil. I have an eye for beauty and it seems to me that the one place I could combine my love of beauty with photography would be the sweet spot of fashion photography.

But, for the time being, I’m going to have to focus on the five novel project I’m working on.

And, yet tonight, Kristen Stewart’s outfit at the Oscars caught my eye. She looked amazing! She looked very modern and classy. The black and white ensemble was stunning and she still managed to feature her “pins” as the Brits would say. Her stylist did a great job.

I Believe The Zendaya – Tom Holland Relationship Is A Lie

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I have no inside information, but the so-called “relationship” between Zendaya and Tom Holland seems like a bullshit PR stunt. I’m sure they like each other as friends and co-starts, but I just don’t see Zendaya dating someone like Holland. It doesn’t fit her vibe.

He’s just too nice.

Seems like Zendaya would want an older bad boy with a little bit more edge. And, as I understand it all the Spidermen in the franchise have “dated” their co-stars, so, lulz.

But I could be wrong. I usually am. It just seems like this relationship is a little too pat and convenient for everyone involved.

The Obvious Way To Fix The Oscars


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I love movies and I love the Oscars. I really like Vanity Fair’s podcast on the lead up to the telecast that I’ve been listening to. There’s a lot — a lot — of talk about how to fix the Oscars. ABC and the Academy are so desperate that they’ve even taken to not airing some of the awards in the live broadcast.

This is extremely misguided.

I’m not particularly clever in presenting the most obvious way to fix the Oscars. Sell the rights to a major streamer and make the Goddamn thing five hours long if need be. The era of the Oscars being as huge as the Superbowl is over. There is a core group of people who watch the Oscars and everyone else.

So it’s better to indulge the people who love the Oscars’ spectacle and glitz, rather than criming the program’s style in hopes that…skate borders might watch? What the what?

Anyway, by not adopting this idea, the Academy is only hurting itself. They’re in denial. With the rise of an extremely fragmented media landscape it’s just not as easy as it used to be to get the eyeballs for the telecast that it once was.

It will be interesting to see how long it takes for the Academy to succumb to the inevitable.

Movie Pitch: A Romcom Based On Digital Telepathy


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I have too much on my plate creatively to do anything with this, but here’s a fragment of a movie idea that someone, somewhere should do something with. The idea has a touch of magical realism to in a vein similar to The Enteral Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

Same same, but different.

The idea is that there’s an app that not only can read your mind, but also manipulate you. So, what happens is our hero keeps seeing a woman who is perfect for him, the love of his life, on his For You Page, but she lives in NYC. But he knows if he ever met her in person, they would fall in love — or at least he would.

So, the plot is something like, he studies the young woman, travels to NYC and they meet. He uses what he’s seen from her videos to strike up a relationship with her.

Now, this is the point where I don’t know what happens. I like the idea that the couple realizes that the app (a Tik-Tok clone) really is reading their minds and they have some sort of adventure together to prove this to the rest of the world.

Or something. Something like that.

Back to mulling my five thriller novels.

Mulling Jon Hamm’s Reboot Of Fletch



by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

One of my favorite easy read novels growing up was the Fletch series of mysteries. They’re a lot of fun and funny. So, I’m keenly interested in what Jon Hamm’s take on the character will be.

Image by EW Magazine

Apparently, he’s working on a new Fletch movie, “Confess, Fletch.” There are a lot of really great novels in the series. My personal favorite is “Fletch And The Man Who.” But all the novels are great because they’re so short you can finish them virtually in one setting and they’ve got a very wry sense of humor to them.

Of all the actors out there, I think Hamm is one of the better suited. But I think in an ideal world, a Fletch movie would be done by someone like Greta Gerwig. The movies have been a little too broad in their humor for my tastes and don’t really reflect the tone of the novels.

Anyway. I’m looking forward to it.

Hollywood Renaissance: Will The Russo-Ukrainian War Cause A Vibe Shift In Audience Appetites?


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

The way we’ll know if things are changing with movies is a war movie — or just a more serious movie in general — will suddenly blow up into blockbuster status out of the blue.

If the last time there was a major war in Europe is any indication, there’s a chance that we’re in for not just a War Movie Renaissance, but a Hollywood Renaissance. A portion of the Hollywood Gold Age — as I understand it — was right around 1937 – 1946.

Or, put another way, it’s possible that we’re in the middle of an entertainment vibe shift and we just don’t know it yet. Come to think of it, there were a lot of serious movies that became popular around the time of the height of the Vietnam War.

Of course, there is the risk that the exact opposite will happen — people, seeing how horrible reality is, run away into silliness and comedy. But even that would be better than the now overwrought and self-indulgent superhero movies.

And there are some caveats — because of the changes in showbiz, it could very well be the big streamers that reap the rewards of whatever vibe shift we may be about to undergo. It won’t be like the good olde days — it’s not like we’re going to leave home to go see a very good God Father 4 in the theatres.

Please give us movies that aren’t superhero movies.

The industry has changed so much that there might be a significant lag time between when it becomes clear that audience want something different than superhero movies and when Hollywood actually does anything about it. So, it could be just about when the “Great Reset” or “Fourth Turning” of 2024 – 2025 happens that we get to have a series of great movies to watch again.

All of this is very speculative. But one of my favorite quotes about Hollywood is, “Nobody knows nothing.”

Of Marketing These Five Thrillers


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I’m just daydreaming here, but I often find myself thinking about the marketing of these five novels and how that should change the novels themselves. One issue is, as it stands, the Olivia Munn-type character is the protagonist of only two of the novels. Then her son is the protagonist for two novels and then my Lisbeth Salander-type person is the hero of the last book.

This works, at least from a creative standpoint because I see the first three novels as a trilogy and the last two novels as the beginning a new series based around my personal interpolation of the Lisbeth Salander trope.

And, yet, at the heart of these five novels is the relationship between the Olivia Munn-type character and my Lisbeth Salander type character. But I sometimes find myself struggling with how all of this would be marketed. People want a character they know they’re going to come back to once they grow familiar with it and I wonder how marketing would deal with the shift in focus over the course of the series.

I personally think I’m overthinking things. The point is to tell a series of great stories that have an overall theme to them. I can’t get too worked up about the marketing of the stories if I do a good to great job telling the individual stories. And it’s not like people’s favorite character — if she becomes one — will be missing. She’ll still be there, it’s just the focus will be on her son, and, then, later a fucked up woman about Lisbeth Salander’s age in The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo.

Imagine Olivia Munn playing this type of character (to some extent) and that would be the protagonist two novels in this series and the series’ overall heart.

And, I want to be clear, my interpolation of the Lisbeth Salander trope is a variation on a theme. The two characters are dramatically different, to the point that, again, only for marketing purposes might their similarities be enough to highlight.

Anyway, I have a long ways to go before I have to worry about such things in real terms. I have to fucking finish an actual first draft, for Christ’s sake. But every time I get closer to a serious first draft, I get closer to not embarrassing myself.

It’s just taken much, much, much longer than I expected because apparently my storying telling ability sucked a lot more than I realized when I began this process a few years ago.