George Clooney is the exception to the Hollywood rule.

The Oscar winner has taken pot shots at 1997’s “Batman & Robin” for years. He’s done so in good humor, recognizing the film is the weakest of the four original Bat features and his performance was less than stellar. 

And that’s being kind.

Generally, artists don’t like to trash their work in public. They tried their best at the time, and doing so often insults their fellow cast and crew members.

That’s the Hollywood normal, but there’s an asterisk to this belief.

Some stars have taken to attacking their own film for not being 21st-century “woke.”

• Jessica Chastain slammed “The Help,” saying the 2011 film shouldn’t have focused on her white character but the black “help” in the story.
• Jonah Hill has mocked his 2008 smash “Superbad” for its problematic humor.
• Tina Fey yanked episodes of “30 Rock” from circulation in 2020 for blackface-style sequences.

It’s often called Virtue Signaling, disparaging older content that doesn’t align with the latest groupthink. How can a film from the mid-90s hope to reflect life in 30-plus years?

It can’t, but that doesn’t stop the signaling. And it’s precisely what actress Roseanna Arquette just did.

The veteran actress called out Quentin Tarantino for using the “n-word” too often in his 1994 masterpiece “Pulp Fiction.

The catch?

Arquette co-starred in the film in question. That didn’t stop her from calling the “n-word” use “racist and creepy.”

“But personally, I am over the use of the N-word [in films]. I hate it. I cannot stand that [Tarantino] has been given a hall pass. It’s not art, it’s just racist and creepy.”

She’s not the only artist to criticize Tarantino for using the word excessively at times. It’s still odd when it comes from a co-star who appeared in the film in question.

The Oscar-winning director didn’t take long to respond, sharing this statement with media outlets.

“Dear Rosanna,

I hope the publicity you’re getting from 132 different media outlets writing your name and printing your picture was worth disrespecting me and a film I remember quite clearly you were thrilled to be a part of?

Do you feel this way now?

Very possibly.

But after I gave you a job, and you took the money, to trash it for what I suspect is very cynical reasons, shows a decided lack of class, no less honor.

There is supposed to be an esprit de corps between artistic colleagues.

But it would appear the objective was accomplished.

Congratulations

Q“

Of course, this is the same director who went out of his way to mock Paul Dano and Matthew Lillard late last year in public.

Still, Tarantino’s comments matter on a few fronts.

One, he’s calling out Arquette for ginning up media coverage. The actress isn’t in demand like she was in the 1990s, and her comments drew plenty of Legacy Media coverage.

Was that the plan all along?

Two, she could have reached out to him privately and shared her concerns with him. That might have led to a heartfelt exchange between fellow artists. Heck, she may have convinced him to tone down that awful word’s usage in the future.

Three, and most importantly? Tarantino defended his art. Sounds simple, but it’s not always the case. When USA Network put a trigger warning on “Goodfellas,” director Martin Scorsese refused to attack the policy or defend his work.

Nor did star Robert De Niro.

The trigger warning insulted the film by saying it was defamatory to Italian-Americans. “Goodfellas” deserved some protection, and the directorial legend and Oscar-winning actor couldn’t be bothered.

More recently, both Jodie Foster and Sir Anthony Hopkins said nothing publicly after their “Silence of the Lambs” co-star, Ted Levine, trashed their horror movie classic as being insensitive to trans people.

Some artistic complaints can be helpful and clarifying. It’s hard to defend casting Mickey Rooney as a stereotypically Asian man in 1961’s  “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” for example.

The use of the n-word in feature films demands a more nuanced conversation. When Tarantino deployed it in “Django Unchained,” the word captured its dehumanizing impact on black people during slave times.

Is it always necessary elsewhere? Artists can agree to disagree on the matter.

Calling out a fellow artist for its use in public, hoping for clicks and controversy, feels like a terrible way to do just that.

The post Quentin Tarantino Did What Foster, Scorsese and More Refused appeared first on Hollywood in Toto.

Canada has a system of agricultural marketing boards; they regulate the sale of dairy, eggs, poultry, and grains. At a Federal and Provincial level, they control the food supply. They fix prices and manage imports. Our Wheat Board has recently had a few of its wings clipped, but it is still in business, interfering with the free enterprise system.

Ordinarily, in the absence of such market interferences, free trade would be the policy most conducive to prosperity. We produce the products for which we have a comparative advantage, and interfere with the international division of labor as little as possible.

However, matters change with marketing boards. Is it possible that a second economically illiterate regulation may benefit us by (partially) reducing the impact of the first? Yes, without marketing boards, free trade is the ticket to economic well-being. But with them, is there a case for tariffs on grounds of economic development?

Here is the argument in favor of such a paradoxical hypothesis. We would be better off, actually, if we obtained from abroad products covered by these regulatory models, such as the aforementioned dairy, eggs, poultry, and grains. We could get them for less than the prices they are currently offered in Canada. We could then pay for them in effect with goods and services which were not so smothered by marketing boards. This new optimal but problematic change in purchasing patterns cannot be ruled out.

Let me clarify. Assume that without any milk or other such marketing board interferences, the optimal arrangement would be for us to drink 20 liters of this made-in-Canada fluid, and import 5 liters of it. But we have with this marketing board shot ourselves in our economic foot; we have purposefully rendered this industry less efficient than it otherwise would have been. Now, then, the optimal allocation between domestic and imported milk might become something in the order of 15 of the former and 10 of the latter.

How would we get to this better state of affairs, where we reduce our consumption of the home-grown variety? One way to do so would be to set up a subsidy on milk imports. Ordinarily, this would be economic anathema. However, all’s fair in love, in war, and now in international trade. To promote prosperity, we have to ameliorate the effect of these marketing boards. I do not favor this course of action. Two wrongs do not make a right. This subsidization policy brings with it the usual inefficiencies. But, as an insight as to just how bad marketing boards are, this constitutes food for thought.

Here is an analogy from a different realm of economics that makes a similar (paradoxical) point. Imagine you want to help tenants find more, better, cheaper accommodation. The socialist would say that the answer is rent control. Yet this, as we have seen time and again, has the opposite of your intended effects. It reduces the incentive of entrepreneurs to invest in rental housing. This reduces housing stock, and, as should surprise no one, raises rent levels and decreases space that tenants can occupy for a given dollar. Rather control the prices of everything else under the sun except residential rental units. Then, capital will come flowing into this one sector of the economy, to the benefit of tenants.

The point is that rent controls (like marketing boards) are so counterproductive that you can help tenants by doing the very opposite of them.

But what about the poor newly unemployed Canadian dairy farmers (and cows) if we buy more of our milk elsewhere? There are two solutions. The easy one: eliminate the milk and other such marketing boards, and render the Canadian dairy industry more efficient, more competitive, and its products less expensive. Other countries, too, interfere with their dairy industries. We cannot change that; but we can put our own economic house in order.

The tougher one: if conditions change, and our comparative advantage shifts away from milk toward something else, say, maple syrup, then the cows will have to “retire” and the ranchers shift to this other industry. There is precedent for that. We moved our economy away from horse and buggy products, away from manufacturing typewriters (remember them?) with no increase in unemployment; no chaos.

The logic of this argument, if not absolutely clear, is at least discernable. Ordinarily, Canada might well have a comparative advantage in these agricultural products. So, we should be importing very few of them, according to correct economic theory. But, now, with marketing boards, our efficiency in producing these items is lessened. So, we should be relying on more imports of them.

NEW YORK CITY — Mayor Zohran Mamdani has strongly condemned New Yorkers for making Muslims throw improvised explosive devices at them.