I don’t mean Wicked: For Good (Universal, 11.21), which may or may not be worth seeing. I mean the giggly, gushy Cynthia Erivo + Ariana Grande award-season tour, phase one of which nearly finished me off a few months ago. I’m exhausted just thinking about it.

I’ve been saying for years that franchise movies don’t respect the idea of really and truly meeting your maker…the inevitable, inescapable reality of existence vaporizing like that…a sudden gasp and then nothing…the spirit rising one way or another…no dodging or putting it off.

Which is precisely what big-budget bullshit movies do time and again — they dodge, delay, sidestep or otherwise ignore the grim reaper because they want to keep reaping those Joe and Jane Popcorn dollars so forget all that biological end-of-the-road stuff. Fuck finality.

The “death” of Daniel Craig‘s 007 four years ago was, of course, bullshit — a symbolic gesture for the #MeToo crowd to momentarily savor, and then forget soon after. The Ballerina return of Keanu Reeves‘ John Wick, despite having bought the farm two years ago in John Wick 4: Even More Bullshit, meant nothing one way or the other.

And it’s all basically the fault of the nihilistically-inclined John Carpenter…Carpenter of the late ’70s was the first disser and disrespecter of death, and the idea of a character (male or female, hero or villain) breathing his or her last hasn’t been the same since.

Variety‘s Owen Gleiberman: “In movies, you can trace the trend of what we might call Death Lite back to the moment in 1978 that established the if-it-makes-money-bring-it-back paradigm: the ‘death’ of Michael Myers at the end of Halloween.

“He gets shot six times and falls off a balcony, lying on the ground, joining the ranks of half a century’s worth of movie monsters who are destroyed by the forces of good. Seconds later, though, he is gone; his body has vanished. In essence, that one moment set up the entire arbitrary nature of movie sequel culture. You can draw a direct line from the return of Michael Myers to the resurrection of John Wick, all done in the name of fan service.

“But why does it feel like all this ritual undercutting of killing is killing us? You might say: What’s so bad, really, about taking characters who are this beloved and bringing them back to life?

“In a sense, nothing. Yet the subtle cumulative effect of it has been to create the sensation that a movie no longer has a true beginning and end, that it lacks what the Greeks called the dramatic unity of action. In Old Hollywood, movies had that; in the New Hollywood of the ’70s, they had it as well. But the death-that-isn’t-really-death syndrome feeds the perception that movies are now, more and more, just a perpetual blob of time-killing, with nothing at stake.

“And that has an insidious way of sanding down the inner morality of pop culture, and maybe of our society. In fact, I’d argue that all this ‘miraculous’ resurrection has begun to raise the question: If death in the movies is no longer permanent, if it no longer means anything, then does anything mean anything?”

In Thursday’s riff about the Good Night, and Good Luck CNN telecast (tonight at 7 pm), I explained, for the benefit of the HE commentariat dumbshits, an obvious parallel between the political climates of the red-scare, Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy-dominated 1950s and the recently concluded peak era of woke terror (2018-2024).

Edward R. Murrow’s famous anti-McCarthy expose, which aired on March 9, 1954, ridiculed McCarthy’s argument that if a person disagreed with or called into question McCarthy’s witch-hunt tactics, then he or she must be considered a Communist dupe or sympathizer or perhaps even an actual, card-carrying pinko.

Likewise, if a person had issues with woke fanaticism and the temerity to question its theology between ’18 and ’24 (institutionalized DEI, identity issues above everything else, #MeToo cancellations, fat is beautiful, pregnant men, Lily Gladstone for Best Actress, the power and the glory of being LGBTQ and especially trans (particularly for children of high-profile industry celebrities), the Gothams and Spirits embracing gender-free acting categories, the 1619 Project as absolute gospel, drag shows in elementary schools, presentism or the historically absurd casting of POCs in certain historical settings, Woody Allen labelled a monster, tearing down statues of Abraham Lincoln and George Washington, older straight white guys deemed inherently evil, men competing in women’s sports, half-excusing the George Floyd riots)…if, God forbid, you had problems with any of this you were presumed to be a bad person — perhaps a closet racist or homophobic or transphobic or at the very least a social undesirable, and therefore deserving of political and professional punishment.

George Clooney‘s head is ummistakably in the right place as far as Good Night, and Good Luck‘s tribute to Murrow’s balls and backbone are concerned, but how did Clooney the industry player respond to the climate of fear and intimidation fostered by Hollywood wokeism over the last few years?

I’ll tell you how he responded to it. He completely capitulated. Clooney and partner Grant Heslov pretty much said aloud to the Stalinist mobthink wokeys, “We’re with you!…we agree!…tell us how we can most effectively grovel!”

Clooney and Heslov showed their inclusion-mandate colors two or three years ago when they cast The Tender Bar. To film a tale about a young lad and fledgling writer, called “JR Maguire” and based on journalist-author J.R. Moehringer (played by Tye Sheridan), who was raised within a German-Irish community in Manhasset, Long island, George and Grant bent over backwards by not casting birds-of-a-feather actors in a couple of key roles — the 10 year-old version of Moehringer and a Fairfield County-residing whitebread lass whom the real-life Moehringer fell in love with while enrolled at Yale.

The basic rule of thumb was “the less white, the more wokey and therefore goody goody.”

In my 10.10.21 review, I wrote that The Tender Bar “is partly undone by a pair of surreal casting decisions, one of which makes the first 40% of the film feel seriously out of whack.

“I’m speaking of the casting of young Daniel Ranieri, a kid who hails from some kind of swarthy Mediterranean heritage, as the 10 year-old version of Tye Sheridan, who, like Moehringer in actuality, is the biological son of a German/Irish paleface couple (Lily Rabe, Max Martini).

“It would be one thing if Ranieri was adopted, but there’s NO WAY IN HELL this kid grows up to be Tye Sheridan.

“And then The Tender Bar doubles down by changing the identity of a wealthy Westport white girl named Sydney, whom Moehringer fell in love with during his time at Yale in the mid ’80s and who represents the unattainable ideal for a working-class kid from Manhasset…Clooney changed Sydney from a blonde, Daisy Buchanan-like character with a small nose, ample breasts and whiter-than-white parents (her father is described by Moehringer as Hemingway-esque) into a ravishing woman of color (Briana Middleton) and her parents into an interracial couple (mom is played by Quincy Tyler Bernstine).

“This is yet another example of casting by way of virtue-signaling, and particularly Clooney, Heslov and producer Ted Hope wanting to groove along with the white-disapproving ethos of progressive Hollywood.

“I grew up in Wilton and Westport, and I personally knew of one couple of color (opera singer Betty Jones, a friend of my mom’s, and her husband) and heard about no interracial couples at all. That’s not to say there were none, but if they existed in the Wilton-Westport-Weston region they were very under-the-radar.

“For a working-class Manhasset kid to fall head over heels in love with a rich, blonde, unattainable goddess from Westport…that works, that fits, I’ll buy that. But Tender Bar’s version of Sydney and her parents is insincere presentism — it has no reality current, certainly in a 35 year-old context.

“And frankly? People from scruffy working-class towns like Manhasset weren’t exactly known for being racially progressive or attuned to color-blind attitudes. This is the ‘70s and ’80s we’re talking about. Those boozy guys in The Dickens would have definitely raised an eyebrow if Sheridan’s J.R. character had shared the particulars about his Yale dream lover. They wouldn’t have ‘said’ anything, but they would have definitely, you know, cleared their throats.”

Boiled down: You can’t kowtow to the wokeys in the early 2020s and then turn around and produce a period play that says “Edward R. Murrow was a hero and a man of bedrock principle for refusing to kowtow to Sen. Joseph McCarthy!”

Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone posted about this general subject yesterday (6.6) — worth reading.