Until recently, Michael Calleri was a movie reviewer for the Niagara Falls Reporter. Indeed, he’d been reviewing movies for the weekly paper for more than 20 years. But then the paper got sold to a new owner, and Calleri found that many of the reviews he sent in weren’t making their way into print. He contacted the new publisher, who was also the new editor, and after several surreal conversations and a number of emails, he received this explanation from his new boss:
i have a deep moral objection to publishing reviews of films that offend me. snow white and the huntsman is such a film. when my boys were young i would never have allowed them to go to such a film for i believe it would injure their developing manhood. if i would not let my own sons see it, why would i want to publish anything about it?
Yeah, I think we can all see where this is going.
snow white and the huntsman is trash. moral garbage. a lot of fuzzy feminist thinking and pandering to creepy hollywood mores produced by metrosexual imbeciles.
I don’t want to publish reviews of films where women are alpha and men are beta.
where women are heroes and villains and men are just lesser versions or shadows of females.
i believe in manliness.
not even on the web would i want to attach my name to snow white and the huntsman except to deconstruct its moral rot and its appeal to unmanly perfidious creeps.
i’m not sure what headhunter has to offer either but of what I read about it it sounds kind of creepy and morally repugnant.
with all the publications in the world who glorify what i find offensive, it should not be hard for you to publish your reviews with any number of these.
they seem to like critiques from an artistic standpoint without a word about the moral turpitude seeping into the consciousness of young people who go to watch such things as snow white and get indoctrinated to the hollywood agenda of glorifying degenerate power women and promoting as natural the weakling, hyena -like men, cum eunuchs.
Dude,”eunuch” is not the preferred nomanclature. Mangina-American, please.
Oh, but the new boss made clear that he was open to some sorts of reviews from Calleri:
If you care to write reviews where men act like good strong men and have a heroic inspiring influence on young people to build up their character (if there are such movies being made) i will be glad to publish these.
i am not interested in supporting the reversing of traditional gender roles.
i don’t want to associate the Niagara Falls Reporter with the trash of Hollywood and their ilk.
it is my opinion that hollywood has robbed america of its manliness and made us a nation of eunuchs who lacking all manliness welcome in the coming police state. …
In short i don’t care to publish reviews of films that offend me.
if you care to condemn the filmmakers as the pandering weasels that they are…. true hyenas.
i would be interested in that….
So, yeah, apparently the Niagara Falls Reporter is now being edited by a barely literate misogynist who seems like he just stepped out of the comments section of The Spearhead.
You can read the rest of Calleri’s story over at the Chicago Sun-Times.
(Thanks to several alert Man Boobz readers for pointing me to this story.)
That’s funny, because I don’t like films where men are alpha and women are beta, where men are heroes and villains and women are just lesser versions or shadows of males.
It’s telling that his two examples of man-oppressing films are “Headhunters,” which is a thriller about two male characters, and “Snow White and the Huntsman,” a movie that machos-up the original fairy tale to the point that the Huntsman gets top billing. He can’t even find an actual film with perfidious weakling men!
I wonder if he thinks Magic Mike portray alpha men, or if it’s really pandering to the “metrosexual” imbeciles. These questions keep me up at night.
If anyone needs an antidote to this garbage, if you remember the Littlest Jedi (the girl who was being bullied for liking Star Wars a couple years ago) she got some help with her Halloween costume this year: http://www.chicagonow.com/portrait-of-an-adoption/2012/10/aren%E2%80%99t-you-a-little-short-for-a-stormtrooper-star-wars-fans-worldwide-join-to-build-a-halloween-costume-for-one-lucky-little-girl/
@drst: Aw, that’s awesome. I love the 501st.
“I believe in male supremacy.” There, fixed it. Also, I am offended that a newspaper publisher and editor has such disregard for proper capitalization.
Manliness is such a fragile construct that newspapers must carefully filter out any reference to fiction that does not support it. It doesn’t really get much stupider than that.
Checked out redbox for movies with “strong male leads”:
Spiderman?
Hard Flip? (maybe not though the male lead has feelings probably not manly enough)
Fire With Fire? It has bruce willis must be MANLY
Maximum Conviction? (crappy film, but VERY manly)
Werewolf: The Beast Among Us? (another crappy film, but has ALL male leads)
In theaters:
Taken 2 (no idea haven’t seen it, but taken was all about a man saving a girl; that is manly right?)
Skyfall (007 how much more manly can you get 😉 )
The Man with the Iron Fists (most certainly manly, but even with the sexuality outfits of the women they do know how to fight to maybe not MANLY enough. Alpha female +Alpha male probably equals feminazi BS).
I kinda get the feeling that the only films this man would like is action films. So, I’m ignoring most other genres.
As far as females with alpha females and beta males didn’t see a whole lot that qualfied. Sometimes men had to share the spotlight (avengers), but not a many where men were beta to womens alpha.
Sorry about my issues with the english language above. I’m very tired.
There is this great Stephenson quote about pretense and how it is like papier mache houses that require constant maintenance lest they melt away in the rain.
drst: That is a lovely story.
What planet does he live on? Hollywood glorifies white men so much its ridiculous. Even many films with “strong female characters” only have a few other female characters of note in a cast of males. Not to mention the fact that women of color are an even rarer find as leads in Hollywood films.
What
A
Wanker
…
Oy.
I don’t think this guy knows anything about hyenas, as he’s pretty much reciting from the scavenger/parasite narrative in which hyenas are whinging wusses who live to steal garbage from the mighty, manly lions (if he knew that the lionesses did all the work, would he see it as a good thing, or a bad thing?). If he knew spotted hyenas — the ones everybody thinks of when they hear the word “hyena” — were female-led, he’d have talked about it; he’s just that blunt, obsessed, and mentally unmoderated.
@Melody
I guess Clerks could qualify as a non-action film with a beta male, and alpha female.
I thought Headhunters was an overall entertaining film, but it’s idiotic and mere male wish-fulfilment that the main character (who’s a complete douche) ends up finding out that his super hot wife (whom HE seems to have married mostly for her looks) actually loves him for himself and not his money. Like, seriously? You have weird taste, lady.
But I suppose that since the main character is something of a beta desperately trying to be alpha… and he ends up killing a true alpha male… (at least I think you might interpret things that way if you’re inclined to using “alpha” and “beta” about human beings of the male sex)… I suppose you might consider it a threat to manliness.
Reblogged this on iheariseeilearn and commented:
‘Alpha’/feminist women intimidate Niagara Falls new publisher/editor, he believes in ‘Manliness’:
A blog post written about the publisher of the Niagara Falls Reporter. My favorite line: “Frank Parlato is Pope of the Church of the Space-gays”
http://www.battleofcali.com/2012/7/24/3185566/frank-parlato-hates-babies
And you just know he’s not talking about young female people having their character built up, don’t you?
I felt that Skyfall had serious issues with its female characters. I’d talk more about what those are but I’m sure lots of people still haven’t seen the movie
There is occasionally a glitch when I try to get in here where my Android keeps reloading and reloading. It’s only this blog. Thought I’d say so because sometimes things like this are a harbinger of monkey business.
I’d call this guy a piece of Fifties backlash, except in the Fifties, we could punctuate and spell.
I had the same initial reaction, and then I thought about the source. Ol’ Frank probably thinks that watching men fire heavy guns and kick people is enriching for young women, too. Girls learn “hey, dudes do heroic stuff!” If there’s a damsel in distress in the film (which is usually the case), then they get to have a female role model, too. It becomes, “hey, dudes do heroic stuff while ladies sit passively and wait for the hero-action.” If the villain manages to kill the damsel before the hero arrives, a girl learns another valuable lesson: “Don’t choose the wrong hero.”
Also, I read the blog post Stuffed Fantod linked. Holy cow, Frank Parlato is nuts. And inconsistent:
If that’s the case, why is he fussing over movie reviews? Or are words only harmless opinion, protected by freedom of speech, when one of his columnists throws out some homophobic snark at the end of a piece about hockey fights?
More to the point, why would anyone who doesn’t believe that words have power over people want to edit a newspaper?
I followed the link and sent it on to a couple of people who might be interested. It also has a bearing on the dextrification and presstitution of the media generally.
So. A movie based on an old fairytale that utilizes extremely old tropes about virtuous virgins and the evil stepmothers who hate them is a feminist plot to make MEN feel bad about themselves?! WHAT THE FUCK.
For the movies with a male hero saving the damsel in distress, the main message I picked up on was that a woman has to be very pretty and innocent to be “worthy” of rescue. But I noticed how the women in those movies don’t do anything to help themselves besides call out for the hero, too. The Disney version of Snow White is a good example. I haven’t seen this new one, but if it annoys MRA’s, I might want to.
One thing that really stuck out to me from Spiderman was how he would rescue all sorts of people, not just young, pretty women or people that represent innocence. He saved an elderly woman from falling, even though he had no romantic interest in her. As a person, her life was inherently valuable and worthy of rescue. He later saved a bus full of people of all types, not just nuns or children (who in movies, represent innocence).