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.)
Yeah, a lot of Batman just… he seems like such a DICK. A GRIMY dick. Who skulks in corners miserably.
I’m unlikely to get the issue (money is at a massive premium right now–I’d rather save the three, four bucks I’d get on the issue to buy a used book or even better, new soap) but I’ll see if any of my other comics buddies have it.
Current Batman still sulks quite a bit (to be fair, if I were captured, dehydrated, and on LSD for a week straight I would probably sulk too), but so far he’s only slipped into Batdick mode once (at least in his main series, I haven’t kept up with Detective, Justice League, or Batman and Robin), and Nightwing called him on it immediately.
Batman: The Dark Knight is currently making him flat out sweet, actually. http://lauralot89.tumblr.com/post/29804782027/comic-panels-that-make-me-unreasonably-happy
I really hope one of the mandates of the relaunch was “Don’t make Bruce Wayne a dick.”
Lauralot – I haven’t read comics in, gods, must be pushing forty years, but that Batman page is really great. Thanks for the link!
Glad to be of service! I’m kind of obsessed with comics, so it’s always good to know that my fangirl rambling is of use to someone.
@Falconer,
Oh yeah, you’re right. That was Spiderman’s aunt he saved. It’s been a while since I saw it. But he was a nice enough hero, he would save an elderly person he doesn’t know, too. I haven’t seen the 2012 version. I’m annoyed that in the new one, his webs come from cartridges and not from his own wrists. That just seems like too big of a hassle to me because he’ll have to worry about replacing web cartridges. Ha ha ha, I’m aggravated on the behalf of a fictional character.
I must admit to missing the box of comics I had as a kid … I’d love to read ’em now and actually get the stories a bit better! :/
Lauralot, currently reading your tumblr. Dammit. It’s interesting. It’s 2am why are there shinies on the internet?!
RE: Lauralot
Aw, that is nice. Yeah, my memory of Batman is stuff like Year Zero where he smacks Robin and doesn’t apologize for it. (One of the kids here likes to play a sad game where zie keeps track of how many times adults in media explicitly apologize for wrongdoing. It’s… sad how rare it actually happens outside of kids media.)
Also think I shall follow you on teh tumbler thing.
Aw, thanks, everybody.
Yeah, the new 52 was what got me seriously into comics. Before that, I would read short series and stuff because my OCD couldn’t deal with starting at #26218. I do remember I read Gotham City Sirens, Green Arrow, and Zatana because I could start them at #1.
My memories of Batman start at the Tim Burton film and Batman: The Animated Series. So, the Batman I knew was always pretty awesome. I was him on Halloween at least twice.
Are we long-lost siblings?
@Lauralot: I don’t know. Maybe one of us is from a from parallel universe?
(I don’t know how quotes work, sorry)
Hey guys I just read a review of Skyfall.
I feel ill.
I WILL NOT SEE THAT FILM!
Uh oh. Beloved and I were looking forward to seeing that film…
*goes to check reviews*
Also, the shock people had that a man would think the way the editor did. Wait, was the presidential election and all the Republican bullshit said my imagination or did everyone watch the news with the sound turned off?
It also includes scenes of women in hijab protesting – one is even carrying a gun! This is obviously some liberal PC feel-good crap, because everyone knows Iranians don’t let their women out of the house. Some feminist probably made the director put in some “strong women”.
And then the feminists invented a metrosexuality-powered time machine and traveled back to the 1970s to create the news footage from which those scenes are directly copied. It is the only explanation.
Of all the movies out in theaters right now, the only one with a strong, aggressive heroine of the type this guy complains about is “Brave.” That movie came out six months ago and is still doing solid box office (it’s #20 this weekend), which suggests that there’s a much bigger demand for movies with heroic female leads than Hollywood is meeting. The unmanly perfidious feminist cabal down in L.A. needs to get to work.
Skyfall is really good, but… all I can say is that OBLIQUE SPOILERS a thing happens in it that makes me much less interested in seeing the next Bond movie.
Check this wiki entry out:
In 2012, after new publisher Frank Parlato became the owner of the Niagara Falls Reporter, one of the long-time contributors had no other choice other than to quit. In a story[1] related through Roger Ebert on his Chicago Sun-Times website, the Reporter’s former movie critic explained that the new publisher had a fear of empowered women, and also of movies with a strong woman as the lead character. The story had many hits around the world, and its readers were massively shocked by the statement of Frank Parlato in one of his emails: “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. ”
And this…
http://blogs.suntimes.com/foreignc/2012/11/post-2.html
In which Parlato is referred to as “a guy who has no professional journalistic experience, and a warped view of humanity, does not like strong women.”
I’ve heard enough mixed stuff about Skyfall that I am not really jazzed about seeing it.
Besides, now that I’ve seen Wreck-It Ralph I feel like I don’t need to see any other movie ever because I’ve already seen the one most specifically custom-tailored to make me love it.
If I see the new publisher for the Niagara Falls Reporter, I’ll be sure to give him a swift kick to the crotch. Wearing Doc Martins. Under custom forged iron boot-covers. Or would that not be manly enough for him?
@Shaenon
I bet I saw the same bit. Does it have to do with scotch?
@inurashii
I liked Wreck-It Ralph well enough to see it twice in theaters. The second time was today. It may be even better the second time, because knowing how it plays out, you can pick up on all the bits of foreshadowing strewn throughout the movie.
I’m just…so…fucking impressed with Disney right now. They’ve set a new bar for themselves in the current Revival period. For plotting, characterization, and worldbuilding. I can’t think of another pure Disney film that goes to such lengths to show us an alternate world and explain the rules that govern it.
I haven’t seen Snow White and the Huntsman, but Mirror Mirror was surprisingly awesome imo. The women are the strong characters with “weaker” male characters (I contest that they are weak characters, but from a power level standpoint they are lower). But part of the point is to not judge by appearances. I was mostly impressed because it kept a fairy tale/ Disney feel while subverting most of the themes of the original Disney Snow White.
Anyway… this makes me want to see the Snow White and the Huntsman, though I doubt I’ll like it as much as Mirror Mirror. MM also has the benefit of being an excellent movie for my young daughters where SWatH is probably too scary. But if it makes MRAs mad… 😀
Wreck it Ralph was pretty great. I also got a pro-neural a-typical message from the movie which made me happy. Maybe reading too much into it but I don’t care!
I didn’t super care for Skyfall, but I am not a huge Bond fan. I am too nitpicky for most action movies and Bond ones seem particularly lazy about building a sensical plot.
Whenever I see the word Huntsman I think of the big spider of that name in these parts … not a name to get me into a cinema! 😀
I really don’t want to see one of those spiders on the big screen.