Okay so full disclosure: I haven't seen the movie "Don't Look Up." I don't have much patience for movies; I tend to reduce the whole of a movie to the director's viewpoint, and resent the restrictions upon my imagination imposed by the medium of film (as opposed to print, in which I am obliged to imagine nearly everything depicted).

When the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy first came out in movie theaters, I watched each one with a certain enjoyment while telling myself "okay, here's Peter Jackson's rendition of Gandalf, the Hobbits, the Dwarves, the Elves, the Balrog, Lothlorien, and so on." When movies based on books are released, this is how I read them.

I also sat in judgment upon each of the movies because I could in each instance compare the plots of the movies to the plots of the books. When the director Peter Jackson came out with three movies depicting "The Hobbit," some time after the Lord of the Rings movies came out, I did that also, though I did notice that in the middle movie Jackson was trying extra-hard to overcome Tolkien's boys-club mentality. Apparently Tolkien (the historical individual, born 1892, died 1973) never let go of his boys-club mentality, not even given that he did love his wife Edith, and maybe not even in reflection upon his experiences in World War I. Most of Tolkien's fantasy world is about depictions of men. It's not surprising -- most of written history is about depictions of men. At any rate, Peter Jackson thought something ought to be done about this, insofar as he was going to make movies about all of it. And so he did.

At any rate, my criticisms of movies with books applies to movies without them. Why would I want to sit through a movie when I could get a much more creative experience reading the screenplay?

The most I've committed to any of this, so far, is by reading the reviews, and reading the plot summary on Wikipedia. There has, by the way, been a critique of the critics by Joshua Sperber, which I found on Counterpunch.

And then you have Nathan J. Robinson, who argues even more forcefully in praise of the movie and in criticism of the critics. In his piece in Current Affairs, "Critics of Don't Look Up Are Missing The Entire Point," Robinson tells us some good things about this movie:

1) David Sirota is a co-writer of the screenplay.

2) It criticizes our sold-out mass media, and in many of the right ways.

3) It criticizes our politicians, and in many of the right ways.

4) It criticizes our billionaires, and in many of the right ways.

5) Robinson summarizes:

I can tell that a leftist, rather than a liberal, was behind the storyline for this film, precisely because it does not say what some reviewers think it does. This is not the film Idiocracy, depicting us all as dumb consumerist sheeple. This is a film with great faith in humanity, and cynicism only about the institutions we have built and the particular people who hold power.

These are high praises indeed.

'Course, if you read Counterpunch, you'll catch a full debate on the merits and drawbacks of this movie. The Counterpunch debate includes Kenn Orphan's positive review, with criticisms, and Manuel Garcia Jr.'s positive review, Tony Christini's contextualization of the movie and of its director Adam McKay, and Thom Hartmann, who really liked it and thinks the message needs to be broadened.

On the flip side, there is Jim Driscoll, who argues:

Having worked full-time to limit the ongoing climate catastrophe for the last ten years, I was deeply disappointed in the new movie, “Don’t Look Up!” It is a funny bit of social satire and certainly worth watching if you already pay Netflix to distract you from reality. However, I had been told by other climate activists that this movie would make a difference to our movement. I can’t imagine how.

And you have Michael Donnelly, who argues:

Its scattershot messaging will NOT lead to any major reordering of our carbon-intensive – what Dick Cheney called our – “non-negotiable American Way of Life.” Neither will it change the minds of the Endless Growth advocates; won’t change the rush to extract minerals from and cover over more habitat for electrons; won’t end new Oil Leases or end our tens of billions in subsidies for the billionaires’ “Green” energy scams, rockets and other space junk any more than Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” did.

And here's a very negative review which deals with many of the same issues.

If you want to read about the quotidian critics of this movie, the people who criticized it for stupid reasons, you can find the links in Robinson's piece, and in the Counterpunch pieces I've linked here. The Roger Ebert legacy website critic gave this movie one and a half stars, in a review that can be summarized as "I didn't like it."

To summarize: "Don't Look Up" is a blockbuster movie. People will do what they do when they watch and discuss blockbuster movies. So here's my suggestion: perhaps for his next movie Adam McKay could do a social critique of the Nice Liberals with Big Egos. Those who remember my diaries of 2020 remember this phrase. It should be the center of Adam McKay's next movie.

The Nice Liberals with Big Egos make the most sense in the context of the American electoral system. They think that the difference between Democrats and Republicans is a difference between life and death. That's fine -- this is a free country, believe what you want. They also, however, believe that the key to this difference, the salvation that lies for us if we elect a government without Republicans, lies with them. It doesn't. The American electoral system decides (D) or (R), one way or another, by counting the votes of that segment of the American public which frets by telling itself: "gee, Democrat or Republican, which one should I vote for, I just don't know!" Those are the SWING VOTERS, and it is THEY, and NOT the LEFT, nor the LIBERALS, who decide American elections. (This is of course true insofar as there is something to be decided -- there are those who argue, with some amount of credibility, that it really doesn't matter if you vote (D) or (R), you'll get the same result anyway.) Yet the Nice Liberals with Big Egos continue to believe that it is THEY who make the big difference in American politics. They don't.

The movie, by which I mean the future Adam McKay movie I'm proposing here, will be about the American two-party system, and the fact that the best it could do last year was to get Joe Biden elected President. (Meanwhile, the Nice Liberals with Big Egos were getting ready to either blame the Left for Biden's defeat or praise the Left for his victory, when it was clear that the Left would have had no part in either outcome.)

It will also be about the Nice Liberals with Big Egos, who spend their time arguing the merits and drawbacks of blockbuster movies when the real effort is to be found with those who are busy creating an alternative to the two-party system. Let's do it before our world dies.