Outstanding Red Team, Outstanding

Get you a case of beer for this one.

Thanks to your hard work and dedication, Both Siderism is slowly becoming what we have always known it to be.  A joke.  A fairy tale that quibbling fence straddlers tell themselves to avoid having to pick a side or look in the mirror.  And that critique is now getting into the cultural groundwater. 

How do I know this?

Behold, the Vulture review of Green Book:

Green Book Flopped. But Who Was It Supposed to Be For?

So why is Green Book tanking when it stars two fine actors -- Mahershala Ali and Viggo Mortensen -- and did very respectably at the Toronto Film Festival?

Do American audiences still want a movie like Green Book? To many, the answer seemed obvious back in September, when, following its premiere at the Toronto Film Festival, Peter Farrelly’s odd-couple seriocomedy won the Audience Award and was deemed an Oscar front-runner by the small set of prognosticators who are now the first line of assessment when it comes to fall contenders. ... It might not charm all critics, the early thinking went, but it was clearly going to be a crowd-pleaser.

Because... (emphasis added):

To understand why, it’s necessary to take a closer look at Green Book’s strategic and timeworn take on racism — a “we all have something to learn” approach that, on paper, may mark it as both a reaction to the polarization of the Trump era and a symptom of the both-sides-ism that often defines it...

Aha!

And...

Green Book is a but also movie, a both sides movie, and in that, it extends a 50-year-plus tradition of movies that tell a story about American racism that has always been irresistibly appealing, on and offscreen, to that portion of white Americans who see themselves as mediators. They’re the reasonable, non-racist people poised halfway between unrepentant, ineducable racists on one side and, on the other, black people who, in this version of the American narrative, almost always have something to learn themselves.  

In other words, this is the perfect David Brooks movie.  And that audience just keeps getting smaller and less relevant every year.

Good work, team.


And remember:  #BothSidesDont

Behold, a Tip Jar!