Editor’s Note: Whether on screen or off, Hollywood can always be counted on to keep us entertained. This is especially true when it comes to politics. Join us each week as we shine the spotlight on Tinseltown’s A-listers and their whacky and sometimes inspiring takes on today’s current events.
The Craft: Legacy Getting Woke
It seems like each week, an old television series or movie is being remade. The goal here, it appears, is to take classics and turn them into something more politically correct for today’s overly sensitive and tolerant public. Take The Craft: Legacy, for instance. Vanity Fair described it as “a story of empowerment against oppression, rather than of power’s internal corruption.” For the 1996 Craft fans who watched teenage girls struggle with magic, causing a fellow female student’s hair to fall out over jealousy, this switch to righting the world of all wrongs is a significant change – and not necessarily for the better.
Fixing society’s flaws is evidently up to these four girls, who aren’t even old enough to vote. Instead of acting the average teenager, whose biggest concerns are boys, grades (sometimes), and friends, this shift to becoming social justice warriors – er, witches – is a bit of a letdown. As Vanity Fair wrote:
“From the first scene, it is established that these girls are aware of the social injustices ever surrounding people in America today, both the strangling claw of history and the present-tense clench of Trumpism.”
“In Legacy, they are mostly only agents of righteous change—always recognizing their failures of praxis, editing and apologizing as they go.”
The cast is diverse as well. Cailee Spaeny plays Lily, this version’s main character. Black actress Lovie Simone portrays Tabby. Frankie, an insecure girl with a hopeless crush on a boy, is played by Gideon Adlon.
Instead of trying to cast a love spell on a schoolboy, as they did in the 1996 movie, the girls decide to make the chauvinist Timmy (played by Nicholas Galitzine) into an upstanding woke male. “They have, in essence, made him into a model of a new kind of cis straight white man, one who is abashed of his privilege, stands up for the right causes,” Vanity Fair remarked.
In the classic, the girls learn the error of their ways (some of them) and that changing people using dangerous magic is not a good idea. People are who they are, and forcing them to love or be someone else doesn’t end with good consequences. With the remake, however, it seems it’s okay to change a person with magic – if it’s to help them get woke.
Being a Conservative in Hollywood
As Election Day rapidly approaches, how are our HollyWeird celebrities faring? Just how difficult is it to be a Republican in Tinseltown? What about those who claim the red side of the aisle, yet disapprove of the current commander in chief?
Frasier star Kelsey Grammer said being a Republican is like having “a target on your back.” James Woods retired from acting in 2017 after supporting Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) in 2016 and then Donald Trump. He said he had been blacklisted from Hollywood for his Republican views. Stacey Dash noted it has been complicated ever since she announced she was conservative. “You’re only tolerated if you fit their liberal profile. I’ve been blacklisted. I don’t even get to auditions,” she explained.
Candace Cameron Bure left The View after only two seasons, saying, “That was a super tough job … you always feel like you’re fighting to speak your opinion.” Although a Republican, she said in 2016, “I am disappointed in my party.”
The Governator himself, Arnold Schwarzenegger, is a Republican. But he isn’t happy with Trump’s policies when it comes to the Golden State. In 2018, he said he was glad the president had only made one trip to California: “Look, I mean the very fact that he doesn’t want us to write-off our state tax is a direct attack on Californians … I don’t think he cares about California and I think California doesn’t care about him.”
But then there are the celebrities who either have enough clout or don’t give a hoot – or both – who proudly and vocally support the president. Clint Eastwood is a prominent Republican (who would argue with Dirty Harry?) who said about Trump: “He’s onto something because secretly everybody’s getting tired of political correctness.” And then there’s outspoken singer-songwriter Joy Villa, who openly supports the president. She even showed up to the 2017 Grammy Awards wearing a mermaid gown with “Make America Great Again” emblazoned down the front of the red, white, and blue dress. In a tweet, she said, “America is the greatest country in the world and @realDonaldTrump will go down in history as the GREATEST leader in world history.” And we can’t forget KISS lead singer Gene Simmons, who predicted a landslide re-election back in 2018 and who, in 2019, said Trump has “forever changed” politics and that the world had “never been better.”
Cheers and Jeers
Sometimes, HollyWeird players make headlines for silly or bizarre happenings, so here is a collection of newsworthy doings — honorable and dishonorable — by the tenants of Tinseltown.
Sarah Silverman and “righteousness porn.”
The comedian, who recently went nude to instruct people how to vote, called cancel culture “righteousness porn” that pushes people towards hate groups. During a recent podcast, she warned:
“…without a path to redemption, when you take someone, you found a tweet they wrote seven years ago or a thing that they said and you expose it and you say, ‘This person should be no more. Banish them forever.’ They’re going to find some place where they are accepted. And it’s not going to be with progressives, which ironically means ‘to be changed; progress.’”
The comedian argued that people need “a path to redemption,” or they’re going to go to where they will be welcomed and accepted, which she termed the “dark side.” She added, “do we want people to be changed? Or do we want them to stay the same, to freeze in a moment we found on the internet from 12 years ago? And so we can point to ourselves as right and them as wrong.”
Tune in next week to see what else Tinseltown has planned.
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Read more from Kelli Ballard.
