Hmmm. Or maybe there is another, less Newsmaxy reason?

Love the site and this article was grand. This line...

"Now people debate whether or not it's the best movie of all time."

...is insane. If people are seriously debating that Vertigo - lovely, but incredibly flawed Vertigo - is the best movie of all time? We are all lost.

--- End snarky rant ---

This was not good enough for this much investment in scholarship.

Unimaginative filmmaking? The article describes a trope - literally an unimaginative story shorthand fallback. This one doesn’t require any notion of human reality - it’s a crap shorthand to a male fantasy that objectifies women and adds no actual imagination to any story... lamenting the loss of simple mindedness seems counter-intuitive to the argument that awareness of this trope means “creative restriction”.

So, for years, films were openly racist, filled with damaging tropes. Do we miss those good old days too?

The article says know what you’re presenting and then provides a way to do it without lazy, false, damaging tropes. I do not understand this reaction.

Unimaginative filmmaking? The article describes a trope - literally an unimaginative story shorthand fallback. This one doesn’t require any notion of human reality - it’s a crap shorthand to a male fantasy that objectifies women and adds no actual imagination to any story... lamenting the loss of simple mindedness seems counterintuitive to the argument that awareness means “creative restriction”.

So, for years, films were openly racist. Do we miss those good old days too?

The article says know what you’re presenting and then provides a way to do it without lazy, false, damaging tropes. I do not understand this reaction.

Respectfully, one might argue that the single most scary part of these "past messed up decades" is how little people seem to understand that the exploitation described in the article is a damaging male fantasy trope. It hurts and denigrates people. We did this throughout the 80s (and before and since).

There's two sort of answers to your cancel question here - first, these films aren't "cancelled", but hopefully you see them through a new and more inclusive lens. Long Duk Dong was a horribly racist stereotype in a movie that also celebrated Anthony Michael Hall's date rape of a pretty drunk girl (16 Candles). Doesn't mean we cancel the movie, but the fact we DIDN'T NOTICE then was problematic, and that's the point. It's awareness.

Second, if you are trying to get work most studios and creative money sources pay attention to these things precisely because they don't want their new content (the stuff that should know better) to be cancelled. Because people are more aware. That's good thing. Watch some TCM and notice the horrible racist and sexist crap in old movies. We've moved on. That's good.

You can rail against it, but the criticism raised in the article is legit.