Review of the Movie "The Arroyo"

Update:

Just spent a bit of time perusing some reviews of the "documentary" about Cleopatra. I won't link to it. Just mentioning it here in the context of what Bill Whittle tried to accomplish a decade ago. It is also worth mentioning there was a movie that re-did Barbie. Yep, it was not well-received.

So there it is again. Just a whole lot of belly-aching, but doing absolutely NOTHING about it.

I tried. I contributed to the movie "Arroyo". Modestly contributed to it. If people would just get off their asses and DO something, good things MIGHT happen. But noooooooo. You've got all the belly-aching and nothing done about it. Indeed! We've got "conservatives" who would prefer to fight US than to fight Democrats!

the original post of 10/5/22 is directly below:

Hollywood Stasi, an old story

It appears that those Americans who oppose the powers-that-be cannot sustain a movement long enough for it to reach fruition. That is a fault that should be remembered first BEFORE you start bellyaching about the political left. We've been down this road many times before, yet the results seem to be the same. It is the continual drift to socialism, societal decay, and failure. The fault dear Brutus, may lie within us.

Nothing will change until there is a sustained movement that cannot be denied. This is what Paul Krugman and his ilk are so afraid of. Krugman called it "movement conservatism". There's a clue about the left that Krugman may not have wanted to be emphasized. He called it "movement" conservatism. The only kind of conservatism that the left likes is the kind that doesn't move. In other words, it is dead, or might as well be.

Hollywood can make movies that cast conservatives as villains, but why can't "conservatives" do anything about that? Oh, but there's a lot of bellyaching. You're not going to change the left, but you can certainly beat them at their own game---provided that there's still the opportunity to do so.

Declaration Entertainment attempted to do that. But the "conservatives" failed to rally behind it. Perhaps because there wasn't the perceived need. Has that changed? So you get this post on Instapundit, which is a link to somebody who wrote a post about the "Hollywood Stasi". It just seems to be in the mold of talking but not doing anything about it.

What to do? Conservatives need to get the "fire in the belly". Also, to see alternatives being brought to the market, while we still have one. As Dan Bongino says all the time, we need an alternative economy. We have to be able to impose real financial pain on the left, or there won't be alternatives to the left anymore. One way is to compete with Hollywood. Hollywood is anti-conservative. Companies like Declaration Entertainment could have provided that alternative in that economic space of making movies.

There's more to it. It is a comprehensive plan and movement that is needed. That's what the left seems to have had so much success with. They've had that success because nobody has had that fire in the belly to see it to completion.

All talk and no action is no longer permissible. Time to get moving.

Update coming:



Originally posted Mar 8, 2014



This will be a short review.  First of all, a background.  The movie was a Bill Whittle project.  It was made by an outfit called Declaration Entertainment, which I helped fund as a "citizen-producer".  As a consequence of my support, they now just got around to sending me a copy.  It is also true that I dropped out after a short term, so I didn't fund it all the way to its completion.  Okay, so the criticism can go both ways.

I went in thinking that this may have been a "jerk-off" fantasy, as so many things are in our society these days.  To my surprise, it didn't not confirm that.  However, there was an element of unreality to it that I must call out.

The good guy is injured in a manner that probably made him incapable of doing what he did in the climax.  That's the unreality.  But the unreality was necessary for the film to reach its climax.

It is true that, in the movies, the "good guy" wins.  Even today, in Hollywood movies that Whittle objects to, the "good guy" wins.  But, what is "good" and what is "bad"?  That's the rub.  It all depends upon where you're standing as to the identity of that personage.

In this movie, the good guy wins.  After all, he's just defending what's his.  Even in Hollywood, the guy here can be a hero.  Nothing out of the usual here.

I think what Whittle wants to do is to motivate people into not being sheep, and start acting like free men.  I applaud that.  The main character is a man in that mold.  Someone we used to look up to.  Today's Hollywood would make this guy into a villain because he's just too macho for today's tastes.  There's the difference, perhaps.

Today's men are driven into passivity.  Today's men are told that it's okay for them to literally be like girls.  So, it shouldn't be a surprise that that is the way some of them behave.

Yet, in this movie, the women are bad ass too.  It doesn't necessarily follow the old sex type mold.

It's an okay movie.  But it may shift a bit into the unreal mode in order to keep the hero heroic.  That's a small fault to find.  Otherwise, a movie can't be a movie without some artistic license.  People have to have their fairy tales.