Old grumbles Bloomberg watched what might have been the tenth film he has seen in his life, and he was borderline outraged with all that nonsense that comes before it. The parade of theatrical trailers did not amuse the "easily bored" Mayor.
Here's his take on the face of contemporary entertainment, the mediated political system, and intellectual maturity of the American consumer:
"I sat through an hour of trailers, and every one was stupider than the other. And then there were these ads for video games - for adults! And you want to know why we're dumbing down politics."
Bloomberg groused to a writer from M magazine, a quarterly men's fashion magazine, in an interview published last week. Possible theory: because he was watching the sensationally lengthy Les Miserables, he might have been misdirecting some annoyance without wanting to pile on Hathaway.
Bloomberg was also biting the hand that feeds him—publicly, Mayor Bloomberg is a champion of the film and television industry in New York which bring in about $7 billion a year of economic activity to the city, according to Bloomberg's office.
But he really doesn't only have it in for fiction films, Bloomberg continued to rant about the whole face of media generally:
"I don't see any difference between a newspaper on the Internet and a blog. It confuses everything and takes away the difference. People are getting their news from sitcoms and from movies with a political agenda. They're even getting information from games!"
Again with those pesky games! They will be the downfall of the American intellectual, if Bloomberg can have the last word about it.
[AV Club, image via AP]