What was he thinking?

A New York Times reviewer criticized Disney's new children's movie, The Little Mermaid, because it lacked — are you ready? — "kink."

According to BizPacReview:

Disney's live-action remake of "The Little Mermaid" is a dud, according to one woke critic.

It's "everything nobody should want in a movie," wrote Wesley Morris for The New York Times, "dutiful and defensive, yet desperate for approval. It reeks of obligation and noble intentions."

What the film, starring singer Halle Bailey, needed, according to Morris, is more "kink."

"Joy, fun, mystery, risk, flavor, kink — they're missing," he stated.

How'd that get past the editors?

And what, exactly, did this guy have in mind?  Whips and chains?  "Sex" with dogs?  "Sex" with men in dog costumes?  Fisting?  Throuples?

He seems to have forgotten that this was a children's movie, unless that of course is what he thinks belongs in a children's movie.

We know that in his justification of such remarks, he considered kinkiness something that makes him laugh.

"The movie is saying, 'We tried!'" Morris's opening paragraph continued, as though he hadn't just said that the children's film wasn't kinky enough for his liking. "Tried not to offend, appall, challenge, imagine. A crab croons, a gull raps, a sea witch swells to Stay Puft proportions: This is not supposed to be a serious event. But it feels made in anticipation of being taken too seriously. Now, you can't even laugh at it."

Cripes, it's a child's movie.  They are innocent.  They are not camp, they are not ironic, they are not cynical, which are adult forms of humor.  Whenever you see a little kid with those traits, the only thing you can feel is pity for the lost soul there.

It would be interesting to know which kind of kinkiness hits his funny bone, though.  Is he a foot man, a leg man, a butt man?  Maybe someone can ask.

He's also not the only one.  Right now, there's an emerging controversy in another quarter over the how the villain in the piece, Ursula, played by Melissa McCarthy, got her makeup done.  Apparently, it didn't look sufficiently like that of a drag queen, and the makeup artist was not gay, or not gay enough (it's not clear), according to this account in the Daily Mail.  Little kids, see, need to be exposed to drag queens even in their fairy tales, according to these critics, although I don't recall that detail in the original Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale. 

Not surprisingly, the Times writer was scored.  BizPacReview curated some choice tweets from disgusted readers:

"Kink…and we wonder why people ask questions about you lot…" another user remarked.

"Kink, you say?" asked another. "Were you aware that this movie was made for kids?"

"'Kink,'" another quoted, adding an "OK GROOMER" gif.

It's almost as though The Times wants to get boycotted.

"NYT staffer: 'Hey I bet you can't write a horrible review on the new Little Mermaid and still get the right mad at you,'" quipped one user. "NYT critic: Hold my bellini."

"Hold my Bud Light," replied another user, "but same energy."

What it shows is that there's an establishment out there, embedded at top media and other organizations, that wants the ongoing trend of kink, sexualization, and corruption of the innocent minds of children to carry on as normal.  It's quite possible that Disney, which has been in trouble for this kind of behavior in the past, has backed off, or at least tried to tone it down, and perhaps that's why the Detroit News found the picture dull and flat.  But they sure as heck didn't call for a little kink as a means of livening it up.  What's obvious here is that the Times critic sees kink as the answer to the film's problems.  What kind of taste in movies does this guy have?

Image: Screen shot from official movie trailer via shareable YouTube.