|
Heywood Allen
|
#
¿
Jan 30, 2021 20:01
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 17, 2024 02:22 |
|
|
For what it's worth, Polanski actively and often cheated on Sharon Tate and bragged about how many women he would gently caress. He nearly came to blows with John Cassavetes on the set of Rosemary's Baby because Cassavetes was so appalled at how he'd talk about his wife. He would talk about how he had no idea how any man could be satisfied with just one woman. Yes Polanski went through traumatic events, not diminishing the impact the Holocaust could have on his psyche, or the brutal murder of his wife (for which he was briefly detained and questioned as a suspect). But Polanski was always a genuine chauvinist and explaining away him raping a child because he'd been through some trauma is not really an accurate read of his character given what we know about him and his attitudes towards women and sex. For chrissakes the girl was 13 and he forcefully assaulted her. He was arrested the next day. He was found guilty and fled the country to avoid the consequences of his actions. Watch Chinatown if you want, but trying to say "well he made X move before it happened" or "well, remember he went through a lot of poo poo" ain't good excuses.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 1, 2021 21:21
|
|
|
Darko posted:That's the weirdest part though, since he made a better movie about gaslighting a woman than Gaslighting and he made another excellent movie about an underage woman being sexually abused by an older man and it clearly presented as a really horrible negative. Could be a case of him working through his own dark places (before it was noted that those things happened) with his art. Yeah I think a lot of people see this and think of it as "he made these fascinating films about abuse but he's a child rapist" when really it's "he made these fascinating films about abuse and he's a child rapist." It really forces you to recontextualize the work and try to understand it through the light. But on the other hand, I don't really have much interest in watching his work these days unless it was explicitly for an academic/critical project.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 2, 2021 00:43
|
|
|
The Voice of Labor posted:if you're trying to parse a sentence into it's logical structure, "but" and "and" mean the same thing. both are just conjunction, true iff both conjuncts are true. I get the distinction you're trying to drive home, it requires more than substituting that pair of words to make. "But" and "And" do not mean the same thing. In this particular case "But" implies there's a contradiction between Polanski's works being arguably feminist, exploring the trauma of women and dealing with themes of rape and abuse, while also being a rapist and a chauvinist himself. The films identify with the women, but Polanski as a person is more like the villains of these pieces. The "But" serves to separate the two warring ideas and suggest that you can consider the feminist themes while presenting Polanski's personal transgressions as some weird outlier. The "And," however, says that these two things are both true and therefore we need to reconsider what these films are intending to communicate, how Polanski's personal life recontextualizes their content, and whether anything made by a child rapist can even be considered feminist at all. So, does being an abuser preclude Polanski from making interesting films about abuse? No. But we need to consider that point when we analyze Repulsion or Rosemary's Baby. In this essence the art and the artist are in fact intractable and the Death of the Author only applies in so much as we can say these films are feminist despite their creator. It's all messy, I don't pretend to have an easy answer to any of these questions. Even moreso, it's not like there isn't thousands of pages of writing out there on this exact subject. But again, I just don't like the idea that you can separate the art from the artist here, particularly when the themes of the artwork are so relevant to the actual real life crime he committed.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 2, 2021 17:32
|
|
|
Yeah, I don't think the Soon-Yi relationship is the reason people don't like him these days. That is weird and skeevy, but yes far more nuanced than it gets made out to be. Molesting his actual daughter, who by the way is a 35 year old woman now and still maintains this indeed happened, tends to be the reason he's told to gently caress off.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 9, 2021 14:46
|
|
|
There was also this piece that dug into Allen's archives to reveal that, whether he actually molested his daughter or not, dude has a deeply unhealthy obsession with teenage girls. https://www.washingtonpost.com/outl...e175_story.html
|
|
#
¿
Feb 9, 2021 21:20
|
|
|
There's one Louis CK bit I remember where he talks about how horrible men are and how insane it is that women trust them. Actually found it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRzs7v0do_Q See, this bit comes off as really funny when you assume that CK is taking the perspective of the woman and, arguably, a feminist lens. It seems that he's decrying the actions of violent, abusive men and making dark comedy out of the reality that many women have to take a calculated risk assessment when agreeing to meet a new man for the first time. But when you know that the dude is actually a straight up predator IRL, well suddenly it reads as a confession. He IS the man you shouldn't trust. Like I don't think it's that hard to see why this bit is funny and enlightening if CK is just an ordinary man who respects women, and creepy and prescient when it turns out he does the exact poo poo he jokes about other men doing here. It perhaps even suggests some internal guilt and self-loathing, which is a running theme throughout his work. Also see the bit in Louie where he tries and fails to rape Pamela Adlon and the punchline is "God, you can't even rape right."
|
|
#
¿
Feb 10, 2021 20:43
|
|
|
fr0id posted:This thread is kind of getting away from its original topic, and theres already a whole thread to talk about abuse in Hollywood and the culture around it. Im probably gonna close this one at the end of this week, so if anyone has any parting contributions get them in before then. I feel like this thread is entirely on topic? We're largely discussing how lovely people have depicted/hid/managed their lovely behavior through their works and why the two things are interconnected. Is that not the exact point of the OP? - Woody Allen is accused of molesting his daughter and his work belies an unhealthy obsession with young girls. - Louis CK made a career of telling everybody he's a terrible person and how awful men are and lo and behold everything he said wasn't really a joke - Roman Polanski is a misogynist and a child rapist and his films are filled with explorations of traumatized and abused women and frank sexuality - Joss Whedon presented himself as a feminist who sought to empower women but really was an abusive rear end in a top hat, showing the overarching thesis of his body of work (badass women being empowered) was fraudulent - James Cameron is a dick to work with, is that on par with what any of these guys have done? Does that extend into abuse? Do you feel uncomfortable watching his films cause sometimes he screams at his employees? Seems like everything you made the thread to discuss.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 11, 2021 00:01
|
|
|
My stance is that it's not inherently unethical to watch something. People act as if it is a moral failing to passively watch a film that was made by bad people -- it's not. However, you understand that by doing this and discussing them you also keep their names alive in the culture and present them as continuously relevant. That can cross a moral line in some regards. I don't know. My former roommate was obsessed with this issue to the point that we had the same loving discussion hundreds and hundreds of times because he could just never square it away. Do what feels right for you. There's no perfect answer. If you feel uncomfortable and weird then maybe you should just cut your losses and watch something else. If you want to take a stand against rape culture or abusers or racism then Not Watching something is not even the bare minimum you could or should be doing to affect change -- it's beneath the minimum because it is an act so passive as to be irrelevant to the grander scheme of societal ills. But I'll say this definitely: You cannot always separate the art from the artist. To Schrecknet's point, someone like whatshisname in Ferris Bueller is a minor player in the film with little creative input beyond his few scenes. But someone like Woody Allen is the chief creative voice behind his works and his films are all manifestations of his beliefs and ideas. Likewise, you cannot watch Triumph of the Will and divorce its cinematography from the service to the Third Reich -- those who try to are kidding themselves. If you do watch these movies, those are things you should think about if you're at all an active viewer.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 11, 2021 17:01
|
|
|
The article is really enlightening. Add on that she literally just broke up with Paul Simon right before leaving for England, so she's starting the shoot in a vulnerable place. Her character is perpetually victimized and she, as a professional actress, had to work herself into this dark, frenzied mental state for much of the time.quote:Where 3 Women took six weeks to shoot from start to finish, The Shining took 56. That was partly because of a fire at EMI Elstree Studios in February 1979 that badly damaged the Overlook Hotel set at the time the largest ever constructed there requiring it to be rebuilt. But it was mostly because of Kubrick's famously exacting process. The schedule was grueling, with the director filming six days a week, up to 16 hours a day. For much of that time, Duvall needed to work herself up to a state of absolute hysteria playing the wife of a writer (Nicholson) who goes insane inside a snowed-in resort hotel, eventually trying to hack up his family with an axe. Unlike Nicholson, who rented a home in London that he shared with Anjelica Huston, his girlfriend at the time, Duvall rented a flat by the studio in Hertfordshire, where she lived for the length of the shoot with only a dog and two birds as companions. "Nobody does that," says Huston, 69. "You go back and forth from London, even though you could get stuck in two-hour traffic going in and out. But Shelley did that for a good year and a half. She got herself an apartment and lived there because she was just terribly dedicated and didn't want to shortchange herself or anyone else by not giving over fully to her commitment." So you have her in this precarious position: She's just broken up with a longtime partner, she's living alone in a foreign country, she's taking an absurdly long commute to work 16 hour days, all to play a character whose emotional state is fraught and frenzied and has to do take after take after take to get it right. It was also a clash with her experiences with Altman, who would typically be a one or two takes and move on type of filmmaker. quote:Duvall says, "[Kubrick] doesn't print anything until at least the 35th take. Thirty-five takes, running and crying and carrying a little boy, it gets hard. And full performance from the first rehearsal. That's difficult." Before a scene, she would put on a Sony Walkman and "listen to sad songs. Or you just think about something very sad in your life or how much you miss your family or friends. But after a while, your body rebels. It says: 'Stop doing this to me. I don't want to cry every day.' And sometimes just that thought alone would make me cry. To wake up on a Monday morning, so early, and realize that you had to cry all day because it was scheduled I would just start crying. I'd be like, 'Oh no, I can't, I can't.' And yet I did it. I don't know how I did it. Jack said that to me, too. He said, 'I don't know how you do it.' " Yeah so you do have some weirdness here. She suggests Kubrick had a cruel streak because of how he was treated in the past and started trailing off. It's a little weird and could suggest a topic she doesn't want to discuss, but then does clarify that Kubrick would be very friendly. I think it's more the demanding nature of him requiring dozens of takes at the bare minimum. quote:But as Huston remembers it, the director and Nicholson could be unduly rough on Duvall. "I got the feeling, certainly through what Jack was saying at the time, that Shelley was having a hard time just dealing with the emotional content of the piece," she says. "And they didn't seem to be all that sympathetic. It seemed to be a little bit like the boys were ganging up. That might have been completely my misread on the situation, but I just felt it. And when I saw her during those days, she seemed a generally a bit tortured, shook up. I don't think anyone was being particularly careful of her." Still, Huston admits there is no denying the ferocious power of the final product. "She actually carried the movie on her back if you look at it," Huston says. "Jack wavers between sort of comedic and terrifying, and Kubrick was Kubrick at his most mysterious, interesting and powerful. But it must have been something for her to be in the middle of that mix. And she took it on. She was, I think, incredibly brave." So then we have Anjelica Huston feeling that Kubrick and Nicholson weren't taking into consideration just how much stress she was putting on herself. This is certainly concerning, but it could also speak to more of neglect than intentional cruelty. Or perhaps a deliberate willingness to let her do this to herself in order to elicit the exact kind of haggard response we get in the film. It's certainly questionable, and the fact that Duvall cries when watching the clip of the staircase sequence because it was so difficult to to make could potentially suggest some underlying trauma. Though her second comment, about empathy for women who've been abused and assaulted by their partners, is also interesting. Like there's this dual response in which she's both remembering the ordeal of making the movie but also about the mindset of thinking about people who deal with this in real life. So I dunno where I'm going with this. I think it provides a lot more nuance and also clarifies that Duvall was a much more proactive collaborator on the film than some of these tellings make it out to be: Like, so many people who talk about Kubrick's treatment of her make it out to be like Duvall wasn't in control of her own faculties and sort of ignore her own agency, something I think she reasserts here. But that doesn't mean the conditions of the film weren't questionable and you can argue whether Kubrick's approach to filmmaking was in violation of worker's rights, or whether Duvall was any more mistreated than anyone else on set (Scatman Crothers famously broke down crying for the scene mentioned above). Kubrick also would do it again and again for the remainder of his career: He made Tom Cruise open and close a door dozens and dozens of times and seemed to delight in having Nicole Kidman film the fantasy sex sequences with the sailor for several days as a means to further emasculate Cruise. So he was not above mentally manipulating his actors. I would simply say, there's a lot more to what went on behind the scenes on The Shining than what we know and how its been characterized. I'm wary of ignoring Duvall's contributions to the film and her knowing embrace of the material. She also had another two full decades in show business, doing six seasons of Fairy Tale Theater after The Shining, 14 episodes of Bedtime Stories, plus steady film and television roles up until 2002. I do think it's fair to say in the end she was mistreated by Hollywood, and she always had an outsider/gonzo quality to her that is never as appreciated in women as it is in male performers. Her final performances are not of the caliber of her early work, and we know how middle aged women in Hollywood typically fair in finding work. Plus, mental illness has certainly played a role in her life, but I don't know how fair it is to probe that or read into it: the Dr. Phil episode did her a horrible disservice and while she does seem to struggle with it, she also seems to be living a fairly happy, quiet life in retirement while remaining proud of the films she made.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 12, 2021 18:31
|
|
|
Something interesting that comes up in that profile, btw, just as I'm thinking about it. One of the big things in the Dr. Phil episode was her saying she thought Robin Williams was still alive. She says the same thing about Robert Altman in this piece, but clarifies that she doesn't like to think about how he's dead and prefers to imagine he's still out there, doing his thing. So perhaps that's also what she meant about Robin Williams, that he's still alive in a spiritual sense, or rather that she doesn't want to think about his death but envision him as still alive.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 12, 2021 19:21
|
|
|
I saw Magnum Force as a midnight screening once and honestly, the way that movie opens -- with a gun pointed straight at the audience as Harry recites the "Do you feel lucky, punk?" monologue in voice over -- is kind of brilliant. When talking about conservative art, it puts the audience in the position of the victim and forces you to think about what happens when you're at the other end of the barrel. Rather than identifying with Harry, Harry is the one threatening you, and it does beg the question "don't you wish you had a gun right now?" Fascinating film. I don't agree with its politics at all but it's that rare right-wing work that actually forces you to question and consider the reactionary mindset, whereas most films of that type are too angry and confused to form coherent statements. BiggerBoat posted:It's interesting to think about. Christ, if this thread were just about musicians...poo poo...we could be here all day (Jagger, Bowie, Jimmy Page, R. Kelly, Manson, MJ, Chuck Berry, Vince Neil) Took me a second to realize you meant Marilyn Manson because I was gonna say, I know Charlie cut a record but he's kinda more known for the race war death cult lmao TrixRabbi fucked around with this message at 17:59 on Feb 16, 2021 |
|
#
¿
Feb 16, 2021 17:57
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 17, 2024 02:22 |
|
|
I'm dreading Farrow vs. Allen dropping cause I just want the broader discourse around Woody Allen to go away forever. But yeah, much like MJ, it's amazing to me how many people in film communities just assume he's innocent, still think it's about Soon-Yi (and not Dylan), or just straight up take the "Mia Farrow's a Lying Bitch who Brainwashed Her Daughter" stance. Every other day, someone in a Facebook group posts stills from Manhattan and does the whole "ya gotta admit, it's a great movie!" schtick and I'm just so sick of debating it.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 17, 2021 16:11
|
|