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There’s also a lot of artistic creepers, which predate the internet but the internet shone a light on their creepiness. I would, for instance, watch The Ninth
by hinkley 10mo ago
There’s also a lot of artistic creepers, which predate the internet but the internet shone a light on their creepiness.
I would, for instance, watch The Ninth Gate a couple times a year if Polanski hadn’t directed it, or had directed it post jail instead of hiding from justice for 25 years. Instead I watch it about twice a decade. Luke Beson is almost as problematic, and I have a hard time reconciling just how brilliant Gary Oldman is as Stansfield with how creepy the overall tone is, especially the European cut. I enjoyed that movie when I was young and had seen the American version. Trying to show it to other people (especially the Leon version) and seeing their less enthusiastic reactions made me see the balance of that story less affectionately. As well as seeing it through the lens of an adult responsible for children instead of being the child. Now I watch The Fifth Element and that’s about it.
- francoisfeugeas 10mo ago> Luke Beson Luc Besson.
- hinkley 10mo agoDudes who have children with 16 year old girls don't get their name spelled right.
- socalgal2 10mo agoInteresting. I showed my right leaning 83 year old mom the full version of Leon last year, she loved it.
- jonfromsf 10mo agoThe expectation that artists be "good people" always baffles me. Anyone who becomes a great artist has: 1)High levels of narcissism required to think the world needs to hear "your vision. 2) High levels of sociopathy to thrive in a snake pit like the art world or Hollywood. It's even stranger than if someone expected CEOs to be good people (which we don't).
- skeeter2020 10mo agoI refuse to accept that a genius in their field cannot be a decent human being. If that makes me naive, so be it.
- MrChoke 10mo agoThe difference is between "can be" and "are".
- Earw0rm 10mo agoThey can, but they're competing with assholes, you can figure out the odds. Like there's an Olympics where everyone's on drugs but a few good folks decide to compete clean. Want to win fair? Sure, same here. Now here come the whispers, you can just ignore them, sure, but now your girlfriend's pregnant and your bank account is looking a little thin. Good luck.
- fc417fc802 10mo agoSeems like quite some assumptions are being made there. Can't work be done for intrinsic reasons? Can't artists (creators more generally) be insular or even reclusive?
- hinkley 10mo agoI can't agree with that. While unwavering determination is definitely necessary to overcome lack of success, there are other ways to achieve that. And as was once put to me, the reason that some artists are not appreciated until after their death isn't just a matter of not meeting your heroes, but because they understood something about the present moment that the public was not yet prepared to reflect upon. That we appreciate them in retrospect because they tell us something we are not yet ready to hear. That requires a degree of empathy for humanity that is not well represented in a strictly narcissistic diagnosis.
- latexr 10mo agoKeanu Reeves, Dolly Parton, Weird Al Yankovic, Bryan Cranston… By all accounts I ever found, they’ve always been described as genuinely nice human beings.
- mschuster91 10mo agoI'd add Star Wars to the mix, to be honest - at least the early movies. There's nothing I know of implicating George Lucas to be a sex pest like the other examples you mentioned... but Leia's slave costume is something giving off pretty bad vibes from today's viewpoint.
- ProjectArcturis 10mo agoThe outfit she's forced into by Jabba? And then she kills him?
- selcuka 10mo agoI've never understood why Jabba, a male Hutt, would enjoy seeing a female of a completely different species in a revealing outfit.
- krapp 10mo agoThe real answer is because it's a pulp sci-fi movie and Jabba is a gross evil slug monster and him having Leia chained up like that just shows how depraved and dangerous he is. Also Carrie Fisher looks really hot in that outfit and most of the audience is likely to be adolescent boys and men. The funny answer is.and in a universe in which it's common for alien species to intermingle, and where humans (being the Imperial species) are particularly common, being a "humanophile" might be a kink, the galactic equivalent to being a furry or "monster fucker" in our world.
- account42 10mo agoIt's not even a given that Jabba has her in that outfit because he finds it attractive. It could just as well be to titillate human guests or a pure power play.
- krapp 10mo agoFair, although I think in Doylist terms it isn't that deep, especially when we're considering George Lucas. It's a common enough villain trope. But Jabba did give her a good lick, so it seems like there's something he liked.
- yakshaving_jgt 10mo ago…what’s wrong with Leon?
- parrellel 10mo agoThe long cut implies reciprocation of the girl's crush and that casts further shade on Leon's backstory.
- yakshaving_jgt 10mo agoI watched the director’s cut again last week, and I don’t see this at all. The Leon character explicitly refuses Mathilda’s… well they’re not even propositions are they.
- hinkley 10mo agoIt turns out that Jean Reno refused to film the scenes as Besson wanted them to be.
- yakshaving_jgt 10mo agoOk. I'm not convinced at this point, because I don't know how Besson allegedly wanted the scenes to be filmed. And that isn't to say I approve of Luc Besson's choices in his personal life — I find the idea of a romance between a 32 year old and a 15 year old unacceptable. Whether there are parallels between his private life and his artistic expression, I am unwilling to speculate on.
- greedo 10mo agoRead some interviews with Spielberg and Lucas about how they wanted the Marion character to act and the age they originally wanted. It's not pretty at all. I'm not sure who convinced them to follow a different path, but Raiders of the Lost Ark would have been quite a different film if they had followed through with some of the ideas they were spitballing.