Tag: movies

The filthy fat man

Why is Harvey Weinstein not finished in Hollywood already?

Two decades ago, the Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein invited Ashley Judd to the Peninsula Beverly Hills hotel for what the young actress expected to be a business breakfast meeting. Instead, he had her sent up to his room, where he appeared in a bathrobe and asked if he could give her a massage or she could watch him shower, she recalled in an interview.

“How do I get out of the room as fast as possible without alienating Harvey Weinstein?” Ms. Judd said she remembers thinking.

In 2014, Mr. Weinstein invited Emily Nestor, who had worked just one day as a temporary employee, to the same hotel and made another offer: If she accepted his sexual advances, he would boost her career, according to accounts she provided to colleagues who sent them to Weinstein Company executives. The following year, once again at the Peninsula, a female assistant said Mr. Weinstein badgered her into giving him a massage while he was naked, leaving her “crying and very distraught,” wrote a colleague, Lauren O’Connor, in a searing memo asserting sexual harassment and other misconduct by their boss.

“There is a toxic environment for women at this company,” Ms. O’Connor said in the letter, addressed to several executives at the company run by Mr. Weinstein.

An investigation by The New York Times found previously undisclosed allegations against Mr. Weinstein stretching over nearly three decades, documented through interviews with current and former employees and film industry workers, as well as legal records, emails and internal documents from the businesses he has run, Miramax and the Weinstein Company.

During that time, after being confronted with allegations including sexual harassment and unwanted physical contact, Mr. Weinstein has reached at least eight settlements with women, according to two company officials speaking on the condition of anonymity. Among the recipients, The Times found, were a young assistant in New York in 1990, an actress in 1997, an assistant in London in 1998, an Italian model in 2015 and Ms. O’Connor shortly after, according to records and those familiar with the agreements….

Dozens of Mr. Weinstein’s former and current employees, from assistants to top executives, said they knew of inappropriate conduct while they worked for him. Only a handful said they ever confronted him.

Mr. Weinstein enforced a code of silence; employees of the Weinstein Company have contracts saying they will not criticize it or its leaders in a way that could harm its “business reputation” or “any employee’s personal reputation,” a recent document shows. And most of the women accepting payouts agreed to confidentiality clauses prohibiting them from speaking about the deals or the events that led to them.

Charles Harder, a lawyer representing Mr. Weinstein, said it was not unusual to enter into settlements to avoid lengthy and costly litigation. He added, “It’s not evidence of anything.”

At Fox News, where the conservative icons Roger E. Ailes and Bill O’Reilly were accused of harassment, women have received payouts well into the millions of dollars. But most of the women involved in the Weinstein agreements collected between roughly $80,000 and $150,000, according to people familiar with the negotiations.

In the wake of Ms. O’Connor’s 2015 memo, some Weinstein Company board members and executives, including Mr. Weinstein’s brother and longtime partner, Bob, 62, were alarmed about the allegations, according to several people who spoke on the condition of anonymity. In the end, though, board members were assured there was no need to investigate.

I tend to doubt there is a person on the planet who is genuinely shocked by this, or that Weinstein expects to be able to skate by on his behavior – again – for reasons that no one could possibly ever know or anticipate.

It’s long past time for the media to dig deeply into the moral sewer that is Hollywood.

If movies were reviewed like video games

Miller Jason is branching out:

I thought it was generally accepted if you review films for a living, you do it because you like movies, and therefore have watched a lot of movies in your lifetime and career. Even if you’re not formally educated to analyze and critique them, a lifetime of watching movies is still a pretty valid informal education in the field.

But since we’re throwing all that out of the window, you don’t need to understand the medium you are reviewing I would like to welcome you to my film review section we’re going to be running!

We’re gonna start off with a classic Schindler’s list:

I sat down to Schindler’s List not knowing what to expect. As a guy who mostly watches buddy cop comedies and Disney movies, I wasn’t a huge drama movie aficionado, but I had heard that List was a solid entry in the genre by my friends who watch more drama than I, so I was tentatively excited.

For a movie about such a simple premise, a list, the movie takes a lot of dialogue to get across the point. I couldn’t really follow all the conversations, especially because some of them were in some other language (I guess the director never heard of dubbing?) and I had to read along on the subtitles. 

This makes the movie less visually appealing, and it’s already skirting the boundary with it’s lo-fi black-and-white art style. 3/10.

Actually, I have to confess that I would enjoy reading this sort of movie review. They would be more entertaining than the average movie these days.

Intelligence and communication

Normal: Eh, it was fine.
Midwit: 1,500-word monologue reiterating the Mary Sue article that said the comic book was better.
High: 3,000-word dissertation on the technical details.
VHIQ: Eh, it was fine.
UHIQ: What movie?
I can explain the latter process:

  1. The movie ends.
  2. Think about X scene or character.
  3. Think about how something like that might be useful in the book I am currently writing, or less frequently, thinking about the possibility of writing someday.
  4. Start mentally writing the dialogue or playing through the action sequence.
  5. Upon completion, think about what implications that little vignette will have for previous or subsequent scenes. Mentally note the more significant ones.
  6. Lights go on.
  7. Debate whether it would make sense to write the scene down upon returning home, or simply file it away mentally for later in the hopes that I actually recall it at some point. Regardless of what is decided, it is always mentally filed away for later. There is perhaps a 5 percent chance it will ever cross my mind again.
  8. Suddenly recall a previous idea that had been filed away for later, but never recollected. Consider whether it would have utility in the current book or not, then remember that the book for which the idea is applicable was published five years ago. Mentally shrug.
  9. Everyone stands up. Spacebunny says, “did you like the movie?”
  10. “What movie?” “The. One. We. Just. Saw.” The latter statement is usually accompanied by an eyeroll and eyelid flutter that is less a gesture of contempt and more one indicative of seriously questioning her life choices.

The sickness in Hollywood

It goes back further than you might expect. And includes figures you probably did not suspect.

“RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK”
Story Conference Transcript
January 23, 1978 thru January 27, 1978
George Lucas (G), Steven Spielberg (S), Larry Kasdan (L)

G — We have to get them cemented into a very strong relationship. A bond.

L — I like it if they already had a relationship at one point. Because then you don’t have to build it.

G — I was thinking that this old guy could have been his mentor. He could have known this little girl when she was just a kid. Had an affair with her when she was eleven.

L — And he was forty-two.

G — He hasn’t seen her in twelve years. Now she’s twenty-two. It’s a real strange relationship.

S — She had better be older than twenty-two.

G — He’s thirty-five, and he knew her ten years ago when he was twenty-five and she was only twelve.

G — It would be amusing to make her slightly young at the time.

S — And promiscuous. She came onto him.

G — Fifteen is right on the edge. I know it’s an outrageous idea, but it is interesting. Once she’s sixteen or seventeen it’s not interesting anymore. But if she was fifteen and he was twenty-five and they actually had an affair the last time they met. And she was madly in love with him and he…

S — She has pictures of him.

G — There would be a picture on the mantle of her, her father, and him. She was madly in love with him at the time and he left her because obviously it wouldn’t work out. Now she’s twenty-five and she’s been living in Nepal since she was eighteen. It’s not only that they like each other, it’s a very bizarre thing, it puts a whole new perspective on this whole thing. It gives you lots of stuff to play off of between them. Maybe she still likes him. It’s something he’d rather forget about and not have come up again. This gives her a lot of ammunition to fight with.

S — In a way, she could say, “You’ve made me this hard.”

G — This is a resource that you can either mine or not. It’s not as blatant as we’re talking about. You don’t think about it that much. You don’t immediately realize how old she was at the time. It would be subtle. She could talk about it. “I was jail bait the last time we were together.” She can flaunt it at him, but at the same time she never says, “I was fifteen years old.” Even if we don’t mention it, when we go to cast the part we’re going to end up with a woman who’s about twenty-three and a hero who’s about thirty-five.

S — She is the daughter of the professor who our hero was under the tutelege of. She has this little fragment of the map.

G — He doesn’t have to have the fragment in hand. All he has to do is get a copy of it, make a rubbing of it.

L — (this section is not clear, something about the fragments and how he gets them)

Steve on Star Trek

This was simply too beatifully contemptuous not to highlight.

Star Trek is just the UFP’s version of Pravda, making their lycra-clad goons and minions out to be heroes and geniuses. But they weren’t, were they?


Picard: pompous slaphead who repeatedly got clowned on his own ship by Q, allowed himself to be captured at least twice – one of those times saw him giving vital intelligence to the Borg and lead directly to the deaths of millions of Federation citizens and servicemen.


Riker: this guy was offered his own command, but turned it down. That’s a huge red flag right there, but it gets worse. He stuffed himself with space doughnuts until potatohead O’Brien had to grease the Jeffries tubes, and let his dopey girlfriend cuck him with Worf. Whenever you saw Riker interact with fellow crewmen it was just awkward and unpleasant, he’s a weird, insecure, unlikeable fatbeard who keeps annoying the crew with his shitty saxophone like he’s Bill Clinton or something. Even his own dad hated him.

Worf: the special-needs Klingon, too stupid to live. A badass in his own mind who kept losing fist fights and could be easily tricked by small children or Data’s cat. No wonder the other Klingons wouldn’t let poor Worfy join in any Klingon games.

Dr Crusher: if she was such a good doctor, why was her husband dead? Check and mate. Spawned Wil Wheaton and had space sex with a space ghost that had previously serviced her grandmother. I’m not sure which is more shameful.

Data: autistic RealDoll who should’ve been recycled as something marginally more useful, such as a vending machine selling jumbo-sized adult diapers to David Gerrold.

Geordi LaForge: handicapped sex-pest who cyberstalked the woman who designed the Enterprise and only avoided an HR investigation because he’s black.

This was, mind you, the finest crew in Starfleet, which leads me to deduce the other ships were full of window-licking retards like Janeway.

In the meantime, much respect to ST:D, which is the first science fiction television show to make ALL of the characters GLBT. This is real progress I’m sure we can all support.

And not only Britain

Peter Brimelow isn’t mourning the societies we have lost. He wants revenge:

In 1940, my father, already in the British Army in which he was to spend 6½ years, was stationed on the English Channel at Folkstone, looking right at Dunkirk. Years later, reading about the German plans for Operation Sea Lion, the invasion of England, I realized he was right where paratroopers were to land and asked him what kind of resistance his unit would have been able to mount.

He said: “They would have had to give us rifles.”

The Germans never came—but Britain was invaded anyway. By 1990, when my father died, he was bitterly in agreement with Pringle’s interviewees: it wasn’t worth it.

My considered reaction to Dunkirk: People should be hung from lampposts—they should be burned alive—for what they’ve done to Britain.

God send, if only for the sake of my three little daughters, born almost exactly 100 years after my father, that America can be saved from this terrible fate.

I could not possibly agree more. And I have no doubt that there will be a reckoning one day, hopefully in the not-too-distant future.

In a day when young girls are raped, not once, but twice, by the non-Western immigrants that are culturally enriching our societies, it is absolutely astonishing that the men of the West continue to meekly endure these daily atrocities.

SJWs are NEVER content

This is why you cannot give them an inch of ground. Ever. They will simply consolidate it and immediately launch their next attack from it. They do not negotiate. They do not compromise. An SJW can no more stop pressing for more social justice than a shark can stop swimming.

Dr. Who converged

In a rare and totally not-at-all expected twist, the Thirteenth Doctor is a gay black woman!

Broadchurch star Jodie Whittaker is to be the first ever woman to play Doctor Who, it has been announced. The identity of the new Doctor was revealed on BBC One and on social media around the world after the Men’s Wimbledon Final today.

She will be the Thirteenth Time Lord and take over from Peter Capaldi who leaves the global hit show at Christmas.

New head writer and executive producer Chris Chibnall who takes over from Steven Moffat on the next series made the decision to cast the first ever woman in the iconic role.

Jodie Whittaker says: ‘I’m beyond excited to begin this epic journey – with Chris and with every Whovian on this planet. It’s more than an honour to play the Doctor.  ‘It means remembering everyone I used to be, while stepping forward to embrace everything the Doctor stands for: hope. I can’t wait.’

Chris Chibnall, New Head Writer and Executive Producer said: ‘After months of lists, conversations, auditions, recalls, and a lot of secret-keeping, we’re excited to welcome Jodie Whittaker as the Thirteenth Doctor. I always knew I wanted the Thirteenth Doctor to be a woman and we’re thrilled to have secured our number one choice.

It’s got to be a little difficult to fake much enthusiasm for doing what every other SJW in entertainment has already been doing for the last 10 years. Personally, I look forward to the inevitable reboot when the initial fake audience generated by the SJW attention  inevitably drifts away and everyone realizes that the traditional viewership has declined.

Now, personally, I don’t give a damn about Doctor Who. I haven’t watched it since I was in junior high and Tom Baker was the Doctor, and even then I thought it was pretty lame. And the actress is attractive, considerably more attractive than most of the past companions. But that’s all irrelevant, and the casting decision is chiefly noteworthy in that it signifies that absolutely nothing, no matter how classic or beloved, is safe from SJWs. We know we have reached Peak SJW when Heidi is remade, with the blonde Swiss girl played by a gay black transgendered Muslim.

They should have let Luke direct

Then the Star Wars sequels might not have been such barely mitigated disasters. He had some ideas, you see.

As noted in my cover story, Hamill has a lot of thoughts on how Luke might have been reintroduced differently in The Force Awakens. He could have come in during Han Solo’s climactic scene with Kylo Ren, receiving some sort of Force-telepathy distress call from his sister, General Leia, but arriving too late to save Han from death. Or, perhaps, he might have materialized in the snowy forest of Starkiller Base, where Rey duels with Kylo. On his first read-through of the script, Hamill recalled, he got excited when the legendary lightsaber wiggled portentously in the snow. “The moment in the forest, when the saber rattles?” he said. “I go, ‘Oh, baby, here I come!’ And then it flies into her hands? I said, What the hell, she hasn’t even trained!”

Likewise, after reading Rian Johnson’s script for The Last Jedi, Hamill said, “I at one point had to say to Rian, ‘I pretty much fundamentally disagree with every choice you’ve made for this character. Now, having said that, I have gotten it off my chest, and my job now is to take what you’ve created and do my best to realize your vision.’”

And that is one of the many reasons I will never see the sequels to the movies I loved so much as a child. Never to forgive, never to forget. But also, never fear. Faraway Wars: Embers of Empire is coming later this summer for all your revisionist space opera requirements.

SJWs ruin everything

Even classic chick flicks like Dirty Dancing:

The remake departed from the original in several significant ways. Most of the Dirty Dancing’s original themes — a hypocritical upper crust, social and class tensions, and frigid family dynamics — were watered down with heartwarming family reconciliations, interracial friendships, and empowered girls being empowered together.

Of course, they kept abortion sub-plot. Frankly, I’m only surprised that they didn’t have Baby get pregnant by Johnny, then have her father perform the abortion after telling her how proud he is of her decision to not ruin her college prospects by having the baby and marrying Johnny.