Comment by hinkley
2 days 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.
Read 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.
Interesting. I showed my right leaning 83 year old mom the full version of Leon last year, she loved it.
…what’s wrong with Leon?
The long cut implies reciprocation of the girl's crush and that casts further shade on Leon's backstory.
I 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.
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> Luke Beson
Luc Besson.
Dudes who have children with 16 year old girls don't get their name spelled right.
The 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).
Keanu Reeves, Dolly Parton, Weird Al Yankovic, Bryan Cranston… By all accounts I ever found, they’ve always been described as genuinely nice human beings.
I don't think I've ever heard anyone describe Keanu Reaves as a "great artist". Quite the opposite in fact. Most charitably, he's a decent character actor who does really well in certain roles that suit him well, but outside of those, he is not a great actor. He also allegedly plays bass in a band decently well, though again is no world-class master of the instrument.
But yeah, he's generally acknowledged as a really nice guy, and also easy to work with.
Weird Al Yankovic, too, is not generally considered a "great artist". A funny musician who made a career making silly parody songs a few decades ago, sure, but that's not what I'd call a "great artist". Again, not to denigrate his work; it was pretty funny stuff as I recall, but nothing super-amazing.
By contrast, people who are generally considered the very top of their profession frequently have serious personality problems. Kevin Spacey was considered one of the best actors in Hollywood, and look what happened to him. Tom Cruise is generally considered one of the most talented actors of all time, and while he's amazing on-screen, he's a certifiable crackpot and mouthpiece for a dangerous cult. Klaus Kinski was also an extremely talented actor, and also extremely mentally ill and unstable.
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I refuse to accept that a genius in their field cannot be a decent human being. If that makes me naive, so be it.
The difference is between "can be" and "are".
They 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.
Seems 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?
I 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.
I'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.
The outfit she's forced into by Jabba? And then she kills him?
I've never understood why Jabba, a male Hutt, would enjoy seeing a female of a completely different species in a revealing outfit.
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Jabba doesn't exist. The writers and directors exist.
>but Leia's slave costume is something giving off pretty bad vibes from today's viewpoint.
It's less revealing than a bikini. It was tame enough for the 1970s and from today's viewpoint it's practically stodgy.
Nitpick: it was tame enough for the 1980s. Return of the Jedi came out in 1983.
George Lucas does *not* have a reputation as an amazing or fantastic director (like Roman Polanski etc.). In fact, quite the opposite: his Star Wars prequels have some of the worst direction I've ever seen. His first three SW movies were great, but they were very much team efforts, and in the first one, his wife heavily edited it to make it come out so well. The other two weren't even directed by George. George is (was?) a brilliant ideas person: he had a great vision for his movies, and picked some great people to work with (esp. in FX), but he sucked at actual execution and working with actors and script-writing and all that stuff. His best legacy, aside from the first Star Wars, is really his FX company, Industrial Light & Magic, not his work as director.
Leia's slave costume was nothing awful, was perfectly acceptable in 1983, and shows much less skin than a bikini, and was forced on her by an evil and ruthless gang boss who liked to eat his slaves at times, or feed them to his monsters.
> but Leia's slave costume is something giving off pretty bad vibes from today's viewpoint.
No, it doesn't give bad vibes. It was a sexy actress wearing a skimpy outfit for a couple of scenes in the whole goddamn trilogy! And she kicked butt.
Repeat after me: sexy scenes in movies are ok. And young Carrie Fisher was hot, and that was also ok. I was half in love with her when I first watched Star Wars.
Now, you can ask why Mark Hamill or Harrison Ford weren't put in skimpy outfits and whether it was more often women who got those scenes, and that'd be pertinent. But this doesn't give slave Leia a bad vibe.
It's OK if those scenes had sexy vibes. Sexy vibes aren't bad. This didn't define Leia either, she was mostly competent and kicked imperial butt.