Diversity and Representation in Media

Let's not forget The Son of Bigfoot from a couple years ago, or it's sequel coming out next year. A veritable golden age of Bigfoot!

Taika Waititi’s live-action Akira movie gets May 2021 release date.

News from Cannes

Bong Joon-ho has become the first Korean director to win the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival, for his film Parasite.

Mati Diop won the Grand Prix prize for her film Atlantic, becoming the first black woman director to win in Cannes’s 72 years.

Edited by Tuckerscreator on May 25th 2019 at 1:10:26 AM

I am very happy for Bong Joon-ho. Okja was booed at in Cannes in 2017, because Netflix.

He sure got sweet revenge.

Zendaya’s starring in an upcoming HBO series Euphoria. Of note is that her character’s closest friend, Jules, is played Hunter Schafer, who is a trans woman actress.

Just wanted to share this because damn this is beautiful.

The vid is a guy describing his own feelings and the people looking at him while he ponders whether he and his boyfriend should kiss in public. In a Scottish accent. Not sure the miscarriage part was appropriate though…

Source Alleges Mektoub Director Pressured Actors Into An Unsimulated Sex Scene

…15 minutes? Really? Also, even the main actress walked out of the screening apparently.

Edited by Lyendith on May 29th 2019 at 2:23:18 PM

a 15 minute cunnilingus scene

blimey

Pressuring people into doing sex stuff they don't want to do...

I'm pretty sure that counts as rape? Or at least sexual harassment.

So yeah, I watched a short review of the film. Translation below (I just left out some incidental bits).

^note I really liked Mektoub My Love: Canto Uno. It was a hypnotizing film about the seach for desire. Back then I found that it was almost a masterpiece. So I was eager to watch the sequel, Intermezzo. And then people walked out of the room. Half of them. The main actress walked out. The director ran away. It might be one of the worst cinema experiences of my life.

Intermezzo happens 5 days after the first film, and the two films were largely shot simultaneously. Then at 1:30, close up on an ass. A foreshadowing. The film is 3h28min long and is made of three scenes: we start with 40 minutes on a beach, the rest is in a night club, and it ends on a short epilogue. A radical approach: lock up your characters in a night club with loud music for 3 hours.

During the first 40 minutes I'm not too uncomfortable: it more or less keeps the narration style of the first film, its dialogue, its little nothings that make a great whole. Then the rest happens… Sure, the acting and actor direction are top notch, everyone is properly deranged, you believe in the realistic potential of the movie. In a single blink you can grasp the entire emotional state of a character, it's crazy. But everything that surrounds that changes a beautiful film proposition into an utterly despicable one.

In case you didn't notice, it didn't like it at all. If I had to sum it up in a few words: asses, tits, more asses, lots of asses, sometimes tits, but mostly asses. A journalist counted them, my thanks to her: 178 ass shots in 160 minutes. Not 5 second shots either − some last more than 10 minutes. Still shots. In low-angle. During these 160 minutes, there are only 20 minutes of dialogue. But never to advance the characters' story like in the first film. Because even the dialogue is about asses, like that 10-minute scene between Hafsia Herzi and her friend on the topic "What's your favorite ass?"

After an hour it was grueling, after two it was nauseating. Sure, it's deliberate: Canto Uno was about the search for desire, Intermezzo is about the death of desire. But that doesn't mean it works. And there's some gross misogyny too, which the first film already skirted the line of. We're no longer following the point of view of Amine like before, but the point of view of Kechiche himself. And Kechiche wants to shoot asses. Big, good asses. How much time did he ask Ophélie Bau to dance only to shoot her ass in close-up? It's scary. Normally I would have said "Hey, guy! If you wanna make a porno, make a porno!" BUT HE DOES MAKE ONE. There is, in this film, an unsimulated, 13-minute long cunnilingus scene. With disgusting close-ups − it's not your sexy porn film made to awaken desire, it's a biology class. It might symbolize the death of desire, but it just looks like a humiliation of the main actress. Who walked out, like I said. She didn't come to the press conference either. Don't you think there's something unsettling there?

Plus, the scene is shot in public toilets that reek of piss, with a photography uglier than Virginie Despentes' Baise-Moi. Sure, there are cool scenes of characters looking each other and communicating emotions, but those last a full two minutes before we're back to 15 minutes of ass shots. The poor Hafsia Herzi is depicted as a drunkard in a bar, and the others are treated as whores. The director tells us: "These girls are bitches, they don't deserved to be desired." All those girls we see dance in the club will never fulfill their desire. They are girls that you take and throw away; it's their fault for wiggling like that. Only two girls get sex: Ophélie Bau, and only because she keeps repeating she's a dude − hence why she dominates the cunnilingus scene. It's not justified as a liberation of women, because self-proclaimed liberated women in this film end up alone. You don't screw the liberated woman, you screw the dude. Wonderful message. The other girl who gets sex is the one who arrives at the end of the party and doesn't wiggle. She's more properly dressed too.

The thing is: Kechiche films in close-up the things he hates and wants us to hate. In his story, the woman who claims to be free has no right to be happy. You wanna be free? Be free alone. Men will like either prudish women or masculine ones. Because the camera cuts every time we're at risk of seeing some penis or male ass; you don't show the naked male body. We just spent 2 hours staring at female asses, but men are pure, you must preserve them. The whole movie is Kechiche shouting his hatred of a certain form of female freedom while lauding the demure woman who stays at home. I think the last thing I wrote down in my notes was "Rarely have I wished to die so much while watching a film."

The first film was a masterpiece, this one falls into an abyss of misogyny. Kechiche… jerks off behind his camera, shooting and hating asses. It's unhealthy.

Yeesh…

If that bit about getting them drunk before shooting is true, then it most likely counts, yes.

Edited by Lyendith on May 29th 2019 at 5:20:03 PM

How does that work?

I wouldn't really call it rape, since both actors were pressured to do that but...it's kind of confusing really.

Yeah, which means they raped both actors.

Edited by Kayeka on May 30th 2019 at 4:57:56 PM

It'd count as Rape by Proxy, and regardless of the exact definition it's horrifying.

Maybe they should call it a glorified porno

"but is art!"-the director probably

Michael Beach, who played Black Manta's father in Aquaman, has joined Swamp Thing as main antagonist, Nathan Ellery.

I'd say it's more realistically a form of sexual harassment ("I'm pressuring you to perform a sexual act for your job" is basically the go-to definition of more extreme sexual harassment), and I don't know if that's a crime or just something that can be sued over.

Edited by Larkmarn on May 30th 2019 at 3:16:45 PM

Jason Mitchell was fired from The Chi following several testimonies that he was harassing his coworkers on the show. Additionally, some say that his behavior was known during the first season’s filming but the higher ups dragged their feet on pushing him out.

Amnesty International chastises censorship of the Elton John biopic Rocketman, including of gay kissing and sex scenes.

Trigger warning for discussion of mutilation, rape, and mental sexual abuse.

A review of the Netflix movie, The Perfection. This is, to put it mildly, probably the worst type of movie to come out in a post-Me Too! world.

It would be very nice if cis men writers could cease with turning to writing rape in stories for the drama over and over and over again...

On another topic, here's the New Yorker's review of Ma, starring Octavia Spencer.

If it means anything, one of the writers of The Perfection is a woman.

Edited by windleopard on Jun 1st 2019 at 2:36:12 AM

Welp, may have needed more.

Yeah, whenever anyone says "one of the writers was a woman," I have to ask "out of how many?" If it's out of two writers, then well, whatever. Women can make mistakes too. But if it's one woman out of ten writers, then the problem probably could have been caught if there were more women involved.