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[News] Kevin Spacey.
- Thread starter Insel affe
- Start date
Insel affe
HellBilly
- Thread starter
- #62
Love it....
Only on NSC can something be turned on it's head.
The thread is about alleged sexual assaults committed by a privilege peer to younger vulnerable actors and bingo, NSC manages to switch it completely round to the victim wanting a pay out....
And some people wonder why the victims never said anything sooner, you are part of the problem.....
Way to go....
Paris
Well-known member
I wonder who purchased his watch. Got to be worth a front page Argus lead if they discover it's whereabouts.
The thread theme remains, however PTSD, as an ex servicemen injured in the line of duty and treated successfully alongside a group of people who were involved in quite tragic situations, I find it offensive that this melt Montana should suggest PTSD in the same sentence of his claim.
Paris
Well-known member
Agree with you. Always thought it rather odd how a lot of people seemed to dismiss his very questionable actions because his music was/is so globally popular. One rule for one...
Two Professors
Two Mad Professors
Wonder if he secretly voted for Trump?
I haven't played my Rolf Harris albums for a few years now though.....
studio150
Well-known member
But have you taken down your Rolf Harris original paintings
Brightonfan1983
Well-known member
Probably because he's very good at his job. And there hadn't, until now, been suggestions of impropriety.
Brightonfan1983
Well-known member
There's a really interesting talk to be had about this - when, and can you, separate artists from their art, and should you? It exercises greater minds than mine.
Insel affe
HellBilly
- Thread starter
- #71
I get ya fella, and completely understand your point of view.
I think this sums up Kevin Spacey's thought mentality towards his misdemeanours...
Attachments
Ninja Elephant
Doctor Elephant
- Feb 16, 2009
- 18,855
No, it doesn't. This whole witch hunt is getting sillier and sillier.
The whole thing smacks a bit of the Andy Gray/Richard Keys "did you smash it" debacle, the knives are out now and that's it, public execution is inevitable.
Spacey's got some nerve grabbing Tony Montana by the balls.
- Jan 3, 2012
- 17,351
I'm not claiming to be a greater mind than yours, but what Kevin Spacey seems to have done in the past does not stop him being an excellent actor, and similarly Rolf Harris's crimes don't diminish what he did as an artist in terms of quality, but it does seriously affect how people might view thwm or want to be associated with them or be seen to like them.
My son-in-law worked in a gallery when he was a student many years ago and they had in the stock-room a painting by Rolf Harris which someone had bought some time before and never come back for. When he left the gallery, the boss gave this painting to him as a thank you because he had done well. It is very striking largish picture which would have been worth a few pounds in the past, but not now.
He just wanted to say hello to his little friend.
I'd heard bits and bobs from people I knew who had been around him at parties and in the theatre arena. The impression I got was that his behaviour was laughed off by most people. I suppose that is why things like this get normalised. Until somebody says "hang on, that's not okay".
Even in the low level I have had contact with theatre/actory types, sleazy behaviour, offering drugs to vulnerable people, offering them roles or work. Some of them in Brighton. Some of them with public images so whiter than white you would be shocked to discover the stuff they get up to. A world best avoided.
Even in the low level I have had contact with theatre/actory types, sleazy behaviour, offering drugs to vulnerable people, offering them roles or work. Some of them in Brighton. Some of them with public images so whiter than white you would be shocked to discover the stuff they get up to. A world best avoided.
Insel affe
HellBilly
- Thread starter
- #77
Ok it is funny though right ?
Chief Wiggum
New member
- Apr 30, 2009
- 518
Interesting and amusing article, copy and pasted below, entitled 'Should Kevin Spacey be deleted from History?'. Personally I don't think he should, but then again, we are now living in the new puritanical age.
'There are many wonderful scenes in the film version of David Mamet’s play Glengarry Glen Ross, but my favourite comes towards the end, between the broken and desperate real estate salesman Shelley ‘The Machine’ Levene, played by Jack Lemmon, and his vile manager John Williamson, played by Kevin Spacey. Levene, facing not merely the sack but probable imprisonment, is pleading for help, cringing and cowering. But he has gone to the wrong man. When he asks Williamson why he won’t help, the manager replies with a magnificent finality: ‘Because I don’t like you.’ And Spacey’s face, almost deadpan for most of the film as he suffers the abuse thrown at him by his salesmen, is now writhed in contempt.
But not just contempt — contempt tinged with the slightest suggestion of pleasure and malice. He is, in that moment, every grim, devious, self-serving middle manager you’ve ever loathed in your life. The middle manager from the Milgram experiment, turning up the voltage on the dial and electrocuting the volunteers. And so by obvious extension the middle manager at Auschwitz who was ‘only following orders’. You watch that scene and you recoil.
There is not a bad performance in the film from anyone. I would happily watch the brilliant Ed Harris read out a telephone directory; Al Pacino is at the height of his game; and there’s even a rather decent cameo from Alec Baldwin, not to mention Lemmon’s typically affecting swan song. But it’s Spacey who steals the film. Understated, thoughtful, utterly within the pallid skin of his character. But then Spacey often steals films, doesn’t he? Have you seen many better performances over the past 30 years than Spacey’s in The Usual Suspects? He is probably the best actor Hollywood has. Or had.
It is also quite possible that if he sat down next to you on a park bench he would withdraw his penis and ask you to admire its length and girth. Somewhat odd behaviour, I would contend, although each to their own. This is just one of a dozen or so accusations of sexual harassment levelled at Kevin Spacey and some of them seem to be true, given the actor’s carefully drafted apologies. Spacey, then, may not be a terribly nice man. He may well be a serial sexual predator, or worse. If I were 17 years old, I certainly wouldn’t sit on a park bench next to him, unless Ed Harris was there to sort him out. But watch him act? I’d do that all day long.
Not much chance now, however. Nobody is going to be casting him in anything anytime soon — and perhaps that is right, assuming those accusations have a basis in fact. Maybe we should object to a man who has not faced the consequences for his previous misdeeds being paid vast sums of money to strut his undoubtedly accomplished stuff once again. I see that, although I’ve always rather liked the notion of innocent until proven guilty. But then, clearly, Spacey is guilty of something, so I understand the reason Hollywood has gone rather cold.
But what about expunging his previous work? Wiping it from the record, as if it had never been done. Eradicating Spacey from the world of film and leaving just a space. That’s what is happening now. Director Ridley Scott is digitally removing Spacey from his picture All the Money in the World and replacing him with Christopher Plummer. The sixth series of House of Cards will not feature Spacey at all, which neatly removes the only possible point of watching the thing. His films are also being pulled from festivals; all of this madness as if we were attempting to erase him from our consciousness, pretend that he has never existed. Spacey’s fall from grace was triggered by the revelations about the producer Harvey Weinstein, and indeed both men are now in some institution dedicated to purging rich people of their desire to have sexual intercourse. This is what slebs always do when they’ve been caught out: head for rehab to demonstrate to the public that they have a problem and therefore are in some sort of sense a victim, too. But anyway, I am waiting for the film world to expunge Weinstein from our minds. Confiscate all his films. No more Kill Bill or Pulp Fiction or Velvet Goldmine — none of them to be seen again. Or does Weinstein not matter because he doesn’t actually appear on screen?
This purging is a comparatively recent phenomenon. The first time I remember it happening was when the BBC started expunging Gary Glitter from re-runs of Top of the Pops, believing — perhaps rightly — that the public’s answer to the question: ‘Do You Wanna Touch Me?’ was a fairly firm ‘No, Gary, and nor does my 12-year-old daughter’. The next to be edited from existence was the producer and performer Jonathan King — one of the first celebrities to be done for accusations of historic sexual impropriety and, if you read the court transcripts, convicted on what seemed to me rather dubious evidence.
I always held that King’s most criminal act was ‘Una Paloma Blanca’, one of a string of largely novelty hits from a time when he was able to storm the charts seemingly at will. But anyway, King was cut out of another Top of the Pops re-run – shown in 2011, after he had served his sentence. King was not happy about this and complained to the then director-general, Mark Thompson, about the ‘Stalinist revision of history’. Incredibly enough, Thompson apologised and agreed that his segment should not have been cut. Of course removing Gary Glitter, Jonathan King, the Bay City Rollers and the inevitable Jimmy Savile from early 1970s re-runs of Top of the Pops would leave you with very slender pickings indeed. You’d just about be left with the morally upstanding David Bowie. Oh, and Hawkwind.
Back in 1944 George Orwell wrote an essay entitled Benefit of Clergy: Some Notes on Salvador Dali, after he had read the artist’s autobiography. Orwell detailed, with humorous fastidiousness, Dali’s appalling character: kicking his little sister in the head, eating a dying bat covered in ants, the penchant for necrophilia and so on. Orwell pointed out that there were two responses to Dali. There were those who cited Dali’s behaviour as a compelling reason to dismiss him as an artist, and those who thought he was such a wonderful artist that his behaviour could be excused or even commended — artists being afforded the benefit of clergy.
People seemed to find it impossible to navigate towards the evident truth that Dali was, as Orwell puts it, a superb draughtsman but an absolutely ghastly individual. Even so, not even Dali’s fiercest critics thought his work should be removed from public display because he had bitten a bat in half.
But Orwell’s essay has a resonance today — it’s simply that we take our absolutism a little further. In this sense, Kevin Spacey is the exception to the rule. You may have noticed that those celebrities hounded by the police (and, in some cases prosecuted and convicted) were, in the main, irredeemably naff. Look at the list: Freddie Starr, Dave Lee Travis, Jimmy Savile, Gary Glitter, Jonathan King, Stuart Hall, Rolf Harris, Lowbrow entertainers, the staples of Saturday-night entertainment in that most naff of decades, the 1970s. Somehow the critically acclaimed celebrities never quite got caught in the net. John Peel, for example, who boasted in his autobiography of having sex with a 15-year-old girl: no action taken. And look at the way in which Hollywood has sheltered the appalling Roman Polanski for the past 40 years, despite accusations against him that dwarf anything levelled at Harvey Weinstein. Until this year, Hollywood actors and actresses queued up to defend Polanski — a fugitive from justice — perhaps because he is an auteur, the man who directed Chinatown, which, everyone agrees, is a clever movie.
So, Spacey is something of an exception to the rule — although I notice that this week the writer Libby Purves was defending the actor, insisting that Spacey’s behaviour took place at a time when there was much homophobia around. Seems to me a thinnish excuse. And I will bet Purves would have resisted sailing to the defence of the deathlessly unfunny Freddie Starr (who was hounded by the police but never convicted of anything at all). We still find it easier, then, to shovel our opprobrium and loathing on performers we never thought were very much cop in the first place, while affording those who are on our cultural wavelength the benefit of clergy. But expunging any of them from history is otiose, deluding and psychologically puzzling.
'There are many wonderful scenes in the film version of David Mamet’s play Glengarry Glen Ross, but my favourite comes towards the end, between the broken and desperate real estate salesman Shelley ‘The Machine’ Levene, played by Jack Lemmon, and his vile manager John Williamson, played by Kevin Spacey. Levene, facing not merely the sack but probable imprisonment, is pleading for help, cringing and cowering. But he has gone to the wrong man. When he asks Williamson why he won’t help, the manager replies with a magnificent finality: ‘Because I don’t like you.’ And Spacey’s face, almost deadpan for most of the film as he suffers the abuse thrown at him by his salesmen, is now writhed in contempt.
But not just contempt — contempt tinged with the slightest suggestion of pleasure and malice. He is, in that moment, every grim, devious, self-serving middle manager you’ve ever loathed in your life. The middle manager from the Milgram experiment, turning up the voltage on the dial and electrocuting the volunteers. And so by obvious extension the middle manager at Auschwitz who was ‘only following orders’. You watch that scene and you recoil.
There is not a bad performance in the film from anyone. I would happily watch the brilliant Ed Harris read out a telephone directory; Al Pacino is at the height of his game; and there’s even a rather decent cameo from Alec Baldwin, not to mention Lemmon’s typically affecting swan song. But it’s Spacey who steals the film. Understated, thoughtful, utterly within the pallid skin of his character. But then Spacey often steals films, doesn’t he? Have you seen many better performances over the past 30 years than Spacey’s in The Usual Suspects? He is probably the best actor Hollywood has. Or had.
It is also quite possible that if he sat down next to you on a park bench he would withdraw his penis and ask you to admire its length and girth. Somewhat odd behaviour, I would contend, although each to their own. This is just one of a dozen or so accusations of sexual harassment levelled at Kevin Spacey and some of them seem to be true, given the actor’s carefully drafted apologies. Spacey, then, may not be a terribly nice man. He may well be a serial sexual predator, or worse. If I were 17 years old, I certainly wouldn’t sit on a park bench next to him, unless Ed Harris was there to sort him out. But watch him act? I’d do that all day long.
Not much chance now, however. Nobody is going to be casting him in anything anytime soon — and perhaps that is right, assuming those accusations have a basis in fact. Maybe we should object to a man who has not faced the consequences for his previous misdeeds being paid vast sums of money to strut his undoubtedly accomplished stuff once again. I see that, although I’ve always rather liked the notion of innocent until proven guilty. But then, clearly, Spacey is guilty of something, so I understand the reason Hollywood has gone rather cold.
But what about expunging his previous work? Wiping it from the record, as if it had never been done. Eradicating Spacey from the world of film and leaving just a space. That’s what is happening now. Director Ridley Scott is digitally removing Spacey from his picture All the Money in the World and replacing him with Christopher Plummer. The sixth series of House of Cards will not feature Spacey at all, which neatly removes the only possible point of watching the thing. His films are also being pulled from festivals; all of this madness as if we were attempting to erase him from our consciousness, pretend that he has never existed. Spacey’s fall from grace was triggered by the revelations about the producer Harvey Weinstein, and indeed both men are now in some institution dedicated to purging rich people of their desire to have sexual intercourse. This is what slebs always do when they’ve been caught out: head for rehab to demonstrate to the public that they have a problem and therefore are in some sort of sense a victim, too. But anyway, I am waiting for the film world to expunge Weinstein from our minds. Confiscate all his films. No more Kill Bill or Pulp Fiction or Velvet Goldmine — none of them to be seen again. Or does Weinstein not matter because he doesn’t actually appear on screen?
This purging is a comparatively recent phenomenon. The first time I remember it happening was when the BBC started expunging Gary Glitter from re-runs of Top of the Pops, believing — perhaps rightly — that the public’s answer to the question: ‘Do You Wanna Touch Me?’ was a fairly firm ‘No, Gary, and nor does my 12-year-old daughter’. The next to be edited from existence was the producer and performer Jonathan King — one of the first celebrities to be done for accusations of historic sexual impropriety and, if you read the court transcripts, convicted on what seemed to me rather dubious evidence.
I always held that King’s most criminal act was ‘Una Paloma Blanca’, one of a string of largely novelty hits from a time when he was able to storm the charts seemingly at will. But anyway, King was cut out of another Top of the Pops re-run – shown in 2011, after he had served his sentence. King was not happy about this and complained to the then director-general, Mark Thompson, about the ‘Stalinist revision of history’. Incredibly enough, Thompson apologised and agreed that his segment should not have been cut. Of course removing Gary Glitter, Jonathan King, the Bay City Rollers and the inevitable Jimmy Savile from early 1970s re-runs of Top of the Pops would leave you with very slender pickings indeed. You’d just about be left with the morally upstanding David Bowie. Oh, and Hawkwind.
Back in 1944 George Orwell wrote an essay entitled Benefit of Clergy: Some Notes on Salvador Dali, after he had read the artist’s autobiography. Orwell detailed, with humorous fastidiousness, Dali’s appalling character: kicking his little sister in the head, eating a dying bat covered in ants, the penchant for necrophilia and so on. Orwell pointed out that there were two responses to Dali. There were those who cited Dali’s behaviour as a compelling reason to dismiss him as an artist, and those who thought he was such a wonderful artist that his behaviour could be excused or even commended — artists being afforded the benefit of clergy.
People seemed to find it impossible to navigate towards the evident truth that Dali was, as Orwell puts it, a superb draughtsman but an absolutely ghastly individual. Even so, not even Dali’s fiercest critics thought his work should be removed from public display because he had bitten a bat in half.
But Orwell’s essay has a resonance today — it’s simply that we take our absolutism a little further. In this sense, Kevin Spacey is the exception to the rule. You may have noticed that those celebrities hounded by the police (and, in some cases prosecuted and convicted) were, in the main, irredeemably naff. Look at the list: Freddie Starr, Dave Lee Travis, Jimmy Savile, Gary Glitter, Jonathan King, Stuart Hall, Rolf Harris, Lowbrow entertainers, the staples of Saturday-night entertainment in that most naff of decades, the 1970s. Somehow the critically acclaimed celebrities never quite got caught in the net. John Peel, for example, who boasted in his autobiography of having sex with a 15-year-old girl: no action taken. And look at the way in which Hollywood has sheltered the appalling Roman Polanski for the past 40 years, despite accusations against him that dwarf anything levelled at Harvey Weinstein. Until this year, Hollywood actors and actresses queued up to defend Polanski — a fugitive from justice — perhaps because he is an auteur, the man who directed Chinatown, which, everyone agrees, is a clever movie.
So, Spacey is something of an exception to the rule — although I notice that this week the writer Libby Purves was defending the actor, insisting that Spacey’s behaviour took place at a time when there was much homophobia around. Seems to me a thinnish excuse. And I will bet Purves would have resisted sailing to the defence of the deathlessly unfunny Freddie Starr (who was hounded by the police but never convicted of anything at all). We still find it easier, then, to shovel our opprobrium and loathing on performers we never thought were very much cop in the first place, while affording those who are on our cultural wavelength the benefit of clergy. But expunging any of them from history is otiose, deluding and psychologically puzzling.
worthingseagull123
Well-known member
- May 5, 2012
- 2,687
I wont stop watching his old films.
Usual Suspects, American Beauty, Outbreak, Seven - he has been in some quality films.
Not going to stop watching then on basis of unsubstaniated allegations
Usual Suspects, American Beauty, Outbreak, Seven - he has been in some quality films.
Not going to stop watching then on basis of unsubstaniated allegations
- Oct 17, 2008
- 14,500
Not guilty on all charges.
I hope everyone, from the alleged victims to Spacey to the public and media can move on.
I hope everyone, from the alleged victims to Spacey to the public and media can move on.