Today’s Observer lists a series of age gap films that have just featured at the Sundance Film Festival. The article is well written but predictable and depressing.
It starts off by saying that yes, age gaps in movies often involve a sixty something man and a teenage girl, but if you look in the right places you may find evidence that the tables are quietly turning.
The Licorice Pizza film is apparently about a 25 year old woman who has the hots for a fifteen year old guy.
Good Luck to You, Leo Grande, a film starring Emma Thompson is about a retired schoolteacher hiring a sex worker.
These films are offered as evidence of the cultural sea change happening in the film industry.
It’s five years since the Harvey Weinstein scandal took place. Weinstein himself is not referred to in the article. But the #MeToo movement is and so is Woody Allen.
Allen is referred to as a serial transgressor that has happily cast himself alongside women who are forty years younger than him.
There are quotes from actresses who say that they can’t get work once they’re forty.
The idea is, and I think there must be a lot of truth to it, that the big financing decisions about which films to make and consequently who to cast are made by 60 year old white men. This gets mentioned, but barely.
Despite it being 5 years since #MeToo, no mention was made of the relationship between Woody Allen and Harvey Weinstein or Jeffey Epstein.
Steve Bannon interviewed Jeffrey Epstein for several hours in 2019. Few people are likely to have watched the full tapes. I don’t know if they are due for airing. I know Bannon has his own current legal problems.
Ghislaine Maxwell is trying to get a retrial and the man formerly known as Prince Andrew is trying to get trafficking victim Viginia Giuffre relabelled as a sex trafficker.
That’s just one part of the world that we live in.
The Observer feels soft on misogyny, racism and other forms of prejudice despite always making out that it isn’t. Must be awash with government influence and all that goes with it.
Anyway, here’s Steve and Jeffrey
