I adored Little Women. I might have unseated the 1994 version as my new favourite.

It's not a completely straightforward adaptation. I mean, all the story beats are there, but slightly... scrambled. It's formally inventive and has some startlingly metafictional side to it, which may give LW purists a pause. It really worked for me though.

All the cast is first rate but a particular shoutout to the Florence Pugh for being the Best Amy Ever. I can't get over how splendid that casting choice was, honestly. She's such a sparkly, charismatic pistol, it's kind of difficult to look at anyone else when she's on screen (which is saying a lot given the rest of the cast). Also, this is first time a LW adaptation really sold me on Amy/Laurie.

Oh, and make sure to take some Kleenex to the theater. The sad parts made me cry until I had a headache.

Is it easy to get past his association with other roles? For example, Moriarty

I was AMAZED at how easy it was for my brain to make the switch from Moriarty to Hot Priest.

Ditto. Basically from the first scene, he was just Hot Priest.

I need to see the Jumanji and Star Wars sequels as soon as I can sit in a theater without coughing, and then Bombshell with my mom as it's in the Venn diagram overlap of movies we'll probably like.

I'm not sure about the Little Women film—wasn't there a present day adaptation just last year?

We had our usual Christmas Movie Day and saw Uncut Gems, NewStar Wars and Bombshell. I loved Uncut, liked Bombshell and was underwhelmed by SW. I just didn't care about any of the characters or what happened to them. I enjoyed the other two in this trilogy, so I don't know why this one didn't hit the target with me.

Super, extremely petty movie gripe: I can't get past Kevin Spacey's selfish, opportunistic, life-ruining predatory awfulness, and this is the third year in a row I've looked at the DVD of my previously favorite Christmas movie, The Ref, and been unable to stomach it.

The script is marvelous, Judy Davis is a wonder, Glynis Johns and Christine Baranski are corrosive delights, Denis Leary is as great as he's ever been, Richard Bright is comic and heartbreaking as poor inept Murray, endlessly abused but also endlessly tolerated by the only person on earth who'll put up with his catastrophic ineptitude, it's JK Simmons's film debut, and there's even a brief delicious glimpse of BD Wong.

But there's Kevin Spacey sitting in the middle of it; he's one of the leads, and his character is flawed but deeply sympathetic, and by about the 3/4 mark you're rooting for Lloyd and Caroline to work it out. Except that now the thought of him snuggled cheek to cheek and giggling with her makes me queasy. He victimized teens and tweens over and over again and is just a thoroughly shitty human being, and acting is so emotionally naked and present an art that I can't separate this performance out from him. Which infuriates me, because I bloody love that movie, and, like all successful movies, it's a great collaborative work and I so badly miss all its other collaborative graces.

I just keep thinking about an anonymous essay by one of the tween boys he "dated" as a 20-something rising star, who looked back on it all in his 40s, and how painful that reflection was, and how this man is still bewildered by how hurtful and confusing it was and is. He wrote about how when he reached the age Spacey had been when they "dated," he made a point of looking at every tween boy he saw, to try to understand. But all they looked like to him was kids, children, fragile and flailing and absolutely not for his use or anyone else's. I only read it once, but it gutted me and I still haven't shaken it.

Does anyone else still watch that movie? Or any of his? How do you sort it all out, the art and the artist and the monster? I feel like Caroline and Murray and Gussie are beloved friends I can't visit with anymore because I can't see them privately, away from the monster.

I don't have that as a favorite movie, so it doesn't effect me as much. Somehow, because he was a theatre actor, I "knew". Already It is a really small world. Especially if it was "known" by me in Rochester years ago. Henry and June was the movie I liked Kevin Spacey in.

My guilt issue is with Weinstein/Miramax. I mean, I really love Enchanted April. But a whole bunch of movies are Miramix associated [link]

Sophia, ugh. So many. I don't think I had fully processed just how many.

I'm usually pretty good at separating the artist from the art, but films are so much the work of so many people, and the actors are so much the embodiment of everything that's valuable and enduring about them, that I'm finding this sort of fractally difficult. He and Weinstein committed deeply personal, violating crimes against specific individuals, which is incredibly awful, but they also involved themselves in public works and tainted the work of hundreds if not thousands of other, better people. The personal crimes are more than monstrous enough, but it feels almost personally shameful for me that I can't separate it all out enough to still honor the art of their collaborators. But I can't.

For me at least part of it is that they are still alive, they were terrible, and people still defend them. And it is so new. Also, that they used their art to find and in some cases groom their victims. So I am wondering, each time I watch, if something happened that we don't know about, so it takes me out of the film.

For me at least part of it is that they are still alive, they were terrible, and people still defend them. And it is so new. Also, that they used their art to find and in some cases groom their victims. So I am wondering, each time I watch, if something happened that we don't know about, so it takes me out of the film.

Yes, and that the victims are still alive, and (possibly/probably) still in pain.

It's not quite the same, but it's similar to the JK Rowling transphobe thing. On one hand, my enjoyment of and participation in that fandom is mine, and she can't take it away from me. On the other hand, I don't want it to seem like I support her and her transphobia.