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.

I guess I should be thankful my distaste for Dennis Leary kept me from ever watching the movie, so it's one thing Spacey can't ruin for me. Well, and given his characters in The Usual Suspects and Se7en, I guess I could watch those again without him bothering me.

I'm meh on Leary in general, but the screenwriter for The Ref (Richard LaGravenese, who also wrote The Fisher King, Bridges of Madison County and A Little Princess, all of which I fucking love), knew his strengths and wrote to them beautifully. The whole production is just a goldmine of sharp writing and great character acting, and it used to be one of my great pleasures to show it to people who'd never even heard of it and watch them discovering it. And Spacey has (for me, anyway) drained all the joy out of all their work on it.

The Harry Potter movies are a little easier, just because Rowling created the source material but played no active role once the cameras started rolling; each one is very clearly the work of its individual director, building these worlds within worlds along with the actors and set and props and light and sound and costume people and absolutely everyone else. The books themselves make me uncomfortable now, and I'm not sure when/if I'll reread them or how it will feel when I do, but the films are just enough removed from her that it's not visceral or tainting in the same way.

God, I love The Ref. I haven't seen it in years, though. I'm not sure how I'd feel about it now.

I agree about Se7en and The Usual Suspects, though. I actually just watched the latter last week.

I can't wait to see Little Women. I just want it to be ... everything I want it to be. There's no perfect version for me yet -- I'm strangely partial to the 1950s one, although June Allyson as Jo is just weird. I really did NOT like the recent PBS one, but I know I have incredibly intense feelings about the story, so.