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Post by kathryn on Apr 16, 2024 21:42:42 GMT
Back To Black - ** 1/2 Is this going to be the way of things now with modern biopics? That we know so much and have so much real life content to compare to that everything just feels incredibly cringe? We should be getting the Robbie Williams biopic later this year, and reportedly it is an exercise in original filmmaking. So maybe if that is a success…
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Post by kathryn on Apr 16, 2024 21:36:01 GMT
Watched Damsel last night on Netflix.
2.5*
It’s fine as a switch-your-brain-off action-fantasy. It falls apart the minute you think about the premise or the world-building.
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Post by kathryn on Apr 15, 2024 12:19:38 GMT
. Freddie I can imagine would have enjoyed collaborating with some of the modern artists but I don't think he'd have been a big fan of social media unless it was to release his music or his "inner circle who all had the pet names" would have been a private group on whatever platform. Like John Deacon in the band he was a more private individual whilst Brian and Roger would appear on TV programmes more readily and had higher profile partners. . To continue to be annoyingly off topic, I am enjoying Robbie Williams on Instagram - he has been using it to showcase his visual art, make jokes, poll his followers for their favourite 80s films/songs, do art-collabs with other Instagram-artists, find deserving recipients of a flood of coordinated internet cuddles, and post pictures and videos of his pets. I can imagine Freddie getting well into #catsofinstagram and filling his grid with cat photos. And probably he’d have enjoyed the eye candy, but likely from a private account.
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Post by kathryn on Apr 14, 2024 22:30:29 GMT
And of course she was only 15!!
Only not really, because she is a character in a play and didn’t actually exist.
(Don’t tell the tourists that, though - they make a nice living down in Verona!)
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Post by kathryn on Apr 14, 2024 22:27:26 GMT
scarletmoodFreddie was a bundle of contradictions, which is what makes him fascinating still. 😁 Like being a ‘unique’ individual who deliberately adopted the ‘Castro Clone’ style because it helped him blend in. I think we sometimes forget just how different our culture is now to the 70s and 80s because of the way our media landscape has changed communication. Freddie could not have even imagined social media!
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Post by kathryn on Apr 14, 2024 22:21:16 GMT
When people start posts with "rolling my eyes so hard at this" or generally telling people off because they simply "wonder" about something on a flippin messageboard it really turns me off listening to their response however well worded or well-researched. Well worded and well-researched is all the response that's needed, and can keep the discussion going, without publicly humiliating someone and getting to be the boss who sent them to the naughty step. There’s an ignore function on this board. You can save yourself from reading my opinions any time by using it. But then you’d miss out on the fun of appearing holier-than-thou and telling me off for how I express myself, so I doubt you’ll do that!
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Post by kathryn on Apr 14, 2024 20:36:33 GMT
Sorry folks. Went on a Freddie Mercury hyperfixation binge a couple of years ago, and as a result people trying to re-write his personal life is particularly annoying to me!!
We truly don’t need to guess about this stuff about him because everyone even tangentially connected to him wrote a book! And the contents of his house just went up for auction. He actually told people before he died that he didn’t mind them cashing in on their stories and memorabilia. He had a pragmatist’s approach to it all and could be rather cynical.
To bring it slightly back on topic, he was cynical about Geldof’s motivations for Live Aid, and thought he was in it as much for the fame as helping people. Unsurprising that the musical doesn’t really mention that!
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Post by kathryn on Apr 14, 2024 18:02:30 GMT
It always makes me wonder what pronouns some of the flamboyant singers from that era would have used or how they might have identified. Bowie always seemed to be ahead of the curve somehow. I once heard the joke what came between Glam Rock and New Romantic and the answer is Freddie. Again the person playing Freddie can identify any which way they like but the performer had a very good voice and was well cast for the role which is all I care about. Please stop trying to ‘trans’ dead people. There were transvestites and transsexuals in existence when Freddie Mercury was alive; he was neither. He was a gay man. He was not particularly effeminate, even - he liked masculine men and he dressed and behaved in masculine ways. Glam rock was a fashion when Queen started their careers and so they followed it. Freddie was by all accounts very relieved when the fashion changed and he didn’t have to wear that get-up anymore. His favourite outfit when he was at home relaxing was a track suit and trainers. And we do actually know this for sure because his live-in personal assistant and his partner both wrote memoirs after his death, and they both included lots of candid photos.
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Post by kathryn on Apr 13, 2024 12:32:54 GMT
Bowie wouldn’t have ‘identified as’ in the current sense it is used. He was playing different characters as part of his art. He *was* an actor!
We used to have a culture that understood this - that actors *act*, they are not presenting their own ineffable and authentic essence. That characters don’t have authentic ‘identity’ and are always open to interpretation.
The idea that artists are representing a particular identity on stage - and therefore that they can’t play what they cannot, the essentialist trend - may well be implicated in this racist backlash. If you see Juliet as a ‘white character’ - because after all she was a 16th Century Italian from a noble family - then in theory her whiteness in as inherent to her identity as the ‘blackness’ of Othello is. And so the double-standard of insisting that Othello must always be played by a black actor but that Juliet can be played by an actor of any non-white race creates the backlash.
But that is a silly overreach of identity politics. The reason that Othello should be played by a black actor is that racial othering is an important part of the story.
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Post by kathryn on Apr 11, 2024 16:26:21 GMT
Indeed, social media has set progress back at least 10, perhaps 20 years. Trans, for example; which was almost no thing at all in 1972 when David Bowie was representing the whole thing at 7pm every Thursday on BBC1. Rolling my eyes hard here. Bowie was never Trans. He just played dress-up and took on a range of personas in order to get himself lots of attention and become famous. He has nothing at all to do with the present-day issue. There has always been a contingent of theatregoers who are vehemently opposed to colour blind or diverse casting. This subject has been discussed over and over again all the way back to the original WOS forum. It’s not a new thing - people just stopped talking about it. Whenever you stop people talking about these issues they build up a huge head of steam about them under the lid that eventually leads to an explosion of nastiness. I suspect it is probably true that there has been some bot-stoking of the online flames with this particular casting, that has pushed it to audiences who would not normally even hear about theatre productions. Because this casting is really no different from hundreds of others.
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Post by kathryn on Mar 6, 2024 10:36:19 GMT
know an invited Dress isn’t the best gauge of a proper audience- but I haven’t seen an audience react to the songs like that … since seeing this very show in NYC. Is there any way for mere mortals like many of us to ever get invited to an 'invited dress'? Seeing this week after next and VERY excited. Invest in the show. 😉
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Post by kathryn on Feb 29, 2024 10:57:41 GMT
There’s some research that shows trigger warnings are actually detrimental for the mental health of people who respond to those triggers.
This is separate from effects that trigger physical illnesses, like strobe lighting.
The theory is that trigger warning help people avoid things that trigger an anxiety response or to prepare themselves for them. But the research showed that the trigger warning increased the duration and intensity of the anxiety, because it led to the person anticipating the trigger and building up anxiety about their response to it, compared to people who were not forewarned, whose anxiety response had a shorter duration and therefore recovered quicker from the impact of it.
As for the issue of avoiding triggers entirely, the problem is that avoidance is a maladaptive response that actually increases anxiety overall. Every effective PTSD and anxiety treatment involves exposure to the trigger and processing the anxiety experienced to reduce the impact of it.
It’s like someone who has an obsessive compulsive fixation on germs who engages in hand washing rituals - if the whole family adopts those rituals to soothe their anxiety, it actually reinforces that the ritual is necessary and makes the overall anxiety worse. The correct treatment is not to reinforce the anxiety but to disrupt it, so that the behaviour can be reduced and eventually stopped.
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Post by kathryn on Feb 27, 2024 12:16:29 GMT
I do wonder why eight year olds are expected to cope fine with dated racial language their parents probably won't understand, but four year olds can't. I didn’t even spot that this was a racial reference as a child 30+ years ago, it was dated then. Particularly as people covered is soot are just people covered in soot and don’t actually look like a different race. It seemed like a made-up nonsense word. I can’t imagine a modern child recognising it at 8, 12 or 4. This change isn’t about the kids, is it. It’s about people who are much older than 12. But saying that, it is essentially harmless. I doubt anyone allowing their child to watch Mary Poppins is going to be unfamiliar enough with the film’s content to need an age-advisory. Only real impact might be to make some parents take a 12A rating more lightly that they should on new films. There’s some 12A films that are genuinely scary for little kids.
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Post by kathryn on Feb 22, 2024 16:35:41 GMT
Like saying the DNA is ‘flawed evidence’- it is evidence of sexual activity by multiple unidentified males in that bed, in a case where sexual activity with boys is being alleged to have taken place in that bed, when we know that lots of boys spent lot of time in that bed. We don’t have any evidence of adult males other than Jackson using the bed, we have lots of evidence of boys using it while Jackson was there. . We don’t need to know if there where other men having used that bed. Did the DNA found match any of the boys claiming sexual abuse. When you realise the answer is no, then there is no evidence that suggests sexual activity with those boys. Sworn testimony is evidence. There was a considerable amount of sworn testimony of sexual activity with boys. Including from a now-adult. The boys’ testimony includes descriptions of activities with them and other boys that would have led to the physical evidence found. The evidence indicated multiple individuals engaged in sexual activity in that room. It is a great shame that the physical evidence remaining was not matched to the boys who brought the complaint, and that multiple other boys with complaints settled their cases outside court, or refused to testify in the case. It is a great shame indeed that the owners of the fingerprints on the adult materials and DNA on the mattress could not be identified. Though I rather suspect that even if they could be traced to young boys who Jackson had stay in his bedroom with him, that would still not convince some fans. Because fans are motivated to give Jackson the benefit of the doubt, any doubt, any tiny slither of a reason at all they can grasp at to avoid believing that he was a paedophile. And that included some of the people selected for the jury.
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Post by kathryn on Feb 21, 2024 12:51:13 GMT
The jury stated that they were applying a much higher bar than would normally be expected in such a case, though. That’s my point - Jackson’s fame and his art gave him a leeway that a normal person would not get. Like saying the DNA is ‘flawed evidence’- it is evidence of sexual activity by multiple unidentified males in that bed, in a case where sexual activity with boys is being alleged to have taken place in that bed, when we know that lots of boys spent lot of time in that bed. We don’t have any evidence of adult males other than Jackson using the bed, we have lots of evidence of boys using it while Jackson was there.
It’s circumstantial evidence but it’s not ‘flawed’. One has to imagine scenarios which there is no evidence for in order to dismiss it entirely.
Jury members actively said after the trial that they were convinced Jackson was a paedophile, and had likely abused some children; one of the star defence witnesses now says that Jackson abused him, with a second accusation from someone who refused to testify in Jackson’s defence.
It baffles me that people can point to ‘he wasn’t convicted’ in those circumstances. No justice system is perfect and we know that many abusers escape conviction - particularly when they are rich and famous. Jimmy Saville was not convicted; R Kelly was acquitted in 2008 despite there being photo and video evidence of his abuse; he was not convicted of any crime until 2022 despite decades of allegations with really solid evidence.
Of course we will agree to disagree on this. I don’t expect to persuade anyone who has made up their mind.
I believe this musical is very much aimed at people who are content to disbelieve these allegations and are happy to ignore them as much as possible, rather than people who would acknowledge them but separate the art from the artist.
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Post by kathryn on Feb 21, 2024 9:35:12 GMT
Hm, I think the distinction here is the effect that fandom has on the assessment of the person’s behaviour.
No-one is going to Six because they think Henry VIII was a swell guy or an innocent victim, or because they are such a huge fan of Greensleeves.
The fact is that people’s love for Jackson’s art motivates them to excuse his behaviour, which had really serious consequences. The love for his art makes it hard to even accurately discuss his behaviour and its impact on people, and while he was alive it gave him license to act however he pleased, regardless of how damaging that was - for him as much as anyone else.
That is why it is uncomfortable. If we were all saying ‘terrible human being, but let’s separate the art from the artist’ that would be a different conversation than the one we have been having for the last several pages.
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Post by kathryn on Feb 20, 2024 19:39:49 GMT
Edit: if the standard of evidence to convict a paedophile of child abuse was ‘conclusive proof’, most cases would fail. It is very very hard to conclusively prove anything. The standard we use is ‘beyond reasonable doubt’. In most cases with evidence like MJ’s you would get a conviction. Put it this way - if you are on the fence about Jackson you should also be on the fence about Saville. The evidence is of the same type, there is no ‘conclusive proof’ of the Saville accusations either. None of the evidence against Saville has been discredited to the extent that the evidence against Jackson has. The extent that one believes the evidence against Jackson has been discredited really depends on how ardent a fan you are. No-one has had an incentive to attempt to discredit Saville’a accusers after his death. They were certainly discredited if they tried to report while he was still alive.
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Post by kathryn on Feb 20, 2024 19:33:56 GMT
The evidence he was sexually interested in children is the books of photos of boys, the pictures he put on his bedroom walls of children, the testimony of multiple about his behaviour, and his visible behaviour with them as testified to by his staff and caught on camera.
We all recognise that people like looking at pictures of the people who attract them, enjoy spending time around those people, want to hold their hands and cuddle them and be physically close to them.
The behaviour of Jackson would not have been unusual if the people had been adults - if either or both sexes - rather than children. He behaved around children how most people behaved with girlfriends and boyfriends.
As for the possibility that other family members used his bedroom in ways that would result in their DNA being in his bed, it’s not technically impossible, but it’s unlikely given that they had their own rooms. Quite frankly it’d be a weird thing to do and certainly would have been noticed by the cleaning staff who would have needed to clean the bed up before he returned. Also, it would be provable - you’d be able to DNA test family and staff and match them up. The defense didn’t even attempt that.
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Post by kathryn on Feb 20, 2024 19:07:29 GMT
There is no relationship between the forensic evidence and the perjury charges - they were entirely separate matters.
From what jury members said afterwards, the bar they had set themselves to convict was so high that the forensics didn’t affect their decision. Although it was persuasive evidence that sexual activity with some children was *likely* to have taken place, it wasn’t conclusive proof that the sexual activity with Arvizo had taken place.
It’s strong evidence that Jackson was a paedophile, though. You don’t actually need to prove that Jackson molested any particular boy to believe that he was sexually interested in children.
Edit: if the standard of evidence to convict a paedophile of child abuse was ‘conclusive proof’, most cases would fail. It is very very hard to conclusively prove anything. The standard we use is ‘beyond reasonable doubt’. In most cases with evidence like MJ’s you would get a conviction. Put it this way - if you are on the fence about Jackson you should also be on the fence about Saville. The evidence is of the same type, there is no ‘conclusive proof’ of the Saville accusations either.
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Post by kathryn on Feb 20, 2024 18:52:03 GMT
I can’t go into details on the forensics as it is not suitable for the board’s age limit.
I am sure you know that the ‘fraud and perjury’ charges were about not declaring the compensation payment on the welfare claim, which was the matter raised by the lawyers in court during the case. Truly irrelevant to whether MJ molested any kids.
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Post by kathryn on Feb 20, 2024 18:45:25 GMT
In America, the land where it is totally normal for people to fundraise for cancer treatment, a mother asking to help to pay for a child’s cancer treatment is hardly a grifter.
But it doesn’t matter if she was, it wouldn’t change the likelihood that Jackson was a paedophile based on how *he* behaved with her son and other young boys, and the forensic evidence gathered from his bedroom.
Kicking up dirt in the mother is a distraction tactic.
Poor woman - her kid got cancer, she tried her best to get him help, she made some stupid mistakes in the process, and she got her life ruined.
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Post by kathryn on Feb 20, 2024 18:21:47 GMT
The poor woman didn’t understand what paperwork to file after receiving a compensation payment and was caught out on a technicality. It doesn’t mean her son was not sexually abused, it means she didn’t understand the US welfare rules around compensation payments.
If the family had been focused on money and not justice they’d have gone after Jackson for a multi-million dollar out of court payment, and avoided the stress of going through a trial.
Frankly it just goes to show how Jackson’s expensive lawyers’ strategy was to influence the jury by attacking the parents, not by addressing the actual testimony of the boys and physical evidence found.
A cursory reading of the stories you linked to shows that the matter was indeed raised in court. It is definitely not true that all the evidence presented has been ‘debunked’, although MJ stans always make claims like that.
I am fully, fully aware of all the ‘debunking’ claims out there. We can take it as read that as far as the fans are concerned every single thing has been debunked, all of the accusers, all of the witnesses, all of the physical evidence presented, even at times Jackson’s own words out of his own mouth.
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Post by kathryn on Feb 20, 2024 16:20:28 GMT
That's where I draw the line. I love listening to Michael Jackson's music, but I'd never have gone to Thriller Live or this if he was alive to benefit. Now he's dead, he can't benefit so it's fine to patronise his music. If you don't want to go, out of consideration to his victims, that's fine too. There's no right answer, so everyone can make this decision for themselves. I guess my problem has always been with the parents as much as MJ, and the fact that things have always been ‘settled’ out of court. Taking the money rather than letting things play out in open court speaks just as much about their morals as his. These are all properly messed up people being used by a morally bereft legal system and its players, with barely a thought for the lives it is affecting. They have not always been settled out of court. The Arvizo case went to trial. It’s incredibly hard to get a jury to convict a famous person, though. Some of the jurors in the Arvizo case later said they were convinced he was a paedophile, they just had an incredibly high evidence bar for convicting him in their heads. Basically they’d decided they would acquit him on the specific charges unless there was video of him with the boys. Which there obviously wasn’t. Edit: I do agree that this thread will quickly become unwieldy if the MJ stans decide to flood it with defenses if him, so the mods may find they have to take some remedial action to allow the actual show to be discussed. I fully support any deletion of my posts required should that happen.
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Post by kathryn on Feb 20, 2024 16:14:18 GMT
Regularly sleeping in beds with children that are not your own is weird behaviour, whether it's illegal or not. Anyway, I've booked for this as a fan of theatre rather than MJ, just as I was happy to watch Steve Coogan playing Jimmy Savile on TV. I never said it wasn't weird, but it doesn't mean he was a peodophile either.....there is a difference....and again, probably for a different thread as it is the show we should discuss here, not the morals of someone none of us will ever know the truth about. The bedroom he shared with multiple children night after night had easily-accessible adult material, his mattress had unidentified male DNA on it, he had a couple of books authored by known paedophiles full of suggestive photographs of boys plus multiple accusers over an extended period of time giving very detailed accounts of abuse. Plus he was obsessed with childhood and children, and behaved in inappropriately friendly ways with them - taking them to adult events as his +1 instead of a date, sitting them on his lap, being incredibly touchy-feely with them, spending hours on the phone to them, saying that spending time with them was the thing that made him truly happy, etc. If it were anyone but Michael Jackson I don’t think many people would say that they ‘could never know the truth’.
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Post by kathryn on Feb 20, 2024 14:09:31 GMT
Live Aid was very far from perfect, especially in the actual execution of the funds spent - there is research that suggests it was a wash, in terms of lives saved, because the civil war was prolonged by the money flowing in to the economy - but that had nothing to do with the skin colour of the people involved.
The outcome would have been the same if it had been spear-headed by Lionel Ritchie and Quincy Jones (who led ‘We are the World’) instead of Bob Geldoff.
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Post by kathryn on Feb 20, 2024 9:45:24 GMT
Ok I just read the thing in full. Six pejorative mentions of the race of the people involved in the event dramatised and the writer of the show. At some point you do have to wonder at the double-standards on display. A critic would never dream of criticising a writer for being from an ethnic minority.
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Post by kathryn on Feb 19, 2024 13:53:27 GMT
City AM: “Majestic” “banging songs” “Hilarious “ “Incredibly entertaining” “A brilliant watch” “Dazzlingly imagined” ⭐️⭐️ I think he liked it but hated himself for liking it, Aaahaaaaa! In one phrase you have just solved a mystery that has long puzzled me about some critical responses to a range of art forms. So that’s what’s going on in their heads!!
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Post by kathryn on Feb 11, 2024 20:14:12 GMT
I also thought this scene was a misfire. Not least because the song is so much older than the character singing it… To use 'My Generation' as the baton-pass song, picked up by the young generation and campaigners of today, is undermined by its lyric: "Hope I die before I get old". With environmental collapse, and nuclear threat, there's a chance of that, but I was surprised to find a feelgood show ending on an expression of nihilism. Lyrically it’s about as far away from being a campaigning song as possible: Why don't you all f-fade away (Talkin' 'bout my generation) And don't try to dig what we all s-s-say (Talkin' 'bout my generation) I'm not trying to cause a big s-s-sensation (Talkin' 'bout my generation) I'm just talkin' 'bout my g-g-g-generation. I get that it’s meant to be a passing-of-the-baton moment but the song is not particularly associated with Live Aid because The Who were so unrehearsed and shambolic that their reunion was a major disappointment, and the satellite link was having technical problems during their set.
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Post by kathryn on Feb 10, 2024 21:11:17 GMT
Funny queue conversation in the Old Vic loos this afternoon. As usual the signage (cubicals only and cubical+urinals) was causing a bit of confusion, but people had managed to figure out that the men should use the one with urinals in.
Lady in the queue: ‘oh, are they gender neutral then? What a stupid idea’ Me: ‘Yes, they’re mixed sex, but what you do is point out to the men that the other one doesn’t have a queue….’
🙄 Still can’t believe that given the demographics of the Old Vic’s actual audience and their clear preference for sex-segregated loos that the management went along with it.
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Post by kathryn on Feb 10, 2024 20:48:38 GMT
😂😂 You've got to tell us. What made it so cringe? Picture a scene where Bob Geldof is talking to a character representing "the youth of today", and metaphorically hands over the baton of helping all of the poor people in the world. Geldof exits as said character bursts into song - "My Generation". 🫠 I also thought this scene was a misfire. Not least because the song is so much older than the character singing it…
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