It's hard to know exactly how to review something like The Invisible War, how to step back and look at it as a movie through the steady barrage of emotional devastation it presents. The stranger sitting next to me at my screening spent the latter half of the runtime sobbing into a fistful of tissues, and I couldn't blame her — the film, the latest documentary from the Oscar-nominated Kirby Dick (Outrage, This Film Is Not Yet Rated) presents a sickening chorus of accounts not just of rape but of institutional betrayal, of a system that's utterly failed to protect or serve those who've joined it.
more »
Back in January, actress Kim Novak issued a statement decrying the use of Bernard Hermann's theme from Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo in eventual Oscar-winner The Artist, igniting a flurry of debate by calling it an act of rape. (“I want to report a rape," she declared. “My body of work has been violated by The Artist.") And whether or not you agreed then that it was an appropriate way to describe an act of artistic citation -- the Academy Award-winning team behind The Artist would call it homage -- Novak is back with another stunner that may reignite the conversation. "I didn't use that word lightly," she said in a report by The AP's Derrik J. Lang today. "I had been raped as a child."
more »
"I’ve done nothing wrong," director Michel Hazanavicius told CNN when asked his reaction to Kim Novak's recent comments lambasting The Artist for using the Vertigo love theme. "I used music from another movie, but it’s not illegal. We paid for that, we asked for that and we had the permission to do it. For me there is no real controversy...I feel sorry for her, but there’s a lot of movies with music from other movies, directors do that all the time and I’m not sure it’s a big deal." [CNN]
Today's real talk from Johnny Depp, speaking with Vanity Fair about his lucrative Pirates of the Caribbean franchise: "Basically, if they're going to pay me the stupid money right now, I'm going to take it... I have to. I mean, it's not for me. Do you know what I mean? At this point, it's for my kids. It's ridiculous, yeah, yeah. But ultimately is it for me? No. No. It's for the kids." And, on the subject of being photographed: "Well, you just feel like you're being raped somehow. Raped ... It feels like a kind of weird -- just weird, man." [Vanity Fair, THR]
