Does anyone else find it interesting that screenwriter Tom Ford decided to give Amy Adams' character some long, irreleva
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DHfilmfan — 9 years ago(December 31, 2016 12:08 PM)
Why do you find gay references so deeply and personally disturbing?
If you got it on the first try, then why would you presume that I was somehow deeply and personally disturbed by gay references? After all, if you got it on the first try, then you'd know that I was more bemused by Ford's misogyny.
How do you know I'm not gay myself, and therefore find it deeply and personally disturbing that Ford's pro-gay agenda exists side-by-side with his selling out of women?
I may not be that clever or deep, but what I do find deeply and personally disturbing is people's tendency to presume and lash out against strangers on the internet based on their own sensitivities. -
twookey — 9 years ago(January 14, 2017 03:17 PM)
I don't think I've ever read a more unreasonable riposte to a post before, such as the one you received from that bed wetting liberal harping on about sentivities.
Having just watched the film, I completely concur that Ford does seem to be dragging us through the liberal agenda, then suddenly reminding us of the deleterious emotional effects of abortion, thus seemingly compromising his whole political agenda. Remember, for liberals abortion is just a fun day out, not to be taken too seriously, just a free visit to a clinic to rectify the problem of liberal parenting.
You've been hit with the homophobia tag for daring to mention the director's agenda. I have no issue with homosexuals, bar the fact that they are terribles bores. Banging on about rights ad nauseam and castigating those that mention it just makes them slaves to their own insecuriity. -
DHfilmfan — 9 years ago(January 14, 2017 05:41 PM)
This post is so confusing.
I understand and completely agree with most of what you wrote, especially the bit about Ford compromising his whole political agenda (and perhaps less with your hyperbole about liberals' attitudes towards abortion). However, my main point is that it's the hypocrisies of liberal tolerance that we both seem to be picking up on hereand in particular, in my case, that nauseating variety typified by wealthy gay men wearing their 'oppression' as some badge of honor.
But the sensitivities I was talking about were the (liberal) responder and her knee-jerk reaction to defend all gays, and her immediate interpretation of my observation as a sign of fear and hatred. If anything, the bed-wetting liberal is she, not I.
And I, not she, have been hit with the homophobia taga predictable attack lobbed by her. -
tigerfish50 — 9 years ago(January 15, 2017 08:34 AM)
Remember, for liberals abortion is just a fun day out, . .
This remark is beyond stupid, and identifies you as a buffoon and bed-wetting conservative bore. The film is a psychological mystery - not a political diatribe. Ford uses the abortion issue as plot point - it's only tedious dogmatists who see propaganda wherever they look. -
weirdozmedia — 9 years ago(December 30, 2016 08:13 PM)
I don't see anything wrong with gay people and women having rights.
Hack The Planet!
http://www.ExilesoftheUnderground.com -
joekiddlouischama — 9 years ago(December 30, 2016 08:14 PM)
It's like Ford's waving his rainbow flag and equating (however indirectly) abortion in the mind of a man as tantamount to a brutal abduction and murder all in one fell swoop.
These ideas never occurred to me in my two viewings. Would you describe yourself as politically conservative (perhaps passionately so)? You may well possess a pointthat Ford was covertly pushing a liberal political agenda or at least offering some progressive political subtextbut one might have to be especially sensitive to such issues in order to come away with that interpretation.
For the record, I am not sure that the "soliloquy about her gay brother and her intolerant parents" is that "irrelevant," because it suggests that Susan is socially isolated and alienated on some levela theme that continues through the end of the movie and that may explain why she got into the LA art scene rather than, say, moving back to Texas like Edward. And the abortion point creates (or at least tries to do so) some emotional depth and a plausible theory for motivation.
I never saw any of that as especially political. Yes, the whole "Republican, racist, sexist" spiel is superficially political, but I saw it primarily as a point of character illuminationto suggest Susan's disaffectionand one that Ford presents with humor and irony. Actually, even Susan is saying those lines with some humor and irony, as if to suggest that she is being somewhat hyperbolic while still reflecting a strong kernel of truth. -
DHfilmfan — 9 years ago(December 31, 2016 04:43 AM)
Susan's isolation and disaffection is compounded, first by rejecting the stifling, conservative existence of a Southern debutante, and second by eventually capitulating to her family's bourgeois way of thinking.
We don't really need Ford's treatise on anti-gay conservative Americans to bring this point home. It's beyond superficial; it's superfluous.
What's interesting to me, however, is that you seem to see this as somehow significant for character development (Really? We're talking about Columbia grad school students enjoying dinner at a place most of the student body couldn't afford), while giving Ford a pass for his abortion plot device as grounds for Edward's rape-revenge fantasy.
Does gay acceptance trump women's rights for you as it apparently does for Ford?
And no, I'm not politically conservative. Maybe I'm just attuned to these things after having studied film and political anthropology and even queer theory. Perhaps that you didn't see this as especially political means that it's so commonplace for you as (now it's my turn to presume) an urbane sophisticate in a wealthy liberal society as to escape your notice. But if you haven't seen Ford's previous film A Single Man, and hear echoes of the overtly political sentiments in that film here, then maybe it's not so much my 'conservative' sensibilities that were affronted as these pro-gay-yet-misogynistic ideologies being as natural as the air your breathe. -
VonDC — 9 years ago(January 16, 2017 01:03 AM)
DHfilmfan wrote:
'But if you haven't seen Ford's previous film A Single Man, and hear echoes of the overtly political sentiments in that film here, then maybe it's not so much my 'conservative' sensibilities that were affronted as these pro-gay-yet-misogynistic ideologies being as natural as the air your breathe.'
You are absolutely right. -