After a Rain Man review appeared on this very same website’s homepage, I wondered about how many more great movies are based on the premise of gambling and casinos. Then I thought about Dustin Hoffman being in the movie, and him getting caught up in the #MeToo storm that rightfully hit Hollywood in the last few years.
The MeToo plus betting mix automatically led my mind all the way back to 2008, in a small theatre, where I watched 21, starring and produced by Kevin Spacey.
The movie itself felt like fun back then, but comes out as sort of trite looking back at it now. Nothing’s revolutionary: from the plot, to the characters, to the old blackjack counting cards theme we’ve seen in a movie at least once every five years.
However, it was overall a pretty solid and enjoyable moviegoer experience at the theatre: the acting was solid, the fact it was based on a true story made it compelling, it was well shot… And there was Kevin Spacey that, similarly to Hoffman but even more so, has been pushed out of the industry for being a sexual predator. This leads to a question: should we still be able to watch and enjoy his movies?
My controversial answer to this is: yes, as long as we’re not paying him. Amazon has recently shelved a Woody Allen movie starring Timothee Chalamet and Selena Gomez that was 100% ready to go; much like “I Love You Daddy” by Louis C.K.
While the latter allegedly includes some too-close-to-home references and scenes, the first one is not different from anything else Woody Allen has brought to the table, and can’t possibly be any more controversial than Manhattan.
So, if the people involved in these movies have already been paid, shouldn’t we be able to release them, perhaps donating the revenue to charitable organizations helping sexual harassment victims?
Maybe it’s an uneducated idea coming from someone who doesn’t necessarily understand the complicated twists and turns behind the revenue coming in from movie tickets, or maybe it would be pointless looking at how much the last Kevin Spacey movie made at the box office, but it’s still an idea.