BEFORE: Carey Mulligan carries over again from "Far from the Madding Crowd", and this one FOR SURE does not belong in the romance chain, because it's all about the Harvey Weinstein scandal. I could make a case for the last two films belonging in February, maybe, but then I'd have to put them at either the start of the February chain or the end of it, and use a film like this one for the intro or the outro. Since I didn't want to wait a whole year to watch "Maestro", these three Carey Mulligan films are getting worked into January, and it's a theme week about John DeLorean and Leonard Bernstein and people using their position to get sexual favors or drug deals and maybe take some shortcuts or consider themselves above the rules. Or something to that effect, anyway.
There is another Carey Mulligan film that came out for Oscar season, and it's "Saltburn". Maybe I could have worked that one in, too, if I hadn't wasted my time on the Alec Baldwin films. Oh well, I'll try to circle back to "Saltburn" later this year if I can, I saw bits of it and I'm honestly not in a rush.
FOLLOW-UP TO: "Bombshell" (Movie #3,485)
THE PLOT: Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey's quest to break the Harvey Weinstein scandal.
AFTER: This movie was made in the same vein as "All the President's Men", "Spotlight" and "The Post" (among others, I'm sure), based on the decision to tell the story through the news organizations working to break an important scandalous news story. There's an obvious reason for this, as the events in question were not seen by the public, Watergate happened behind closed doors, and obviously there were no witnesses to the Catholic Church molestation scandals, so those movies focus on the reporters who worked for the Washington Post or the Boston Globe. We learn the details of the case as they do, and so slowly we, the audience, learn to wrap our brains around a complex story as the details slowly become available.
But I think there's a miscalculation, a price to be paid for telling the story in this format, because this all involves a lot of phone calls being made, and then meeting those interview subjects at their homes, or taking people out to lunch, and that's all just not very cinematic. The rule of movies, generally, should be "Show, don't tell", and this just subverts that rule completely. It ends up just being a lot of people talking on the phone and having conferences in the NY Times office, and god damn it, if I wanted to be involved in meetings like this then I'd just go get a job at the New York Times, wouldn't I? It's my day off, I just want to watch an exciting movie where cops chase down perps or alien starships shoot at each other, or I'll even prefer to watch farmers clean the mud and poop off their sheep before they shear off their wool. Even that would be preferable to watching people making phone calls and booking plane tickets to go interview people about their experiences working for Miramax.
It's important stuff, I know, because Harvey Weinstein needed to be taken down, he'd spent decades getting away with a lot of bad stuff because he never learned to take "No" for an answer sexually, and nobody ever felt comfortable telling him "No" about what he could do, and then even when actresses and assistants reported him for sexual assault or even rape, nothing was done about it for decades, because he had an army of lawyers who would keep accusers quiet, and then he started hiring private investigators to harass the journalists who were trying to report his misconduct, and did everything he could to silence his accusers with either money or threats, rather than change his habits, admit his misdeeds and face prosecution.
Finally, through the efforts of the New York Times reporters, more than a dozen women came forward with their accusations, Weinstein was identified as a serial accuser, dismissed from his company, Miramax, and went to prison. The shockwave throughout the entertainment industry took down many others who were abusing their positions of power, like Matt Lauer and Charlie Rose and R. Kelly, then things filtered down to other industries, such as the sports world and the military and college campuses, and now in every company in America employees (and more importantly, CEOs) have to take sexual harassment training every year. We can't say the problem was fixed completely, but hey, it was a start. Then there were, unfortunately, some perhaps false allegations made against some prominent actors, and things started to get a little muddled, maybe?
However, the most prominent figures in the entertainment world who'd gotten away with all kinds of sexual misconduct for years were Jeffrey Epstein and Donald Trump. Epstein died in prison, and Trump, well, we're still working on that one. "She Said" has a scene early in the film where Trump is harassing a NY Times reporter shortly after the Access Hollywood "Grab 'em by the pussy" scandal broke, but after that, no matter what news came out about Trump, he kept failing upwards until he won the election. And now it's 8 years later and he STILL hasn't seen any bad consequences from ANY of his misdeeds, but I think they're close on the NYC fraud charges and maybe on the election influence scandal. Sexual assault, I think they're working on the E. Jean Carroll case again, because after he was found guilty of the assault, he went right out and spoke publicly against his accuser, which led to a defamation of character case.
Here's the problem with the Trump scandals, though - the news organizations, in general, couldn't get enough of them in 2015 and 2016, because each one they reported on brought in big ratings. But those ratings also meant that his profile was being raised, and that cycle continued until he got elected - with Trump there was no such thing as bad publicity, apparently. The only way to prevent his ratings from going up among his fan base would be to stop reporting news about him completely, and the news media just doesn't know how to do that - so they were unwillingly feeding his fire and raising his profile every time they reported on the terrible things he was accused of. If he doesn't get sentenced soon, like Harvey Weinstein was, then before you know it, he'll win the 2024 election too, and the news media who hate him but also can't stop talking about him will be partially to blame. If you want him to lose, then by all that's holy, STOP devoting so much of your nightly program to his actions, good or bad. Just ban him from your show, simple as that, then he can't reach his misguided fan base.
Anyway, "She Said" might have single-handedly saved the NYC restaurant industry after COVID, because they shot lunch interviews in nearly every restaurant in town, apparently. That's good, we don't want to lose any more Manhattan restaurants than we have to, and I hope those restaurants were well compensated. Beyond that, the film also decided to spend time on the other aspects of the reporter's lives, like taking their children for walks in the park, watching TV with their spouses, getting hit on in a bar - it's all extremely boring because I think they were trying to make the reporting duties very interesting by comparison, but that didn't really work either. Ideally this should make the viewers want to become involved in the exciting world of journalism, but God, I don't know, it just seems like so much effort, so many phone calls, so many meetings, so much taking notes. So much work, how could it possibly be a satisfying career? Where are the scenes where they have to meet their anonymous sources in an underground parking garage?
Also starring Zoe Kazan (last heard in "Cryptozoo"), Patricia Clarkson (last seen in "Pieces of April"), Andre Braugher (last seen in "The Gambler"), Jennifer Ehle (last seen in "Monster"), Lola Petticrew, Samantha Morton (last seen in "Miss Julie"), Molly Windsor, Ashley Judd (last seen in "Barry"), Zach Grenier (last seen in "A Shock to the System"), Peter Friedman (last seen in "Side Effects"), Emma Clare O'Connor (last seen in "Tesla"), Tom Pelphrey (last seen in "Mank"), Adam Shapiro (ditto), Frank Wood (last seen in "The Phenom"), Angela Yeoh (last seen in "All the Old Knives"), Edward Astor Chin, Sean Cullen (last seen in "Framing John DeLorean"), Sarah Ann Masse, Anastasia Barzee, Dalya Knapp, Emery Ellis Harper, Katie Nisa, Mike Spara, Tessa Lee, Harvey Friedman (last seen in "The Voices"), Roxanna Hope Radja, John Mazurek, Hilary Greer, Nicole Betancourt, Marceline Hugot (last seen in "Motherhood"), Kathleen Mary Carthy, Maren Heary (last seen in "The Kitchen"), Elle Graham, Wesley Holloway, Justine Colan, Ashley Chiu, Catherine LeFrere, Lauren O'Connor, Greg Edelman (last seen in "Green Card"), Brad Aldous, Jason Babinsky (last seen in "A Cure for Wellness"), Davram Steifeler, Tasha Dixon (last seen in "Fahrenheit 11/9"), Maren Lord,
with the voices of Judith Godréche (last seen in "The Overnight"), Mike Houston, James Austin Johnson (last seen in "Hail, Caesar!"), Keilly McQuail (last seen in "Like Father"), Makia Martin, Gwyneth Paltrow (last seen in "The Pallbearer") and archive footage of Bill O'Reilly (last seen in "Bitchin': The Sound and Fury of Rick James").
RATING: 5 out of 10 NDAs
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