Post by robeiae on Jan 30, 2019 10:12:34 GMT -5
It's the new treatment of Ted Bundy, starring Zac Efron.
It premiered at Sundance a few days ago and it's getting a lot of attention. I've seen a lot of people complaining about it, insofar as they see it as "romanticizing" Bundy and/or think Efron is too "hot" to Bundy. Here's a piece at Vanity Fair that asks the (pointless, imo) question, did the movie earn its existence?
From it:
Here's a more general article about the compaints: abcnews.go.com/GMA/Culture/ted-bundy-biopic-starring-zac-efron-accused-glamorizing/story?id=60695175
My thoughts:
1) A movie is good, is worth "existing" if it entertains, one way or another, if it holds our attention.
2) A movie that purports to be about real events and real people should capture those realities to some extent.
3) Mark Harmon was "hot" when The Deliberate Stranger came out in '86. And that's one of the things that earned it a lot of praise back then, the fact that Harmon was a great choice, so I can't see how Efron's "hotness" is any sort of problem. Really, it's an asset.
4) Bigger picture: we romanticize a lot of bad people all the time. Some are real, some are fictional (consider all of the romanticizing that goes on with the GoT characters). Getting wound up about this is kinda silly and--imo--it's mostly about being outraged on social media, yet again.
It premiered at Sundance a few days ago and it's getting a lot of attention. I've seen a lot of people complaining about it, insofar as they see it as "romanticizing" Bundy and/or think Efron is too "hot" to Bundy. Here's a piece at Vanity Fair that asks the (pointless, imo) question, did the movie earn its existence?
From it:
But again, I’m not sure what all that thoughtfulness really gives us as an audience. And as a culture! I’m probably as guilty as anyone for not only participating in the current true-crime boom, but also for giddily ingesting serial-killer fiction ever since I first saw The Silence of the Lambs. (A story inspired, partly, by Bundy.) And yet something in the current discourse about what kind of stories we want to tell, and how we want to tell them, has dislodged the thing in me that kept me gripped by these kinds of narratives; I have trouble finding the justification for the prurience anymore. Extremely Wicked only furthers that distaste, even as it tries to give us a new, more humane angle on all this horror.
Here's a more general article about the compaints: abcnews.go.com/GMA/Culture/ted-bundy-biopic-starring-zac-efron-accused-glamorizing/story?id=60695175
My thoughts:
1) A movie is good, is worth "existing" if it entertains, one way or another, if it holds our attention.
2) A movie that purports to be about real events and real people should capture those realities to some extent.
3) Mark Harmon was "hot" when The Deliberate Stranger came out in '86. And that's one of the things that earned it a lot of praise back then, the fact that Harmon was a great choice, so I can't see how Efron's "hotness" is any sort of problem. Really, it's an asset.
4) Bigger picture: we romanticize a lot of bad people all the time. Some are real, some are fictional (consider all of the romanticizing that goes on with the GoT characters). Getting wound up about this is kinda silly and--imo--it's mostly about being outraged on social media, yet again.