#2017. What a year it has been in the entertainment industry. Al porter, Harvey Weinstein and Kevin Spacey have had the most spectacular falls from grace seen in entertainment in a long time. I do recall asking a director acquaintance of mine a long time ago what Weinstein was like and he told me I would not like him. I asked why not and he said he did not want to go into detail. That was in 1997. That is the earliest I had first heard that Harvey was 'problematic'. If he has done even 10% of the things he is accused of, then he deserves all that has happened to him.
Kevin Spacey, who had been in the closet so long he qualified as a citizen of Narnia, was then unveiled as a serial groper. He then took this event to come out. Was he actually under the impression that a)it mattered and b)this was some sort of justification for his actions?. He was then dropped by his agents who are actually the most powerful agents in Hollywood. I dont see how he can come back from this.
Al Porter had always set my teeth on edge. I saw a poster of him advertising a panto and said to myself' Nope, not with you in it'. One week later the whole scandal broke. He is now the subject of a police investigation. He has been dropped from the panto in question and from his radio show.
I am glad that there has been financial punishments in the cases of all three men but they all,not just Porter, need to feel the heavy hand of law enforcement. Such behaviour must be punished. I hope that the perverts out there in the industry who are still unpunished are quaking in their boots.
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#Alporter I was not 100% per cent surprised when this story emerged to be honest. This guy has given me the creeps for a long time. I could not quite put my finger on what it was but he just had this air about him that gave me the impression that he lacked boundaries.
I know comedians are supposed to have less of a filter than most people so they can be outrageous on behalf of the rest of us but he just made my skin crawl.
I could not have said that it was something of a sexual nature that made me feel this way but I was seriously harassed myself by someone and maybe I was picking up on this vibe on a subconcious level.
I do think he should be removed from the panto with these allegations standing over him though. He cannot go on with it. I do feel sorry for the people putting on the panto as these things are cast well in advance but the show, this time, must go on, just with someone else.
I wonder who is going to be the next celebrity to be dangled from the hanging tree of society? I am so glad that high-profile pervs are not getting away with it anymore though. The astonishing thing for me in all of this is the sheer number of men who are coming forward. He has been an overactive pervert all the same. I wonder did he feel that he was untouchable because he had gotten to the top of the showbusiness tree in Ireland? Wow, what a fall from grace to disgrace. This one is going to be monumentally difficult to come back from, if at all.
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#BobGeldof So Sir Bob Geldof has handed back his freedom of Dublin award to us as his way of politically objecting to Aung San Sun Kyi, calling her a murderer in the process. Now I confess here to once having had a major talent crush on Sir Bob. I was thrilled to bits when the Boomtown Rats got to no 1 in England. I read his autobiography and swore someday I would raise money for Africa because of him. (I have been in Oxfam for the past decade so I stayed true to this promise).
I do think however he could have picked a less offense way to make his point. (Or could he? He is known as Bob the gob for a reason.) He decided to annoy the people of Dublin by returning this freedom of the City while retaining his British knighthood. He might claim to be a proud Dub but he has a funny way of showing it. i think he would have been better served by flying out to see Aung San Suu Kyi and asking her what the hell is going on in her country. I know he is not famous for patience and tact but this would have been the first right step to take in my opinion. It was a badly thought out gesture on his part. The world was already talking about her.
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#actresses I just went to see Bad Moms at Christmas and it was hilarious as I knew it would be. It had an awesome female cast including Susan Sarandon. Kathryn Hahn, Mila Kunis and Christine Baranski among others. It was a delight to see so many of the top actresses of our time in there. It got me to thinking that there are not enough female led movies in my opinion. Men can do action franchises into their 60's(Liam Neeson, All of the Expendables cast) but where are the same age group franchises for the women then?
Is it my imagination or do casting directors simply think women are not visually attractive once they are into support bra territory? When men age, they get the serious roles. When women age, they get the funny grandma roles. Some actresses can carry off these parts but you just know they did not go to acting school for this.
I loved going to see the Hunger Games franchise.An entire franchise led by one of the best actresses of her generation was simply too big a deal to stay away from. Can we have more of this Hollywood please?
There are so many books out there that could be filmed with strong female characters. What about a feminist version of Little House on the Prairie? Now there's one I'd go to see.
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#KevinSpacey i just find the whole way in which Kevin Spacey came out to be so odd indeed. He gets accused of making unwanted advances on a 14 year old and he chooses this as his moment to come out. He then claims he cannot remember it as he was drunk. See, for me, if the incident was one he is not sure of, then how does he know he was drunk on the night in question? It is one night 3 decades ago and he is totally confident it was the drink in charge of his behaviour.
And then he goes and chooses this as his time to let the world know what was known all along? He himself has admitted there is more to come out about him. Wow! Is he the Harvey Weinstein of the gay world then? Well, were we all presuming that all the predators out there in the entertainment business were all straight men then? Silly of us to say the least.
Predators come in all forms and in all walks of life. What Kevin Spacey did was an abuse of power at its worst and he deserves to feel ashamed.
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#toxicfriends #badfriends. I used to be friends with a gay man who was in fact a complete and utter bitch. I am not calling him a bitch because he was gay. He would have been a bitch even if he was straight.
He would sit beside me in bars and chat people up. He would ask for their phone number. He would then text them saying that he did not like me and that he was using me. He was actually too dumb to figure out that people were going to contact me and tell me about this. He also stayed in my home a few times and I noticed money going missing. The last time I spoke to him he was trying his level best to get me to go home to my place as he was simply trying to get at my money. I was actually on my way to an acting class and he did not seem to understand this. He was as high as a kite that day. His pupils were like dots.
I got the hell away from him by the simple move of blocking him on Facebook. This was the sort of thing he understood. Just about. Of course I should have listened more when my friends told me to get the hell away from him but the person I used to be was simply too trusting. I have learned to not let anyone into my home as it does not work out. So at least he gave me that lesson. I have not seen him in a long time but I imagine he is still hopping over the wall of the Phoenix Park in the early hours. He says it is for fun but I have my doubts. #looseman.
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#HurricaneOphelia So the Hurricane hit Ireland. We responded by clearing out Tesco and taking the washing off the line. Now I managed to not pay a vast amount of attention to the news over the weekend and did not actually even know there was a Red Alert in Place until I got to the bus stop. Sometimes you just dont listen to the news and you miss things.
Anyway I headed on foot to the city centre and noticed a few interesting things. A lot of shops were closed but one or two restaurants were open. And of course you get those lads who were not going to miss the daily gargle or ten and to hell with the wind.
I was in the web cafe by City Hall and I noticed a lad outside rolling a rollie. In the wind. In short sleeves. I think, like me, he was only slightly aware of the weather warning.
Then I headed on down to see if by some miracle the library was open. On the way a homeless man asked me for money and followed me down the street when I said no. I darted across the road from him and he called me a miserable old cow. The library was not open so I came back towards the Halfpenny bridge. I saw the metal awning from H samuel Jewellers get bent in half by a pole and decided it might be time to go home.
On the way home I saw tourists taking pictures of the rainbow which appeared just over Liberty Hall. I was tempted to tell them this was normal weather for Ireland and the Hurricane had not hit yet. I think I might just have a mean streak.
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#HarveyWeinstein I am not vastly astounded by the news that a big name producer in Hollywood can be a letch. I am just surprised by it being this guy. Harvey Weinstein had long had the reputation of being a tough guy to deal with but this whole thing of him letching on actresses did come as a bit of a surprise to the general public.
This is how it can be though. Men in power can get away with so much because they are picking on people who do not dare to speak out for fear of never working again. Rose Mcgowan sued him and was given a settlement in secret. She is not even A-list and she stood up for herself. There is much to admire in her.
Harvey Weinstein has a lot of power though and there is the danger that he could spin his way out of this as he has done in the past. I just hope that now he is not allowed to do this. Money can be a persuasive thing but guilty is guilty.
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#StephenPaddock #LasVegasShootings I can remember as a teenager hearing about the Brenda Spencer shootings. A teenager who had been given a new gun every year since she was a child had just leaned out her upstairs window and started shooting. Singer Bob Geldof heard about the shooting as he was giving an interview and was appalled. He later immortalised her in the song 'I don't like Mondays'. He was at pains to point out that he was not doing this to immortalise her but to pass comment on the whole pointlessness of her explanation as to why she did it.
Then yesterday morning the world woke up to the news that there had been a mass shooting on American soil. A man named Stephen Paddock had opened fire at a music gig in Las vegas and taken many many lives. He had a stockpile of guns in his hotel room. When he had finished his horrendous attack, he then took his own life.
There are so many questions here. How did he get such a stockpile into his hotel room in the first place? How was a man so clearly mentally ill able to get so many guns in the first place? How is it America does not have the toughest gun laws on Earth, given the long line of nut-jobs who have opened fire on the innocent? I know that the right to bear arms is enshrined in the Constitution but I would have thought that the right to live in safety in your own country would be a bit of a priority for any government.
I don't believe that guns have a place in modern society unless they are in the hands of people who have a massive understanding of the fact that they are not to be used unless absolutely nescessary and even then only in the defence of life.
I wonder will Trump's government sit up and do something. Successive governments before him seem to have ducked the problem of gun control. Maybe this time things will be different. For America's sake, I hope so.
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#HughHeffner So tributes all over the world are being paid to the owner of one of the most successful wank mags ever published. I know he liked to think he was promoting a lifestyle of some kind but really, was he not just an outdated cliche?
Hardcore porn has long dominated the Internet and Playboy magazine actually took the decision to go offline a while back.
The Playboy mansion had been sold last year with the proviso that he could live there until he died. The Playboy Empire had been, like the mansion,crumbling for some time. I guess I am too young to remember a time when that magazine was actually relevant.
I remember it arriving on our shelves after being banned for a long time and I looked at it out of curiosity. I remember thinking that the women looked way too airbrushed and I remember thinking it was a regular tsunami of blondes. Well, Heffner did have a type.
Once Fhm and Gq arrived on the scene, starlets and other celebrities did not have to flash the lot to raise their profile. They could wear a clinging dress or a bra/knickers combo and promote themselves as the hottest thing in shoe leather without having to go the soft-core route.
Of course there were some blondes who suited the magazine. Pamela Anderson, a woman who once got married in a bikini, posed for Horny Heff a record 11 times. to my mind, she was the living personification of Playboy and she got nicely compensated for this. I wonder did she ever get to a point where she realised she could keep her clothes on if she wanted. Who knows, maybe she is at that point already?
Sharon Stone and Kim Basinger also posed for Heff but they were two women who could be said to have self-exploited all the way to the top of the ladder. Kim Basinger actually stated that' the more you show, the higher up the ladder you go'. Madonna was featured in the magazine too and she tried to sue but lost. It was one of the few times in the Material girls career when she could not control an image of herself and she was furious. Personally I thought her complaining drew more attention to the picture and she was badly advised when she sued but it is her life.
Hugh Heffner made a career out of telling women it was empowering to get their tits out for the men in every walk of life. I dont care how many good photographers he used, exploitation is wrong. I also remember the time Ozzy Osbourne's daughter said she would like to pose for him and he replied' We don't airbrush to that extent'. This was a nasty thing to say to a young girl and to my mind, she had a lucky escape.
I personally would not lose any sleep over the demise of his sordid empire and its exploitative lure. I think young men have long required better role models than this.
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suzy bevan / Blog
What a year it has been.
#2017. What a year it has been in the entertainment industry. Al porter, Harvey Weinstein and Kevin Spacey have had the most spectacular falls from grace seen in entertainment in a long time. I do recall asking a director acquaintance of mine a long time ago what Weinstein was like and he told me I would not like him. I asked why not and he said he did not want to go into detail. That was in 1997. That is the earliest I had first heard that Harvey was 'problematic'. If he has done even 10% of the things he is accused of, then he deserves all that has happened to him. Kevin Spacey, who had been in the closet so long he qualified as a citizen of Narnia, was then unveiled as a serial groper. He then took this event to come out. Was he actually under the impression that a)it mattered and b)this was some sort of justification for his actions?. He was then dropped by his agents who are actually the most powerful agents in Hollywood. I dont see how he can come back from this. Al Porter had always set my teeth on edge. I saw a poster of him advertising a panto and said to myself' Nope, not with you in it'. One week later the whole scandal broke. He is now the subject of a police investigation. He has been dropped from the panto in question and from his radio show. I am glad that there has been financial punishments in the cases of all three men but they all,not just Porter, need to feel the heavy hand of law enforcement. Such behaviour must be punished. I hope that the perverts out there in the industry who are still unpunished are quaking in their boots.
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Al Porter, the man who always made me uneasy
#Alporter I was not 100% per cent surprised when this story emerged to be honest. This guy has given me the creeps for a long time. I could not quite put my finger on what it was but he just had this air about him that gave me the impression that he lacked boundaries. I know comedians are supposed to have less of a filter than most people so they can be outrageous on behalf of the rest of us but he just made my skin crawl. I could not have said that it was something of a sexual nature that made me feel this way but I was seriously harassed myself by someone and maybe I was picking up on this vibe on a subconcious level. I do think he should be removed from the panto with these allegations standing over him though. He cannot go on with it. I do feel sorry for the people putting on the panto as these things are cast well in advance but the show, this time, must go on, just with someone else. I wonder who is going to be the next celebrity to be dangled from the hanging tree of society? I am so glad that high-profile pervs are not getting away with it anymore though. The astonishing thing for me in all of this is the sheer number of men who are coming forward. He has been an overactive pervert all the same. I wonder did he feel that he was untouchable because he had gotten to the top of the showbusiness tree in Ireland? Wow, what a fall from grace to disgrace. This one is going to be monumentally difficult to come back from, if at all.
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Couold you not just have gone out there bob?
#BobGeldof So Sir Bob Geldof has handed back his freedom of Dublin award to us as his way of politically objecting to Aung San Sun Kyi, calling her a murderer in the process. Now I confess here to once having had a major talent crush on Sir Bob. I was thrilled to bits when the Boomtown Rats got to no 1 in England. I read his autobiography and swore someday I would raise money for Africa because of him. (I have been in Oxfam for the past decade so I stayed true to this promise). I do think however he could have picked a less offense way to make his point. (Or could he? He is known as Bob the gob for a reason.) He decided to annoy the people of Dublin by returning this freedom of the City while retaining his British knighthood. He might claim to be a proud Dub but he has a funny way of showing it. i think he would have been better served by flying out to see Aung San Suu Kyi and asking her what the hell is going on in her country. I know he is not famous for patience and tact but this would have been the first right step to take in my opinion. It was a badly thought out gesture on his part. The world was already talking about her.
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More female-led movies please
#actresses I just went to see Bad Moms at Christmas and it was hilarious as I knew it would be. It had an awesome female cast including Susan Sarandon. Kathryn Hahn, Mila Kunis and Christine Baranski among others. It was a delight to see so many of the top actresses of our time in there. It got me to thinking that there are not enough female led movies in my opinion. Men can do action franchises into their 60's(Liam Neeson, All of the Expendables cast) but where are the same age group franchises for the women then? Is it my imagination or do casting directors simply think women are not visually attractive once they are into support bra territory? When men age, they get the serious roles. When women age, they get the funny grandma roles. Some actresses can carry off these parts but you just know they did not go to acting school for this. I loved going to see the Hunger Games franchise.An entire franchise led by one of the best actresses of her generation was simply too big a deal to stay away from. Can we have more of this Hollywood please? There are so many books out there that could be filmed with strong female characters. What about a feminist version of Little House on the Prairie? Now there's one I'd go to see.
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What an odd way to come out
#KevinSpacey i just find the whole way in which Kevin Spacey came out to be so odd indeed. He gets accused of making unwanted advances on a 14 year old and he chooses this as his moment to come out. He then claims he cannot remember it as he was drunk. See, for me, if the incident was one he is not sure of, then how does he know he was drunk on the night in question? It is one night 3 decades ago and he is totally confident it was the drink in charge of his behaviour. And then he goes and chooses this as his time to let the world know what was known all along? He himself has admitted there is more to come out about him. Wow! Is he the Harvey Weinstein of the gay world then? Well, were we all presuming that all the predators out there in the entertainment business were all straight men then? Silly of us to say the least. Predators come in all forms and in all walks of life. What Kevin Spacey did was an abuse of power at its worst and he deserves to feel ashamed.
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Sometimes you have to shove them out the door
#toxicfriends #badfriends. I used to be friends with a gay man who was in fact a complete and utter bitch. I am not calling him a bitch because he was gay. He would have been a bitch even if he was straight. He would sit beside me in bars and chat people up. He would ask for their phone number. He would then text them saying that he did not like me and that he was using me. He was actually too dumb to figure out that people were going to contact me and tell me about this. He also stayed in my home a few times and I noticed money going missing. The last time I spoke to him he was trying his level best to get me to go home to my place as he was simply trying to get at my money. I was actually on my way to an acting class and he did not seem to understand this. He was as high as a kite that day. His pupils were like dots. I got the hell away from him by the simple move of blocking him on Facebook. This was the sort of thing he understood. Just about. Of course I should have listened more when my friends told me to get the hell away from him but the person I used to be was simply too trusting. I have learned to not let anyone into my home as it does not work out. So at least he gave me that lesson. I have not seen him in a long time but I imagine he is still hopping over the wall of the Phoenix Park in the early hours. He says it is for fun but I have my doubts. #looseman.
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The big Storm hit us then
#HurricaneOphelia So the Hurricane hit Ireland. We responded by clearing out Tesco and taking the washing off the line. Now I managed to not pay a vast amount of attention to the news over the weekend and did not actually even know there was a Red Alert in Place until I got to the bus stop. Sometimes you just dont listen to the news and you miss things. Anyway I headed on foot to the city centre and noticed a few interesting things. A lot of shops were closed but one or two restaurants were open. And of course you get those lads who were not going to miss the daily gargle or ten and to hell with the wind. I was in the web cafe by City Hall and I noticed a lad outside rolling a rollie. In the wind. In short sleeves. I think, like me, he was only slightly aware of the weather warning. Then I headed on down to see if by some miracle the library was open. On the way a homeless man asked me for money and followed me down the street when I said no. I darted across the road from him and he called me a miserable old cow. The library was not open so I came back towards the Halfpenny bridge. I saw the metal awning from H samuel Jewellers get bent in half by a pole and decided it might be time to go home. On the way home I saw tourists taking pictures of the rainbow which appeared just over Liberty Hall. I was tempted to tell them this was normal weather for Ireland and the Hurricane had not hit yet. I think I might just have a mean streak.
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So it seems to be all over for Harvey Weinstein
#HarveyWeinstein I am not vastly astounded by the news that a big name producer in Hollywood can be a letch. I am just surprised by it being this guy. Harvey Weinstein had long had the reputation of being a tough guy to deal with but this whole thing of him letching on actresses did come as a bit of a surprise to the general public. This is how it can be though. Men in power can get away with so much because they are picking on people who do not dare to speak out for fear of never working again. Rose Mcgowan sued him and was given a settlement in secret. She is not even A-list and she stood up for herself. There is much to admire in her. Harvey Weinstein has a lot of power though and there is the danger that he could spin his way out of this as he has done in the past. I just hope that now he is not allowed to do this. Money can be a persuasive thing but guilty is guilty.
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And so the grim cycle continues.
#StephenPaddock #LasVegasShootings I can remember as a teenager hearing about the Brenda Spencer shootings. A teenager who had been given a new gun every year since she was a child had just leaned out her upstairs window and started shooting. Singer Bob Geldof heard about the shooting as he was giving an interview and was appalled. He later immortalised her in the song 'I don't like Mondays'. He was at pains to point out that he was not doing this to immortalise her but to pass comment on the whole pointlessness of her explanation as to why she did it. Then yesterday morning the world woke up to the news that there had been a mass shooting on American soil. A man named Stephen Paddock had opened fire at a music gig in Las vegas and taken many many lives. He had a stockpile of guns in his hotel room. When he had finished his horrendous attack, he then took his own life. There are so many questions here. How did he get such a stockpile into his hotel room in the first place? How was a man so clearly mentally ill able to get so many guns in the first place? How is it America does not have the toughest gun laws on Earth, given the long line of nut-jobs who have opened fire on the innocent? I know that the right to bear arms is enshrined in the Constitution but I would have thought that the right to live in safety in your own country would be a bit of a priority for any government. I don't believe that guns have a place in modern society unless they are in the hands of people who have a massive understanding of the fact that they are not to be used unless absolutely nescessary and even then only in the defence of life. I wonder will Trump's government sit up and do something. Successive governments before him seem to have ducked the problem of gun control. Maybe this time things will be different. For America's sake, I hope so.
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And so a High Profile Pornographer has passed on
#HughHeffner So tributes all over the world are being paid to the owner of one of the most successful wank mags ever published. I know he liked to think he was promoting a lifestyle of some kind but really, was he not just an outdated cliche? Hardcore porn has long dominated the Internet and Playboy magazine actually took the decision to go offline a while back. The Playboy mansion had been sold last year with the proviso that he could live there until he died. The Playboy Empire had been, like the mansion,crumbling for some time. I guess I am too young to remember a time when that magazine was actually relevant. I remember it arriving on our shelves after being banned for a long time and I looked at it out of curiosity. I remember thinking that the women looked way too airbrushed and I remember thinking it was a regular tsunami of blondes. Well, Heffner did have a type. Once Fhm and Gq arrived on the scene, starlets and other celebrities did not have to flash the lot to raise their profile. They could wear a clinging dress or a bra/knickers combo and promote themselves as the hottest thing in shoe leather without having to go the soft-core route. Of course there were some blondes who suited the magazine. Pamela Anderson, a woman who once got married in a bikini, posed for Horny Heff a record 11 times. to my mind, she was the living personification of Playboy and she got nicely compensated for this. I wonder did she ever get to a point where she realised she could keep her clothes on if she wanted. Who knows, maybe she is at that point already? Sharon Stone and Kim Basinger also posed for Heff but they were two women who could be said to have self-exploited all the way to the top of the ladder. Kim Basinger actually stated that' the more you show, the higher up the ladder you go'. Madonna was featured in the magazine too and she tried to sue but lost. It was one of the few times in the Material girls career when she could not control an image of herself and she was furious. Personally I thought her complaining drew more attention to the picture and she was badly advised when she sued but it is her life. Hugh Heffner made a career out of telling women it was empowering to get their tits out for the men in every walk of life. I dont care how many good photographers he used, exploitation is wrong. I also remember the time Ozzy Osbourne's daughter said she would like to pose for him and he replied' We don't airbrush to that extent'. This was a nasty thing to say to a young girl and to my mind, she had a lucky escape. I personally would not lose any sleep over the demise of his sordid empire and its exploitative lure. I think young men have long required better role models than this.
Reply