Roman Polanski

Ooooh, this is the sweetest little website I’ve seen in a very long time: the Roman Polanski Creep Meter, which measures movies according to the number of Polanski apologists who participated.

For those of you with short memories and/or no daughters, Polanski drugged, sodomized and raped a 13 year-old girl, despite her frequent cries of “No,” and subsequently fled the US, from which country he has refrained in the many decades since and that not by accident.

Let’s look at the deal:Roman Polanski was charged with the following:
1.  Giving drugs to a minor.
2.  Committing a lewd act on a person less than 14.
3.  Rape of a minor.
4.  Rape by use of a drug. (See charge #1)
5.  Oral copulation.
6.  Sodomy.

He agreed to plead guilty only to unlawful sexual intercourse with a child under 14.  In return he expected:

1.  Not be charged with giving drugs to a minor. (a 13 yr old)
2.  Not to charged with committing a lewd act on a person under 14. (she was 13)
3.  Not to be charged with rape by use of a drug. (of a 13 yr old)
4.  Not to be charged with oral copulation.  (of a 13 yr old)
5.  Not be charged with sodomy. (of a 13 yr old)
AND
6.  Not to serve more than 90 days in jail undergoing psychological examination.  It is possible he served only 42.

That’s a shockingly good deal.  Roman Polanski apparently believes you should be able to seduce, drug, rape, orally copulate, and sodomize a 13 yr old girl and serve only 42 days in jail.

When that deal looked to be at risk, Roman Polanski chose to flee justice.

From the Creep Meter site:

Roman Polanski raped a 13-year-old girl in Los Angeles in 1977. He confessed to the crime in his plea agreement, then fled the country before sentencing. You can read all the details—including news stories and the court transcripts themselves—at The Zero.

On September 26th, 2009, Polanski was arrested in Zurich while on his way to a film festival. A bunch of self-described “[f]ilmmakers, actors, producers and technicians—everyone involved in international filmmaking”—signed a petition “demand[ing] the immediate release of Roman Polanski.” They dismissively refer to his crime as “a case of morals.” Then more Hollywood types started piling on, with Whoopi Goldberg proclaiming Polanski’s rape of the child wasn’t “rape-rape.”

If you’re as disgusted by this as I am, tell these filmmakers in the only language they understand: dollars. Me? I’ll never spend another dime going to see or renting the films these creeps worked on. If you’re with me on this, type the name of a movie below. Before you rent it or go see it, find out if it’s creep-free or creep-infested. And decide where you want to spend your money.

You can then input the name of whatever movie you want to see (the DVD of Star Wars I just picked up is mercifully free of Polanskiists, yay!) and get a Creep Meter Rating. Putting in Polanski’s own Bitter Moon (not a half-bad movie) gives the following:

Your movie was: Bitter Moon Release date: 11 March 1994 Director: Roman Polanski Plot: British couple Fiona and Nigel Dobson are sailing to Istanbul en route to India. They encounter a beautiful French woman… Creeps who helped out: Roman Polanski Kristin Scott Thomas

Fortunately, tonight’s viewing of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof yields a Creep Rating of zero:

our movie was: Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

Release date: 20 September 1958
Director: Richard Brooks
Plot: Brick, an alcoholic ex-football player, drinks his days away and resists the affections of his wife, Maggie. His reunion with his father, Big Daddy, who is dying of cancer, jogs a host of memories and revelations for both father and son.

Creeps who helped out:

This movie is creep free!

Happy viewing, happy viewing choices!

Bonus Tasteless Joke: Why doesn’t Roman Polanski ever win at blackjack? Because he never hits on anything over 14.

For those of you with poor screen resolution, it says: “Mel Gibson announces intent to “stay married to his craft”; calls craft a “disgusting, AIDS-ridden Ukranian whore.”

Yup, pretty much. And then I bet he called James Lipton “Sugar Tits” and passed out.

Yes, against all odds (and all good advice), another Michael Jackson post.

don't stop till you get enough, MJ!

It is a truth universally acknowledged that in all of celebrity culture, there is no-one whose fans are more … uh … proactive? loyal? energetic? defensive? rabid? batshit insane? than Michael Jackson’s. If you doubt me, look here, here, or here. Or here:

People on their way up in the Fame Machine would commit any number of felonies for that kind of attention, although I think we can all agree it must get rather wearying after the first ten years or so. So why don’t all these other hard-working, desperately famewhorish people have fans like that? Why is the fandom of Michael Jackson one of the wonders of the modern world? Is it because these other people don’t sing as well? Is it because they don’t dance as well? Is it because he was prettier than they are? Of course not; Michael Jackson’s level of superstardom and his hold, even after death, on his fans’s hearts, have little or nothing to do with the skills that brought him to our attention in the first place.

Interestingly, a study printed in an old science magazine of mine which is too old to be online indicated that, regardless of fame, the percentage of the population who finds a person attractive/loathesome remains the same; the effect of fame is to increase the numbers of people who are aware of the subject, but not the percentage who find that person attractive. Which is rather reassuring to those of us who toil in obscurity but still have our admirers, and rather heartening when you turn temporarily emo and think everyone in the world has eyes only for Fill In The Blank (Justin Bieber, Jessica Simpson, Rihanna, Bob Barker, whoever).

People become true, capital F Fans of someone not out of admiration for the work, but out of a personal love sparked by some (sometimes trivial) quality of the star. It’s really the same process as face-to-face infatuation, minus the in-person biochemistry, and it’s something we’re becoming increasingly aware of now that so many infatuations among noncelebrities begin online.

It’s Love.

Big “L,” irrational, quit-my-job-and-follow-you-anywhere kind of Love, that’s what it is. Remember Adaptation? The only part of the movie where Donald, the tacky, sellout brother makes any real sense is right at the end, when he’s describing the unrequited love he had for a girl back when they were both young teenagers. Charlie, the intelligent brother chides him, telling him what he’s sure is a shocker: that the girl knew of and mocked this love that was so precious to the young boy. Cheeseball Donald, however, isn’t phased by the information, and replies that the love that he felt and expressed is not dependent on its reception, not dependent, in fact, on anything else, but exists purely as a metaphysical manifestation of Love itself, and thus cannot be diminished by anything as banal as ingratitude, vulgarity, or even unworthiness.

This is the kind of love that his fans have for Michael Jackson.

That he was a flawed human being is something that even the most passionate fan might admit in a quiet moment (if there were no witnesses around) but perfection and imperfection are irrelevant to the inspiration that they gather from him. The inspiration’s source is Jackson’s lifelong struggle to regain a state of childlike innocence that he may never have actually enjoyed in his childhood. Neverland wasn’t an elaborate honey trap; it was his Xanadu, a place where he could let his inner child run free, even if surrounded by laser security devices and attended at all times by a security staff that would be the envy of the Israeli military. It’s akin, in a scrambled, show business way, to the Blakesian concept of Innocence and Experience, the idea that we are born from a state of innocence into a world that vulgarizes and beats us down from the moment we arrive, but that through faith, strength of will, and persistence we can eventually achieve an enlightened form of innocence, once we’ve transcended the mundane and learned to manifest the eternal in our own lives.

As a man who’d endured horrific physical and mental abuse, sexualization, and pressure to “grow up” from the age of four or five, Michael Jackson spent his adulthood trying to return to a state of innocence he had never experienced in the first place. It’s quite likely that he saw even the behavior that others condemned as simply another form of “Love,” and you can ask NAMBLA if he was alone in that. His filter was warped, and his stardom gave him the money and the power to avoid the consequences for most of his life, but it’s not a stretch to claim his motivation was simply a desire to live in a state of pure love.

It is this shared dream that draws his fans to him, even a year after his death, and which will doubtless continue to draw them fifty or a hundred years from now. There is no song a man could write, there is no light fantastic he could trip that could keep him alive in fans’s hearts indefinitely. But a shared dream of pure love? For the millions of people around the world who’ve felt the heavy hand of the world ripping away their own innocence, he is the one who succeeded, or rather, the one who sacrificed his life to the effort and died trying to make the dream a reality.

And you know what that makes him.

Michael Christ

Michael Jackson would like to send a drink over...to your nine year old son

(And don’t forget to read the follow-up post to this)

Having written about “is Jesus as famous as Bono” I am not unused to controversy, but you and I and Bono and Jesus and MJ know that post is nothing on one attacking the sanctimony around the one-year anniversary of Michael Jackson’s death.

Not to be cold-blooded about it (oh, perish the thought!) but as I said on Gawker:

And STAY down, you bastard. I highly approve of the masses gathering, if only to tramp the dirt down.

Yes, he made some terrific songs. He could dance up a storm. He was a fantastic entertainer, one of the greatest. And overcame a background of terrible abuse to become his own man and direct his own course.

But the truth is, he gave children as young as eight or nine alcohol without their knowledge, slept with little boys, and bought off or threatened the parents into silence. Something about this makes me uncomfortable describing his death as a loss.

Via Maureen Orth in Vanity Fair:

I spoke to hundreds of people who knew Jackson and, in the course of my reporting, found families who had given their sons up to him and paid dearly for it. I found people who had been asked to supply him with drugs. I even found the business manager who told me on-the-record how he had had to wire $150,000 to a voodoo chief in Mali who had 42 cows ritually sacrificed in order to put a curse on David Geffen, Steven Spielberg, and 23 others on Jackson’s enemies list. I sat through two trials and watched his bizarre behavior on the stand when he said he did not recognize his publicist of a decade. One of the reasons I endured this not-fun circus was that, when I began, I was the mother of a boy roughly the same age as the ones Jackson was so interested in spending the night with. His behavior truly troubled me. Understandably, in the wake of his death, there are those who do not want to hear these sad facts. Yet nothing that Vanity Fair printed was ever challenged legally by Jackson or his associates.

Of course not, because it was true. Michael Jackson was an active, predatory pederast whose proclivities were supported by the celebrity-industrial complex, and however catchy and inspiring his songs they will never make up for the damage he inflicted on little boys all over the world.

There, I said it.

Bono is totally feeling the heat:

Michael Jackson totally dominates Jesus in Google results. 60 million to 9.5 million. Looks like Michael is even bigger than The Beatles now…

Michael Christ

Congratulations, George.

re:

Marlee Matlin sells cellphones by the sea shore?

Now you’ve gone and done it.

subtext: Marlee Matlin is deaf. That is a phone. George is a really, really old guy and tetchy Australian and possibly a fake Twitter account (it’s awfully witty for a model/actor). They are both famous for having done one big movie, and have been successfully coasting ever since, more power to them. Lazenby was so bad as James Bond that the phrase “The George Lazenby of Whatever” has gone down in history; it’s roughly equivalent to “The Cousin Oliver of Whatever.” And it looks like someone needs to tell George that 21st Century cellphones come with keypads, and that hearing-impaired people are using them for millions of things besides listening to casting agents and phone sex operators. And that they can be touchy, too.

George Lazenby, you are hereby declared the George Lazenby of Twitter.

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