Taxi Driver is trying to elicit a response from the audience, but it’s not trying to elicit a specific response. It’s not providing emotional guardrails to guide you to a predestined conclusion. Scorsese gives you the space to work through that yourself. (Which one could hypothetically argue is actually a…

it sort of seems like he could just not talk about movies he’s not a part of.

One of the participants in the Nashville Scene article alleges that they continued abusing her after she’d said the safe word that was supposed to end the experiment, which seems pretty skeevy. (He used to operate without a safe word at all, which is illegal—legally, participants have to be able to revoke consent at…

The linked review isn’t loading for me, but the Rolling Stone feature on this season of YMRT quotes the relevant bit of the Bosley Crowther column (published a week or so later than the first review you posted): the “master-slave relation is so lovingly rendered in your yarn … that one might imagine you almost figure…

It got theater re-releases into the ‘80s. Parts of it were shown on the Disney Channel and put on compilation-y things even into the ‘90s. Disney didn’t really put it on full lockdown until the 2000s.

Franken was accused of groping and kissing a number of women against their will. If you’re going to defend him, at least engage with the actual accusations.

this almost certainly means that the allegation that she paid one of the affair partners a bonus was accurate.

I don’t think all feminists believe the same thing, and I think a number of the people on Twitter calling this a double standard are people who wouldn’t necessarily see this as an issue if the gender roles were reversed, either. (Roxane Gay is a big Bill Clinton fan, for example, so I don’t think she has major issues…

Studio people only care about money, no matter what the movie is about or who is in it or directing it.

He is! These are some of his quotes on it:

If you don’t care about demarcating what is or isn’t art, obviously you’re allowed to, but

For who? For studios? Absolutely. For producers? Yes, this is usually the or at least a primary goal. For directors? It’s rarely their primary concern, although it usually matters to some extent. Occasionally, if you’re Coppola-level, it’s not a concern at all. Actors, designers, cinematographers, screenwriters, etc.…

So if you discovered an authentic diary in which Velazquez said he cared not for the conveying of “ideas or beauty,” would Las Meninas suddenly become not art?

He also founded the World Cinema Project, which has supported/worked to preserve a bunch of movies by people of color or in countries with less traditional film infrastructure. So he’s doing more than a lot of directors, honestly. It’s why I find the comments where he’s being compared unfavorably to Marvel (which is…

But like I’ve said many times now, my argument isn’t that something created in exchange for money can’t be art. It’s that something created solely for the purpose of making money isn’t art. And there is a wide spectrum of motivations in creating things, especially when it comes to something like a movie where there…

Nobody said he doesn’t care about the money; you’re arguing with a strawman. I said for directors like Scorsese and Coppola, the goal is art before money. The money matters insofar that it allows them to create the art they want to make. And nobody’s talking about starving artist mythology, either. Scorsese and…

They gave him that money to make the art. It’s not like Scorsese is walking out of this deal with $100m+ more in his own personal bank account.

Aside from Coppola, though, most of these guys aren’t arguing that it doesn’t count at all, though. Scorsese said they’re “theme parks, not cinema” (i.e. your exact argument—they’re low art, not high art), and Loach and Meirelles basically echoed that or said they can’t comment because they don’t watch them much.…

Depends on the mafia movie, of course. But for Scorsese and Coppola, it’s very clear that their goal is to make art before making money. (Coppola has lost significant amounts of his own money and declared bankruptcy multiple times in the pursuit of making the films he wants to make.) The vast majority of directors in…

Man, that’s such a terrible answer. Of course not every film you make has to have a female lead. But if, like Scorsese, you have a pretty free range in what you’re able to make movies about, and over the course of a 50-year-career, you’ve consistently picked men—then you should at least have an answer ready as to why.