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NYT: Hollywood’s Most Decent Fella on Weinstein, Trump and History

Via The New York Times:
direct
On playing "darker" roles:
”It's not a matter of not willing to get dark," he says. ”Look, I played an executioner in a movie. Then the journalist says, ‘Yeah, but you were a nice executioner.' It wasn't fun to play a guy whose job it is to put everybody to death. In ‘Road to Perdition,' I played a guy who shot people in the head. And you know what they say? ‘Yeah, but you shot him in the head for all the right reasons.' I'm not interested to play a guy who is some version of ‘Before I kill you, Mr. Bond, would you like a tour of my installation?' I like stories in which everybody makes sense, so you can hear their different motivations and understand them, as opposed to ‘When this elixir goes in the Gotham City water structure, then the city will be mine!'

On Harvey Weinstein:
”I've never worked with Harvey," Mr. Hanks says, after a long pause. ”But, aah, it all just sort of fits, doesn't it?"

Why did Hollywood help shelter him, if everyone knew about the decades of abusive behavior?

”Well, that's a really good question and isn't it part and parcel to all of society somehow, that people in power get away with this?" he says. ”Look, I don't want to rag on Harvey but so obviously something went down there. You can't buy, ‘Oh, well, I grew up in the '60s and '70s and so therefore. ..." I did, too. So I think it's like, well, what do you want from this position of power? I know all kinds of people that just love hitting on, or making the lives of underlings some degree of miserable, because they can."

They think their achievements entitle them, he says, noting: ”Somebody great said this, either Winston Churchill, Immanuel Kant or Oprah: ‘When you become rich and powerful, you become more of what you already are.'

On Hollywood and Silicon Valley's issues with misogyny and sexism:
”Look, I think one of the greatest television shows in the history of television was ‘Mad Men' because it had absolutely no nostalgia or affection for its period," Mr. Hanks says. ”Those people were screwed up and cruel and mean. And, ‘Hey, wait, that's going on today? Shouldn't we be on this?' Is it surprising? No. Is it tragic? Yes. And can you believe it's happening? I can't quite believe that" — here Mr. Hanks uses an expletive — ”still goes on."

(When I ask about Cam Newton's gender faux pas, Mr. Hanks is more sympathetic. ”Now I've done that," he says. ”I'm not so far away from ‘Hey, Maureen, how you doing, sweetie?' ‘Well, look sweetheart.' ‘Aw, doll baby, I don't know how to answer that.' I could have done that in a moment. What's wrong with having there be a requirement to learn more rules of the workplace?")

On Trump:
Mr. Hanks says he just listened to the NPR show in which a former producer of ”The Apprentice" admitted that the show made the Trump Taj Mahal in Atlantic City, which was falling apart and, as Mr. Hanks says, ”stank," look glossy in an effort to sell the image of Trump, the successful businessman.

”At the time, who cares?" he says. ”It's just a show about a guy. But in retrospect, that is what the official record is of a public figure that holds sway. Making this stuff up is dangerous, man. It's an absolute, total falsehood."

On the future of America:
”Let me just read you one thing," he says, getting up to go into the other room and coming back with ”April 1865: The Month That Saved America," a book by Jay Winik about the closing weeks of the Civil War: ”‘And where abolitionists preached slavery as a violation against the higher law, Southerners angrily countered with their own version of the deity, that it was sanctioned by the Constitution. In the vortex of this debate, once the battle lines were sharply drawn, moderate ground everywhere became hostage to the passions of the two sides. Reason itself had become suspect; mutual tolerance was seen as treachery. Vitriol overcame accommodation. And the slavery issue would not just fade away."'

He looks up. ”Somehow, sometime in the last 20 years of our generation, that's re-emerged. So, yes, this is the calm before the storm."

On the removal of Confederate statues:
”Look, if I'm black and I live in a town and every day I have to walk past a monument to someone who died in a battle in order to keep my grandparents and my great-grandparents illiterate slaves, I got a problem with that statue," he says. ”I would say if you want to be on the safe side, take them all down. Put them in some other place where people can see them, in a museum somewhere."

Tom Hanks, still a totally all around swell guy. There's much more at the link above.
 
"I like stories in which everybody makes sense, so you can hear their different motivations and understand them, as opposed to ‘When this elixir goes in the Gotham City water structure, then the city will be mine!’"

RIP Nolan
 

Famassu

Member
When did this forum decide to make Milkshake Duck a thing?
Why?
Isn't milkshake duck a pretty recent thing altogether? It's caught on as a thing because it's so common that someone people admire for whatever reason (great actor whose movies they like, talented musician, inspiring politician, insightful essayist) turns out to actually be a shitstain of humanity and be a rapist, racist, homophobe or something or the other behind the scenes.
 

traveler

Not Wario
That Civil War passage is interesting.


Or maybe he's just a person like everyone else in Hollywood.

I know the tweet it came from, where we're informed that the duck is racist, I'm talking about its increased prominence.

I mean, being a decent person is not a particularly hard thing to aspire to. Expecting people to not be bigots, not assault people sexually or otherwise, and not cheat people isn't idolizing them or placing some unfair level of expectation on them; it's expecting the bare minimum level of human decency. It's holding them to a standard I'd hold everyone to.
 
When did this forum decide to make Milkshake Duck a thing?
Why?
I think it recently exploded here during E3 when that one really neat looking indie game turned out to be made by a homophobic and transphobic gamergater where it was revealed that the initial premise for the game was a dystopian world where the feminists won and got too much power or something stupid.

Worst you can say about Hanks that I know of is that he started seeing his current wife, Rita Wilson, when he was already married. But, after the divorce he married her and they’ve been together since the mid 1980s.
 
The Last Nigga in Hollywood

That Civil War passage is interesting.


Or maybe he's just a person like everyone else in Hollywood.

I know the tweet it came from, where we're informed that the duck is racist, I'm talking about its increased prominence.

Take it up with every person who uses it and gets on your nerves
 

Rahvar

Member
Chris Evens is also very vocal about his disdain for Trump. Glad to see nice people being visible.

Obviously all of Hollywood aren't Weinstein, but those stories are a lot more prolific.
 

watershed

Banned
Tom Hanks has always struck me as a decent human being who never sought out acting for the power it could bring him. That's not to say he doesn't live a life of extreme privilege, but he doesn't seem to abuse his position of power. A lot of actors actually came out of the midwest or small towns along the west coast, and some never lost whatever decency their life before Hollywood taught them.
 
I mean, being a decent person is not a particularly hard thing to aspire to. Expecting people to not be bigots, not assault people sexually or otherwise, and not cheat people isn't idolizing them or placing some unfair level of expectation on them; it's expecting the bare minimum level of human decency. It's holding them to a standard I'd hold everyone to.

People in this thread are holding him up as some sort of savior figure/representative of all we should strive for in humanity, as some sort of rock to lean on amidst the current shift in perception of the entertainment industry as whole (as though this perception of Hollywood is new, and not just the slow swing towArds actually changing the culture we're witnessing).

When in reality the easier solution would be to just to cease with the idolization as a whole, and cease with terms like "milkshake duck" that either trivialize wrongdoing or reduce people to one negative point that ignores the full breadth of their person, in the quest for the uber-virtuous human who's totally unattached from any unscrupulous people/systems/actions that many here and in other places seem to be looking for.

But instead we'll keep jumping to the next celebrity to say "they seem decent", "oh they seem decent", "another decent one", until we find something to smash them with.
 
People in this thread are holding him up as some sort of savior figure/representative of all we should strive for in humanity, as some sort of rock to lean on amidst the current shift in perception of the entertainment industry as whole (as though this perception of Hollywood is new, and not just the slow swing towArds actually changing the culture we're witnessing).

When in reality the easier solution would be to just to cease with the idolization as a whole, and cease with terms like "milkshake duck" that either trivialize wrongdoing or reduce people to one negative point that ignores the full breadth of their person, in the quest for the uber-virtuous human who's totally unattached from any unscrupulous people/systems/actions that many here and in other places seem to be looking for.

Most of those people are joking or obviously being hyperbolic.
 

DeathyBoy

Banned
Chris Evans? Denzel Washington?

Denzel once did an interview promoting Man of Fire where he said if someone hurt his kids, he'd handle it.

Dude seems like a guy you want to mess with. I wouldn't go so far as to call him decent, but I would say that it appears like he has some strong morals and won't back down from a fight.

Like when he tore into Tarantino on the set of Crimson Tide (QT did uncredited rewrites) for his use of the N word. And Tony Scott just let it go because Denzel makes the films he wants to make, he doesn't take orders.
 
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