The Washington Post on Friday offered a double dose of creepy as film critic Ann Hornaday called out Harvey Weinstein as a monster, but a monster who made such “important” movies. She also praised a film on the man who created Wonder Woman. It’s a great “love story” about a man, his wife, the other woman and the sex bondage they all loved.
To be clear, Hornaday condemned Weinstein for his alleged sexual assaults. But then she went on to praise the man now accused of rape and of exposing himself: “Weinstein’s importance transcended money and power: He allowed an increasingly corporate industry to convince itself that it could still make art.”
She reminisced:
And, at a time when the industry was largely turning its attentions to comic books and special effects, he fashioned them into a viable business model. Thanks to the free advertising of their stars’ appearances on red carpet and at congressional hearings, small and midrange movies actually stood a chance of making money. Weinstein’s Oscar campaigns could get brutal, but they gave Hollywood a potentially lucrative alternative to the comic-book spectacles it had pinned its future on.
In another article, Hornaday praised the film about the weird kinks behind the man who created the character Wonder Woman:
Similarly, in “Professor Marston and the Wonder Women,” which opens Oct. 13, writer-director Angela Robinson handles potentially lascivious or voyeuristic material with tact and taste. The film tells the true-life story of William Moulton Marston, who created the Wonder Woman character and was largely inspired by his wife, Elizabeth, and the couple’s mutual lover, Olive Byrne. The politically progressive trio — who lived together and parented four children together in the 1930s and 1940s — eventually discovered sex play in the world of bondage, whose accoutrements of whips, cuffs and form-fitting corsets became Wonder Woman’s chief signifiers.
Keeping in mind that this movie is about affairs, sex toys and bondage, Hornaday praised director Angela Robinson for being
determined to present her title characters not as figures of titillation or psychological obsession but intelligent and self-aware scholars who simply wanted to live honestly and in good faith with their hearts’ desires. The result is a film that, despite its sometime outre subject matter, feels improbably old-fashioned, sincere and wholesome.
