STREEPS OF FIRE: CANCELLED CO-STARS: MANHATTAN & SHE-DEVIL

The Good, The Pod and The Ugly

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STREEPS OF FIRE: THEY WHO SHALL NOT BE NAMED in MANHATTAN and SHE-DEVIL!

We here at The Good, The Pod and The Ugly, like all serious fans of the four arts, struggle with separating the Art from the Artist these days. It's not easy when great works come from noxious, odious people who are later cancelled because of that stuff becoming public. Meryl Streep has worked steadily in film for nearly 50 years (!!!!) so it stands to reason she has made a few movies with people who are, today, persona non grata in popular culture. We have paired two of them for this week's episode.
MANHATTAN (1979) was Woody Allen's follow-up to his Oscar-winning smash ANNIE HALL. Paired with one of the best scores ever to jaw-dropping black and white visuals supplied by Gordon Willis (one of the all time best who considers Manhattan his best), the film nevertheless boils down to, er, Allen, here playing a thinly-veiled version himself at 42, dating a 17-year-old girl and coming to accept he is in love with her. Super cool... if you squint hard enough and focus solely on the visuals and the score. It wasn't a great conceit in 1979, despite that plot point being gravely overlooked by critics, but in 2023? Nope.
Streep was shooting Kramer vs. Kramer at the same time and would sometimes shuttle between sets, playing an ex to two different small men she had a son with (in the films). She is great in her few scenes here, no surprise. Ken, Jack, Thomas and Andi go all-in tearing the morality of the film down to the ground nevertheless. Manhattan truthers, you have been warned. Manhattan may have shown us the real Allen a good decade before it got extremely public. Allen has announced his retirement to making films earlier this year to which many of us film fans asked, "He's still making movies?"
NOTE: Andre Previn did NOT compose any of the music in the film as stated on the episode. It was in an article on the film and we did not get secondary sourcing on that info. Apologies.
Is SHE-DEVIL (1989) the worst film we've EVER watched for the podcast? That is a hot discussion and quite an honor given some of the crap we have watched. Filmed after Roseanne Barr had finished her first season of the legendary ROSEANNE series, Streep plays a successful romance novelist who steals (why?) Ed Begley Jr. away from Barr's mole-y housewife character, who then gets rid of her kids (baby boomer conceit right there) and focuses on a truly moronic revenge scheme. Is it really that bad? It's 80s kitsch, right? It's Susan Seideleman's follow-up to Desperately Seeking Susan, which was... kinda good, right? Find out all about it on the episode!
Roseanne has, since '89, had a tumultuous personal and professional life, briefly back on top with a reboot of her seminal Roseanne series in 2018. She went off the rails not long after, spewing racist tweets/statements, then doubling down when confronted about them. It was an ugly scene. She was removed from her own show (her character was sent to space or something) and it has gone on successfully without her. Hey, she has a comedy special coming in 2023 that will air on *checks notes* the Fox Nation streaming service. So, um, yeah.
THEME SONG BY: WEIRD A.I.
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Ken: Ken Koral
Jack: jackk1096