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So, what do you all think happens after the credits roll? The movie frames it as a happy ending, and I suppose there is some measure of vindication at the end for Douglas’ character, but ultimately he still works for a company whose Machiavellian CEO and corporate toady sidekicks were more than willing to frame and fire him for incompetence over an allegation that they knew to be false. They clearly preferred Demi for the job, who wasn’t fired so much for what she did, but because she was publicly caught. Why should Douglas think for even a second that there won’t be further retaliation? And even if he made such a good impression at the shareholders’ meeting that he’s effectively proved his worth and saved his job, why would he want to stay there? Fuck that place.

While I have my own relatively mundane story about the choir director at my church (who later served a lengthy jail sentence for plying other teenage boys with alcohol and smut), I was thankfully old enough and cynical enough to see the writing on the wall and extricate myself from that nightmare-in-the-making. But I wanted to take a moment to say I'm glad all of you are here and able to turn this terrible movie into a net positive. And, if we're talking Spike Jonze dance videos, to share the greatest perfume ad of all time:

@taylorannephotoThanks for the shout out! i’m sorry that you’ve had your own experiences to deal with (I also regret that it’s hard to sympathize/empathize/whatever the phrase is without it feeling somewhat trite). i’m doing this by phone and don’t have a catchy gif to easily add for a lighter touch, but I will link to this Christopher Walken/Spike Jonze video (that’s not related to ANYTHING else in this thread), because who doesn’t like to see Christopher Walken dance?

Can somebody help explain the company Michael Douglas works for to me. So we know that the company is large enough to have multiple branches. So is the Seattle office the main office or just another branch? Demi Moore, Doanld Sutherland, and Dylan Baker all are said to come up from the South. They are all higher ups, so it makes it seem that they are at the main office which is down south. However, they are picking a VP from the Seattle office and the VP position seems to be based out of the Seattle office. At first I thought Donald Sutherland was up in Seattle because the company they were merging with was based out of Seattle as well. They aren't because they're staying at a hotel and the president of the merging company isn't going to be there until the day of the merger. It just all much no sense and has no flow. I don't work in the corporate world so is it normal to have the VP and President to be based out of separate branches? Also is there not a branch manager? Do presidents have offices in all branches that sit there unused until the president shows up for short periods?

That’s what’s crazy to me too. I was under the impression that Demi was an outside asset or something. Otherwise, I don’t understand how his girlfriend from nearly a decade ago could not only be working at the same company as Douglas but also up for the same position, and he has absolutely no idea about it. Again, Douglas seems to be pretty shitty at his job. Like, the kind of unprofessional, mediocre guy who gets passed over for the position he just sort of assumed he’d get, so he calls a staff meeting so he can throw a temper tantrum in front of all of them like a toddler. I mean, why does he think that he’s such a shoe in for a promotion that he ties it up for work that day, but is also somehow in a scenario that he could feasibly be fired or transferred from his job, and he’s not really all that surprised. Did he not interview for the VP position? They clearly never told him that the job was 100% his. And honestly, unless he had the job absolutely locked, he really should have been on time for work that day. That’s cocky as shit.

@taylorannephotoalso, since I didn’t directly say it, thank you for sharing.

I mean this is classic cool non-tie guy Mikey Dougs behavior right there. Now, Michael Crichton wrote Disclosure on the heels of the slightly problematic Rising Sun and might have had Japanese business practices on the mind in which seniority a vast majority of the time out weighs cause for advancement. Therefore Mikey Dougs being the most senior member of stuff just assumes the position is going to him because he's been there the longest. Also in all of this what is A Friend's position? Is she the head of a different department? Is the manufacturing division Mikey Dougs cool guy leads the most important or highest performing department? I mean the position is Vice President and I assume that's the whole company, don't you think your competition would be the other heads of all the other departments across all the other branches? Again, Mikey Dougs doesn't wear a tie! He doesn't close his office door, he's your pal and mine. He likes to joke and have a good time but at the end of the day he's a business man. Nah, the balls on that guy means he assumes everything is coming to him. He's also the same kind of guy that puts on a tie before brushing his teeth. Brazen all around.

I still don’t understand why they would lead him on that he was going to get this huge promotion, only to pull the rug out from under his feet. How does professionally and mentally fucking with Douglas benefit the company at all? Also, what kind of company would announce the promotion of an employee to an executive level position without first formally offering the job to that person in private? It drives me fucking crazy that Douglas just drove into work like a cocky sonuvabitch and nary a contract had been signed.

Ultimately, I don’t think Moore and Sutherland we’re too off base in trying to get Douglas fires for incompetency. No, the production issues weren’t the result of any direct action of his, but apparently his ex-girlfriend had been busy sabotaging his work in Malaysia for months without him noticing a goddamn thing. He’s the Manufacturing Department Head, for fuck’s sake, and under his purview, drastic changes were being implemented by a freaking outsider right under his stupid nose. I may not know much about the manufacturing of CD-ROMs, but I know ineptitude when I see it. It shouldn’t take a sexual harassment charge to get you to figure out just how badly you’re fucking it up at work.

Also also, that music video is better than anything in Disclosure.

According to Wikipedia it is the Seattle International Film Festival. (Update: The film showed there in 2010.) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Kissed_a_Vampire

I watched the preview. Interestingly, it says it was picked for the Seattle Film Festival. That’s NOT the Seattle International Film Festival, where even Neil Breen got a special day of screenings, so I’m... intrigued? I legitimately have no clue what the Seattle Film Festival is.

Yeah, as much as it pains the child in me to admit, this one's not great. Great designs though. Bluth's movies are pretty fifty-fifty for me in terms of good/bad, but they're all pretty fucking weird.

The funny thing is, I was actually told "Yeah, but if they were hot, you'd have gone along with it!", whether I would or wouldn't have in that situation is irrelevant this situation, I wasn't interested in THIS group of women. But, I consider myself quite lucky, because it had no impact on my life other than mild annoyance at the time, and an anecdote for later in life. But it is interesting in to share when discussing stuff like that, even without going into the "Oh well, if my mates and I did that, we'd be in trouble!" yes, you would be, they should have been too. But, I was also lucky to have been raised by my amazing mother, who instilled this "Don't take it from anybody" attitude, and innate "Brick Shit House" genetics which allowed me to tell them to fuck off, and push my way through, someone else might have been REALLY fucked up from it, especially not receiving any form of help.

I can pronounce binary.

And fart bats

I thought you were just making the point that you liked Rockula. As you should. It’s cinematic perfection.

And I liked it! There we go horrible joke saved.

Fair point. I had forgotten that detail, though I wonder how deep a cut a HDTGM listener really wanOH.MY.GOD.IF.THEY.DID.TROLL2'SGOBLIN.QUEEN.AND.POTTED.BOY.OR.POPCORN.BOY.IT.WOULD.BE.AMAAAAAAZING!!!!!!

So this is Vampire Academy: The Musical?

There is a possible cause for Kirk Douglas’ behavior that is briefly described in the article that Electra Boogaloo linked to In the New York Post (once again, the article is called A look back at Kirk Douglas’ most famous sexual conquests, By Linda Massarella, December 8, 2016). in the article, Ms. Massarella writes how Douglas’ sexual experiences started. “It began with his English teacher, a Mrs. Livingston, who seduced him when he was 14, he said.” Ummm, that’s rape. I get the feeling that Douglas might not view it as such, or has talked himself into the belief that it’s proof of his machismo, but at one point he appears to have been a victim. I’m not saying that this excuses anything he’s done—not by a fucking long shot. But... I’ve worked in a middle school. Any 14-year-old that I know would be severely traumatized by a sexual encounter with their adult teacher. It would warp how they relate to people sexually. Perhaps Kirk Douglas is old-school and superhuman and immune to feeling vulnerable—and I honestly don’t know shit about him, he might be—but it wouldn’t be very hard to theoretically link his experience with his teacher to how he treated women in his life. And I guess I did just that, as convincingly as I could.

I grew up in Seattle and I will give Disclosure this much credit: it was actually shot here. Many movies SAY they are filmed in Seattle but are actually filmed in Vancouver, because (a) it’s cheaper and (b) Washington does a terrible job providing tax breaks and incentives for movies to be able to afford to shoot here. Basically, that’s a long-winded way to say, when a whole movie is shot here (not just exteriors and shots of the Space Needle) that’s a BIG deal. Especially when that movie stars Michael Douglas, Demi Moore, Donald Sutherland and was directed by Barry Levinson. I was in between high school and college when Disclosure came to town. Since I had never seen a film shoot before and loved films, I was very excited. The scene where Dennis Miller embarrasses Michael Douglas at a fancy dinner in front of his wife, that was shot four blocks from the house where I grew up! It was filmed at the Volunteer Park Conservatory at a beautiful old greenhouse made up to look like a fancy restaurant (it was also the greenhouse where Annabella Sciora worked in The Hand That Rocks The Cradle, BTW). My younger brother and I walked up and stared at all the production trucks lining the street, hoping to get a glimpse of somebody, anybody. Time may have distorted this memory, but I still can picture how all the lights made the park seem like it was glowing. December rolled around and people packed into the Cinerama (a giant old-school theater that still exists) to see Disclosure on its opening weekend. Me, (now in college), my parents and my brother (now in high school) were among them. The film started, everyone was excited to see our hometown on film. Two hours and ten minutes later, the vibe of the entire theater was “I guess that was ...good...right?” Rewatching it 25 years later, I can’t even say that. But it is hilarious!

So what was interesting to me about this was that the movie basically took out most of the reason why Moore did what she did, which in the book is explained as she was getting major kickbacks from the Malaysian government who wanted their own changes made in the factory to aid in cost cutting. In the movie it just comes off as a spiteful kind of "fuck him" type of plan for shits and giggles a la Trading Places or Cruel Intentions. Also the ending of the book is A LOT more bleak in that when the machinations of Moore and her conspirators are revealed, it basically tanks the deal that the company was hoping for and the bad guys basically end up with better offers from other companies elsewhere while Douglass' character is left without the promotion and the future of the company is left in question. Crichton was kind of like Stephen King in that he would occasionally redo stories from different focal points but with similar plot threads, in this case his book Airframe which follows a female quality assurance executive at a plane manufacturer who is trying to solve a mysterious incident that happened on one of her company's planes that left two people dead, while a giant merger looms. The tension is so much better and the reasoning behind why someone is trying to screw her is more built into corporate espionage which Crichton writes really well about. It also removes a harassment storyline, making the attack on her more mental and work related rather than dong related. Also hearing that June loved this movie now makes me think there might be some relation to my family as my parents love the most random movies, from classics to utter dogshit. For June I can recall these for the love list: Daredevil, Odd Life of Timothy Green, Grease 2, Teen Witch, Drop Dead Fred, Disclosure, Crank 2 My family's love list: Godfather part 2, Meet Joe Black, The Postman, Jaws

Ok so let's get to the nitty gritty here. Men can be and are sexually harassed. Much like domestic violence it's 100% something that does happen to men but is not talked about nearly as much as what happens to women. Nearly 1 in 5 ( roughly 17%) complaints to the EEOC are by men. A survey by Quinnipiac University found 20 percent of men surveyed had been harassed. While they government does not track the gender of perpetrators researchers say that men are more likely to harass other men then women ( though women can be perpetrators). The number of men who have reported harassment has stayed pretty steady for the past decade. The movie is correct in the idea that a lot of sexual harassment is about power. It's also a way to punish people who do not meet the ideal gender norms and for men in particular, those who are not sufficiently like the idealized version of their (perceived) gender. Many men do not report their harassment much like many male victims of sexual and domestic assault. they feel they will not be believed because we live in a society that thinks only women can be victims. A 2014 study found that Canadian woman were twice as likely to report harassment Han their male counterparts( 20% vs just 9 %) To quote a survivor who told his story in this really great article from the Washington Post : "Funk, 53, said he was at first hesitant to talk about what he said he was experiencing at work. “ ‘You are a man. You should be able to protect yourself,’ ” he recalled thinking to himself." But even incredibly "masculine" men can be subject to harassment. In 2016 Terry Cruz says he was groped by Adam Venit at a party. Venit is a very well known executive who works at William Morris Endeavor. He's not alone. Brandon Fraser claims in 2003 former HFPA president Philip Berk groped him. These are both famous men, powerful in their own right yet they both have stories about harassment. While this movie is 100% the panicking of rich straight white men in the wake of the Anita Hill Clarence Thomas testimony ( yet here we are in 2019 with another sexual predator on the bench. I'm not going off on that rant) there is a germ of truth in it. Sexual harassment can happen to anyone https://www.canadianwomen.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/Facts-About-Sexual-Assault-and-Harassment.pdf https://poll.qu.edu/national/release-detail?ReleaseID=2502 https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/social-issues/men-account-for-nearly-1-in-5-complaints-of-workplace-sexual-harassment-with-the-eeoc/2018/04/08/4f7a2572-3372-11e8-94fa-32d48460b955_story.html https://www.eeoc.gov/eeoc/statistics/enforcement/sexual_harassment_new.cfm

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