YEAH..A MAN IN HIS 40S DATING A TEENAGE GIRL.REAL CREEPY BY TODAYS STANDARDS....CAN YOU FEEL ME ROLLING MY EYES?

@jorgito2001 : In 1979 and even in 2019, we can consider it is not shocking to watch a movie like Manhattan with a relationship between a man aged 44 (Woody Allen was born in 1935) and a young woman aged 18 (Mariel Hemingway was born in 1961) because it is NOT REAL LIFE . It is only a movie, depicting some characters and telling us a story. In real life, yes, it would be disturbing, but in a movie, it is different because everybody agrees. If not, Hemingways family should not sign the contract. Moreover, should Miss Hemingway or her parents find the script shocking in some ways, then they had to refuse the part of Tracy or ask to change it. I understand in 2019, a lot of movies from the 70s could be shocking, but let's remember it's only a story, only a movie for an art named cinema.

@jorgito2001 said:

Considering its 2019 & all that has come out about Woody Allen and his love for underage girls, his relationship with Mariel Hemingway in this movie is...just...disturbing..and didn't sit right. How was this acceptable back in '79?

There did seem to be different mores back then. It was sort-of acceptable to lech over schoolgirls and the films of David Hamilton got fairly wide releases: https://www.themoviedb.org/person/188517-david-hamilton?language=en-US . Heck, look at the video for Ultravox's "Visions in Blue" (and that was 1983). Don't do this at work, though. In the UK "The Sun" newspaper would crow about having a topless 16 year old on page 3.

@jorgito2001 said:

Are we supposed to believe Allen is this sex God? it really brought my rating down a few points for me. He came off like a big time CREEPER! Especially the ending dialogue when he's trying to convince her not to go to Paris...ewww!

I've never understood how we are supposed to accept Woody as irresistible to younger ladies either.

@M.LeMarchand said:

I've never understood how we are supposed to accept Woody as irresistible to younger ladies either.

Not a few movies Woody Allen has made depict him(self) as a lady's man. Go figure.

@jorgito2001 said:

I had never seen it before, but caught some clips on CNN's "The Movies" that got my attention (especially the gorgeous imagery of NYC in B&W), so decided to watch not knowing much...

It made me fall in love with NYC, really.... perhaps the greatest city in the world.

Considering its 2019 & all that has come out about Woody Allen and his love for underage girls, his relationship with Mariel Hemingway in this movie is...just...disturbing..and didn't sit right. How was this acceptable back in '79? Are we supposed to believe Allen is this sex God? it really brought my rating down a few points for me.

The singer and actress Aaliyah (RIP) once sang, "Age ain't nothin' but a number." Her marriage to singer R. Kelly, at least for me, showed the shortcomings of such a philosophy. Wherever Aaliyah is, she's probably satisfied with Kelly's fate, but... yeah! Within certain parameters, age isn't much more than a frigging number. It doesn't necessarily signify maturity, wisdom, or much of anything. Except probably experience. As long as both parties are of legal age, so what? Now, are we supposed to believe Woody Allen is a "sex God?" Well... if the magic he pulled off in his film is effective, we might.

He came off like a big time CREEPER! Especially the ending dialogue when he's trying to convince her not to go to Paris...ewww!

And the hate in your heart for Allen, or whoever it is "he" is supposed to signify here, is unmistakable. Maybe tune down the piety and self-righteousness by a fold or twenty.

@CelluloidFan said:

And the hate in your heart for Allen, or whoever it is "he" is supposed to signify here, is unmistakable.

"He" as in a child-molester/pedophile, for which there is ample documentation, and to which hate is not an ill-appropriate reaction.

Maybe tune down the piety and self-righteousness by a fold or twenty.

Or maybe not. "Self-righteous" as in what, we'd all do it if we could? FOH.

@DRDMovieMusings said:

@CelluloidFan said:

And the hate in your heart for Allen, or whoever it is "he" is supposed to signify here, is unmistakable.

"He" as in a child-molester/pedophile, for which there is ample documentation, and to which hate is not an ill-appropriate reaction.

Right… for you, that is. The “he” is also a potential human being—as are we all.

@CelluloidFan said:

@DRDMovieMusings said:

@CelluloidFan said:

And the hate in your heart for Allen, or whoever it is "he" is supposed to signify here, is unmistakable.

"He" as in a child-molester/pedophile, for which there is ample documentation, and to which hate is not an ill-appropriate reaction.

Right… for you, that is.

For me? He never molested me. But, to the people he did molest, and to people who have been molested, and to society, what he represents is vile.

And, I'm not talking about all of his work. I can name several of his movies I like quite a bit (if you comb my profile, it should be relatively easy to find). I can separate the man from his work and speak of them independently.

The “he” is also a potential human being—as are we all.

No one is questioning Woody Allen being a human being. But that's not an excuse to predate on children. If a human being punched your toddler child in the face, would you be arguing in support of his humanity?

What are we arguing about?

@jorgito2001 said:

Considering its 2019 & all that has come out about Woody Allen and his love for underage girls, his relationship with Mariel Hemingway in this movie is...just...disturbing..and didn't sit right. How was this acceptable back in '79? Are we supposed to believe Allen is this sex God? it really brought my rating down a few points for me. He came off like a big time CREEPER! Especially the ending dialogue when he's trying to convince her not to go to Paris...ewww!

If Woody Allen looked and sounded like the sex god Elvis Presley, he could have dated as many underage girls as he wanted, and people would be all right with that, wouldn't they?

@wonder2wonder said:

@jorgito2001 said:

Considering its 2019 & all that has come out about Woody Allen and his love for underage girls, his relationship with Mariel Hemingway in this movie is...just...disturbing..and didn't sit right. How was this acceptable back in '79? Are we supposed to believe Allen is this sex God? it really brought my rating down a few points for me. He came off like a big time CREEPER! Especially the ending dialogue when he's trying to convince her not to go to Paris...ewww!

If Woody Allen looked and sounded like the sex god Elvis Presley, he could have dated as many underage girls as he wanted, and people would be all right with that, wouldn't they?

Elvis, Steven Tyler, the list goes on. It was never okay - at least, to me.

It's remarkable how some people get the benefit of the doubt, and their "crimes" are mitigated; others, however, are vilified and crucified for minor offenses, how quickly people forget all about "hey, he's a human being, too." Go figure how that works.

In relative hindsight, it would appear to me what we've been arguing about is your mindset. That is an unwinnable fight. It wouldn't make any sense for you to argue here about my liking for multiple beautiful actresses either. My bad. You are who you are.

I felt the distaste coming off of jorgito's initial post about WA and sounded off about it. That was how it started.

@CelluloidFan said:

In relative hindsight, it would appear to me what we've been arguing about is your mindset. That is an unwinnable fight. It wouldn't make any sense for you to argue here about my liking for multiple beautiful actresses either. My bad. You are who you are.

I felt the distaste coming off of jorgito's initial post about WA and sounded off about it. That was how it started.

My mindset, but not yours?

And you aren't who you are?

Got it.

@DRDMovieMusings said:

@CelluloidFan said:

In relative hindsight, it would appear to me what we've been arguing about is your mindset. That is an unwinnable fight. It wouldn't make any sense for you to argue here about my liking for multiple beautiful actresses either. My bad. You are who you are.

I felt the distaste coming off of jorgito's initial post about WA and sounded off about it. That was how it started.

My mindset, but not yours?

And you aren't who you are?

Got it.

Aren't we exacting with our words today?

Let me rephrase: I've been arguing with you about your mindset, and that is an unwinnable fight. Maybe you've been doing likewise, but at this point, I'm like, who cares? It's dinnertime. I need to get something cooking.

@acontributor said:

I'm pretty sure 17 is legal in most of the United States including New York as well as just about everywhere else in the world.

Look, I haven't seen this movie, and I don't like to spend too much time on boards where I haven't seen the actual film/television show in question, but, from reading this discussion, here are just a few thoughts:

The term "pedophilia" is thrown around way too much in our modern society (really, as it relates to entertainment, within the last 30 years or so). The term refers to sexual attraction to prepubescent children. It does NOT mean an attraction to someone who is 16 or 17, for example. While such an attraction (to a 16 or 17 year-old) might be, depending on the circumstances, unethical or immoral, it is not pedophilia. If it were, then a great many men-- some only a few years older than the person they might look at --who had any iota of a flash of attraction when they saw someone under 18 in a bathing suit, or any middle-aged woman who thought her daughter's 16 year-old boyfriend stepping out of a pool was "kind of hot", would be considered a "pedophile". Heck, such a loose definition would classify hundreds of millions (billions, really) of people outside of the U.S. and Canada as pedophiles . . . and, alluding to acontributor's post, many people in a number of U.S. states where the age of consent is under 18.

Has anyone here ever appreciated a nude "Classical" painting that was painted anytime in history right on up to the 1950s or so? Whether the painting was of a female or male? Or a Classical nude sculpture? If you have, then march yourself down to your local police station, declare yourself a pedophile, and turn yourself in. Because many-- and probably most --of the models used for those paintings and sculptures were younger than 18.

See my posts on the films Walkabout (1971) and Ava (2017) for more on this. And also-- I'm just going to say it --all of this hand-wringing about such nudity definitely seems to have a racial aspect. When the actress or model in question is white, people scream "porn!" or "pedophilia!", but hardly ever if the subject of the nudity is black. Walkabout is a perfect example of this, actually, as there was plenty of underage nudity of aborigines-- and a white (male) child --but no one got worked up about it; only when Jenny Agutter got naked, was there a problem.

Concerning Woody Allen, from what I know of his case, the most disturbing thing for me there was not the age of his girlfriend's daughter, Soon-Yi (she was at least 18 at the time), but that she was . . . his girlfriend's DAUGHTER! In other words, the almost-familial circumstances of that situation.

But as others have said, I can separate the personal life of the man, from his art. Although I've never been a big Woody Allen fan, anyway. The only film of his that I thought was particularly good was Bananas (1971).