{"id":1425,"date":"2024-07-12T13:42:51","date_gmt":"2024-07-12T13:42:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/2024\/07\/12\/sorry-not-sorry\/"},"modified":"2024-07-12T13:42:51","modified_gmt":"2024-07-12T13:42:51","slug":"sorry-not-sorry","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/2024\/07\/12\/sorry-not-sorry\/","title":{"rendered":"Sorry\/Not Sorry"},"content":{"rendered":"

Produced by The New York Times<\/em>‘s video division, and depending heavily on its own reporting, “Sorry\/Not Sorry” is a primer on the rise, fall and reinvention of \u00a0Louis C.K. A respected standup comic who remade himself as a low-budget arthouse confessional filmmaker, he became\u00a0the writer, director, producer and lead actor\u00a0of the semi-autobiographical FX series\u00a0“Louie,” about a divorced single father who was also a standup comic.\u00a0At the show’s peak of popularity, C.K. was\u00a0hailed as being the kind of earthy New York intellectual entertainer\u00a0that Woody Allen’s fans used to unabashedly\u00a0enjoy, before his luster was tarnished by scandal.<\/p>\n

Although the movie\u00a0never convincingly\u00a0answers the unspoken question that dogs many\u00a0New York Times-<\/em>produced long-form videos\u2014”Is this topic better suited to a newspaper article, or perhaps a podcast?”\u2014it is\u00a0handsomely assembled, with crisp and thoughtful\u00a0cinematography\u00a0by Robert Richmond and an insistent underscore by Kyle Scott Wilson that would have fit right into a network TV drama about likable people doing bad things.\u00a0Co-directors Cara Mones and Caroline Suh try to make the total package\u00a0as cinematic as possible. They do it mainly by building\u00a0the story\u00a0around\u00a0interviews with women who went on the record with the Times<\/em>\u00a0to say that C.K. had abused his power as an A-list club\u00a0comedian (and later, a king- or queen-making\u00a0TV\u00a0producer) by putting them in situations where they felt as if\u00a0they had to watch or listen to him masturbate or make sexually explicit remarks because if they objected, their careers would suffer.\u00a0<\/p>\n

There are also interviews with C.K. colleagues like Andy Kindler and Michael Ian Black and\u00a0clips of non-interviewees like Jon Stewart and Sarah Silverman grappling with the knowledge that their friend did something bad and wondering what it says about them if they suspected or knew but didn’t act.\u00a0(Full disclosure: comedy scene chronicler and “Good One” podcaster\u00a0Jesse David Fox, a colleague of mine at New York<\/em> Magazine, appears briefly as a commentator.)<\/p>\n

The main characters are three comedians\u2014Jen Kirkman, Abby Schachner, and Megan Koester\u2014who experienced that side of C.K. and initially either decided to keep it to themselves for career reasons or were placated into staying quiet. Apparently, C.K. had a habit of forthrightly contacting people he believed had anonymously accused him online and apologizing in a non-specific way\u00a0or asking if he could talk to them on the phone or meet with them in person (to do damage control). Sometimes, he’d invoke the pitiful specter of his daughters finding out what he did, to shame accusers\u00a0into backing\u00a0off.\u00a0<\/p>\n

One of the more\u00a0confounding and sinister aspects\u00a0of C.K.’s behavior was that he’d ask people’s\u00a0permission before doing wildly inappropriate\u00a0things. This\u00a0created the outward impression of consent, even though the women subjected to his behavior were nowhere near as powerful as C.K. and feared that if they said, “No, I don’t want to hear this” or “No, I don’t want to watch you masturbate,” or just turned and walked away,\u00a0they’d be blacklisted from everything\u00a0C.K. was involved in. (Cara Buckley, one of the\u00a0Times<\/em>\u00a0reporters who worked on the piece that nailed down most of the accusations against C.K., says that they solved the problem of contextualizing his behavior by asking whether the same acts would be considered acceptable in a non-showbiz workplace, such as a bank.)<\/p>\n

C.K.’s public statement\u00a0confirming the accusations\u00a0said pretty much everything\u00a0a person in his situation was expected to say. It concluded\u00a0with, “I\u2019ve brought pain to my family, my friends, my children, and their mother. I have spent my long and lucky career talking and saying anything I want. I will now step back and take a long time to listen.”\u00a0<\/p>\n

Did he, though? \u00a0One of the binding motifs in “Sorry\/Not Sorry” is C.K. seeming as if he’s not actually seeking forgiveness or making amends, but tamping down the possibility of lasting\u00a0consequences, in a way that ultimately seems a variation of\u00a0danger-seeking behavior, where the main goal is to see how far you can push or how low you can go without losing everything forever. C.K. pushed things very far, hid for a few months, then returned to work.\u00a0If you look at his career through that lens, the\u00a0post-apology era feels\u00a0like the ultimate escalation of risk, as well as the ultimate trickster’s victory.<\/p>\n

In my review of C.K.’s film “I Love You,\u00a0Daddy,” I compared him to a flasher, in that a sizable portion of the perpetrator’s adrenaline rush comes from making others doubt that they’re seeing what they are indeed\u00a0seeing because they simply can’t imagine that anyone would be so\u00a0disgusting and blatant in public. In that spirit, \u201cI Love You\u00a0Daddy”\u00a0stars C.K. as a father of a nubile daughter who loves wearing bikinis, and John\u00a0Malkovich as a Woody Allen-like director who becomes her lover. There’s also a scene where another character loudly pretends to\u00a0masturbate and ejaculate in front of a woman in an office.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The movie\u00a0was shot and completed\u00a0in 2016 and early 2017, when a contentious election capped by Trump’s inauguration and assorted charges of predatory behavior were all over the news, and anonymous accusations against C.K. were swirling around the Internet. The finished film debuted at the Toronto Film Festival in September, 2017, as the Times<\/em> investigation was being finished, and slated for national release Nov. 17, 2017. The Times piece and C.K.’s confession\/apology ran Nov. 9, scuttling the release. The picture painted by “Sorry\/Not Sorry” makes you wonder if\u00a0that two month period\u00a0was the most anxious of C.K.’s life or the most thrilling. Possibly\u00a0both? Interviewees express incredulity not just\u00a0at the movie’s timing but its\u00a0existence. It\u00a0really did seem as if C.K. was daring people to name the ugliness he was\u00a0wagging in their faces.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Produced by The New York Times‘s video division, and depending heavily on its own reporting, “Sorry\/Not Sorry” is a primer on the rise, fall and reinvention of \u00a0Louis C.K. A respected standup comic who remade himself as a low-budget arthouse confessional filmmaker, he became\u00a0the writer, director, producer and lead actor\u00a0of the semi-autobiographical FX series\u00a0“Louie,” about …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[43],"class_list":["post-1425","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-documentary-movies","tag-documentary"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1425","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1425"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1425\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1425"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1425"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1425"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}