'Failed' families??

[Grackleman]

Hi members, Winona experts and more, long time no see but I am glad to be back. :-) First of all I hope that all of you are healthy and happy, it's no fun to always be ill, I can tell you... :-( Okay, a few nights ago I watched a documentary film about Johnny Depp which also included some statements and so about our Noni. The documentation about Captain Depp was quite interesting but in my opinion it always seemed to have the actual goal to present him as a kind of a lost soul, a poor man which shall have never found his real love and real happiness in his sad life. Well, of course I can't say or judge if this theory is TRUE but the makers of this documentation shouldn't have UNDERLINED this aspect that much, I think. There were some things I hadn't known about Mr. Depp, so I would like to ask you if YOU have ever heard or known these sides of him... What I had to learn was that he had no school exam (I've never had the impression that he is not intelligent or so), did some little criminal things like stealing soft drinks from supermarkts and lived in a CAR for a while with one of his best friends. As for the movie 'Platoon', they said that Johnny's very good scenes in it had been DELETED because Charlie Sheen had been chosen by the producers to become the big star of this movie, not Mr. Depp. Hmm, not fair, if you ask me. Indeed very sad for him were his maybe 30 moves in his childhood because his father always had to change the districts or cities because of his job, so Johnny had to change schools and to find new friends, not easy, of course. So I understand that he probably had a very difficult childhood, no wonder. Then they claimed that he had his breakthrough through the movie 'Pirates of the Caribbean' and I thought 'wasn't it already earlier through '21, Jump Street''? Maybe Winona first watched him in the movie 'private ressort' where he presented his nude back... :-D Um. Sorry. Oh, what I have forgotten, he also shall have hurt himself in his youth by cutting his arms so there is a parralel to a role Winona has played in a movie. What probably all of you know is that Johnny's mother once gave him a guitar as a gift and that THIS started his interest for music and that he actually wanted to become a rock star and no actor. When Kate Moss was his girlfriend, he shall have destroyed hotel suits, not because OF her, but rather WITH her... :-D Okay, what I actually wanted to tell you is that they mentioned that Winona and Johnny fit so perfectly together because BOTH of them shall have had 'FAILED families'? Is that TRUE, what do you think? What I once read in a biography about Dreamnona was that her parents got divorced (like Mr. Depp's, too, he then lived together with his mother) BUT that Winona's parents lived TOGETHER with the new partners in the same house, so I think 'FAILED' is much too strong, not? And as I've mentioned above, I think the actual goal of this documentary film was to show JD as a very sad man who has NEVER found his love in his life, not even NOW. I don't necessarily think that this is true, just take a look at how he loves his children. Sorry that this was so much about JD and not Winona but I of course would have preferred to watch a documentary about HER, I tell you... :-)

[Charles]

Hey G-man, welcome back . . . long time no see. Your thoughts on Johnny D. are interesting, much more than I knew. Regarding Winona's family, what you are describing is new to me. Her parents didn't get married until she was well into school, but I hadn't heard about successive live-in partners. During that era in the 1960s-1970s there was often rather casual intimacy in communal settings. I had assumed that her parent's fascination with the hallucinogenic drug lifestyle could have had an unsettling effect on her upbringing, perhaps in the form of either inconsistent or sometime unavailable parents. I suppose one could even delve into "Attachment Theory," but I won't.

Finally, interesting that the documentary alluded to Johnny not finding the true love of his life, well, neither has Winona. That certainly could be related to the familial dynamics in each of their early lives, who knows? Interesting speculation . . . Big D, any thoughts . . .

[bigdaddy]

I don't know...every year I get to listen to guys who tell me how their pitcher on The Reds, or the Tigers or The Jays or The Red Sox or The Orioles is not throwing as good this year as last year because he is hemmed in on the field, feels conflict in his home life, and was not happy when a team mate was called down to the minors...Now usually I am polite and just nod. What the heck. It's not MY team. But I can't help but wonder. I mean, it's hard enough to know what is going on in your OWN heart let alone with someone else....and you REALLY have to wonder when they get PUBLIC facts wrong..PIRATES as Depps' break through? Movies like ED WOOD were sold on the basis of having him on board YEARS before he did what I call 'the Sparrow twitch'.
If that is not break through, what is???

I mean, Patrick Macnee (The Avengers, you remember...) grew up in a BROTHEL..a bordello...what ever you want to call it...and he came out more or less okay because he thought that was what EVERYBODY experienced at home...Remember the maid in the James Thurder story? She thought the government didn't let you keep furniture for longer then 6 months because she would buy stuff on credit,forget the payments, and then have it repossessed. You could just as easily say that Winona was traumatized by bullying at school and THAT left her lasting personal effects...I don't know..we might have to wait until she writes her own bio to find out HER side of it...and even then, it's going to be her side...Last I heard her folks both moved to Canada together, so there's some sort of history going down...Depp I've always compared to Brando anyway, because I think they are both artists that were lucky to find an outlet for their passions...I figure if either had not gotten into something creative, they just as easily could have wound up in any local jail...totally serious...Red Skelton used to say if it was not for comedy, he would have wound up in an insane asylum and I think he's right...
But you have to wonder what totalling a hotel room with Kate Moss would be like...ohhh la la...

[imayne]

Digressing a little, but it's related.

Earlier this year I watched the Amy Winehouse documentary AMY and one scene affected me: it was when Winehouse was receiving an award and in the background was none other than Taylor Swift. That scene has gained an eerieness that wasn't there before cos it seemed like two different realities of celebrity culture were juxtaposed with each other in that brief moment in time.

Winehouse was an old soul: talented, troubled, scandal-ridden, in that fine tradition of the sad souls that populated jazz whose lives seemed to hurtle from being stuck in one ditch to another, with intermittent spots of brightness. One whose tragedy was that she never got the hang of the age of social media and was devastated by the spotlight. People loved her, then they dissed her, and she died and they loved her again.

Swift was the future: slick, savvy, polished, everyone's best friend and expected role model, whose embrace of social media would be the steps on which she strode to megastardom. She started in country, a product of the Nashville music mill, but with her affluent family background she was of a different breed from her predecessors. Forget Loretta Lynn or Dolly Parton, she wasn't even the same breed as Shania Twain and Jewel Kilcher. This was a girl whose scandals never went anywhere beyond being a pretty girl who was dating lots of okay boys and getting mildly dissed on stage by a rapper whose mom was an English professor. And people love her now.

It says a lot, I think, that we now expect our celebrities to be so polished, slick and audience-friendly that any talk about troubled or eccentric celebrities now revolves around folks who are at least in their forties!


In short: our celebrity culture has to be SO DULL NOW that this thread is even an issue!

[Grackleman]

Thanks, two things that I forgot last week (just to add ALL I can remember): It obviously was a total shock for Johnny D. when his grandfather had died, it was mentioned that he walked with him through forests and so on and that he explained/showed him very much about their Indian background. Plus, they said that (because of his musical side) Alice Cooper and Marilyn Manson had always been very good friends of Johnny D. Quote of Marilyn Manson: "I like Johnny because he has always accepted me the way I am". Okay, enough now...