Johnny Depp, one of our greatest actors and movie stars, was unjustly blacklisted by fascist Hollywood, and now his new movie will open Cannes.
Bet you never expected to hear me say this: Thank God for the French.
In Jeanne Du Barry, Depp plays King Louis XV. His co-star is also the director, a woman who goes by one name: Maïwenn. She plays the title character, the king’s favorite courtesan. In today’s vernacular, “courtesan” means “sex worker.” To those of us who talk like real people, it means “hooker.”
Jeanne Du Barry will have its world premiere at next month’s Cannes Film Festival, one of the most prestigious festivals in the world. The Netflix production will hit theaters in France on the same day the period drama screens at Cannes, May 16.
There is no question that by opening this year’s festival with a Johnny Depp movie, Cannes is sending a message—and it is the exact right message… Like Woody Allen, Depp has been wronged, smeared, blacklisted, and cast out based on nothing more than the word of a bitter ex. For five years, Depp lived under this cloud of neo-McCarthyism. What happened to him in Hollywood was a moral obscenity.
After years and millions of dollars spent trying to clear his name, Depp finally did clear his name when a civil court awarded him $15 million in a defamation suit against his hideous ex-wife Amber Heard. She chose to settle rather than appeal.
Heard was exposed as a liar, and Hollywood was exposed as no different from the McCarthyites of the 1950s.
Woody Allen also has a new movie, a thriller called Coup de Chance. It’s been three years since his last film, Rifkin’s Festival (2020), and three years is the longest we’ve gone without a Woody Allen movie since the multiple-Academy Award winner started making films 54 years ago. There were two years between his debut, Take the Money and Run, in 1969, and Bananas, in 1971. Two years between Sleeper (1973) and Love and Death (1975). Two years between Stardust Memories (1980) and A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy (1982). Two years between Wonder Wheel (2017) and A Rainy Day in New York (2019). Outside of those four breaks, Allen has consistently delivered a movie a year between 1969 and 2020—nearly 50 feature films, many of them great.
I would love to see Cannes send a real message by closing its 2023 festival with Coup de Chance.
The American left has become so fascist the French(!) are showing us what courage means.
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