Hacker Cinema
Stillwater
2021 · Film · 139 min
Directed by Tom McCarthy
Bill Baker, an American oil-rig roughneck from Oklahoma, travels to Marseille to visit his estranged daughter, Allison, who is in prison for a murder she claims she did not commit. Confronted with language barriers, cultural differences, and a complicated legal system, Bill builds a new life for himself in France as he makes it his personal mission to exonerate his daughter.
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5 comments on Hacker News
Stillwater, which is the first movie in a while I've wanted to see.
Note, from Deadline (): "UPDATE 7/30/21: To Clarify Legal Status Of Amanda Knox. The 2007 case of Amanda Knox, the American convicted in an Italian court of murdering her roommate (after being convicted and spending four years in jail Knox was acquitted and freed in 2011. She was later definitively exonerated by the Italian Supreme Court Of Cassation in March 2015), was the impetus for writer-director Tom McCarthy’s Stillwater, but in the 10 years since beginning, abandoning and starting over, it has evolved into something much more – and much better."
I find it interesting that they mentioned she was convicted twice in a paragraph about her legal status, with the acquitted and exonerated part relegated to a parenthetical. And to have a plug for the movie.
I'm confused: are you taking into account the existence of this movie? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stillwater_(film)
It's one of the points of the article. You really, really should take that into account before saying something like
> I'm convinced that, when there's the will, the world is big enough for anyone to disappear and get a new life.
and blame her tweets for the attention she gets.
>IANAL, but I think she absolutely has a legal case.
If she does, it seems like a bunch of greedy lawyers looking for a big pay day would be willing to take her libel case on contingency which would cost her nothing. If a lawyer is willing to risk a ton of their own firm's money because they're confident of a winning big multi-million dollar judgement from the filmmaker, that would a good signal that Amanda has an excellent case.
Maybe her phone is ringing off the hook with calls from such lawyers but I doubt it because such defamations lawsuits against works of fiction have been historically hard to win.
Another aspect that's made more confusing by the various replies in this thread is that the film's official marketing (trailer, official website, posters) do not mention "Amanda Knox" or even have a tagline of "inspired by a true story". Instead, it's the various news media (such as Vanity Fair magazine article she cited) making the parallels to Amanda Knox.
Yes, the filmmakers may be sly about avoiding the mention of "Amanda Knox" while being fully aware that the media outlets will make that connection in the minds of the public for them.
>The small penis thing doesn't seem relevant here,
To clarify in case the sequence of ideas got lost in the replies... I mentioned the "small penis" informal rule was a strategy for Amanda Knox to hypothetically write a fiction story about someone named "Mack Dorkin not being well-endowed" and the real Matt Damon not pursuing a lawsuit to silence her. It wasn't about "Stillwater"'s filmmakers using that strategy to protect themselves from Amanda Knox.
Can't she sue the movie producers of Stillwater? Even if the movie producers didn't officially acknowledge inspiration, Vanity Fair mentions it:
> This new film by director Tom McCarthy, starring Matt Damon, is “loosely based” or “directly inspired by” the “Amanda Knox saga,” as Vanity Fair put it in a for-profit article promoting a for-profit film, neither of which I am affiliated with
There is clearly precedence for this type of lawsuit because of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_persons_fictitious_disclaimer