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While my guitar gently weeps

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There are a lot of actors I'm turned off by these days.  Some because they are insufferable to watch, others because of their public personalities and in many cases both.  Yet, there is no way to avoid them, like Johnny Depp who keeps popping up on my facebook timeline and Yahoo! news feed. The latest story has Alice Cooper remarking on how good a guitar player Depp is.

I had to check with various guitar enthusiast sites like Consequence first and the general consensus is that he surrounds himself with talented musicians like Jeff Beck and Joe Perry so that he creates the illusion of being much better than he actually is.  But who knows he may pop up on the Rolling Stone Top 100 Guitarists at some point?

What really irks me about Depp is the way he managed to skate clean from the sordid trial last year over Amber Heard's allegations.  Relatively clean anyway as there are a lot of persons who became turned off by him and he is no longer such a big draw at the box office.  Still, he has a very avid fan club who seemed to exercise influence in the decision that was reached in the defamation trial.  Since it was a civil case, the jury wasn't sequestered so they would have been privy to all the rumblings in the social media.

It's not like I'm an Amber Heard fan either.  I never saw her as anything more than a sexpot that managed to pick up a few plum roles, the most infamous being the girl in a red dress in The Rum Diary where she first met Johnny and stole his black heart.  A torrid love affair ensued that came to a thundering crash a few years later when Heard was forced to sign an NDA as part of the divorce agreement.  By this point, it was estimated that Depp had lost a staggering $650 million.  He blamed much of it on Heard's allegations in the Washington Post.  She never once said his name but he made it clear to everyone she was referring to him.  Hence the defamation trial in 2022, in which Depp asserted that the 2018 article had sullied his name in Hollywood.  Most of that money had been squandered long before 2018 but no matter. 

It's really too bad it turned out this way because Depp did have a lot of promise, but his fixation with the debauched life of Hunter S. Thompson and the fame and fortune that came with The Pirates of the Caribbean franchise led him into a downward spiral he couldn't pull out of until it was too late.  Although the early warning signs were all there for anyone who cared to look.

He lost his long-time companion Vanessa Paradis in the process, leaving her with the children while he was left to take care of Amber's dogs in Australia.  This led to quite a scandal as he and Amber had illegally smuggled the tiny pooches into the country which has very restrictive quarantine rules.   Authorities were set to euthanize the poor little beasts, Pistol and Boo, but he managed to get a last minute reprieve with a public apology.  Yet, Vanessa stuck with him during the defamation trial, claiming there was no way he could have committed such heinous acts as Amber described.

He might have garnered more sympathy from me had not his lawyers and fan club gone out of their way to make Amber into such a villain on social media, as if poor Johnny wasn't responsible for a great part of this fiasco.  Now that a year has passed we will get to see it all played out again on Netflix.  Emma Cooper apparently avoids judgement, leaving it up to viewers to decide in this side by side account of the event that shook the world.

Mostly I was galled by all the public attention the trial received when there was a war going on in Ukraine and still is.  Surely there are more important things the media could have been focusing on but Hollywood gets far too much attention like the current actors and writers strike going on.  Who cares when most of what you see coming out of Tinseltown is pure garbage and this trial was no exception. 

Yet, the stories keep popping up on news feeds tempting one to react.  My chief gripe with Depp is how he has used his "friends" to play his audience.  He does so like a psychopath, knowing he can get his gullible following to side with him no matter what he does.  It's kind of like the movie Secret Window in which Depp played a dubious writer who gets away with murder.  Amber should consider herself lucky.

Both have tried to rebound since the trial.  They worked out a settlement where she would only have to pay $1 million instead of 10 and that all the money would be donated to charities.  It made Johnny seem like such a nice guy.  Meanwhile, Johnny took up the guitar again, jamming with Jeff Beck shortly before Jeff passed away, and releasing a posthumous album 18.   Johnny has also palled around with Joe Perry and Alice Cooper in a band called the Hollywood Vampires.  Fitting.  Amber has picked up a couple roles and managed to hold onto her character Mera in another instalment of Aquaman.  Depp will soon be gracing the big screen again as Louis XV.  Thanks for the warning.

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