Showing posts with label Hollywood. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Hollywood. Show all posts
Sunday, June 11, 2017
Wednesday, March 1, 2017
Meryl Streep at the Oscars: my new, improved gif!
I managed to salvage five images from the internet of Meryl Streep's unforgettable reaction to the Oscars screwup, in which Best Picture was awarded to the wrong movie. Turned out that, because they were taken quite close together and she was looking straight into the camera (gee, I wonder why?), they made quite a nice gif. It does seem amazing, however, that she wasn't looking at the stage at the time. She was looking at. . . whoever. Whoever had the camera on her at that moment.
Speaking of Oscars, can't we give her an honorary one just for this?
Thursday, April 11, 2013
Tuesday, July 31, 2012
Beautiful Ruins: Liz and Dick on the rocks
Beautiful Ruins
Jess Walter
HarperCollins
EDMONTON - The wistfully lovely dust jacket for Jess Walter’s latest novel — tiny blocks of houses piled on top of each other on the teetering summit of an oceanside cliff — should have a protective plastic cover, not just to preserve the picture but to keep out beach sand and lake water. But in this case, “beach read” is a compliment.
If summer readers want high entertainment, they’ll find it here, for Beautiful Ruins has a quality of spectacle, the epic journey of people who enthrall us with personalities that are bigger than reality. But because Spokane-based author Jess Walter knows his way around a novel (The Zero and, most notably, The Financial Lives of the Poets), his extravaganza teeters atop a bedrock of hard reality, speaking uncomfortable truths about the frail, often narcissistic nature of identity.
The gorgeous ruin on the cover is Porto Vergogne (“Port of Shame”), a tiny Italian fishing village completely isolated except by boat. This is a misty Brigadoon of a place that does not appear on the map and which some people say does not even exist. Presiding over the one dingy hotel he inherited from his father is Pasquale Tursi, a dreamy young man waiting “for life to come and find him.” The cramped, uncomfortable place seldom draws guests, but on a certain day in 1962, all that changes — and so does Pasquale — startlingly, and forever.
If the dreamlike atmosphere of the Hotel Adequate View is not cinematic enough, it’s about to burst into Technicolor with the arrival of a lovely young woman, Dee Moray, a movie star, they say, working in Rome on the set of the most talked-about picture in decades, Cleopatra.
Yes, that Cleopatra – the overbudget epic, the disaster-in-the-making already guaranteed a huge audience by the raging scandal of Liz and Dick. Moray is only marginally connected to the movie, and has come to Porto Vergogne — or rather, has been sent there — because she has just been diagnosed with “cancer” (i.e. a scandalous pregnancy).
Just as we sink into this complex, delectable story, suddenly there is a jerk away from the romance and bubbling eroticism of 1962 to present-day, and a completely different scene involving the nasty world of Hollywood deals and pitches. Michael Deane, a producer in his seventies from a different sort of Hollywood, looks “prematurely embalmed,” a stooped old man “with the face of a nine-year-old Filipino girl.” He signs a ludicrous deal for a movie called Donner! about the cannibalistic Donner Party of 1849, just to get himself out of a studio contract.
As we’re batted back and forth in time and place like the balls in Pasquale’s imaginary cliffside tennis court, threads begin to tie the different scenarios together. An elderly Italian man appears to confront Deane, not with a gun but a dog-eared business card that Deane gave him 50 years ago. Pasquale has never forgotten Moray, the lovely blond actress who spent just a few days at his hotel in 1962, and demands to know what happened to her.
The answers are not so simple, because by then several more storylines have leaped to the forefront, most taking place in different times and locations. As if that weren’t enough, there’s Richard Burton drunkenly spouting Shakespeare as he tools off by boat to the Hotel Adequate View.
Performing, posing, spectacle, disguise, the subversion of the true self ... it’s all here, especially in the story of Moray’s son, a mediocre rock musician who seems to be on a rampage of self-destruction. But like everything else in this novel, his existence is intimately linked to that surreal dockside arrival in 1962. Though the switchbacks in time and place can be disorienting, what pulls us back into the book’s core is the characters’ earnest search for real happiness, an intrepid desire to embrace “the sweet lovely mess that is life.”
Margaret Gunning is a writer and reviewer based in Port Coquitlam
Performing, posing, spectacle, disguise, the subversion of the true self ... it’s all here, especially in the story of Moray’s son, a mediocre rock musician who seems to be on a rampage of self-destruction. But like everything else in this novel, his existence is intimately linked to that surreal dockside arrival in 1962. Though the switchbacks in time and place can be disorienting, what pulls us back into the book’s core is the characters’ earnest search for real happiness, an intrepid desire to embrace “the sweet lovely mess that is life.”
Margaret Gunning is a writer and reviewer based in Port Coquitlam
Wednesday, February 22, 2012
Flying Down to Rio, the hard way
Just discovered this at the end of an otherwise-unremarkable old '30s musical, Flying Down to Rio. I started watching it coz it had Fred and Ginger in it, but as it turned out they were only in it for about 3 minutes, doing one dance number that wasn't anywhere near their best. This was their first movie turn however, and they stole the show.
That said, I was about to ditch the thing in boredom when THIS incredible sequence came on. It's almost surreal in its gleeful beauty, with sexy but innocent young women cavorting on the wings of planes. If you look closely at 1:33, you'll notice some of the girls suddenly lose their dresses in the breeze and continue their wriggly dance, apparently, in their birthday suits. At 1:45, you'll see that their shirts are practically transparent, no bras on underneath. We'd call that a "nip-slip" and cut the scene out of network TV. This was pre-Code Hollywood, obviously, before the bitter repression of the Hays Office took all the fun out of everything and sex had to be implied with a raised eyebrow and a crooked pinkie.
Maybe this was all done on a sound stage, but it looks pretty good to me. Even the music is free-spirited and energetic, a touch wild, foretelling the delightful Piccolino number at the end of Top Hat (my favorite Fred and Ginger movie: oh, that dress made out of feathers!). There's a sort of vibrating hum in the background suggesting, I suppose, plane engines or - vibrators?
http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm
Wednesday, January 11, 2012
Hollywood actresses: 3D House of Wax
This is how this post got started.
I saw an ad on TV for this not-very-promising-looking new movie called Joyful Noise. Cashing in on the wild and unlikely success of Glee, it's all about some gospel choir in the South, or some-such, and it has Queen Latifah in it, along with -
Jeez, who's that?
That fossilized Muppet with a horizontal slit where her mouth should be? That dead-eyed mausoleum-piece whose smile is so tight it has to go sideways? The one with the blown-up lips and the dead-looking immobile cheeks that scream "implants!"
Ye gods. It's Dolly Parton.
Dolly Parton, she of the self-deprecating wit and earthy humor (i.e. when someone once asked about her height and weight, she said, "Five foot none and a hundred and plenty"). She of the now-self-deprecating-about-all-the-plastic-surgery-she's-had wit, only it's not funny. Not funny to see an embalmed Dolly who, it must be admitted, hasn't grown old, but hasn't grown either, hasn't matured facially because the stars have all seemingly gotten together to take a vote: ageing, or showing your age in any way, is an abhorrent, disgusting process that must be stopped. At any cost.
Even at the cost of looking human.
Oh, God, what a sad parade! Admittedly, it looks like Liza is without makeup in this shot, but her face has that weird bent-out-of-shape look that seems to happen a couple decades after you first start fucking around with it. You can move stuff around all right, freeze some things, lift other things, or even remove them, but as you get older, genetics will out: the underlying musculature will insist that you resemble your great-great-great-aunt Zelda, and begin to pull and wrench at the deadened tissue in a desperate attempt to make it so.
The more you fight it, the worse it gets. Tiny little noses unmoored from their natural facial roots start to bend and twist, cheek implants slide down towards the chin, collagen injections melt like candle wax. Which only necessitates more screwing around.
Like this, maybe.
I don't know who this is, but just the fact that someone like this exists gives me the heeby-jeebies. But how much better is this?
Oh my God, it's Mary Tyler Moore. I know she has a younger husband and all, but did she have to erase herself like this? The sideways smile is bad enough, the hardened cheeks squished up into tiny apples. But the eyes. I don't know why this is, but after too many procedures the eyes seem to turn into nearly-closed, tiny little slits.
Those other dames I can understand, since they've been in the Museum of Hollywood History for some time now. But Darryl Hannah: didn't she used to have a natural, unaffected beauty? Why has she donned the deadened fright-mask that makes everybody look the same?
I think this hurts me most of all. Plainly, Meg Ryan and Mary have the same surgeon, since they now look so much alike it hurts.
Cheek and chin implants have become standard now, but as you get older they look plain lousy. They jut out like they've been bee-stung, squeeze the eyes nearly shut.
Let's not get into the famous Botox forehead which is so anaesthetized that you can't even raise your eyebrows.
I remember, I swear this is true, someone doing an interview about Botox and saying, "What's all the fuss? If you want to raise your eyebrows, just use your fingers."
Wayne Newton, well. . . Madame Tussaud's isn't going to bother making a wax model of him. They'll just wait until he croaks and keep him on ice.
You shouldn't look at a formerly-beautiful actress and say, "Ewwwwww." That shouldn't be the first thing out of your mouth.
Your first thought shouldn't be, "My God, what has she done to herself?" But all too often, it is.
Bad plastic surgery (and is there any good plastic surgery?) provokes a visceral disgust that registers in a nanosecond.
Doesn't anyone have the courage to tell these people how heartbreakingly awful they look?
There's another way to do this. I don't think Susan Sarandon has done anything to her face, because she doesn't have to. She is just plain gorgeous.
Vanessa Redgrave is an example of someone who has decided to let the magnificent Redgrave genes blossom with age. Wise choice, don't you think?
Is this face smooth, unlined, immobile? No, it is not. It's much better than that.
This "older woman" has a fiery beauty that lets her get away with supershort hair and flaming colors. Being intensely alive helps. Brava, Judi.
Gee, what's that in Helen Mirren's hand? Don't know, but I'll bet she deserves it. Some women still know how to use their faces to capture a character.
Cheekbones to die for, but I'll bet you any money they're real.
Would they have chosen a Botoxed, pinned and tucked actress to play Margaret Thatcher? Imagine plastering ageing makeup over a face that has been ruthlessly de-aged.
For once, Hollywood said "no thanks".
Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book
It took me years to write, will you take a look
Order The Glass Character from:
http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001K7NGDA
Barnes & Noble
Thistledown Press
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