Separated at. . . oh, you know

Yes, I know I've been through this 

(and through this) before. 

But bear with me.

When an actor plays someone famous, 

such as - uh, er, Ashton Kutcher playing 

Steve Jobs - we expect a startling physical 

resemblance and not much else. The 

"oh, doesn't he look like" phenomenon

 lasts for about 15 minutes.

But after a while you need some acting chops to carry it through. 

And it is VERY important not to aim for caricature, or you could ruin the whole thing.

When you look at these two, it gives you the sense of some kind of blood kin, however distant. 

I just find it interesting, is all. 

I do. 

Not that the two of them really have anything to do with each other. Or with me.

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.ca/2013/04/the-glass-character-synopsis.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm

The STRANGEST "separated at birth" ever seen!

If you've been following my blog for a while now - and I just fervently hope SOMEONE reads this, at least once in a while - you will have noticed my recurrent series, Separated at Birth. Anthony Perkins and Gregory Peck. Harold Lloyd and Jake Gyllenhaal. That sort of thing.

Well.

I stay up way too late sometimes and just look for things to muck around with to use on my blog. I love diddling around with images that move, but I like images that don't move too. I also wanted to see if I could find a good YouTube video on the Hapsburgs, preferably a comedy: Take it on the Chin Charlie, Louie the Lip and Friends, whatever. An animated series on King Charles II of Spain, also known as El Hexado because he was so fucking ugly, would have filled the bill, but all I could find was a very strange 2-minute "reconstruction" of the face of Marie Antoinette. 

I could find almost no information about this, but it started with the standard portrait of her and slowly morphed into something a lot more realistic. Someone in the comments section said something about a death mask, so it may have been reconstructed from that, though death masks, I find, generally aren't very flattering.

But as it slowly morphed, I cried into the void, "Hey. That's not Ms. Let-Them-Eat-Cake at all. That's Kaley Cuoco!"

Yes.

The adorable female lead on the hit comedy The Big Bang Theory, which is now on so many times a day that my DVR just can't keep up. I think it looks EXACTLY like her, or at least close enough, though Kaley definitely has Marie beat in the cheekbone department.

The comments under the video mentioned Marie's "Hapsburg lip", so like all the rest of those aristocratic swine she must've been hopelessly inbred. I don't see the lip here, but the picture's not in 3D, is it? I don't know if Kaley has any Hapsburg blood in her, and to be honest I've been trying to figure out just what sort of a name that is anyway - sounds kind of Portuguese. So now I'm off on yet another search.

SPECIAL Bonus Creep-o-rama Link! One of the creepiest links I've ever found, next to Victorian Post-Mortem Photography. In fact, this one is worse.


http://www.undyingfaces.com/info/

It has got THE WORST pictures of dead guys' faces all melted down, or with their mouths tied shut. I don't know when they stopped doing this shit, but there's one of Alfred Hitchcock that's just ridiculous, it looks so much like him.
There's also one of Timothy Leary (but I forgot to save it). To be honest, I thought they froze his head. I saw a video once of a bunch of scientists carting his severed head around. It was too sickening.

Special Post-Post Bonus-Bonus: There are all sorts of these creep-o sites, apparently, for sickos who like to look at death masks. Nobody WE know. This one is a sort of Greatest Hits list. But I'm beginning to be suspicious. Some of these masks are of rather murky provenance and might have turned up in some third-rate history prof's cellar in 1980 or something. One site even said, astonishingly, that it was clear Abraham Lincoln "had not been assassinated". Gee, then I wonder what all the fuss was about?

http://oocradio.blogspot.ca/search/label/death%20mask

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.ca/2013/04/the-glass-character-synopsis.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm

Just a little something I threw together

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.ca/2013/04/the-glass-character-synopsis.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm

Woody Allen: Harold Lloyd's bastard son?

This one is so weird, I can hardly believe what I'm seeing in front of my gritchy little eyes.

I've been getting over some vicious bug I caught in San Francisco (where I left my heart, not to mention my wallet). It has its barbed hooks into my immune system, so that nearly four weeks later I feel almost as lousy as I did at the start.

So I haven't been blogging very much. But I stumbled on something that I think is both cool, and very very strange.

I don't know what movie this was taken from: Harold still has an intact right hand (which was blown apart in a freak accident in 1919), so it must be a very early one. Certainly not The Freshman, though that headgear doesn't look like any football helmet I ever saw.

The robot from Sleeper is wearing some sort of a colander on his head without too many holes in it, but still. The whiteface, the dark frames. . . even the tux, coz Harold was often dressed up in his movies.

Like this:

Can you imagine Woody Allen without his glasses? Ditto Harold, who called himself the Glass Character because the glasses were crucial to the development of his movie persona.

But the resemblance runs deeper than that.

If it weren't for his Gentile-ity, I'd say Harold looked like Woody's uncle or something. Who'd a thunk it?

Okayfine, let's acknowledge that from the very beginning Harold had leading-man good looks with a sort of Barrymore profile (and a chin that would later help Gregory Peck make it in Hollywood. Not to mention Jon Hamm.) But lots of girls and women have lusted after Woody, at least until the Mia Farrow debacle which kind of turned the whole thing upside-down.

               

There's something sort of disturbing about both these photos. Harold Lloyd telegraphed his emotions chiefly through his eyes, which were not obscured but magnified by those magic glasses. At times, it was as if you were looking right down into the depths of his soul, and it wasn't a very happy place. I won't even comment on Woody, who has made an industry of his existential despair.

Yes. On the set, there is a certain sense of being in charge which seems totally at odds with the nerdy characters they portray on film.

Is it such a stretch? Maybe not, though facially they aren't all that similar. I always thought Woody Allen resembled a pastrami sandwich on Russian black bread with mustard dripping out the sides. Lloyd is more like a Maserati. (It's my blog and I'll mix my metaphors if I want to.)

Speaking of hybrids. . .cross a red-headed Jew with a famous comic Gentile, and what do you get? Woody, I'm sorry to tell you this, but your Mom had a naughty little secret.

Adele's doppelganger: she's a Lulu!

s


My separated-at-birth post about Adele and Lulu got me thinking: I haven't heard her one hit (To Sir With Love) for a long time. Though this clip is badly-synched, it does bring home  how startling the resemblance is: a fresh-faced, apple-cheeked, slightly chubby English girl with heavy eye makeup and a "flip" hairdo. Problem is, Lulu didn't win six Grammys at the age of 22, but never mind: she was a big star, if only for a moment, and very much a product of her times. The movie this belongs to is good, by the way, a little cliched but effective: and anything with Sydney Poitier in it can't be all bad.

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.com/2012/01/synopsis-glass-character-novel-by.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm

Adele: Grammy loves her!

I confess, I didn't know who this girl was until very recently: that is, until her face was plastered over every available surface. Predictably, this avalanche of hype ended up with an astounding Grammy win last night, something like six trophies. I didn't even know you could be nominated in that many categories. Busy girl. (And I say girl because she's barely in her 20s: you'd better pray for her now.)

As you can guess, I'm not really in touch with all this, but when I saw her - really saw her on TV, not in her carefully-lit, cheekbone-sculpted publicity photos - I was reminded, startlingly, of someone else.

I wonder if her image is meant to be '60s retro, as in Amy Winehouse's famous towering beehive. Whether it is or not, I'm going to mix up some photos here.

Just a coincidence?. . . You Tell Me!

                                                         

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.com/2012/01/synopsis-glass-character-novel-by.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm

Separated at birth, Part Deux