Yay! Got tickets to the restored, hi-res version of The Wizard of Oz that’s playing at the New York Film Festival (and elsewhere, but only during the NYFF in NYC).
I’m such a sucker for this movie. I’ve never seen it on a big screen, either. Whee!
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Archive for the 'Movies' Category
Dana Goldstein examines some of the complicated and problematic stereotypes and roles in the Potterverse in The American Prospect. I agree with most of her points, including the parallels to 20th-Century racist classifications — in particular, those of Nazi Germany — in the whole mudblood/halfblood/pureblood distinctions and rankings. Rowling claimed not to have seen the parallels until a visit to a Holocaust museum, but I have a hard time believing that. Continue reading ‘It’s called the “wizarding” world for a reason’
Take a gander at what John Travolta had to say about playing a woman, Edna Turnblad, in the new movie version of Hairspray (based on the stage musical, which was based on the original film):
He had to spend up to five hours a day encased in a full body suit weighing more than 30lb with five separate gel-filled silicone prosthetic appliances for parts of Edna’s face. But it had its compensations.
“I’m happy to be a man, but I miss being groped,” he says, laughing. “Everybody tried to grope me all day. Suddenly having breasts and a big bottom gained me so much attention. Men and women wanted to feel my breasts and feel my bum. I must be a slut because I didn’t care. Men were flirting with me and I was being given power I never had before. I found it fascinating. Women have power I didn’t know they had.”
Gosh! Being groped is actually empowering! Who knew? All this time I thought the power belonged to the groper, the person who was invading your space and putting his hands on your body, whether you wanted him to or not. Turns out that gropers are actually powerless at the sight of breasts and a big bottom! Ladies, stop complaining — you really enjoy lording it over those helpless, helpless men!
Jesus. Gosh, John, did you ever think that maybe the reason you’re enjoying getting groped is that you’re on a movie set, you know the groping’s all in good fun, and everyone else knows this is a woman-suit, and everyone knows that not only can you not actually feel the groping, but that you’re a big star with a lot of power already, and you can take off the prosthetics at the end of the day and go back to being John Travolta?
Not exactly getting your tits squeezed by some asshole on the train, when you can’t get away. Not exactly getting your ass goosed by your boss and having to take it because you need the job.
As offensive as *that* is, and oh, it is — there’s more.
Continue reading ‘John Travolta: The best part of playing a woman is the groping!’
You know Captivity, the movie with the torture-porn ad campaign, including a huge four-panel billboard in LA, showing Elisha Cuthbert being Abducted, Confined, Tortured and Terminated. I’ve seen her being buried in sand on the side of a bus stop in New York, and seen her crying behind a chain-link fence that she held with her bloody fingers on the subway.
It’s a vile movie, from all accounts. As if the ad campaign weren’t enough. From the scathing New York Times review:
Though hyped as a torture movie, “Captivity” is really the extreme revenge fantasy of every (slightly damaged) guy who ever lusted after a woman far out of his league. We are first introduced to the victim, a supermodel named Jennifer (Elisha Cuthbert), via a long close-up of lips slathered in blood-red gloss. Soon those lips will be sipping a drugged apple martini at a SoHo charity event and then, a little later, screaming “I’m sorry, I’m sorry!” to a hooded abductor (Pruitt Taylor Vince) while their owner is strapped to a dungeon table. As images of Jennifer’s magazine covers flash around her, it’s clear that the only thing she has to apologize for is being attractive — and unavailable to mommy-damaged sadists.
A punish-the-tease tale of exhausting repetitiveness, Larry Cohen’s script is trapped in a tedious loop of drugging and threatening as Jennifer is shown the fates of previous victims and meets a cute fellow captive (Daniel Gillies). Yet after four days of psychological battery — during which her skirts and her heels climb ever higher — our heroine is still glowing and eager to make out. Like the infamous 1978 Hustler cover depicting a woman disappearing into a meat grinder while her legs wave invitingly at the viewer, Jennifer is a pervert’s fantasy. She is also, as a character, more silly than sympathetic.
Here’s the thing.
My brother worked on it. He doesn’t have a credit, but he worked part-time on the crew during the shoot in Moscow, where he lived at the time, in 2005. Before it became torture-porn. When it was “just” a movie about a psycho who kidnapped a model whose only crime was not being available to him and held her captive in his basement. Before the eyeball milkshakes, designed to appeal to Elisha Cuthbert’s “fan base” and the people who dig the Saw movies. And bonus! The emotionally-stunted, pretty-people-hating psycho kidnapper is fat.
I’m honestly not sure how to feel about that. I mean, in 2005, when he picked up a little work on the side (he’s in the Director’s Guild, but always wanted to live in Russia; he got a job in the US Embassy there at least until there were some visa issues, but since there’s a lot of production work going on in Moscow…), this was something perhaps a little icky, but not torture porn. When he visited in May, he brought along a rough cut of the film, with the titles in Russian, and was excitedly pointing himself out to me on-screen (he has a walk-on as a cop).
By that time, I’d already seen the buried-in-sand ad, which wasn’t around long. And I’d seen the trailer where the bloodied and crying captive whispers, “I’m sorry” to her captor. Honestly? I wasn’t sure what he’d seen of the ad campaign in Moscow. I’m not sure I wanted to ask, since it was work, and he’d had trouble finding work in the DG for a while for arcane and Byzantine reasons relating to base-of-operations rules. He’d gotten work on a TV show being filmed in Charleston, SC a while back, while he was still trying to get into the Guild, and switched his base of operations to be anywhere but Southern California, which meant he had a hard time getting work in Southern California once the TV show didn’t work out. So getting work somewhere like Moscow (or Hawaii, when my sister lived there and he got some work on Windtalkers and the execrable Pearl Harbor) was good for him.
I watched the film as far as his appearance, and then decided I really, really wanted to go to dinner. Let’s go!
I’m guessing he worked on a very different movie than what we’re seeing today.
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