Ponders the myriad pathologies of pop culture.
Obsesses about actressing at the edges.
Loves grilled cheese.
ARCHIVE OF SUPPORTING ACTRESS SUNDAYS & THE SMACKDOWN
Thanks, Babs.
I have but one or two things to say about Kurt Russell's largely shirtless performance in Silkwood. First, I think it's brilliant and hilarious when an actor, in clear collaboration with the costumer, makes a choice about the character's approach to underpants (ie. he wears none). And, second...
Nice work, Kurt. Thanks.
Among the more startling moments for me in Martin Ritt's Cross Creek arrived with the introduction of the ancillary character of Paul, the hired man who helps Mary Steenburgen's Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings whip her orange grove into shape. Within the film, the character is nearly incidental -- part narrative necessity, part ambient detail. But 'twas the casting of the role that yanked me awake...
For, in the 1983 film, the role of the hard-working farmhand and part-time moonshiner is played by one of the most important actors of my childhood, Ike Eisenmann. Eisenmann is perhaps best remembered for his portrayal of Tony, the boy witch from the first iteration of the Witch Mountain series (a role which had him adopted/abducted by a guignol Bette Davis in the wackadoo sequel). But I first fell in swoon with Ike as the child protagonist of my favorite teevee show circa 1977, The Fantastic Journey. And for a brief period, young Mr. Eisenmann enjoyed, along with Matthew Laborateaux, the status of being my very favorite actor. At least through the end of the 4th grade. 'Tis always strange to see kid actors grown up. And even stranger to reencounter adult versions of those kid performers, especially when those actors were the ones who stirred such intense but not-yet-understood feelings way back then. And when they look so much as they did, yet entirely -- ahem -- different? It's a startling encounter, to say the least.
His singularly brilliant performance as the insufferably nerdy/needy/neurotic Sheldon just makes me happy. Hap hap hap hap hap happy. Happy! And then when I see pictures like this, and realize that he appeared in this play (directed by a college friend of mine no less), I get even haphaphappier. So, I offer this -- my personal definition of "adorkable" -- to share my haphaphappy with you.
Post a Hollywood candid or three you'd mostTo which, I say: Let's make this a caption contest.
like to hear the accompanying audio track to.
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"I didn't make you do anything that wasn't in you already."
StinkyLulu offers the following as my contribution to the monthly FILM CLUB instigated by Final Girl. This month brings our attention to a curious classic of the "When ____s Attack" genre that became so ubiquitous in the 1970s. And even though the film didn't inspire my imagination so much (see my unedited ramblings on the film here; click image at above right to be routed to the trailer), The Car (1977) did provide several moments of surprising, delectable delight. 
Ahhh, the rich pungency of 70s studness. 
Perhaps my favorite moment in the entire film happens in the first minutes when one of The Car's first fatalities pauses his bike race with his girl friend. They roll to a stop, giggling and chattering. And then -- for reasons that remain unclear to me -- the boy sniffs his hand and makes a massive stinkface. (It's a fleeting moment of veritas, akin perhaps to the legendary Brando-glove business, just nasty tacky.) Between the "sniff" and my impulse to confirm that that screaming girly is indeed my beloved Nikki, I can confirm that, having carefully screened this tiny sequence scores of times, its inexplicable delights endure.
A long drink of man. Naturally smooth, naturally strong.
Of course, my favorite character was the school principal lady. A girdled nightmare of hairspray, polyester, cat-eyes, and moral righteousness in one scene; a grimacing wild-haired gorgon in the next. My kind of character.
Any film that spends several minutes staging a scene in which one character teases, taunts and torments James Brolin's manly bits is a film that I will forever appreciate.
As a child of the 1970s southwest, I must say this film does observe a principle I grew up witnessing on a fairly regular basis: hitchhiking hippies carrying weird musical instruments and throwing attitude to the locals are indeed at severe risk of being run over. Not judging, just saying.
By 1977, I think I envied Kim Richards even more than I did Melissa Gilbert. (And that's saying a lot.) Kim Richards was soooooooo lucky. She got to be Tia (opposite my 2nd grade dreamdate Ike Eisenmann) in Escape from Witch Mountain and she gets to have James Brolin for a dad? No fair, no fair, no fair. (That scene in the "hopped up on Holly Hobby" bedroom when Brolin pops in wearing his velour mini-robe? That single image realizes I don't know how many of my elementary school fantasies... All at once.) Though considering the above picture, and recalling all the times I rode on the back of a motorbike, terrified by the ride but thrilled that I was clutching some 70s man's abdomen, I think I would have wanted to be the one in the red helmet.
If doing a paint-by-number painting of your boyfriend, and then getting run over in the middle of your living room, and then having that paint-by-number emerge undamaged and carefully lit from amidst the wreckage -- if that ain't proof of true love, I dunno what is.
Indeed. It. Is.
Among the many ambiguously (un)resolved mysteries in Tobe Hooper's Lifeforce (1985), that enduring epic yarn about vampires from outerspace set on turning all earthlings into zombie cannibals and possibly instigating a nuclear holocaust, is the one about Mathilda May's two equally naked escorts. You know, the two dudes with carefully obscured genitalia hanging there in the subordinate translucent tubes.
The phallic imagery of these dangling dudes is only amplified when we note that these crystal dildos are pointed toward the giant space sphincter of this mysterious alien ship.
We don't really get to see these dildo dudes again, as the narrative quickly fixates on the nubile, neverending nudeness of Mathilda May. But when we do finally get to see the naked dudes again, they're paired on matching exam tables (with kicky, electric blue bumpers, no less!).
Then we get our first close up. First, the prettier one on the right...
and, then, the craggier on on the left, the one I think is actually Mick Jagger's brother.
But, together, they're the Wonder Twins!
The sort of pretty pretties you might have brushed up against at Boy Bar circa 1988!
But unlike most go-go boys, these ones'll stalk you through the backroom...
With their sexy alien vampire gaze...
But the thing that gets me about these mysterious nearly naked space dildo boys is this: Mathilda May explains her voluptuous self to Steve Railsback's Colonel Tom (not Major, Colonel - get it) by telling him that she's a manifestation of his deepest thoughts, that she emerged as the embodiment of his deepest fantasy of womanliness. Which gets me to wondering -- from whose deepest fantasies did the naked boys manifest? Sure, the original space crew had a lady or two but, as best as I can tell, that space mission was like 90% guys. So are these naked dudes the embodiments of the deepest erotic fantasies from the minds of those astronauts? Cool. I can go with that. OR are these to be Railsback's "backup" fantasy essences? The extra players who sneak in the "backdoor" of his most private erotic dreams? Nifty. I can go with that too. Alas, the narrative provides no answers to these pressing questions but instead leaves us dangling like those dingleberry space dildos in the opening shot.
We do get a brief resolution for the craggier one fairly early one (the one who gets dressed up as a soldier and shares a charged flirtation with the white haired scientist) but it's not until the penultimate moments that we get to see the prettier one again...
when he's all windblown and working that disco blue glow again...
just before he starts sucking all the life out of London.
I guess that's just what very pretty alien vampires are wont to do. Of course, mere moments later, he explodes in a heap of vanquishment and all the prettyboyness is gone from Lifeforce. Forever. And, like much of this film, the fleeting glimpses of random cinematic hotness prove to be something of a disappointment.Toward the end of 1953's Torch Song, Marjorie Rambeau describes her daughter Joan Crawford's current boyfriend as a "hothouse clotheshorse." Upon hearing this evocative turn of phrase, MrStinky piped up: "Is that a homosexual?" And, given the evidence provided by the film, 'twould seem to be the case that "hothouse clotheshorse" might be yet another 1950s euphemism for queer. Crawford's boytoy, Cliff Willard, even boasts of his other, younger girlfriends as he bills Crawford's Jenny for his dates, a swagger that seems curiously off pitch, even when mouthed by notorious womanizer Gig Young (above). Then, when Young's Cliff is called upon to assist in assembling a spontaneous cocktail party for his patroness, the partygoers turn out -- surprise surprise -- to be exclusively well-heeled gentlemen like himself. A veritable cornucopia of hothouse clotheshorses, it might seem, with neither a damsel or dame in site, only La Crawford herself as the reigning diva. It's not mancandy per se but the assemblage of implicit queerness is its own variation on the them of assorted random cinematic hotness...
Fred Zinneman's film stages a curious spectacle of unpreparedness on the morning of December 7, 1941, as semi-clad soldiers scurry this way and that while Japanese bombers attack the Hawaiian military outpost. (For StinkyLulu, 'twas a curious moment of cognitive dissonance: Oh look at the nearly naked cute boy! Oh no the airplanes have machinegunners! Nearly naked! Machine guns!) The sequence utilizes male undress to signal the soldiers' collective "rush to readiness" on this historic morning. Yet the sequence also provides quite the unanticipated assortment of random cinematic hotness...
