thanx mstarz.com
Mean Girls and White Oleander coming under consideration in a moment:
In the early 1950s I joined the crowd worshipping Marlon Brando, thought that the Wild One was deep; but didn’t fall for the judge at the end telling us that everything was everybody’s fault.
thanx filmjackets.com
Anyway, with Brando, fault was irrelevant: do you look for flaws in how Mars chops your head off? So: yea, Brando; boo, hiss, Stanley Kramer: another damn missionary imposing his view of existence onto everyone.
But I took Kramer’s social puritanism seriously throughout the 1950s: High Noon, Guess Who’s Coming to Diner … Judgment at Nuremberg … It wasn’t until 1962 and It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad Mad World that I vividly hated him and never wanted to see another thing bloated by his secular solemnity.
Hilary and I saw Mad World in the Catskills. I remember clearly what I most hated about it. I hated the unequal roles for males and females in Hollywood slapstick. Jimmy Durante, Milton Berle, Terry Thomas, Sid Caesar all take pratfalls, get clobbered; Ehtyl Merman, Edie Adams don’t even get dust on their yellow gloves, let alone have to bear poop-sprayed petticoats. Woman weren’t allowed to do what the men clowns did: trip over a crack in the walk, get hit where it hurts: take pie in the face.
Till Gilda Radner: at least in the public eye. Chevy Chase and John Belushi had to share the stage with Gilda. They could do great gags, and they did, but so did she. Still, the taboos were observed 99% of the time. Carol Burnett pushed the envelope, a little bit. One reason I so enjoyed Mean Girls was how democratically the girls, including the pretty girls, share the social wounds.
I rented Mean Girls because I finally surrendered to curiosity as to why an actress named Lindsay Lohan kept sneaking under my nose with news about arrests, bonds refused, recrudescences of rehab: Who is this girl? and why does anyone care? Well, I quickly cared enough to be unable to eject the DVD: I watched it, and watched it again. Across the board the cast was terrific, the comedy machinery very skilled. And I soon saw that any connection to Gilda was not mere accident: Lorna Michaels was on board, SNL‘s Tina Fey played several roles, writer, actress … boob joke after boob joke … (I never heard of her either till the other evening, but now it all ties together: I’m now a fan of several people on the pay roll.)
Still, that’s trivial compared to what I’m building a bridge toward:
thanx iamawildthing
I rented White Oleander never having heard of the novel (or Oprah’s book club selection) or the movie: or differences between the book and the movie … I didn’t even know the oleander plant’s rep for toxicity: I didn’t even understand first viewing what the murder weapon was!
OK, I hope that’s enough bridge, now let me leapfrog straight to the important stuff: Astrid is the daughter, Ingrid is the mother. Ingrid kills the boyfriend, goes to jail, Astrid’s tough life doesn’t improve much: each foster home she’s bounced through being another introduction to hell.
Point: consider classical American lit: a Cooper heroine may get a little dust on her gloves, but it’s the Cooper heroes who get the lion’s share of murder, torture, mayhem, proof of manhood … Twain’s great creation, Huck, experiences every degradation a boy can suffer. Becky Thatcher suffers no embarrassments in the cave with Tom. Now here’s an American fiction, advertised on TV, and the orphan is female: and perverted every step of the way. Her mothers are druggies, whores, murderesses, dealers … strippers, deluded dream-aways … As a teen, in the book, she’s learning to give blow jobs for pot …
Um … How come Nixon didn’t put a stop to that? I mean to the news getting out? Not to the phenomena, always familiar to those in the gutter. If Nixon didn’t stop it, how come Reagan didn’t?
News leaks! Ellsberg, now Snowden. What’s the point of being Macbeth if you can’t murder whoever you want?
White Oleander reminds me of Lolita. I tried White Oleander thanx to a blog (by an interesting blond!): Blond Fury
2013 01 31 Above I narrate how I hadn’t known who the hell this Lindsay Lohen was, then I deliberately chose Mean Girls to seek out, to acquaint myself with: and now I can’t get enough of her. She’s a drunk, she’s a junky, she’s showing wear and tear; yeah, but she’s got something, she’s got me.
2013 07 27 Bit by bit I’m swooning for the rest of the Mean Girl cast. Most fuckable to my eye all along was the brunette: Lacey Chabert. Rachel McAdams was fine in her part, but it was the clumsy buxom blond, the Amanda Seyfried character, that got the biggest guffaws from me. And now we’ve seen her elsewhere: Les Miserables, Red Riding Hood. Now there’s another girl I can’t take my eyes off, especially her face, her cheeks: in combo with the eyes. 2013 10 09 Continues true. I’m about to watch another Amanda Seyfried effort, Gone. More may follow.
This morning I solved another mystery-beauty problem. Lindsay Lohen was all over the news, and I didn’t know why. A decade or two ago it was ditto for Britney. My son clued me in: the web was filled with the answers, but I don’t normally use the web as a time waster. Anyway, now I see stories about an Amanda Bynes too. Pic shows a girl with green hair. I poke a millimeter deeper. Oh, she was that dynamite chick in Shampoo! We loved her! But the info didn’t carry from the one impressive entertainment to this or that news item a year later.
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