| Demi Moore to sell 2 19th c. paintings in NYC By ULA ILNYTZKY 2010-10-12T15:17:06ZNEW YORK (AP) -- Demi Moore is selling two 19th-century European paintings at auction, including a French work the actress says inspired her because of the artist's depiction of strong women.... hosted.ap.org |
Breathless (A Bout de Souffle): No 4 Jean-Luc Godard, 1960In 1946, Humphrey Bogart had played "Bogey" in The Big Sleep, alongside his wife-to-be, Lauren Bacall, a sexy daughter available for marriage. Maybe the Hollywood dream never had a purer, crazier manifestation. But here we are, 15 years later: Bogart is dead and, worse, his Hollywood has entered its funeral years. And then arrives Jean-Luc Godard, half in love with that old mythology, half contemptuous of it. So Jean-Paul Belmondo, a magnificent jerk, will model himself on Bogey and take off.Breathless was Godard's first feature, and his first demonstration of how to turn the raiment of the Hollywood dream inside out. In addition to putting Godard's love-hate relationship with Hollywood up on the wall like graffiti, it was a signal that movies could be made nearly as quickly and cheaply as we might write emails. So it's important to remember that while Breathless still feels desperately modern, it was made before the machinery of our modern culture. It was done from a four-page outline, on about $48,000, with a quarter of that paying for Jean Seberg, a failure in Hollywood, but the hip new thing in Paris in 1960. She's Patricia, an American who sells the New York Herald Tribune on the streets, and Belmondo is Michel, an existentialist idiot on the run after he shoots a cop. His days are numbered and the film moves like a Charlie Parker solo – so hectic you wonder if the alto sax will live out the next 16 bars. There's no way it should work, being made up as they went along, but Godard knew it was time to treat the audience like dirt and his characters like shit. This casual malice turned into a monument nonetheless.RomanceWorld cinemaDavid Thomsonguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
A Clockwork Orange: No 6 Stanley Kubrick, 1971Even though it was made in long-ago 1971, there is still something almost fetishistically futuristic about A Clockwork Orange. Perhaps that is owed to the exuberant and indelible production design, its characters' peculiar teenage argot ("Nadsat") or its electrified, classical score by transsexual composer Walter (later Wendy) Carlos – or perhaps simply because the early 70s were crazier – in hyper-stylised design and fashion – than any period since. Either way, A Clockwork Orange endures, not so much for its philosophical musings on the nature of free will in the face of good and evil, but because it is simply a triumph of style from its opening sequence in the Korova Milk Bar through its cartoony violence and horrible retribution, all the way to its bizarre final shot of Alex (Malcolm McDowell in a role that has dogged him for 40 years) having wild sex before an audience of voyeurs clad in Louis XIV courtier finery as he crows: "I was cured all right!"Kubrick thought of every detail in the costuming (the droogs' white thug outfits, with their crotch-emphatic outer jockstraps and bowler hats, not to mention Alex's false eyelashes), furniture, decor and art (the giant plaster penis that Alex uses as a murder weapon) – giving them as much attention as he had to the dashboards of his bomber in Dr Strangelove, the spaceships in 2001, or the painterly compositions in Barry Lyndon. Within the universe he created, he let loose a cast of characters closer to grotesque gargoyle status than anything in the rest of Kubrick's body of work, and it is here that Kubrick first deploys his tactic of starting close-up on a face and pulling back drastically to show its environs (by the time of The Shining, most of his camera movements tracked maniacally forwards, not sombrely backwards). These days we have cause to wonder what all the fuss over the violence in the movie was about. It seems so tame now (and probably did even then, alongside, say, Straw Dogs). Evidently the copycat aspect of the audience response – certain violent crimes were rumoured to have been inspired by the film – was real enough for Kubrick, who made the movie unavailable in his adopted homeland for the rest of his life. More's the pity, because it's a crucial British film of its period, and a key to our larger understanding of Kubrick himself.DramaScience fiction and fantasyStanley KubrickAnthony BurgessJohn Pattersonguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Randy Quaid, wife seek refugee status in Canada By JEREMY HAINSWORTH 2010-10-23T02:24:19ZVANCOUVER (AP) -- Actor Randy Quaid told Canada's immigration board Friday that he and his wife are seeking asylum from "the murderers of Hollywood" and will therefore apply for refugee status in Canada, after they were arrested on U.S. warrants related to vandalism charges.... hosted.ap.org |
Sylvester Stallone sex film rights sold on eBay Rights to 1970 softcore erotic film Italian Stallion in which actor plays his first lead sells for $412,100 on auction websiteThe rights to a softcore erotic film which holds the distinction of being the first movie to star Sylvester Stallone in a leading role have been sold on eBay for $412,100, according to Variety.Italian Stallion, from 1970, was originally named The Party at Kitty and Stud's, then retitled after Stallone found fame with Rocky in 1976. Stallone plays Stud, an oafish alpha male who invites a number of strangers to the apartment he shares with girlfriend Kitty for a sex party. The film is notorious for being far from X-rated: Stallone has said in interviews that he was once offered the chance to buy it for $100,000 but declined on the grounds that his reputation would hardly suffer.Nevertheless, the actor told Playboy magazine in 1978 that he had been starving and desperate on the streets of New York when he took $200 for two days' work on the film. "I'd been bounced out of my apartment and had spent four nights in a row at the Port Authority bus terminal, trying to avoid the cops, trying to get some sleep and keeping my pens and books in a 25-cent locker," he said. "I mean, I was desperate."The eBay auction included worldwide rights to the film as well as the original 35mm negatives, which Edward Parry, president of distributor Bryanston, said were actually lost for a period.A supposedly hardcore version of Italian Stallion was released in 2007, but it subsequently emerged that extra scenes had been inserted into the movie which did not feature Stallone. The actor has said that the film "would almost qualify for a PG rating" were it to be released today. "About 10 people show up [to the party] and they do a lot of kissing and necking, and that's about it," he told Playboy.Sylvester StallonePornographyeBayBen Childguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |