Well, this is only marginally on topic (if this were an Ohio Proficiency Test in writing, Grade 8, I'd fail for drifting off the subject, as some of the finest writers I ever taught sometimes did).
Last night Joyce and I saw Young Adult, the new film about a divorcee (Charlize Theron) who writes YA novels (though the series she's been doing is about to come to an end). She decides to act on a fantasy: returning to her hometown to recapture her lost high school love, who now is happily married with a new baby. All along the way we see her life collapsing: she drinks heavily, eats piles of junk food. And yet ...
When she takes off her her clothes, she is ... hot! Nary an ounce of fat.
Over the past decade or so, I've noticed that whenever movie/TV actors remove their clothing, they are in better shape than Babe Ruth or Mickey Lolich or most people ever were. (Exceptions: character actors who are supposed to be chubby, chunky, old, all the above.) Think of Don Draper on Mad Men: Here's a guy who drinks heavily, eats horribly, never seems to sleep (alone), but when he removes that shirt ...
Not long ago I watched the old 1972 Sam Peckinpah film The Getaway (remade not too long ago with Alec Baldwin). McQueen plays a guy who's been in prison for a while, and when he comes out and is in a motel with his GF (Ali McGraw), he is nervous and has trouble, uh, producing. And when he takes his shirt off, he looks ... like a real person. Just an ordinary torso, unremarkable arms. Why, he could be ... any of us.
But when stars today disrobe, they look like aliens to me--like no one I know, or ever have known, or could know.
Yes, I saw that film-- Jimmy and Suzanne called it social terrorism. They cringed in their seats.
ReplyDeleteAs to ripped, I have to laugh. My father and Jim's father both winced at the new breed of muscular actresses. I think it was Daryl Hannah in Planet of the Cave Bear that really got to Jim's dad --
Ha! That's very true about Don Draper.
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