Self-Indulgence: 30 Day Music Meme: Day 26: Your Favorite Movie Video

Another easy one for me!

Day 26: Your Favorite Movie Video

Hands down, the best ever is the video for Queen's Princes of the Universe which intercut footage from the film Highlander with footage of the band (and Highlander star Christopher Lambert).

Self-Indulgence: 30 Day Music Meme: Day 23: Your Favorite Duet

This one was REALLY easy.

Day 23:  Your Favorite Duet

I love the movie Victor/Victoria, and my favorite number is the Julie Andrews/Robert Preston duet You and Me.

The Insidious Technological Plot to Destroy Life As We Know It; or, Lela Thinks All That Terminator Stuff Might Come True

Ever since I was a young girl (I played the silver ball!)

Ha ha.  Oh, I am a caution.

Seriously.  Ever since I can remember, I've loved science fiction.  Books, movies, whatever.  If it smacked of technology and THE FUTURE, I was probably all for it.  Robots I loved especially.

Pictured: Your best friend and your
mom. Time travel and the impending
robot apocalypse tend to make people
somewhat careless.

And then, when I was around eight, I saw both The Terminator and Terminator 2 for the first time.  And I was sore afraid.  Not that I'd never been introduced to the idea of machines turning on their owners (that's a big part of the backstory of Dune, and Dune was, is, and probably always will be a big part of my life), but this...they were stopping at NOTHING to destroy this one guy BEFORE HE WAS EVEN BORN!  Also, I learned that time is really a mess (long before I got so fully immersed in the world of Dr. Who), Arnold Schwarzenegger is more than just a buzzard-biting barbarian, and that sometimes, the best friend you send back from the future to save your mom so that you can be born really turns out to be your dad.  Talk about confusion!

New Zealand Week: Day 7: Star Profiles: Danielle Cormack

Danielle Cormack

Danielle Cormack got her start in theater in her native New Zealand and first came to real prominence as a teenager with a role in the soap opera Gloss.  She's compiled quite the list of credits since then, with her abundant talents for both comedy and drama making her a natural choice for a rich variety of roles in television, film, and theater.

New Zealand Week: Day 7: Star Profiles: Karl Urban

Karl Urban

Karl Urban is one of New Zealand's stars who has managed to start getting some real footing in the entertainment industry outside of his homeland as well.  Though he is primarily a star of action-type films where Americans are concerned, a review of his career shows an actor also adept at comedic roles, and at deep drama.

New Zealand Week: Day 6: Star Profiles: Rena Owen

Rena Owen

As one of New Zealand's top female stars, Rena Owen has taken on many roles through the years.  From her beginnings in theater to breakthrough roles in film and television, she has shown herself to be among the top acting talents around.  She's also overcome personal problems and addiction, never letting life beat her down.

New Zealand Week: Day 5: Star Profiles: Temuera Morrison

Temuera Morrison

Temuera Morrison is one of New Zealand's biggest stars, known at home and abroad as an amazing actor capable of handling everything from comedy to intense drama to action with ease.  In a career that has thus far spanned over 20 years, he has proven himself a powerful performer who can enfuse almost any role with true feeling and heart.

New Zealand Week: Day 3: Review: The Price of Milk (2000)

This is a film that, after even one viewing, you won't soon forget, whether you like it or not.  It's magical, mystical, weird...altogether trippy.  It's got romance, betrayal, danger...everything that makes a fairy tale great.  Don't let that put you off though.  This is a film with a heart and a message.

New Zealand Week: Day 1: Star Profiles: Lucy Lawless

Lucy Lawless

I've already kicked off New Zealand Week over on my horror blog, and now we're gonna start things off here with a profile of a star who'll be recognizable to a lot of people outside of  New Zealand. (I'm easing you into things, see?  Aren't I nice blogger?  Say it.  Say that Lela's a nice blogger!  Very good.  Here.  Have an apple.)

Just a note for my U.S. readers (pretty sure that's all three of you), I'll be using international dating conventions in these profiles; for example, rather than writing, say, January 1, 1954, it would be 1 January, 1954.

Lucy Lawless is best known for her roles as Xena on the series Xena: Warrior Princess and D'anna Biers on the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica.  She's also had roles on everything from The X-Files to Veronica Mars and made a small cameos in the first Sam Raimi directed Spider-Man film and Boogeyman.  To the average person (read: not an obsessed fan), it might seem that Lucy's fame just happened overnight.  But it's not as if Lucy just appeared one day, rising from the dust of Aotearoa and taking a small part on Hercules: The Legendary Journeys and then bursting into stardom.  No, she's a bit more complicated than that.

Happy 70th Birthday, Raquel!

That's right, folks.  Pop culture icon Raquel Welch is the big 7-0 today.  Hard to believe, because she still looks damn good.

1970 publicity shot for Raquel's film
Myra Breckenridge

Raquel earlier this year.

And the Count Drops by One...

Eleanore Cammack 'Cammie' King Conlon died of lung cancer on Wednesday.  She was 76.  Perhaps you've not really heard of her, but chances are you've seen her or heard her voice; at least, the voice she spoke with in her youth.

She was better known as Cammie King and, in 1939, she was one of the actresses chosen to portray Bonnie Blue Butler, daughter of Scarlett and Rhett in the classic film Gone with the Wind.  She would also provide the young voice for Faline the doe in the Disney animated feature Bambi.

Though Cammie left acting while still a child, she remained proud of her role in Gone with the Wind, and she continued to appear at gatherings and retrospectives about the film as recently as last year.  She had also written and published a memoir of her childhood experiences at the time of Gone with the Wind.

An autographed photo of young Cammie on the set of Gone with the Wind with her onscreen father Clark Gable.

Cammie more recently, holding a copy of her memoir.

I'm Magic! or, How I Really Decided to do This Blog's First Theme Week

Earlier today I was kicking back, working on some possible blog posts.  I noticed that I was doing reviews of a lot of films from New Zealand.  The entire culture and entertainment industry of that place has interested me for a long time, and then I started to think that it might be fun to do a weeks worth of overviews and guides to films, music, and television from New Zealand.

A few hours later I learned that, while I was dreaming up Kiwi Theme Week, there was a magnitude 7.0 earthquake near Christchurch, New Zealand.   The international dateline means it happened on Saturday morning for them, but still!

My thought must've caused it.  That or it's the earth warning us, what with the earlier quake up near the Aleutian Islands off the coast of Alaska.

But I'll stick with the "Lela has a magic brain" theory.

I'm monitoring Radio New Zealand, national stream, to keep up.

Next week is New Zealand week on EPP.

So...yeah.

Everyone is Gay?: The Strange Obsession with Keeping Stars in the Closet...or Not

I've gone through life with so many people telling me that anything but heterosexuality is a bad thing.

Yet in This Modern Age, bi and homosexuality are slowly becoming accepted, at least in some quarters.  Some say this is a bad thing (I'm looking at you, Westboro Baptist Church) and that allowing people to practice non-heterosexuality will be the death of this country.  Being homosexual myself (though not homosocial, should any guys wanna, ya know, hang out and shoot the shit), I don't want to believe that.  There are plenty of other problems with this country that will probably inevitably lead to its downfall.  Teh ghey is the least of our worries.

What bothers me about the whole thing is that, even with different forms of human sexuality finally becoming so accepted in the Western World, celebrities, be they actors, musicians, or what have you, have such a hard time coming out of the closet.  Of course, they couldn't come out of the closet years ago when being gay was something that most of the general public feared and hated.  But now, they still seem to think it will ruin their careers.  Who knows; it might.  After all, there's been controversy lately over whether an out gay actor can believably portray a straight romantic lead.  That hinges not only on the performer's ability, but on the ability and willingness of the public to look beyond the reality of the person's private life and to immerse themselves in the story being played out on the stage or screen.

I read Blind Gossip on occasion, and it seems that 3/4 of the items are concerned with this actor or that actress or some musician being in the closet but being dangerously close to being outed, or being told by their "people" to get further in.

Frankly, who cares?

It's time for the public to admit that, just as sexuality typically has no bearing on the ability of a person to perform most regular, every day jobs, it has no bearing on entertainment either.

It's time for Hollywood and the entertainment industry in general, from the producers and publicists to the stars themselves, to get their heads out of their asses and understand that, if a performer is good at what they do, if they have fans who love their work, then coming out as gay is no longer going to be a complete end to their career.

Or maybe I'm insane.

When You Get Caught Between the Moon and Pointless Remakes

(Before I get down to me real complaint o' the day, I must commend Bad Ronald for his excellent and incisive article on James Cameron's claim that Piranha 3-D is cheapening the medium of 3-D.  Seriously...how do you cheapen 3-D, Mr. 7 foot tall blue cat people?)

On to the rant of the moment.  They're doing it to me again.  They're remaking a movie that I love, a movie that was already perfect, or at least as close to perfect as a film can get.

They've started on a remake of Arthur, the classic early 80s gem that starred Dudley Moore, Liza Minnelli, and John Gielgud.

To be fair, not all remakes suck.  And they have gone the British acting royalty route once again when casting the role of Arthur's servant-cum-caretaker.  Now, rather than a stodgy butler, the character is a stodgy nanny played by the great Helen Mirren.  The title role will be played by Russell Brand, who's about as far from Dudley Moore as one can get, at least if we're discussing height.  Greta Gerwig, an actress mostly known for her independent film work, takes over the Liza Minnelli role.

As I said, not all remakes suck.  But it seems that, in the past few years, an overwhelming number of them have.  Granted, this one comes from a script by Peter Baynham, who has previously been nominated for a screenwriting Oscar...but that nomination was for Borat.  Granted, the script also passed through the hands of the writing staff of the acclaimed, Emmy-winning television comedy Modern Family thanks to the fact that Jason Winer, the director of this remake, was also a primary director on the first season of that show.  But then the script went back to Baynham.

I want this to be all right.  I want to believe that Arthur can be reimagined and remade into a film that will be both undeniably modern and a loving remembrance of the original.

Who'm I kidding?  I have almost no faith in the Hollywood machine anymore.

The Silent Majority: John Gilbert

As I mentioned in the first post of this feature, I had been planning for a while, once I got this blog started, to do a series on my favorite stars of the silent screen.  The impetus to finally do it (as well as the feature title) came from a Facebook friend who has recently gotten very interested in silent films herself.  In particular she's developed a fascination with John Gilbert.  So here, in the latest edition of The Silent Majority, that fine actor will be showcased.
Elizabeth, this one's for you.

The Silent Majority: Clara Bow and Louise Brooks

I had been wanting to do a semi-regular series on this blog featuring some of my favorite stars of the silent film era; the new interest of a friend in silents has led me to go ahead, as well as giving me a title (thanks, Elizabeth).  So here it is, ladies and gents, the first enstallment of a picture feature I'll call The Silent Majority.

(NSFW due to one instance of what I like to call tasteful nudity!)

Clara Bow is still remembered today by many as "The It Girl," while Louise Brooks was, until recently, often forgotten by all except film historians and a group of loyal, dedicated fans.  Clara and Louise were both influential as far as the "look" of the flappers and jazz babies of the 1920s.  Chances are, if you've seen a film set in the 1920s or 1930s and there are any pictures of then-popular film stars featured, then you've seen both of these ladies.

Hungry Like the Wahrwilf Wuhrwulf Werewolf

(A companion piece to my earlier article about vampires...)

It is no surprise that, when humanity began to romanticize the vampire, the werewolf would also be enthusiastically reimagined and reinvented.
Where once the two sorts of creature were on something of an equal footing, being night-walking terrors that one wouldn't want to tangle with, they are now rather like opposite sides of the same coin flipped in the dark of a moonlit night.  The vampire is now most often seen as the slick, sophisticated monster, a gentleman (or woman) out for blood, seducing their victims along the way.  The werewolf, on the other hand, is ever the animal, a person transformed, whether through chance, fate, or will, into a ravening beast.

Self-Indulgence: Ladies I Adore...

This is one of those droolerific posts where I admit to being incredibly homosexual in the way that some women are.
Over the course of my pop culture obsession, I've found myself drawn to certain actresses for any number of reasons.  So, after the jump, here are just a few of the lovely ladies who are tops in my book.

Why Vampires are OHMIGOD SOOO Romantic.

(This post started life as a set of comments on the blog of a friend who just doesn't understand why people so romanticize a bunch of walking corpses.  It was really an attempt to explain why they are romanticized when, face it...they're just dead people who drink blood.)

Vampires have long been romanticized.  However, if one reads up on some of the more ancient, classic vampire legends, particularly those from Eastern Europe, it quickly becomes clear that a vampire isn't a beautiful, romantic creature; it's a freaking WALKING CORPSE!  As one scholar put it, originally, being bitten by a vampire was about as romantic as being bitten by your dead Uncle Boris.

The concept of the vampire as more than just a walking corpse came about because, as well as being immortal, they were well-nigh invulnerable (fire was bad...and decapitation...but most other stuff was just a scratch. Oh, and staking wasn't originally to kill them...it was to pin them down so you COULD kill them...so you had to drive the stake ALL THE WAY THROUGH.) Invulnerability=you don't rot=you are eternally young/the way you were, which is a very attractive prospect to some.

Quickly! Shield your Children from Everyday Human Behavior in Cinema!

Let me start this off by saying that I am not a supporter of the tobacco industry or of the idea of cigarette smoking.  I spent much of my life up to earlier this year seeing the effect that smoking had on my mother's health.  I do not smoke.  I will never smoke.  However, I am not against the idea that it is the right of each adult individual to decide whether or not they will smoke.

Recently, there's been a big flap because of talk that films which show any scene in which a character smokes may be forced to carry an R rating.

Uh.  'Scusa me?