When I heard the new Total Recall had remained true to its predecessor by including a mutant three-breasted hooker (newcomer Kaitlyn Leeb, who's already steeping in the positive and negative attention associated with such a role), my elation turned bittersweet when I realized how little I knew about Lycia Naff, the actress who originated the role in Paul Verhoeven's 1990 blockbuster. Even in a movie teeming with compelling females in thankless minor roles—the "two weeks" woman; the grotendously disfigured mutant fortuneteller; the wee, Uzi-toting Thumbelina—Naff's performance became downright totemic. Verhoeven's entire vision of man's future balances on her prosthetically enhanced bustline.
Right after Total Recall, Naff earned [...]
Or something like that. Anyway, everyone's real upset over the (quickly fading) neon-green Spring Street bike lane that runs past L.A.'s City Hall, because it… impedes the film industry's ability to mimic Real America. If only other cities had enormous financial incentives to lure TV and movie production outside of L.A.!
We all know that our movie stars are not only a precious natural resource, but also a group of individuals that are very highly compensated, not just now, but even back then, when we were just figuring out what to call them (moving picture heroes? Lumièronauts?). We also all know that this compensation has increased as the years tick by and the Oscars are doled out. But do we know exactly by how much?
They came slowly, the franchise films, the grandchildren of the serials. The other night I was in the theater trying to see The Green Hornet for the second time (the first time, the theater started to burn down 30 minutes in, so I had to, like, evacuate (evacuate the theater, I mean, not like, in my pants), and then the next day sit through act one twice, which wasn't really the worst thing), and there was the omnipresent trailer for Pirates of the Caribbean 4: On Stranger Tides. And it suddenly occurred to me that we were on the fourth movie of a franchise built around a really rather [...]
The richly imaginative details of J.K. Rowling’s fictive world, it must be admitted, are pleasurable. The hot-rod brooms, the flowing robes and flying cars, the goth Heaven of the sullen Slytherins, the snake language and the magic wands enclosing phoenix feathers or unicorn hairs, the metamorphic potions, the leaping or fizzing sweets! All these have been fully and lovingly realized in the Warner Brothers movie adaptations of the Harry Potter books, including the most recent, which is a fine-looking but completely incoherent mess with a morally bankrupt and politically repugnant story at its core.
"A bachelor… he lived with his mother in a mansion in the Hollywood Hills…. He was a natty dresser, sporting silver hair and bare feet." That's the Wall Street Journal on Hollywood agent Ed Limato, who died over the weekend. A bachelor, you say! God bless Nikki Finke for being the only one to explicate "bachelor" and for tagging her extensive obit with "Hollywood gays"… even if the obit is the only item in that category yet. Honestly, no wonder every vampire and friendly alien is in the closet in L.A.
