Eros vs Academia: In Space No One Can Hear Your Mind Fart

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Merry Christmas

From childhood, I've always associated Christmas postcards with beautiful snowy landscapes of luminous pine forests and clear starry skies. Then came 1985, Dujan Makavejev's THE COCA-COLA KID (1985) and Greta Scacchi's scorching sex-scene dressed as Santa Claus. 

From then on, every December the 25th I picture that hot Summer Christmas in Australia, when quiet snowy dreamscapes were forever substituted in my mind for a furious tempest of downy feathers and Ms. Scacchi's enticingly beautiful breasts emerging from the classic Coca-Cola Santa costume.

So, in loving rememberance of that Christmas past, Merry Christmas you all!  

Face of an Angel

The face of an Angel. The body of a sinner. It doesn’t matter that she’s the villain of this particular episode of BONES (2005-2017), although one just finds that out in the end. This is, after all, a nicely done whodunit-procedural-crime-series. And it doesn’t matter that I give this info up ahead. One needs not be particularly attentive to the intricacies of plot structure to figure it out when one first catches a look of Lena Brodsky (then Emily Foxler, actually Emily Baldoni).

Her manner is all professionalism, and yet conveys some insecurity. Her Ukranian accent (how refreshing that this was done prior to the 2022 Russian invasion, when Ukranians could still be villains, and not just washed-up saints), or what passes for it in TV-land, makes her voice oh so sexy and as inviting as those deliciously pouty lips and those clear grey-green eyes. And those long, long legs… they just make you wonder… Can someone with legs like these be so innocent as those sweet big eyes imply? Can someone so hot really feel even a little insecurity? Or is it just a mask? A way of allay suspicion, just as the bejeweled belly of a black-widow spider makes it look just an object of natural beauty?

Some women are just like that. They look so sweet and so innocent, they makes us want to do things for them. And to them. And if you fool yourself, even for a tiny moment, that you’re on top of things, they’ll bite your head right off.

Goodbye Kirstie (1951-2022)

I don’t like obituaries. They tend to be mere pro forma exercises, a kind of duty one feels bound to perform. They rarely sound sincere. Maybe one cannot put into words true emotion when it is simmering inside one’s heart like smoldering embers. Or, sometimes, they’re the cold and cruel reminders that our objects of desire, our fantasies, are real persons, living in the real world like the rest of us. Sometimes insufferable, sometimes suffering.

Kirstie Alley was one of those persons. One of those objects of desire. I don’t have much to say about her as an actress, although she was always delicious to watch in any role. In my mind she’ll forever be Rebecca Howe of Cheers, so funny and lively, and full of life. So utterly sexy. Oh yes, Kirstie Alley was an incredibly sexy woman. And she was one of the actresses that filled my teenage years with wild imaginings. Strangely, however, despite her amazing body, it was her breathtaking beauty that captivated me the most. Her exquisite, feline face, her incredible grey eyes, and that sultry, warm, raspberry voice.

I fell in love with her long before I saw her in Cheers. Her beauty had caught my attention when she was playing Virgilia Hazard in North and South (1985-1986), and then in 1984’s RUNAWAY , which I caught later on satellite TV, on a wonderful summer night, somewhere in 1986 or 1987. After that, after Cheers got to an end and she starred in LOOK WHO’S TALKING (1989) and it’s sequels, I lost track of her. Babies are not my thing, alas, even if they’re talking babies. In a somewhat misguided way it was for the better: my infatuation with Kirstie Alley endured throughout the Eighties, and dissipated with the arrival of the Nineties.

From the glorious Eighties comes a minor masterpiece by Niko Mastorakis, the film where Kirstie looks more luminous than ever: BLIND DATE (1984). It is impossible for any red-blooded male to watch that movie and not fall in love with Kirstie Alley, so young, joyous and full of life. By not following her career after the end of Cheers, I’ll forever remember her as she was then, an indelible memory of fun and joy that I ritually rekindle now and then with a dip into my DVD collection.

So here’s to you, Kirstie Alley, in loving memory. Cheers!

Happy Halloween

It was with some surprise that I noticed it's been five years since I posted something on Halloween in this semi-dormant blog of mine. Tempus fugit, indeed. Well, maybe not to our cherished muse, Elvira, Mistress of the Dark. She irradiates such immortal beauty. Oh, Elvira, tempus fugit, forma manet. So here it is: Happy Halloween folks. 

I fell in love with Temperance Brennan…

…from the get go. Maybe it’s due to the contrast between her bright brains and her sinner’s body, or maybe it’s due to the nonchalant disdain for all things that our pop-bubblegum culture thrives on. Truth is, I love her dedication. Her utter obsession towards the task at hand. Towards solving the mystery.

Her selfless quest for truth and enlightenment almost erases her inner self. Piecing together the puzzle of a smashed skull, the looks straight into the abyss of death, and although the abyss looks back at her, her capacity for marveling with the hidden truths and the cold equations of the universe, smothers that frightful look, like vacuum killing a flame.

Working throughout the night she seems lonely, but one feels she’s never truly so, as if she’s carrying the ghosts of all her broken, twisted, charred skeletons within her, collecting experience – lived experience – through the martyrdom of the victims she reveals in every episode. 

In a way, it’s as if Bones (Brennan’s nickname, derived from her anthropological expertise) is meant to give life to the Cartesian duality of body and soul. Something the series – Bones (2005-2017) – hints at, but never quiet fully explores. Temperance, Dr, Brennan, or simply Bones (Emily Deschanel), is a focused mind lodged in a body she’s oblivious to, however a body that we’re all too aware of.

Although to say she’s oblivious to her body is not the most truthful assertion, as she keeps it honed as a lethal weapon through martial arts training. The more correct statement would be that she thinks of her body as an instrument to her mind, and so the attention she gives to it is the same we give our cars. It must be kept functional, and clean, and impressive, but it is not who we are.

Not having met her when I was kid, I didn’t fell head over heels for her, as I had for Wilma Deering, or Daisy Duke, or Triple A. But I fell in love nonetheless. How can you not, when such a sharp mind is housed in a body like hers? 

The Point of the Matter

There comes a moment in Richard Linklater’s A SCANNER DARKLY (2006) that beg the question that until then was quietly simmering on everybody’s mind. And that is when Bob (Keanu Reeves), who’s in love with Donna (Winona Ryder), not knowing that she is also his boss Hank, and being rebuffed due to Donna’s repulsion at being touched, ends up on a consolation sex marathon with Connie (Lisa Marie Newmyer).

Said sex marathon is seen only after the fact, as Bob obsessively fast-forwards and pauses the surveillance footage of his intense sexual athletics. However, waking up from his post-coital slumber, and looking at her exhausted partner sleeping by his side, he seems to see her morph into Donna. Not only her face, but her body as well. And now, back at his voyeuristic observation post, his own identity hidden from his co-workers by means of a scramble suit (like the one Donna uses when being Hank), he freeze frames that fleeting moment when his mate turns into his dream-lover, moving the footage back and forward, back and forward, and even projecting that frame as a hologram for better to study – to worship, to adore? – the naked dream girl.

And it is at that precise instant, with that wonderful freeze-frame of a topless rotoscoped Winona Ryder, that the viewer feels the quiet question pressing the back of his mind, just as if it was the cold barrel of a metaphysical gun; and, just like Bob does, the viewer wonders: is that really Winona Ryder lying there, breasts exposed? Are we really seeing her topless? And, underneath that first, most obvious question, what one's really asking is: what is the point? Why did Linklater go the rotoscopic way?

I wonder if he himself has the answer. Technical showoff, probably. Or because no one had done it before (outside of spaghetti western’s opening credits back in the sixties). Listening to the technicians themselves in the DVD featurette “The Weight of the Line: Animation Tales” one’s puzzlement grows even deeper. Take, for instance, Christopher S. Jennings, who was lead artist in the making of the film: answering his own question – Why rotoscoping? Why drawing over footage? – he has nothing more significant to add than to state the obvious, that it is not Winona Ryder’s voice over the animation, it is really her performance. The actor’s performance. Well, yes. But then, why do it? Wouldn’t one have the same performance without painting over it with computer tools? In the same featurette, trying to voice his wonderment, Woody Harrelson, one of the actors, sounds equally puzzled, babbling about painting over the frame that exists. Well, no shit, Sherlock. But why?

Is it a way of superimposing one’s imagination over reality? Of pimping out the actors’ performance to one’s dreams? Is it really Winona’s tits one’s ogling, or merely the way the animators imagine them to be? Early on on the movie, as Charles (Rory Cochrane) and James (Robert Downey, Jr.) are ordering breakfast on a luncheonette, Charles starts fantasizing that the sexy waitress Betty (Natasha Janina Valdez) makes sexual advances to him while stripping down her waitress’ uniform. As the girl’s breasts come into view, one again wonders: are they really the actress’ or the way the filmmakers and animators imagined them to be? Want them to be? Are we watching drawn-over reality, or just the animators fantasizing the way her breasts look, just as Charles is imagining them to be?

Did Natasha Janina Valdez, or Winona Ryder, or Lisa Marie Newmyer really undress for their performances, or just like many before them, wearing pasties or capture-suits, did they just lend their shapes to be molded by the filmmakers’ minds? And, if so, then, what’s the point? Really. If all of cinema is illusion, what’s the point in adding another tier of make-believe over the actors’ basic performance? It gains nothing but an added degree of scrutiny of the cinematic illusion. Making the viewer even more aware that all that he's getting for his money is illusion? Isn’t that a defeat of the cinematic medium itself?

Like the multi-eyed creature that at one point of the film seems to be checking the inner workings of our reality, the viewer is prompted to challenge the sacred implicit contract which, since time began (cinema time, that is), bound him to believe the lies he's been shown on screen. And he believes, because fulfilling his part of the bargain, the filmmaker strives to make those lies seem true. That’s what we call verisimilitude. And that’s what got lost in the scalpeling of these scenes prompted by their sheer artificiality.

We know Woody Harrelson dind’t turn into a giant bug. That is all special effects. We buy that. But when the filmmakers ask us to believe that all they’ve done is to scrawl over the actual performance of the actors, we wonder not only if those are Winona Ryder’s real breasts, masked by virtual ink, but also about Reeve’s and Newmyer’s sex romp: did they do it? Is that really Keanu Reeves’ post coital dick still erect? Or is that part of the illusion, hidden under the artists' virtual pen?

If it isn’t Reeves’ pecker, or Ryder’s, Newmyer’s, or Valdez’s tits we see there, than what’s the point? If this is some kind of virtual body-double, why go the trouble? Why do you need the actors after all, and not only their voices? Why not use traditional animation, or 3D rendering, to convey your imaginanings? Wouldn’t it be more honest? Wouldn’t the illusion be truest?