Thursday, February 12, 2009

Coming Distractions February 17th, 2009

It's too late to stop them now:

Quarantine
I Served the King of England
Body of Lies
Flash of Genius
Religulous
Choke
Changeling
High School Musical 3
Midnight Meat Train
How to Lose Friends and Alienate People


Since we were speaking of windshield wipers (right?) here are a few other movies that have windshields prominent enough they should be listed in the credits.

Brown Bunny (hmm... for all the numerous and lengthy shots of driving in BB, all I can find stills of are the bj scene...)
Highway 61
Natural Born Killers
Stuck
Jurassic Park
Lost Highway
Wild at Heart
You got any more?


I have been reading this David Foster Wallace essay about his trip to the set of Lost Highway (from A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again). Here is his trivia about Wild at Heart (p.168-169).

"Wild at Heart, starring Laura Dern as Lula and Nicolas Cage as Sailor, also feature Diane Ladd as Lula's mother. The actress Diane Ladd happens to be the actress Laura Dern's real mother. Wild at Heart itself, for all its heavy references to The Wizard of Oz, is actually a pomo-ish remake of Sidney Lumet's 1959 The Fugitive Kind, which starred Anna Magnani and Marlon Brando. The fact that Cage's performance in Wild at Heart strongly suggests either Brando doing an Elvis imitation or vice versa is not an accident, nor is the fact that both Wild at Heart and The Fugitive Kind use fire as a key image, nor is the fact that Sailor's beloved snakeskin jacket -- 'a symbol in my belief in freedom and individual choice' -- is just like the snakeskin jacket Brando wore in The Fugitive Kind. The Fugitive Kind happens to be the film version of Tennessee Williams's little-known Orpheus Descending, a play which in 1960, enjoying a new vogue in the wake of Lumet's film adaptation, ran Off-Broadway in NYC and featured Bruce Dern and Diane Ladd, Laura Dern's parents, who met and married while starring in this play."

Whew! Awesome.

My only problem with the essay thus far is that DFW refers, several times, to Kyle Machlachlan as "potato-faced." I'm not entirely sure what that means. Urban Dictionary describes potato face (no hyphen) as either being:
1. Someone with an abnormally large forehead, similar to having a potato on it.
or
2. The process of lifting your chin up and sinking it back into your neck causing a chinless appearance.

Neither of which problems I really think Kyle has.
I assume he means bland?

My new favorite website (other than this one, of course!): Dear Old Love

2 comments:

Miss Molly Manglewood said...

Oh, man. That's a tough one.

Christine (that's how Arnie finally dies in the end)
Hybrid (maybe? It's not out yet)
Creepshow 2: The Hitchhiker

Millie at the Pictures said...

i just recently watched Wild and Heart and decided when I move to a new place and get some fish they will have to be named Sailor and Lula. Thanks for the article, I'm interested in investigating! though i will say i wish i had known a bit more before seeing it, otherwise i may not have chosen a great guy friend of mine, too much naked for fully comfortable viewing . . .

wipers, can't believe i'm gonna say this, but Urban Legend came to mind. tons