Johnny Depp is not particularly happy with Ricky Gervais' behavior hosting the 2011 Golden Globe Awards, and seeks to vent his spleen once and for all. Oh, snap!
Ah, I love Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant. Committing to the spirit of the Olympic Games of 2012, I just finished a The Office Marathon and an Extras Triathlon - the blood taste in my mouth is making me delirious. Perhaps I need to take a look at Life's Too Short. That is, when I've recovered from all the times I've passed out, oxygen deprived from - out of pure, excruciating embarrassment - having buried my head into a cushion too violently and too frequently.
I can't give credit to where the hell I nicked this comic strip, since I just found it in an old map on my computer named "lulz". But yeah. Can't stop laughing.
Please not that this is poking fun at racists and misogynists, and is not meant to be either racist or misogynistic. Please also note that the Holocaust was awful and that 9/11 is no laughing matter. Unless you are really funny.
I sincerely hope that all you classic movie geeks out there have visited the Basil Rathbone blog, The Baz. If you haven't, check it out immediately. That's an order. Well, it's at least a recommendation that you should all be thankful for me to share with you. Aiight?
Being absolutely crazy about Basil Rathbone myself, the total dedication and devotion from Neve R is heart warming. But the best thing about Neve and her Rathbone work is her humor. Because, as one in all honesty has to admit... not everything in Basil Rathbone's repertoire is brilliant. More often than you would wish, Basil is the creamy toffee in the middle of a lollipop made of cow excrement.
I just read Neve's post on the strange, homoerotic, next-to-impossible-to-locate-any-damn-copy-of The Mad Doctor (Tim Whelan, 1941), and I was very amused. It's a clever little analysis, focusing on the, well... gayness of it all. You can't deny the meaning of the classic fallic symbol: the cigar. Read the blog post and watch the screenshots yourself, over here: "The Mad Doctor (Redux)"
And if you want to get an idea of just how pathetically nerdy I am, I will confess something to you. It's not like I have any pride anyway.
I found this YouTube clip, created and uploaded by Neve. If I understood it correctly, it was her contribution to some kind of bromance contest. (How lovely doesn't that sound, by the way?) And here's my confession: It gave me goosebumps, and I even shed a few salty tears into my weak, cold cup of coffee. I love Basil Rathbone. Really nice work, Neve. The pace is perfect, the film clips wisely chosen. If you can make even one weird, crazy film nerd moved to tears with a cliché song like "You're My Best Friend", you've succeeded!
Update: Yeah, I totally misunderstood. Neve just led me to find this lovely work of art. Love her anyway, though. Haha.
Eli Wallach as Tuco in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (Sergio Leone, 1966).
One of my favorite shots of the whole movie.
Writing this, I just realized that Eli Wallach is still alive. At least according to IMDb and Wikipedia. The guy is like a century old! When he was born Abraham Lincoln was still just a twinkle in his father's eye, and Europe had not yet converted to Christianity. He's like that old!
Just a thought.
So I watched The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo., 1966) with my beau yesterday, and it's as amazingly fudging awesome as ever. The obligatory goose bumps all over my arms when I heard the first tunes of "Ecstacy of Gold" teasing in the far background of the soundtrack, where of course present.
But I actually just wanted to share one tiny little observation with you all: If you are really, really perceptive... you might just spot a few women in this film! I know, it sounds totally ridiculous and unnecessary. But I can, off the top of my head, mention a total of three women that I managed to spot. Chronologically, here they are:
1)
In the very beginning, there is the wife and mother of a family. Remember her? She does of course not have any lines of dialogue. That's not necessary for putting the food on the table, is it? Apart from feeding her husband and the strange visitor, she faints when family is suddenly decimated.
...That's, like, it.
Woman 1.1
Woman 1.2
2)
The Bad One, Angel Eyes, needs to extract some information from... some woman. The only way to get that stupid bitch to talk is, of course, to beat her up a bit. It's her own fault, really - not being clever enough to sell out her lover before getting physically abused. Duh.
Look! Her character has a name. And several lines.
Maria: Is that you Bill? Bill!
Angel Eyes: Go on talking about Bill Carson.
Woman 2.1
Woman 2.2
Woman 2.3
3)
The Ugly, Tuco, and his men are looking for The Good One ("Bloooondiiiiieeeee!!!"), and a woman dares to speak up when a man is pressed for information:
- You leave him be, He doesn't know who rides every horse!"
- You stay quiet, old hen!
And of course, she had no clue about anything. The man with a gun in his face did have information. Stupid old hen, indeed.
Woman 3.1
Now, don't get angry with me. I realize that women were pretty much either breeding stock or prostitutes in the Wild West era, and to portray that society as egalitarian would be revisionism. But I don't really buy that there was only one woman in each village either, and that all women were peripheral in their existence.
And YES, I can watch these kinds of films as entertainment only, and I do. I don't need to analyze everything, especially not something as tiring as the portrayal of women in classical movies. But why is it a tiresome subject? Because it's such an obvious issue! You can not NOT notice the skewed gender roles in popular culture. But I'll leave it for now. Cheers, darlings of mine.
The theatrical trailer, where Lee Van Cleef is branded ugly. That's kind of mean.*
* Copy-pasta from IMDb's trivia page:
In the theatrical trailer, Angel Eyes is "The Ugly" and Tuco "The Bad," which is the reverse of their designations in the actual film. This is because the Italian title translated into English is actually The Good, the Ugly, the Bad, not The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, and the Italian trailer had "The Ugly" and "The Bad" in that order. When the trailer was transferred to English, The Ugly and The Bad were not reversed to coincide with the altered title, causing the incorrect designations.
