People talk all the time about how unfair it is that certain people benefit from having a famous name. And they're right. Why should being the son of a famous actor give you an advantage over another actor? Why?
So. Okay. Here's how you can DO something about it! You can take advantage of a famous name just as well as people who are actual members of famous families.
You wouldn't fool anyone, but people would pause for a moment when they see your name. They would consider your resume or your movie an extra few seconds.
These are NAMES, not trademarks.Why SHOULDN'T you be one of the Kardashians?
For ladies, I would suggest:
Karla Kardashian, Kate Kardashian, Kelly Kardashian, Kora Kardashian, Kollette Kardashian,
Kitty Kardashian, Kailee Kardashian
Boys:
Karl Kardashian, Bruce Kardashian, Bob Kardashian, Ken Kardashian, Kole Kardashian, Klint Kardashian, Kurt Kardashian, Kai Kardashian, Kosmo Kardashian
Of course, Kim Kardashian sued Old Navy for having an actress in a commercial who looked like her. Kardashian has had a lot of plastic surgery, and the actress she was suing over didn't. And she was dancing in the ad, not lumbering around like that bloated Kardashian monster.
Kim, Khloe or Kourtney Jenner.
(Is it true Bruce Jenner is getting a sex change?)
For Coppola, any Italian or Italian-sounding name:
Benito Coppola, Maria Coppola, Abrielle Coppola, Adriana Coppola, Leonardo Coppola.
Look at how many Chinese kung fu stars have used names like Bruce Le, Bruce Li, Lee Bruce, Dragon Lee.
I would suggest someone use Lee Brandon. Robert D. Nero.
Francis Coppola Ford. Lucas George. Stephen Speel Berg. ("Speel" must be a real name in some language.)
Caulay McCulkin.
Alan Woody (he would sue you, though.)
Charlie Estevez. Carlos Sheen. Emilio Sheen. Martin Estevez.
Sid Poitier. Cindy Poitier. Lee Spike. Franco James. Erin Spelling.
I thought it was awfully coincidental that there a comedy team name Bob Elliott and Ray Goulding, and an actor named Elliott Gould. And I assumed Hyundai was trying to rip-off Honda.
Saturday, October 25, 2014
Saturday, October 18, 2014
17 Girls (17 filles) 2011
Maybe the French aren't so sophisticated after all.
In Massachusetts, there was a high school. They usually had about five girls a year get pregnant. But one year, there were eighteen of them. So these poor girls formed a support group for themselves. The local media jumped on this and falsely claimed that they had a "pregnancy pact", that the eighteen girls had intentionally become pregnant so they could all have their babies together.
The 2011 French movie, 17 Girls (17 Filles) was based on this misinterpretation of events.
The movie is set in a town on the west coast of France. The French girls are lined up in their underwear in the hallway of their school. One by one, they go in to see the doctor. They're weighed and measured.
"I think I'm pregnant," a girl tells them.
She's the leader of the cool girls. She tells her friends that she's going to have the baby and keep it. It will be "cool", she says, going to high school with a baby. And soon, the others decide to do the same. They'll be free and get respect for a change. They can become legally emancipated, get an apartment and all live together with their babies. The babies will be the same age, so they'll go through school together in the same grade, they'll dominate the place.
One of the uncool girls who was always trying to join their group now does so by getting pregnant.
When parents demand the school do something, the nurse suggests they provide contraceptives.
"Why don't you get them a hotel room while you're at it!"
"They use drugs anyway---maybe we should hand those out, too!"
The school makes the kids watch a film showing the horror of childbirth. I saw one of those in junior high school. I think we played it much cooler than those French teenagers, at least until they got to the placenta.
"They think they can scare us!" says the leader of the girls.
The ringleader is expelled from school, something I don't think they could get away with here even if she were walking around convincing other girls to get pregnant.
The boys figure out what's going on and start refusing to sleep with the girls. One girl has trouble finding a boy even when she offers to pay them.
There's an Afghan war veteran walking around assuring people he doesn't have PTSD.
I don't think France ever comes out looking very good in the movies. Look at The 400 Blows, or just about any French crime movie. The French carried out their last execution by guillotine in 1978. While we were watching Star Wars and Smokey and the Bandit, they were chopping off people's heads. In the '50s, French doctors did experiments to see how long people remained conscious after being decapitated. They didn't abolish capital punishment until 1981.
Look at the subway chase in the movie Diva--as a cop runs after the fleeing postman, his policewoman partner yells, "Don't shoot!" Do French police have to be told not to shoot a fleeing unarmed person who, if I remember correctly, wasn't even suspected of a crime?
Look at Mr Hulot's Holiday. A French mother slaps her kid in the face for no reason.
I've never seen France look so bad. From what we see of the town in this movie, you'd never want to live there. All we see is relatively new, not very attractive buildings. My school cafeteria had more charm than theirs, except they had pitchers of milk on each table. The cool girls weren't as cruel and callous as the British, but they were worse than Italians or Norwegians.
The movie was pretty good, though, and, for a French movie about high school girls setting out to get pregnant, it was remarkably inoffensive.
In Massachusetts, there was a high school. They usually had about five girls a year get pregnant. But one year, there were eighteen of them. So these poor girls formed a support group for themselves. The local media jumped on this and falsely claimed that they had a "pregnancy pact", that the eighteen girls had intentionally become pregnant so they could all have their babies together.
The 2011 French movie, 17 Girls (17 Filles) was based on this misinterpretation of events.
The movie is set in a town on the west coast of France. The French girls are lined up in their underwear in the hallway of their school. One by one, they go in to see the doctor. They're weighed and measured.
"I think I'm pregnant," a girl tells them.
She's the leader of the cool girls. She tells her friends that she's going to have the baby and keep it. It will be "cool", she says, going to high school with a baby. And soon, the others decide to do the same. They'll be free and get respect for a change. They can become legally emancipated, get an apartment and all live together with their babies. The babies will be the same age, so they'll go through school together in the same grade, they'll dominate the place.
One of the uncool girls who was always trying to join their group now does so by getting pregnant.
When parents demand the school do something, the nurse suggests they provide contraceptives.
"Why don't you get them a hotel room while you're at it!"
"They use drugs anyway---maybe we should hand those out, too!"
The school makes the kids watch a film showing the horror of childbirth. I saw one of those in junior high school. I think we played it much cooler than those French teenagers, at least until they got to the placenta.
"They think they can scare us!" says the leader of the girls.
The ringleader is expelled from school, something I don't think they could get away with here even if she were walking around convincing other girls to get pregnant.
The boys figure out what's going on and start refusing to sleep with the girls. One girl has trouble finding a boy even when she offers to pay them.
There's an Afghan war veteran walking around assuring people he doesn't have PTSD.
I don't think France ever comes out looking very good in the movies. Look at The 400 Blows, or just about any French crime movie. The French carried out their last execution by guillotine in 1978. While we were watching Star Wars and Smokey and the Bandit, they were chopping off people's heads. In the '50s, French doctors did experiments to see how long people remained conscious after being decapitated. They didn't abolish capital punishment until 1981.
Look at the subway chase in the movie Diva--as a cop runs after the fleeing postman, his policewoman partner yells, "Don't shoot!" Do French police have to be told not to shoot a fleeing unarmed person who, if I remember correctly, wasn't even suspected of a crime?
Look at Mr Hulot's Holiday. A French mother slaps her kid in the face for no reason.
I've never seen France look so bad. From what we see of the town in this movie, you'd never want to live there. All we see is relatively new, not very attractive buildings. My school cafeteria had more charm than theirs, except they had pitchers of milk on each table. The cool girls weren't as cruel and callous as the British, but they were worse than Italians or Norwegians.
The movie was pretty good, though, and, for a French movie about high school girls setting out to get pregnant, it was remarkably inoffensive.
Sunday, October 12, 2014
Going Places
I saw this movie on HBO back when it was still called "Home Box Office". I was thirteen or fourteen and I was appalled. I was hoping they would kill those guys.
The movie is about a couple of violent French sex criminals going around robbing, raping and in a couple of cases, killing people. They sexually assault a woman who played the 6-year-old girl in Forbidden Games. They force a doctor to treat them then rob him by threatening his children.
And people claim this thing is an attack on "bourgeois morality". I have no idea what they mean by this. If anything, bourgeois morality looks pretty good after watching that scum.
Made in 1974. France carried it out its last execution by guillotine in 1978, so we can at least hope these two were hideously decapitated sometime after the end the of the movie. I'm opposed to capital punishment except for certain fictional characters.
The movie is about a couple of violent French sex criminals going around robbing, raping and in a couple of cases, killing people. They sexually assault a woman who played the 6-year-old girl in Forbidden Games. They force a doctor to treat them then rob him by threatening his children.
And people claim this thing is an attack on "bourgeois morality". I have no idea what they mean by this. If anything, bourgeois morality looks pretty good after watching that scum.
Made in 1974. France carried it out its last execution by guillotine in 1978, so we can at least hope these two were hideously decapitated sometime after the end the of the movie. I'm opposed to capital punishment except for certain fictional characters.
Sunday, September 21, 2014
Mark Borchardt, American Movie
I watched American Movie again, the documentary about Mark Borchardt. It reportedly covers a two year period, his setting out to make a feature called Northwestern. He has no money. We see him go through his mail. He has tax collectors after him, companies are threatening to sue him. He has a paper route at one point. He can't get money from his father to make the movie, so he works to raise money from his elderly uncle who is in bad health.
Borchardt's brothers are interviewed. One says that he would be best suited to working in a factory. They figured he would end up as a stalker. One mentions that he would tell them that he was going to get rich and would a millionaire some day, and that this just made them feel sorry for him. He had made little slasher films as a kid, and one said he couldn't figure out what appeal his movies would have with the public since he was having to compete with Hollywood.
The poor guy's situation seems hopeless. He had struggled with alcoholism and had been a pothead.
He starts production on Northwestern, realizes he's going to fail and decides to complete a short film he had started several years earlier called "Coven", about a guy who discovers that his AA group is actually a coven of devil worshipers----but he's a drug addict and a drunk, so his perceptions may be terribly skewed.
His plan is to sell 3,000 videocassettes of "Coven". This will make him enough money to produce the next movie, Northwestern.
I read an interview with him after American Movie came out. It sounded like he was on his way to selling that many cassettes of "Coven". But he had sold only 100 cassettes before the documentary was released, and a couple thousand after American Movie came out.
I was looking at Amazon after that. I looked at Robert Rodriguez's old book, Rebel Without a Crew, about the making of El Mariachi. I was able to read a little of it on the website.
In some ways, Rodriguez was in the same boat as Borchardt. He was studying film at a university far from Hollywood. He had worked two jobs while attending school. He wanted to make movies and would have to do it without money.
But Borchardt worked on his movie in the most public way possible. He was in his home town. His family and friends were all involved and a camera crew was there filming the whole thing. Rodriguez, on the other hand, left the country, filmed in Mexico, paid for it himself, and, as he put it, wanted to be able to "fail quietly".
Rodriguez got his script completed, although he was making an action film---Borchardt's feature, Northwestern, seemed to be a drama. Rodriguez had a more realistic plan to make his money back---to sell the film to a Spanish language video distributor. Borchardt was going for self-distribution for "Coven"---I'm not sure if he could have done anything else with a short film.
Rodriguez just went out and did it. Maybe it was because he was in college and did this for his summer vacation. He had a strict time limit. He wanted to be able to come back to school, and when people asked what he did over the summer, tell them he made a foreign film.
I thought it sounded like Borchardt could do it. He wasn't shy. He got a cast together and had done this sort of thing before---he won an award for doing a Halloween radio play that's broadcast every year. He should have made the movie while he was in college competing with classmates.
But I look on imdb.com. "Coven" is his only director's credit. He's gotten a lot of work as an actor though, appearing with his friend, Mike Shank, on Family Guy and on David Letterman. He was clutching at straws when he made his movie, looking for a way out of his problems, and "Coven" provided it, just not in the way Borchardt originally planned.
Borchardt's brothers are interviewed. One says that he would be best suited to working in a factory. They figured he would end up as a stalker. One mentions that he would tell them that he was going to get rich and would a millionaire some day, and that this just made them feel sorry for him. He had made little slasher films as a kid, and one said he couldn't figure out what appeal his movies would have with the public since he was having to compete with Hollywood.
The poor guy's situation seems hopeless. He had struggled with alcoholism and had been a pothead.
He starts production on Northwestern, realizes he's going to fail and decides to complete a short film he had started several years earlier called "Coven", about a guy who discovers that his AA group is actually a coven of devil worshipers----but he's a drug addict and a drunk, so his perceptions may be terribly skewed.
His plan is to sell 3,000 videocassettes of "Coven". This will make him enough money to produce the next movie, Northwestern.
I read an interview with him after American Movie came out. It sounded like he was on his way to selling that many cassettes of "Coven". But he had sold only 100 cassettes before the documentary was released, and a couple thousand after American Movie came out.
I was looking at Amazon after that. I looked at Robert Rodriguez's old book, Rebel Without a Crew, about the making of El Mariachi. I was able to read a little of it on the website.
In some ways, Rodriguez was in the same boat as Borchardt. He was studying film at a university far from Hollywood. He had worked two jobs while attending school. He wanted to make movies and would have to do it without money.
But Borchardt worked on his movie in the most public way possible. He was in his home town. His family and friends were all involved and a camera crew was there filming the whole thing. Rodriguez, on the other hand, left the country, filmed in Mexico, paid for it himself, and, as he put it, wanted to be able to "fail quietly".
Rodriguez got his script completed, although he was making an action film---Borchardt's feature, Northwestern, seemed to be a drama. Rodriguez had a more realistic plan to make his money back---to sell the film to a Spanish language video distributor. Borchardt was going for self-distribution for "Coven"---I'm not sure if he could have done anything else with a short film.
Rodriguez just went out and did it. Maybe it was because he was in college and did this for his summer vacation. He had a strict time limit. He wanted to be able to come back to school, and when people asked what he did over the summer, tell them he made a foreign film.
I thought it sounded like Borchardt could do it. He wasn't shy. He got a cast together and had done this sort of thing before---he won an award for doing a Halloween radio play that's broadcast every year. He should have made the movie while he was in college competing with classmates.
But I look on imdb.com. "Coven" is his only director's credit. He's gotten a lot of work as an actor though, appearing with his friend, Mike Shank, on Family Guy and on David Letterman. He was clutching at straws when he made his movie, looking for a way out of his problems, and "Coven" provided it, just not in the way Borchardt originally planned.
Monday, September 15, 2014
Reviews of Young & Beautiful
So I read some reviews of Young & Beautiful.
Reminded me of what I read one time many years ago, long before the avalanche of internet pornography. They discussed how subjective the term "pornography" was. Researchers discovered that people were more likely to label a photograph "pornographic" if it was in black and white rather than color, and if the model in the photo was less attractive.
In the case of Young & Beautiful, critics see the fact that there was no explanation at all for the girl becoming a prostitute as a virtue and the nudity and explicitness of the sex scenes as a peculiarity of the French which only the most sophisticated Americans will understand. The fact that all the director does is make movies about teenage sex apparently makes him an auteur rather than a pervert. The little brother spying on his sister through binoculars, peeking in her room and watching her masturbate, and wanting her to tell him all about losing her virginity to a German tourist is seen as wholesome curiosity.
There's a scene where the girl, wanting to show how hypocritical the grown-ups are for not letting her be a prostitute, asks her stepfather if he's ever slept with a prostitute.
Instead of replying, "Good lord, no! Are you kidding?" he says, "That's none of your business!"
The rich people in the movie were all attractive. The maid and the cops were less attractive.
The movie should be a lesson in how to make the upper-class rubes think that your cheap exploitation movie is high brow cinema.
Reminded me of what I read one time many years ago, long before the avalanche of internet pornography. They discussed how subjective the term "pornography" was. Researchers discovered that people were more likely to label a photograph "pornographic" if it was in black and white rather than color, and if the model in the photo was less attractive.
In the case of Young & Beautiful, critics see the fact that there was no explanation at all for the girl becoming a prostitute as a virtue and the nudity and explicitness of the sex scenes as a peculiarity of the French which only the most sophisticated Americans will understand. The fact that all the director does is make movies about teenage sex apparently makes him an auteur rather than a pervert. The little brother spying on his sister through binoculars, peeking in her room and watching her masturbate, and wanting her to tell him all about losing her virginity to a German tourist is seen as wholesome curiosity.
There's a scene where the girl, wanting to show how hypocritical the grown-ups are for not letting her be a prostitute, asks her stepfather if he's ever slept with a prostitute.
Instead of replying, "Good lord, no! Are you kidding?" he says, "That's none of your business!"
The rich people in the movie were all attractive. The maid and the cops were less attractive.
The movie should be a lesson in how to make the upper-class rubes think that your cheap exploitation movie is high brow cinema.
Sunday, September 14, 2014
Young & Beautiful (2013)
I didn't understand why the girl became a prostitute once they got back home.
Everybody's good-looking in this movie. The girl's step-father's good-looking in a scruffy French sort of way. She has sex with a couple of good-looking old guys. After an unfortunate incident, police go to her mother with proof of what she's been doing. Because of her age, she's a victim, not a perpetrator. She's grounded and has to see a psychologist, but she sulks through the rest of the movie because her mother won't let her be a prostitute.
The psychologist smiles too much and offers no insight as to why the girl would do this.
There's a lot of sex and nudity.
And then you have Charlotte Rampling's character, a good-looking old rich French woman who says that she wishes she had been a prostitute when she was young. What is wrong with these people? First of all, Charlotte could still find plenty of work as a prostitute if she wanted to. Watch the movie Barfly if you want to see what prostitutes look like. Being "young and beautiful" is not a requirement.
With Marine Vacth, Fatin Ravat and Geraldine Paihas among others.
Sunday, September 7, 2014
The Unspeakable Act (2013)
"One of the funny things about being in love with your brother is that you can say almost anything you want about him to anyone you want because no one wants to go there. People will bend over backwards to put the blandest possible interpretation on whatever you say."The girl says this in her voice-over narration early in the movie, and she's right. I started watching this thing knowing it was about 17-year-old girl in love with her 18-year-old brother, but I assumed it was one of those movies about a quirky bourgeois family. They're rich. They're sort of quirky. The girl says she thought their money came from a trust fund, but she's not sure. She just seems to have a very close relationship with her brother.
But, as the girl goes into therapy, she realizes how screwed up she is and the movie seems fairly serious. She's made it clear that she wants actual incest from her brother. He refuses her advances, of course. He wants it to stop but doesn't know what to do without cutting off contact with her completely.
I thought the movie was pretty good. Written and directed by Dan Sallitt. Available on Fandor.
The movie looks great but was reportedly made for only $50 thousand.
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