by Sharon Swart photography Andre Vippolis
“From the Twitter-obsessed pen of author Bret Easton Ellis...By the never-nominated director Paul Schrader...” a campy English-accented movie-trailer voice trumpets as black and white images, cut in the gleefully maudlin style of a ’50s melodrama, flicker onscreen. Cut to introductions of the film’s stars: tabloid-bait Lindsay Lohan and porn god James Deen, both of whom get naked in the film. The other actor of note: iconic filmmaker Gus van Sant, in a cameo as Deen’s therapist. One other thing: the film is not actually set in the ’50s nor filmed in black and white, just this trailer.
Welcome to The Canyons, the only yet-to-be-seen, ultra-low-budget film to register on the Hollywood radar this year. It’s also a massive career gamble for its writer and director, both living legends who, despite their maverick natures and penchant for outré material, have never gone all in quite like this before.
The trailer is actually the second genre-inspired Canyons promo to hit the web this fall (following a “grindhouse” version evoking ʼ70s horror in early October), and it's the latest unconventional marketing ploy that the film’s creative team — including Ellis, Schrader and producer Braxton Pope — has unleashed on the Web. The gambit worked, although it’s stoked as much intrigue as venom: Bloggers branded the contemporary noir about 20-something Angelenos as everything from “schlocky” to “trashtastic” to “terrible.” (Schrader dismisses the critics as unimaginative literalists, while Pope explains that the clips are “intentional misdirections” intended to stir up trouble and attention online. Mission accomplished.)
But controversy is nothing new for practiced provocateurs Schrader (whose credits include writing Taxi Driver and Raging Bull and writing and directing American Gigolo and Hardcore) and Ellis (whose eight novels include the epoch-defining American Psycho and Less Than Zero). Like with everything else about The Canyons, the filmmakers’ approach to PR has been governed by a different set of principles. This is a film for a time that Ellis famously branded in a 2011 essay he wrote for Newsweek as “post-Empire” — or what comes after the accepted media and entertainment constructs of the past century. (The tagline for The Canyons: “Itʼs not The Hills.”)
It all began after Schrader, Ellis and Pope saw their last collaboration, a shark thriller called Bait, crater last year due to shaky financing. Schrader emailed Ellis in January, suggesting that they do something else together — something that could be done on a very low budget and without financier or studio interference.
“With the new economics of filmmaking, we could just do this ourselves,” insists Schrader. “The kind of stuff that Bret writes is not that expensive — you know, beautiful people doing bad things in nice rooms. I said to Bret, ʻWhen youʼre talking about a micro-budget film, youʼre talking about dialogue — thatʼs the thing you can afford. You can afford people sitting in a restaurant and talking, and thatʼs what you do best.ʼ”
Despite the budgetary constraints, the filmmakers didnʼt want the film to feel too small. “I had to make something that was more open than your usual micro-budget movies, to take it out of interiors and give it some movement,” says Ellis. “Not six people sitting around in a loft somewhere complaining about their relationships.” What Ellis came up with is “a classic noir,” he says. “Itʼs a cat and mouse movie about two guys interested in the same girl and playing increasingly dangerous mind games over her.”
The creative inspiration for the screenplay was Ellis’s obsession with Deen, an unwitting muse long before the two actually met. A “nice Jewish boy” from Pasadena, Dean is porn’s most visible male star: a real-life Dirk Diggler with more than 1,000 hardcore scenes and multiple AVN and XRCO awards (the Oscars and Golden Globes of hardcore) on his résumé. With his scruffy, hipster good looks, wiry frame, prodigious endowment and hyper-intense performing style, the 26-year-old is the closest the adult industry has come in the past 30 years to recreating the star power and crossover appeal of the iconic John Holmes. And like “Johnny Wadd,” Deen is unique in that he’s a straight male performer with a sizable and vocal fanbase, made up almost entirely of young women and gay men, including Ellis.
“In a lot of his porn work, James can switch on and off quickly — he's very tender one minute and this very intense, sexually brutal dude the next minute, and that was really interesting to me,” explains Ellis, who says the story’s protagonist, Christian, a “neurotic control freak and sexual libertine,” is based on his fantasy of what Deen’s personal life might be like. “I also thought James was really sexy,” he adds. “It wasn't necessarily that I wanted to bang him, but if you have a muse, there’s certainly going to be some kind of sexual-attraction component to that. While I was writing this stuff I was picturing no other actor but James.”
As soon as Ellis finished a detailed treatment for the film, he fired off a tweet about Deen being the inspiration for one of the characters. Deen sent a tweet in reply and eventually got in the mix for the role.
Less than two months after deciding to make the low-budget indie, Ellis had cranked out an original script that Schrader and Pope signed off on immediately. They each put in about $25,000 of their own cash and raised additional financing through online crowdfunding platform Kickstarter. Their goal to raise $100,000 on Kickstarter eventually yielded around $160,000 from 1,000-plus backers. (A $10,000 Kickstarter bidder will be rewarded with an autographed money clip that Schrader received from Robert De Niro on the set of Taxi Driver.) Even with the extra cash, it remained a super-tight budget. (Schrader says the out-of-pocket spend so far is $75,000. Finishing the film plus deferred payments for cast and crew will escalate the budget from there.)
Ellis’s enthusiasm to actually cast his hardcore muse in the lead wasn’t shared by his partners. “Bret has a very promiscuous Twitter finger,” says Schrader. The director said heʼd consider Deen with a screen test, but still had reservations. “I said, ʻCome on, Bret, this guyʼs been in 3,000 porn films — thatʼs a lot of pool boys and a lot of pizza boys! How are you ever going to get that out of his system?’ Then I tested him, and he was really interesting and good, and original and unique, and fully formed as a screen personality — but youʼd never seen him in anything before.”
In the end, the final arbiter was Schraderʼs actress wife Mary Beth Hurt, whose initial skepticism vanished when she compared Deenʼs screen test with that of another finalist for the role: Deen, she said, was a star.
“The prep was a little more extensive than what I usually do,” Deen says, without irony, of his first non-porn experience. “We had a full week of rehearsal, and we had meetings to talk about character development and plot...” Once shooting started, Deen admits he was nervous that heʼd be the “weak link,” but the supportive crew put him at ease.
“James gives a completely magnetic performance in the movie,“ says Ellis. “He's a movie star. He’s incredibly charismatic.”
The casting of Lohan was a bit of a whim, says Schrader. There was a minor character in the script named Lindsay, and it made him think of Lohan. Pope, who knew Lindsay socially and was a longtime fan of her acting work, got her the script in the hope that she might make a cameo. Lohan read the script and agreed to do it, but only if she played the lead.
Both Pope and Schrader were totally on board with the idea, but this time it was Ellis’s turn to object. Ellis feared that working with the troubled but talented actress — whose professional reputation and box-office value have been in free-fall for years (she’s struggled with legal issues, substance abuse and embarrassing family dramas) — would be both a creative mistake and compromise the film’s integrity. "I was completely against the casting of Lindsay," he remembers. "There were passionate emails that I wrote to Paul and to Braxton voicing my concern.” This time, it was Schrader and Pope’s turn to convince their reluctant partner to let Lohan screen test before making a final decision.
And, like Deen, Lohan delivered in the audition room. “Afterwards it was like, Oh, well she can actually really play this role,” Ellis says. “The girl in the script was much more vulnerable than Lindsay, and she played it a little bit tougher than I first envisioned it. But, undeniably, she was very good.”
While Schrader says it was at times “exhausting” to work with the paparazzi-stalked starlet, he “more than” got what he had hoped for from her performance. “You canʼt take your eyes off her,” he says. “Sheʼs no longer an ingenue. Sheʼs moved into Ann-Margret territory — the husky voice, the brassy personality. Sheʼs not that cute girl, but sheʼs still always very, very interesting.”
The decision to go with Lohan and Deen was very fittingly post-Empire for a team of filmmakers that from the very beginning insisted on going against the grain with The Canyons. “Like England in the 20th century, weʼre living off the ruins of our Empire artistically,” Schrader explains. “And what better post-Empire casting: One actor who comes from celebrity culture and one from adult-film culture. I was really excited by that pairing and how that would work in the world of new media.”
The rest of the cast was found online through Let It Cast. “We werenʼt really looking for established names and we certainly werenʼt willing to pay for them,” admits Schrader, who says the actors were paid $100 day and had to provide their own transportation and housing. “You donʼt go to agents with that kind of offer, particularly if it involves nudity and sexual simulation. We didnʼt even think about it. We cast right on the web, and we got 650 auditions from around the world.”
In that spirit, the filmmakers have kept their potential audience for The Canyons updated through social media. Since the filmʼs summer shoot, Schrader has contributed frequent, barefaced posts to The Canyons Facebook page, while Ellis has tweeted up an equally unedited storm.
For Schrader, who has almost exclusively worked on studio budget-level films during his career, the spartan shooting experience went surprisingly smoothly. “Iʼve always been a bit of a run-and-gun filmmaker — push, push, push — so that didnʼt change,” he says. “I thought I was going to have to make a lot of stylistic sacrifices, but once I got into it, I found that the technology allowed me a lot more freedom.”
Technology like the Arri Alexa camera, which Schrader notes didnʼt require a lot of time for lighting scenes, helped keep the shoot tight and flexible. “I thought the film was going to look like a student film, but then I started wanting to make those American Gigolo camera moves,” he says. “And, to my surprise, I was able to do it with this budget and technology.”
“We never had to compromise,” says Pope, noting the only difference between The Canyons set and a regular shoot was a lack of talent trailers.
Ellis says the end result “looks like a $10 million movie. In a lot of ways, the movie looks so much better than I ever thought it could look. So much of that has to do with Paul, of course.”
Schrader still marvels that the film went off without a hitch (despite the fact that he was forced to strip down to his birthday suit when Lohan shot her nude scenes). “There are so many things that could have gone wrong,” he says. “Lindsay is something that could have gone wrong; James is something that could have gone wrong. And when you donʼt pay for locations and permits, that could have gone wrong very easily.”
Lohan may have kept her act together during production, but the ensuing months have seen her fall back into the tabloid abyss. (When she missed an ADR session, Ellis called her out on Twitter.) But despite their decision to stoke at least some of the controversy, the filmmakers are hoping that audiences will be able to judge the film on its own merits when it’s ready to be shown.
“We have been completely trashed in the press, based on the fact that Lindsay is in it, that James is in it, that there was a very, very mixed response to those two trailers,” says Ellis. “But the film is actually good. How we made it is the real subject of The Canyons for me. I didn't come to L.A. to become a studio writer and do another draft of The Amazing Spiderman. I came here to make movies that I really wanted to make, and that's what makes The Canyons so gratifying.”
Pope, Ellis and Schrader are now exploring all distribution options for The Canyons. It will most likely have a simultaneous theatrical and VOD release next year.
So post-Empire.
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Danny De Vito is very gropey on Nicole Sienna in It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia: Season 8, Episode 9 [The Gang Dines Out]
and she didn't like it all.......
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Michelle Jenneke Is Perfect Imaginary Girlfriend in Hilarious Chive Video
Michelle Jenneke is cramming just about a lifetime's worth of fame into 2012, getting this hilarious video in by the new year.
This video is from the minds of those procurers of hilarious images, The Chive, and they have seen fit to make a video off one of their memes.
Here is Mac Faulkner who they refer to as Forever Alone. One quick jaunt through that link will explain why they call him that.
Well, they decided to use the biggest Internet star of 2012 to see what it was like to be Forever Alone after watching the famed viral video of Jenneke warming up for a track meet in Barcelona.
The start of the video is a hilarious rendition of how some may have seen the Australian hurdler for the first time, "I think I just forgave my father."
When the buddies leave, Forever Alone gets lost in a fantasy world where Jenneke is the perfect girlfriend, making you pancakes, playing video games and watching Up while you both lose it emotionally.
Perfect girlfriends make you pancakes right? Because I've had similar fantasies.
The video ends with Forever Alone missing out once again, with the actual Jenneke leaving on a date with his bro.
Poor guy is destined to be forever alone.
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22-years old Albanian-American model Lorena Angjeli sure is pretty all naked-y: photographed by Pierre Dal Corso for Schon Magazine
Q: You’re one of the only working models not in Paris at the moment.
Yeah, I just signed with Muse a few weeks ago. Fashion Week had just started, so I missed the New York castings. We thought it would be good to get established in New York first instead of sending me off to Europe like right after I signed. But I’ll be doing the shows next season!
Q: Where are you originally from?
I was born in Albania, but we moved to New York when I was young. It’s kind of a disadvantage, being a model from New York. People are always like “Oh, you’re from here? Boring.” We go to Albania every August, though, because my parents have a beach house there. I get pretty tan, which my agency doesn’t like.
Q: How did you get into modeling?
After I finished high school, it was kind of a weird time for me, and I was figuring out who I was. I always thought about modeling, but I wanted to figure out who I was as a person first. So last summer, I cut off all my hair and moved to Paris for three months.
Q: How did your family react to you moving to Paris?
It’s cool because my mom is really supportive. She’s kind of a stage mom. Every time I go to a big casting, she gives me tips and tries to build my confidence. She’s kind of picky about my book. Like before I came here [to meet WWD], she rearranged the pictures in my book without telling me.
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On 'Dexter,' Strahovski kills as a sexy-sweet predator
Exhibit A: Hannah McKay on this season of Showtime's Dexter (the finale airs Dec. 16, 9 p.m. ET/PT), a flower and plant peddler who serves up her poisoned potions with a peekaboo bra and a smile. Hannah's creator is Aussie actress Yvonne Strahovski, who transitioned from sassy spy (Chuck) to kindhearted killer by studying the savants of the genre, including Dexter himself, Michael C. Hall, "and how he constructs this amazingly likable character that ordinarily you wouldn't root for." (A newly-cast Strahovski, not yet a Dexter disciple, pored over the previous six seasons in three weeks.)
Some might see Hannah's sweetness as manipulative — the cops at Miami Metro certainly do. But Strahovski also turned to the pinnacle of big-screen prostitute-cum-murderer to inject sympathy into her character: Charlize Theron as Aileen Wuornos in Monster. "At the end (of the movie), your heart breaks for her as her heart is breaking," says Strahovski, 30. "Through that performance, you feel she didn't do anything to be malicious; she's just trying to survive in her own way. I think that's sort of Hannah's deal."
But first she had to survive Dexter's table. And being wrapped in plastic. "It didn't feel claustrophobic," Strahovski insists. "At most, it's a little uncomfortable and you get a little hot and sweaty."
Speaking of steamy, that scene where the kill table turns into a tryst table for Hannah and Dex? Strahovski says it was "definitely" the most intimate she's stripped down for work. "No. 1, I was on the kill table, which is sort of its own confronting. Then being naked and doing a sex scene, it's a whole sort of other level of confronting and (feeling) vulnerable."
Hall's expertise when it comes to getting in flagrante delicto on set helped. "I felt like I was in good, comfortable hands," Strahovski says. "No pun intended," she laughs.
Yes, Hall is "an intense guy" but his co-star insists filming wasn't all demonic dads and dark passengers. "I like to be a little jokey at times and we sort of had a lot of fun in between scenes," she says. "I am constantly in awe of Debra (Dexter's lieutenant sister, played by Jennifer Carpenter) and their dynamic."
And no, Strahovski says it's not awkward on set, Hall and Carpenter's off-screen relationship notwithstanding (the two were married from 2008 to 2011). "Everyone is very happy and loving toward each other."
Strahovski won't dish on her own dating status — "I'm going to keep that a mystery" — but she will say that when it comes to Dexter v. Chuck types, she's drawn to "a lovely combination or balance of both: a little bit of danger with a little bit of nerd."
There's no mystery as to how the suburban Sydney native nails such a convincing American accent: a childhood spent attending drama school and watching American movies and TV. "I was obsessed with Dawson's Creek, which was really funny because when I ran into Josh Jackson at Comic Con (a few years ago), I was such a nerd and went up to him and said, 'I really liked you in Dawson's Creek.' He kind of laughed."
This fall, however, Strahovski has had to master an accent trickier than sweet Florida woman with a checkered past: 1930s New Yorker. It's for her co-starring role in the Broadway revival of the Clifford Odets drama Golden Boy, which opened Dec. 6 at the Belasco Theater, the same stage where the play premiered 75 years ago (Strahovski's part, Lorna, was made famous by the legendary Frances Farmer). Working in the same space, there's "sort of a ghostly feel about it," Strahovski says.
Also on Strahovski's 2012 resume: the Christmas Day comedy film The Guilt Trip, alongside Barbra Streisand and Seth Rogen (next fall comes the horror/thriller I, Frankenstein with Aaron Eckhart) and — a No. 35 ranking on Maxim's Hot 100. "It makes me giggle more than anything," Strahovski says about the, uh, honor. "I am a goofball, so being on that list is kind of ironic to me."
Still, she has high hopes for the future: "Maybe one day I will make it to No. 1, and then I can celebrate with a bottle of Champagne."
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sex and fashion
from Gennadiy Chernomashintsev
Model: 25-years old Ukranian model Olena Bevza @ Elena Bevza
More of her here and here
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Google's NSFW image filter ordeal: just add XXX
Summary: The Internet is currently imploding, due to the recent announcement of Google filtering NSFW images, but is it really as bad as is being reported? No. Here's the workaround, as well as an explanation for why this whole thing has been blown out of proportion.
By Stephen Chapman for SEO Whistleblower
If you're flesh-and-blood and into tech news, then you've most likely heard the recent news that's left many to question their life's purpose: Google's decision to relieve their image search engine's duties of returning NSFW results -- or so that's how it's being portrayed/understood by many.
Indeed, Google has changed things up and made it a bit more difficult to flesh out racy content, but only insofar as it becoming more difficult to speed on a street because of a new, insignificantly-small speed bump.
This post is part "how-to," and part "this-whole-thing-has-been-blown-way-out-of-proportion." First, I'll show the naughty lot of you how to easily circumnavigate Google's new restrictions. All you have to do is the following: add xxx or porn somewhere in your search query.
Example: eyelids xxx or eyelids porn
That's it! Naturally, you replace "eyelids" with whatever tickles your fancy (I'm afraid to see what "eyelids xxx" might actually return, but I digress...); but, as those of you who try this method will see, Google hasn't just up and done away with NSFW images -- far from it. Google's index is still rife with more NSFW imagery than you can shake a Fleshlight at; it just takes a little more pizzazz with one's querying to find what one desires.
Where that's concerned, "censorship" is one of these buzz words that just automatically gets people all riled up -- kind of like "privacy" and "bacon." But there's a massively-huge difference between "censorship" and "filtering" -- the latter of which being what Google is doing in this scenario. As a Google rep mentioned on sister site, CNET:
We are not censoring any adult content, and want to show users exactly what they are looking for -- but we aim not to show sexually-explicit results unless a user is specifically searching for them. We use algorithms to select the most relevant results for a given query. If you're looking for adult content, you can find it without having to change the default setting -- you just may need to be more explicit in your query if your search terms are potentially ambiguous. The image search settings now work the same way as in Web search.Clearly, instances like this go to show how people take Google's services for granted. Not a single one of us are guaranteed Google's services. As much more than a company with a search engine now, Google has sectioned itself into a multitude of business units, and guess what? It's their right to do what they see fit with their products. They might shoot themselves in the foot, or they might just be doing certain demographics of users a favor by implementing X feature or tweaking X results.
So, Internet, calm yourself! This isn't a big deal, like, at all. Google's not taking your "pr0nz" away, nor are they censoring anything; they're just making it infinitesimally more involved for you to find whatever your burning/passionate/lustful heart desires. Personally, I don't think this is a bad move on Google's behalf whatsoever.
For as much as I search, and in the context of seeking content the way I do, I've had my fair share of rosy-cheeked moments, due to certain image results popping up when I least expected them. But this is just one man's opinion, and I'm not so disillusioned as to project it onto much more than a handful of others.
What will be interesting from here is to see how people attempt to work around this filter from a ranking perspective. There's big business in pornography -- specifically, getting your images to rank above all others for select naughty keywords. While Google isn't really forthcoming with NSFW keyword data, there are plenty of other ways to gauge the popularity of pornographic keywords and topics. And let's not forget the malware distributors, too, who seek to get certain images to rank with the sole purpose of getting searchers to click-through and, ultimately, end up with malware installed.
So, that's that. The Internet is still awesome and Google's still your friend; however, as my colleague, Zack Whittaker, noted, you can always hit-up Bing Images if you find adding "xxx" or "porn" on the end of a Google query to be too involved for you. What have thee, if not choice? Good thing the Internet is chock-full of it!
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DID F.D.R LURE JAPAN INTO ATTACKING PEARL HARBOR?
December 10, 2012 – Japan’s surprise attack on Pearl Harbor 71 years ago this month was a “day that will live in infamy” according to US President Franklin Roosevelt.
Seven decades later, it increasingly appears that the president’s surprise and outrage may have been synthetic. Roosevelt had been maneuvering for more than a year to bring the United States into World War II.
However, most Americans were against joining Britain’s war against Germany, and had little interest in Asia.
Something dramatic was needed to arouse war fever in the United States – particularly so since American-Germans constituted one of the largest ethnic group in the United States. In 1900, New York City was the third largest German city after Berlin and Hamburg.
Washington had been demanding since the mid-1930’s that Japan cease its occupation of strategic Manchuria, an autonomous state on China’s northeastern border. America’s warnings to Tokyo intensified after Japan invaded China in 1937. By 1941, Japanese armies were deep in China, a nation that the US considered its sphere of commercial and political interest.
Roosevelt issued an ultimatum to Tokyo to get out of China – or else. When Japan ignored the warning, Roosevelt cut off all US exports to Japan of crude oil, aviation gas, scrap iron and other strategic commodities on which Japanese industry depended. At the time, the US produced over 50% of the world’s oil supply. Japan produced no oil and imported all of its strategic materials and much of its food.
Washington should have known an attack was coming. The 1904 Russo-Japanese War began with a surprise attack on Russia’s important northern China naval base of Port Arthur. When President George Bush I ordered US forces to war against Iraq in 1991, he justified the attack by claiming America’s oil supply was threatened.
Japan’s war against the ten times more powerful United States was folly. The architect of the Pearl Harbor attack, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, who had lived in the United States, warned beforehand “we are going to war for oil, and I fear we will lose it because of oil.”
In 1941, Japan had a two-year strategic reserve of oil. The US embargo meant that Japan had to either go to war while it still had oil, see itself crippled by the embargo, or pull out of China, something the Imperial Army would not accept.
Yamamoto was absolutely correct. Japan’s main source of oil was the Dutch East Indies (today’s Indonesia), which it quickly conquered. But mid-1944, US submarines and mining had cut off 96% of Japan’s imports of oil, strategic material and food. Japan’s navy and air forces became inoperable. Japan began to starve; half its cities were leveled by US fire bomb raids.
From 1939, the Imperial Japanese Navy had been at samurai sword’s drawn with the Imperial Army. They in effect ran two separate wars: the Navy wanted the East Indies’s oil and to dominate the Pacific Ocean. The Army demanded resources be poured into its wars in China and Southeast Asia.
Strategists calling for Japan’s Kwantung Army in Manchuria to attack Russia’s Far East were ignored. Had Japan done so, Stalin would not have been able to transfer 41 tough Siberian divisions just in time to halt the German advance on Moscow.
Had Germany and Japan coordinated their offensives, Russia would likely have been defeated. But they did not. Japan’s Emperor, Hirohito, dithered and failed to force the Army and Navy into a coordinated war effort. Recent research in Japan has uncovered the tragicomic bungling and squabbling of the Imperial generals and admirals, and a weak emperor paralyzed by indecision.
Even worse, Hitler for some reason declared war on the United States soon after Pearl Harbor, giving Roosevelt the pretext he had long sought to enter the war against Germany.
Historians will long battle over whether Roosevelt lured Japan into attacking Pearl Harbor. The absence of the only two US aircraft carriers in the Pacific from Pearl Harbor during the attack, and Washington’s ability to read Japan’s naval codes add suspicions that the White House saw the attack coming. At minimum, the embargo of strategic material to Japan was a huge provocation. Japan foolishly took the bait and paid a terrible price.
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Exhibition challenges attitudes to nudity
video link : http://www.3news.co.nz/Exhibition-challenges-attitudes-to-nudity/tabid/312/articleID/280481/Default.aspx
Warning – video contains nudity
One would normally find a room full of naked women in a particular type of establishment catering to the needs and desires of a particular type of clientele.
But now a performance exhibition in Wellington, New Zealand is hoping to change people's attitudes to nudity - by de-sexualising the female form.
The Lady Garden is a performance exhibition where everything is on show, but gallery goers insist they’re not just there to perve.
“If you go to a strip club, you go with a certain intention, with art you go with a different intention,” says spectator Rose Seaoy.
“I do respect women and it would be cool to see art that's like that as well - and see women in a natural, true form, and as a companion, not as an object,” says another viewer.
And that's exactly the point, says director Virginia Kennard.
But can we stop sexualising the female form?
“We do it so much - can you not do it? Can you stop it? It's about how common it is in the commercial realm, and how that feeds into out personal perspectives,” says Ms Kennard.
Inspiration's come from Ms Kennard’s days as a life-drawing model.
“The model always leaves the room to get changed because it's like stripping, but being naked in front of people who are drawing you isn't sexual at all - and I really liked that boundary, that juxtaposition of a naked body, but not being sexualised.”
In the past, she says she’s run into reluctant spectators.
“I've had some pretty straight-up people say to me say, ‘It makes me really uncomfortable and I can't de-sexualise you, I can't, and I don't want to be a pervert, so I'm going to leave or not come’.”
But on opening night there was little embarrassment in the room.
“You look at a piece and you go, ‘Okay cool, I can see that’ and it didn't have to be weird. Obviously it’s uncomfortable because it's a naked lady - but it wasn't arousing, so to say,” says a viewer.
“Nowadays, with the internet, it's kind of like, everyone's so de-sensitised, and it's not maybe as shocking as it was 20 years ago,” says another.
The Lady Garden shows at Matchbox Studios until Sunday.
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Gemma Arterton On The "Dirty, Filthy Underworld" Of 'Runner, Runner' and The Difficulty Of Finding Quality Roles For Women In Hollywood
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One of those interesting-looking movies is next year’s “Runner, Runner” from “The Lincoln Lawyer” director Brad Fuhrman. Penned by David Levien and Brian Koppelman ("Rounders"), the film -- which will see her star alongside a great cast -- will tell the story of a Princeton student who gets cheated out of his tuition playing online poker, but winds up as the right hand man of the dude running the site. “It’s a thriller about online gambling in central America and the dirty, filthy underworld of that. Ben Affleck is in it, and I play his right hand woman I guess, and also it’s a bit sleazy -- our relationship," Arterton said. "Justin Timberlake is the hero of the piece; there are some great actors in it -- Anthony Mackie who was in 'The Hurt Locker' -- he’s brilliant. It’s all very sexy and shot by the guy that shot 'Avatar' [Mauro Fiore] so it has a film noir feel to it -- that dirty bling world.”
She goes on to clear up some confusion (ours, we confess) surrounding a movie about famed war photographer Robert Capa, a project to which she was also linked a couple years back with Andrew Garfield said to be in the lead. It appears we might have a Capote/Hitchcock situation on our hands again here: “There’s two versions: ‘Waiting for Robert Capa’ which is Michael Mann’s and my version which is just called ‘Capa,’ ” says Arterton. “It’s now being directed by Paul Andrew Williams who directed ‘Song for Marion.’ The original screenplay was by Menno Meyjes... We’re in the process of casting our Capa, and I hope it happens because it’s such a great story. And I hope we do it before Michael Mann! I’m like, ‘Quick, hurry up!’ because obviously ours would be a lower budget.”But the film it becomes clear she is most excited about is Neil Jordan’s “Byzantium.” The picture, which will be released sometime next year stateside and co-stars Saoirse Ronan, Sam Riley and Caleb Landry-Jones, tells the story of two women (and vampires -- Arterton and Ronan) who find their immortal lives challenged when the younger woman begins a tentative relationship with a sickly teenager. In our review from TIFF, we called Arterton's turn “committed, tremendously sexy and vicious.”
“I got the script for 'Byzantium' while I was shooting ‘Hansel and Gretel,’ and it’s an amazing script, written by a woman, which is very rare, and it’s all about girls. Neil Jordan flew over to meet me and offered me the job on the spot, and I was like [gasp!] because it was the perfect job for me... I’m really happy with that film, I think its boundary-pushing in that genre,” she enthused about the movie.
Of course it does mean U.S audiences will see her as a witch hunter and a vampire within a few months. “Yeah, the whole witches, vampires thing was a coincidence. Now I only need to do a zombie film and I’ll have collected the whole set,” she laughs. However she is clear that “Byzantium” is not your standard vamp movie. “The original draft wasn’t really about vampires at all, they rewrote it a lot. They’re selling it like that because, well, it works. But we’re not really vampires, we drink blood, but we don’t have fangs and we can live in the daytime. [Jordan] likes to use the word ‘succreant’ [rather than ‘vampire’] which is quite sensual, which is what we are.”
And her Gretel does gently suvbert her persona, perhaps. “She’s a damaged girl, very masculine, but very vulnerable. It’s nice for me that she’s not the love interest. Another girl is the hot babe and I’m the tomboy.” But of course, it is still apparent that Gretel has her damsel side and from the trailer alone, we see she needs rescuing.
“You’re so right!” says Arterton immediately. “At the time I didn’t think about it and in hindsight I’m like, yeah, I get captured and Hansel has to save me? And I spoke to the director and I said, ‘That’s not fair, wouldn’t it be funnier if he got captured and I had to save him?’ and he said…well I can’t give away the ending, but he said, You do have the payoff.' And he’s right, I do have the payoff at the end.
It gets us thinking about how much she chafes against being cast as the “pretty poster girl”? “I used to be [only offered those parts] and I’ve been very vocal about how I don’t want to do that any more, and now I don’t get offered those parts any more.” But it’s a difficult choice for an actress of her age and profile.
“I shouldn’t say this but I had a meeting at a big studio about 6 months ago, and she said, “I’ve seen all your movies, I loved you in ‘Alice Creed,’ I love you in ‘Tess of the D’Urbervilles’ so how about the hot girl in ‘blah blah blah’ movie? -- I can’t say the film, but just the most awful action movie ever," she said. And I said, ‘Are you serious? Are you joking?’ And she was like, ‘Well that’s all we have for you.’ But that’s what the majority of the parts are for somebody my age, you just have to be really strong and not take them, and hope that the great parts, like ‘Byzantium,’ come along.”
In fact, she has very firm and passionate views on women in Hollywood. “It’s a hard industry to be a woman in. I think it’s changing. It’s a big subject for me, I get very upset about the lack of female representation in the film industry… I need to start my own production company that’s geared around women, and commission female writers and directors.” But she is understanding of the different challenges a female director might face “As a director you have to be so, so strong in your opinions and you can’t succumb… I mean, as actors, we can go off and do a piece of independent theater and then do a big-budget movie to pay our mortgage, and then come back and do an independent film. You can’t do that as a director because you sacrifice your reputation. You have to be so certain and strong and as a female director, the bottom line is it’s sexist, this industry, and female directors are given less opportunities.”
Unsurprisingly, given these opinions, the first name that comes to mind when we ask Arterton who she’d most like to work with (after Michael Haneke) is British director Andrea Arnold, for all the reasons you might expect, but also because of an accident of geography: “I really, really love Andrea Arnold. I’d love to work with her...she’s definitely on my list, and also we’re from the same town, she’s from Dartford too. I met her and she was like ‘Oh, I know your street! I used to have sleepovers in house opposite you.’ And the films that she makes, especially like ‘Fish Tank’ -- that’s the world I grew up in.”
Arterton says she was first turned on to film acting after seeing Bjork in “Dancer in the Dark” (“I’m sure she was very damaged by it. But she was so brilliant in it and it was such an amazing performance. That was what captivated me, the process -- how did she do it?”), and also claims she’d have no fear working for a director like Lars von Trier. “I am not afraid of things like that, I think I kind of crave it, in fact. I like to be challenged and most of the time you’re not. I like the idea of going somewhere else, of being a bit out of control, having to trust the director so implicitly that you are putting your emotions and everything in their hands.”
If there is a major blot on Arterton’s copybook to date, it is probably the bloated, overblown and ultimately totally forgettable would-be franchise starter “Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time.” It’s an experience she’s typically candid about: “I had a really hard time making that film. It was my first foray into very big studio movies, and I lost faith in studio movies, really. I’d done a couple of movies that had just burnt me so bad... Because you are nobody, your opinion doesn’t matter, and I come from theater where everyone’s opinion matters…”But again, Arterton reveals her pragmatic side -- it was an unpleasant experience for her, but one which she believes helped her grow: “I’m glad it happened early on in my career because I learned how to deal with it, and this time, on ‘Hansel and Gretel’ it was totally different, because I was like, ‘right. this is how it’s gonna be. You’re not going to fuck me over.’ And I’ve also learned with those films, you just have to let them be what they’re gonna be. Because there’s no way I can go along to the edit and say, ‘I think I did better in that take, how about we..?’ You can’t do that, it’s too big a deal, there are too many people involved.”
“Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters” releases January 25, 2013.
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‘PAWN STARS’ SEXPOT IS SECRET PORN STAR
Published on: December 14, 2012
“PAWN STARS” sexpot OLIVIA BLACK is definitely ringing CHUMLEE’s register, but the heavily tattooed store clerk is hiding a shocking porn secret.
The 27-year-old exotic beauty used to model nude under the name Belladonna for the notorious soft-core pornographic website SuicideGirls.com.
The bizarre, alternative-culture site features sizzling pictures and profiles of Goth and punk young women who call themselves the Suicide Girls. Access to most of the site requires a paid membership.
Olivia, who was selected to join the group in 2008, fits right in with her piercings and inked body – not to mention her enthusiasm for posing in the buff!
“Olivia doesn’t talk about her porn past, but all the guys and the crew know about it and have seen her photos,” a source told The ENQUIRER. “It’s one of the best-kept secrets from viewers.”
Since 2001, the Suicide Girls’ website has received millions of racy photos from women around the world, hoping to join the ranks of the flesh-flashing alternative lifestyle crowd. And Olivia, who began her modeling career in Florida before moving to Nevada, joined the ladies after she realized, at 5-foot-2, she was too short to be a runway star.
Meanwhile, Olivia made a living as a hairdresser and makeup artist. Then, in 2011, the Maryland native was looking to earn extra income when she interviewed for the night-shift position at the now famous Gold and Silver Pawn Shop in Las Vegas.
Incredibly, when she applied for the job, Olivia didn’t even know that the family-run business had become the subject of one of the most-watched shows on cable TV, according to an insider.
She joined the long-running History Channel megahit in its fifth season and is now working alongside some of cable’s most famous faces.
The show features 71-year-old pawn shop owner Richard “The Old Man” Harrison, his son Rick, grandson Corey (aka “Big Hoss”), and Corey’s bumbling childhood pal Austin “Chumlee” Russell, who was instantly smitten with Olivia and began pulling double shifts in an attempt to spark a romance.
“Olivia loves her gig on ‘Pawn Stars,’ but her nude modeling isn’t necessarily in the past,” said the source. “She would never do anything to upset the show’s producers or her pawn shop bosses, but if ‘Playboy’ called her right now and asked her to pose in the buff, I’m sure she wouldn’t think twice about shedding her clothes and saying ‘cheese!’”
The 27-year-old exotic beauty used to model nude under the name Belladonna for the notorious soft-core pornographic website SuicideGirls.com.
The bizarre, alternative-culture site features sizzling pictures and profiles of Goth and punk young women who call themselves the Suicide Girls. Access to most of the site requires a paid membership.
Olivia, who was selected to join the group in 2008, fits right in with her piercings and inked body – not to mention her enthusiasm for posing in the buff!
“Olivia doesn’t talk about her porn past, but all the guys and the crew know about it and have seen her photos,” a source told The ENQUIRER. “It’s one of the best-kept secrets from viewers.”
Since 2001, the Suicide Girls’ website has received millions of racy photos from women around the world, hoping to join the ranks of the flesh-flashing alternative lifestyle crowd. And Olivia, who began her modeling career in Florida before moving to Nevada, joined the ladies after she realized, at 5-foot-2, she was too short to be a runway star.
Meanwhile, Olivia made a living as a hairdresser and makeup artist. Then, in 2011, the Maryland native was looking to earn extra income when she interviewed for the night-shift position at the now famous Gold and Silver Pawn Shop in Las Vegas.
Incredibly, when she applied for the job, Olivia didn’t even know that the family-run business had become the subject of one of the most-watched shows on cable TV, according to an insider.
She joined the long-running History Channel megahit in its fifth season and is now working alongside some of cable’s most famous faces.
The show features 71-year-old pawn shop owner Richard “The Old Man” Harrison, his son Rick, grandson Corey (aka “Big Hoss”), and Corey’s bumbling childhood pal Austin “Chumlee” Russell, who was instantly smitten with Olivia and began pulling double shifts in an attempt to spark a romance.
“Olivia loves her gig on ‘Pawn Stars,’ but her nude modeling isn’t necessarily in the past,” said the source. “She would never do anything to upset the show’s producers or her pawn shop bosses, but if ‘Playboy’ called her right now and asked her to pose in the buff, I’m sure she wouldn’t think twice about shedding her clothes and saying ‘cheese!’”
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