The Fake Life - Love movies? We do too!

Thursday, April 26, 2007

First Pic Of Galactus' Asshole Hits The Web!

Our heroes pause before their fantastic voyage.

You know why I'm looking forward to the new Fantastic Four movie? Because unlike the first tepid installment, this one looks rife with sci-fi sets and props. They seem to be fully embracing the concept here and HOLY SHIT BEN GRIMM'S GONNA WRASSLE A BEAR!

More neato pics and way boring promotional art can be found here.

Discuss this and other Fakery on our message boards!

Labels: Fantastic Four, Galactus, News

Continue reading First Pic Of Galactus' Asshole Hits The Web!

Posted by Doug Slack @ 10:08 AM :: (0) comments

Tuesday, April 24, 2007

Geek Pin-Up #18: Shannon Whirry

It seems a fair enough definition to call a geek someone who spent a good deal of their childhood alone in a darkened room. Also that some of their most important experiences are defined by what they have seen, rather than what they have done. With this in mind, I should like to nominate Shannon Whirry, star of a series of 'erotic thrillers' during the early to mid 90's, as our latest pin up, for services rendered to a teenaged me.

The films were called things like Animal Instincts and Mirror Images and usually involved Shannon as a repressed/bored housewife struggling against the confines of her marriage/sexual inexperience who is drawn into a shadowy world of sensual intrigue by circumstances beyond her control. Perhaps her husband is secretly filming their sex so, to save her marriage, she starts sleeping with other men just so her husband can watch the video. Perhaps her evil, sexy twin sister (that would be Mirror Images) tricks her into acting as a prostitute.

She would start off shocked by this steamy new world, but it would secretly thrill her, and she would then go back again and again to it, becoming more and more confident as she finally starts to express her true unbridled sexuality. All this leads up to a scene at the end of act two where she fully sheds her inhibitions, usually involving lezzing up and some spectacularly mild bondage. A saxophone will be playing in the next room.

Then there'll be a mobster, or some sort of obsessive man and this new sexy world starts getting dangerous for Shannon and it all gets resolved usually with a gunshot or two and Shannon going back to her old life, only much more sexually free and satisfied. Something like that anyway - these films were basically only watched for the nudity and Shannon's character arc of increasing naughtiness, both of which basically ended after the lezzing at the end of act two in favour of the 'thriller' part of the equation. Plus they were on late at night and that, coupled with other circumstances, usually led to me being asleep long before the end of these films.

Shannon herself was pretty great though. Looking a bit like a slightly more refined Sherilyn Fenn, if only for having a slightly taller face and a more fragile, translucent complexion, with the added bonus of massive, natural boobs, she could do innocent and repressed but still show that hint of a sexy fire having been lit within after that first encounter with the new world. She could also keep that tension going all the way through her libidinal adventures, never turning the sex into simple mechanical rutting. The films took these indiscretions and very mild perversions very seriously. Shannon seemed genuinely shocked that she was doing these things and, even worse, really enjoying them. This rather quaint prudery actually served to give the soft focus gyrations a bit of heft. It made them saucy, naughty - these erotic thrillers, in their own cheesy way, were actually erotic.

Now the films were, of course, atrocious. Slow paced, badly acted and nominally scripted to the point of being technically unwatchable these days, even for a fifteen year old. But the simple act of having a slightly old-fashioned attitude towards nookie, where wearing a blindfold was awfully, awfully kinky, gives them a certain charm lacking in the modern, ever more extreme gonzo fucking of modern porn.

Equally, the softcore DTV romps popping up in Blockbuster over the last half decade have been the Misty Mundae starring epics like Lord Of The G-Strings and Playmate Of The Apes. I've not seen any of these (there is a quiz held in the pub that inspired Shaun Of The Dead's The Winchester and once I was only 5 points away from winning an entire set of these films. My life is a tapestry of disappointment) but the jokey, knowing nature of these 'erotic pastiches' seems less alluring than the straight-faced melodrama of the Shannon Whirry starring, post-Basic Instinct 'erotic thrillers'.

In fact (just to make sure I don't write an entire article about softcore porn), my theory as to why Grindhouse bombed at the box office is that the great unwashed like their exploitation trash dead serious and without the too-cool-for-school post-ironic posturing of the Grindhouse trailers. Witness the success of 300, which consists of exactly the same sex and violence formula as all the B-movies Grindhouse was referencing but never acknowledges how cheesy it actually is.

It's most likely that Shannon Whirry isn't really worth immortalising in TFL's great pantheon of geek pin-ups - it's just that she happened to be getting her kit off when I was learning how to masturbate. If I had been a few years older, maybe I would be writing about former softcore-nonsense star Shannon Tweed. This is a good thing, however, as Shannon Tweed is really ugly.

Nonetheless, Ms Whirry seems to be getting regular work on TV these days, so avoiding the bored housewife fate of all her characters, so that's nice. If you still aren't convinced as to her geek credibility, she was in Steven Seagal's Out For Justice so some of you could beat off to that instead if you like.

Discuss this and other Fakery on our message boards!

Labels: Geek Pin-Up, Shannon Whirry

Continue reading Geek Pin-Up #18: Shannon Whirry

Posted by Andrew Clarke @ 1:28 AM :: (1) comments

Monday, April 23, 2007

On Being Beyond Hope

So I was considering watching Independence Day again.

Here was my thinking. Mainstream entertainments actually reflect the society at the time they were made more than ‘real’ works of art. The act of trying not to offend anyone means that what is included or, even better, is conspicuously absent from a film tells us a great deal about the fears or hopes of the people the films were made for.

Independence Day, for example, spends a great deal of time blowing up America, something unlikely to occur in a film today, so implying a possibly smug sense of security. The fear of massive innocent death at the hands of a foreign power could be safely indulged, as it wasn’t likely to happen.

Black people are normal in this film, women are fine as long as they are only the emotional motivators of male action, gays aren’t threatening but they are the target of constant mockery and get killed early on.

You can do this with a lot of films: Independence Day’s hero-president is taken to its logical conclusion with Air Force One, still in the Clinton era, which has a president-as-action-hero.

A lot of films through the 80’s were essentially adverts for justifiable homicide, with an antagonist invading the cosy world of our hero and, usually, his loving, blonde wife/girlfriend. The end of these films is always a very bloody, very satisfying bout of small arms justice.

Equally, what are we to make of the success of films like Saw and Hostel and the rise of hysterical, leering torture porn over the last few years?

All of these were juicy topics and there was plenty for me to chew on until I realised that, actually, what I really wanted to do was watch Independence Day again.

I wanted to see the giant spaceships, the bit when a cloud of enemy fighters emerge from the mothership, the bit when the fireball whooshes up a New York street, scattering cars like toys, the bit when all the famous buildings blow up, the bit inside the mothership at the end with all those huge ships rendered tiny by the scale. And so on.

Oh Christ, I thought, I’ve got the nostalgias. I want to watch the crap from my youth while great films like The Lives Of Others sit unwatched in cinemas right now and Three Colours: Blue sits on my table having finally reached me after months of being shunted down my rental queue by Smokey And The Bandit sequels.

My critical senses are the slaves of childhood whims! I genuinely believe these films are good just because I saw them when I didn’t know what good was! Oh Christ, a quick look at other releases of 1996 reveals an urge to watch Judge Dredd again! And, for fuck’s sake, Mighty Morphin Power Rangers (and seriously now, there’s a hot chick in a fur bikini, which we just don’t get much these days)! My sentences are all ending in exclamation points! I am beyond hope!

But then I remembered the bit where the dog survives, the bit where Will Smith punches an alien, that whole thing with the computer virus and basically every time a human speaks. I remember thinking it was stupid back then because it was stupid and, despite being a hopelessly stupid teenager, I could still tell how stupid it was.

But I had just started going to the cinema two or three times a week that year and we had just been connected to cable, meaning my cinematic world had just exploded with an influx of new information, from the thrill of watching every new release to the cheesy delights of watching shows about ‘America’s Top Ten’ which, back when we didn’t have day-and-date releases, had trailers for the exciting future-films we in England wouldn’t get for months. Other things too, that you need know nothing of. It was an exciting time. And Independence Day was a big part of that, being the biggest movie of the summer, being all over the TVs and bus shelters, and being talked about by pretty much everyone I knew. The images and sounds of that film are wedged in my brain, hard wired to various memories, experiences and feelings. Watching the film would actually be a very strong experience for me.

It isn't the film's plot, atmosphere or characterisation that inspires the experience, it is that the film was, for better or worse, a part of a particular period in my life.

I have a personal connection to it, whether I like it or not, and it is this that is getting exercised when I view the images of the film. Unless you are a pure ascete or budding psychopath, you probably have family photos dotted around the house, but you don’t have them because of the quality of their composition.

The 'goodness' of the film is, ultimately, irrelevant here. There are, shock horror, different reasons for and ways to watch a movie. Same physical thing (or ‘text’ if you want to be intellectual. ‘Existent’ for the philosophers), but wildly different relationships to it.

Hopefully, this great epiphany shouldn’t come as any great surprise to anyone reading this. It should be common sense. It should be painfully bloody obvious. The problem (and the reason I’m plugging away at it again), is that it is an idea that can get lost in the great rush towards ‘good taste’ in art, and the need to be able to judge everything. ‘I know more than you’, ‘I have better taste than you’, ‘I am a true film-lover and you are not’ – all are ideas that spring up naturally in a community based on film-watching, where films are the criteria and context of your positions within the community.

I’d suggest that those who are too caught up in their need to be ‘right’ would feel threatened by this paradigmatically diverse model of art appreciation as it undermines the basis of their sense of self-worth – knowing movies better than you. They would probably accuse me of apologia for crappy movies. They are film-nazis, fascists of the most tedious kind, reserving their totalitarian bullying for something practically pointless and utterly ephemeral. The pussies.

But is this just hair-splitting boondoggling about minor and arcane subjects? The same logic applies to the culture wars happening between science and religion, with one side (or, sometimes, both) usually refusing to accept that there are different ways to look at a subject. The different viewpoints are, importantly, separate, as opposed to contradictory. They are different languages (despite often using the same words) for describing the world, and you can not argue between them, only attempt a translation.

The demand to see everything in terms of one value system only leads to dogmatism and close-mindedness. It is political, and about power. The idea of ‘better’ is, unfortunately, an ideologically loaded term.

And, just to re-iterate, objective knowledge of film is a language it is useful to learn if you want to communicate about film. And that's it.

That humans do things for lots of different reasons should not need to be explained over and over but, as in the above example, forgetting this can and does lead to vast amounts of animosity and pain in the real world and, in the world of message boards, a lot of tediously unnecessary bickering.

A couple of further points:

1. People thinking that a personal connection means that the film is, critically, ‘good’. This is the curse of nostalgia. It is a confusion of languages – using the terms of critical thinking (i.e. ‘good’) to describe the feelings you get from this more experiential thinking. It is the same mistake being made, importantly, as those who would accuse those who would watch Independence Day (or, perhaps more controversially, Star Wars) of being cinematically ignorant.

2. These films really are often shit. But hey, digging out those pictures of the holiday you had when you were twelve is probably a bittersweet experience too.

You can not choose the films you grew up with, and I am left with having grown up in the 80’s and 90’s, a time of enormous shit in movies. It seems so harsh to tell an 8 year old that his film choices are going to affect the cultural context of every film he watches for the rest of his life – all he wants to do is watch the spaceships while eating ice-cream. Maybe I should have grown up in the late 60's, or French or something.

For the record, I have as yet not seen Independence Day again.