Starlet Showcase

6/27/09

Cover Girl Gina

Major 1950s Italian raccoon makeup babe
Gina Lollobrigida. I mean, totally MAJOR.

Any major dude will tell you. . .

6/26/09

Damsel in Dis Dress

Anne Helm in The Magic Sword (1962).

. . .and in dis towel.

(The physics gets a little complicated here, but it's basically

just gravity vs surface tension.)

Yesterday I sat down and watched The Great Gatsby (1974), which I had never seen before. I never read the book or saw any of the other films. It's full of great cars and great music. The production design really gives you a Jazz Age feeling. Robert Redford plays the strange Jay Gatsby. Bruce Dern is his usual scary self. Sam Waterston is alternately baffled and bemused. Scott Wilson plays a slow, spooky guy named Wilson. Howard Da Silva, for once, plays a non-sinister person. Delicious Lois Chiles plays golf. The delightful Kathryn Leigh Scott plays someone's sister. Francis Ford Coppola wrote the screenplay. It runs 144 minutes, but I rarely used the Fast Forward button. It was indeed entertaining. I personally had problems with the suspension-of-disbelief in the romantic parts. You see, Robert Redford's Gatsby falls in love with Daisy Buchanan, a monumentally shallow, neurotic, jittery airhead played by the monumentally jittery Mia Farrow. Ewww! And psycho Bruce Dern's Tom Buchanan is cheating on Mia with an annoying and unattractive character named Myrtle, who is played by the thoroughly annoying and unattractive Karen Black. Yuck! (You can tell this is pretty serious and high-brow film criticism, right?) It is sometimes hard to tell what's more repellant, the annoying female characters or the annoying actresses playing them. Anyway, bear with me here. I liked the film, but I found the romantic entanglements simply unbelievable. I mean, for me, it's far more likely that a man would fall in love with Lois Chiles; she's cute as a button and not bipolar. Or a man might go for the intriguing Kathryn Leigh Scott, who plays Karen Black's sister and is obviously the better looking and more grounded sibling. I mean, me, if I pulled up to a garden party in a yellow Rolls-Royce and got out and saw Mia Farrow and Karen Black waiting for me, I'd get back in my WAY cool ride and head elsewhere. That's just me, all right? I'm just saying...

Jittery jittery jittery

Way totally annoying

Lois Chiles. . .Mmmmm. . .dreamy!

Kathryn Leigh Scott. . .yesss!
(The opinions expressed herein are the author's strange personal opinions and do not in any way represent respectable film criticism.)

Portugal Postcards

There's an eBay seller called PORTUGALCARDS,
who sells delightfully sexy old postcards like these.

6/24/09

Groovy Wednesday

Psychotic Reaction

Good Thing

Nobody But Me

Keep On Dancing

(I kept this one large so we can watch the on-stage dancers
and, of course, it's my favorite silly mid-60s tune.)

6/23/09

Hollywood Harem #13

I looked it up. Here's the original December
2007 explanation for this category.
"Okay, this new category will be called Hollywood Harem and will include any odd photo of a starlet playing a harem girl or, well, wearing a weird little costume, including--let's see now--starlets in Biblical epics, starlets in so-called sword-and-sandal or spear-and-slipper movies, prehistoric starlets in jungle epics, starlets bellydancing, starlets playing Cleopatra or her handmaidens, starlets charming snakes, starlets playing princesses and Egyptians and stuff, starlets playing Atilla the Hun's wife or Lady Macbeth's milk maid, starlets dancing for John the Baptist's head, starlets in bear skin bikinis, starlets playing the Queen of Sheba and Delilah and Ali Baba's forty thieves' girlfriends and Robin Hood's girl cousins and King Arthur's granddaughters, and starlets playing pirate girls and gypsies, and any movie with sand in it that is supposed to take place a long time ago in some place warm where they don't have to wear, like, boots and winter coats and scarves and knit hats and longjohns and stuff. Okay? Got it? Cool. Here we go..."
(Must have been chilly the day I wrote that.)