Awwww, Susan Tyrell died.

She'll always be the evil queen in Forbidden Zone to me. The interviews with her on that DVD blew my mind. She was so outrageous. The first time she saw Herve Villechaize she thought, "I'm gonna fuck that dwarf!" And they hooked and were lovers for a while.

I remember when she did her one woman show in LA. I didn't see it but it sounded incredible. She'd talk about coming back from shooting an exploitation movie in Spain, getting another round of plastic surgery, holing up at the Chateau Marmont until the bandages came off and then screwing some poolboy for a month. Just wild living on the Hollywood periphery for years.

Ellen Barkin was just on TCM recently with Robert Osborne and talked about Tyrell's career making performance in Fat City.

eta: A quote from her ganked from AV Club:

"I'm a loner. I don't like beautiful people, but I find beauty in the grotesque. And in the sweet soul inside someone who has been able to get through their life without being a rat's ass. Such people should be collected, should be swept up immediately and kept in a box of broken people."

A very Waitsian sentiment.

Oh, Sean. It's "bollocks". The Sex Pistols weren't requesting you ignore the bovines. Don't worry, I will give you a refresher course in what bollocks mean when I kick you in them.

And yes, I may actually like this new Dredd movie. Pity The Raid got to the screen with one of the core concepts of the trailer though.

So far I've seen that Brave is Highlander, How To Train Your Dragon, and Mulan.

With a girl, a girl and a bear, and white people, respectively.

People are really sure about this.

I’be heard that it’s Koyaanisqatsi with a plot. Or that it's My Dinner With Andre in the woods.

OK, maybe not.

Oh, and it's How To Train Your Dragon with Irish people and a girl and a bear.

A short bit on creating The Hulk for The Avengers (no actual demonstration of the process, but the shots of the stand-in models are kind of fun.) [link]

Thanks, Kalshane, that was great!

OK, I ended up seeing Brave this afternoon.

Unlike Jessica, I was not grossly disappointed. I enjoyed it. It was funny, and scary, and beautiful, and occasionally a bit moving.

But I can see how people would be disappointed, because while it's fun and enjoyable, it's not marvelous. Erm, except for the visuals, which are, all the way through, splendid. It's just that Pixar has given us very high expectations for their movies: there's a level of complexity and subtlety in the best of them that Brave doesn't hit.

A bit of unspoilery detail: The setup is a bit thin, Merida comes across as a bit stupid (and as someone who has never heard any fairytales at all, which strikes me as unlikely), and the resolution is, in fact, so pat that I was sure that wasn't it. For such a fundamental disagreement, the end is too easy: on the other hand, it's a children's movie.

Also? Do not take a five-year-old: they will be terrified by at least three scenes.

And yet, for all that, it's very entertaining and I'm glad I went. Also, the theater was full of girls and women, with not a lot of boys in the audience.

Has anyone in a fairy tale read any fairy tales?

Is that a modern assumption?

Actually there is a sort of sub-genre of fairy tales where the clever third son or whoever is aware of the tropes and manages to outwit the giant.