I'm doing a little write-up on Greta Garbo and have been doing some research.
Can you guess how old she is in this picture? (That's a candid, btw, with minimal makeup and no fancy lighting.)
Answer:
50!
Side note: She was a shrewd businesswoman and invested heavily in real estate in the 30s, owning a good chunk of Rodeo Drive. Her estate was worth $20 million when she died. She left it all to her niece.
Also: Louise Brooks (who had a brief fling with her) said Garbo was a totally masculine dyke, and a very charming and tender lover.
Speaking of 1930's movie stars who invested in real estate, the building I lived in a few years back, in Oak Park, IL, was said to have been owned by Sonja Henie back in the 1950s. In doing some research into this, the only thing I could figure out is that the man who ran her ice skating show at that time was Arthur Wirtz, a real estate agent who got into sports venues and shows (his son owned the Black Hawks). So, it's definitely a possibility!
Saw
District 9
yesterday. Meh. The effects were beyond incredible, but the story made no sense.
Well, no sense might be over-stating. There was....when they...the...ummm....
I thought it was anvilicious, although T thinks that it was playing to the level of the general audience, and he may well be right.
The director wants to make a sequel. Of course, he has no plot ideas, but if people want more, he'd be happy to give it. How you end that process with no plot ideas for a sequel is beyond me, but there you have it.
For Jilli: Twisted Princesses.
Ooooh. Why yes, I like those muchly.
David, did you get to her humiliating fling with Marlene yet? Poor Garbo was young and unsophisticated at the time.
There exist gorgeous candids of Garbo shirtless in shorts.
David, did you get to her humiliating fling with Marlene yet? Poor Garbo was young and unsophisticated at the time.
I did. Marlene's name was forbidden to ever be spoken in front of her. I guess she learned a thing or two, though.
There exist gorgeous candids of Garbo shirtless in shorts.
Which is where she had one-up on Dietrich, as Marlene always hated her rather flat breasts.
Anyone seen the director's cut of
Alien
yet? I think I'm gonna go tonight....
An odd and obsessive sci-fi article that I nonetheless found interesting: In praise of the sci-fi corridor
Coincidentally, I just got back from
Alien.
I wanted to slap the people who kept on laughing....
eta:
Corridors make science-fiction believable, because they're so utilitarian by nature - really they're just a conduit to get from one (often overblown) set to another. So if any thought or love is put into one, if the production designer is smart enough to realise that corridors are the foundation on which larger sets are 'sold' to viewers, movie magic is close at hand.
...
Repeat sections are what corridors are all about, and they're part of the iconography of pre-CGI sci-fi movie-making. For Alien, Roger Christian would have the production department mock up different sections of corridor for Ridley Scott's perusement, and whatever got the green light was fabricated multiple times to create the final corridor, often with the classic trick of placing an angled mirror at the end of the long set to suggest further recession and depth.
It's a trick lovingly employed by Duncan Jones in this year's Moon, wherein rather thin sections of strut support have been laid in to provide geometry on a pretty low-budget corridor...
Note the use of the 'Eurostile' typeface that pretty much typified movie and TV sci-fi typography in the 60s and 70s once everyone got over the ghastly computer-fonts that were sadly used in Space:1999 (in fact this was the typeface used in the earlier UFO, and in most of Gerry Anderson's late sixties SF TV shows). Moon is a retro-feast for the SF corridor nut!
...
Another great example of NASA-porn is to be found in the first class mis-en-scene of the Steven Soderbergh remake of Tarkovsky's Solaris (2002)...
What luxury - a flat wall with a slight curve. It's antiseptic, unfriendly and really quite repellant, but a very convincing projection into the near-future from the current state-of-the-art in space stations.
I think I love this guy....
