F&F Vol. 4 - FAME - MAY 2019
“There are things I know about Los Angeles. It’s for the young and beautiful. It’s for the rich. And if you’re in the business, best of luck to you, because chances are, your 15 minutes of fame are almost up.”
“That said, if you’re not famous or infamous, then you damn well better be interesting. Wherever you are, there you are, sure, but with bells on if you have any respect for pageantry.”
“The evil in these stories does not come from the fact that these women celebrated their bodies by putting them on display. While there are insidious aspects of the pornography industry, women who actively choose to showcase themselves for the pleasure of others are not wrong, corrupted, or evil. But when they are used as pawns by the men who are supposed to love them, when women’s bodies are used as a canvas for men’s dreams, who they are is smothered and devalued by cheap and dishonest intention.”
“We see just a few glimpses of Noni’s life, but it is apparent that every aspect of her career and appearance is constructed and that she’s enmeshed with a mother who’s poured every fiber of her being into making Noni a success. Noni does not have emotional or physical freedom, even down to what she eats. […] This alienation from herself has made Noni suicidal and she tries to destroy her body as an expression of emotional pain […]”
“The Neon Demon and Starry Eyes share a number of similarities in their narrative structures. Both films purport to track the rise and fall of a Los Angeles ingenue. Both position sexual favours as a tool of the trade, particularly with regard to older, powerful men. Both suggest that women are predominantly disposed to be petty, jealous and scorn-filled and that men are primarily interested in hitching their rides to a star on the rise.”
“Brad (Cliff De Young) and Janet (Jessica Harper) have changed significantly since we last saw them. In The Rocky Horror Picture Show, they were newly engaged and in the honeymoon portion of their relationship; now it’s been a few years, they’ve settled into their new life and things are becoming too routine for both of them. After being plucked out of the audience to appear on a show called Marriage Maze, Janet is manipulated by Burt Schnick (Barry Humphries), the supposedly blind TV host, into having Brad committed into the care of those at Dentonvale (a hospital-based soap opera similar to General Hospital) to fix his boringness, and ‘infantile regression.’”
“How many successful women have been accused of sleeping their way to the top rather than getting there on their own talent? Too many to count. The psycho-biddy is a male reaction to the fact that women age just like men do, and that the window of hotness is short. Fuckability, after all, is the prime metric of women in the public eye to the patriarchy, and once that’s gone, what’s even the point of women anyway? This, after Hollywood went out of its way to make its most glamorous stars into gorgons as they aged. The system is rigged.”
“In 2016, the Japanese film studio Nikkatsu reached out to five directors to each make a film to fall under the Roman Porno label that had been active from 1971 until 1988. […] Director Sion Sono uses his entry in the revival, Antiporno (2016), to shed a light on the sexual politics being exploited by the industry and how the ghosts of fame and shame live on within and through film.”
“Porn was a two-edged sword for Quek. On the one hand, it afforded her an outlet for her overwhelming libido (she is very frank about her partners, male and female, and the sex acts she prefers), and presented an opportunity for her to explore female sexuality in an artistic way. She often felt that, by getting involved in “stunt” porn, that she was engaging in a sophisticated form of performance art. […] On the other hand, the porn industry, dominated largely by straight men, sought to repress – or at least ignore – her humanity. In a telling moment in Sex: The Annabel Chong Story, Ron Jeremy reads one of Quek's essays and expresses astonishment that she could have been so eloquent, given that she has been notoriously awkward in conversation. To these men, Quek was never anything more than Annabel Chong, the porn star.”
“[…] much of gay desire is predicated on envy, and what the presentation of iconographic representations of beauty suggests is a self-immolatory streak into an unreachable fame. Essentially, reenacting the beauty of someone whose fame was based in beauty is an alternate death drive; the consumption of fame and beauty is finite, incestuous, and self-destructive. As aforementioned, Harris Dickinson’s Jim reenacting Saint Sebastian as a form of ultimate beauty is reaffirming that he, himself, is the ultimate beauty.”
“For Showgirls in particular, fame has another, much higher purpose: to broadcast to the entire world that the people who hurt you did not stop you from becoming the strongest version of yourself. At the end of the film, Nomi tells us what she has won on her journey, and the answer is herself.”
“…what was more important: the mundane nature of the characters, the relations and the portrayal of that sexuality in a society that was still too conservative regarding its relation to women and sex. The characters were, in most of the cases, normal, average Japanese people, living through their life, and having sex, because it was the normal thing to do. It was essentially a portrait of the private life of the Japanese. […] In this modern society, one can’t have too much sex if you’re just an ordinary person, the only way to justify it is by having them be extraordinary, and in this particular case, they have to be extraordinary artists…”
“At the centre of Maps to the Stars is an extraordinary, schizophrenic turn from Moore that moves from one sense of hysterical to another with the whiplash speed of channels being changed on a T.V. Many reviewers argued that Moore played her character, an actress named Havana, as what seemed to be an older version of another actress, Lindsay Lohan.”
“And yet, what of life between Instagram posts? What are us small, inconsequential humans supposed to do, in those in-between moments when our guides forsake us? What are we to do with all the silence, the ordinary life that no filter can make pop, no hashtag can make #empowering?”
“Valerie’s quest for fame is a seeking of validation. If her ideas are spread and accepted, her identity can be too. However, her attempted journey to fame is put entirely into the hands of men. Girodias is her only hope at spreading her words through a published book. Warhol is her only hope at spreading her play. When she goes on television to spread her word she is set up with the show by Danny. The show’s host is also a man. Men have taken things from Valerie her whole life from her father’s molestation to the johns who sleep with her. Warhol, Girodias, and the talk show host are no different, they use her for their own entertainment and an increase in their own notoriety.”
“If you think about any movie featuring a black woman, she’s either a vixen, or a matron, or a cross in-between. Rarely do we get a depiction of a young black woman who has her own vision outside the needs of the men in her life. It is rare to find a film where a black woman is just allowed to be. She is not managed or made palatable; crushed by socioeconomics. In B*A*P*S, Townsend allows his female leads to thrive and succeed beyond their wildest dreams, and in doing so, allows young black women to escape reality in way few other movies can provide.”
Last summer, husband & wife filmmaking team Caleb Quinn & Danica Anna Uskert-Quinn made a feature beset by PROBLEMS—a heart attack and hospitalization due to heart failure, issues with sound equipment, trouble securing locations, actors getting lost en route to set, etc. The film was eventually completed, but the couple needs financial help acquiring an audio engineer to finish post-production. Please consider contributing to their indiegogo campaign:
SPECIAL THANKS TO THIS MONTH’S DONORS: