More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
16 October
My recent Tweet to this effect, that, when you have bought furniture from MFI and the clothes-rail collapses,
that is a wardrobe malfunction, shows how even the words that we use about film and its principals are dominated by the big business behind celebrity and cinema : after all, there is no such thing - to my knowledge - as
a wardrobe function*, unless it is the costume department having an end-of-filming pre-bash !
So we have this nonsense about
Angelina Jolie's
bikini body, as if - in some proper wardrobe - her real body keeps Dorian Gray company, or
a nip showing, or whether that look is
hot or not. All of it just lazy shorthand, used not to be bothered to express something other than through what is tritely ill thought out.
And, back where we started, we pay the ticket-price to see, say,
@HelenHunt, as made up in the appropriate chair for the role and the part of the film in which her character appears in the scene to be shot. A lot of time, money and expertise is spent - if people know what they are doing with the film, and her prize acting isn't edited away - to get her looking a certain way.
So why, without those lenses, make-up artistes, costumes, studio lighting - why, in hell, do we expect her to look like that, nice enough as she is, when she gets out of a car outside a big cinema? To use a stupid parallel, why watch Madonna, say, doing some car maintenance from the vantage of a nearby tree and without binoculars, when you could buy a ticket to see her act the part of, say, Lucrezia Borgia on the cinema screen? (
Not that I know anything about any such film-project, you understand...?)
End-notes
* And perhaps it was only as a bit of light relief from that tired
dysfunction, which every family knows about, that they chose the prefix
mal-.
