February has been a good month for American movies in which vulnerable males stare out their bedroom windows at willowy, troubled blondes and grow obsessed. No, Rear Window has not been re-released; in James Gray’s melodrama Two Lovers a Brooklyn Heeb falls for the Shiksa next door, and in William Olsson’s stylistically assured, super-cynical without even realizing it directorial debut An American Affair, a slick, low-budget period movie with the cozy art direction of a Danish furniture commercial without even blinking an eye suggests that Jack Kennedy was a man of many mistresses and woefully foreseeable enemies.
Such is our post-Watergate American existence that we no longer see politicians as enlightened, civic minded individuals in an ennobling vocation. Such is our post-Lewinsky American existence that we are no longer shocked or even especially aroused by our political leaders’ sexual misdeeds. Sure Eliot Spitzer’s political star fell just under a year ago after his nocturnal visits from call girl Ashley Dupre were exposed, but Louisiana Senator David Vitter continues to sit in his Senate seat nearly a year and a half after he admitted to seeing prostitutes. As An American Affair deftly dramatizes, in the previous era the press corps would have just kept what they knew about the sex lives of powerful men under wraps. But lets get to those tantalizing one sheets.
Last week I shared some disturbing McDonalds ads that I found in Argentina in addition to a clip of a faux Marilyn Monroe also endorsing the Golden Arches. Compared to some dead celebrity-employed marketing, though, that’s relatively innocent. A black and white photo with a badly inserted color cheeseburger? Even Marlon Brando would have been fine with that unbelievable campaign. As for the Marilyn commercial, I’ve seen some people comment on YouTube that they didn’t know she did a McDonalds ad. But aside from inadvertently confusing some idiots, having an impersonator hawk products isn’t too unethical.
This 2005 Volkswagon ad is a little more questionable, as it superimposes the face of Gene Kelly (d. 1996) on the bodies of breakdancers outfitted to look like his character in Singin’ in the Rain. I’d say it’s despicable or blasphemous but I have to admit to having enjoyed it when I first saw it. And the remix of the movie’s titular tune is also appreciable. Also, its painstaking recreation of the iconic scene is to be respected, especially because it doesn’t simply pull some archive footage or photograph of a dead actor and randomly plop it into an advertisement, like the John Wayne Coors spot.
That’s not actually Marilyn Monroe in the McDonalds commercial above. It’s Susan Griffiths, a Marilyn impersonator who you may have seen on the cover of this month’s GQ magazine. I’m not sure how old the ad is, but I wanted to use it as the Clip of the Day in order to share some other McDonalds print ads that I discovered while on vacation in Buenos Aires last week (no, I wasn’t dumb enough to bother eating at McDonalds with all the great Argentine beef elsewhere; I was using the restroom). I don’t know how old these ads are either, but they seem pretty despicable regardless. Check out some pics of Bogie, James Dean, Marlon Brando and Nat King Cole hawking cheeseburgers after the jump.
We’re bringing back The Media Diet, our long-dormant series of interviews with filmmakers and indie industry people about the movies, music and assorted pop cultural detritus that they like to consume. This week we’re talking to Harmony Korine, whose incredible Mister Lonely (see our review from SXSW) comes out in NY and on IFC On Demand tomorrow. After the jump, Harmony talks about his favorite YouTube videos, his (questionably sincere) love for Patrick Swayze and Triple Six Mafia, and explains why he refused to watch Marilyn Monroe movies in the run up to making a movie about a Marilyn Monroe impersonator.
Um, that Marilyn Monroe sex tape? Probably not real. Defamer has a guest post co-written by Marilyn experts Mark Bellinghaus and Ernest W. Cunningham and journalist Jennifer J. Dickinson, which makes a compelling case that the guy selling the 16mm fellatio footage is “well-known within the tight-knit circle of Marilyn Monroe memorabilia collectors for being a sycophantic, press hungry namedropper (check out his likely self-penned IMDB bio) whose main objective is to promote himself and the Monroe documentary that he is working on.” Sorry, boys––at least it’s still porn, right?
With news that a memorabilia collector has purchased a Marilyn Monroe “sex tape”, we now see the old starlet meets new starlet trend coming full circle. As if Lindsay Lohan’s aping Marilyn in her recent New York spread and Mamie Van Doren’s recent nipslip weren’t enough to show us both that today’s darlings are nothing compared to yesterday’s and that the media’s crucifixion of Lohan, Britney, Paris and the rest ignores the fact that actresses have been comfortably wild since before most paparazzi photogs were born, now we have an historical artifact that seems to validate Paris Hilton’s breakthrough via her sex tape “1 Night in Paris.”
Unfortunately for Paris, in her being validated, we also learn that in the 1940s, fellatio was perhaps a surer step to real movie stardom than it is in the 21st century. Of course, I also think that if Marilyn were alive and just starting out today, she would have enough talent to circumvent the “casting couch” and still become a bigger star than Paris. In the context of today, though, she probably wouldn’t become nearly as iconic nor would she have appropriated the same dumb blonde image. So, it’s difficult to tell where she’d fit in.
Back in October, we brought you a guide to finest examples of on-screen cleavage from the days of pre-code Hollywood. In our ongoing quest to revisit Hollywood history through the nip-slip and up-skirt crazed lens of the celebrity coverage of today, we now point you to the World Of Wonder blog, where Chip Duckett has nothing but praise for a recent “accidental boob reveal” by Mamie Van Doren. “This woman is 77 years old, and is frankly hotter than anybody on the planet one-third her age,” Duckett writes. This, he says, is how the “oopsie! semi-nip-slip…is done properly in 2008.”
Van Doren, seen at her heyday at right, was Universal’s card in the Marilyn Monroe copycat craze of the late 50s, the star of such not-quite-classics at Ain’t Misbehavin‘ and High School Confidential!She’s been pretty much off the radar since the end of the Fantasy Island era, but with the tenuous Marilyn connection intact, can we assume this is Van Doren’s entry in the Monroe–>Lohan–>Musto self-promotion-via-calculated toplessness sweepstakes? Let’s hope!
If Lindsay Lohan can drive a print publication’s subscription revenue up by a low five figures by pretending to be Marilyn Monroe, why can’t columnist/VH1 talking head/soft-sculpted middle-aged gay man Michael Musto do the same for the Village Voice? Interestingly, this slideshow seems to be a trojan horse used to smuggle a cranky old man essay into the weekly, complete with grumbles that today’s nip-slipping, up-skirt courting starlets “never claim an affinity for anyone esoteric, like Barbara Payton, Carrie Nye, or Tippi Hedren.” Cool it with the history, old man––just show us your tits!
At the beginning of this week, Lindsay Lohan horrified classic nude starlet photo-shoot purists by revealing her apparently very real breasts in otherwise not-so convincing homage to Marilyn Monroe. We wondered, at the time, if aligning herself with the ultimate image of female celebrity self-destruction was really the best way for Lindsay to prove her post-rehab worth. Turns out, we were wrong––Lindsay just got a job! In a Jack Black movie! About renaissance fair nerds! Case closed, right? Also, with subscriptions currently going for about $20 each, New York Magazine made at least $10,000 off the spread. And thus, the career of one actress and the whole of the magazine industry are rescued in one fell swoop. Rejoice!
There’s a lot that could be said about Lindsay Lohan’s “performance” as Marilyn Monroe in this mostly-nude photo shoot for New York Magazine, aping the latter’s stars famous champagne-fueled “Last Sitting” with photographer Bert Stern from 1962. Just the frame-by-frame contrast above says a lot about how Marilyn and Lindsay approached the, um, role. Where Marilyn seems caught in a moment of abandon, Lindsay’s frozen in rabbit-toothed defiance, her wig shalacked into the antithesis of bedhead, nostrils flared as though she’s holding her breath. We could go through each of the pictures and talk about all that stuff, but that would seem to be giving the endeavor more credit than it deserves. As Perez Hilton so astutely notes (no, that’s not a typo), “She has no movie coming out. That new album won’t be released for a while. Lindsay has NOTHING to promote, other than herself.”
So you have to wonder what the Lohan camp sees as the endgame of this. …Read more
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
filmcouch-114
At the beginning of this week, Lindsay Lohan horrified classic nude starlet photo-shoot purists by revealing her apparently very real breasts in otherwise not-so convincing homage to Marilyn Monroe. We wondered, 
