Posts tagged: pretty girls

People often like to get me alone and confide that they would really really love to pose nude for me but they are concerned about their future careers. When I lived in Washington, DC, I just took this at face value. I’m proud of how I have lived my life. I was class president in 10th grade. If I felt like running for some community office, I don’t think I would be daunted by my – gasp – association with artistic and activist depictions of naked people. Nonetheless, I understand how someone who aspired to be a beltway insider might be concerned about limiting their career options. But I live in Los Angeles now. These are actors, models, musicians, and celebutantes whispering to me about how they crave to have their bodies in front of my lens. But they can’t, they just can’t. Maybe the conversation is titillating and erotic for some people. I don’t know. It isn’t for me.

Did getting naked on camera hurt the careers of Marilyn Monroe or Sharon Stone? How about Ewan McGregor or Bruce Willis? I’m not even going to take a stab at naming naked models because there are nudes in existence of every single successful high fashion model I can think of. Tyra Banks devotes a whole episode of America’s Next Top Model to getting wannabe models to get naked. Has on-camera nudity hurt the careers of Madonna or Marilyn Manson?

When it comes to entertainment careers, the public’s response to nudes is generally either positive interest and applause or a complete lack of awareness. Except of course for poor beleaguered Fred Durst, but the public’s brutality for …

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I never trust any woman who lists Sixteen Candles as one of her favorite movies.

The most fundamental flaws with society today can all be traced back to 80’s teen movies, specifically the work of John Hughes. I hoped, when I moved to Hollywood, that I would someday get the opportunity to tell him so in person. I’ve been here a while and haven’t run into him yet, so I thought I would post it on a nice busy site and wait for him to find it while ego-searching.

The message of pretty much all John Hughes movies is that you should hate successful people, while coveting what they have and having the exact same sucky values that the people you hate have. If you hate someone, why would you aspire to be like them? I understand that sometimes one can take a wrong turn in life, but who actually wants to become something they themselves hate?

Let’s start with The Breakfast Club. Although Sixteen Candles and Some Kind of Wonderful are so much worse, I’m going to try to go with chronology. The basic conceit of Breakfast Club, for those fortunate enough not to have seen it, is to place a group of dissimilar and unrealistically stereotyped students in a room where they are not allowed to leave and see how it all turns out. The results are an implausible and thoroughly unjoyous exersize in unhelpful group therapy. Anthony Michael Hall’s character blubbers and actually gets sympathy from fellow high school students trapped in detention with him. Molly Ringwald’s character takes the poetic and sexy character played by (much hotter) Ally Sheedy and gives her a makeover that would qualify her to play the ugly friend. You know how lots of …

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