News & Notes Inside the Week in Film

Ain’t That a Kick(starter) in the Head

Actress Melissa Joan Hart tried to get in on the crowd-funding, Kickstarter revolution… and raised less than 6% of her stated goal.  More lessons are to be learned from this and, of course, these lessons merely reinforce what we already know.

by Chris Neumer

Just Another Week As Usual…

… googling naked photos of the cast of The Golden Girls.  You know how it goes.  Also, a nude picture of Bea Arthur sold for $1.9 million.  It’s a tangled web we weave.

by Chris Neumer

So I spent a sizeable chunk of my time this week googling naked pictures of Bea Arthur.  It’s a great sentence to be able to write and a concept that my friends have been having a field day with.  “This differs from your normal routine how?” one asked me.  All and all, it’s been a lot of fun.

The reason for this is that a painting by John Currin of the former Golden Girls’ star topless was auctioned off this week for $1.9 million (see image to the right).  It should be noted that Arthur did not pose for the painting, nor was it commissioned by her, nor was she in any way connected with it other than being its subject, it was merely painted by Currin.

There are a lot of interesting aspects to this story that are, at worst, stellar dinner conversation starters.  First, there are the fascinating legalities of being able to paint and then sell naked pictures of celebrities who aren’t associated with the works themselves.  Second, someone out there paid roughly $2 million to have the privelige of looking at Bea Arthur topless (I’m sure there’s a Melissa Joan Hart/Kickstarter joke in here somewhere).  Third, there are also honest-to-god nude photos of Betty White online and a nice lingerie photo of Rue McClanahan; as far as I can tell, Estelle Getty is the only member of the Golden Girls not to have scantily clad photos of herself readily available online.

Chalk this up to a second thing this week that is worth $1.9 million and change.

Laird Hamilton Doesn’t Dream This Big

Hey, Hollywood, can you please add some surfers in your movies where you have 1,000 foot waves taking out new york city?  Please?

by Chris Neumer

This is a minor point in a section of Stumped that is devoted to minor points.  One thing by which I am always surprised is the way that no surfers are ever seen surfing the enormous tidal waves in the disaster film genre.  When it was announced in Deep Impact that a comet would hit the earth in a year’s time and produce a wall of water 1,000 feet high, my first thought was, “Are the surfers ever going to have fun with that one.”  If all surface life would be killed off by the comet’s, uh, deep impact, are you trying to tell me that no surfers would be out there trying to ride that massive wave?

Hardcore surfers are a strange breed of athlete.  They all sound stoned and stupid, even if they’re sober and have a doctorate from M.I.T.—Keanu Reeves nailed this in Point Break.  They have an enormous amount of respect for the environment and the beauty of the land and they will often wax poetic about how waves are formed and what a pebble falling into the ocean in Thailand means for surfing conditions in Hawaii.*  Surfers will travel around the globe to hit a 100-year storm there—W. Peter Iliff nailed this in Point Break too.  If they know that there will be a fast moving wave the size of the Sears Tower, you can most assuredly bet on their presence at said wave.  Surfers don’t seem motivated by much in life, but have no trouble getting up at 4:30 every morning in order to surf for four hours before they have to go to work.  Since they also don’t spend much cash on anything outside of surfing, travel to exotic locales with good breaks is hardly the stumbling block it might otherwise appear to be.

* Things that most people only talk about when they are stoned.

Hot or cold, near or far, in a friendly place or in the Gulf of Aden, surfers will go where the waves are (or are scheduled to be).  They are like humanity’s Switzerland.  They don’t care about politics, they don’t wish to harm anyone and everyone pretty much leaves them alone.  Surfers have somehow finagled a deal where the basically can come and go as they please in search of the best waves on the planet.

However, I have yet to see a single surfer anywhere near any of the enormous waves in any movies that involve massive waves. Not in Deep Impact, not in Tidal Wave and not in The Day After Tomorrow.  I’m going to go as far as to say, I’m surprised no one has thought to include this in both Poseidon or The Perfect Storm.  Technology has come a long way in the last twenty years and if you think having 100-foot waves in the middle of the ocean will preclude surfers from being there, you are dead wrong.  Or, more impressively, watch this video.  I mean, holy shit.

I was struck by this glaring, albeit extremely minor, oversight when I saw the following headline on huffingtonpost.com: “Surfer Describes Riding Out Samoa Tsunami”.  Britain’s The Sun newspaper trumpeted another story of a man who “survived the Pacific tsunami by surfing out towards the 20 ft waves”.

While doing some further poking around I found another story detailing professional surfer Garrett McNamara’s effort to specifically surf a tsunami.  McNamara hasn’t succeeded in this endeavor yet, but is staying sharp by surfing glacier waves.  If you’re not familiar with what ‘glacier waves’ are, don’t worry about it.  I surf and I didn’t have a clue.  Glacier waves are what occur when huge chunks of icebergs break off and fall into the water.  According to McNamara, this can produce waves as large as 25 feet in height.  If you’re asking yourself why McNamara wouldn’t simply go to Hawaii and surf Pipeline or Jaws, the answer is simple: it’s too easy.  As McNamara states, “I [am] comfortable in the ocean.  The glacier wave scared the shit out of me… I was aware of everything about the glacier; the river, the rock garden, the gravel bar and the… slightly submerged rock mines.”

Oh yes, did I forget to mention that McNamara is doing this in Alaska in a shallow river?  Adding to his enjoyment, the river in which McNamara surfs the glacier waves is one of the best places in the world to catch salmon, so there’s also a good chance he’ll have to fend off a hungry bear while surfing the 25-foot glacier wave in a shallow, rocky river filled with sharp chunks of floating ice.

As I said, it’s an incredibly minor point, but with surfers traveling into the middle of the ocean to find huge waves, hanging out near collapsing icebergs and actually attempting to surf tsunamis, can someone in Hollywood please make sure to add two CG surfers riding the next thousand foot tall wave to hit the Statue of Liberty?  I’m begging you.

The Photo of the Week

The Ageless Tobey Maguire

While writing about Tobey Maguire’s starring turn in The Details, I made mention of the fact that he hadn’t really seemed to age that much in the last, oh-I-don’t-know, fifteen years.  In The Details, he looked pretty much the same as I’d remembered him looking in… well, everything I’d seen him in post Cider House Rules.  It took a little bit of searching, but here are two press photos that were taken a mere 11 years apart, the left photo from 2002’s Spider-Man and the right photo from this year’s The Great Gatsby.  Those are some good genes that Maguire’s working with there.

The 5 Things I Learned This Week

Fascinatingly true things to broaden your mind

1) The word is spelled ‘petechia’.  For years, I’ve been trying to figure out how to spell it (it’s pronounced Puh-teek-ee-uh) and running into that comedy gold mine of not knowing how to look up the spelling of a word I didn’t know how to spell.  Now I know.

2) The term ‘consensual homicide‘ exists and is apparently a legitimate thing.

3) The cult at the center of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, the Thuggee cult, existed and is thought to have killed more than a million people between 1740 and 1840.

4) The English word ‘thug’ actually is derived from the name of the Thuggee cult.

5) The Thuggee weapon of choice was a noose.  They killed their victims by strangling them.  There are no figures available on how many of the Thuggee victims were lowered into lava minus their hearts.