Face: the final frontier.

 

My partner Fiona would like to point out that Javier Bardem, much discussed for his role and hair-do in the Coens’ NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN (“a haircut for all time” — Coen hairdresser Paul LeBlanc) has the biggest face in creation.

It covers his entire head! Front AND back.

One of the many interesting things about Milos Forman’s GOYA’S GHOSTS is the sight of Bardem’s colossal pan nestling under a tiny tiny skull cap.

I’ve always said that the truly epic film gains its sense of vastness by contrasting the very big with the very small:

An eyeball reflects a flame-spurting urban dystopia at the start of BLADE RUNNER.

Peter O’Toole blows out a match, and the sun rises across an illimitable desertscape in LAURENCE OF ARABIA.

A pen drifts in zero G as a space-ship docks with a mighty rotating space station in 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY.

And now: Bardem’s king-sized kisser is crowned by a casquillo del cráneo the size of a mooncup.

Bardem’s casting in GOYA’S GHOSTS is the climax, to date, of Milos Forman’s policy of casting actors with surprising accents in his period films. It begins (though I can’t speak for the Czech films) with AMADEUS, where the starting point was a notion of using Americans to play the more declassé characters, with Brits as snooty Viennese aristos. But this system was abandoned, more-or-less, as soon as red-blooded American Jeffrey Jones was awarded the role of Emperor. Meanwhile, Tom Hulce as Mozart would try to tone down his American accent and Forman would try to catch him at it.

(Scots actor Brian Pettifer (IF…) found Forman, “a bully” and notes that the Czechs hated him. Actor and biographer Simon Callow had a hard time disguising his overtly theatrical tendencies. “Stop ACTING!” Forman would bellow. Then: “NO! Now you are ACTING NOT ACTING!”)

In VALMONT, there’s an even mixture of Brits and Yanks among the French aristocracy, with Scottish-accented servants. Weirdly, the exact same rule applies in the other version of Laclos’ novel, DANGEROUS LIAISONS. And yet I’m not sure Scots would make the BEST servants… watching John Laurie’s erratic buttling in UNCLE SILAS seems to confirm this.

GOYA’S GHOSTS has the most extreme mishmash of accents, because we have a Swedish Goya, an American King Carlos, a French Spanish Inquisitor, and English Napoleon, and then, just to shock us: a Spanish actor playing a Spaniard. Bardem’s is truly the most distracting accent in the film. But it’s his contribution that pushes the whole thing to the point where we can GET IT, and relax and enjoy the pageant of inappropriate accents as an unimportant sideshow to the main event, which is a pretty good film, despite those reviews.

Oh, and I’ve just seen NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN, which I’ll attempt to say something about once it’s been digested.

Euphoria #22: A New Hope

OK, what can I say? Art College technician and filmmaker Fiona Reid suggests this happy-happy-HAPPY ending from the first STAR WARS (I refuse to call it by that other title) and who are we to judge?

I asked WHY, of course, and she said she liked the whole thing, it was a warm childhood memory, and she liked the way Leia winks at R2-D2, or whatever it was.

I thought, “She WINKS at R2-D2? The little dustbin robot? What’s been going on here that we don’t know about? Why would she prefer him over, say, the wookie?” (And why doesn’t the wookie get a medal?)

We know R2 is anatomically correct — I don’t mean the third leg, I mean the contraption he uses to stick it to the Death Star computer and make the garbage compactor open up — but he still seems a little bit too mechanical to play romantic interest, compared to, say, the wookie (although I’ve said that about Tom Cruise too). No doubt he has a winning personality, if only we could understand his clicks and whistles. But still…

Then it clicked (and whistled)! The sinister torture-bot Vader sends into Leia’s cell (this is a roBOT torturer, not something to torture your BOTtom) — this has caused her to suffer Stockholm Syndrome or it’s galactic equivalent and she has transferred her passion to the nearest non-humanoid robot (C-3PO being both humanoid and obviously gay). STAR WARS begins to look like a colourful re-imagining of THE NIGHT PORTER.

So, there must be DELETED SCENES, previously unseen frottage, showing Leia’s romantic tryst with the pint-sized mechanoid during the long trip back from the Death Star to Yavin, as I believe it’s called. No wonder Han Solo is so frosty towards her. Princess-droid relations are still frowned upon in these post-Republican days. It is the love that dare not beep its name.

But given Lucas’ well-known fondness for ripping off his fan-base, I’m sure we have only parsecs to wait before a new edition of SW hits the stores, full of restored, digitally-enhanced, hot droid action (actor Kenny Baker, sweating away inside the tin can, is replaced by a porn dwarf stand-in for these scenes), leading to further adult re-imaginings: in THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK, Luke experiences a sentimental education from the experienced person of Yoda, and in RETURN OF THE JEDI, Jabba the Hutt… well, you’ll just have to wait and see.

This entire theory may actually be DESTROYED as soon as anyone looks at the clip and realises it’s HAN SOLO the Princess is winking at in the Riefenstahl-inspired coda. But of course, this is just another example of Lucas’ sinister Stalinist historical revision, recutting the film to remove all traces of the tender cross-category romance.

It’s like the whole “Greedo shot first” thing all over again.

But we know.

R2 shot first.

Quote of the Day: Profiler

‘Like Stanislavsky and Brecht, I’ve invented an entirely new method of acting, I call it the enantiodromic approach. The theory of enantiodromia is that the left and right sides of your face represent different personalities. If you’re clever with mirrors you’ll see what I mean. My right side, for instance, is that of an inept housewife and the left side — or “facet” as we call it — is that of a spanking squire!’ ~ Ken Campbell, Pigspurt.

But NO! Because, THIS, from Lionel Atwill:

‘See, one side of my face is gentle and kind, incapable of anything but love of my fellow man.

 

‘The other profile is cruel and predatory and evil, incapable of anything but lusts and dark passions. It all depends which side of my face is turned towards you — or the camera.’

Ken Campbell is a genius and antic visionary, but seeing as Atwill died in 1946, I’m pretty sure he came up with this concept first.

I’ve also heard that the artists of the late lamented Jim Henson’s late lamented Creature Workshop always sculpted their monsters a little lopsided, so that you’d get a better variety of expression when they moved their face motors than you do with, say, Tom Cruise. (Thanks to Comrade K for pointing out the connection between Scientology and animatronics).