(no subject)

[rm]

I've never really thought about Nicole Kidman one way or the other. I mean... she looks perfect and she's really talented, and I've enjoyed most everything I've seen her in (and Dogville is just Dogville), and it has nothing to do with me or my aspirations. Nothing to learn there. She's a species apart, blah blah blah.

This piece in the NYTimes is really interesting though. Just in terms of talking about how she's been able to take a certain coldness and brittleness that she unavoidably gives off (and it's bone structure as much as anything else) and run with it and just how unusual that is.

It's also a funny piece because Kat and I were just talking about a variant of this, which is that Kat said that directors really get off on destroying her because she's so beautiful. At the time, I had a very mixed feeling about the comment, but certainly agreed it was extremely true in places. Thinking about it now, I am reminded of the little boy who was my neighbor as a child. And how we dropped his mother's china figurines on their carpet over and over to watch them bounce, until eventually, they broke.

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/02/movies/02SCOT.html

Comments

[patashoqua.livejournal.com]

Because of the very specific way in which she's beautiful, actually, but yeah.

[patashoqua.livejournal.com]

Also, I had no idea that "To Die For" was Van Sant- I simply didn't track on such things in 1995. Damn. Strange career arc there, too.

[rm.livejournal.com]

Yeah. I don't know anything about him other than his work (and still can't figure out why he did that remake of Psycho), but really interesting stuff. Strange preoccupations on his part, too.

[coyotegoth.livejournal.com]

He's odd visually, too; just saw Elephant, and it's _just_ this side of being visually formalized the way that, say, Bresson's films were, to the point where you'll be saying "Hmm, he's shooting the photographer character in profile shots and sideways tracking shots, rather than the head-on closeups and tracking/reverse tracking shots he's using for everyone else- I wonder if that means something...?" only to have him then shoot the guy in a regular, head-on closeup. It's the kind of thing that's more distracting than anything else.h