R.I.P Isabella Blow

I've watched FT: Fashion Television since I was a little girl. I love it. Occasionally, during the segments in Europe at the fashion shows, they featured an eccentric English woman with heavy eye-lids and crazy, crazy hats. She would make comments on Galliano, McQueen and Gaultier, all out from underneath a truly crazy hat. That woman was Isabella Blow. She worked with Anna Wintour and Andre Leon Talley. She discovered Alexander McQueen and Sophie Dahl. And wore crazy hats. I love her. She was diagnosed with ovarian cancer in the spring and had surgery two weeks ago. A long time sufferer of depression, there are reports she killed herself. She was an original.

Isabella Blow

Mexican filmmakers had a brilliant year in 2006. Innaritu had Babel. Cuaron had Children of Men. And Guillermo Del Toro had Pan's Labyrinth. It was not only incredibly beautiful in it's design, but it haunted me with it's sadness and it's brutality. There is a gentle, perfect balance between the horrors found in a child's imagination and the horrors human beings inflict on each other. For Ofilia, the most threatening creature in her life is not the "pale man" with his eyes in his hands, that kills children and who rips the heads off faeries, but instead the man who married her mother. She retreats into a fantasy world, because her real life is too much. It's a masterpiece.

I remember once being in the rag section of a bookstore and I saw on the cover of one of those "cosmo for men" mags (stuff, fhm, or maxim) a picture of a curly haired, blessed-with-hips girl baring her belly. I did a double take because I wasn't sure if it was Beyonce or if it was Shakira. I always kinda thought they looked alike and sure enough, someone else agreed. Their new (very catchy but also kinda cheesy) song and video for the remix of Beyonce's "Beautiful Liar" features quick cuts between the two, and sometimes it's hard to tell the difference. Shakira (whose hips never lie. Ever.) has got the tighter moves. There is a smoke machine, writhing on the floor and wind through panels of fabric. There is also a rain machine. So the girls get wet. There are also neon purple lights on the floor. I think the budget was a $1.99. Cheesy, but hypnotically so.

Oh Blockbuster, you sucked. I go in to rent some movies. I rent Little Miss Sunshine. I asked the little teenage girl when Half Nelson comes back in. I have asked about when movies come back in before. They check their little computer and tell me, "Oh, one is coming in tommorow. Try tommorow." But this girl is all, "Um, well, I can't really check cause there are no more late fees." Okay, that wasn't really the question. "So you can't even check to see when one is due, I'll just come back and check?"

"Well, I can't give you like a time of day...so no. And you don't have rewards (which, by the way, she never asked me about. Maybe I do. I don't. But she didn't know), so you can't reserve it anyway."

I'm standing there, speechless because of how dense this girl is. Just check the computer, or check the pile videos that just came in, you gnat. I don't need a time of day!! So I give her my card to rent Little Miss Sunshine. And she randomly says "try Tuesday, cause that's when like, the new movies come out." and I elaborate what she just said :" So people return movies to get new ones..." "Umm....yeah. Do you want to like, renew your rewards for like $7.99..." she says, kind of spacey. Okay, I think we already established that I don't have rewards, thus I can't renew them. So no. And then my video cost me $6.03. For one video. So whatever, Blockbuster.

Little Miss Sunshine kicked ass for about half it's run. And then two of the things that made it awesome ended. One was that the older son Dwayne, who had taken a vow of silence until he got into the air force, started talking. As Steve Carell's Frank (the suicidal, gay, Proust scholar) says "Who is that? Nietzsche? So you stopped talking because of Friedrich Nietzsche? Far out." Yes, yes it was far out. Dwayne's vow had lasted for 9 months and he wrote all his communications on a little notepad for people to read. And Carell pronounces it "Neat-cha", very precisely. Which I enjoyed.

They other thing they did was they(spoiler) killed off Grandpa (end spoiler). He kicked ass. He tells the silent Dwayne in the back of the yellow VW bus, "Fuck a lotta women, kid, I have no reason to lie to you. Not just one, a lotta women." He yells at dinner, "Every night it's the fucking chicken! Holy God Almighty! Is it possible just once we could get something to eat for dinner that isn't the goddamn fucking chicken?" He snorts heroin, got kicked out of a nursing home he loved (where the women outnumber the men 4:1) and teaches his granddaughter stripper moves for her pageant talent. "I can say what I want... I still got Nazi bullets in my ass!" He was totally raging against the dying of the light. And then they kill him off. He dies. I kept hoping he had faked his own death and had run away. But no. Actually dead.

The little girl, with her big glasses and pot belly, and how she kinda vibrates back and forth before unleashing her famous scream, is really cute too.

Okay. Let's pretend you are pretty cute but kinda dumb. And you also get a swanky internship at the teen version of a swish magazine. You have equally silly friends. You have a stupid, but equally rich boyfriend from highschool. He seems kind of unemployed. You buy him golf clubs for his birthday. Maybe you two will spend the summer together at a beach house.You get excited about boys at photo shoots and by sparkly clothes. You have a boss who has a very pinched mouth. You never seem to do very much work, but you do get offered an internship. In Paris. Paris is Mecca in fashion. Even your dumb friends are all "You gotta do it, right?" But what about your stupid boyfriend and the little beach house of vapidness? Desicions, desicions.

Fashion Mecca with French boys or Beach House of Vapidness with loser boyfriend?

Dumbass.

Watching Alfonso Cuaron's film Children of Men last week, an absolutely beautiful film, there were a few scenes that reminded me of two of Cuaron's previous films Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban and Y Tu Mama Tambien.

There is a playful car scene with Theo, Julian, Kee, Luke and Miriam. Julian is trying to catch a ping pong ball in her mouth. The playfulness and the close camera work reminded me of some of the car scenes in Y Tu Mama.

And there are a few scenes, including one in which Theo (and the viewer) view from a distance what happens to Michael Caine's Japser that completely reminded me of the whole Hermione and Harry rescuing Buckbeak from his execution sequence.

Dear J-Lo:

How's it going? I used to sort of hate you. I mean, I loved you in Out of Sight. You and George were smoking hot and you have a great ass. But then the whole Ben thing happened. You know, when you guys loved each other and then you put him in that stupid video for the song whose hook you stole from the Beatnuts, and Ben kissed your ass (like literally) and then you made him get tanned and polished and seemed to suck his soul. And then you totally went to a Red Sox game with him and were photographed filing your nails, unlike that new Jennifer who seems to glow when at Sox games. And then you guys (thankfully) broke up and then you married poor, emaciated Marc Anthony. And you made a lot of very shitty movies. Like a ton. And wore some really ugly clothes. So anyway, your new MTV show Dance Life kinda kicks ass. I've always kinda wanted to be a dancer, you see. And these kids are all bitchy and hard bodied. The gay dudes are total bitches (which, of course, is the only kind on tv). And one kid is dating a freaking Pussycat Doll. And they cry and diss each other. And then they dance for you and Marc (who seems very excited to be there. It was nice of you to include him). There was even a freaking Fame-style dance interlude, meant to show how introspective and deep the dancer is. So keep it up, Jenny, even though I know you are totally not still from the block. And don't think I've been fooled by the rocks that you've got.

Love Joanna

P.S. Please feed your man. He looks pale.

There are always rumours going around about how Madonna hates Gwen Stefani for stealing her schtick. Her schtick being platinum bottle blonde Italian-American with English husband and ugly/crazy/cool fashion sense. Maybe this is true and maybe it isn't. Gwen's new album is kinda silly (okay, very silly). I hated the first single "Wind It Up" when I first heard it. Like, did she seriously sample that goat herder song from The Sound of Music? Is she really yodelling? But it grew on me. Her new single "The Sweet Escape", the album's title track, is similarily stupid yet catchy. It might also be the sonic stepsister to Madonna's "True Blue". Something else for Ms Cicone to hate Ms Stefani over.

Yodellay, yodallay, yodal-low