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praetorianguard!!!
So I got the DVD to Carrie. I love this movie, and wonderfully it contains some nice documentaries with cast interviews etc.
Fun facts:
There's a lot of interesting stuff obviously, and it made me have
There's a five minute piece on the musical. For anybody who doesn't remember, Carrie had a brief run on Broadway after being done by the RSC. It was such a flop a book about bad musicals was written using the title, "Not Since Carrie..." I know somebody who saw it and I remember thinking the staging sounded like at least part of the problem (along with incredibly stupid lyrics!). I don't actually think the idea of this story as an opera, at least, is ridiculous. It is an operatic story, kind of a Greek Tragedy, and with the right idea it could go over well. But it was interesting that the writer, while not blaming everything on the director, said that he felt the RSC direction didn't help the piece by not being American.
It made me think of all those dreadful HP stories where the kids are somehow in a Hogwarts that's an American high school. It just doesn't work. What's odd is that obviously one doesn't have to be English to appreciate the books. It's just when it comes to write a fanfic I guess many American kids find themselves at a loss for just how this world is created. It's not just a case of not knowing the right way to describe the end of school if you can't say graduate. It's like a million details you're not even aware of. So you think in between classes (which is what those things one goes to with a teacher are called in your mind) you would need something to do with your books so you'd go to your locker, which presumably exists even though we have never once had a reference to the kids at a locker while in mostly any American high school story there would be because it's an important thing. It's also that you don't get what things mean to the students. It doesn't keep you from understanding the story because JKR understands it well enough that the characters make sense but it's almost impossible to reproduce.
I was just thinking about that given this guy's thoughts on Carrie because it's like, if you don't understand what the prom means on a primal level, you can't really tell the story correctly. And what a prom means can't even really be put into words, because there are so many conflicting ideas--is it the prom that's like the Cinderella ball at the end of the year? The prom that's the debauched night when people get sick? The prom that spawned the phrase, "I'm off like a prom dress?" It's all of them. It's just, you know, THE PROM (or PROM if you're from the Midwest or wherever else they don't use the article). So if somebody was writing a story and asked, "So what does it mean to be Prom Queen?" there'd be a difference between the mythic meaning of the term and the reality of it...at some schools. It depends.:-) What's great is again you don't have to understand this for the movie to work--what you do need is for the characters to understand it. So there are tons of throwaway details that spark recognition in part of the audience that may be foreign to other parts of the audience, yet if you take those details away both parts of the audience would feel the loss. I guess it's part of just the wider fact that an author has to have complete control over the world and know far more than the readers ever will.
There's even a wonderful thing where they talk about the thought that went into the school mascot, which only appears as a picture on the gym floor. The high school is called "Bates" as homage to Psycho, but they didn't want a mascot that could ever be cuddly. So they went for the Stingers with a picture of a bee. (My own high school was The Pelicans.)
Another line that sparked an HP thought was when Nancy Allen, who plays Chris, is talking about her scenes with John Travolta (Billy) she says until she saw the movie she didn't really get how villainous they were. "I thought we were the comic relief," she says. And she's right, because Carrie walks that exact edge between satire and horror. Chris and Billy are total stereotypes: the rich, popular princess and the white trash boy she slums with. Chris is bratty and Billy is dumb, and it's only when the pranks cross the line of viciousness that they become villains. They (along with Norma and even pudgy Helen) are the Slytherins of the high school
That, to me, is part of the beauty of the story and I sometimes wonder if it could really be made today. (I know it was remade on TV but I saw no reason to watch it.) Carrie's class in the movie is the same year my sister graduated from high school and I think when I watch it it does sort of tug at memories of her as a teenager. I graduated a decade later, so my own high school years are strictly 16 Candles. (Which despite its own fairy-tale qualities still amazes me for how much it reminds me of my life--when a friend of mine first saw it and was telling me about it I briefly thought she was telling me about what she did the night before instead of a movie!) What strikes me about Carrie is how old the students seem. Not old meaning unconvincing--Sissy Spacek certainly looks convincingly teenaged, for instance, and Betty Buckley was the oldest cast member as the gym teacher when she was 26. It's more just that the teenagers here seem like adults, or on the verge of adulthood. It seems like in movies of the 80's, 90's and today kids come across more as, well, as kids. Maybe this is because adolescence has so come to dominate all of life, so that stage of life spins out far into your 20s. It's like in Bowling for Columbine when Matt Stone says (correctly) that kids get the message today that if somebody calls you a fag in seventh grade that's it, you're a fag forever. They don't know that very often it's the popular people who wind up having lives you wouldn't want and the geeks are the ones who succeed.
Carrie, despite in many ways being satirical, doesn't seem as wedded to this idea. What makes this tragedy happen is that clearly these kids are too old to be picking on Carrie this way. Most of them probably wouldn't be, without Chris' vendetta. So you've got what's really a childish idea played out by adults with access to sledgehammers, pigs and blood. It's not so much pranking anymore as hazing (struggles to keep from mentioning certain pictures in the news recently...) I feel like if the movie was made today it would focus too much on the idea of high school cliques when that's really not the point. Carrie is very much about high school, but despite its own satire it's not about high school according to the current Hollywood model.
Also, in light of recent discussions onroxannelinton's lj, it's a great movie to see true Girl!Power in action. Whether it's Chris asking her boyfriend to kill a pig mid blo-job or Sue announcing, "We don't care how we look," in answer to a question directed at her boyfriend and not herself, these girls make things happen.
praetorianguard!!!So I got the DVD to Carrie. I love this movie, and wonderfully it contains some nice documentaries with cast interviews etc.
Fun facts:
- auditions for Carrie were actually joint auditions for that movie and Star Wars. (Yes, William Katt was there reading for Luke!)
- Amy Irving's real life mother plays her mother in the movie.
- Piper Laurie saved one of my favorite lines in the movie from getting cut--though she thinks most people don't even notice the line and only she cares about it.:-) The line is when she sees Carrie's prom dress she says: "Red. I might have known it would be red." This line was written assuming the dress would be red, and they forgot to change it when the dress was changed. When it came time to say it dePalma wanted to cut it but Laurie insisted it remain. So now we have the way it is in the movie, where she says that line and Carrie replies, "It's pink, Momma." As Laurie explained--and as I always thought was wonderfully apparent in the scene--to Margaret White, it's red. There is no pink. Go Piper Laurie!!
There's a lot of interesting stuff obviously, and it made me have
There's a five minute piece on the musical. For anybody who doesn't remember, Carrie had a brief run on Broadway after being done by the RSC. It was such a flop a book about bad musicals was written using the title, "Not Since Carrie..." I know somebody who saw it and I remember thinking the staging sounded like at least part of the problem (along with incredibly stupid lyrics!). I don't actually think the idea of this story as an opera, at least, is ridiculous. It is an operatic story, kind of a Greek Tragedy, and with the right idea it could go over well. But it was interesting that the writer, while not blaming everything on the director, said that he felt the RSC direction didn't help the piece by not being American.
It made me think of all those dreadful HP stories where the kids are somehow in a Hogwarts that's an American high school. It just doesn't work. What's odd is that obviously one doesn't have to be English to appreciate the books. It's just when it comes to write a fanfic I guess many American kids find themselves at a loss for just how this world is created. It's not just a case of not knowing the right way to describe the end of school if you can't say graduate. It's like a million details you're not even aware of. So you think in between classes (which is what those things one goes to with a teacher are called in your mind) you would need something to do with your books so you'd go to your locker, which presumably exists even though we have never once had a reference to the kids at a locker while in mostly any American high school story there would be because it's an important thing. It's also that you don't get what things mean to the students. It doesn't keep you from understanding the story because JKR understands it well enough that the characters make sense but it's almost impossible to reproduce.
I was just thinking about that given this guy's thoughts on Carrie because it's like, if you don't understand what the prom means on a primal level, you can't really tell the story correctly. And what a prom means can't even really be put into words, because there are so many conflicting ideas--is it the prom that's like the Cinderella ball at the end of the year? The prom that's the debauched night when people get sick? The prom that spawned the phrase, "I'm off like a prom dress?" It's all of them. It's just, you know, THE PROM (or PROM if you're from the Midwest or wherever else they don't use the article). So if somebody was writing a story and asked, "So what does it mean to be Prom Queen?" there'd be a difference between the mythic meaning of the term and the reality of it...at some schools. It depends.:-) What's great is again you don't have to understand this for the movie to work--what you do need is for the characters to understand it. So there are tons of throwaway details that spark recognition in part of the audience that may be foreign to other parts of the audience, yet if you take those details away both parts of the audience would feel the loss. I guess it's part of just the wider fact that an author has to have complete control over the world and know far more than the readers ever will.
There's even a wonderful thing where they talk about the thought that went into the school mascot, which only appears as a picture on the gym floor. The high school is called "Bates" as homage to Psycho, but they didn't want a mascot that could ever be cuddly. So they went for the Stingers with a picture of a bee. (My own high school was The Pelicans.)
Another line that sparked an HP thought was when Nancy Allen, who plays Chris, is talking about her scenes with John Travolta (Billy) she says until she saw the movie she didn't really get how villainous they were. "I thought we were the comic relief," she says. And she's right, because Carrie walks that exact edge between satire and horror. Chris and Billy are total stereotypes: the rich, popular princess and the white trash boy she slums with. Chris is bratty and Billy is dumb, and it's only when the pranks cross the line of viciousness that they become villains. They (along with Norma and even pudgy Helen) are the Slytherins of the high school
That, to me, is part of the beauty of the story and I sometimes wonder if it could really be made today. (I know it was remade on TV but I saw no reason to watch it.) Carrie's class in the movie is the same year my sister graduated from high school and I think when I watch it it does sort of tug at memories of her as a teenager. I graduated a decade later, so my own high school years are strictly 16 Candles. (Which despite its own fairy-tale qualities still amazes me for how much it reminds me of my life--when a friend of mine first saw it and was telling me about it I briefly thought she was telling me about what she did the night before instead of a movie!) What strikes me about Carrie is how old the students seem. Not old meaning unconvincing--Sissy Spacek certainly looks convincingly teenaged, for instance, and Betty Buckley was the oldest cast member as the gym teacher when she was 26. It's more just that the teenagers here seem like adults, or on the verge of adulthood. It seems like in movies of the 80's, 90's and today kids come across more as, well, as kids. Maybe this is because adolescence has so come to dominate all of life, so that stage of life spins out far into your 20s. It's like in Bowling for Columbine when Matt Stone says (correctly) that kids get the message today that if somebody calls you a fag in seventh grade that's it, you're a fag forever. They don't know that very often it's the popular people who wind up having lives you wouldn't want and the geeks are the ones who succeed.
Carrie, despite in many ways being satirical, doesn't seem as wedded to this idea. What makes this tragedy happen is that clearly these kids are too old to be picking on Carrie this way. Most of them probably wouldn't be, without Chris' vendetta. So you've got what's really a childish idea played out by adults with access to sledgehammers, pigs and blood. It's not so much pranking anymore as hazing (struggles to keep from mentioning certain pictures in the news recently...) I feel like if the movie was made today it would focus too much on the idea of high school cliques when that's really not the point. Carrie is very much about high school, but despite its own satire it's not about high school according to the current Hollywood model.
Also, in light of recent discussions on
roxannelinton's lj, it's a great movie to see true Girl!Power in action. Whether it's Chris asking her boyfriend to kill a pig mid blo-job or Sue announcing, "We don't care how we look," in answer to a question directed at her boyfriend and not herself, these girls make things happen.
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One thing really stood out. Nancy Allen thought they were the comic relief? Oh, that's intriguing.
And William Katt as Luke Skywalker - do they have any footage of these joint audtions? *dies at the thought* That would be so hilarious!
-brodie
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Yes! I guess fairy tales are the same way, really. But they're really not sexist because they go beyond sex roles. They're just so...primal or something. Watching it again I was really struck by that--particularly the way that in the beginning Carrie smears blood on Miss Collins' shorts (later grossing out the principal) and also Sue's shirt. Then in the surprise ending Carrie's bloody hand is clutching Sue in sort of the same place--I never made the connection before, but it would make sense that her dream would contain that sort of thing. (That is Sissy Spacek's actual hand, btw.:-))
One thing really stood out. Nancy Allen thought they were the comic relief? Oh, that's intriguing.
Yeah, isn't that funny? And she wasn't being stupid about it, I don't think. Because their scenes in the car etc. really are so silly. Piper Laurie originally was going to turn down the script because she thought her character was a cliche, but her husband pointed out that Brian DePalma tends to be satirical. So she went back and read it with that in mind and then got really into the whole OTT-ness of it. It was probably the same for Nancy Allen, that they got really into the characters and had fun and then thought, "Wow. We're scary."
The scene where Betty Buckley slaps her is just so great.
And William Katt as Luke Skywalker - do they have any footage of these joint audtions? *dies at the thought* That would be so hilarious!
I wish! Can't you just almost imagine an alternate universe where he *was* Luke Skywalker? *hums Great American Hero theme*
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The funniest thing ever was on Seinfeld, when George recorded his own version of that song for his answering machine. A tinny keyboard, then George's inimitable voice - "Be-lieve it or not, George isn't at home/please leave a message after the be-e-ep/I must be out or I'd pick up the phone/where could i be?/Believe it or not - I'm not home!'
My sister downloaded a copy of that snippet, but I remember watching it and LAUGHING.
William Katt and his blond afro saving the universe - that image alone could give me nightmares.
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William Katt looks like quite the Ken Doll now. He still has blond blond hair, short and curly, and he was tan with little round tinted glasses.
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William Katt ... is it him or that Willie Aames guy who's supposedly a born again Christian? What does weird olf William Katt do, these days?
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Sadly, I now this. It's Willy Aames who is born-again. He plays Bible Man in Christian videos! I'm not sure what William Katt is doing now, but he looked healthy.:-)
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Man, I really need to see Carrie again. But only on dvd with the extras. Is Brian DePalma crazy onscreen, or does he hide his misogyny well?
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I think I know what you mean about the kids seeming older. That is, they seem like they should know better, and so come off as astonishingly cruel instead of like kids playing pranks that they don't understand. I don't know quite why that is. Maybe it's that in the overall writing they seem sharper, more intelligent and manipulative and cynical than teenagers in dramas written now. Teenagers in today's dramas seem more bumbling, more I-don't-know-who-I-am-oh-woe-is-me. Those kids before thought they knew everything. Which might be more accurate, I don't know.
My high school life hasn't resembled Carrie or 16 Candles. Mine was much more boring.
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LOL-yeah, me too. My life was only like the part so 16 candles where nothing much was happening. Nobody ever paid any money to see my underwear, I can tell you.:-)
Teenagers in today's dramas seem more bumbling, more I-don't-know-who-I-am-oh-woe-is-me. Those kids before thought they knew everything. Which might be more accurate, I don't know.
Yes, that's sort of what it's like. It's almost hard to put my finger on. The characters who think they know who they are in teen movies today are almost always parodies or something, but here everybody was just a very strong character. You could imagine them being 35 as much as being 18. You can't say that about a lot of teenagers in movies today.
Heh. And of course, one of the teens in Carrie is Edie McClurg, and it's hard to ever imagine her even being a teenager--then there she is playing the receptionist in Ferris Beuler's Day Off less than 10 years later!