#ReelInfatuation Blogathon Starts Friday!

Silver Screenings

Image: Walking on Clouds

The Reel Infatuation Blogathon starts Friday, and we can’t wait!

This is a blogathon where we dish about our secret (or not-so-secret) screen or book character crushes – past or present. Click HERE for the original announcement and HERE for the roster.

If you, like us, are having trouble picking one fictional character, you can choose two or three!

If you haven’t yet signed up, there’s still time to join the fun. Just grab a banner (below) and let us know your choice.

The blogathon runs this Friday through Sunday (June 8-10). See you there!

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Jessica Rabbit – a very animated sex symbol

The following is my entry in the Reel Infatuation Blogathon, being co-hosted by the blogs Font and Frock and Silver Screenings from June 8-10, 2018. Click on the above banner, and read about bloggers’ crushes on memorable characters from movies, TV shows, and books!

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(WARNING: The following blog entry, while not overly explicit, is as risque and politically incorrect as this blog ever gets. If such subject matter even mildly offends you, turn back now.)

It’s not an original observation to say that Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988) is a landmark in American film animation.

IMHO, the same can be said for the movie’s buxom heroine, Jessica Rabbit.

When my blog was given its first Liebster Award in 2015, I responded by posting several facts about myself, including the following:

A lot of my readers and fellow bloggers are female, so I truly hope this won’t offend you. But I have to confess, I am mesmerized by large breasts. I don’t get it, it’s embarrassing, and I try my best not to stare. But then, Christina Hendricks. Or somebody who dresses like her. And then she’s mortified that I’m wide-eyed over the very appendages that she’s put on display. It’s God’s curse on me.

So you can just imagine the effect that Jessica Rabbit had on me. It was as if some wizard had taken the essence of Jane Russell, Jayne Mansfield, and Adrienne Barbeau, transplanted them into one single human female body, and then injected her with hyper-silicone.

It turns out that I had the right idea, just with different actresses. Gary K. Wolf — who wrote Who Censored Roger Rabbit?, the novel from which the movie was loosely adapted — based Jessica on Red, the curvaceous dancer in Tex Avery’s cartoon Red Hot Riding Hood (1943). Richard Williams, the movie’s animation director, said, “I tried to make her like Rita Hayworth, we took her hair from Veronica Lake, and [live-action director Robert] Zemeckis kept saying, ‘What about the look Lauren Bacall had?’”

Jessica’s “influences.”

Upon the movie’s original release, many party-poopers complained that Jessica was a prime example of male sexism, as she was given outsized physical attributes that amped up the objectification of women. There’s no doubt that Jessica was intended to rev up male moviegoers, but I submit that she has several virtues that make her far more “relatable” than the typical femme fatale.

Jessica is not about being unattainable, a fact laid bare by her choice of spouse — gangly, hyperactive Roger Rabbit. When questioned by detective Eddie Valiant as to what she sees in Roger, she replies, “He makes me laugh.”

Despite her curvaceous appearance, Jessica is innocent at heart. Her most damning extramarital activity is being caught playing patty-cake with a human male. (As Jessica famously described herself, “I’m not bad. I’m just drawn that way.”)

Jessica is far from helpless. When one of the bad-guy weasels reaches into Jessica’s overwhelming cleavage to cop a feel, he is taken aback (and thrown back) when his hand gets caught in a bear trap that Jessica had placed in her decolletage. (Valiant tells Jessica admiringly, “Nice booby trap.”)

Finally, I submit that Jessica does a nice turnabout on “the male gaze” — the feminist theory that women in film are depicted solely as sexual objects for the pleasure of the male viewer. If you believe that Jessica is an example/victim of this, I think it is leavened by, again, her choice of husband. If someone as un-macho as Roger Rabbit can be adored by someone like Jessica, then there’s hope for all American males. Conversely, when a man truly falls in love with a woman, he sees his partner as someone like Jessica, no matter what her physical attributes (or lack of same).

I have but one regret regarding my infatuation with Jessica. Someone once observed that, if a 1930’s moviegoer was stealthy enough, he could sneak onto the Warner Bros. movie lot and actually watch James Cagney or Humphrey Bogart doing their thing…yet that same moviegoer could be invited right up to the camera to see Bugs Bunny, and without the necessary animation, all he would see is a flat, inactive cel. In that sense, Jessica really is unattainable. Imagine being a red-blooded male moviegoer, knowing that, try as you might, you would never be able to shtup Jessica Rabbit.

Less than two weeks until The 4th Annual SEX! (now that I have your attention) BLOGATHON

It’s only a few more days until we call cinematic shenanigans with our 4th Annual SEX! (now that I have your attention) BLOGATHON. There’s still time to enter; we’re looking for blogs about movies that subtly suggest sex rather than blatantly depicting it. Click here for the complete rules and to find out how to enter.

THE PRODUCERS (2005) – I’m a prisoner of love…for Mel Brooks

 

The following is my entry in The Broadway Bound Blogathon, being hosted by Rebecca at her blog Taking Up Room from June 1-3, 2018. Click on the above banner, and read bloggers’ tributes to Broadway-related movies!

There are countless groups who are certain to be offended by Mel Brooks’ musical version of The Producers. There are those who didn’t like Brooks’ initial 1968 film, those who thought his Broadway version was a bad idea, and those who will think the 2005 twice-removed film version is even worse.

A pox on all of them.

I’ve been a Brooks fan since Blazing Saddles. But though Brooks is famous for wallowing in excess and bad taste, his more recent movies were downright benign, as if Brooks had turned into the eccentric uncle who tells risque stories at the dinner table. The musical Producers returns Brooks to full-throttle bad taste, and it is all the more hilarious for it.

You probably know the basic story by now: Loser Broadway producer Max Bialystock (Nathan Lane) and his meek accountant Leo Bloom (Matthew Broderick) scheme to produce the worst show ever, so that it will close in one night and they can keep the investors’ money. They choose to produce “Springtime for Hitler,” written by an unrepentant Nazi (Will Ferrell). And to treat themselves, they hire Ulla (Uma Thurman), a beautiful but ESOL-impaired Swedish secretary.

If you liked Brooks’ 1968 version, you can regard this one as The Producers on steroids, and that’s mostly a compliment. People who seemed like one-joke numbers in the original — Ulla, the Nazi — get to blossom here. Who knew that Uma Thurman and Will Ferrell could sing and dance so well? (As for me, this is the first Ferrell movie performance I’ve actually enjoyed.)

And that’s another of the movie’s surprises: Satiric or not, it’s presented as an honest-to-gosh musical, as if Guys and Dolls had collided with the scatological Brooks. Some of the numbers are straightforward, others are slightly wacko (the tap-dancing ladies with walkers are one for the ages), but they’re all done with old-style panache. For that, kudos to Susan Stroman, who directed the Broadway version as well as this one.

People will complain that it’s all too over-the-top. Of course, any of Brooks’ best work is. They’ll complain that Lane and Broderick are not Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder (of the original version). No, they’re not — they’re Lane and Broderick, and they do just fine as such.

Best of all is Brooks’ relentless effort to score laughs, big and small. It’s been a long while since a moviemaker worked so hard for his comedy, and an even longer while since I’ve laughed until I cried. It was worth the wait.