Clip joint: The monarchy
If you’re a producer, there are certain things you can safely budget into your film - a picnic scene, a nifty helicopter shot, perhaps, Bruce Willis’ singing - knowing that you’re not going to break the bank. If at any point, your script says something like “enter THE KING, in infinite splendour, accompanied by DEAFENING FANFARE”, you might want to start worrying.
Not only is the costumes department going to have to be on quarter-rations to stump up the cash for all the bling, but you’re going to put the down-payment on a flagship actor with authority stamped across their forehead. (Or you could just CGI everything in, like this week’s Mongol.)
5) There is also a fine line of monarchical cameos: a chance for the high-calibre thesp of the day to blaze in, grab the paycheque and split while the divine mandate’s good. Sean Connery shows how it’s done, as Richard I (9mins 09secs), at the end of Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves.
Thanks to everyone who fearlessly turned themselves inside-out for last week’s look at the body on film. Here are our freaky bits:
1) Superbly produced, genuinely “genuinely disturbing” and funny, Chris Cunningham’s Rubber Johnny peers dimly at the eerie biological perversions of a secret midnight raver.
2) Brian Dennehy’s bodily woes somehow get projected onto the Roman cityscape, thanks to “Mr Corporeality”, Peter Greenaway, in 1987’s The Belly of an Architect.
3) Surprisingly, Almodóvar’s name was touted repeatedly as a flesh-fixated auteur to rival David Cronenberg - and in a more celebratory vein. Apparently the gist of this advert from 1980’s Pepi, Luci, Bom is the young lady is wearing special underwear that reacts to farts by creating perfume (maybe Pedro’s oeuvre has to be reappraised in the light of Benny Hill)…
4) Fatal Attraction meets American Pie meets Cronenberg meets Charles Burn’s Black Hole: there was quite a lot of excited (under-skirt) chatter about new sex-horror flick Teeth.
Tags: dennehy, elizabeth