LIFE

Marilyn Monroe fascination comes to Netflix with ‘Blonde’

Published

2 years ago

September 26, 2022

Marilyn Monroe has been dead for 60 years, but there is still a kind of madness around her that remains. Just look at the frenzied discourse around “Blonde,” an adaptation of Joyce Carol Oates’ fictional portrait of the Hollywood star that has yet to be seen by the general public.

There was intrigue around its NC-17 rating and the reasons for its long delay in release (it was filmed before the pandemic). There was curiosity about its star, Ana de Armas, and her native Cuban accent slipping through in the trailer. Meanwhile, its director Andrew Dominik, who has been trying to make this film for well over a decade, was calling it a masterpiece.

“Blonde” got a rapturous reception at the Venice Film Festival earlier this month, but reactions from film critics have been divided. Some love Dominik’s treatment. Others have wondered if it is exploitative. The New Yorker even called it, “A grave disservice to the woman it purports to honor.” It is not dissimilar to the responses to Oates’ novel in 2000. Or even the discussion around the much-tamer “ My Week With Marilyn,” which got Michelle Williams an Oscar nomination for her performance. But they all invite questions about our own relationship with Monroe, what we owe her and what we still demand from her.

Dominik, for his part, has read many of the reviews. In some ways, he said, both the positive and negative reactions are indicative of its success. Like it or not, “Blonde,” which arrives on Netflix on Sept. 28, does not want you to feel good about what happened to Monroe.

“The film’s a horror film,” Dominik said earlier this week. “It’s supposed to be an absolute onslaught. It’s a howl of pain. It’s expression of rage.”

“Blonde” takes viewers on a surreal journey through the short life of Norma Jeane Baker, from her childhood with a single mother living with schizophrenia (Julianne Nicholson), to her superficial successes in Hollywood, as Marilyn Monroe. It looks at her marriages to baseball star Joe DiMaggio (Bobby Cannavale) and playwright Arthur Miller (Adrien Brody), her addiction, her mistreatment and assaults, her abortions, her miscarriage and her death, at 36, of a barbiturate overdose.

There are stunning recreations of iconic film moments, from “Gentleman Prefer Blondes” and “The Seven Year Itch,” and classic photos brought to life, but all are done with a twist. A glamourous red carpet turns into a lurid phantasmagoria of gaping, gawking jaws. The subway grate moment is a prelude to domestic abuse. Even a seemingly sweet photo of her and DiMaggio takes on a new meaning.

To Dominik, his film is the opposite of exploitation.

Exploitation is happily performing a song like “Diamonds are a Girl’s Best Friend” with a “wink and a nod,” he said. But, he shrugged, “People like to be offended.”

“The primary relationship in the film is between the viewer and her,” Dominik said. “I’ve never made a film that tells me more about the viewer than this one.”

What it is not, he said, is a commentary on Roe v. Wade, or about something as reductive as “daddy” issues, though Norma Jeane calls both of her husbands that. It’s about an unwanted child and a woman going through the industrial filmmaking process. And the real test for Dominik will come when the global Netflix audience gets to watch it.

It’s a moment a lot of people have been waiting for, but perhaps no one more so than de Armas, who finished work on “Blonde” back in 2019. Her raw and vulnerable performance has been widely praised, even in the more negative reviews.

It was a demanding nine-week shoot after a year of preparation, during which she was also working on other films. Her first day on set was in the actual apartment Norma Jeane lived in with her mother — a nightmare sequence in which she rescues a baby from the dresser drawer that she was kept in as an infant, as the place burns around her. Her second day on the set was her visit to her mother in the mental hospital, where she got to speak as Marilyn for the first time on camera. It was quite a way to break the ice, she said.

Though she’s not an actor who stays in character when the day is over, living with the emotions, the character, and filming in the places Marilyn lived, ate, worked and even died, it was “impossible not to feel heavy and sad,” she said. Even so, she counts “Blonde” as one of the best times she’s ever had on a set.

“I do trust what we did,” de Armas said. “I love this film.”

Everyone around her was stunned by the performance as well. Brody said he left the set his first day feeling like he’d actually worked with Monroe.

“She’s so iconic and it’s such a tall order for someone to interpret,” Brody said. “What she gave to be so vulnerable and so brave? It’s not something to be taken lightly.”

The paradox of Monroe is that no seems capable of honoring her in exactly the right way —at least according to everyone else. To worship her beauty and glamour is to deny her person. To take joy in her comedic skills is to ignore her depths and desire to be a serious actor. To ignore her trauma is naïve, but leaning into it is unpleasant. Though most people seem to agree that it was creepy for Hugh Hefner to boast about buying the crypt next to hers.

But the madness has lived on. This spring even saw two major Marilyn moments, first with Kim Kardashian wearing her crystal-embellished nude gown to the Met Gala, and then a week later when someone paid $195 million for Andy Warhol’s “Shot Sage Blue Marilyn, ” making it the most expensive work by a U.S. artist ever sold at auction.

“She’s a kind of rescue fantasy for a lot of people,” Dominik said. “You see that in some of the negative reactions to the film. It’s like they love Ana and they kind of hate the movie for putting Ana, putting the poor character through what she goes through. But I think that is an expression of the film’s success, in a way.”

He continued: “There’s something very challenging about her as a figure because she is a person who had everything that the media is constantly telling us is desirable. She was famous, beautiful. She had an amazing job. She dated the so-called dudes of her generation. And she killed herself. And so what is everybody running towards? Why are they all running towards that? It challenges our ideas of what constitutes a good life, of the American dream.”

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LIFE

conic Smiths bassist dies aged 59

Published

12 months ago

May 21, 2023

The San Francisco Telegraph

The bassist with legendary English rock band The Smiths, Andy Rourke, has died at the age of 59, the group’s former guitarist Johnny Marr has announced.

“It is with deep sadness that we announce the passing of Andy Rourke after a lengthy illness with pancreatic cancer,” Marr wrote on Twitter on Friday.

“Andy will be remembered as a kind and beautiful soul by those who knew him and as a supremely gifted musician by music fans,” he added.

Mike Joyce, who was drummer for The Smiths, described Rourke as “not only the most talented bass player I’ve ever had the privilege to play with but the sweetest, funniest lad I’ve ever met.” The musical legacy of his former bandmate is “perpetual,” Joyce said in a tweet.

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Rourke was with The Smiths from 1982 to 1987, performing on all four of the band’s studio albums: ‘The Smiths’ (1984), ‘Meat Is Murder’ (1985), ‘The Queen Is Dead’ (1986), and ‘Strangeways, Here We Come’ (1987).

He also had an impressive career after the group split up, playing with Smiths’ frontman Morrissey on his solo projects and with the likes of Sinead O’Connor, The Pretenders, Dolores O’Riordan, Badly Drawn Boy, Killing Joke, and guitarist Aziz Ibrahim.

In 2005, Rourke put together a supergroup called Freebass with fellow bassists Peter Hook, who previously played with New Order and Joy Division, and Gary “Mani” Mounfield of the Stone Roses and Primal Scream. Among other things, he also worked as a DJ on the popular British rock radio station XFM, now known as Radio X.

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Village People demand Trump stop using their music

Published

1 year ago

May 17, 2023

The San Francisco Telegraph

A viral video emerged last week of Donald Trump dancing to a Village People song at his Florida estate

Village People, the disco act best known for 1970s hits like ‘YMCA’ and ‘Macho Man,’ has issued Donald Trump with a cease and desist order to stop using the band’s music at political events without express permission, according to a legal filing. The former US president has frequently played Village People songs at campaign rallies throughout his political career.

Last week, a video emerged online showing Trump dancing to a Village People tribute act during a poolside dinner at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida – leading to the band’s management issuing Trump with a legal request to abstain from using Village People intellectual property at any future events.

“The performance [in the viral video] has, and continues to cause public confusion as to why Village People would engage in such a performance. We did not,” wrote the band’s manager Karen Willis, the wife of singer Victor Willis.

Willis added that Trump’s use of Village People music was previously “tolerated” by the band but that it has decided to issue legal proceedings to prevent further use of its popular songs, for fear that it could be construed as an “endorsement” of Trump’s political ambitions. She also explained that the video had created confusion among fans who mistakenly thought that the real Village People had performed at Trump’s Florida estate.

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Trump’s legal team has issued a withering response to the band’s cease and desist request. Attorney Joe Tacopinca told TMZ on Monday that, “I will only deal with the attorney of the Village People, if they have one, not the wife of one of the members. But they should be thankful that President Trump allowed them to get their name back in the press. I haven’t heard their name in decades. Glad to hear they are still around.”

Village People music, particularly the song ‘Macho Man’, has been a regular soundtrack to Donald Trump’s political rallies in recent years.

Singer Victor Willis indicated in a post on social media two years ago that while Village People music is intended to be “all-inclusive,” its use by Trump has been problematic. “We’d prefer our music be kept out of politics,” he wrote in February 2020. Willis later requested that Trump stop using his band’s music in June 2020, following reports that then-President Trump intended to use the US military to stamp out Black Lives Matter demonstrations across the United States.

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Hollywood star pulls out of hosting awards show amid strike

Published

1 year ago

May 5, 2023

The San Francisco Telegraph

Drew Barrymore is stepping down as host of this year’s MTV Movie & Music Awards, due to be held on Sunday, in solidarity with the ongoing strike by the Writers Guild of America (WGA). The actress has agreed to host the ceremony next year instead, Variety reported.

Although the MTV awards are set to go ahead without a host, Variety said that arrangements for the show are in constant flux as producers are unsure which of the presenters, nominees, and guests will be willing to appear.

Organizers have already scrapped the red carpet as well as interviews that were supposed to take place before the ceremony.

In a statement quoted by Variety, Barrymore said she had “listened to the writers, and in order to truly respect them, I will pivot from hosting the MTV Movie & TV Awards live in solidarity with the strike.”

The actress added that “everything we celebrate and honor about movies and television is born out of their [writers’] creation,” and revealed that she is “choosing to wait” until a solution is reached on fairly compensating writers for their craft.

Although Barrymore will not be present at the live event in Santa Monica, California on Sunday, she is likely to appear in several pre-recorded short films created for the telecast.

Unions representing writers working in Hollywood and beyond officially began a strike on Tuesday. The move comes amid a dispute with major studios such as Paramount and Universal over working conditions and the shift brought about by the rise of streaming services such as Netflix and Amazon.

Hollywood writers go on strike

The WGA has complained that its members are being “devalued” and have received reduced pay despite significantly more movies and TV shows being in production than ever before thanks to streaming.

Aside from increased pay, the WGA has issued a list of demands to the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP), which represents Hollywood’s major studios. Among them is a request for guarantees that scripts would not be generated using Artificial Intelligence, and that writers would not be asked to edit or rewrite screenplays generated by such technology.

The current strike is the first work stoppage in the US entertainment industry in 15 years. The previous writers’ strike in 2007 lasted for 100 days and ultimately cost Hollywood an estimated $2.1 billion.

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