Lisa and Louise Burns were twelve years old when they played the Grady Twins in The Shining. It was the only film appearance for the sisters.
In a June, 2002 issue of JANE magazine, the twins, then 35, recalled running around in the Hedge Maze set, getting lost and forcing crew members to remove panels to let them out. They discussed still owning a pair of the dresses they wore in the film, and Louise recalled, “I got to keep a jar of fake blood. I stored it in the fridge until it congealed.”
Woody Allen (center) and giant marauding breast on the set of Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex, But Were Afraid to Ask (1972, dir. Woody Allen)
My first Woody Allen movie.
Watching Equus. I make great decisions instead of working on my Anthropology project.
I wish I had done a monologue from the play when I took Acting 1 a year ago.
So, I just watched the film Keep The Lights On.
Good, though sad little film. Should have beaten Silver Linings Playbook at the Independent Spirit Awards.
Also, this shot is great.
If you want to know the artistic films that shaped me as a young gay man.
My Own Private Idaho
Total Eclipse
Angels In America
A Single Man
ERWANN: In my bed you can stay,
ISMAËL: In your soft, warm sheets.
ERWANN: But if you want all that, you need to hear —
ISMAËL: Love me less, but love me a long time.
This last scene gets me every single time. I could watch the final song and scene on loop…I just love it, especially the last line, “Love me less, but love me a long time”.
I posted this a couple times on Facebook in months leading up to the Oscars, but never here. But, since Argo won Best Picture and I am bitter about that, it should be posted here.
Instead of keeping its eye on the big picture of revolutionary Iran, the film settles into a retrograde “white Americans in peril” storyline. It recasts those oppressed Iranians as a raging, zombie-like horde, the same dark-faced demons from countless other movies— still a surefire dramatic device for instilling fear in an American audience. After the opening makes a big fuss about how Iranians were victimized for decades, the film marginalizes them from their own story, shunting them into the role of villains. Yet this irony is overshadowed by a larger one: The heroes of the film, the CIA, helped create this mess in the first place. And their triumph is executed through one more ruse at the expense of the ever-dupable Iranians to cap off three decades of deception and manipulation.
Argo makes the Iran hostage crisis, one of the most cataclysmic episodes in U.S. foreign affairs in the last 50 years, a mere backdrop to a silver-lining subplot—one that even Robert Anders, one of the Argo hostages, admitted was a “footnote.” The film thus distorts and belittles an event that transformed U.S. history. Ironically, the larger narrative of the hostage crisis would make for a more compelling movie from both a plot and action standpoint: A great filmmaker could make an amazing sequence of Operation Eagle Claw, a failed rescue mission that resulted in two helicopter crashes, several dead U.S. soldiers, and a subsequent overhaul of U.S. military operations. Imagine the last act of Zero Dark Thirty, but with an unhappy ending.
