Monday, June 30, 2008

Faster, Pussycat! Blog! Blog!

satana.jpg
With America’s most patriotic holiday coming this week, it seems a fitting time to note my favorite bit of dialogue from the movie Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!

Our heroines — homicidal go-go dancers — drive their cars to a rural gas station and converse about their travels:

GAS STATION ATTENDANT (STARING AT TURA SATANA’S IMPRESSIVE CLEAVAGE): Now that’s what I believe in, seeing America first!

TURA SATANA (STERNLY): You won’t find it down there, Columbus.

I didn’t say it was a great film (though it does seem so perfectly designed for the early-90s retro-nihilist vibe that if it had not existed, Charles Burns and Quentin Tarantino would have had to build a time machine to go back and create it).

And speaking of tough broads in art, here’s a short story by Michele Carlo.  And for a non-tough but busty perspective (don’t blame me — reviewers keep mentioning it, and I’m just trying to come up with a Tura Satana segue), check out this short story by Katherine Taylor.

(And William Huhn also writes good stories.  He’s not a tough broad, though he does live next door to Patty Smyth, who is obviously a tough broad and manages to put up with husband John McEnroe, which must take some backbone.  In largely unrelated but still literary news, I see writer David Lipsky has weighed in in the Responses thread to my blog entry from one week ago, which is cool.)

On another womany note: DON’T FORGET THERE’S NO DEBATE THIS WEEK, but on Tuesday, July 22 (8pm), we’ll have a three-woman panel of egg-sellers at Lolita Bar, talking about how they came to make this interesting reproductive transaction and what it was like.

Unable to join us but originally invited was Jen Dziura, who, being a good feminist, is sometimes wary of framing things in gendered terms and has noted that one risk in using “girl power” terms like, say, “fempreneur” is that it’ll end up teaching people to think of creative activities by women as cute and abnormal instead of just plain human.

She was thus even more annoyed than I was by a mass-e-mail advertisement that said, in part:

Kim Power Stilson, A mom with 4 dogs, 3 kids, 2 birds and a cat & Debbie Cluff, a zany little lady from Pasadena help Momprenuers unlock the mystery to the Internet, the Web and Social Media Tools with Power Strategies Education!

Worst of all — though I can hardly claim to be the final authority on this question — it seems to me they have misspelled “Mompreneur.”  Good to see ladies attempting capitalism, though.  Keeps ’em from dabbling in witchcraft.

9 comments:

Todd Seavey said...

I see that Roger Ebert says John Waters has said that Faster Pussycat is without question the best film ever made and perhaps better than any film that will be made in the future. That may be the highest praise I have ever heard of anything.

Todd Seavey said...

Ah, and Justin Pogue informs me that Tarantino _is_ traveling back in time to create the movie, or rather, is currently rumored to be planning a remake, coincidentally. Right man for the job, but the job doesn’t clearly need doing. Sort of makes me want to leave the culture and find a fresher one, like hearing talk of a _RoboCop_ remake. (And next year brings a brand new Kirk, Spock, and McCoy to theatres, of course, but that almost seems proper and inevitable.)

Todd Seavey said...

Speaking of remakes that make me nervous: _The Prisoner_:

http://www.newsarama.com/tv/080630-prisoner-amc.html

Marc said...

Oooh… RoboCop!

But would Murphy still be a cyborg? It seems like we are too close to real, autonomous robots to mess around with cyborgs.

Is there any way to do a libertarian RoboCop? The original was an anti-capitalist wet dream.

Todd Seavey said...

The best way to make RoboCop more capitalist, I think, would be to get Frank Miller to once more write the sequels — but this time drawing upon his late-90s Rand influences and his post-9/11 turn toward patriotism instead of the Marxist-anarchism of his naive youth, compared to which even the Euro-postmodernism of Verhoeven’s original film was vastly preferable (and not so unlike Miller’s own _Dark Knight Returns_ — for some of us, these things characterized the 80s more than _Pretty in Pink_).

But Miller is completing a _Spirit_ movie and reportedly planning a _300_ sequel (the _Sin City_ sequel, by contrast, reportedly being on hold due to the shocking underperformance of his co-director Robert Rodriguez’s movie done with Tarantino, _Grindhouse_).

Todd Seavey said...

And if all those connections seem surprising, you might also enjoy knowing that _Quantum Leap_ was derived from a discarded time travel element to the original pitch for the terrible sequel series _Galactica 1980_. It’s all connected, man.

Todd Seavey said...

One more remakes note: I take it that movie referred to in the following news item is _not_ a remake of that TV series about veterinarians, unless they’ve really, really altered the plot:

“All Creatures Great and Small” for Sony Pictures and Original Film: The story is set in a world where the animals control the planet and humans are the minority — the survivors live in forts defending themselves from stronger animals…

Marc said...

D’oh! It’s an Al Gore movie:

“Because of people’s inability to quench their thirst for oil and consumption of resources, we basically ruin the planet, and the planet fights back.”

http://www.cinemablend.com/new/Wanted-Screenwriters-Make-Animals-Attack-9329.html

Todd Seavey said...

Well, and that’ll make it the perfect companion piece to Shyamalan’s latest, _The Happening_. (And since he apparently ripped off the plot of _The Village_ from a novel, here’s hoping they copy him scene for scene.)

Better yet: just have everyone watch _Idiocracy_ again, then read some Aristotle or something.