Tag Archives: Hollywood

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Neverlands

When Snow White, Rapunzel & Oz
Meant Much More Than Fairy Tales

Video games may be the modern equivalent of fairy tales. But if child psychologist Bruno Bettelheim was right, those ancient stories about damsels in distress and their rescuing knights are far from having exhausted their appeal. The good old doc should know it.
He survived the Nazis only to fall in disgrace for enhancing his resume and being nasty to his pupils. Alas, the man who taught us about warding off life’s demons, could not handle his own. He suffocated himself to death with a plastic bag wrapped around his head in 1990.
After such a florid intro, though, we’re switching gears to focus on some hardly known facts behind two classics of children’s literature, Rapunzel and Snow White, and a book written a century ago that became a breakthrough movie, the Wizard of Oz.
They all share an underlying common trait: the confusion and hardship typical of impoverished children going through puberty. While predating even the concept of childhood and adolescence, there’s never doubt about what demographics they were catering to.
Behind a veneer of an idealized world to which the young protagonists long to belong and conquer, and a patina of virtue and redemption righting all wrongs, deep down, the stories are suffused with intrigue and betrayal, brutal competition and carnage.

TALES FROM THE DARK AGES
For all the high-def graphics and sensory numbness-inducing FX of video games, and all modern entertainment for that matter, they’re no match to the emotional intensity and masterly manipulation of deep-rooted fears, which are the currency of fairy tales.
All are about lonely children transitioning to adulthood, trapped by conspiring circumstances and on the verge of defeat until the very end, often when their rivals perish. Strife and miserable family bonds are never far from center stage, and neither is the threat of annihilation.
For Bettelheim, beyond their imagery, these tales are loved for offering kids happy outcomes, which they can come up with on their own. Behind the Dark Ages’ ambiance and archaic social settings, (more)
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Read Also:
* Warped Worlds
* Remarkable Apparatus

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Exhibit B

Lucas Sues Creator
of Star Wars Helmets

George Lucas is taking to the U.K. Supreme Court his fight to preserve the rights to the famous stormtrooper helmets, used in the “Star Wars” movie saga. He’s suing British artist Andrew Ainsworth, who created and manufactured the original helmets used in the first films of the series, and who a few years ago, Continue reading →

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Easy Shooter

Auction Block for Warhol’s Mao
with Dennis Hopper’s Bullet Holes

JUST IN: Hopper’s estranged fifth wife, Victoria Duffy Hopper, has succeeded in halting the sale of a significant portion of the actor’s art collection after lodging court papers in California. But the temporary decision affects only part of the auction lot: Warhol’s Mao has already been sold for $302,500, more than 10 times its estimated sale price.

When Dennis Hopper died last May, his best film acting and directing work were far behind him. But his developed taste for photography and painting, if it never matched the success he had on screen, helped him to become a gifted collector.
By the mid 1970s, he’d already acquired several seminal works of contemporary artists, such as the 1972 silk-screen “Mao Zedong”, by one the hottest artists of the time, Andy Warhol. At the same time, Hopper had also acquired a sizable appetite for drugs and alcohol.
The combination of the painting and of his binges proved explosive. And somewhat historical. In one of his rages, Hopper Continue reading →

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Power Cell

Wasps Harness the Sun
Better Than Movie Stars

Oh, no, now the whole Hollywood illuminati will drive their handlers insane to get them one ASAP, so they can show it off just in time for the Oscars. The Oriental Hornet, though, already beat them to the pitch. It turns out they’re the first animal to convert solar power to energy.
Maybe they just got the memo first. Maybe they have better agents, who knows? Scientists at the Tel-Aviv University just found out that the beautiful but feared Vespa Orientalis can trap the light of the sun in their cells and convert it to electricity at a modest rate of .3% percent. It still beats Leonardo di Caprio’s.
Actually, you’d need to have a way bigger percentage of cojones Continue reading →

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Two for the Road

Art & Bernie Take
a Final Bow Together

Their careers never intersected and yet they shared more than just the proximity of their ages and final days, starting with their Jewish heritage and tumultuous early life in Philadelphia, where Arthur Continue reading →