1. When not seen in digitally candied music-video light, body
appears to have augmented-breast and liposucted-abdomen
indices. Could be angry-lustful-old-man projection onto the
Star-Body.
2. When a 20-year-old Super-Star with the emotional development
of a 12-year-old decides not to make a flossy, sugary Hollywood
teen movie and instead decides to make a Gritty Indie Thing, this
is what you get.
3. The one moment of "genuineness"--as opposed to unaffectedness, naturalness and relaxation, which are all there in
abundance--in the Super-Star Performance comes when her hard
exterior cracks and she bursts into tears. Bursts too quickly, too:
indice of Emotional Needs Long Pent-Up by Driving Type-A
Personality.
4. The woman who plays the aging, blowsy, semi-jowly nymphomaniac on Sex and the City plays the Super-Star's mother.
One must think that this is a cruel joke on the star.
5. Taryn Manning, lyrical Super-Genius Real Actor in the Lili Taylor
and Juliette Lewis modes, steals scenes, and in the end (no
doubt with the permission of Paramount Pictures, MTV Films, and
probably the Super-Star Herself) usurps the entire movie. And yet,
time and time again, the Gritty Indie Girl's character is made to
defer, to literally get up and move into the back seat, so that the
Super-Star's character can, literally, assume the limelight. One
must consider this to be an expression of the Super-Star's Guilt
and Subsequent Anger in Re: the Marginalization of "Real" Music
by Prepackaged Pop Schlock such as the product her handlers
make using her as a marketing tool.
6. The Super-Star's character's Growth-Arc is defined by the
progress of a poem-turned-song called "Not a Girl, Not Yet a
Woman." The Growth-Arc of poem-turned-song is calibrated as
carefully and rigorously as that of "Sympathy for the Devil" in the
Jean-Luc Godard film of the same name. One comes away from
the final version of the poem feeling that its genesis was the
Super-Star's frustration in describing her target demographic in a
meeting with the abovementioned marketing advisers.
7. Pains have been taken to move the Super-Star's presentation
away from the X-treme Diva terrain of Glitter and Mahogany. It is not
altogether clear whether this is an aesthetically or commercially
astute judgment.
8. One comes away from the picture with the Schadenfreude-filled
realization that one has spent its entire running time wondering
about slash fantasizing when the Super-Star will reach her
expiration date and descend into Whitney Mariah Valleys of
Madness.
appears to have augmented-breast and liposucted-abdomen
indices. Could be angry-lustful-old-man projection onto the
Star-Body.
2. When a 20-year-old Super-Star with the emotional development
of a 12-year-old decides not to make a flossy, sugary Hollywood
teen movie and instead decides to make a Gritty Indie Thing, this
is what you get.
3. The one moment of "genuineness"--as opposed to unaffectedness, naturalness and relaxation, which are all there in
abundance--in the Super-Star Performance comes when her hard
exterior cracks and she bursts into tears. Bursts too quickly, too:
indice of Emotional Needs Long Pent-Up by Driving Type-A
Personality.
4. The woman who plays the aging, blowsy, semi-jowly nymphomaniac on Sex and the City plays the Super-Star's mother.
One must think that this is a cruel joke on the star.
5. Taryn Manning, lyrical Super-Genius Real Actor in the Lili Taylor
and Juliette Lewis modes, steals scenes, and in the end (no
doubt with the permission of Paramount Pictures, MTV Films, and
probably the Super-Star Herself) usurps the entire movie. And yet,
time and time again, the Gritty Indie Girl's character is made to
defer, to literally get up and move into the back seat, so that the
Super-Star's character can, literally, assume the limelight. One
must consider this to be an expression of the Super-Star's Guilt
and Subsequent Anger in Re: the Marginalization of "Real" Music
by Prepackaged Pop Schlock such as the product her handlers
make using her as a marketing tool.
6. The Super-Star's character's Growth-Arc is defined by the
progress of a poem-turned-song called "Not a Girl, Not Yet a
Woman." The Growth-Arc of poem-turned-song is calibrated as
carefully and rigorously as that of "Sympathy for the Devil" in the
Jean-Luc Godard film of the same name. One comes away from
the final version of the poem feeling that its genesis was the
Super-Star's frustration in describing her target demographic in a
meeting with the abovementioned marketing advisers.
7. Pains have been taken to move the Super-Star's presentation
away from the X-treme Diva terrain of Glitter and Mahogany. It is not
altogether clear whether this is an aesthetically or commercially
astute judgment.
8. One comes away from the picture with the Schadenfreude-filled
realization that one has spent its entire running time wondering
about slash fantasizing when the Super-Star will reach her
expiration date and descend into Whitney Mariah Valleys of
Madness.