Jennifer Lawrence

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm2225369/?ref_=nv_sr_1

I’m not sure why.  Maybe I’ve watched too many sci-fi movies that wanted to be Star Wars and make huge money on limited budgets but I always feel like there isn’t much interest in bringing in talented actors or actresses to play these roles.  Getting Patrick Stewart to play Professor X seemed so impossible in the pre-2000 world that I lived in.  Comic books were not mainstream and the idea that major actors would want to play these roles seemed like a pipe dream.  Superman and Batman seemed the exception to the rule just because they were so iconic that they had jumped over to the silver screen and be half-heartedly accepted.

Then Blade came out and showed that movies based on Marvel comic books could make money.  Suddenly, Fox announced that they were doing an X-Men movie and filled it with a mix of established talent and unknown actors.  After they ran into the ground after three movies, they rebooted the franchise with a prequel.  Getting James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender was spectacular and awesome but the best casting may have been getting Jennifer Lawrence to play Mystique.  Jennifer Lawrence was just coming off being nominated for an academy award for “Winter’s Bone” but was still unknown to most of the movie audience.  That did not last long though as “X-Men: First Class” and then especially “Hunger Games” shot her into the spotlight and the top of the entertainment hot list.  Since then, she has done a great job switching between the two huge franchises and doing quality Oscar-nominated work for “Silver Linings Playbook” and “American Hustle”

One has to wonder what will happen when Hunger Games ends this year and X-Men: Apocalypse comes out next year.  I don’t know how many X-Men movies she is signed to and whether or not she would keep doing them or leave to do more Oscar-bait films.

Evanna Lynch

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm2121541/

Sometimes you don’t know something is missing until it shows up.  From the first time Luna Lovegood shows up in the Harry Potter series, she is a breath of fresh air.  The Harry Potter series was expanding from the “Power Trio” to “Dumbledore’s Army”.  Luna shows up as the reverse Hermione.  If Hermione is logic, Luna is fantasy.  She is crazy but in a completely awesome way.  Because of the love for the character, people were nervous about who would play her in the films.

Their fears were quickly put to rest though.  Evanna Lynch was Luna Lovegood in the flesh.  She came in to audition for the role of Luna with no Hollywood acting experience and yet impressed the producers with her knowledge and imitation of the character.  She wore her own radish earrings that she had created and won everyone over including J.K. Rowling.  She is the ultimate ascended fangirl.

Danielle Sharp

 

I know.  I haven’t done anything on the blog for 3 years.  It’s weird.  I’m pretty sure that Lost killed the blog.  I could either write for the blog or binge-watch the show.  And you see what won out.  And after six seasons of it, Lost ended in a way that made me happy for the characters but still be frustrated with the fact that there are still a ton of things I wished they had explained but they didn’t.  And then other boring things happened and blah, blah, blah.

I don't have any lofty reasons for this one.  She's not an actress and she hasn't starred in a film that meant a lot to me.  She's a British model that I think looks absolutely stunning.  In a modeling world of overly-tanned models, she has pale skin which is stunning especially when countered with dark hair and makeup that really sticks out.  Or she dyes her hair blonde when matched with her really dark make-up which still looks amazing.

I’m not sure why she has really caught my attention this week.  Hollywood and the internet is full of attractive women.  Sex sells and there are a lot of things that are trying to catch your attention with sexy women.  They all show lots of skin and it becomes hard to distinguish between them.  It’s almost a form of white noise.  You look through the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue and look at all the pictures but do any of their names or pictures stand out to you in the end.  You forget them as soon as you finish looking at them because you are on to looking at something else.

I think it’s that just beneath the sexiness is sweetness.  Looking at pictures of her where she is just being normal, she just looks like the sweet innocent girl next door.  It’s such a great dichotomy that it really works for her.

 

 

Tribute to the bad girls

Anna Paquin

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001593/

When Blade came out and proved that a superhero movie not named Batman or Superman could make money, it opened the floodgates of the movie industry to want to try to secure properties that they could adapt into money making films. One of the more interesting things that occurred out of this was that the studios have done a great job of getting real talent to fill the roles of the characters. Everyone has done a dream casting where you cast movie stars as your favorite characters but it never really seemed possible. Why would real actors do these fantasy films?

When you look at the casting of the X-Men, the big pickups are the acquisition of Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellan. They give the films a certain amount of gravitas by signing on. Perhaps though, a pickup that was deliberately down-played was Anna Paquin. She was an Oscar-winning actress for her role in “The Piano”. I always thought it was odd that the pre-marketing blitz didn’t play her up more but I think they were holding it back in order to hide how important she would be to the plot. (It also could be because pointing out acting talent necessarily doesn’t get people to go see action movies.) Unfortunately for her and Rogue, Hugh Jackman as Wolverine ended up being the huge thing coming out the movie and the next two films primarily focus on him to the detriment of everyone else in the film. And then X-Men 3 killed the franchise and Wolverine has gone off to star in his own films.

Anna has gone on to become a huge TV star though with the success of “True Blood” which is capitalizing on the current vampire craze. Although I don’t watch the show, it’s good to see her having success.

Movies I've watched her in: Fly Away Home; She's All That; X-Men 1-3; Joan of Arc; Trick 'r Treat

Saturday morning cartoons - Daphne Blake

If there is one consistent for the past 40 years, it’s that you can turn on TV and find a Scooby-Doo show somewhere. For a show that has the same plot episode after episode, it has a huge appeal and show-biz legs. As great as Scooby and Shaggy were, I always remember thinking that the show didn’t focus enough on Daphne. Scooby and Shaggy got into trouble, ate and ran away from monsters. Fred and Velma solved the case. Daphne was the fanservice character. She seemed like a girl who would have been a cheerleader in high school. She was dressed in purple and pink while Velma was dressed in an unattractive orange. And she taught us all how sexy nylons could be. I can’t really remember any other cartoon character who wore nylons other than her. (They probably were. I just don’t remember.)
Her portrayal wasn’t always the best though as she was constantly getting captured or falling into a trap. They even called her “Danger-Prone” Daphne on the show. Later on the one the shows, Fred and Velma left and Daphne solved the cases.

Christina Applegate

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000775/

One of the mainstays of the 90’s was “Married with Children”. It was a classic deconstruction of the TV of the 40’s and 50’s with its perfect families. The dysfunctional family provided for us the perfect representation of the ‘dumb blonde’ though. Kelly Bundy was ahead of her time for TV since today’s landscape is full of dumb attention-seeking characters but those are reality-TV stars just being themselves.
There is something of a tragedy with Christina Applegate in that she suffered from breast cancer and has had a double mastectomy. For a woman whose body was such a focus for so many years playing the ‘Ms. Fanservice’ character on “Married with Children”, it just seems like bitter irony.

Movies I've watched her in: Don't Tell Mom the Babysitter's Dead; Mars Attacks!; Married with Children; Hall Pass