The Screengrab : mariel hemingway

Jailbait Cinema: 16 Films That Make Us Nervous (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 22 May 2008 20:00:00 GMT

If we all hit puberty overnight on our 21st birthdays, American life would be a helluva lot less complicated. But, as the recent Miley Cyrus “back-gate” scandal revealed, teenage sexuality is a topic that America doesn’t want to think about, even as it just can't seem to stop thinking about it.

On the one hand, most of us had (or at least thought about) sex in high school...on the other hand, once we’re adults, we’re all supposed to conveniently forget our memories and fantasies of adolescent lust. On the one hand, sex education is viewed as promoting underage promiscuity...but on the other hand, abstinence-only education tends to lead to a lot of unwanted pregnancy, since teenagers somehow figure out how to have sex even without classroom lectures about condoms. On the one hand, innocent teachers, day care workers, 19-year-olds with 17-year-old girlfriends and that 6-year-old boy who smacked a female classmate on the butt have all been branded for life as sexual offenders based on false or flimsy charges in hysterical witch hunts to “protect the children” at all costs...on the other hand, research indicates 20-25% of girls and 5-15% of boys in the U.S. experience some form of molestation at the hands of adults, the Catholic Church ignored its own institutional abuse scandals and the international sex trade in young flesh is thriving.

Clearly, we’re a little conflicted about the whole sex thing. Sure, we’re all shocked and disgusted by those creeps on To Catch A Predator...but somebody out there is watching Gossip Girl, sneaking peeks at Barely Legal magazine, lusting after Zac Efron and buying sexy cheerleader outfits from the Frederick's of Hollywood catalogue...and it’s not all just teens and predators. In fact, if we here at the Screengrab didn’t know better, we’d almost think Americans fetishize taboos instead of just being honest about them, leading to some pretty screwy behavior...AND the following list of films that reside in that dangerous grey area between sexual initiation and exploitation.

LOLITA (1962 & 1997)

Of course, no list of jailbait cinema would be complete without the grandmother of them all, or this previous Screengrab post on the screen adaptations of Nabokov's novel.

TAXI DRIVER (1976)

The best joke in Martin Scorsese’s masterful meditation on violence and alienation is when Robert De Niro’s Travis Bickle is turned into a hero for ‘rescuing’ Jodie Foster’s teenage prostitute by gunning down her pimps and johns; the best joke outside Taxi Driver is that a lot of critics actually believed Scorsese was being sincere in his depiction of the event. More than one film writer, including a few who should have know better, saw in the movie’s chaotic ending an endorsement of vigilantism, a baffling interpretation that came back to haunt Scorsese – who clearly couldn’t have been more taken aback by this turn of events – when realities like the assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan and the saga of subway shooter Bernard Goetz impinged on the fantasy of his film. The notion that Bickle is any kind of a hero is subverted at every turn: his diary is filled with racism and paranoia, his targeting of lowlifes and criminals only happens when he’s frustrated in his attempt to assassinate a politician; ordinary people can’t spend more than a few minutes in his presence without thinking he’s crazy; and even his targeting of Iris’ pimp (as with his targeting of presidential candidate Charles Palatine) is motivated as much by sexual jealousy as it is any kind of desire for justice. Travis is rightly appalled by the menu of sexual acts Iris will perform when read to him by the pimp Sport, and he does seem to have some genuine concern for her well-being, but he’s as oblivious to his own sexual desire for her as he is the impropriety of taking a date to a porno theater. Iris herself treats Bickle like he’s from another planet, and the film’s crowning irony comes at the end, when Travis, a marginalized psychotic only saved from suicide by a redemptive bloodbath and only saved from being a spree killer by his fortuitous choice of victim, receives a letter from Iris’ parents, filled with gratitude for having saved their daughter. It’s certain that if Travis ever took up the Steensmas’ invitation to visit them on their farm, they’d peg him for a maniac within seconds, but it’s the intricate chain of happenstance that turns a maniac into a hero which forms part of the genius of Taxi Driver – and totally upends Travis and Iris’ ‘relationship’ in a way no other jailbait movie has managed.

MANHATTAN (1979)

Woody Allen’s lovely, funny Manhattan is to movies about jailbait-chasing creeps what Citizen Kane is to, er, movies not about jailbait-chasing creeps. Mariel Hemingway earned an Oscar nomination for her performance as Tracy, the high school paramour of Woody’s Isaac Davis, and the Wood-Man himself got a nod from the Academy for his light, adept screenplay. So successful was Manhattan as a breezy, skillful romantic comedy that hardly anyone got creeped out by the fact that Woody’s character was technically committing statutory rape; when he explained “She's 17. I'm 42 and she's 17. I'm older than her father; can you believe that? I'm dating a girl wherein I can beat up her father”, he wasn’t being grammatical, but he was at least being really funny and self-deprecating. Those were the qualities that let us overcome our moral compunctions about what was really happening in the movie, and ignore the fact that, when Isaac tries to convince Tracy not to go away for six months to act with a theater group, he’s actually trying to talk her out of leaving him just long enough to be legal when she comes back. It was all very amusing, and even redeeming when he makes the ‘mature’ decision to start seeing Diane Keaton’s Mary Wilkie instead. Of course, all good things must come to an end, and the plot of Manhattan, one of the few times a Hollywood movie allowed us to not be utterly skeezed out by a middle-aged man jumping into the sack with a 17-year-old, took on a whole different dimension when the Soon-Yi Previn scandal broke. The prospect of a real-life Woody, then in his mid-50s, carrying on an illicit affair with a girl barely in her 20s was, somehow, much less appealing and light than a fictional Woody carrying on with a teenage girl, and all the worse that he was still married and the girl was his adopted daughter. For moviegoers, the worst thing about the scandal is that it’s made Manhattan almost impossible to watch without feeling an edge of ickiness it hadn’t previously possessed.

GHOST WORLD (2001)

Jailbait all-star Thora Birch’s performance as Enid Coleslaw in Ghost World is well-played on a number of levels: as we showed in our Girl Geeks list a few weeks back, she appealed to audiences (especially the, uh, male members thereof) because of her intelligence, hipness, cynicism and what seemed to be a wisdom beyond her years. But the other edge of the blade was the fact that for all her toughness and sophistication, she was still a high school girl. She was vulnerable and emotionally fragile and bound to get herself into situations she couldn’t handle. When she first encounters Steve Buscemi’s sad-sack loser Seymour, she toys with him the way she does her bewildered peer Josh; but when she gets to know him, she discovers that he’s as bitter, resentful, and out of step with the mainstream world as she is. They begin to develop a deep friendship based on the things they mutually hate (hey, there are worse things on which to base a relationship), but the astonishing thing about the way things develop between Enid and Seymour is that it’s an almost total inversion of the normal jailbait romance. Almost from the beginning, we sense that somehow, the two are going to end up in bed together, but unlike in most such movies, where no matter how much the writers try to pretty it up with the language of love, it’s still a predatorial relationship where the man has all the power, in Ghost World, we feel just as sorry for Seymour as we do for Enid. They’re both out of their depth, and as much as we like them both and are glad they’ve found each other, we know it can only end in disaster and we almost beg them not to hook up. When they do, we can tell it’s the beginning of the end for Seymour – and sure enough, he disappears from the film soon after, leaving Enid more vulnerable than she’s ever been. Because of this sense of sadness and loss, it’s one of the truest portrayals of such relationships ever put on film.

INNOCENCE (2004)

One of the principal allures of cinema has always been the way it affords its audience a chance to peek in on activities that would normally go unseen. However, this sort of voyeurism can occasionally feel like a curse when it confronts people with images they aren’t comfortable seeing. So it is with Innocence, a strange yet somehow magical film about a remote boarding school for young girls. Sequestered from the world, the girls are free to live and play without a single male gaze being cast upon them, which makes for the movie’s most fascinating conundrum- by showing us this hidden world founded upon the girls not being seen, director Lucile Hadzihalilovic forces us to deal with the question of why we’re so uncomfortable seeing them this way. Hadzihalilovic (wife of Irreversible director Gaspar Noé) doesn’t shy away from some potentially controversial images- a group of prepubescent girls swimming, a bathing teenager staring at her still-developing nude body in the mirror- which played a large part in the film being dismissed by many critics as fodder for the raincoat crowd. Yet Hadzihalilovic knows exactly what she’s doing, and this becomes obvious in the film’s final reel when we discover that the girls’ dance lessons are designed to train them for nightly performances the school puts on for shadowy male benefactors. That this revelation coincides with the beginning of the girls’ sexual development is deliberate, as Hadzihalilovic suddenly re-introduces men back into the lives of the girls just at the time they would begin paying them serious attention. With this final twist of the knife, Innocence asks whether the loss of the girls’ innocence is merely part of nature, or if others force it upon them, and Hadzihalilovic wisely leaves it for us to decide.

THE PROFESSIONAL (1994)

Luc Besson's violent fantasy about a hit man (Jean Reno) who takes in an orphaned twelve-year-old (Natalie Portman) and tutors her in the art of murder may go farther than any other commercial Hollywood movie in blatantly eroticizing a preteen girl. Other actresses not much older than Portman was here have played girls who aroused inappropriate feelings in older men; Portman, with her perfect little features set off by a Louise Brooks haircut and something around her neck that makes her look gift-wrapped, is treated as an object, or a pet, who first begs to be taken in by Leon the professional, and then (in a scene that was first cut from the American prints) begs him to make love to her. How did Besson get away with this? Partly by casting Jean Reno, who's a whiz at holding the camera while signaling that his pilot light has long since gone out, so you can feel confident that he'll stoically decline her entreaties. (Before she showed up, his best friend was a plant.) And partly by the black humor scenes of Leon teaching his little soul mate to become a killer, so that if you object to the film on moral grounds, you're liable to become dizzy from not being able to decide where to begin. It seems a little odd to complain about the unrequited, consensual pedophilia if you have no problems with the violence, but complaining about the violence just makes you feel like a square. The Professional is a truly outrageous movie, but it's extremely (and self-protectively) calculated in its outrageousness.

For more jailbait: Part Two, Part Three

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce, Paul Clark, Phil Nugent

Long Live the New Flesh!: Top 12 Real Bodily Transformations on Film, Part 1

Peter Smith — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 21:00:00 GMT

There was a bit of brouhaha recently over Ryan Gosling's getting fired from Peter Jackson's The Lovely Bones for having packed on too much weight. The story has since been denied, so we don't know whom to believe in that dispute. It may have been apocryphal, but the incident did get us thinking about some of the more notable bodily transformations we've seen on film. And we're talking real transformations here. (Sorry, Nicole Kidman's fake nose in The Hours and John Hurt's fake face in Elephant Man and Eddie Murphy's whole body in like every other movie.) We're talking De Niro eating his way through Italy to plump up for Raging Bull. We're talking Christian Bale starving himself silly for The Machinist. We're talking about actors so devoted to their craft (and, in at least one case, so utterly stupid) as to commit their bodies to real, physical changes for a part. Here are the Top 12 Real Bodily Transformations on Film.

ROBERT DENIRO in RAGING BULL (1980)

When Robert DeNiro won an Academy Award for Best Actor in his role as tortured prizefighter Jake LaMotta in Martin Scorsese's brilliant Raging Bull, he found that after the ceremony, nobody wanted to talk about it. Everybody was far more interested in discussing his role as would-be political assassin Travis Bickle in 1976's Taxi Driver — a role which allegedly inspired the actual assassination attempt of then-President Ronald Reagan by John Hinckley only days before. Now that things have lightened up a bit, and DeNiro isn't distracting everybody by making good movies anymore, his role as LaMotta has become the textbook case for total character immersion. To play the young, lean LaMotta, DeNiro worked his then-slender physique into even better condition, going through the actual workout regimen of a prizefighter (he even entered, and won, a handful of amateur bouts) and honing his body into a whipcord-thin, muscle-rippled wonder. Then, to play the older, decaying LaMotta, he put back all the weight and more, gaining a stunning sixty pounds and utterly transforming himself into a doughy blob of a man whose muscle had all collapsed into fat. There were many more sacrifices, mental and physical, made for Raging Bull: DeNiro really did bash his head into that concrete wall, and Joe Pesci broke a rib during an unsupervised fistfight. But it's the lightning-fast loss and gain of weight that's still remembered today, and which rang out like a challenge to other actors — one that would soon be answered.

VINCENT D'ONOFRIO in FULL METAL JACKET (1987)

Stanley Kubrick's Vietnam-War epic still has a very mixed reputation. While it's no longer widely considered a failure, most critics still maintain that it's a mushy, aimless middle held together by an incredibly strong beginning and end. The anchor of the opening sequence, a brutal story of Marine Corps basic training, is the conflict between the relentless, abusive Sgt. Hartman (R. Lee Ermey) and the slow, heavy recruit Pvt. Pyle (Vincent D'Onofrio). Both actors were appearing in their first major roles, but while Ermey had the distinct advantage of essentially playing himself, D'Onofrio transformed himself both psychologically and physically, from an urbane, gentle Brooklynite to a dull-witted, marginally psychotic southerner who needed only the right stimulus to be pushed over the edge. The fact that D'Onofrio broke Robert DeNiro's Raging Bull record by gaining seventy pounds to play Pyle sounds more impressive than it actually is — seventy pounds on his hulking, six-foot-four-inch frame wears a lot less visibly than does sixty pounds on DeNiro's much smaller 5'9" physique. Indeed, it's a testament to DeNiro's then-superhuman abilities that he managed to go through the entire cycle of transformation in half the time it took D'Onofrio, who needed a year and a half to gain, and then lose, the seventy pounds. But it's still an amazing accomplishment, one that helped yield the perfect body for one of the most memorable characters in the annals of war films.

LINDA HAMILTON in TERMINATOR 2 (1991)

To really appreciate Linda Hamilton's transformation from Sarah Connor in T1 to Sarah Connor in T2, you have to step back and remember the '80s. Sure, these days, when G. Stef has a one year old and a six-pack, muscles are practically de rigeur. But the '80s were the era of the twenty-minute workout: aerobics, jogging and jazzercize were the norm. Jane Fonda was the model of female fitness, and bouncing was a way of life. In T1, Linda Hamilton played a normal looking waitress with nice big eighties hair. Flash forward seven years to T2. To play Sarah Connor, the institutionalized warrior with Cassandra-like prophecies, Hamilton strength-trained till she sculpted her body into peak form. This was a new shape for a female movie star — muscles and sinews and veins, oh my! She was strong, agile, fast and fearless. And hot. She quickly re-set the standard for the female physique; magazine articles told women how to get a Sarah Connor-like body for summer. Did she pave the way for a rash of muscled heroines in leading roles on the big screen? Not quite — but she did her part. And her transformation was iconic enough to give Sarah Connor (the character) her own show in January '08 — sixteen years after Linda Hamilton shocked Hollywood with her abs and buns and everything else of steel.

MARIEL HEMINGWAY in STAR 80 (1983)

After her acclaimed performances in Manhattan and Personal Best, Mariel Hemingway was one of Hollywood's hottest young actresses. But the slender, girlish Hemingway would've been few people's ideal choice for the role of Dorothy Stratten, the ill-fated 1980 Playmate of the Year, in Bob Fosse's final directorial effort. All that changed when she received breast implants, which increased her cup size from an A to a C, the same size as Stratten's all-natural assets. Hemingway has insisted that her enlargement surgery has nothing to do with the role, but whether she did or not, it certainly made her more believable in the role. Hemingway gave one of her best performances as Stratten, but the film was largely reviled by critics and ignored by audiences, and her once-promising career faltered. Oh, Mariel — don't you know that you need to make yourself LESS alluring if you want Hollywood to love you? Star 80 has experienced a small critical resuscitation in recent years, but Hemingway, despite working steadily in the intervening decades, never managed to live up to the potential many had forecast for her. Nowadays, she's arguably as well-known for her yoga and self-help books as she is for her acting. A strange footnote in this story is the fate of her implants themselves. Following FDA warnings about silicone implants, Hemingway had hers replaced by noticeably smaller saline ones in 1993. In 2001, after one of the saline bags ruptured, they were removed altogether.

MICHAEL CAINE in EDUCATING RITA (1983)

Promoting this movie, in which he plays a middle-aged-going-on-elderly literary professor, Caine went on The Tonight Show and lamented that he had been forced to pack on the extra pounds and grow a beard for the role because it demanded that he look "unattractive." It says something about Caine's standing as an authoritative embodiment of manly cool that this remark was enough to inspire a national newspaper columnist to publish a crestfallen demand that he apologize to all bearded males. By De Niro standards, Caine's weight gain may not qualify as a jaw-dropping transformation, but because of the way Caine uses his physical equipment as an actor, it's actually one of the most effective ever caught on film. The professor is a drunk and a burnout who uses his education to keep the world at bay, and Caine uses his own flesh and hair as a metaphor for how emotionally armored he is against letting in anyone who might ultimately cause him pain. You may not realize just how effective a device it is until the final scene, after Rita (Julie Walters), the ambitious Liverpool hairdresser with whom he's bonded and who's now about to disappear from his life, forces him to let her give him a haircut and tame his unruly face fuzz. When she's done, the professor no longer looks the same, but because of the actor's deep immersion inside the character, he doesn't look quite like Michael Caine, either.

— Pazit Cahlon, Paul Clark, Bilge Ebiri, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce, Scott Renshaw