"There are reasons why this film is obscure. It is, in the most charitable possible evaluation, a mess: Bowie has described it as "my 32 Elvis films rolled into one." And yet life on that ever-dwindling island of not-on-region-one DVD films is a harsh fate for any film and particularly for this one, which is at least as interesting as its cast suggests and a good deal more. You don't need to dig out the VHS player to watch Mick Jagger run an agency of gigolos in The Man From Elysian Fields—you shouldn't have to do so to watch Bowie play one. " David Bowie's Lost 70s-era Weimar Berlin Movie: Just a Gigalo.
posted by The Whelk on Feb 2, 2013 - 17 comments

The smell of Scarlet Johansson is art.[slyt]
posted by geos on Mar 29, 2009 - 114 comments

“The thing about the Kraut and me is that we have been in love since 1934, when we first met on the Île de France, but we’ve never been to bed. Amazing but true. Victims of unsynchronized passion.” Author Ernest Hemingway and actress Marlene Dietrich met while traveling across the Atlantic. Their friendship lasted until the Nobel Prize-winning author's death in 1961. In 2003, the JFK library received a donation from Marlene Dietrich's daughter of 30 letters, cards, and other documents that had been written to her mother by the author. Hemingway's estate had already donated 31 letters from Dietrich. These letters have now been unsealed and are set to go on view.
posted by miss lynnster on Mar 29, 2007 - 24 comments

The Garden of Allah, at times, does not reflect the first images that come to mind. It is the title of an amazing 1904 Robert Smythe Hichens book that spawned not one, or two, but three movies, including a 1936 Marlene Dietrich classic; and inspired a 1918 Maxfield Parrish painting. In a seemingly unrelated coincidence a famous contemporary Hollywood hangout spot was also called The Garden of Allah; razing of which prompted Joni Mitchell to sing: "They paved paradise and put up a parking lot." [Gossip] Journalist Sheilah Graham wrote a book on this Hollywood landmark where once her love interest F. Scott Fitzgerald lived. I don't think Don Henley drew from any of these two for one of the two original songs in his 1995 Actual Miles album or its controvertial video.
[ In order: I heard the Joni Mitchell song, without knowing of its inspiration, and then in the span of a few months saw the replica of the Hollywood landmark and came in contact with the original Parrish painting. I eventually read the Hichens book. I have yet to see the movies or read the Graham book.]

posted by tamim on Jun 21, 2002 - 12 comments