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A Whiter Shade of Guile - Joe Queenan writes about the whole white-people-save-black-people-from-themselves movies, and in a really funny way. "If there is anything black people the world over have learned from Hollywood - and there isn't a whole lot - it's that no matter how bleak the situation seems, they can always rely on some resourceful, charismatic and, in some instances, shapely white person to bail them out."
It's been a long time since I've read Queenan, who was snark-incarnate before "snark" became the most overused word on the Internet. I remember him because he used to write for Movieline - the well-written, funny, honest magazine before it got bought out and turned into a worse version of Premiere. Before it got bought out, Movieline was (in)famous for its annual sex issues, and the Jennifer Lopez interview where she insulted almost everyone in Hollywood before she broke out.
Dammit, now I'm on a total nostalgia trip. Salon did a short profile of the magazine some years back. Some of my other favorite writers from that era of magazine-goodness were Stephen Rebello - see interview with Steven Soderbergh, and Martha Frankel - see interview with Christopher Walken, who I also remembered for her interview of Leonardo DiCaprio before he hit it big, and for her rant about how Hollywood portrays pregnancy in movies. I can't find that article, but I remember her revealing that she and her best friend started taking birth control pills before they even really knew what sex was because they were so freaked out by the consequences of Hollywood-depicted sex. There's one part where she describes a movie where the protagonist has to decide whether to save the baby, which means the mother will die, or save the mother and the baby will die and the lead of course decides to save the baby because killing the baby would be a sin and she writes something like "These are my choices? No thanks!"
And there was also Edward Margulies, the former editor, who also co-wrote a feature with Stephen Rebello called "Bad Movies We Love".
Good stuff.
It's been a long time since I've read Queenan, who was snark-incarnate before "snark" became the most overused word on the Internet. I remember him because he used to write for Movieline - the well-written, funny, honest magazine before it got bought out and turned into a worse version of Premiere. Before it got bought out, Movieline was (in)famous for its annual sex issues, and the Jennifer Lopez interview where she insulted almost everyone in Hollywood before she broke out.
Dammit, now I'm on a total nostalgia trip. Salon did a short profile of the magazine some years back. Some of my other favorite writers from that era of magazine-goodness were Stephen Rebello - see interview with Steven Soderbergh, and Martha Frankel - see interview with Christopher Walken, who I also remembered for her interview of Leonardo DiCaprio before he hit it big, and for her rant about how Hollywood portrays pregnancy in movies. I can't find that article, but I remember her revealing that she and her best friend started taking birth control pills before they even really knew what sex was because they were so freaked out by the consequences of Hollywood-depicted sex. There's one part where she describes a movie where the protagonist has to decide whether to save the baby, which means the mother will die, or save the mother and the baby will die and the lead of course decides to save the baby because killing the baby would be a sin and she writes something like "These are my choices? No thanks!"
And there was also Edward Margulies, the former editor, who also co-wrote a feature with Stephen Rebello called "Bad Movies We Love".
Good stuff.
