For a moment I considered giving this blog the title ‘We love you, Gordon Brown!’. It was a very brief moment.
A headline is supposed to draw the reader in, make them curious about what you’ve written, not instantly take the sexy out of it. I know, I know. Everyone gives Gordon a hard time. After all, he can’t help that he looks like a Bloodhound with a two-pack-a-day habit. Though, I’m actually blogging to say the old dog done good.
Lucky for this country, the PM is a movie lover, and this morning he popped into London’s BFI Southbank to announce that the government is (after a lot of to and fros) giving £45million to help fund a new National Film Centre that will be situated a stone’s throw from the London Eye.
It’s expected to be built by 2015 and plans are to make it a movie mecca – five digital screens, one of them so big that events like, say, a world premiere or opening night of the London Film Festival would fit comfortably. There are also suggestions to build a big outdoor screen and to show BFI’s large archive of films. It’s a ten-minute walk away from Movie Talk HQ, so you can understand how we’re pretty excited about it. Let’s just hope they can rustle up the additional £100million needed to make this thing reality…
In the meantime, for convenience, I’ll stick to my sofa, which happens to be situated very near my DVD player. I was watching Guillermo Arriaga’s The Burning Plain the other day, when I realised that Kim Basinger sometimes bears a striking resemblance to Rita Hayworth, and if you’ve read News Muse before (of course you have, it’s part of your Friday routine!), you’ll know that Rita’s one of my favourite actresses. And I just wanted to give her a special mention, seeing as it is her birthday tomorrow – were she alive, she’d be 91!
Famous for her role as film noir femme fatale Gilda, the quite shy Hayworth complained that “Every man I knew went to bed with Gilda… and woke up with me.” Maybe there was some truth to that as she married five times and ended up divorcing all five. I’m pretty sure any woman would have found it difficult to live up to the nickname The Love Goddess. She once said: “I never really thought of myself as a sex goddess; I felt I was more a comedian who could dance.” And dance she did, with both Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire (she is cousins with Ginger Rogers, didn’t you know?).
But, yes, her most memorable role was probably Gilda. Proving that (removing) less is more, here’s a clip of the femme fatale’s saucy striptease performance:
Madonna and The White Stripes sang about her and Stephen King wrote the novella Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption, which got turned into another one of my all time fav movies – The Shawshank Redemption, in which Morgan Freeman’s Red says about the very above movie clip: “This is the part I really like, when she does that shit with her hair.” Let’s just say that if I had a large hole in my wall, I’d make an interior design miracle with Rita too.
I again recommend you read Rita Hayworth: If This Was Happiness by Barbara Leaming to understand a bit more about who the very troubled person behind that hopelessly beautiful mask really was.
The lady also once said: “All I wanted was just what everybody else wants, you know, to be loved,” hence the title of this post.