This blog will present news items about the motion picture business, with emphasis on lower budget, independent film in most cases. Some reviews or commentaries on specific films, with emphasis on significance (artistic or political) or comparison, are presented. Note: No one pays me for these reviews; they are not "endorsements"! Starting in May 2016, many of the reviews for new feature films have been done on a hosted Wordpress site, and this blog now mostly does shorts and older films.
Since the 1990s I have been very involved with fighting the military "don't ask don't tell" policy for gays in the military, and with First Amendment issues. Best contact is 571-334-6107 (legitimate calls; messages can be left; if not picked up retry; I don't answer when driving) Three other url's: doaskdotell.com, billboushka.com johnwboushka.com Links to my URLs are provided for legitimate content and user navigation purposes only.
My legal name is "John William Boushka" or "John W. Boushka"; my parents gave me the nickname of "Bill" based on my middle name, and this is how I am generally greeted. This is also the name for my book authorship. On the Web, you can find me as both "Bill Boushka" and "John W. Boushka"; this has been the case since the late 1990s. Sometimes I can be located as "John Boushka" without the "W." That's the identity my parents dealt me in 1943!
"The 40-Year-Old Virgin": an irreverent satire that a decade later seems to have hidden "political" significance
I had done a big writeup on this comedy on my legacy “doaskdotell”
site, but I thought I would recap the 2006 comedy “The 40 Year-Old Virgin” by
Jude Apatow, originally from Universal (now YouTubeMovies) here.I remember seeing this in the old AMC Courthouse
in Arlington VA before it was renovated.
Steve Carell, then about 42, wrote the script for his own
depilation, where he plays a nerdy 40-year-old who has never “gotten laid”, and
is challenged by Trish (Catherine Keener).
The famous scene in the middle shows women waxing his chest
with various strips, to where he looks like, as the script shows, a “man-o-lantern”.
In fact, this process of violating male body sanctity is
shown relatively rarely on camera in film.There are tacky YouTube videos about the topic, of course, but they are
almost never shown in a “dramatic” context in gay short films.
Swimmer and bikers "do it", of course (in competitive situations). Head shaves as fund raisers showing empathy (cancer) are common and almost expected, but so far they've never gone below the neckline. You wonder. In the distant past, this sort of thing could happen in college and fraternity initiations.
It’s also a good question, why would his (Carell's) girl friend want him
to look “less” virile?
The pundits used to weigh in on this.David Skinner wrote his famous piece for the
Weekly Standard “Notes on the Hairless Man” in June 1999.This topic took a dark turn in 2001 when
there were sporadic reports that the 9/11 terrorists had shaved their own
bodies that morning (another Skinner article). This supposition was shown in
the Discovery Channel film “The Flight that Fought Back” (about Flight 93) in
2005, directed by Bruce Goodison.
The controversy continues with Anthony Weiner’s prosecution,
which wound up accidentally affecting the 2016 election, possibly being the “ball
four” that walked in the winning run for Donald Trump.
It’s also true that about eight years after this comedy/satire
film was a hit, the subject of incels took a dark turn (in June 2014) with the
spree by Elliot Rodger. It is still viewed as a disturbing topic online.
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