Claire is...: body

Showing posts with label body. Show all posts

Thursday, 31 August 2017

http://yalda-sepahpour.com

Friday, 9 December 2016

FILM 1603: THE TROUBLE WITH HARRY

TRIVIA: One of Alfred Hitchcock's favorites of all his films.

Originally designed by Alfred Hitchcock as an experiment in seeing how audiences would react to a non-star-driven film. He was of the opinion that oftentimes having a big star attached actually hindered the narrative flow and style of the story. He also developed the film with a view to test how American audiences would react to a more subtle brand of humor than that which they were used to.

Location filming in Vermont was hampered by heavy rainfall. Many exterior scenes were actually filmed on sets constructed in a local high school gymnasium. Much of the dialogue recorded there was inaudible due to the rainfall on the tin roof, so much post-recording was necessary.

The film was unavailable for decades because its rights (together with four other pictures of the same period) were bought back by Alfred Hitchcock and left as part of his legacy to his daughter. They've been known for years as the infamous "5 lost Hitchcocks" among film buffs, and were re-released in theaters around 1984 after a 30-year absence. The others are The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), Rear Window (1954), Rope (1948) and Vertigo (1958).

"What seems to be the trouble, Captain?" was Alfred Hitchcock's favorite line from all his movies.

Due to the indifferent weather conditions in Vermont, boxes and boxes of autumnal leaves were shipped back to California where they were painstakingly pinned onto trees on a studio soundstage.

Alfred Hitchcock insisted on using a real actor for the body of Harry. He chose Philip Truex.

Unlike some of Hitchock's other leading ladies, Shirley MacLaine became his "eating buddy", and he took her for breakfast every day before shooting. He never propositioned her, but thought of her as "a girl who needed to be fed". After living the poverty-stricken life of a Broadway chorus girl that she had just been plucked from, it was a pleasant change for MacLaine, and as a result she gained 15 pounds during shooting. Ultimately ending in a phone call from the studio telling her to stop eating so much as she was going to "ruin her career before it had even begun".

Tuesday, 15 March 2016

BOOK 146: GULP: ADVENTURES ON THE ALIMENTARY CANAL: MARY ROACH

Mary Roach’s investigations into weird body science were inspired by a plastic torso with removable organs in her fifth-grade class, “the point at which curiosity began to push aside disgust or fear or whatever it is that so reliably deflects mind from body.” Since then, she’s investigated death (Stiff), sex (Bonk), life after death (Spooked), and life in zero-gravity (Packing for Mars). Now, she cruises down the alimentary canal with Gulp. As you’d expect with Roach, this isn’t a methodical top-to-bottom tour. It’s more delightful and memorable than that. She’s a gorgeous writer, a master of sly asides, puns, and the bizarre but ultimately relevant story, sounding at times like an absurdly well-informed comedian (her footnotes are must-reads). And her evocative portraits of experts obsessed with their piece of the digestive puzzle--the surprising properties of saliva, nuances of chewing and digesting, and, yes, the incredible control of the colon--coaxes her readers beyond the gag reflex, inspiring awe for the world inside ourselves. --Mari Malcolm --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

MY VERDICT: I’m a huge fan of Mary Roach, I don’t often read multiple books by the same author but I’ve read three of Roach’s forays into weird science and wonderful anecdotes. Stiff, the first and my favourite book by her, examines what happens to our bodies after we die. It’s as morbid and fascinating as it sounds and wonderfully written.

This book has the usual Roach charm. She breezily makes even the most disgusting facts and stories palatable (her puns are much better than mine.) Her writing appears so effortlessly brilliant that even hard medical terms and concepts are simple to digest (oh god, these puns are catching!) A lot of the time some of these stories would be hard going but I sped through this book in wonder.

Her curiosity is contagious and you can’t help but be taken on a journey through laboratories, hospitals and cafeterias and meeting fascinating characters along the way. And the characters are wonderful, conducting studies where many a person would fear to tread, into the specialist medical fields of anything from spit to natural gases. You feel like a fly on the wall for many of these experiments. Things that you couldn’t imagine are being experimented on all over the world. (I’m just glad I wasn’t there in person as a lot of them seem quite smelly). And they ask and answer questions you never knew you wanted to ask (like why do rats eat their faeces and how big was Elvis’ colon?)

An entertaining read but also an interesting opportunity to look at your body and wonder at the awesome things it can do and how much you take its functions for granted when everything is going fine.