Thin, Thinner ... Gone

For quite some time I thought it was just me, thinking the Hollywood-stars were getting thinner and thinner. But it seems I was right and not just delusional (well, at least about that, I've got loads of other delusions, after all), as the picture of Cate Blanchett above shows.

What I really wonder about is the reason. First the models who have to fit into Size 0 (here goes my Crusade again...), now the actresses too. What's the point in that?

I know they say you're looking fatter through the camera - and I wonder why, as the camera shows the reality, nothing more, nothing less. Maybe we perceive ourselves a bit thinner than we really are and the camera shows the truth? Who knows?

As you might have gathered from other posts I did in the past, I don't see the reason in Size 0 anyway. I don't think two pears on a wooden board make up a human body - especially not a female human body. And if modern fashion designers aren't able to design clothes for a normal-shaped woman, then they either have the wrong job or should learn how to do it.

The same goes for me whenever actresses are concerned (actors too, but usually they don't have to do it for nothing, they have to gain or loose weight for a special role and mostly that's justified). There are loads of different types of characters and so there should be just as many different types of actresses as well. But the only 'type' of actress you see these days is the super-thin one.

And because all the women in public (or at least most of them) are thin, 'normal' women think, they have to be as thin, too. Where does that lead? Sickness and death in really hard cases.

I've quoted this before: "A woman can never be too rich or too thin." I still don't get it. There's a line for everything, even wealth. What good would it do me to own all the money in the world? Nobody could make anything for me to buy then. So there definitely is a "too rich". And "too thin" for me starts when it's really making me sick. And nobody can tell me that the 'super-thin' models and stars really are healthy and will stay so until old age.

Even though "Bridget Jones" isn't my kind of movie, I liked the idea of a movie showing a woman with 'normal' proportions. A

nd I would like to see more 'normal' women in a Hollywood movie (Bollywood does it better, they still have all the types).

In the past Hollywood had some real 'sex goddesses' (even though I don't really like that term). But today? A woman like Marilyn Monroe would not even get through her first casting, she'd be "too fat" for a movie role. (But who really wants to see Gwyneth Palthrow do the scene on that ventilation grid?)

Sometimes when I look at the photographs of stars these days, I think "Are they all auditioning for a new zombie horror movie?" and other things along the line. The models and the stars don't look like living people, they rather look like the walking dead (but they move a bit better, probably because their brain is still working in most cases).

And there even is a "Skin and Bone Diet", it seems, reducing people to exactly that: a walking skeleton. I've seen zombies with more flesh on their bones, although it was rotting.

Honestly, who would want Lara Croft to look like that in her next movie?

I don't. And knowing the way most men - at least most young men - think, they won't either. So who's doing all the casting these days? The Lord of the Damned? I'm sure, even Dracula and Lucifer would prefer women with a little more flesh on their bones...

Everyone looks like a skeleton one day (after rotting in a casket for a few years), there's no reason to do it before dying!

A hairy problem

There's one thing about 'modern women' I simply don't get: The hair-thing.

What I mean is this: from the moment a woman sprouts hair anywhere except for her scalp, she's in trouble. There'll be decades of shaving or waxing ahead of her - or a long treatment with lasers to get the hair off once and for all.

What I don't really get, is the reason. Women have hair on their bodies, so what? It's not as if men shave everything as well (with some, you have to be happy if they remember to shave their chin...). Why does a woman have to go through shaving almost every week or two or waxing once a month? It's painful, it takes ages (especially if you're dark-haired like me and have hair growing almost everywhere) and there's no real use to it.

We all had a fur once - and the body hair we still have is a remainder of it. It doesn't really serve any purpose any longer (well, most of it, eyebrows and eyelashes are still useful), but it's not hurting us to have it either.

I can understand why the statues of Greek goddesses don't have body hair - it would have been quite difficult to sculpt them that way. But most statues of Greek gods don't have body hair either - for the same reason, I should guess. Ever since then - or maybe earlier - the female ideal of beauty has been hairless - at least in Europe. But all the time men have been showing off their body hair.

I personally am sick of shaving - and waxing with all the hair I have on my body? I'm not a masochist, if anything, I'm a sadist.

I really want to find the person who decreed women could only be 'real women' by taking off all that body hair - and drown him or her in a large pool of hot wax.

A violent game

There are games that are violent because of the things the player can do. And there are games which are violent because of what the characters do. That's a big difference. And it is a far more significant difference than most people might think.

Games in which players can do violent things (most ego-shooters or games like GTA) are quite often called "Killerspiel" by the politicians. They are what those people fight against, because they believe it's a bad influence on teenagers and young grown-ups.

Games in which the characters do violent things, on the other hand, are rarely seen as "Killerspiele", they are usually seen as harmless - at least in Germany. I learned that when buying - and playing - the game "Still Life". In Germany the rating is "16+", but he European Rating, which also is on the box, is "18+". Now, if you just examine what the player is doing, the German rating is absolutely correct. But if you take a look at the story and the pictures the player will see throughout the game, then the European rating is absolutely correct.

"Still Life" is about a serial killer who positions his victims in certain ways, each of them differently. He kills them violently and that's how the corpses look when found by the police. As the player character is an F.B.I. profiler named Victoria McPherson, she gets to see the pictures and the corpses (in some cases). The player is faced with some pictures that might be a little too much for a sixteen-year-old teenager - although some will have no problems, but some sixteen-year-olds won't have problems with "18+" games either.

Usually, whenever it's about "Killerspiele", the politicians argue that the European rating is too low (sometimes it's even "12+" when the game is "16+" in Germany). In this case the German rating is lower, because the player can't actually do something violent (well, there's a fight at the end, but that's a cut-scene, not something the player can control).

That shows quite clearly how different people understand the issue of violence in Germany and the rest of Europe. We seem to think the only violence to keep away from teenagers is the kind they're allowed to do themselves while the other countries seem to think the violence to keep away from teenagers is the really bloody type.

"Still Life" is intense. It's drawing the player in and has quite some 'shock-moments'. But it doesn't have any "Killerspiele"-moments.

There are games which are for grown-ups because of their content. And there are games which are for grown-ups only because of what you can do. But there's no way politicians in Germany will ever grasp the difference.

Hey, haven't I seen this stuff before?

On Friday RTL, a German TV-station aired, a new show - and one day later the online-part of a German magazine had to comment on it for being "dangerous", "humiliating" and of "low quality". All of this is true, but the format as a such surely wasn't invented by RTL.

I have to admit it - I watched part of the show, too. And I had a scaring case of "Déjà vu" while I did so. While the setting surely was exploiting the current "Pirates of the Caribbean" hype, the games were familiar in a scaring way.

I have seen such a show - in a different setting - before: "Takeshi's Castle", a Japanese show aired by a sports channel in Germany years ago. That was quite a shock ... normally the TV-stations in Germany steal their ideas from the Netherlands or the USA, not from Asia.

Whoever takes part in a show like that, knows what he (or she) is getting into. They're all grown-ups and can decide for themselves, so what's all comment really about? Just to show that "Der Spiegel" is better than RTL?

I wonder what's worse: Producing a show in a format that was successful in other countries before or criticising the show without real reason. Nobody expects an entertainment show to have depth and people have been humiliated in German television before.

Finally another good Vampire Story

Vampires are among the creatures of the night that are most portrait in novels, comics and movies, but to find a descent vampire manga is quite difficult. This week I managed.

That might have something to do with the fact that there aren't vampires the way we see them in Japan. They have blood-drinking and life-sucking ghosts, but that's not the same. Nevertheless, the Western vampire is quite known in Japan these days. There are some good vampire stories in Manga, Kaori Yuki, forever one of my favourite artists, has done quite a few of them. The first "God Child" story featuring Jezebel Disraeli and Delilah, "Kafka", has a strong vampire motif, although the vampire is man-made. There's a short story about genetic vampires in the short story collection "Boy's next door". And then there's "Blood Hound". Apart from that I can only name "Model", "Rebirth" and "Hellsing" as stories mainly dealing with vampires (but "Model" and "Rebirth" technically aren't manga, because they come from Korea).

Since this week I can add another series to that list: "Trinity Blood". I'd completely ignored it before, because the few things I'd read about it weren't very interesting and I didn't see any of the manga until volume 5, because I wasn't going through the manga at the shop at the train station for a while and my favourite book-shop didn't have them.

But this week I stumbled over volume 5 - and then ordered the other 4 over amazon. The story is good, the graphics are, too. And, in addition, the whole scenario (set in a future in which the vampires have taken control of most of the world and only the church is still fighting them) is quite interesting. And two of the main characters just make up for a lot of funny situations ... that's what I like in a manga with a lot of fights.

And with "Fairy Cube" and "Detective Loki - Ragnarok" complete (since this month) and "Ludwig Revolutions" volume 2 coming 'sometimes' in the future, I can afford starting a new series...

I just love vampire stories!

Bye-Bye to my firs

Ever since I've moved into my flat, there were two large fir trees in front of my living room window. But now they're gone without a trace, cut down today.

I can understand my landlord had them cut down, they were huge (taller than the three-storey house I live in) and might have cause a lot of damage in a storm. On the other hand they served as a protection for me - and I could watch birds a lot who came to sit there for a moment. I still have a yew in front of my bedroom window which has grown considerably during the almost three years I've been living in my flat. Maybe, if I'm lucky, my landlord plants some more of these - as I can't imagine any 'normal' tree to grow on the grounds where two firs have stood (firs and other trees with needles 'poison' the ground underneath in order to keep all the good things in it to themselves). I'd love to have some yews to replace my lovely firs.

Where are the strong women?

It's a question I ask myself frequently. We've had about 40 years of emancipation and still most heroes are male. What for, honestly?

Admittedly, I can live without a female substitute for Bruce Willis in "Die Hard" (whatever part of it). And there's other action heroes I won't deny them their place either, but where's the women in this business? There are some, but not many. "Dark Angel" was one of them, "Buffy" too, of course. Lara Croft still is (although, looking at Angelina Jolie's current body, I don't really want to see her as Lara Croft in a new movie). But for everyone of them there's five or even ten male heroes.

And most women in the action movies? Either they're strong and evil, but always fall for the hero (how's that - does the male villain fall for a female hero?) or they're in dire need of help. And, sometimes, there's the female specialist who's basically neutral anyway, because her only job is to give the hero information or some gadgets.

Where do women play a leading role? Usually in romance or melodrama. They are in love (unhappily at the beginning, usually) with some good-looking guy and he gets to impress them with something (once he's fallen in love with the heroine, too). Sorry, if I make it sound too easy, but I'm usually too bored by love stories to watch them for a long time. And melodramas aren't much better. They start out horrible and get worse from there. One of those can you make want to cut your wrists on a fine summer day. Yes, I'm not exactly one for those stories either, although I can stand them as long as they're not going all the way (meaning the heroine leaves the hospital after she's been cured from cancer just to be driven over by a truck or something).

What does that tell the audience? Anything that requires strength and/or intelligence also requires a 'true man'. And everything that centers around emotion is the right thing for women. Admittedly, I probably wouldn't like a love story any more if the protagonist was a man. (Well, if there were two men in the story and there was more than just two hours of 'I love you' to it, we can talk about it.) But sometimes I wonder why so many women love those movies. Then, on the other hand, that might have something to do with the title of my blog.

We've spent years fighting for our rights and trying to be treated equally (which hasn't completely happened yet, but we're on our way). But on screen, at least in most movies, the women are mainly portrayed the same way as they were before the whole emancipation started.

As long as the movie-bosses think people don't want to see a strong woman who doesn't get 'punished' in the end, we're not truly equal.