Tuesday, January 22, 2013

jacob's crackers

Here's a short list, which I choose to entitle, pithily, Lady Actors Who I Saw In A Film I Really Liked And Additionally Thought They Were Very Attractive In A Quirky And Feisty Kind Of Way Whereupon Clearly Absolutely No-One Agreed With Me Because They Were Pretty Much Never In Anything Else Of Any Consequence Ever Again. Here goes:
Jacob's Ladder, incidentally, in addition to being a genuinely weird and creepy movie, is a filmic embodiment of a trope used occasionally in fiction (as discussed briefly in this book review) - a narrative pretty nearly the entirety of which turns out to be the thoughts of someone dying, the actual dying bits of which tend to bookend the imagined bits. It was being familiar with Jacob's Ladder that enabled me to nod sagely to myself about ten minutes into The Sixth Sense and say: aye aye, I can see where this is going. Granted, that was slightly different in that the Bruce Willis character is already dead and spends most of the film as a ghost, but I clocked the basic plot premise early on. I'm not saying that makes me a genius or anything, but there it is. Even allowing for that I thought The Sixth Sense was OK; it was the follow-up Unbreakable which was the one that was so utterly terrible as to put me off ever seeing an M. Night Shyamalan film ever again.

Back to the death thing, the canonical example of this (and the apparent inspiration for Jacob's Ladder) is Ambrose Bierce's short story An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, which was made into a short film in 1962, later broadcast as an episode of The Twilight Zone, the entirety of which appears (I haven't watched the whole thing) to be available here.

5 comments:

Emma said...

Kelly Lynch in 'Drugstore Cowboy' would be on my list. After that it seemed to be downhill into 'Curly Sue'. Though she has reappeared in recent years as a drag king in 'L-Word' ...

electrichalibut said...

That's not the one that's married to John Travolta is it? Or is that Kelly Preston? And which one was it that was in Road House with Patrick Swayze?

electrichalibut said...

I was tempted to include Annabella Sciorra, who I saw in The Hand That Rocks The Cradle and then nothing else, but I know she has been in a lot of stuff, and also THTRTC is a pretty ropey film, even if it does briefly feature Q out of Star Trek TNG.

Emma said...

That's Kelly Preston.

Kelly Lynch was in Road House; I'd forgotten that. She does take her clothes off in it - not much of a part though.

electrichalibut said...

as the actress said, etc.