CAREER OPPORTUNITIES on Blu-Ray in June from Kino

[AndyDursin]

Long awaited by many!

[BobaMike]

MiniatureSlimHoiho-size_restricted.gif (715.87 KiB) Viewed 28249 times

[Monterey Jack]

Hoo-hah...!

[Monterey Jack]

[Monterey Jack]

A long, involved discussion of Connelly's anorexic, post-90s frame just got deleted by the Mods at Blu-Ray.com. KEEP IT STRICTLY ON TOPIC, NOTHING TO SEE, SHOW'S OVER...!

[AndyDursin]

What the hell? Why?

We are living in some very, very seriously strange times.

[Monterey Jack]

What the hell? Why?

We are living in some very, very seriously strange times.

Typical BR.com Nazi tactics...if you're not 100% ON-TOPIC to the movie or series in question, you get your posts deleted. Even topics that have moments where people post quotes from a favorite film back and forth get deleted!

[AndyDursin]

Bizarre. I was reading a thread on one of the new Carpenter 4K UHD releases and there were, as of the last I looked, 5 straight pages of "Your Carpenter Ten Best" lists with not one mention of the UHD, the topic, whatsoever.

[Monterey Jack]

It seems especially odd that no one is allowed to call out Connelly on how AWFUL she has looked for the last fifteen years, because that's...uh, "skinny shaming" I guess. It seems especially prevalent with actresses, and not actors, too...a BR.com discussion on how Carey Mulligan looks a lot older than her thirty-five years on the Promising Young Woman thread also got policed. What, we're not allowed to comment on people's physical appearances now? You're apparently only allowed to discuss an actor or actress' changing look if it's in a complimentary manner, like how singer Adele became slender and kinda hot recently. But if an actresse gained fifty pounds, you'd get slapped down for pointing it out now.

[AndyDursin]

Nice retrospective piece on the movie with some new interviews with Frank Whaley and producer Hunt Lowry. Not surprised Hughes thought about taking his name off it, but was it any worse than DUTCH? Lol

[AndyDursin]

In the house, 6 weeks ahead of schedule

[Monterey Jack]

Again, let know how the transfer is for, uh, reasons.

[AndyDursin]

Transfer looks good. I haven't seen this in years but it's the same master as the streaming one, so it's older but it has nice color. So odd they shot this in widescreen, especially when none of Hughes' work up to that point was in 2.35 (and so little of it is overall; I guess FERRIS BUELLER counts though that one was Super 35 and not pure anamorphic).

Jen looks great. The interplay between her and Frank Whaley is effectively drawn, but the stuff with the crooks is lame, and Thomas Newman's score is utterly atrocious (I can't believe it wasn't replaced) -- especially whenever they come on-screen. It doesn't result in much of a movie at 83 minutes, but it's attractively shot, charming in its own way, and JC is at her best in this film. It's just a shame she didn't embrace her figure and the roles that could have kept on resulting for years afterwards but Monterey Jack and I will forever lament that.

I'm not crazy about the sound, which sounds like it had normalization applied to it -- it plays like I have "Dynamic Volume" EQ toggled on, and the loudest parts sound a little distorted -- but that's an issue with the master and nothing Kino Lorber was responsible for. (If you play it on Itunes or Vudu, it sounds the same).

[Monterey Jack]

Jen looks great. It's just a shame she didn't embrace her figure and the roles that could have kept on resulting for years afterwards but Monterey Jack and I will forever lament that.

Connelly wasn't the first actress to ruin her figure and/or face in an atttempt to look "younger" or "more respectable", and she sadly won't be the last. Look at Jordanna Brewster...incredibly cute and appealing in the late 90s and early 00s (especially in The Faculty...those glasses ), but now she's this gaunt, hollow-eyed scarecrow. And Connelly's self-mutilation didn't result in much of a career boost at all. Yeah, she copped an Oscar for a forgettable performance in a forgettable Oscar-bait movie (has ANYONE sat down to watch A Beautiful Mind for sheer pleasure in the last 20 years?), but it's been a slow, steady slide into obscurity since then. She was never much of an actress, but she had a glowing luminosity when she was young and healthy-looking that's ossified into a humorless scowl in the years since. She looked TERRIFYING in Alita: Battle Angel, and her emacated frame was far more disconcerting than the "anime eyes" F/X that people were bagging about for months before and after the movie's release.

From...



...to...

[AndyDursin]

lol yuck

Putting aside her (former) physical beauty, I've always thought of her, on-screen, as "icy." She's sort of like Jodie Foster without Foster's acting ability. It's only in her early roles that she projects any kind of personality. Often times, let's face it, she's pretty blah. You'd never remember if she was even in a movie or not, she doesn't have much on-screen charisma -- which is why I think it was a mistake, in many ways (and I'm just going to stay on her career here), to go against what she was evolving into.

Her sexuality should've been part of her appeal, like it was for a time. There's nothing wrong with that either -- or there shouldn't have been. I mean, I get that she was seemingly uncomfortable becoming a "bombshell" but she could have interestingly bridged her looks with a smart selection of roles that played off it. There's even a moment in THIS movie (when she's rocking on the horse) where she's doing just that, playing off her looks to trick the crooks. Alas, all we got was this, THE HOT SPOT and a couple of other movies before that was it, before she started downplaying it and then making cosmetic adjustments to off-set it.

Like it or not though, how she looked was part of her appeal, and minus that, she's a very hollow actress, Oscar or not. I feel like she completely misfired in terms of understanding herself and the career she could have had.