Thursday, March 13, 2008

Thursday's Ways Not To Die

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Single White Female (1992)

For a truly memorable death scene, this shoe-to-the-eye sequence was surprisingly - to me, watching it for the first time in probably a dozen years - bloodless. There's some masterful editing going on here.

Speaking of, I have to direct you to that frame just above the shoe being swung with the glint of spiked heel - the one where we see what is supposed to be Jennifer Jason Leigh's face with the shoe poised to strike - look at that sucker closely. I could be mistaken, it's hard to tell, but I swear that that's Bridget Fonda. Click here to see the picture bigger, and tell me if I'm crazy or what. Like I said, it's been at least a dozen years since I've sat and watched this film straight through, but what do you think the chances are that there might be frames like this through-out the film, where this tale of identity-theft is expressed with purely subliminal visual cues, by replacing one actress for another at key moments? I wonder... seems like something director Barbet Schroeder might do, for sure.

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Previous Ways Not To Die: Flip-Top Beheaded -- Because I'm Too Goddamned Beautiful To Live -- By Choosing... Poorly... -- Fried Alive Due To Baby Ingenuity -- A Good Old-Fashioned Tentacle Smothering -- Eepa! Eepa! -- Gremlins Ate My Stairlift -- An Icicle Thru The Eye -- Face Carved Off By Ghost Doctor After Lesbian Tryst With Zombie Women -- Electrocuted By Fallen Power-Lines -- A Mouthful Of Flare -- Taken By The TV Lady -- Bitten By A Zombie -- Eaten By Your Mattress -- Stuffed To Splitting -- Face Stuck In Liquid Nitrogen -- Crushed By Crumbling Church Debris -- Bitten By The Jaws Of Life -- A Machete To The Crotch -- Showering With A Chain-Saw -- In A Room Filled With Razor Wire -- Pod People'd With Your Dog -- Force-Fed Art -- Skinned By A Witch -- Beaten With An Oar -- Curbed -- Cape Malfunction -- In The Corner -- Cooked In A Tanning Bed -- Diced -- Punched Through The Head -- Bugs Sucking On Your Head
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4 comments:

Agnes B said...

What's amazing to me is that in 7 seasons of Buffy she never staked a vamp with a high-heeled shoe. Unless I'm mistaken, but I don't believe that I am.

Jason Adams said...

I'm pretty sure you're correct, ab. Although it'd need to be a wooden heel, and do they exist? I'm not that up on my women's footwear, to put it mildly, so they very well could. I know I've seen wooden wedge-like heel things. But it does seem right up Buffy's alley, for certain.

Burbanked said...

It's hard to tell from that still which actress it truly is, but it doesn't really look like Jason-Leigh. That WOULD be a terrific experiment for such a movie, though, to subtly switch every so often to see if anyone notices. A much more clever trick in a pre-DVD world.

EXCELLENT addition of dialogue bubbles, by the way. I wouldn't have thought you could make this excellent series more excellenter, but you absolutely have.

zooplah said...

That scene surprises me. I've never seen the whole movie, but my mother always loved it. I think that's odd, considering here disdain for bloody movies.

But yeah, it looks like Bridget Fonda to me too.