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Kim Voynar

By Kim Voynar Voynar@moviecitynews.com

Cry Me a River

I’ve been enjoying the hell out of Susan Boyle’s rise from obscurity to fame this past week. Boyle, 47, is the Scottish woman who took the judges and audience by suprise on the April 11 episode of Britain’s Got Talent. Boyle is a plain and simple woman, and when she took to the stage both judges and audience visibally reacted to her looks; they were all waiting to laugh at her. She sang “I Dreamed a Dream” from Les Mis and within a few honey-drenched notes she had the audience and jugdes in the palm of her hand.
Boyle’s story is as good as her voice. She put her singing on hold to care for her elderly mother, who died in 2007 at the age of 91. She says she’s never had a boyfriend or been kissed. And she sang “I Dreamed a Dream” better, I think, than I’ve ever heard it performed. Now she’s the frontrunner in the competition, which last year was won by a rotund cell phone salesman who’s gone on to become a hugely popular opera star. And the offers are already rolling in. And with good reason: the YouTube video of Susan Boyle’s performance as been viewed, at this writing, nearly 35,000,000 times.
I find it interesting how people are reacting to the story of Susan Boyle. Many — myself included — find her inspiring. Her voice speaks for her, and with a voice like that, you need no other calling card. But I wonder, if her talent had been acting, would she ever have gotten her foot in the door, even if she acted as spectacularly as she sings? I imagine what it must be like to be an aspiring actress in Hollywood who’s 47 years old, pudgy (at least, by Hollywood standards), with graying hair and a plain face untouched by Botox or plastic surgery, and a cat at home named Pebbles.
By the by, I like this audio track of her singing “Cry Me a River” back in 1999 even better than her audition performance. Just close your eyes and listen to it … very sensual and sexy.

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4 Responses to “Cry Me a River”

  1. Hallick says:

    How to put this….The audience’s reaction to Susan Boyle’s appearance on the stage was ugliness incarnate. Every guffaw and rolling of the eyes at her “presumptuousness” for even taking a stage that belongs to the gods and goddesses of pulchritude, and having her own dream of stardom, was mindlessly and self-amusingly soulless for its own sake. I would have stood up in front of my laptop and applauded the screen if Susan had finished that song and then told the entire auditorium to kiss her ass and go to hell with the same joie de vivre she showed by grinding her hips at Simon Cowell.
    But, alas, I am sorry – she is not just a plain jane made ugly in contrast to supermodels and movie stars; and she is not just Hollywood pudgy. Sorry Sorry SORRY. Crucify me for saying so if you must, but I’m not going to patronize the woman by saying that she looks just fine and there’s nothing wrong with her looks. Believe me, Susan Boyle knows she’s talented just as much as she knows she’s not that much to look at. She has probably spent the better part of 47 years learning this from a lot more folks than the ones who worship at the altar of FHM magazine. And pulling the “in this age of Botox and boob jobs…” card out is pointlessness. Boyle would have trouble on this one single level in ANY era, including those that pre-date Hollywood and Dr. 90210. Her face on a 17th century portrait would not have elicited physical compliments in that day either.
    Don’t get me wrong. She is a STUNNER on the inside. Simon looked like he was falling in love with the woman during that song, and you can feel exactly why. Between her saucy talk, her performance, and that version of “Cry Me a River”, she’s more than damn near seductive. But good-looking? No.

  2. LexG says:

    Who cares about this Old Hen?
    POST MORE HOT PICS OF MICHELLE TRACHTENBERG, the FEMALE IDEAL.
    LADIES NEED TO BE MORE HOT. Others NEED NOT APPLY.
    HAHA.

  3. Kim Voynar says:

    Oh, c’mon, Hallick. I get your point to an extent, but she’s not hideously ugly or marred by severe facial deformities. She’s plain-featured, doesn’t know how to apply makeup and has bushy hair and eyebrows. She reminds me a bit of Sharon Osbourne pre-weightloss and plastic surgery.
    My point is, if Hollywood had their hands on her, they’d give her a personal trainer to drop the excess weight, she’d have a stylist to cut, dye and whip that hair into shape, the eyebrows would be waxed way down, they’d botox her wrinkles and maybe give her a chin lift and an eye lift (they wouldn’t touch her nose, because that could screw up her voice), give her perfect white teeth, and a makeup artist would scrub, peel and apply until she was unrecognizable as her former self.
    I do makeup for theater, and you can considerably change a person’s appearance using theatrical makeup correctively, even without plastic surgery. Even the prettiest femme movie stars often look unrecognizable without the benefit of their hair, makeup and fashion brigades.
    Look at how much the appearance of American Idol stars like Jennifer Hudson, Clay Aiken, Kelly Clarkson, Carrie Underwood and Kelly Pickler has changed from their first auditions to their current looks. You’re not going to make Susan Boyle look like Keira Knightley, but a team of stylists could get her considerably closer to her idol, Elaine Page, even without surgery or Botox.
    It appears right now that they’ll try to avoid glossing her up too much — it’s her homely, ordinary appearance on the outside contrasting with that amazing voice that’s part of her appeal — but I bet they’ll buff and polish her quite a bit by the time her first CD gets released.
    And Lex … until I see physical proof that you yourself are as hot, buff and sexy as you demand the ladies be, kindly shut the fuck up unless you have something useful to contribute here, or take your more useless crap back over to Hot Blog, where David seems to have a far higher tolerance for your nonsense than I do.

  4. Hallick says:

    She doesn’t need (and, hopefully, doesn’t desire) a Hollywood wrecking crew type of makeover; but a tasteful, Oprah-style, maximizing what she is naturally with some polishing and an up to date wardrobe wouldn’t be blasphemous.
    And Lex, say what you like about her looks, your taste’s your own thing, but Susan Boyle is CHARMING.
    PS – Kelly Clarkson was SMOKING hot from day one on American Idol by just looking like herself. And actually, the more she’s made over, the harder it is to see that again.

Quote Unquotesee all »

It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” — some novel, you know?

So I decided on three writers that I might be able to option their material and get some producer, or myself as producer, and then get some writer to do a screenplay on it, and maybe make a movie.

And so the three projects were “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “Naked Lunch” and a collection of Bukowski. Which, in 1975, forget it — I mean, that was nuts. Hollywood would not touch any of that, but I was looking for something commercial, and I thought that all of these things were coming.

There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. I couldn’t find Philip K. Dick. His agent didn’t even know where he was. And so I gave up.

I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.

So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.

But then I did, and then I realized who it was, and I thought, “Wait, he’s in that realm, maybe he knows Philip K. Dick.” I said, “You know a guy named—” “Yeah, sure — you want his phone number?”

My friend paid my rent for a year while I wrote, because it turned out we couldn’t get a writer. My friends kept on me about, well, if you can’t get a writer, then you write.”
~ Hampton Fancher

“That was the most disappointing thing to me in how this thing was played. Is that I’m on the phone with you now, after all that’s been said, and the fundamental distinction between what James is dealing with in these other cases is not actually brought to the fore. The fundamental difference is that James Franco didn’t seek to use his position to have sex with anyone. There’s not a case of that. He wasn’t using his position or status to try to solicit a sexual favor from anyone. If he had — if that were what the accusation involved — the show would not have gone on. We would have folded up shop and we would have not completed the show. Because then it would have been the same as Harvey Weinstein, or Les Moonves, or any of these cases that are fundamental to this new paradigm. Did you not notice that? Why did you not notice that? Is that not something notable to say, journalistically? Because nobody could find the voice to say it. I’m not just being rhetorical. Why is it that you and the other critics, none of you could find the voice to say, “You know, it’s not this, it’s that”? Because — let me go on and speak further to this. If you go back to the L.A. Times piece, that’s what it lacked. That’s what they were not able to deliver. The one example in the five that involved an issue of a sexual act was between James and a woman he was dating, who he was not working with. There was no professional dynamic in any capacity.

~ David Simon