Real Beauty

Very interesting Dove Advertisement, a video showing how photos of models are manipulated to form images of beauty.

The other night I watched The Thomas Crown Affair, the original with Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway. I don't think I'd seen it before. I can see why the French would love it. It can be a little slow at times, in that 1960s kind of way. But it is also so bad-ass. Those multi-screen shot must have been soooo high-tech at the time. They are still really cool. Steve McQueen is ultra cool. This quality is the inspiration of The Tao of Steve, a movie I was thinking about the other day.
The recent Spike Lee movie, Inside Man has some similarities: super-clever bank robbery carried out by a group of people conveniently disconnected from the leader; super-clever tough blonde sexy woman brought in by the insurance compny to solve the caper.

The seduction scene in Thomas Crown is one that you just wouldn't see in a movie today. Not only because it is slow and involves a game of chess. But because the extreme close-ups explose the deep crinkles around Steve's eyes and the small scars (chicken pox?) in Faye's. They are both stunningly gorgeous people. To my eye, they're all the more beautiful with those little flaws. You just wouldn't see them anymore, they'd be airbrushed away if the actors hadn'd had them surgically corrected already.

I liked Faye's rich looking beige nail polish in that scene too.

Brain Book

I will admit that my interest in Simon Baron-Cohen's book began because he is realated to Sacha Baron-Cohen (aka Ali G., aka Borat, aka Bruno). But I am really enjoying reading
The Essential Difference: Male and Female Brains and the Truth About Autism. His thesis is that on average, women's brains are more likely to be wired for "empathy" and men's brains are more likely to be wired for "systemizing".