In Hollyweird, what you see is seldom what you think it is. Movie-makers today could fool Houdini with their EFX tricks, but it's the off-camera stuff that's most interesting.We are a youth culture, and actors and actors who want to avoid being put into the old-man or old-lady roles have all kinds of work done to hold off the ravages of time. William Shatner has been bald since his Star Trek days. There are no pictures of him thus.
So many young actresses today have dead-pans because of the wonderful side-effect of a potent poison to cause temporary muscle paralysis. They inport Botox by the trainload down in La-La-Land, and it's easy to tell. If your favorite hot young thing smiles onscreen and her forehead doesn't ever wrinkle? Same thing with the guys.
In their shoes, if my face was part of what got me work, I expect I'd have a couple plastic surgeons on retainer, too. Me, I got a face perfect for radio ...
First round surgery, under an expert with the knife, can be a big improvement: Have a look at Courtney Love, before and after, and after again. Even Cher looks pretty good for a woman a year and some older than I. There are cutters, and then there are cutters. Look uptop, and behold Mickey Rourke ...
And what happens when you can't quit while you are ahead: My. And, oh, my ...
And that's just the faces, we don't even want to go down the road to boob-jobs, lipo-suction, and calf-implants ...
Scary, when it goes bad. Curious about who has and hasn't? Michael Jackson is easy, Priscilla Presley, who looks tighter than her daughter? Sure. But how about some of your other "natural-looking" favorites?
Check out this one, a blog done by a board-certified plastic surgeon who knows how to look. Spooky stuff here.
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Blogger says the previous attempt to post this didn't go through ...
Rourke got back into serious boxing when he was my age. I'll accept he's faster than I am -- he have to be, to be alive right now -- but nobody in their mid-40s is that fast. I'm sure some of that wreck is work -- but I'd bet a lot of it is the deranged decision to try to box professionally when it was much, much too late.
I can still throw a punch. In my daydreams, I'm still bad. Problem is, I can't get out of the way of a punch, which is a much more important skill....
I think it's mostly due to the knife. He caught a few gloves, but he was one of the guys who couldn't let it alone -- the Michael Jackson/Cher Syndrome. Cher had an artist working on her, and while she looks like Barbie, that's better than Quasimodo.
I'm not sure how many of us are capable of growing old gracefully. If your looks have been your ticket to ride and you see them fading, it must be scary.
Courtney didn't start out that way and she may be doing some compensating now.
If the way you got ahead in life was to sleep with people who wanted you and now they don't want you any more? Who are you then?
For men, especially jocks, the diminuendo of your physicality song is frightening. I'm in better shape than most men -- my age, half my age -- but there comes a point where the spirit might be willing but the flesh won't answer; it's the nature of the machine we inhabit.
What happens to the bull of the woods when he can't swing the axe any longer? What does he replace that with?
If you can live in the moment, then you don't worry about that. If you can swing it now, you swing it, tomorrow, the asteroid might come down, so it's Alfred E's outlook: What? Me worry ... ?
You can mitigate stuff to a degree. Martial arts that depend on skill more than pure strength can stretch out your ability to walk tall. (So can a .357 Magnum or a pair of sharp knives.)
But in the end, gravity wins.
Cutting edge science, music, art -- these are often done by fairly young folk, on the way up, and striving. What you hope for is a sharp ascent, and long time at the peak, with a long, slow decline -- if you want to ride it to the end.
Or you could live fast, die young, and leave a good-looking corpse. The reason Houseman's "To An Athlete Dying Young" resonates ...
Bad girls draw the boys, though. You seen Holly Hunter's turn in the TNT series "Saving Grace?"
If not, I think you'd love it. She is wicked. And in fantastic shape, too.
I look at a lot of those pictures and wonder what the hell they were thinking. But then I remind myself that I probably don't want anything as badly as they want to hang onto their fame/fortune (and the looks that helped provide it to them), but if I did? I'd probably do something that looked just as dumb to other people. Of course, there are also stars (male and female) who are aging gracefully--or else have the true artists of the cosmetic surgery world on their speed dial. Either way, you can see what these folks were hoping to achieve....
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