Maxwell Ward

To say that Jim Carrey’s films are defined by the elasticity of his face is a little much, but it can give a big, gurning clue about what they hope to achieve. That’s why I Love You Phillip Morris is an anomaly in his portfolio, a film which has familiar rubbery expressions, but also moments of pitch-black humour, drama and a heartfelt love story. It is, all in all, surprisingly hard to define.

The story, which we are reminded is true, follows the life of Steven Jay Russell (Jim Carrey), a con artist and serial prison escapee. During one of his first spells in jail he meets fellow inmate Phillip Morris (Ewan McGregor), and quickly falls for him. It is the start of a relationship that provides the motor for the film; a love story of exhilarating highs and crushing lows across Russell’s life as a conman, inmate, and fugitive.

The film, which has not been released in the US due to delays finding a distributor, has been re-edited to be less controversial, apparently on the basis of its homosexual content. It is a troubling illustration, if true, of intolerance throughout the US market, and it makes a big statement when films with multiple murders can be seen as mainstream, but those with romantic storylines between two men can’t.

That’s not to say that there are no adult scenes in this film, but the sexual content throughout felt more Carry On than graphic to me. It could be as a consequence of the re-edit of course, but more likely because of the film’s lack of a clear identity, a condition wholly analogous to Russell’s ever-changing persona.

At times the development of Russell and Morris’s relationship, especially in the sex scenes, can feel disturbed by irreverent jokes. It is as if I Love You Phillip Morris cannot decide whether to focus on the drama and character development of the story, or whether to maximise Carrey’s comedy potential, leaving the humour feeling forced and the story interrupted.

That being said, both Carrey and McGregor put in strong performances. Carrey brings his ceaseless energy to a role in which he well cast, an impressionist playing an impressionist, while McGregor is very convincing as the vulnerable Phillip Morris, providing excellent, restrained support that allows a sense of romance and heartbreak to develop subtly. It is his consistency that provides the necessary grounding on which the film succeeds; he invokes compassion, while Russell’s stranger-than-fiction story will keep you entertained throughout.

In recent years, Tim Burton’s output of films has been both offbeat and refreshingly non-conformist. Films such as the supernatural comedy horror of Corpse Bride and his adaptation of Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory cemented his reputation as a director who wasn’t afraid to go a bit crazy. Anybody would think, therefore, that an adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s classic Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland would be the perfect vehicle for Burton’s skills.

We start the film with seven-year-old Alice waking from a nightmare in which she has fallen into another world full of talking animals, petulant despotic queens and mad men in crazy top hats. She is comforted by her father, who tells her that “all the best people are mad”, signalling an obsession with psychotherapy which runs throughout the film. We are then introduced to the grown-up Alice (Mia Wasikowska) who falls back down the rabbit hole in an attempt to escape an unwanted engagement. She appears to have forgotten everything about her original journeys in Wonderland, or Underland, as it is now known.

The mania of the original books becomes sidelined in favour of a more serious Wonderland in which the Red Queen (Helena Bonham Carter) has taken control. It is up to Alice, the foretold saviour and destroyer of the Jabberwocky, to save the day and restore the White Queen (Anne Hathaway) to the throne. The inclusion of Carroll’s famous poem The Jabberwocky gives Burton the chance to add a gothic element to this classic children’s tale, giving it a much-needed purpose. The battle between the armies of the Red and White Queens tries but fails to emulate profitable franchises like Lord of the Rings and The Chronicles of Narnia.

The famous cast reads as a wish-list of British talent, with the voices of the Cheshire Cat (Stephen Fry), Dormouse (Barbara Windsor), Tweedledum/Tweedledee (Matt Lucas) and Absolem the Caterpillar (Alan Rickman) allowing the audience to play a game of guess-the-voice. However, the acting of each character is convincing and engaging. The decision to make the Mad Hatter (Johnny Depp) simultaneously speak in posh English and gravelly Scots is at times distracting. However Johnny Depp’s performance has the right degree of madness with a touch of wistfulness that is at times heartbreaking. There are occasions where the film slightly loses track, mixing Victorian ideals with modern sentiments. A scene in which Alice tells her spinster Aunt (Frances de la Tour), “you’ll need to talk to someone about these delusions” is not only smug but completely at odds with the setting of the film.This much-hyped Disney offering appears to have been made to cash in on the recent trend of 3D films, and like recent blockbuster Avatar it has sacrificed plot for visual effects. Burton’s more inventive tendencies have been curbed leaving a successful Burton/Carroll collaboration an elusive concept.

Tom Bonnick

As of March 8, awards season may have been over, but for all of you haters who thought that would mean idly speculative newspaper commentary also being done with for the year — ha! Think again. For what would any “significant” cultural event be without its post-game analysis, I ask you? Possibly all the better for it, but that’s a story for another day.

Oscars night yielded few real surprises, but critically, just enough raised-eyebrow, I-sort-of-wasn’t-expecting-that moments (at least in the last half-hour) to make following the whole thing on YouTube and blog feeds not seem like the biggest waste of time imaginable (that would be watching the Grammys).

Devoted followers of these pages — and while we’re on the subject, I know there are some; I got sent all kinds of pissy letters after last issue demanding to know what I have against the Academy (for the record, nothing; I just think they’re a bunch of slightly reactionary sentimentalists who only sometimes get things right) — will remember that I predicted that Avatar would win Best Picture, but that Katherine Bigelow would win Best Director for The Hurt Locker.

In the event, The Hurt Locker did rather better than that, winning — as if anyone needs reminding — not only the top two prizes, but also statues for Best Editing, Best Original Screenplay, and some sound awards no-one really cares about. As much as it’s never a good idea to look a gift horse in the mouth and question how or why Bigelow’s low budget, little-seen Iraq movie did so well, its victory over Cameron’s behemoth does have some interesting lessons.

It’s quite likely that the reason The Hurt Locker so trounced Avatar is because this year, for the first time, the Academy introduced a system of weighted voting, and so whereas on previous occasions, everyone just chose one film, this time the shortlisted nominees were ranked from one to ten. Avatar, a film which polarised opinion, will certainly have got a lot of first-place votes, but probably not so many second or third choices. The Hurt Locker, on the other hand, evidently fared very well all round. The fact that there were twice as many nominees will also have helped Bigelow’s chances: ten films dilute the vote and reduce the chance of a runaway winner, which Avatar looked sure to be at one stage. Finally, The Hurt locker won because the anti-Hurt Locker campaign simply kicked in too late: by the time one of the film’s producers had been barred from the ceremony for sending anti-Avatar begging letters to voters (hey guy, here’s a tip: if you’re not Harvey Weinstein, don’t try muscling a win. That’s not for novices) and mutterings of plagiarism and lawsuits had begun to emerge, most voters had already cast their ballots.

And so, with that mystery solved, on to some of the other questions the evening presented: namely, would Steve Martin be funny? Why was Lauren Bacall not being allowed to accept her Honorary Award on the night itself? And, with Precious nominated in so many categories, which token black face (Morgan? Denzel?) would the camera cut to at every mention of the film’s success?

Well, the answers are, respectively, “Sort of, but only sometimes” (best joke of the night: “Everyone who works with Meryl comes away thinking two things – ‘can that woman act’, and ‘what’s with all the Hitler memorabilia?’”), “Because the Academy are idiots who think Hannah Montana has more star power than The Woman Who Was Vivian Rutledge”, and “Oprah”.

I think that about wraps everything up. The only question I have left is, why are there butterflies all over Bigelow’s dress?

Tom Bonnick

There is a lovely advert floating around on the Internet featuring Martin Scorsese, in his capacity not just as acclaimed director, but also dedicated film preservationist. He claims to have unearthed three pages of never before seen Hitchcock material, which he will endeavour to commit to film exactly as the master of suspense would have done himself, and the result is a very clever, lovingly crafted pastiche. I shan’t spoil the ending here, but suffice to say, it isn’t just a promotion for the World Cinema Foundation.

Shutter Island, Scorsese’s first feature film since 2006’s The Departed, is just as ridden with Hitchcock-ian tropes and horror cliché, but to far less endearing effect: it was only when the credits started rolling at the end that I realised that this time the director is being serious. Shutter Island isn’t a parody, or a viral marketing campaign; it’s just very disappointing.

The year is 1954, and Leonardo DiCaprio — who, it has been widely noted, was clearly so taken by the South Boston accent he cultivated for his last outing with Scorsese that he has simply refused to relinquish it here — plays Teddy Daniels, a US Marshal who arrives by boat to investigate the disappearance of a patient from a hospital for the criminally insane (what else?) located on the eponymous island.

Evidently, the four-year break from filmmaking has not been good for Scorsese. He is like an addict, and his drugs are movies — I mean that in a good way — but this is one big overdose, taken (or made; I’m not really sure how this analogy is working) to combat the withdrawal symptoms. Everything about Shutter Island is produced on a grandly cinematic scale, except for the story, which, beyond its ability to treat the camera to yet another money-shot of precipitous cliff faces, is handled with faint indifference.

And this is a real shame, because deep down, there actually is quite a good tale to tell — indeed, one that has already been told, in the novel by Dennis Lehane which is the film’s source material. The story is rather odd and a little convoluted sometimes, but, if Scorsese hadn’t allowed himself to get so bogged down in obeisance to directors of yore, one that could have been told engagingly and with real panache.

Instead, what we have in Shutter Island is a piece of work which is practically forensic in its homage to the thriller genre, but almost completely devoid of passion. The twists upon which so much of the plot hinges (and again, I shan’t ruin them here, but I’d say that it’s pretty damning that I have fewer qualms with doing so for a film than a commercial), however intellectually challenging — which is still only a little bit — are uninteresting, and when the big reveal comes, even it feels like one which has been used a few too many times before. There are, it’s also worth mentioning, far too many puzzles being wound and unravelled at once, and if it feels like I haven’t given any real information as to the actual story, it’s only because with the slightest nudge the whole sandcastle of mystery would collapse at my feet.

Perhaps Scorsese realised all this, and compensated accordingly with a cast list that gives new meaning to the aphorism embarrassment of riches (it really is rich, and they should all be embarrassed to be included in it). The credits read like a who’s who of gothic character actors: Ted Levine (otherwise known as Buffalo Bill from Silence of the Lambs), John Carroll Lynch (or, The Guy Who Probably Dunnit in Zodiac), Jackie Earle Haley (soon to play Freddy Krueger in a Nightmare Before Elm Street remake) and, best of all, Max von Sydow.

I did my very best to care about a film with so many excellent faces attached to it — honest, I did. But Shutter Island is the filmic equivalent of a super-group, and so perhaps it makes sense that it’s nowhere near as good as any of its influences — after all, who’s ever liked Velvet Revolver more than Guns ‘n’ Roses?

To celebrate the release of The Crazies, the remake of George A. Romero’s 1973 cult classic horror film, we’ve got some great merchandise to give away, courtesy of Momentum pictures. To win, just email your answer to the following question to editors@glasgowguardian.co.uk with “The Crazies competition” in the subject line.

Q: What does the unknown toxin in The Crazies contaminate?

Valentine’s Day, directed by Garry Marshall, stars almost every romcom American actor you can think of. From Ashton Kutcher to Julia Roberts, the list is almost endless. The story is about what multiple couples are doing on Valentine’s Day.

From the get go, it would seem that Valentine’s Day is attempting to be an American version of Love, Actually, and in fact, this is its greatest downfall. Some of the stories seem so similar that it feels as if the casting agent for Love, Actually said no to some of these stars and they just decided to be in the rip-off version instead. A story that revolves around a grandfather and his grandson is so reminiscent of Liam Neeson’s character in Love, Actually that if you shut your eyes for a second you would think that you were watching an unreleased Neeson scene.

Its key problem is that the two main characters (if there even are two main roles in such a sea of faces), played by Ashton Kutcher and Jennifer Garner, are clearly supposed to be glue for the rest of the ensemble, yet are just not likable enough. The story between them is tired and sometimes Kutcher feels more like he is performing an episode of Punk’d than the lead in a movie.

It’s not terrible, however, it will not blow you away either. For men, it is likely to get them in their girlfriend’s good books for going to see it but at the same time, women will be disappointed as well since there are so many better romantic comedies available on DVD. The jokes, although few and far between, are there and will make you smile, but are unlikely to have you rolling around on the floor holding your sides.

In particular the story that revolves around Anne Hathaway and Topher Grace’s respective characters is memorable and builds unique laughs. What’s more, this story is interesting because the characters are more realistic, more human than many of the others in the film, and their insecurities are developed alongside the continuing jokes. And as well as this, the story is not another case of Richard Curtis plagiarism, which is truly remarkable.

Valentine’s Day’s big problem is its lack of originality. Yet, with Hollywood seeming to lack this as a whole at the moment, maybe the film should be seen just as symptom rather than cause. Needless to say, if you want a romantic Garry Marshall film to please a lady, stick with Pretty Woman.

The Glasgow Film Festival has literally opened with a bang, courtesy of the Scottish premier of Jean–Pierre Jeunet’s (Amelie, Delicatessen) Micmacs. The film is a comedy centring on the arms trade (is that even possible? Only Jeunet could make it so) starring the inimitable Danny Boon as Bazil. To say Bazil is unfortunate is an understatement of ridiculous proportions: his father was killed by a landmine, and he was himself the victim of a freak accident which results in a bullet being permanently lodged in his brain, with the potential to kill him at any given moment.

If this is beginning to sound uncharacteristically depressing for a Jean-Pierre Jeunet movie, then don’t be fooled. The film’s real focus is on the dysfunctional family of scrap yard workers (featuring Jeunet regulars Dominique Pinot and Yoland Moreu, amongst others) into which Bazil is adopted, and the endurance and faultless loyalty of friendship, even in the most difficult of situations.

Whilst there is undoubtedly a political edge to the movie, this never eclipses the story, with Jeunet instead opting to use his views on the weapons trade as a source of humour, poking fun at the ridiculousness of it all, and never forcing opinions down his audience’s collective throats.

Danny Boon is simply incredible. Simultaneously evoking Chaplin and Tati, he has the incredibly emotive face of a true star of the silent era, and the physical humour to match. Jeunet plays homage to the golden age of silent films throughout, never resorting to dialogue when an image could tell the same story ten times as quickly and a thousand times as effectively. The film is laden with references to his past movies which will reward repeat viewing, but at no point does it seem like Micmacs is in the shadow of its predecessors. In actuality, this may be Jeunet’s most complete film to date (only time will tell) and is certainly one of his best. As always, the success of the film, like most of his other movies, lies in his ability to focus on the simplest of human emotions (namely love) and his skill for wrapping these up in a world which bridges fantasy and reality seamlessly.

The visuals, in particular the sets and locations, are breathtaking, merging the perfection of Paris à la Amelie with dark, surreal interiors reminiscent of Delicatessen. Jeunet’s flair for the image is evident throughout, so much so that any frame picked at random from the movie would immediately identify its creator.

The best thing about all of this is that it seems so effortless. Jeunet, who was in attendance for the screening, summed this up far better than I could ever hope to: “I started [making movies] when I was eight. It’s like eating or drinking to me.” Jeunet has been marginalised in the past by critics, particularly in his native France, due to the overwhelming popularity he has achieved since the release of Amelie. This completely misses the point: if art is popular, is it not still art?

Jeunet’s art is celluloid, and Micmacs is a perfect example of the ease with which he decorates his canvas. This film is not to be missed, and as with all great movies, should be seen on the big screen rather than waiting for the DVD. Go and see it now, in fact. You won’t regret it, and I guarantee you will leave with a smile (and probably want to take the next flight to Paris, too).

If you’ve ever thought to yourself, “Jeez, there sure an awful lot of overblown, self-important snooze-fests in the cinema at the moment — in fact, it seems like this happens around this time every year”, then you must have found yourself in the month of February, for awards season is upon you. Now is when studios drop their powerful biopics about washed-up musicians, poor-kids-overcoming-adversity melodramas, and films starring Meryl Streep on the public, because if there’s one thing that makes a studio executive extra-special, it’s the motivation they can draw from the delusion that what their picture needs to succeed isn’t, y’know, better acting, but more exposure.

But before I begin with this year’s trophy-bait, I feel that it is incumbent upon me to cite what is now being referred to in every appropriately cynical discussion of the Academy Awards as The Dargis Stipulation, so-named after its progenitor, New York Times film critic Manohla Dargis: “Let’s acknowledge that the Oscars are bullshit and we hate them.” At least half of that sentence is definitely true. The Oscars are bullshit; of that there is no question, but I’m not sure about hate. Either way, they do at least manage to provoke something more than mild indifference, which is all the Golden Globes ever seem to manage. And on that note, to the movies!

The two pieces of Academy Awards shenanigans that have garnered the most column inches this year have been the announcement that there will be ten pictures shortlisted in the Best Picture category (a move made in the hope that it will provide a desperately needed television ratings boost), and latterly, that amongst those ten are Avatar and The Hurt Locker, whose directors, James Cameron and Katherine Bigelow respectively, are ex-husband and wife. Cameron and Bigelow will also be competing for the Best Director award, and my money is on a break with tradition and the two prizes being divided between them: Picture for Avatar, Director for The Hurt Locker.

This is not, I hasten to add, because Avatar is the better film. On the contrary, it is probably the worst film nominated (maybe apart from District 9). But critical respect falls far short of money as a measure of power in Hollywood, and whilst The Hurt Locker may have plenty of the former, Avatar is now the highest grossing film of all time, which, unfortunately, counts for far too much.

Sid Ganis, president of the Academy, will want Avatar to win because this will also encourage good ratings: the public are only interested in watching films collect statues if they’ve actually seen them in the first place, and the intersection on the Venn diagram of “All people” and “People who have seen Avatar” is now extremely large.

Nonetheless, Bigelow should win for Best Director, and not just because she deserves it, but because the time is right. It is shocking, even for an industry more sexist than the selection criteria for the Playboy Mansion, that there has never been a female recipient of the Director award at the Oscars. If they don’t give one out this year, they never will: The Hurt Locker was the most tightly controlled piece of film-making, bar none, last year — an achievement made even more remarkable by the fact that is an action movie, a genre which is generally produced with the guiding principles that lots of explosions will suffice in lieu of anything else, and that characterisation or plot development are for sissies.

This split may upset the usual rule of handing the Best Picture and Director trophies to the same film, but it would also honour a rather less orthodox tradition, last evidenced in 2006, of giving the Picture prize to the lesser film with the inexorable momentum behind it, and then awarding Best Director to the superior film as a consolation. Four years ago it was a case of Hollywood patting itself on the back for producing what it saw as a genuinely intelligent examination of race in America, but was in fact two hours of mindless platitude (the lamentable Crash), at the expense of an infintely better film (Brokeback Mountain) which, ironically, actually did confront controversial “issues”. This time around, Cameron’s CGI and 3D wizardry (not to mention all that money) seem likely to earn Avatar the top prize, thereby necessitating that voters ameliorate their liberal consciences by handing Bigelow the silver medal.

As for the acting awards, they appear to be haven been practically pre-ordained for months, and much as the Academy doesn’t seem to like being dictated to, it would almost take an act of God to prevent Jeff Bridges going home with a (much deserved) Best Actor statue for Crazy Heart (one of those washed-up musician biopics) or stop Sandra Bullock winning for The Blind Side (impoverished children again). Equally, why anyone even bothers including a Best Animation shortlist is completely beyond me: the prize should just be given, automatically, to whatever Pixar released in the last year (the outstanding Up, in this case).

Still — and at the risk of completely invalidating every prediction I have just made — who can really say? To paraphrase F. Scott Fitzgerald, Oscars voters are different from you and me; a notoriously fickle bunch, prone to all kinds of whims and fancies to which we common folk are not privy. Maybe Inglourious Basterds will surprise us all and sweep the board (I sincerely hope that it doesn’t). Even though I know it cannot be; that the prize belongs to Jason Reitman, I want more than anything else for Armando Iannucci and his cohort of funnymen to win the Adapted Screenplay prize for In the Loop. I’ll leave you with this. For fans of conspiracy theories, take note: in the categories of Best Picture, Director, Actor and Actress, my frontrunners (Cameron, Bigelow, Bridges, Bullock) are all alphabetically first in their respective shortlists. Make of that what you will.

Tom Bonnick

Youth in Revolt begins like any other Michael Cera film. It has the same faded colour palette, earnest exclamations of indie-cool (this version of Cera wants to be a writer, thinks Ol’ Blue Eyes should be played on an hourly basis, and rents La Strada for fun) and has its protagonist endure the same wistful yearnings to escape his square, adolescent virginity.

Mercifully, director Miguel Arteta dispenses with all these bland pleasantries fairly efficiently, and what emerges from the wreckage (quite literally — half an hour in, Cera causes millions of dollars worth of damage when he blows up a trailer, a convertible and a storefront) is wholly unlike Juno or the execrable Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist.

Adapted from C.D. Payne’s influential 1993 novel, Cera plays Nick Twisp, who falls in love with a rather enigmatic, equally improbably-articulate girl named Sheeni (Portia Doubleday), almost immediately upon meeting her, during an encounter on holiday at a trailer park to which he has decamped with his mother and her trucker boyfriend to escape some angry sailors.

Soon realising Sheeni isn’t too interested in him (favouring her futurist poem-writing windsurfer boyfriend, Trent), Nick concocts an alter ego for himself, the rakish François Dillinger (also Cera, in what must be his first different role in years), who encourages the relationship forward with pseudo-suave aggression and a cigarette permanently dangling from his lips.

And from there, the story takes an odd turn, not entirely for the worst, as indignity upon indignity is heaped upon Nick, a few misguided attempts at romance spiral into a cross-country crime spree and a straightforward boy-meets-girl comedy is transformed into a mock-epic of Homeric proportions.

Arteta has had to abandon several of the peripheral plot elements of Payne’s original, but he succeeds in retaining the picaresque tone of the story and Nick’s character, who along with François, become a sort of cross between Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, and Bonnie and Clyde.

And, even though only half of Cera’s performance feels particularly original, he is still perfectly cast as both halves of Twisp — his impassive face and slightly pallid complexion are used to great effect, and the few truly excellent moments of visual comedy tend to arise from seeing him cowering somewhere in a state of near-undress, hands hovering protectively over his boxer shorts or wrapped uncomfortably around his chest. As Dillinger he is (rightly) more exaggerated and less believable, but no less enjoyable.

If it ever feels slightly strange that Cera is still playing sixteen year olds, the feeling does not last long. Supported by an excellent cast (which includes Ray Liotta, Fred Willard and Steve Buscemi in occasionally scene-stealing cameo roles), he carries the film so capably and to such enjoyable effect it almost erases any memory of his ersatz performances in Paper Heart or Nick and Norah.

Guardian has some great Youth in Revolt prizes to be won. To find out more, click here.

“The body is meant to be seen, not all covered up” were the famous words uttered by iconic starlet, Marilyn Monroe, as she took Hollywood by storm, transforming from small-time actress to an epic household commodity and big brand name. Perhaps the most famous woman of the 20th Century, Monroe represented the embodiment of Hollywood glamour fusing an apparent vulnerability and innocence with an innate sensuality which left men and woman spellbound by her unrivalled energetic charm. Monroe serves as the primary manifestation of the sex symbol, an exhibitionist who obliges voyeuristic tendencies through the spectacle of her voluptuous curves and bold pout. By exploiting her body, Monroe captures and toys with the gaze of male erotic desire. However, the question can be asked — what it is about Monroe that has cemented her legacy as an unparalleled iconic sex goddess above all other women?

Monroe’s appeal can be largely attributed to the sense that underneath the eroticism of her seductive physique lies a harmless naiveté — she symbolises sex without threat in a time when the image of the femme fatale was rife in cinema. Monroe’s arrival to screens in the 1950s coincided with Hollywood’s experimentation with the idea of beautiful women as vixens who ensnare men through seduction and deception, thus provoking dangerous consequences for the men in question. In a time where overtly seductive women were aligned with cultural attitudes of danger, Monroe shone out as the antithesis to this image. With a tendency to feature in roles as the dumb yet bubbly blonde, in films like How to Marry a Millionaire and Some Like It Hot, she created the impression of a woman who required to be protected by a partner; a woman who although sexually alluring was loveable and in need of safety and security. In a time when the silver screen made women seem like the predators and men the innocents, Monroe’s image inverted this idea in its entirety.

In this day and age, Monroe remains a prominent sex symbol. However, it is the actress Megan Fox who is getting men a little hot under the collar on a global scale. In light of Fox’s last movie, Jennifer’s Body, the young actress has found herself very much in the public eye as press world-wide have flocked to splash her image throughout the media. The film — with a ropey plot which promises more than it delivers — serves as a platform for exploiting Fox’s body, and proved to be dependent on parading the actress’s physique in order to clock up fans. Fox’s body is put on full display cooling off with a naked swim in the local lake, to a brief lesbian encounter with her timid best friend. Reaching the number one spot in FHM’s 2008 edition of the world’s sexiest woman, it is evident that her sensual athleticism and Angelina Jolie-esque pout is pushing all the right buttons for the male audience.

Jonah Hex, Fox’s next jaunt onto the silver screen, is proof that the apple doesn’t fall too far from the tree. The movie, due to release this summer, promises to set male hearts a flutter with Fox playing the role of gun-slinging prostitute in this graphic novel adaption.

Despite the fascination surrounding the Fox body there still remains a seemingly fundamental difference between the sex appeal of the 50s goddess Monroe and the rising star of Fox. Boiled down, it harks back to the way in which they are characterised. It is hard to argue against the opinion that both women exploit the sensuality which can be found in the female form, yet Fox doesn’t portray the endearing vulnerability that so became Monroe. Fox’s appeal lies in the fact she seems raunchy and corruptible; however, these aren’t traits which cement you as a legacy like Monroe. Monroe combines loveable family values with an erotic sexualism, while Fox is simply a prime example of “sex sells”. In the words of Lee Strasberg from the Eulogy, Monroe “had a luminous quality — a combination of wistfulness, radiance, yearning, that set her apart and yet made everyone wish to be part of it, to share in the childlike naiveté which was at once so shy and yet so vibrant.” Many women in cinema have used their sex appeal as spectacle but Monroe engages the audience with the person behind the figure, securing her place as a Hollywood legend.