Thora Birch: Stuck in a Dark Corner
Part of: 'Ana' Alert , Gossip , Hollywood
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DK and I sat down at the AFI film festival screening of Dark Corners expecting the film to be decent. If not, we could always walk out. Life’s too short to sit through a shitty two hour movie. But the problem with film festival and market screenings is that people who’ve worked on the film are often in the audience. Even though the AFI’s description of Dark Corners didn’t mention a Q & A, the writer/director announced to us before the screening that he would be doing one after the movie. Great. Now the movie was guaranteed to suck and there wouldn’t be a way to surreptitiously walk out, since DK and I were sitting in the last row. Things got worse. Just before the movie started, the star of the film, Thora Birch, came and literally sat down right in front of me...
I love Thora Birch, but have no idea what she’s been in since Ghost World (probably ‘cause it’s been direct-to-video movies aka crap). It’s very tragic that she hasn’t become more famous, because she’s a really good actress but obviously has shitty management. I even mentioned her the other day in an unrelated post as possibly being ‘ana’. At the screening, she was wearing jeans and a boxy jacket, so I can’t be certain, but she appeared to be normal skinny. Her hair was bleached blond with 2 inch roots—not so pretty--and the color made her look older, though that could be the point.
The other thing that made her look older was the lighting and makeup in Dark Corners. It really made me mad. Poor Thora Birch had probably read the script and had been excited to play two versions of the same character living different lives. The movie ended up being a misogynistic hardcore horror film with cliché dialogue and English actors with bad American accents. (Since it was shot in London, why didn’t they have Thora’s character be an American living in England? That would have solved the accent problem. Duh.) I’m not sure that Thora was a fan of her own movie, either. At one point, she was slumped in her seat, but quickly sat upright when she realized her negative posture. I really tried to sit through the entire movie, but my stomach was not doing well. I hadn’t eaten all day, but had completely lost my appetite. There were only stomach pains from anxiety. After an hour, DK and I left. (I swear it wasn’t you, Thora.) We stopped by the bar and I downed a martini so I could get some of the movie out of my system, but the damage had already been done.
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