Throughout her professional life, Minogue has been the subject of intense media interest in both the United Kingdom and Australia, which has remained constant even while her success as a recording artist has fluctuated. Her efforts to be taken seriously as a musician have sometimes been hindered by her high profile as noted by The Australian, who wrote in 1997, "When you have to lug around an image the size of Kylie's, it's difficult for any music you produce to match the hype—especially in a country that gives scant credibility to pop". http://www.kylie.co.uk/pressroom/00000019.html Her relationships, including her current relationship with French actor Olivier Martinez, have been extensively reported as well. http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/allnews/tm_objectid=14506107&method=full&siteid=50143&headline=kylie-at-the-crossroads-name_page.html
Minogue is regarded as a gay icon, which she encourages with comments such as "I am not a traditional gay icon. There's been no tragedy in my life, only tragic outfits". While part of her appeal lies in her flamboyant costumes, her confident sexual posturing and her sense of fun, she acknowledges the gay community throughout the world by performing at gay venues and events, and by supporting AIDS causes. She has said that she believes gay fans responded to her apparent distress when the news media began heavily criticising her in 1989, and that those fans have remained loyal, explaining, "My gay audience has been with me from the beginning... they kind of adopted me". http://www.mp3.com/updates.php?artist_id=4215&article_id=32576
Minogue has utilised the medium of the music video as an effective way of promoting her image, and has consistently worked at creating and evolving her visual representation. Her earliest videos portrayed her as a "girl-next-door" who was innocent and somewhat gauche but when she took control of her portrayal in 1990, she developed a more adult and provocative image. This caused her to be compared unfavourably to Madonna. Minogue admitted that she was an influence, but as her confidence grew she established a coquettish persona that differed considerably from that of Madonna's sexual aggressor. Minogue presents herself as a more passive object of desire, and frequently imbues her performances with camp elements and humour. Madonna acknowledged Minogue by wearing a "Kylie Minogue" shirt for a performance at the MTV Awards in 2000.
In several of her music videos, Minogue has touched on adult themes—an interracial relationship in "Better The Devil You Know", lesbian posturing and drag queens in "What Do I Have To Do", telephone sex in "Confide In Me" and prostitution in "On A Night Like This". She performed a slow strip tease in the Barbarella inspired "Put Yourself In My Place", and wore revealing costumes in many of her videos, most notably "Spinning Around" and "Can't Get You Out Of My Head". She satirised her image in the video for "Did It Again", in which the four major incarnations of her career, "Indie Kylie", "Dance Kylie", "Sex Kylie" and "Cute Kylie" battled for supremacy.
In 1993, Baz Luhrmann introduced Minogue to the photographer Bert Stern, notable for his work with Marilyn Monroe. Stern photographed her in Los Angeles and, comparing her to Monroe, commented that she had a "similar vulnerability and awareness of the camera". She has gained credibility by her association with people such as fashion designer Jean Paul Gaultier, photographer Stephane Sednaoui, and designer John Galliano, who described her as a "blend of Lolita and Barbarella".
During her career she has chosen photographers who attempt to create a new "look" for her, and the resulting photographs have appeared in a variety of magazines, from the cutting edge The Face to the more traditionally sophisticated Vogue and Vanity Fair, making the Minogue face and name known to a broad group of people who might never buy one of her records. William Baker has suggested that this is part of the reason she has entered in the mainstream pop culture of Europe more successfully than many other pop singers who concentrate simply on selling records. She has appeared in guest roles in television series such as The Vicar of Dibley and Men Behaving Badly in Britain, and Kath and Kim in Australia, that have capitalised on her celebrity status and image for comedic effect.
Despite her commercial success, and her acceptance by a large audience as a contemporary sex symbol, her critics describe her willingness to display her body as an attempt to disguise a lack of talent. Her detractors, such as those discussed in the book La La La, have described her as a "one dimensional performer" and "pretty, but mindless and talentless". Miki Berenyi of the group Lush said "I have a massive problem with her because she epitomises the acceptable role ... it's a shame she gets so much credibility when there are so many women worth a hundred times that. It's war—you shouldn't stick up for Kylie, she should be fought at every turn". She continues to attract discussion, both positive and negative, and in Paul Morley's study of the evolution of pop music, Words And Music: A History Of Pop In The Shape Of A City, Minogue is the vehicle by which pop is explored.
Minogue has often spoken of the stability of the team she works within. Her parents, Ron and Carol Minogue, are actively involved in her career; her father, an accountant, is her financial advisor and her mother has joined her on each of her tours. She has been managed by Terry Blamey since 1987 and the close network, along with her Stock, Aitken and Waterman origins, have led to comments that she is "manufactured", an assessment which she has freely admitted is partly accurate, saying, "If you're part of a record company, I think to a degree it's fair to say that you're a manufactured product. You're a product and you're selling a product. It doesn't mean that you're not talented and that you don't make creative and business decisions about what you will and won't do and where you want to go... Ultimately, yes, it's my name and I have to deliver the goods. But it doesn't happen without a team. So I try and work with the best people I can and take from them what I can. Hopefully I enhance what they do as well" http://www.mp3.com/updates.php?artist_id=4215&article_id=32576
William Baker has described her status as a sex symbol as a "double edged sword" observing that "we always attempted to use her sex appeal as an enhancement of her music and to sell a record. But now it has become in danger of eclipsing what she actually is: a pop singer".Minogue has suggested that although her career will inevitably change direction she expects to continue as a singer, and move away from the "sex-pot" persona she has created. In 2003 she received positive reviews for some low key performances in Paris clubs where she performed jazz standards, and she indicated she may take her career in this direction. Rather than identify herself as a particular type of singer, she has assessed herself with the comment, "now more than ever, I consider myself a performer... on stage is where I have given and received so much energy and enthusiasm".
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Ever since they first fooled around in the Atari era, movies and videogames have had a troubled relationship.
Movies based on games -- like Super Mario Bros. and Postal-- deliver pure cinematic dreck, yet somehow games based on movies up the crap ante. Slapped together on tight development schedules by B-list teams, movie tie-in games rarely crawl out of the hole of mediocrity. Quite frankly, they dream of being mediocre.
Adding insult to injury, they sell enormously well. The NPD Group reported in June that the PlayStation 2 Iron Man game was May's seventh best-selling U.S. game.
Here's our list of the 10 worst movie-to-game translations in history, with input from a Wired.com reader poll. If it seems heavy on retro games, just remember that things used to be a lot worse.
Raiders of the Lost Ark
Atari 2600 owners who ripped open their Christmas presents in 1982 were probably doubled over in glee at the prospect of jumping into the fedora of America's sweetheart, Harrison Ford, and going on an adventure as Indy. Instead, what they got was a game that we might charitably describe as "ahead of its time" but after a drink would call "ridiculous."
Not only were the graphics completely inscrutable -- can you even tell which of these abstract objects is supposed to be Indiana Jones? -- but the game was impossible to understand unless you pored over the instructions. Woe betide you if they ended up in the trash bag with the wrapping paper.
"Indecipherably bad graphics, unintuitive 'gameplay' (if you can even call it that) and the worst possible control scheme ever," writes commenter Sakimori.
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Star Wars (Namco version)
A long time ago (1987) in a galaxy far, far away (Japan), the development house behind Pac-Man decided to try its hand at creating a Star Wars game for the 8-bit Nintendo system. For the most part, it's a mundane side-scrolling game in which Luke hacks away at enemies with his lightsaber and dies a lot. But you know that things have gone horribly awry when he enters the Jawa Sandcrawler after about five minutes of gameplay to find Darth Vader, who transforms into a scorpion.
No, really. Luckily for everyone involved, this game was only released in Japan.
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Back to the Future
Screwed up though it was, Namco's version of Star Wars was more or less faithful to the movie insofar as Luke Skywalker does, at times, use a lightsaber. If we were to apply the same sort of thinking to the Nintendo Entertainment System version of Back to the Future, we would necessarily determine that the film starred a young man who spent all his time being assaulted on the street by killer wasps, girls with razor-sharp Hula-Hoops and men wearing pink. Back to the Future's controls were so shaky that players felt like they were as drunk as the people who programmed it.
Even the jump to 16 bits didn't help the series. "Shonky controls and mediocre graphics were just the start of this atrocity that really did seem like it had traveled through time from the past," wrote an anonymous Wired.com reader about Back to the Future III for Sega Genesis.
Back to the Future was just one of the flood of execrable movie-to-game releases foisted on an unsuspecting public by the thankfully dead Acclaim Entertainment. (We'll see them again before we're finished with this dreadful expedition.)
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Nausicaä Kiki Ippatsu
This is another game that only saw release in Japan, but its worldwide impact has been tremendous. The developers at Tokuma Shoten, tasked with creating a game based on animation legend Hayao Miyazaki's breakout smash Nausicaä, turned a film about nonviolence and environmentalism into a vapid shooter.
As the story goes, Miyazaki was so enraged by the game that Studio Ghibli never had anything to do with videogames ever again. Sure enough, no game projects have ever been released for any of the studio's later films, like Princess Mononoke or the Oscar-winning Spirited Away. Maybe that's all for the best.
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Friday the 13th
Yes, it's another inscrutably bad movie-to-game translation courtesy of our good friends at Acclaim Entertainment. You all remember Friday the 13th, that horror film about camp counselors who throw knives at Yetis that burrow up from beneath the Earth. At least the Back to the Future games kept epileptic Marty McFly constantly moving toward the goal.
Making a failed attempt at nonlinearity, Friday the 13th mostly left players to wander around the identical screens that made up the virtual version of Camp Crystal Lake, listening to exactly four bars of the worst sonic torture ever devised until they died. Technically it was possible to finish the entire game in three minutes, and we feel terribly sorry for anyone who spent the time to learn how.
"I'm not sure if I've ever seen anyone do anything besides run around and die," writes reader (not the real) Bob Dole.
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Seven Samurai 20XX
Wired.com reader Fnord called this PlayStation 2 game "a generic-to-bad brawler game that was trying very hard to be Ninja Gaiden, shoehorned and chopped and hammered into something that tried to resemble the plot of one of the best movies ever made."
We simply call it an atrocity. Akira Kurosawa wasn't even five years in his grave, and already his son Hisao was whoring out his classic films to the highest bidder, allowing Japanese pachinko-maker Sammy to turn Kurosawa's samurai masterpiece into a campy futuristic fighting game. It's embarrassing to even say this game's title out loud, let alone play it.
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Total Recall
For all of Acclaim Entertainment's sins of the 8-bit era, perhaps none was so unbelievably ham-fisted as Total Recall. Turning R-rated films into games for children had to have been hard work, but that still doesn't explain why the gameplay of Total Recall consists of a gorilla that is supposed to be Arnold Schwarzenegger being kidnapped by bearded midgets in pink jumpsuits, dragged into alleys and kicked in the knees. To death.
Everything about this game is hilarious, except for the fact that children spent actual money on it back when the dollar was worth something. Also, there was no three-boobed alien hooker.
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Street Fighter: The Movie: The Game
Quick, what's a worse idea than turning Street Fighter II into a live-action movie? Turning said live-action movie into a videogame. Hey guys, there already is a Street Fighter videogame, and it's awesome. We don't need one starring Raul Julia. But Raul Julia we get.
Isn't it amazingly sad that this talented actor's final appearance is in a videogame where he (his stuntman, actually) gets to serve as a punching bag for a squad of B-list actors? Besides Jean-Claude Van Damme and Kylie Minogue, there's also Ming Na, and seeing her jump around in a tiny China-doll dress shouting horrifically mangled Japanese catch phrases more than makes up for how preachy Mulan was.
Bonus points: When Street Fighter: The Movie came to the PlayStation and Sega Saturn, it was so bad that it wasn't even published by Street Fighter creator Capcom. Instead, it carried the logo of -- you cannot make this stuff up -- Acclaim Entertainment.
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Enter the Matrix
Every now and then, there's a movie game that is supposed to change everything we know about movie games. This is inevitably followed by the backlash that results when these massively hyped projects turn out to be just as crappy as their predecessors.
Reviewers agreed that the only reason to play Enter the Matrix would have been to watch the extra footage from the Matrix Reloaded shoot, a desire that simply watching Matrix Reloaded should have cured. Otherwise, it was an utter mess.
Even sadder? In a past life, lead designer David Perry was responsible for one of those rare-as-a-unicorn good movie games: Aladdin for the Sega Genesis.
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E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial
Wired.com readers might not have enjoyed the Raiders of the Lost Ark game, but Steven Spielberg liked the Atari 2600 title enough that he asked its designer, Howard Scott Warshaw, to design a game based on his upcoming film E.T.
In time for the film's release. Which was six weeks away.
Faced with an impossible deadline, Warshaw sequestered himself away in his Atari office, emerging just a month and a half later with E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. It's not the single worst videogame ever created, but it lives in infamy as the videogame industry's first high-profile disaster. Again, let us look back at children opening their presents one fine Christmas morning in 1982, and watch as they attempt to maneuver E.T. around the game screen, only to fall into a pit that they cannot escape from, no matter how many times they try. Repeat until tears are flowing steadily and Mom takes the game back to the store.
There are many urban legends about E.T., and all of them are true. Atari manufactured 4 million copies of the game and found itself stuck with 2.5 million leftovers, which it buried in a New Mexico landfill. But E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial remains one of the best-selling Atari 2600 games of all time, proving the old adage that people will, in fact, buy any videogame with a movie license on the cover, no matter how terrible.
Published: Wed, 02 Jul 2008 02:00:00 GMT - Source: Wired.Com - Read the article
Literature
Heavy Load: UK punk band with learning-disabled members.
Today on Boing Boing tv -- a sneak preview of Heavy Load: A Film About Happiness, a new documentary about a UK punk band whose members include people who have developmental disabilities. '70s punk star Wreckless Eric describes them as "a triumph of dysfunctionalness," and even Kylie Minogue (they've covered a hit song of hers) has become a fan. The band says their mission is... ...to demonstrate that disability rocks. There are few genres left in music that have yet to be defined. Heavy Load have unwittingly created a brand new one. The band is also behind a campaign called "Stay Up Late" which advocates for the right of cognitively disabled people to be allowed to go out, supervised, to live music shows and -- well, stay out late enough to actually see and hear the show. Again, from the band: We play gigs all over the country and we have noticed that something strange happens at 9.00pm ? people start to go home. Heavy Load are fed up with people with learning disabilities leaving club nights and gigs early because their staff finish their shifts at 10pm. This means they are missing out. If this happens to you: You need to talk about this with your friends, support workers, family and advocates. Our ?Stay Up Late? campaign is to make managers and staff know that we want them to plan ahead and talk to us about what we want to do... Link to Boing Boing tv post with discussion, downloadable video, and BBtv podcast subscription info. The full-length documentary premieres on the US cable network IFC on June 23rd, 9PM ET/10PM PT, and again on 24th June. (Special thanks to BB's Mark Frauenfelder, and to the film's director, Jerry Rothwell)...
Published: Mon, 23 Jun 2008 03:19:52 GMT - Source: Boingboing.Net - Read the article
Entertainment
Family dinner as Kylie reaches 40
Family members are due to join Kylie Minogue in Germany later as the singer celebrates her 40th birthday. Published: Wed, 28 May 2008 09:38:50 GMT - Source: News.Bbc.Co.Uk - Read the article
