A poll of questions

[slemslempike]

A poll for a morning, a Thursday morning, apparently, which means that I must remember to buy the Guardian to get the booklet about Freshers Week.

[Poll #1446248]

And I would have posted about this horrible review in the Independent before if I'd been here. I haven't seen The Girlfriend Experience, though it sounds interesting, and I've no idea if his other criticisms are valid, but this:

One of them, the elephantine Tessa (Debbie Chazen) giggles nervously about going to see a play that she's in.
There's no point in not saying that these huge and unappetising women come across as being incredibly sad and curiously stupid, with their whale-like lolloping around

is fairly vile no matter what.

Comments

[slemslempike.livejournal.com]

Yes, very. Also, that there is apparently no difference between "not attractive to me, personally" and "objectively hideous to everyone". It made me want to see the play more, actually.

[ankaret.livejournal.com]

Actually, having thought about it more, the dodgier his demand that everyone on stage pander to his personal aesthetic preferences becomes.

I mean, whilst Debbie Chazen is talented and funny, and a strong contender for the position of Only Fat Woman On Telly Other Than Dawn French once Annette Badland has finished with it, I kind of doubt that she'd have been cast to play a specific sex worker if she and that sex worker didn't resemble each other a bit. Ditto with the actress who I don't think he could even be bothered to name because he was too busy being rude about her wig. I really doubt the casting director was sitting there thinking 'Well, the woman whose voice was recorded was a blonde with an athletic build, but unfortunately due to the lack of roles for athletic blonde actors and the general disdain for athletic blondes in our society, the only actors with the appropriate levels of skill and training are outsized brunettes'.

So... does the idiot reviewer seriously think that fitting his idiosyncratic standards of attractiveness and grooming is more important that being true to the sex workers' own experiences? I expect that if it was a play about trafficked Eastern European women, he'd think it important to mention that it was sad how scrawny and underaged they looked, and that personally he associated that sort of accent with bus drivers and plumbers. :p

I'm not even going to touch the idea that studying the way someone moves is a good way of telling their intelligence, except to say that he's on the slippery slope to ableism there.