Word: freakish
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...valiant effort, to be sure, but an unsuccessful one. And then there is Arbus, whose fascinatingly strange photographs you will sadly not see in this film. Arbus shows us people who are decidedly a part of our world and, though often appearing to be normal, decidedly freakish. Her subjects are often that part of ourselves we refuse to recognize. “Fur” shows us people from another, imaginary world who, despite appearing to be freakish, are decidedly normal and maddeningly bland. It gets the formula backwards, and is all the less powerful for doing so. Worst...
...than no perimeter defender in the Ivies can keep him out of the lane. He can penetrate and get to the basket at will and is, in addition, accurate shooting from long range. According to unconfirmed reports, he can also touch the ground without bending over. He uses that freakish wingspan to lead the league in steals, boasting over three thefts per game a year ago. Zoller has really cute curly hair, and was the top rebounder in league play last season...
According to the credits Fur is "inspired" by Patricia Bosworth's sober, well-researched and touching 1984 biography of Diane Arbus, the photographer who specialized in making indelible images of the freakish-giants, dwarfs, Siamese twins and the like-in mid-20th century America. The filmmakers, in an on-screen foreword, say that what we are about to see is "a film that invents characters and situations that reach beyond reality to express what might have been Arbus' inner experience on her extraordinary path...
...doing, they travesty Arbus. Her photographic manner was quite objective. Mostly she just had her subjects stand before her and stare, more or less expressionlessly, into her camera. Her pictures often seemed like snapshots raised to flashpoint and their intention seemed to me to reinsert the freakish back into the quotidian, to make us see the human normality lurking beneath the outer forms nature cruelly imposed upon her subjects. To put it simply, underneath her apparent artlessness there was great artfulness...
...reason we want models to gain weight, let's face it, is not mostly to protect them. It's to protect other, less genetically freakish girls--our daughters or, ahem, us--from having poor self-esteem or becoming anorexic. But people don't get anorexia from looking at fashion magazines (although it doesn't help). Anorexia is as much about a girl feeling that her life is not in her control as it is about body image. So dictating to models what their body type should be, whether to make it bigger or smaller, seems to send the wrong message...