China Blue

What are these girls doing? Goofing? Trying a new fad? That's what I figured when I first saw this still from "China Blue", the documentary by Micha Peled.

I was truly shocked when I learned the clothes pins are used by workers to stay awake during long shifts making blue jeans in Chinese factories.

Filmed over four years, China Blue focuses on the Lifeng factory in Shaxi, China, and three girls who work there: Jasmine, 16, who travels from the countryside in search of a better job (a thread cutter); Orchid, 19, a zipper-installer who travels to meet her boyfriend; and Li Ping, 14, a seamstress. For her work as a thread cutter, averaging a pair of jeans per half hour, Jasmine makes half a yuan, or six cents.

Complete story at The Reeler

The Way You Look Tonight

You have to admire this crew's knowledge of movie tunes. AV Club

How Far Will An Actor Go?

How committed is Robert De Niro when it comes to preparing for a role? They joke about it. Playing De Niro when he finds out a movie he was planning to do has been cancelled, Sean Penn says, in an SNL skit, “I can’t believe it! I had three vertebrae surgically removed to make myself shorter for this role!”

To play the young Vito Corleone, he became fluent in Sicilian dialect. There was the filing down of his teeth to perfect the appropriate maniacal snarl in Cape Fear; the proficient jazz sax mastered for New York, New York; the custom-made silk undies insisted upon, but never seen, in The Untouchables, allowing him to swish exactly like Al Capone. Almost no need to mention his fabled 4½-stone porkathon for Raging Bull. In researching The Deer Hunter, it is whispered, he played real Russian roulette. On Awakenings, so authentic were the results of his brain scan, it was feared he had acted himself into a genuine coma.

I don't really believe the Russian roulette thing -- sounds too much like having a vertebra removed. I do love Bob, though. Who doesn't? De Niro talks with Jeff Dawson at The London Times.

Kathleen Turner On Stage

When Kathleen Turner did "Body Heat" she was afraid she would "cast a smoldering look at Bill Hurt and people would giggle". Not quite. Turner is now in a production of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Interview at All Things Considered

Tarantino Doll?

I'm not sure who would want a Quentin Tarantino doll, but they're available ($47.99 for the above set) along with other action figures from the movie "Grindhouse". (via Sneakpeek.ca)