This is probably the most gender-bending I’ll ever see from Korea xD Though I do feel Amber’s rapping isn’t as fluid as Jay Park’s here, I can’t help it seeing biases working together.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t1FGuQYachA
Also, Amber has earned her tag.
Han Hong brought out the big guns with the most perfect rendition of Heavenly Road (天路) [1] I’ve seen her do. You know she means business when she pulls that song out, so she -of course- was crowned the winner of this season of I Am a Singer. Well, it was about time! LOL
I still wish she and Meav could collaborate in a song together.
Oh.mah.gosh.
It’s a battle of the horse-riding sword-brandishing tough ladies that -actually- existed in real life, with lives brought onto the silver screen, beautified while being personified by THE faces of their own Golden Eras.
In the case of Greta Garbo, of course, with Hollywood in her most fun and most relaxed Queen Christina, often mistaken for a man and featuring the infamous scenes of Garbo kissing a lady and being romanced by John Gilbert while in mannish get-up. Then there’s the Mexican and Latin movie classic diva La Doña Maria Felix as Catalina Erauso, escaping a convent and dragging it up as Don Alonso, making the ladies of the Peruvian Viceroyalty swoon in La Monja Alferez, with a twist ending to match Some Like It Hot.
And to quote Toni Collette:
We’re women dressed as men dressed as women!
This is a tough one. I do have a terrible Greta Garbo bias, but I think I’m handing it down to La Doña on this one. Maria Felix is like the awesome fusion of everything that’s good with both Greta Garbo and Joan Crawford.
Chris Li Yuchun, Amber, Jing Chang and BiBi together one one stage for once in my life. Not even performing together, just standing one next to the other.
So apparently BiBi held a concert in Chengdu recently, and I went on a spazzy search because- Dude, BiBi in dreadlocks. Apparently, some of the wardrobe worn (at least the two more androgynous ones) were Yohji Yamamoto designs, including the one she’s wearing while in dreadlocks. It’s like- too many things are perfect in that combination.
There are loads of other photos and snapshots of the concert in this Weibo hashtag: #周笔畅unlock成都演唱会#
All photo credits too all the people with their watermarks. All you lucky sons of guns.
I’m not a fan of the cowboy gauchito hat, but I was surprised that Madhuri Dixit’s Facebook page shared this photo of her showering all her swag. It’s the first time I’ve seen some sort of gender-bending from India. Like… I would die with all the femininity that is supposed to embody women there with their overly long hair, their strong accentuating make-up, the saris and anarkalis.
Rani… sorta did the gender-bending gig for Dil Bole Hadippa! [1], and she had swag but the role was played for laughs, while Tabu has worn suits for different reasons in a number of films (lawyering up in Ghaath, gender-switcheroo gag in Aamdani Atthani Kharcha Rupaiyaa), and wore short hair for a brief period during Hu Tu Tu, but I’ve never come to grips with that.
Maybe I’m just used to seeing them with long hair and saris. I also love how the color red suits Tabu. Sure~ it looks good on film and photoshoots, and it could be local – so of your own – and exotic at the same time, but I would find having to live with it exhausting.
… and Esquire Magazine likes covers with women shaving their fake beards.
I don’t like Sonam Kapoor. Seeing her name on a movie I’m about to watch (or should be in queue) elicits a groan from me, as it happened with Bhaag Milkha Bhaag or Delhi-6, which I must admit was successful and made me not hate her so much. But I’m also not madly in love with Fan Bingbing, so there.
Though I do think that Fan Bingbing is a better actress than Sonam Kapoor, I did find something that the two of them have in common. They’re both fashion ladies. Now they also have photos shaving their fake masculinity, with Sonam being photographed by Rohan Shrestha for… whoever the heck knows this is for.
I kinda welcome this (though brief) change. This is the first time I’ve seen all of them all together not showing one inch of leg. I barely recognize any of the members this way, though.
When women play tomboy girls or girls who have to pretend to be boys on screen is hardly believable, mainly because mainstream actresses are normally TOO pretty and productions wouldn’t bump the masculinity to make them look less like girls — at least that USED to happen in a film like Queen Christina (and Morocco, though I don’t think Marlene Dietrich intends to play tomboy as much as play Dietrich on that) [1].
Actresses like Bynes in She’s the Man [1] didn’t exactly hit the mark, though it could come close to Ella Chen’s level in Hana Kimi [1]. However, the other adaptations of the same manga series- the Japanese version of Hana Kimi with Horikita Maki [1] or the most recent Korean version To the Beautiful You with f(x)’s Sulli [1] suffer from similar problems. Same could be said for Zhao Wei- maybe I could overlook her role in Red Cliff [1][2], but I definitely CAN’T overlook her prettyfied self in Mulan [1].
In general, though, Taiwan and China leave me very surprised with the gender-bending… intended or unintended. It’s countless the times that I’ve asked myself whether I was seeing or listening to a boy or a girl. It doesn’t help that most names (without characters) look very gender-neutral.
ANYWAY, I’ve gone way off topic here. The main thing in this post is supposed to be Rani Mukerji, whom I saw for the very first time in Dil Bole Hadippa. Though it’s a pretty decent film, I’ve come to appreciate it more now for Rani- especially for her mannerisms in the Bhangra Bistar number. Though the number is before she gets to pretend to be a guy, her character works as a performer at a moving acting troop, with the lack of a leading man… she’s made to play the part.
And she does it perfectly.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IzYq_m8iG9k
I usually very hard to please on these issues, but Mukerji sells me the role of ‘the dude’ in this one. She pulls it off better than Ella or Bynes, though all of them get to be funny while doing so.
You can even see a bit of the shooting of this part of the film [1].
There’s also an official upload, but quality is not as good and they only include the musical numbers without context.
