View current page
...more recent posts
Lovely and Amazing, directed by Judith Holofcener (Walking and Talking) is highly recommended: it helps to clean the toxins out of your system if you've recently seen the awful Minority Report. Don't go see the film expecting a neat narrative arc, though: it just kind of ends. But the details and performances are wonderful. Think Ghost World without the male menopausal bile; Magnolia without the apocalyptic pretensions; Short Cuts without the length. Stroke of genius: casting the formerly dapper Michael Nouri (Jennifer Beals' sugar daddy in Flashdance) as Brenda Blethyn's liposuction doctor. The man has a gentle voice, competent bedside manner, and eyes of pure burning hate. Blethyn plays a wealthy woman with grown daughters who adopts a little black girl; the kid freely tells everyone her own mom is a "crack addict." The stolid, Buster Keaton face of this 8-year-old, passive-aggressive Holy Terror has to be seen to be believed. In one of the running story lines, Blethyn enrolls the kid in the Big Sister program so "she can have contact with black people"; the family is outraged, however, when the Big Sister straightens the girl's hair. Artists should get a kick out of the scenes where the oldest daughter, knickknack sculptor Catherine Keener, shops her wares around various arty retail outlets: the rejections she gets are priceless. ("Fine, get out of my store," says a snotty German in a fashionable eyewear, after Keener backtalks him.) In another awkward scene, the middle daughter, a neurotic, starting-out actress, stands nude in front of a Brad Pitt type she's just slept with and asks him to critique her body. He briefly wakes up from his narcissism to tread through this dangerous minefield, in a scene women should find amusing and men captivating. (She's the "lovely and amazing" of the title.)
On 6/30/02, Media Whores Online posted the following notice by yrs truly in The Record, which documents "egregious press whore misbehavior":
In a piece that read like it was geared towards viewers of VH1, his new employer, Salon writer Jake Tapper recently trashed Al Gore's appearance at Lot 61, an arts & entertainment oriented Manhattan bar. He quotes large-tongued Kiss singer Gene Simmons very admiringly on how great Bush is and how irrelevant Gore is. Tapper is obviously really proud to have gotten this quote: he refers to it again later in the article. He appears to be offering it as evidence that the young and the hip don't like Gore, but the only problem is Simmons is just another aging redneck at this point. The article is incredibly snide; it's obvious that soon-to-be-tanking Salon is starting the cycle of Gore-bashing all over again. Of course, Gore's cogent criticisms of the disastrous Bush regime got swallowed up in all the bile.