CleverDonkey.com …Musings, Commentary, Opinions, and Drivel

I had pretty much written this movie off my possibility radar — I really like Paul Bettany (those of you who don’t recognize him might remember him from A Beautiful Mind or Master and Commander, playing second violin in both to Russell Crowe) but I can be hot and cold on Kirsten Dunst. Normally she’s okay, but the ads for this movie looked a little too sappy chick-flick, and it looked like her character was just a little too simpering for me.

However, in looking for a good post-dinner-and-coffee film with a girlfriend the other night (we even went jewelry shopping, so I guess we were looking for a chick flick), Wimbledon lined up correctly in the genre/theatre/timing category and there we were. Boy, was I pleasantly surprised! I was expecting at best a guilty pleasure and at worst a cringe-worthy moosh-fest with all the worst that Hollywood

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Shaun and Ed are flatmates in London. They have been best friends since primary school. Shaun has a brain-numbing job as a salesman in an electronics store, and Ed pretty much just sits around the house playing video games and not taking phone messages. They have a third flatmate, Peter, who is an officious prig who harangues Shaun about the fact that his friendship with Ed is holding him back in the world.

Shaun and Ed spend most evenings down at the Winchester pub, which is a sort of long-standing, dingy neighborhood watering hole. Shaun drags his upwardly mobile girlfriend there each evening, too, much to her dismay. Shaun and Ed spend each day in a semi-drunken, stuporous torpor, going about their soul-sapping, lower-middle-class lives as numbly as possible.

However, one effect of their self-induced sensory deprivation is that they fail to notice that their neighborhood (and

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I can’t quite figure out why there’s not more chatter and hubbub surrounding mad cow disease. I have theories, such as the fact that if the facts were made clear to everyone there might be massive public panic (plus the possible collapse of the commercial beef industry). For all intents and purposes, mad cow disease looks like it will be the AIDS of this century. We appear to be on the precipice of an epidemic, but nobody is talking about it.

What Is It?

Cows get something called bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), which is known informally as Mad Cow Disease. Diseased cattle can transmit the affliction to humans, where it manifests itself as something called variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD). In both cases, what happens is that malevolent particles, called prions, drill through the actual tissue of the brain, consuming grey matter and slowly eroding the function of

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This year’s Emmy awards offered a reality-show theme while skewering the format, with the wry smile and funny jokes that only Garry Shandling can deliver. It was such a joy to have him back in the driver’s seat, I really couldn’t wait for the show to be on, and I wasn’t disappointed. This year’s telecast offered some truly hilarious moments.

Great acceptance speeches:

Michael Imperioli accepting his supporting dramatic actor for The Sopranos: touching, thoughtful, and brief. Others could learn from him.
Drea de Matteo, too flustered to remember who to thank, just said she’d get off the stage before she started to “cry, choke, or puke”.
Kelsey Grammer’s speech, paying respects to John Ritter while also graciously signing off after 20 years of playing Frasier Crane.
Meryl Streep, accepting for Angels in America. She epitomizes the first lady of american acting, showing off the cuff humor and wit.

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In general, there were no really horrific messes this year and not too many standouts. Mariska Hargitay wins top honors for best dressed at the Emmys in a gorgeous, gorgeous, absolutely classic outfit – a beautiful apple green Vera Wang column dress-and-a-train complete with a tropical flower in the hair. She just glowed and looked every inch the classic Hollywood goddess. (I guess being a newlywed helped, she was just smiling the whole time as well).

For the most part I liked:

Heather Locklear’s wine-colored goddess dress
Portia Di Rossi’s classic Givenchy with great Diane Von Furstenburg jewelry.
Marlo Thomas’s classy white column as she accepted her father’s Bob Hope Humanitarian Award.
Drea de Matteo’s beautiful and slightly renaissance-looking black and gold frock.
Kim Catrall in a simple but fun pink Pamela Rowland – her overall look was just so simple and effortless.
Jennifer Anniston’s gorgeous white tube dress from Chanel with a very Indian gold design.
Cheryl

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So, I have to admit, I always watch Miss America if I track that it’s on. It’s a spectacle of pure schmaltzy Americana that is truly impossible for me to pass up. The combination of fashion (or what passes for it on the pageant circuit), the opportunity for me to make bitchy comments (see previous parenthetical note), and how American women wrestle with their femininity in a decidedly unfeminist contest is like catnip to a girly girl and holder of a sociology degree. This year I had no clue it was on but was just closing the browser window for TV Guide when I saw Miss America pageant in the listings and got it queued up on TiVo just in time.

Of course, this is one of the new and weird Miss America pageants that they have now, where they rejigger the format every year to desperately try

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So, I’m learning that Bernie Mac is an actual actor, in addition to being a comedic performer. We’ve watched The Bernie Mac show sporadically, and I’ve always enjoyed his performances, although I’m hot-and-cold on the show in general. He was engaging as the new Bosley in the second Charlie’s Angels movie, and in Ocean’s Eleven. I like that he seems to have doggedly kept doing his thing and waiting for the world to figure out he was talented instead of trying to remake himself or package an image that follows the trends of the day. I find his humor to be very funny and very real, and obviously derived from real life, which is where all of the truly funny material comes from.

And in Mr. 3000 he shows that he is not just a performer and a funny guy, but also an actual actor and a

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I used to like Denzel Washington a lot as an actor. But then he slipped into a fairly repetitive rut of playing himself in every role, and I lost interest. I didn’t see Training Day, but I heard he gave an interesting, non-Denzel-like performance. That piqued my interest in his movies again, to a certain degree. But then I heard that he was starring in a remake of The Manchurian Candidate. Now, I loved the 1964 original, and thought it was way, way ahead of its time. It was also one of those movies that (I thought) never should or would be remade, because what would the point be? How could one surpass the shocking bizarre-ness mixed with reality that caused the first one to perfectly capture Cold War paranoia? When I heard about the remake, I knew two things: first,

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