Word: alleys
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Think it's impossible to play yourself and still overact the part? Kirstie Alley proves you wrong in the first seconds of Fat Actress, the Showtime sitcom (Mondays, 10 p.m. E.T.) based on her well-publicized experience as a 200-lb. actress in body-conscious Hollywood. Stepping on her bathroom scale, she reads the verdict, howls like a wounded animal and drops to the floor, then crawls to answer the phone. Her agent asks how she's doing. "Very well!" she sobs. "The pounds are just melting...
Cheers to Alley for getting the last laugh on the tabloids. But it would be nice if there were a few more laughs for the rest of us. Fat Actress fast devolves into a one-joke Hollywood sitcom, with your usual inside jokes, sycophants and celeb cameos (John Travolta, Kid Rock, NBC president Jeff Zucker and others). It could be called Curb Your Appetite...
...unlike Larry David's self-lacerating HBO show, Fat Actress, with its cartoon conception of Hollywood, lacks any sophistication. The comedy is way broad (ba-dum-bump!) and when it hits, it's very funny, as when Alley complains about the double standard for chubby actors ("Jason Alexander looks like a freaking bowling ball!"). When it's bad--more often--it's amateurish. When she pitches a sitcom to Zucker, he answers, "Oh, I'm sure it will be huge. Enormous." This is as Cole Porter--esque as the repartee gets. Other plots hinge on black men who like...
Eight years ago, a handful of Roman Catholic families in Huntersville, a suburb of Charlotte, N.C., started a new parish. The home of their church, St. Mark, was a bowling alley. Our Lady of the Lanes, as they jokingly called it, was an apt symbol of the scarcity--and supple ingenuity--of Catholics in a region known as the buckle of the Protestant Bible Belt. Soon St. Mark was gaining a family a day. Now its almost 2,800 families hear Mass in a cavernous gymnasium as they await completion of a new church. Among the newcomers is Ben Liuzzo...
...encounter but gained the power to converse with cats. Also present is Johnnie Walker (of whisky fame, in tails and top hat), who kills felines to make flutes from their souls, and Colonel Sanders (the fried-chicken guy, in white suit and string tie), who moonlights as a back-alley pimp and supernatural fixer. Fans of Murakami will find none of this unusual. Since Norwegian Wood, his 1989 tale of nostalgia and loss (4.5 million copies and counting), the former Tokyo jazz-club owner, now 56, has gained worldwide fame for his coolly narrated stories of odd disappearances, bizarre quests...