Word: hollywoodism
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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...
...keep Schwarzenegger's derriere pinned to the hot seat. As they see it, the Governor is just bowing to another set of special interests--hospital and insurance companies--that want to keep profits up by employing fewer nurses than California law requires. And so the nurses have produced a Hollywood caper of a showdown, putting unrelenting public pressure on Schwarzenegger to back down. In two protests, thousands of uniformed R.N.s stormed the steps of the capitol in Sacramento, shouting, "Arnold, Arnold, you can't hide--we can see your corporate side!" Nurses have buzzed his fund raisers with "Air Arnold...
Oscar night is the one evening each year when actresses have parity in Hollywood. Now that it's over, female stars can return to playing patient wives or waiting for an agent's call. Or, for real wallowing, seeing a movie from the era when women onscreen were equal or superior to men. Here are six upcoming diva DVDs to glamorize your evenings--and to make every modern actress want to pour herself another vodka hemlock...