Word: parkerisms
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Canada At the Alpine Club of Canada, huts range from remote bivvy shelters at the base of snowcapped mountains to cozy log cabins like the Elizabeth Parker Hut, above, in Yoho National Park. The hut has a well-equipped kitchen and can sleep...
...glum, cardigan-swaddled Catherine doesn't sound like the right kind of role for Paltrow, whose most successful movies give her the sort of sweetly wispy presence one associates with cirrus clouds. This is more the forbidding thundercloud area of Mary-Louise Parker (who originated the role on Broadway and who some thought was unfairly overlooked for the movie). Paltrow was in the later London version of the play, directed by her old Shakespeare in Love comrade John Madden, and two years after was cast in his film version...
...casting her as Catherine in Proof instantly alters the vectors of David Auburn's Pulitzer prizewinning play. A young woman whose genius father went mad is suspected of inheriting not his gift but his curse. The actresses who played her on Broadway--Mary-Louise Parker, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Anne Heche--radiate an otherworldly, almost Martian eccentricity. The question with them was, How can you believe Catherine when she says she wrote a pioneering mathematical equation? With Paltrow the question is, How can you not? Her reading doesn't subvert the play's problem; it's just a more elegant...
Showtime's Weeds (Mondays, 10 p.m. E.T.) focuses on the supply side. Nancy Botwin (Mary-Louise Parker) is a housewife in fictional, upscale Agrestic, Calif., whose husband dies, leaving her with two sons and too little insurance money. So she starts dealing marijuana to bored salarymen. Soon Nancy discovers a whole illicit world of suburban toking: a young dealer gripes to her that his inventory was tapped out by stoners watching the bird documentary Winged Migration at the multiplex. Far from hardening her, her tiptoe into the grass has Nancy "beginning to think I am extremely naive...
...Parker's laid-back delivery, which can seem mannered in some roles, is perfect for the shell-shocked Nancy, and the characters are well realized almost down the line. (The exceptions are her egregiously stereotyped black pot suppliers.) Creator-writer Jenji Kohan gives Weeds an arch yet dreamy tone that improves on its two obvious influences. It's Desperate Housewives with nuance, Six Feet Under without the self-seriousness, a pot comedy worth the buzz...