The star of "The Cell" and "Steal This Movie" talks about playing a serial killer, the head yippie and a job that requires him to be suspended above a naked woman.
Vincent D’Onofrio doesn’t look like a movie star. Slightly disheveled, in a long-sleeved black shirt with the tail hanging out over gray pants, he looks more like some suburban dad who just rolled out of bed on a Sunday morning to fetch the paper in his socks. (In fact, he’s married and has two young children.) With his dull brown eyes, closely cropped gray-brown hair and Vandyke beard, D’Onofrio could be any guy in a crowd. There’s not an iota of glamour in his stooped, out-of-shape 6-foot-3 frame.
But D’Onofrio is a movie star, though not as a result of good looks or sex appeal. Rather, the 41-year-old, Brooklyn, N.Y.-born actor has talent on his side. That, and a gift for selecting plum roles. His film career began when his pal Matthew Modine hooked him up with Stanley Kubrick for a part in “Full Metal Jacket.” You may recall D’Onofrio as the hapless Gomer Pyle, the inadequate Marine recruit who ends up killing his sergeant and himself. There were also bit parts in major films like “JFK,” “Malcolm X” and “The Player,” but it was his leading role as novelist Robert E. Howard, creator of “Conan the Barbarian” and “Red Sonja,” in “The Whole Wide World” that put him on the map.
Now D’Onofrio’s in the catbird seat with starring roles in two new films that open Friday: “The Cell,” a brilliant horror/sci-fi flick in which D’Onofrio plays a serial killer whose cerebral cortex becomes the war zone wherein he and Jennifer Lopez do battle; and “Steal This Movie,” a disappointing examination of yippie leader Abbie Hoffman’s life. D’Onofrio portrays Hoffman in the latter, his performance rescuing the film from its TV movie format. But D’Onofrio’s performance in “The Cell” really blew me away, and that’s mainly what we talked about during an interview earlier this week in Los Angeles.
What was it like playing a serial killer in “The Cell”?
It was tough. It was something I was reluctant to do because there have been performances about serial killers in the past that have done pretty well. I figured society pretty much knows enough about serial killers by now. But then I met the director, Tarsem Singh, and his vision won me over. Basically everything in that film is because of him. The actors did their work and brought things to it. But in the end that film is the way it is because of Tarsem.
I thought it was a good chance to take. I’ve taken chances before in my career, so I figured I’ll take this one, what the fuck, you know? I just kept it out of my mind that you’ll never be able to top an Anthony Hopkins performance, so don’t worry about it. It’s like playing someone who’s mentally impaired now ever since Billy Bob Thornton did “Sling Blade.” You can’t touch a performance like that. It’s like “Streetcar” after Brando. It’s dead.
Your performance in “The Cell” seems deliberately low-key. Was that part of some plan to make your character, Carl Stargher, sympathetic?
The serial killer was down, but you’ve got to remember we had allowances, because once you’re in his head everything is wide open. So that was Tarsem’s and my choice.
About the sympathetic thing, if we had had it our way, there would have been no pity at all. I’m totally against that. I hate the idea of bad guys walking away at the end of movies — because I have a family and stuff. It just bothers the shit out of me.
But we had to keep on course so we didn’t do this entirely different movie. What we had to keep in mind is that we’re not trying to redeem him, we’re trying to define his psychology. The only chance to do that is showing him when he’s a child and revealing his evolution as a human being, what he grew up to be because of certain circumstances.
There’s an intense scene in the film where Stargher’s suspended over a dead, naked woman by steel rings that are pierced into his skin. Can you describe the filming of that?
It was uncomfortable. A body double shared half the pain with me for all the wide shots. I had to do all the closer stuff. You’re harnessed up, and prosthetic skin is glued to your skin. You’re hoisted up by cables hooked to a harness beneath this fake skin. I mean, it’s not digging ditches or anything, but it’s not the first thing you want to do in the morning. Actually, in the photos of people who do that, their skin stretched a lot farther than we stretched it. They wouldn’t allow us to stretch the skin any farther.
Was that scene cut?
Yeah, they cut it down so it’s really just hinted that he’s masturbating, rather than showing it. Not that we show any frontal nudity or anything. But I went through the act where my arm comes around, goes over my penis, working into the orgasm — all that was in the original scene. And then the orgasm itself, they wouldn’t allow it. So Tarsem had to snip, snip, snip and just kind of hint at it.
Why do you think people are fascinated with serial killers?
It’s like why people read scary books or go see scary movies. Because it creates a distance. They’re scared, but they’re not going to get hurt. It’s the same reason why people get S/M prostitutes to come over and whip them. They know at the end of the evening they’re not going to die. It’s just a kink. Some people have it. It leans toward being pathetic, but it’s still human.
Yet it is somewhat pathetic because they know they’re not going to be murdered. They’re going to pay the prostitute; she’s going to do her job and spank them or make them run around in a diaper with a snorkel. Then at the end of the evening, they’re going to go home, cuddle up to the wife and be nice and safe. It’s the same thing.
Is there any similarity between what you’ve just described and acting, since you get to pretend to be a serial murderer or Abbie Hoffman and then go home?
I wouldn’t put it in that area. I’d put it more in the area of expressing your creative side, whatever form that comes in. The strange people I’ve met in my life so far, the stranger they are, the more unlikely they would be putting themselves in the public eye. The actors, musicians and writers that I’ve met — they’re a bit odd, but they’re odd in a creative sense. They have some need to flex their creativity. That’s kind of their kink, my kink, our kink.
What kind of research did you do to prepare for the role of Stargher?
I don’t want to get into it too much because some of it’s too harsh. But, you know, there’s so much access to things these days because of the Internet. I had books and encyclopedias on it, letters from the insane dating back to the 1700s, books of art made by the insane. My room at the Chateau Marmont was full of this creepy stuff I was reading and studying — pictures and photos and things.
Was that particularly disturbing, going through all of that?
Yeah, but it just gives you nightmares, like it would anybody. I remember going with my wife to bookstores and looking at books of old ’50s pinups and kind of sadistic stuff — things that don’t go through my mind, these kind of drunken, slutty, big-breasted women with their breasts falling out of their bras. Images like that which I can’t conjure up myself are disturbing. But it’s stuff I had to get into my head for this role — looking at women in a sexual-object kind of way.
One of the great moments in the film is when Stargher and Lopez’s character, Catherine Deane, have a conversation while your hands are playing in the bloody water of a bathtub containing a nude, female corpse. Can you describe what was going on between you and Lopez in that scene?
All the times that Jennifer and I were together, it was very quiet, particularly in that scene. Her approach to it was very silent and my approach to it was very silent. Nobody knew what I was going to say. They certainly knew by then that I wasn’t going to stick to the script. Jennifer and I never spoke about any of the scenes we were going to do on purpose. It got to the point where if anybody had interrupted what we were doing, the whole mood would have crashed down like glass. It was that fragile — quite an intense day.
The girl who was in the tub, she had to lie there — not very nice. I didn’t know her name — some model chick. She certainly wasn’t going to talk to me. And I wasn’t going to talk to her. It was that mood on the set. The cool thing about doing a film like that, unlike the “Steal This Movie” part, is you don’t have to be social at all. I prefer that. That’s more my personality. I can carry that feeling around with me when I’m doing a part like that where I don’t want anyone to know what I’m going to do. That is, if the director allows that.
So I riffed on the idea of what was there and did many different versions of it. Then when the camera was on Jennifer, I did something completely different to bring some tears up in her. Something I won’t discuss with you. I said things that I knew would move her. But that’s not uncommon; actors do that all the time.
How do you know what to say to get that kind of reaction?
We’re actors. We know that shit. If we don’t know anything, we know that.
You’ve done disturbing roles before — was Stargher the most disturbing?
As far as a fictional character’s morals, he would probably be the least moral person I’ve ever played.
How did you approach the role of Abbie Hoffman in “Steal This Movie”?
I approached it as a drama about this man’s emotional life with the background of this revolution going on. I knew a bit about Abbie, but I’m a little too young. I was born in ’59. So when I read the script, it read more like a drama to me.
Yes, there were the events that actually happened, and we felt legitimate about the way we portrayed them because we had Anita Hoffman [now deceased, played by Janeane Garofalo in the movie] with us, Tom Hayden and Gerry Lefcourt, his lawyer — people who were there, confirming things for us.
What’s more difficult — playing a purely fictional character or doing something biographical?
There’s a lot of shame that goes on when you’re playing someone who has really lived and has passed. You’re struggling with it all the time. I am, anyway. When I played Robert Howard in “The Whole Wide World,” I was struggling with it. There’s this dual thing where you feel real good about being able to play this juicy part, and then there’s constant shame. Who am I to pretend to know who this guy was? Who am I to represent this guy for people who never knew him? The pressure is unbelievable, I can’t tell you.
Stephen Lemons is a freelance journalist and regular contributor to Salon. He lives in Los Angeles.
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She’s 66 years old. She has an Academy Award for playing a decidedly frumpy Queen Elizabeth. Her last movie role was as the elderly spinster nanny to Russell Brand’s playboy millionaire in “Arthur.” And she’s officially got the best body in the world. Dame Helen Mirren, what was it like when they created you on Mount Olympus?
When the gym chain LA Fitness polled 2,000 members on the sexiest male and female physiques on the planet, you’d expect renowned hotties like Nicole Scherzinger and this year’s It Girl, Pippa Middleton, to make the list. And they did. But who’d have guessed that Inspector Jane Tennyson would blow away the competition for the top spot? Or that 48-year-old Elle Macpherson would come in second, and 42-year-old Jennifer Lopez would land in fourth? And lest you thinking defying Father Time is for the ladies, the male list is decidedly unyouthful too, with Daniel Craig, Johnny Depp, Brad Pitt, David Hasselhoff and Simon Cowell all making appearances. Note to gravity: YOU LOSE.
Now, an LA Fitness poll isn’t exactly the ne plus ultra of scientific inquiry, and it’s not as if Helen Mirren’s off-the-charts level of foxiness is going to change Victoria’s Secret fashion shows or Sports Illustrated swimsuit issues. You need only do a comparative perusal of the Maxim 100, where teenagers like Miley Cyrus and Taylor Swift are holding their own against a variety of Kardashians and models, to know that dewy, voluptuous youth never goes out of favor.
There’s something defiantly cheeky and provocative about the LA Fitness poll results — a little like, oh, I don’t know, declaring Mirren’s costar Russell Brand the sexiest man of the year. Look at us! Thinking outside the box! No wonder LA Fitness’s marketing director Tony Orme told the Hollywood Reporter this week that “It’s great to see the public celebrating bodies of all shapes and sizes, and proving that you really can look fabulous over 40 and 50.”
That’s really the point here, isn’t it? A beautiful body at 18 is all but a birthright, but one at 60 is the result of damn hard work and incredibly serendipitous genetics. And indeed Mirren declared last year that her “best friend” is her Wii Fit.
Of course, a survey whose results suggest that beauty and sexiness aren’t the sole terrain of the young — and that having a rocking body is possible at any age — is well in service of the fitness industry. Sure, Mirren, like those ankle-biting whippersnappers Macpherson and Lopez, surely has all the body, face, and hair upkeep that a woman could dream of. Simply rolling out of bed looking like a million bucks becomes an increasingly unrealistic option the older any of us get – even a woman who is still cavorting around in red bikinis and posing naked in magazines.
Yet despite the attention-getting nature of the LA Fitness poll, it serves as a reminder that beauty and sexiness don’t necessarily have an expiration date. That aging is inevitable, but “letting yourself go” only has to be if you choose to make it so. That being vibrant and active is always seductive. And that the untouchable Helen Mirren can outscorch legions of females 50 years her junior.
"It's getting harder to breathe...when you're in my face."
“You can do this,” Casey Abrams told himself while stepping up to the microphone. “Just remember to take deep breaths.” Casey understood the inherent irony of telling himself to inhale when he was about to sing Maroon 5′s “Harder to Breathe” in front of millions of people on “American Idol.” But that’s not what Casey was worried about.
The portly bearded gentleman had spent weeks practicing his kissing technique at home on an upside-down mop, to which he had attached a photo of Jennifer Lopez’s face from InStyle magazine. Every night, he would sing-whisper the last lines — “It’s getting harder and harder to breathe” — while slowly inching his face toward the J. Lo cutout. For 14 days, he had planted a kiss on the “Idol” judge’s paper lips, imagining her eyes turning moist and looking back at his with absolute love and devotion.
Casey knew he would make it to the Top 3 with this move. He was sure of it. He heard the beginning strains of the song and inhaled deeply.
For years afterward, Casey’s friends would sit around a long wooden table, drinking grog and demanding that he tell the tale of the time he had kissed Jennifer Lopez on the cheek. Casey would recount his heroism with a certain shyness and shuffling of his feet: something that his mates would chalk up to the young man’s humble nature. Casey could never bear to tell them the truth. It was only on his honeymoon night, when his zaftig new bride with her ample breasts asked him about his experience with Jennifer Lopez, did Casey Abrams finally unburden himself of the truth.
“She had terrible breath,” Casey said with a sigh. “It was actually really gross.”
After a pause which seemed to last forever, Mrs. Abrams let out a hearty laugh. The former “American Idol” star joined with her, relieved to have finally gotten that terrible secret off his chest.
Jennifer Lopez and Steven Tyler will join Randy Jackson as “American Idol” judges next season, after months of turnover and speculation about the future of TV’s top-rated show.
With pomp rivaling that of a U.S. Supreme Court appointment, Fox finally assembled the new pieces of the “Idol” panel that will be returned to its original three-member format for season 10.
Actress-singer-dancer Lopez and Aerosmith frontman Tyler will have the job of trying to match the offbeat chemistry of former judges Simon Cowell and Paula Abdul.
The likely Lopez-Tyler pairing had been reported so frequently that Fox would have had to produce Betty White and 50 Cent instead to generate any surprise.
Cowell announced last January that he planned to leave to launch a new talent show for Fox in 2011, with newcomers Ellen DeGeneres and Kara DioGuardi exiting this summer. Abdul left in 2009 over a contract dispute.
Jackson will be the only original judge when “American Idol” returns in January.
Lopez and Tyler could help “American Idol” reinvent itself for the new season, when it will try to stem a ratings slide and bring in younger viewers. The show’s audience has been gradually aging, and advertisers prefer to pitch to young adults.
But Fox and the show’s producers didn’t match the new judges to the target audience when it comes to age: Lopez is 41 and Tyler is 62. Jackson is in the middle at age 54.
Lopez’s films include “Selena,” “The Wedding Planner” and most recently “The Back-Up Plan.” She has appeared as a mentor on “American Idol.”
She was part of the “Fly Girl” house dancers on the comedy show “In Living Color,” in 1990, before becoming a backup dancer for Janet Jackson.
“On the 6,” Lopez’s first album, came out in 1999 and launched a career in pop, Latin, hip-hop and R&B. “Love?” is the latest CD from the Grammy winner, who has twins with husband Marc Anthony.
Tyler brings a colorful and tempestuous history with him. He’s fought with his band mates, been in rehab for prescription drug abuse and took a fall off a stage in 2009 that forced cancellation of Aerosmith’s summer tour.
“American Idol” was the nation’s favorite program last season, the seventh time it’s held that position. But it showed rare vulnerability, beaten in the weekly ratings several times by ABC’s “Dancing With the Stars.”
A total of 24.2 million viewers watched the ninth season’s final duel between Lee DeWyze and Crystal Bowersox, compared to the nearly 29 million viewers who saw Kris Allen claim victory over Adam Lambert last year.
GTD-05023â¨DREW BARRYMORE as in New Line Cinemaâs romantic comedy âGOING THE DISTANCE,â a Warner Bros. Pictures release.(Credit: Jessica Miglio)
If you want proof that the American romantic comedy is in a dismal state, trapped halfway between apology and experiment, you need look no further than “Going the Distance,” which features real-life couple Drew Barrymore and Justin Long as a likable young recession-era duo separated by a continent, a lack of funds and a cloudy future. I don’t mean that this movie is strikingly good or strikingly bad, in cosmic terms — it’s a solid but totally forgettable entertainment, redeemed somewhat by Barrymore’s loud, horsey laugh and some agreeably racy comic situations.
Here’s the thing: Simply by trying to break free of the hoariest situations and archetypes, and to create characters who talk and behave somewhat like actual young (or at least youngish) middle-class Americans, director Nanette Burstein and her cast have made the year’s best mainstream rom-com. But seriously, consider the competition: Two “comeback vehicles” for fading stars named Jennifer, both of them self-fulfilling prophecies about the difficulties faced by American actresses over 40, both of them encouraging the media to be both observers and enablers of Hollywood sexism. (Yeah, mea culpa on that one.) “Sex and the City 2,” a genuinely idiotic film that got beaten up out of all proportion. “Eat, Pray, Love,” which of course doesn’t really qualify as a rom-com, but would have been a lot better if it did. And I can’t go back to February and revisit the fact that I actually spent a little bit of my life watching “Valentine’s Day.” I just can’t.
So awarding a prize to “Going the Distance” in this context is a little like giving an A for effort to the only student in your class who isn’t dropping out to take a job at Chick-Fil-A. It’s the only romantic comedy to emerge from Hollywood this year that doesn’t feel completely defensive and cynical. It doesn’t condescend to its audience or shamelessly yank the emotional chains of middle-aged female viewers. It isn’t set in Romcom USA, that mysterious alternate universe where the clothes and cars look convincing but everyone’s apartment is three times too large and the conversations and situations all seemingly belong to the Mary Tyler Moore era.
Most impressively, Burstein and screenwriter Geoff LaTulippe do not seem to share the widespread assumption that romantic comedy is a contemptible if economically necessary phenomenon, based entirely on feeding over-35 women a steady drip of the dumbest possible clichés about guys and gals and that joyous-yet-painful thing that happens between them. (Besides home mortgages, I mean. And pubic lice.) “Going the Distance” doesn’t always click but has a distinctive, sardonic voice and vision. It at least tries to capture the social world of Erin (Barrymore) and Garrett (Long), a couple of smart but underemployed post-collegiate types who meet over the Centipede machine in a New York bar, smack dab in the middle of a shrinking economy.
Now, am I claiming that “Going the Distance” is a Zeitgeist-capturing yarn of love in our hookup culture, one that may capture the mood of an entire generation? I am not. It has a little of that ambition, which is admirable and all. In bringing together a documentary filmmaker (Burstein made the docs “American Teen” and “The Kid Stays in the Picture”) with an unknown screenwriter, this film’s producers seem to be splitting the difference between conventional rom-com and more “alt” fare, like the films of indie auteurs Joe Swanberg or Andrew Bujalski. But I strongly suspect the skeptics are right. Of course romantic comedy could come back, and it undoubtedly will. But at the moment it’s a moribund genre, with little appeal to the “Twilight” generation of girls and young women. All a pleasant, offbeat movie like “Going the Distance” can hope to do is swim halfheartedly against the ebbing tide.
I spent a little while after watching “Going the Distance” trying to puzzle out its flaws and limitations — the directing is better than the writing, the actors rise above a pedestrian plot, etc. — before arriving at the perfect summary: It’s kind of good, but not all that great! (Hear that sound? That’s the Pulitzer Prize for criticism, whooshin’ toward me.) Thing is, Barrymore is so terrific as Erin, a ballsy, physical, foulmouthed guys’ gal who’s universes away from your average neurotic rom-com heroine, that you keep thinking a movie built around her ought to be awesome. So the fact that is isn’t is continually surprising.
When Erin and Garrett go home together after their little contretemps at the Centipede machine — she was about to hit a high score before he screwed it up — neither one of them is exactly thinking about a great romance. He broke up with somebody else quite recently (OK, minutes earlier). They do bong hits and make out. She pretends to be outraged that Garrett’s hopeless roommate Dan (comedian Charlie Day) is “DJ’ing the hookup,” i.e., playing the “Top Gun” score through the flimsy apartment walls while they get it on. They actually have breakfast together the next morning, complete with sincere conversation — but when Garrett calls Erin later, she still doesn’t know his name.
This whole sequence of scenes around the couple’s first meeting is so charged with tenderness, toughness and combative, outrageous humor — and that brash, braying Barrymore laugh — that one can only wish the rest of “Going the Distance” lived up to it even halfway. But as Garrett and Erin fall in love, Burstein almost immediately resorts to a montage of, God help me, the couple frolicking on the beach or strolling Manhattan’s streets hand in hand. See, their idyll is to be short-lived: Erin’s a summer intern at a New York newspaper who’s heading back to grad school in California, while Garrett works at a record label that used to be hip and is now hoping to survive by finding the next Jonas Brothers.
Yes, the fact that they both work in crippled or dying industries is meant to be significant, but like a lot of other things in LaTulippe’s script it comes off as intriguing but a little half-baked. Why is Garrett and Dan’s other buddy, Box (Jason Sudeikis), so interested in finding a girlfriend over 45 who will, in some epistemological sense, not be a cougar? Why must we learn strange but irrelevant details about the sex life of Erin’s unhinged married sister (played by Christina Applegate, who is very funny)? I think the only reason is that screenplays in the post-Tarantino, late-Apatow era must garnish their supporting characters with all kinds of potentially symbolic eccentricities.
Inescapably, “Going the Distance” gets more flaccid and ordinary as it manages the highly predictable yuks emerging from Garrett and Erin’s efforts to keep their relationship going across 3,000 miles of low-budget separation. I never lost interest in this couple, who have a relaxed and natural chemistry together (as I guess they should). If Long’s no match for Barrymore, he’s still a genial comic performer, and even the most ordinary parts of the film deliver plenty of laughs. You never have the feeling that “Going the Distance” got made because of econometric projections; the people involved actually like it, and that counts for a lot. Can it save the rom-com? Definitely not, but I’m not sure anything can.
Scott Fitzgerald’s maxim that there are no second acts in American lives has been proved wrong so often that it blazes out above the landscape in flaming letters of wrongness. Sometimes it seems that American lives are nothing but second acts: Getting wrecked, screwing the wrong people and going to jail is the process that ultimately makes us lovable.
Jennifer Lopez has avoided any such catastrophic meltdowns, as far as I know — unless you’re counting “Gigli,” her misbegotten lesbian-mobster romance from 2003, and the botched betrothal to Ben Affleck whence it sprang. (That relationship might have counted, for both of them, as screwing the wrong people.) Actually, while “Gigli” is a very bad movie, it does not quite deserve its reputation among the most terrible ever made; as deluded pop-celebrity vehicles go, it’s no “Glitter.” But let us not grow distracted by that topic, alluring as it is. (We can discuss the relevance of Mariah Carey’s second-act strategies some other time.)
Still, “Gigli” signaled that the curtain was beginning to fall on Lopez’s first act, if you will. After that came “Shall We Dance” with Richard Gere, God help us, and then the alarming, inept “Monster-in-Law” with its muggy, mincing supporting performance from Jane Fonda (Satan help us!) and then Lopez’s dismal attempts to reinvent herself as a dramatic actress in “An Unfinished Life” and “Bordertown.”
By the time Lopez walked away from the limelight to focus on motherhood and her marriage to Marc Anthony, the limelight had already walked away from her. In retrospect, her tenure as world-dominating movie star and pop star — and possessor of the most celebrated derrière since Aphrodite Kallipygos — was less than half a decade, from “Out of Sight” in 1998 through “Maid in Manhattan” in 2002.
So here we have a woman who is tremendously rich and famous, able to command her own business ventures and control her own destiny to a significant degree, yet who is still in search of a second act as a pop celebrity. That’s a dangerous game for a female performer approaching middle age to play (Lopez will turn 41 in July), especially when she’s trying to swim upstream against the most vicious currents of Hollywood sexism, and double-especially when her star appeal in the first place was built on evanescent qualities like beauty and charm.
If Lopez insists on using her financial muscle and production powers to shove her way back into leading-lady roles on the big screen, that can only mean more tepid embarrassments like “The Back-up Plan,” one of the most unintentionally apposite titles in movie history. What remains of Jenny From the Block’s one-time hotness is her easygoing, everygirl persona and a modest comic gift; at this point, her real backup plan should be a TV sitcom (as a recent EW article on her career plight suggested).
Instead, we get a dispiriting and thoroughly ineffective romantic comedy, with some juicy morsels provided around the edges by a great supporting cast but no heat whatever in the central coupling between Lopez and Aussie TV hunk Alex O’Loughlin (a vampire in “Moonlight” and a doctor in “Three Rivers”). Zoe (Lopez), a Manhattan pet-store proprietor — why do the single women in romantic comedies always own pet stores? Is it psychological shorthand for how lovelorn and nurturing they are? Or is it just to provide cute animal reaction shots? — meets Stan (O’Loughlin), a bad-boy cheesemaker, in a rainy-day taxi dispute right after she’s been inseminated by wisecracking OB/GYN Robert Klein.
As scripted by TV veteran Kate Angelo, Stan and Zoe’s fateful meeting is supposed to be screwball-awkward but instead comes off as skin-crawlingly uncomfortable, and despite the entirely conventional demands of the plot, the duo never seem remotely at ease with each other. When Stan announces that he’s sticking around even after learning that Zoe’s pregnant with twins who were literally fathered by a red-headed stranger, it seems willful and bizarre rather than noble and romantic, as if maybe he’s the one with compulsive baby-lust.
Speaking of weird and uncomfortable, at about the two-thirds mark in their predictable on-again, off-again romance, Zoe tells Stan: “I miss my old ass. It was like my new ass, but way hotter.” They discuss this subject for another minute or two, while Zoe fetishistically clutches an underwater photo of her in a bathing suit, taken “by her college boyfriend,” in which she’s visible only from the neck down.
What is that, a wild stab at self-deprecating humor? A collective dive into a Freudian black hole? Not only does this movie’s star look like a leaner, bionically altered version of herself, but the filmmakers call attention to that fact — and symbolically decapitate her at the same time? Now, nobody held a gun to Lopez’s head and forced her to play that scene, but you have to wonder what she thought she was doing, and what kind of advice she’s getting.
Since you bring it up, Zoe, let’s talk about the old ass and the new one. There’s no nice or polite or even entirely acceptable way to say this, but Lopez looks kind of strange in this movie. She’s been gym-toned and bronzed and highlighted and frosted and layered and processed and accessorized and hidden in drapey dresses and buried under a somewhat doggy Farrah Fawcett ‘do. You can see J.Lo in there, or someone who looks like her, from time to time, but she can’t come out and play. In close-up, Lopez’s enormous false eyelashes cast their own shadows on the set; they threaten to reach out and entwine you, like those plant-tendril 3-D thingies in “Avatar.” She is indeed less curvaceous than she once was, and she has a sort of mysterious, hardened sheen, like a cupcake left too long in the Easy-Bake Oven.
Listen, I understand that Lopez’s struggle to play a romantic leading role opposite an actor who is seven years younger, and my reaction to it, reflect a culture of pernicious sexism that judges women and men by different standards. Of course the age difference between Stan and Zoe shouldn’t matter, but you can’t make the issue disappear by pretending it doesn’t exist. A better version of “The Back-up Plan” might have used it as a comic plot point (it’s briefly hinted at) or evaded it by casting a man who wasn’t self-evidently younger. Casting a man who actually appeared to be attracted to Lopez might have been a good idea too.
More to the point, in some hypothetical good version of this movie Jennifer Lopez wouldn’t have been so desperately repackaged in a wistful, pseudo-Proustian effort to recapture the lost magic of, say, “The Wedding Planner.” (Yes, that’s a ridiculous phrase to think or type, but there you are.) Even amid the notorious sexism of showbiz, there are more opportunities than ever for women to be sexy, gorgeous, charismatic, etc., into and beyond the years of motherhood, maturity and menopause. I believe Jenny can pull it off too — but not by sitting around mourning the lost ass of yesteryear.
As for “The Back-up Plan,” the reasons to see it are all about hilarious bits by Michaela Watkins as Zoe’s borderline-intolerable loudmouth best friend, Anthony Anderson as a playground dad dispensing dire words of wisdom to Stan, and Maribeth Monroe as a member of Zoe’s support group who gives birth in a kiddie wading pool, hooting and grunting like a warthog possessed by the Wendigo. In fact, toward the end of the film Angelo and director Alan Poul sneak in a pretty funny 20-minute spoof on New Age childbirth culture and the hazards of having twins (an experience Lopez and I have in common). Zoe, Stan and the headless woman in the bathing-suit photo are reduced to bystanders, and it works better that way.
Helen Mirren 
"It's getting harder to breathe...when you're in my face." 
GTD-05023â¨DREW BARRYMORE as in New Line Cinemaâs romantic comedy âGOING THE DISTANCE,â a Warner Bros. Pictures release.(Credit: Jessica Miglio) 
Photo by Peter Iovino â © 2009 CBS FILMS INC 
