Salon.com > Ana Marie Cox

Love hate

Mon, 27 Mar 2000 17:00:00 +0000

In the normal course of things, directly comparing "Time of Your Life" star Jennifer Love Hewitt to Audrey Hepburn is unfair -- like comparing LeRoy Neiman to Picasso. But with Monday night's "The Audrey Hepburn Story" (ABC, 8 p.m. EST) -- starring and co-produced by Hewitt -- she has made the contrast inescapable. This is not to her advantage.

Hewitt is unconvincing enough as a first time New Yorker complaining about a ridiculously cheap $300 a month rent on Fox's "Time of Your Life." And since Hewitt doesn't possess a trace of Hepburn's charm, grace or magnetism, the interminable biopic resorts to the crudest of script and visual cues. We remember that Hewitt is playing Audrey Hepburn only because she stiffly, emphatically keeps introducing herself that way. As if this were too ambiguous, Hewitt is occasionally shown sliding into various director's chairs, all clearly labeled "Audrey Hepburn." To say the role is a stretch gives Hewitt too much credit. Hewitt's accent is that of a child pretending to be a fairy princess, and her manner is that of a runway model dipped in molasses.

Monica's got a brand-new bag

Thu, 23 Mar 2000 17:00:00 +0000

This was the ad. A quarter-page in the New York Times Sunday Styles section, illustrated (somewhat incongruously) by a sketch of a rail-thin woman with a dark-haired flip cut, reading: "Meet Monica Lewinsky as she personally presents her spring collection of handbags and totes available exclusively at Henri Bendel. Wednesday, March 22, 12 - 2 p.m."

Of course, I go.

11:15 a.m.: The "trunk show," as the signs describe it, is being held in the fourth floor atrium. The bags department is small, overheated, luxurious and directly overlooks the four-story chasm in the middle of the Bendel store. At this point, the media outnumbers actual customers by a margin of about 3-to-1. I try to appear inconspicuous, but am wearing a casual wool car coat, jeans and am carrying a messenger bag. The woman from Newsday has a Prada purse. Decide to pretend to shop.

11:25 a.m.: More journalists arrive. The six people standing in line are so picked over I am embarrassed to ask any questions.

11:27 a.m: The Monica bags are actually pretty cute. Square, shaped like the cloth bags the Strand gives out, but made of thick, expensive fabric. Brocades. A kicky lime green and black zebra stripe. Very now. Very Spring 2000. Would go well with Capri pants and a sleeveless blouse.

“Julien Donkey-Boy”

Fri, 15 Oct 1999 16:00:00 +0000

Without any semblance of a narrative arc, "Julien Donkey-Boy" seems like it will never end. After about an hour, the loosely configured amalgam of drunken soliloquies, gross-outs and frolicking children with Down's syndrome simply begins to ooze on into eternity. It is not a pretty sight.
Then again, it's not supposed to be.

"Julien" is the second film, after "Gummo," from professional Wunderkind Harmony Korine, who first slouched into the media margins with his screenplay for Larry Clark's "Kids." The goofy nihilism of that movie was mitigated by the obvious pleasure Clark took in his protagonists' youthful sensuality. In "Gummo," however, Korine's violent antipathy for "normal" came to full expression, and all the pleasures typically associated with movies -- plot, the actors' physical beauty, metaphor, cinematography -- were eradicated for the sake of an exercise in disgust.