THE BEST AND WORST LOVERS IN HOLLYWOOD:
Justin Timberlake & Jessica Biel: "You could safely call him a groomzilla." Having gotten over his "inability to commit," Timberlake threw himself into planning the $6.5 million ceremony, renting an Italian resort for the wedding and flying guests in on chartered jets. "Justin planned a series of mini-celebrations leading up to the evening ceremony. Guests were treated to a seafood feast followed by a fireworks display on the beach the day they arrived." He chose Biel's "6-carat princess-cut engagement ring without consulting her" and "picked out Jess's gown from sketches. She trusts him." Well, that's her first mistake.
Blake Lively & Ryan Reynolds: "With its 300-year-old moss-draped oak trees and stately, columned mansion, the Boone Hall Plantation & Gardens in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, is a favorite venue for couples tying the knot. But it wasn't just the charming post-and-rail fences and lush lawns that appealed to the couple saying 'I do' there September 9th."
Was it the historic slave quarters then? Boone Hall's website seriously boasts about the "eight original slave cabins" and the road in front of the plantation property is quaintly named "Slave Street." I personally find the whole idea of getting married at a Southern plantation totally tacky and repulsive on a soul level, but hey, I'm not Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds.
Taylor Swift's Fatal Attraction: Her relationship with rising high school junior Conor Kennedy continues at warp speed. "Swift is certainly taking her one-and-a-half-month romance rather, well, swiftly. Since meeting the 18-year-old Kennedy in July, the six-time Grammy winner, 22, has rearranged her schedule to spend as much time with him as possible." Although the rumor that she bought a house across the street from the Kennedy compound has been debunked, she is still giving off some serious Stage 5 Clinger vibes. "Swift loves that her new guy (son of Robert Kennedy Jr. and the late Mary) gives her entrée to the storied political family. She says it's a fantasy come true. She's very smitten." Isn't she always, though? "Pals are concerned she's repeating a troubling relationship pattern," citing the insanely fast pace of her monthlong fling with Jake Gyllenhaal, which ended when he dumped her unceremoniously. "She's always rushing into love. We all wonder why she can't take it slow." Because she thinks fairy-tale, love-at-first-sight romances are real, and always decides that whomever she is dating at the moment is The One (regardless of what the dude might think). "For years, Swift has harbored a not-so-secret infatuation with Conor's iconic family. One insider says Conor's cousin Ted Kennedy Jr. even calls the crooner a Kennedy groupie!" Well maybe Conor Kennedy is a Taylor Swift groupie! And they're not groupies, they're Band-Aids! She started collecting Kennedy memorabilia last year, after reading The Kennedy Women. She met Rory Kennedy at a screening of a doc about Ethel Kennedy, and was invited to spend her Fourth of July at the compound in Hyannis Port. She and Conor Kennedy have been inseparable ever since, although that may change in the fall when he goes back to, uh, high school.
In the corner, wearing a beanie and two stud earrings, strumming a guitar, and talking about poetry, Colin Farrell is about to make out with your girlfriend, and all you can do is applaud him and hold his drink while he does it.
Some months ago, upon the release of an earlier Total Recall trailer, our esteemed colleague Alex Pappademas fretted, Hey, where's that nice, tri-mammaried sex-worker from outer space? I don't see her here, and I was explicitly guaranteed the return of a mutant prostitute with three breasts. (We paraphrase, but that was the thrust of the piece.) Sure, if you dug deeply enough into the movie blogs, you could find promises that the new Recall team knew where its triple-boobed bread is buttered, but the video evidence of such was nonexistent.
“Restrained” is probably the wrong descriptive adjective for a trailer that takes just over a minute to get to Colin Farrell making an “I suddenly know the cheat codes to this level” face (© 2002 Jason Bourne) and dispatching what looks like a squad of leftover Star Wars clone-troopers with his bare hands. And yet: While Underworld director Len Wiseman was reportedly fan-service-minded enough to make sure his forthcoming Total Recall reboot featured both a three-breasted space-hooker and a Kuato (played, because taking time off from movies to do Stoppard doesn't pay for itself, by Bill Nighy), this trailer shows us neither. Instead we get Bryan Cranston, John Cho with archetypal creepy-guy blond hair, a glimpse of the reimagined Rekall Inc. offices (which look like a floating-touchscreen-enhanced Ruby Foo’s) and some hovercar shenanigans straight out of Minority Report, which happens to be the last point of overlap between Philip K. Dick’s oeuvre and Farrell’s.
In the wake of his successful gender transition, Chaz Bono has spoken of wanting to serve as an advocate for people who feel "trapped" in their bodies. People like him who, for whatever reason, grew up loathing what they saw in the mirror, rejecting the shallow labels that society placed upon them. While it might not be exactly who Chaz had in mind, the first person this made me think of was Colin Farrell.
In the beginning of the last decade, Farrell emerged from nowhere (or at least from one of Joel Schumacher’s bawdiest fantasies) to become one of Hollywood’s leading men by fiat — the sort of star-anointing from on high (or, in Hollywood’s case, "while high") that happens every few years and rarely works out well for anyone. (“Ryan Reynolds? Gretchen Mol and Julia Ormond will see you now.”) The then-24-year-old Irishman was handsome and hungry, and on the strength of little but a pair of eyes the color of aged Jameson, he promptly gobbled up every starring role in town: a noble, blandly macho WWII POW in Hart’s War, a cocky, blandly macho cop in S.W.A.T, the only publicist in New York without a cell phone in Phone Booth, and as something-something-young-something in The Recruit (seriously, does anyone actually remember that movie?). In each of these pictures, Farrell was occasionally compelling but mostly unmemorable, a sprinter stuck running in quicksand. Yet because none of them exactly tanked, the myth of Farrell-as-leading-man continued, to the increasing skepticism of everyone — including the man himself. (Check out Farrell’s face in this poster — it's screaming, "What the hell am I doing here — and is that really LL bloody Cool J?!")
