Bloodless Coup

She was a little too goody-good for me on Nip/Tuck. But I still thought she did a great job- just her character wasn't so exciting.

I fear that that's part of her problem - execs out West just think, oh she's the "Noxzema girl", and give her characters that are a bit bland. When she's given something to do, she can really be great, and that's part of why I like her in Urban Legend - what she does in it is really unexpected given her image and most of the roles she plays.

you liked her in harvard man? hell, you liked harvard man? aside from her reprising the cruel intentions chair scene in much more flagrante delicto (yes, clothed, but what a dress!), that movie, which i saw just a few weeks ago, didn't impress me at all. i've liked most of toback's offerings since two girls and a guy, but i thought harvard man, ultimately, was hollow, an attempt to come at existentialism via a bad daylight noir, with the james toback three-way(TM) trown in out of some sense of obligation.

maybe it's just that i really didn't like the lead in it, or the way-too-long LSD sequence, which might have been find (the durable trip being necessary to the narrative) had toback not fallen back on familiar and unrealistic visual cliches to represent the state of triping.

dunno. great cast, typically interesting director, eye candy . . . still, it didn't really do it for me. i much preferred when will i be loved and black and white.

Well, I liked Harvard Man more than I necessarily like her in it. But she was fine, a again, fitting with this post, any problems I had with her in it had to do with the fact that I thought she was underutilized.

As to Harvard Man, yes I liked it. A very good (and unusually hot) cast. A story that moved along and kept my interest. And I liked the drug sequence b/c I thought the later turns in the plot - well, without having already spent so much time so off-balance they might have just seemed silly. Oh, and I liked the lead too - but then I pretty much always love Adrian Grenier (though I didn't get the big deal over Sebastian Cole).

So does your praise for Two Girls and a Guy (which I absolute adore, and consider to be the best Toback movie I've ever seen) and the other Toback films after it mean that you liked Black and White? I thought it was awful beyond words. Soooooooo contrived.

i remember loving b & w, but i don't remember the movie all that well so i might be misremembering my response. i love the way he has used mike tyson generally, and i thought the menace he had for robert downey jr. in the one party scene made the whole movie worth watching.

still, though, i think "when will i be loved" is my favorite of tobacks TGG+ movies. i love neve campbell and she's never been better or hotter; plus, i just adore dominic chianese (as all sopranos fans must), and the elegant italian magnate was such a great role for him. i also enjoyed toback's cameo and his riff on what is obviously his own pretention about his filmmaking style was delightfully self-aware / -mocking.

oh, and to return to the subject of the post, gayheart is so unusual looking, such a caricature of teh smoking hot chick, that she might be suffering from the underutilization that afflicted diane lane. a year or two ago, probably following her rapidfire successes in a walk on the moon and under a tuscan sky culminating in unfaithful, the times magazine did a big thing on her, talking about how mediocre and sporadic her peak career years had been, and speculated that it was partly due to her being a little too beautiful to make meaty roles credible. whether that's legit or not (i mean, no one, but no one in the real world looks like julia roberts), it certainly sounds typical of over-test-marketed hollywood fare. it probably doesn't help that gayheart did soome stock teen stuff, too, which derailed, inter alia, sarah michelle gellar's career.