|
|
Maxim have come up with a list of their hottest nerd crushes and I have to agree with most of them, although I think they are missing Sarah Michelle Gellar (Buffy) and Eliza Dushku.
13. Liv Tyler (Arwen Undómiel) The Lord of the Rings
Granted, she wasn’t the purtiest gal in the LOTR trilogy—that would be Orlando Bloom—but her pert-lipped princess upped a whole new generation of fantasy fetishists’ expectations for elvish tail.
12. Milla Jovovich (Leeloo Minai Lekarariba-Laminai-Tchai Ekbat De Sebat), The Fifth Element
The primordial shrieks, the speaking in tongues, the acrobatic dives from tall building and speeding car alike… In short, nerds dig Leeloo because she reminds them of their moms.
11. Natasha Henstridge, Species
Of course, when she impaled some random dude with her tongue during a make-out session, she added a layer of dread to an exercise that already set hearts a-palpitatin’ among the nerdlinger set.
10. Jennifer Garner (Sydney Bristow), Alias
The show’s mythology lost us after a few seasons—wasn’t it eventually revealed that Sydney was her own mother or something?—but the costumes never did. Note to future starlets: Well-tailored schoolgirl and dominatrix getups can do an awful lot to conceal your profound inability to emote.
9. Æon Flux, Æon Flux
She kills. She does somersaults. She catches flies with her eyelashes (just like Phyllis Diller!). The animé-ted Ms. Flux doesn’t communicate all that well, preferring a series of grunts, sighs and giggles (again, Phyllis Diller). That said, as far as mute, assassinatin’, backflippin’ cartoon characters go, Æon totally kicks Smurfette to the curb.
8. Jeri Ryan (Seven of Nine), Star Trek: Voyager
The Trek has come a long way from Scottie’s paunch and brogue, hasn’t it? If Mr. Blackwell were commenting on Seven’s nothing-to-the-imagination jumpsuits, he’d say something like, “Set your phasers to STUNNING!” Then he’d inch closer to death’s sweet embrace, hating himself just a little bit more.
7. Famke Janssen (Dr. Jean Grey/Phoenix), X-Men
There’s something about a smart-gal-gone-bad (more like telepathically superbad, actually) that never fails to whirr a fan boy’s propeller. Separately, how come X-Men Nation never entirely warmed to Halle Berry’s Storm? She’s got glowing eyes and she can make it hail. Like a man needs anything more in a mate?
6. Angelina Jolie (Lara Croft), Lara Croft: Tomb Raider
Not that any of these gals are remotely attainable, but this impossibly dimensioned tart gets bonus points for literally being the figment of some video-game designer’s imagination. That most people prefer the pixelated Lara to the one embodied by Angelina Jolie in the two Croft movies says an awful lot, none of it good, about us as a society.
5. Grace Park (Lt. Sharon “Boomer” Valerii), Battlestar Galactica
She gets the nod over cast mate Tricia Helfer’s Number 6 for a single reason: Helfer, who plays a cylon frostier than a mug o’ root beer on the show, recently dropped her space drawers for Playboy (photos available at alt.battlestar.nerdbooty). Park, on the other hand, remains as mysterious to this audience as the outdoors.
4. Carrie-Anne Moss (Trinity), The Matrix
Whether her form-fitting suit was leather, pleather, or vinyl, she cut quite the figure in it, especially when bounding off walls and displaying the best high kick this side of Radio City Music Hall (hoy-o!). Too bad the producers saddled her with actual human emotions in the two sequels.
3. Gillian Anderson (Dana Scully), The X-Files
Remember the episode, set in Las Vegas, when Scully, like, totally transformed into the anti-Scully and started hitting on the Lone Nerdm…er, Gunmen? That was cray-zee! Scully would no sooner swim in that pool than wear a miniskirt.
2. Zoe Saldana (Neytiri), Avatar
It’s a testament to the incredibly advanced level of motion capture animation on display in Avatar that we left crushing on Zoe Saldana even though she doesn’t technically appear as herself in the movie. We left thinking, “Is it wrong to want to go blue?” And the answer is: “Of course not.”
1. Carrie Fisher (Princess Leia), Star Wars: Return of the Jedi
The nerd-universe equivalent of Phoebe Cates doffing her top in Fast Times at Ridgemont High.
source: Hottest Nerd Crushes [Maxim]
Popularity: unranked [?]
Here’s the Top 10 Best ‘Bond Girls’ of all time, along with the 10 worst.
Kudos to Denise Richards for topping the worst list, I can’t think of anyone more deserving.
10. Carole Bouquet as Melina Havelock in For Your Eyes Only
9. Jill St. John as Tiffany Case in Diamonds are Forever
8. Lotte Lenya as Rosa Klebb in From Russia with Love
7. Michelle Yeoh as Wai Lin in Tomorrow Never Dies
6. Famke Janssen as Xenia Onatopp in Goldeneye
5. Barbara Bach as Anya Amasova in The Spy Who Loved Me
4. Eva Green as Vesper Lynd in Casino Royale
3. Diana Rigg as Tracy Di Vincenzo in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service
2. Honor Blackman as Pussy Galore in Goldfinger
1. Ursula Andress as Honey Ryder in Dr. No
And for the worst:
10. Maud Adams as Octopussy in Octopussy
9. Lynn-Holly Johnson as Bibi Dahl in For Your Eyes Only
8. Lois Chiles as Holly Goodhead (amazing name) in Moonraker
7. Cary Lowell as Pam Bouvier in License to Kill
6. Britt Ekland as Mary Goodnight in The Man with the Golden Gun
5. Karin Dor as Helga Brandt in You Only Live Twice
4. Maryam D’Abo as Kara Milovy in The Living Daylights
3. Corrine Clery as Corrine Dufour in Moonraker
2. Tanya Roberts as Stacey Sutton in A View to a Kill
1. Denise Richards as Dr. Christmas Jones in The World is Not Enough
source: [entertainment weekly]
Popularity: 4% [?]
Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellan look 20 years younger in the opening sequence of X-Men 3, thanks to some new movie magic.
What a pair those dashing young mutants Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart make in “X-Men: The Last Stand.” The two 60-something actors had 20 years shaved off their features for the opening sequence in the comic-book franchise’s latest flick, the filmmakers using digital technology to match current features to those in old photos. In the scene, McKellen, 67, and Stewart, 65, look like fair approximations of themselves in their mid-40s, a time when McKellen was busy doing Shakespeare on the British stage and Stewart had just taken over the starship Enterprise on TV’s “Star Trek: The Next Generation.”
“It’s as brilliantly done as airbrushing in a magazine. You cannot tell the difference,” McKellen said. “You can grow hair, you can shrink eyebrows, you can change cheekbones, you can magnify bosoms, shrink waists. You can do anything you want. It looks like a younger person. Patrick looks sensational.”
[...]
The opening sequence of “X-Men: The Last Stand” features Xavier and Lehnsherr 20 years earlier, still allies as they make first contact with super-mutant Jean Grey as a teenager, who grows into a powerful telepath played by Famke Janssen.
Wrinkles and sagging jowls have been magically wiped clean from Stewart and McKellen’s faces. “I’m scared for Hollywood, because A-list movie stars are going to be putting that in their contract. `I want 10 years taken off me.’ This technology is unbelievable,” said “X-Men: The Last Stand” director Brett Ratner. “It’s like painting the lines out of your face. Why do people have to have plastic surgery, anymore? Just be in a movie and look flawless and perfect.”
Stewart said he and McKellen had fun with the process even before the digital effects were applied, toying around with their carriage and body language to re-create the bearing of men 20 years younger. The technology could come in handy if plans for “X-Men” prequels ever materialize, Stewart said. “Ian was saying the other day there has been talk of a prequel with a younger Magneto and Xavier,” Stewart said. “Well, here we are, Ian and I. Wheel us out and spend the money on the technology.”
That’s be rather expensive. Still, it’s amazing what they can do these days.
Popularity: 18% [?]
This summer at the movies should be quite a change from 2005′s lackluster showing, according to an extensive AP preview.
This year’s summer lead-ins: “Mission: Impossible III,” pitting Tom Cruise against supervillain Philip Seymour Hoffman; “Poseidon,” a remake of “The Poseidon Adventure” directed by Hollywood’s king of the sea, Wolfgang Petersen (“The Perfect Storm,” “Das Boot”); the animated “Over the Hedge,” an animals-against-humans comedy from the makers of “Shrek”; and “The Da Vinci Code,” reuniting Tom Hanks with director Ron Howard.
In addition to the usual sequels and remakes, there are all sorts of genre films to suit every taste. Most of them are sequels and remakes, too.
Tom Cruise’s first two “Mission: Impossible” capers were heavy on action and style. “Mission: Impossible III” director J.J. Abrams, creator of TV’s “Lost” and “Alias,” said he aimed to balance action with character interplay in the spirit of the television show on which the movies are based. “The thing I loved about the show is watching these incredibly accomplished operatives seamlessly working together to pull off a very specific goal,” Abrams said. “I honestly felt that as entertained as I was by the first two ‘Mission’ films, they didn’t embrace that aspect, which to me was the fundamental thing of the series.”
Wolfgang Petersen is back on the water with “Poseidon,” starring Kurt Russell, Richard Dreyfuss and Josh Lucas in a remake of the 1970s disaster flick about a luxury liner overturned by a tidal wave. “It was a chance to do a film reflecting our phobias today, our fear of terrorism or disaster, like 9/11 or whatever nature can do to us,” Petersen said. “A natural disaster like this is sort of a metaphor for the impossible and most disastrous thing you can imagine, and what would we do when it hits?”
Also returning to the water: Johnny Depp, Orlando Bloom, Keira Knightley and director Gore Verbinski with “Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest,” the follow-up to their 2003 blockbuster. “Dead Man’s Chest” has Depp’s woozy pirate Jack Sparrow trying to weasel out of an old debt — his soul, which he owes to the sea devil Davy Jones.
Jamie Foxx and Colin Farrell star in “Miami Vice,” written and directed by Michael Mann, creator of the 1980s cop show and Foxx’s director on “Collateral” and “Ali.” Farrell and Foxx take on the roles originated by Don Johnson and Philip Michael Thomas, playing undercover cops who infiltrate a South Florida drug ring. The TV show was known for glitzy fashion and hip music, but Mann’s new take is a grittier glimpse of cops on the street, Foxx said.
I didn’t care for “Pirates” so will likely skip the sequel. And I’m certainly not nostalgic for “Miami Vice,” which I thought was lame in the 1980s. And that’s lame.
Brandon Routh is the new Man of Steel in “Superman Returns.” Fighters for truth, justice and the rights of Mutant-Americans are back, led by “X-Men: The Last Stand,” the third installment in the franchise about the gang of super freaks, and “Superman Returns,” with the Man of Steel suiting up for his first big-screen adventure in almost 20 years.
Bryan Singer, who made the first two “X-Men” movies, directed “Superman Returns,” which introduces Brandon Routh as Krypton’s favorite flyboy. Co-starring Kevin Spacey as villain Lex Luthor and Kate Bosworth as Lois Lane, the movie has Superman back on Earth after a prolonged absence. Though not a sequel to the Christopher Reeve “Superman” flicks, the film borrows from the look and mythology created in that series. Routh said he fashioned his performance to match, injecting his own personality into the character while trying to stay true to Reeve’s Superman. “Chris did such an amazing job. You can change things, but if you do it could be horrible,” Routh said. “When somebody does something so great, there’s certain things you can tweak, but to change it just to change it sometimes is dangerous.”
The “X-Men” sequel, directed by Brett Ratner (the “Rush Hour” movies), reunites all key cast members, including Hugh Jackman, Halle Berry, Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellen, Rebecca Romijn and Famke Janssen. Driving the action this time is the discovery of a “cure” for mutancy. Jackman said the movie will wrap up the “X-Men” trilogy, though another film is in the works centered on his Wolverine character — the bushy-haired mystery man with metal claws and rapid healing powers. “He’s that reluctant hero, and he’s a fairly classic version of it,” Jackman said. “He reminds me of characters I always liked, Mad Max, Dirty Harry, Han Solo, where there’s more going on than what they’re letting on.”
Summer also offers superhero comedies. Ivan Reitman’s “My Super Ex-Girlfriend” stars Uma Thurman as the ultimate woman scorned, a superhero who uses her powers to exact revenge on the boyfriend (Luke Wilson) who dumped her.
“Zoom” stars Tim Allen and Courteney Cox in an “Incredibles”-like tale of a former hero gone soft. “Tim plays a retired superhero, and I play a kind of comic-book-obsessed, nerdy scientist. We’re trying to find people to train kids to become the next round of superheroes,” Cox said of her first big-screen leading role since she and her “Friends” gang called it quits.
The “X-Men” movies have been excellent, so I’ll certainly see the next installment. Frankly, the television versions of the Superman mythos, both “Lois and Clark” and the current “Smallville,” have been better than the Christopher Reeves movie version. As to the others, I’ll likely wait for the DVD.
N
early five years after September 11 comes the first major wave of big-screen films dealing with the terrorist attacks.
“United 93″ mostly features a cast of unknowns in a gut-wrenching docudrama about the passengers who fought back and lost their lives during one of the September 11 hijackings.
Oliver Stone’s “World Trade Center” stars Nicolas Cage in the story of two policemen trapped in the rubble of the collapsed towers.
On a smaller scale, “The Great New Wonderful” features Maggie Gyllenhaal, Tony Shalhoub and Olympia Dukakis in a sketch of five New Yorkers a year after the September 11 attacks.
I just have no interest in exploiting 9/11 for entertainment purposes quite yet. Granted, we had WWII and Vietnam movies while those wars were still ongoing but this just seems different somehow. Wars are massive societal undertakings whereas terrorists attacks are personalized.
There are also plenty of comedies, cartoons, and family flicks. I’ll likely see some of those but never find it necessary to see them on the big screen, which I reserve for big budget, special effects movies.
Popularity: 16% [?]
|
|
