Squirm-Worthy

At Least Being Dumb Isn't One Of Her Problems

A couple of weeks ago it was suggested that it was the nasty reviews that hounded Nicole Kidman out of town, but it turns out it was actually seeing her own performance.

Nicole Kidman isn't "proud" of her performance in Australia.

The 41-year-old actress has revealed she "squirmed" in her seat throughout the Sydney premiere because she was so uncomfortable watching herself on screen.

She said: "I can't look at this movie and be proud of what I've done. I sat there, and I looked at Keith and went, 'Am I any good in this movie?' But I thought Brandon Walters and Hugh Jackman were wonderful. It's just impossible for me to connect to it emotionally at all."

Nicole was so nervous about her performance she fled Australia as soon as the premiere was over with husband Keith Urban and their five-month-old daughter Sunday Rose.

She told Australian radio station 2dayFM: "We ran because I didn't want to read anything. I didn't want to know. I saw my sister and my family and we saw Keith's family and then we were straight on a plane."

Nicole added she only attended the premiere to please the film's director Baz Luhrmann.

She said: "I don't usually see my films, but because of Baz I had to see it. I saw 'Moulin Rouge'. I've really only seen that and this in my whole career. It gets worse as I get older."

That's it in full (sorry SMH, I can't resist it when it's this juicy in full). At least she knew it was crap the moment she saw it.

Let us now officially dismiss the claims that it was the tall poppy syndrome. The tall poppy syndrome, while it does exist, had nothing to do with this one. Nicole Kidman watched herself on screen and squirmed and decided to hit the road before the crits came in.

There's an old story about how Eric Stoltz was originally cast as Marty McFly. 2 weeks into the shoot, the director and producers realised that as fine an actor as Eric Stoltz was, he didn't have good comic timing. It just wasn't his suite. So they canned Stoltz and brought in Michael J. Fox, and the rest of it is history as we know it.

In other words, if a cast member isn't working out for you, especially in a big budget movie, don't hesitate to replace them. Baz Luhrmann should've known from the rushes it wasn't working, but he persisted with Kidman. Heaven only knows what he was hoping for. It sure hasn't done his films any favors and it's surely dented Nicole Kidman's reputation (and bankability) quite heavily for sure.

The Wages Of Fame

At Least It's Not Famous For Being Famous

Pleiades forwarded this little article about how Nicol Kidman is going to spend this festive season in the US because she's been devastaed by the bad reviews for 'Australia'.

A close friend said the Oscar winner was upset at not celebrating daughter Sunday Rose's first birthday in Sydney.

"She's been so upset by all of it," the friend said. "It really has devastated her."

Although Kidman has received some positive reviews for her role as Lady Sarah Ashley in the Baz Luhrmann epic - including from respected ABC critic Margaret Pomeranz - much of the media attention, at home and abroad, has been negative.

"People seem to to be really going for her; I don't quite get it," Kidman's friend said.

"Many of Australia's own critics gave her strong praise in the role - why are we ignoring what our own critics are saying? It seems very unfair - and it is very distressing for Nicole."

Even longtime allies of Kidman have been on the attack. Deborah Thomas, editorial director of Australian Women's Weekly, ridiculed her on Channel Nine's Today show last week for saying she had only used sunscreen to keep her face looking youthful. Thomas urged Kidman to be more open about any cosmetic procedures she might have had.

Then, it's the usual claim that she's a tall poppy. It probably is the tall Poppy syndrome but I sort of think she called it on herself.

I've been thinking about this quite a bit because I don't think I know many people who keep can keep a straight face when you tell them "Nicole Kidman is a great actress". It's really interesting because in Sydney where I live at least, there's a feeling that people can see right through her acting to see her. People who are otherwise positive, nice, normal people scowl their faces and tell me how awful she is and then unleash an anecdote about just how awful she is in real life.

What to make of it? I have a few anecdotes. She was this girl who would get on the school bus last and declare to the entire bus she was going to be famous star; she was the woman who slept with producer Terry Hayes to get a plum role, then dumped him for a bigger fish; She is absolutely mean and condescending to shop attendants and receptionists (I've heard this from about 5-6 people who have served her); she sacked her Australian agent June Cann from the airport by phone as she left for her first big USA film 'Days of Thunder'; Her contribution to a Tsunami relief telethon was a poster of herself form 'Moulin Rouge!' with her autograph which was then auctioned and then raised a paltry 3-digit figure- and this was from Australia's richest woman; and that's just some of the more memorable accusations against her person.

All this vitriol in the people in her hometown has got to be invidia -envy of the worst kind. I mean, I get it. She's a dreadful human being to people she doesn't know, she's a hopeless narcissist to people who meet her casually, and yet people who work with her tell you she's quite a nice in person, really. Well, that sounds like a typical movie star.

So when people see her on the screen in Sydney, there's this groan of recognition. She is like a mirror that reflects everybody's own narcissism and desire to be more beautiful through cosmetic surgery and the greedy, greedy desire to be rich AND famous and be lauded for it. Just how the hell did she do it? It must have been through evil, underhanded means, a pact with the devil - or scientology and Tom Cruise -  whatever it took. The bitch! Thus people walk out of the cinema riven with self-loathing. It's particularly bad on the North Shore where she grew up, exactly because she represents what can only be described as: 'There but for the Acts of the Devil go I'.

That's got to be envy. Is it fair? No. is it understandable? Entirely. All the same, Kidman really hasn't done enough to make her hometown forget the slights. One of the rules of success is that you don't get to "go home to Kansas". Because there are people waiting with knives of envy back in Kansas for Dorothy-Judy Garland. It's sort of surprising that somebody who was smart enough to marry Tom Cruise without a pre-nup can't figure out why her hometown thinks she's awful.

Me? I don't like her at all because I too see the preening  North Shore girl in everything she does, so it doesn't matter what she seems to be doing as an actor, her being and presence mitigates against me actually seeing the performance as anything but crafted and forced. She's always seemed like she was playing "Nicole Kidman the actress doing her acting thing"predicated  in just about everything I've seen. Her much lauded work in 'To Die For' worked because we could accept that this character was totally in line with who I thought I saw. i.e. it worked because it was the closest thing to what we saw of her.

She's played interpreters and foreigners, a scientist, and a brain surgeon (at 23!) and none of them seemed to reflect on my own experiences of being an interpreter, a foreigner or even a medical student. In that sense her career has been an exercise in demolishing credibility rather than building it.  She's played sirens who are dispyronic and housewives with little charm. What do you make of an unconvincing actress who seems to make a cold charmlessness her trade mark signature thing?

The fact that she would want her hometown to love her, accept her and  embrace her is actually a little pathetic.

They Call Her Nicole

A Great White Shark That Is...

I know I keep harping about these beasties. They truly are the monsters of my nightmares. Irrational fears never go away; that's why they're irrational. Still, in a great leap for rationality, we're reporting a wonderful discovery: it is now understood that Great White Sharks travel a long way around the glob.

A great white shark named Nicole logged more than 12,000 miles swimming from Africa to Australia and back, the first proof of a link between the two continents' shark populations, researchers say.

A second report details the movement of dozens of salmon sharks from summer waters near Alaska to warmer winter quarters off Hawaii and Baja California.

"Sharks have home ranges that are at the scale of ocean basins," said researcher Barbara A. Block of Stanford University. She added that conservation management of sharks such as the white shark and salmon shark will require international cooperation.

Tracking a shark from Africa to Australia "is one of the most significant discoveries about white shark ecology and suggests we might have to rewrite the life history of this powerful fish," said Ramon Bonfil, lead author of that study.

Both reports appear in Friday's issue of the journal Science.

George H. Burgess, a shark expert at the Florida Museum of Natural History, said while sharks are known to travel long distances, this was the first evidence of movement between Australia and Africa.

"These are large animals that have the capability of making large movements," he said.

Enric Cortes of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Shark Population Assessment Group in Panama City, Fla., agreed this is the first direct evidence of a connection between African and Australian white sharks.

Using satellites to track sharks is new technology that may provide new perspective on their movements, he said.

Peter Klimley, a shark expert at the University of California, Davis, called a trip of that length "amazing." He said there have been genetic indications that these two shark groups might be connected, "but that's not the same as showing actual movement."

Bonfil, of the Bronx, N.Y.-based Wildlife Conservation Society, said he "suspected that these sharks could be doing these kinds of travels ... but there was previously no proof of this. Everybody thought they were mostly coastal in behavior."

A satellite tracking device temporarily attached to Nicole documented her 99-day swim from South Africa to Australia. About six months later, she was identified from photos back off the coast of South Africa.

Some 24 other white sharks tagged off South Africa engaged in wide-ranging coastal migration, but only Nicole headed out to sea. Nonetheless, Bonfil said, "I don't think we got one in a million."

Nicole was tagged in November 2003 with a device that reports her position. The researchers said the shark was renamed Nicole in honor of Australian actress Nicole Kidman.

Yay. A Great White Shark called ''Nicole"; I like it. Couldn't have named her better myself.
I love how the researchers pointedly made sure it made the press that that's who they called the shark after.

In related news, here's this funny pic:


It's actually the corpse of a huge Burmese Python that managed to swallow an entire alligator; but the alligator struggled just enough the rupture out of the Python, killing both.
In other news, a chimp in a Chinese zoo successfully gave up smoking after 16-years of chain-smoking.

Ai Ai, a 27-year-old chimp at the Qinling Safari Park in northern China's Shaanxi province, ended her tobacco dependency when zoo keepers put her on a strict regime that included walking, music therapy and exercise sessions, Xinhua news agency said.

"In the first few days, she squealed for cigarettes every now and then, but as her life became more colorful, she gradually forgot about them altogether," one zookeeper was quoted as saying.

"She's served fried dishes and dumplings at every meal, alongside her usual diet of milk, banana and rice," he said, "I also put earphones on her so that she could enjoy some pop music from my walkman."

According to the report, Ai Ai became a smoker in 1989, shortly after her first spouse died.

She started demanding more and more cigarettes after her second spouse died in 1997 and her daughter departed to another zoo, it said.

The report did not say why zookeepers started giving the animal cigarettes, or whether they faced punishment.

It's all true. You know it. A chimp can do it.

Lauren Bacall Slams Tom Cruise

Sanity Prevails

At least on some level on this plane of existence.
Lauren Bacall served up a doozy to Tom Cruise and his recent antics .
Heck, why not quote it wholus bolus:

Screen legend Lauren Bacall has taken a caustic swipe at Tom Cruise, chiding the Hollywood star for his "vulgar" behaviour and questioning his acting ability.

In an interview in the latest issue of Time magazine, Bacall, 81, who has never been shy in voicing her opinion of fellow actors, made clear her distaste for Cruise's recent displays of emotion over his engagement to actress Katie Holmes.

"His whole behaviour is so shocking," she said.

"It's inappropriate and vulgar and absolutely unacceptable to use your private life to sell anything commercially, but I think it's kind of a sickness," she added.

Cruise's red-carpet kisses with Holmes and a series of exuberant and very public expressions of love for his fiancee, led to criticism that the once very private star was seeking cheap publicity for his blockbuster movie, War of the Worlds, which was released in June.

On one occasion, Cruise excitedly jumped up and down on talk show host Oprah Winfrey's couch as he revealed his adoration for Holmes, who was starring in her own summer blockbuster, Batman Begins.

Bacall also had some less than complimentary words for Cruise's acting skills as she bemoaned the liberal way labels such as "great" and "legend" were sprinkled over Hollywood stars.

"I mean the word 'great' stands for something," Bacall said. "When you talk about a great actor, you're not talking about Tom Cruise."



The screen siren and widow of Humphrey Bogart had made similar remarks last year about Cruise's former wife, Nicole Kidman, with whom she worked on the film, Birth.

At the time, Bacall took exception to one reporter's description of Oscar-winner Kidman as a legend.

"She's not a legend," Bacall snapped. "She's a beginner. What is this 'legend'? She can't be a legend at whatever age she is. You have to be older."

Yes. 'Great' does mean something, and indeed it applies to the great dame Bacall.
I saw her perform live in Sydney, performing in 'Sweet Bird of Youth' with Colin Friels, sometime in 1986... Whoah! Time flies.
My secret wish is that one day, when 'Key Psycho' premiers in LA, we get to invite Lauren Bacall. Must. Finish. Film... :)