"Pamela Anderson and Liam Neeson had fans eating up their flirty press tour, but behind the scenes, it was all a PR 'bake-off'...."

TMZ reports, based on "sources with direct knowledge."

I had some trouble understanding the expression "bake-off," since there was no competition, only collusion, pretending to have found love together. But...

A big slice of the stunt involved Pamela claiming she was baking muffins and sourdough bread for Liam -- something he even played along with in interviews leading up to the premiere. It makes us now assume that was also part of the strategy ... pure role-play PR, not reality.

So some literal baking was involved, but there was no literal or figurative bake-off.

Actors promoting a movie are still acting. Why not act as if they'd fallen in love? 

If you go searching into the term "bake-off," you'll probably quickly arrive at something called the "First Lady Bake-Off." That's something that began in 1992, and it was an unwholesome alliance between the press — Family Circle Magazine — and the Clinton campaign. Wikipedia explains:

The actor Liam Neeson defends horse-drawn carriages in Central Park: "I can’t help but see the proposed ban as a class issue."

"A majority of carriage drivers and stable hands are recent immigrants, often raised on farms in their home countries."

They love their jobs and their horses, and they take pride in being ambassadors for this great city. I can’t help but see the proposed ban as a class issue: Their livelihoods are now at risk because the animal-rights opponents of the industry are well funded by real-estate interests, which has led to speculation that this powerful lobby wishes to develop the West Side properties occupied by the stables.

Interesting class politics. Neeson's target is NY's left-wing mayor, Bill De Blasio, who Neeson says should at least "come down to the stables and see how the horses are cared for" and "meet the working men and women whose jobs are at stake."

The linked op-ed is in the NYT, where the comments seem to be running against De Blasio.

Natasha Richardson has suffered a serious head injury in a skiing accident.

The lovely actress is 45 years old, the wife of Liam Neeson, and the daughter of Vanessa Redgrave and Tony Richardson.

We saw her on Broadway in "Cabaret," back in 1998. She'd won a Tony for her portrayal of Sally Bowles, the role that had been identified with Liza Minelli. She played the part completely differently. It was quite cool.

I looked for a good video clip of her. A Google video search brings a scene from "Asylum" up first. Watch that — when you're not at work — and you'll see why that is popular on the internet. I've decided to embed the trailer from "A Handmaid's Tale" — that creepy feminist sci-fi atrocity — because I thought you might like to talk about it. It doesn't show off Richardson's acting. In fact, if I were judging her acting ability from this alone, I'd say she was quite bad. I'm not trying to trash her here though. I'm sad about the accident. But let's talk about something more than that it's sad she's had this accident.



UPDATE: Death.

Best film of the year.

I haven't been reading many of the ten bests lists this year. Here's one, rounding up the usual suspects, the Oscar-y crap with landscapes/history/biography and those heavy-handed sexuality and violence themes.

What a big drag! I especially loathe the biopic. This year, we're supposed to care about Truman Capote and Johnny Cash -- I mean a pretentious actor impersonating Truman Capote or Johnny Cash. Last year, we were supposed to be excited about Liam Neeson pretending to be Alfred Kinsey and Jamie Foxx pretending to be Ray Charles. Both of those '04 movies played on cable TV yesterday evening and I was switching back and forth trying to get a bit of a sense of what was thought to be so good there. Neeson seemed to be giving a competent performance as a dull man, but Foxx was being a giant ham. I was cringing.

Why can't we just see actual footage of Ray Charles? It's disconcerting to imitate his mannerisms. Since there's plenty of film of the man, why not make a documentary? Is this acting stunt worth doing? I seriously do not understand why they make so many biopics, especially of people there's plenty of film of, especially when they are singers and we've got innumerable filmed recordings of their concert performances.

Is it because the actor can show us the actual consumption of drugs and alcohol, and we can drag in an actress for him to have big, loud fights with? Those awful domestic disputes! I'm never interested in seeing a man and a woman just yelling at each other about their relationship! I think Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton are interesting in "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf," but, after that, I really don't need any more. Husband and wife squabbles! Why not just live in an apartment building with thin walls?

I avoided nearly every movie in 2005, pursuant to my aversion to movies. But I did see a few and I can give my full stamp of approval to one. It's a documentary: "Grizzly Man."



And here's Grizzly Liz:

Film fakery.

I went looking for some reviews that expressed what I thought of "Batman Begins" and found this, from David Denby:

This is an overly methodical and heavy-spirited movie—pop without rapture. Bruce comes back to Gotham and slowly assembles the elements of his costume, his vehicle, and his mode of operation—the kind of equipment fetishism that used to be tossed off in a few barbed exchanges between Sean Connery and Desmond Llewelyn’s Q in the old Bond films. And I miss Anton Furst’s urban-grotesque production design from the first movie—the curious, malign details pulled out of the night. Most of this movie is just dark, and the familiar trope of a high-flying passage through Gotham’s bunched skyscrapers isn’t as thrilling as it was years ago. The young Welsh-born actor Christian Bale is a serious fellow, but the most interesting thing about him—a glinting sense of superiority—gets erased by the dull earnestness of the screenplay, and the filmmakers haven’t developed an adequate villain for him to go up against. The return of Liam Neeson late in the movie is a bust, and the action climax, in which the water supply threatens to combine with a vicious white powder floating around the city (the mixture will drive everyone crazy, or at least make them sneeze), is cheesy and unexciting.

The real failing is Nolan’s. There’s very little sense of Batman’s awesome surveillance of the city from the heights; he just drops out of nowhere, thrashes all the bad guys in a whirl of movement that is shot too close, and edited too rapidly, for us to see much of anything, and then elevates out of the frame. In “Memento,” Nolan and his editor, Dody Dorn, created a new syntax for movies. It’s depressing to see Nolan now relying on the same fakery as everyone else.

Yes, exactly.

And about that crazy-making steam... Wouldn't that have been a great choice for the threat in an extremely low budget movie? Blow in some steam and have the actors act crazy.