Reason totters on its throne! Now, I have always thought Julia Roberts was a gawky, graceless and not particularly pretty or talented actress. But this, from today’s Salon, is really beyond the pale:
http://www.salon.com/sex/turn_on/2001/12/06/julia/index.html
Julie Roberts is full of her self, in my opinion. She’s not terribly attractive nor is she a great actress.
All very true, Meat—but that does not mitigate the chilling effect of an article saying that a 34-year-old woman is “washed up” because she’s “losing her looks.”
What’s the difference between saying she’s lost her looks and saying she never had them to begin with?
Because everyone ELSE in the world seems to think she’s pretty . . . “Pretty” is not really the topic here: it’s that Michael Douglas and Sean Connery and Robert Redford and Harrison Ford are still getting leading-man roles, but Julia Roberts is “over the hill?”
Yikes—that makes me down the other side of the hill and in the next town, asking for directions . . .
I have never understood all the hatred that seems to be directed at Julie. She seems to be a decent person, and for my money, she is an absolute knockout. She’s not a great actess, but she’s better than most, IMHO. Why all the loathing?
For some reason my reaction to that article was about the same as my reaction to finding out that the December Playmate was just my age. One of those “That’s it, life is only going to degenerate from here” things.
Eve, the day that papers talk about how Brittney Spears is no longer attractive and appealing- and mark my words, it’ll happen in the next few years- I’ll take you out for tea and we can curse the sands of time. Deal?
Well, I’m not going to go to an URL with “sex” in it from work, but I’d guess this is the same sort of problem that was pointed out about Sally Field’s career: in 1988, she was in Punchline as Tom Hanks’ love interest. Six years later, in 1994, in Forrest Gump, she played his mother.
Well, that’s just not going to happen…not with her solid reputation as a lyric chanteuse and serious composer of current-day art song.
Oh baby baby, Ike.
I read that article, too. It really pissed me off and I don’t even particularly like Roberts. The tone of the article was totally out of line. Like she stood the writer up on a date or something. Totally bitchy bullshit. I expect to see crap like that in the Enquirer or the Star, not Salon, which I thought had some kind of “integrity”. Who decided to run that piece of crap, anyways? It’s just a bitter smear piece.
“This shows how important dinner is for Ms. Roberts” WTF? The writer figured this out from watching a preview screening of a movie where she has little more than a cameo?
I’d have to agree that it’s disappointing Salon posted this kind of crap. I don’t really like Julia Roberts, I don’t find her all that attractive. However, she does seem to be just hitting her stride as an actress, and now she’s all washed up. What a crock!
Human nature, that’s all. People can’t stand to see someone successful.
Well, that’s a bit different. For Gump, they needed an actress who could span the decades the film takes place during. They needed someone to look believably young enough when Forrest was a boy, but who could act well enough to pull off being old enough (with the proper makeup effects) when Forrest grew up. It’s not like Fields was doing this without the aid of makeup to make her look older and younger.
In the article, the guy is just going after Julia with both barrels it seems simply because she’s not as young as when she made Pretty Woman. From the article:
Her head is small? What kind of Seinfeldian insult is that?
So in short, Julia is changing, and it seems this guy can’t accept that. I’ve read the whole article and I really don’t see any justification for this guy going after her the way he does, simply because she’s getting older. She’s human, it happens. If she had plastic surgery to maintain her old looks, he’d probably rip her for that as well. Damned if she does, damned if she doesn’t.
The author of that article is a real bastard, IMHO. She’s a human being, for Gods sake. Do people forget that when they publish nasty stuff like this? Forget that she may read it, have genuine pain from it? Shed real tears from it?
Just because she’s an actress doesn’t give people the right to be insulting and nasty for no reason. She’s a person, whether you like her as an actress or not, whether you think she’s ugly or pretty.
The author of that article should take a look in the mirror if he wants to really see ugly.
Zette
I wonder if the writer didn’t just write it to be different - to get our attention in just this way. Who else are you gonna pick on but the big stars? The bigger they are, the harder they fall. She can take it, right? She’s got it coming. Sure.
Maybe it’s meant to speak to all of us who have wondered just how on earth this pretty but otherwise very ordinary woman (in many people’s estimation, including my own) became such a major star. He may have a point with the “coltishness is all she had” remark - many actresses who are very cute or sexy or what have you don’t age particularly well. Think of Audrey Hepburn. That kind of “gamine,” waif-ish quality doesn’t work indefinitely, but Hepburn had a kind of authority or presence that made that stuff not matter. And maybe Julia Roberts just doesn’t have that. She’s just a kid. She can’t keep flashing that huge, winning smile forever.
Or maybe it’s just hit him that she’s not going to be 25 forever, the way it hits you at family get-togethers when you realize that your siblings and cousins aren’t kids any more. Your baby brother looks like a man, not a kid, and instead of buying video games he’s thinking about buying a house. Julia Roberts is moving out of those twenty-something leading lady roles; now she’s going to be the mom (or stepmom) or the mistress. (Villain? Nah.)
The stuff about the small head and dieting was just dumb.
This is from the same site that recently put up an article arguing that the reason parents are alarmed at their little girls imitating Brittney Spears is because “confidence is threatening.”
[marge]Mmmmmmm… Salon turned into Cosmo so gradually, we never even noticed[/marge]
Y’know, if you ask me, she doesn’t look all that different from how she looked at 33. From what that article is saying, you’d think that she just suddenly warped forward to sixty.
So it’s all right that everyone in the world but you thinks she’s pretty, but it’s not all right that everyone in the world but the author of this article thinks she’s not losing her looks? It’s OK to think she’s not pretty, but it’s not OK to think she was pretty but isn’t as pretty as she used to be? I’m really confused, Eve. Help me out here. I mean, I get the whole age thing and how an old man is distinguished but an old woman is old, but I don’t get where you get upset in this particular instance when the person who’s “lost her looks” is someone you think is a mud fence in the first place.
The writer of that article was way out of line. There’s a difference between saying that you don’t like the movie that an actress does and calling her a vile repugnant bitch who is a disgrace to humanity. The author did the latter, and only succeeded in making himself look like more of an ass then he depicted Julia to be.