Rocci Fisch

May 15, 2006

LIVING IN THE MOMENT

. . . That’s what that Fat Man Walking guy (Steve Vaught) talked about with Katie Couric on the Today show one day last week. Living now and not regretting things later. Being spontaneous, the way actors are. He talked about a lot of other personal things too – sorta like a therapy session with the morning anchor.
. . . Somebody here in the office said it didn’t look like he lost that much weight, walking across the country. Said the observer, “He walks from one Waffle House to the next.”
. . . People are so cruel.
So Nicole Kidman still loves Tom (Cruise). That’s sweet. She admits this and other things about her ex and her marriage in an interview with Ladies Home Journal writer Jean Marie Laskas. Kidman said she didn’t see the divorce coming but that she “always knew the rug was going to be taken out from underneath me at some stage.” In this country, we “pull the rug” out from underneath someone.
. . . Poor Nicole. I’ll take her. CONFESSION: I’ve always been in love with Nicole Kidman. And I don’t like her with Keith Urban, her fellow countryman (Australia) and current beau.
JUST ASKING. Do we think new White House press secretary Tony Snow (formerly of Fox News) will remain natural and let his hair be gray for the cameras or will it gradually go the way of a tube of Just For Men? (I say: Watch it go brown.)
. . . And speaking of gray … John Roberts was in The Situation Room for Wolf Blitzer who was off last Tuesday. It takes a man with gray hair to do that show.
What movie is Michael Douglas getting ready for? That scraggly beard and mustache thing he’s got going on is really all pervasive, all over that face. Actually, he grows a good one but he should trim it up or something. I bet his wife, Catherine Zeta-Jones, doesn’t like all that.
. . . Is her full name Catherine Zeta-Jones-Douglas now?
Mia Farrow looks like she’s gonna be good in The Omen 666. I think she plays that dangerous, protective nanny, Mrs. Blaylock, who takes care of the little boy (the devil incarnate Damien). Spooky. I hope that remake is good – the original one sure was.
. . . Naturally, it opens on 6/6/06, the three sixes being the Number of the Beast, mentioned in the Book of Revelations in the Bible.
BABY BOOMERS LAMENT. Boy, the Beatles lost in that lawsuit with Apple computers. A British judge ruled last week that Apple Computer Inc., is entitled to use the apple logo on its iTunes Music Store. Something like that would’ve never flown in the Beatles’ heyday but hey, it’s many years later and technology and the world have changed.
IF YOU ASK ME … They can’t make a decent stapler these days. Try one of the new Swinglines. For crissakes, the things have no weight to ‘em, light as a feather. And try stapling. Half the time when you’re stapling, the staples don’t adhere properly and when you pull the darn thing away from the paper, it stays stuck -- not a clean break. Annoying. So cheaply made now. But then again, look around. Most people nowadays (young workers) don’t even have a stapler on their desks – or for that matter, a tape dispenser or even a pencil.
. . . UNDERSTATEMENT: I’m getting old.
NEW SHOW: The Most, with Alison Stewart, on MSNBC weekdays at 3. Just started up. It’s about the “most of everything” in the media, online: the most blogged stories, the most searched items on the Internet, the most liked TV ads. Like a minute to minute Greatest Hits of …
. . . So I guess it’s MSNBC’s answer to those Webby gals with Wolf Blitzer in The Situation Room. They’re CNN’s computer posse (Abbi Tatton and Jackie Schechner) and they report similar stuff.
THAT’S MORE LIKE IT. It’s about time they put some of her music into those Patti LaBelle TV commercials for OneTouch blood glucose meters that check for diabetes. The first ones were absent any of the star’s music and, I thought, done on the cheap and creatively lacking but then, obviously, someone realized that LaBelle is a singer and that maybe it would be nice to feature something associated with her (like her music) in the ad. So isn’t someone a genius?
. . . One ad uses New Attitude, her 1985 hit (which was on the Beverly Hills Cop soundtrack). And another just has her singing the product name: “OneTouch changes everything.”
. . . So do you care about all this?
A DYING REQUEST. Could we, just once, see Beyonce without all the hair extensions? They’re with her everywhere she goes. Could she, just once, go back to her roots?
NBC News’s chief science and health correspondent Robert Bazell’s hair looked good brown on last Thursday’s Nightly News. It’s usually gray and he’s got a full head of it but he must’ve tried one of those rinses. And he did look younger and it went good with his light brown suit. So his appearance is younger and hey, that’s what everyone wants to see.
“I live a very big life,” said Oprah Winfrey to Diane Sawyer and Robin Roberts on Good Morning America last week, promoting her Legends Ball which will now air next Monday, May 22 due to the president’s speech tonight on immigration
. . . Everybody’s a legend to Oprah, including herself.
A co-worker of mine shouted at me, “You gonna go see The Da Vinci Code? You’re excommunicated!”
. . . Will that happen?
TAKING THE LAW INTO THEIR OWN HANDS. That’s what it seems Dateline NBC’s To Catch a Predator series does. They go undercover, set up a sting house and catch people who hook up in person with underage kids they’ve been baiting online. Correspondent Chris Hansen calls ‘em on the carpet for it and then the cops come in and make arrests. They’ve done it in five states and there’ll be more, I’m sure.
. . . News organizations have been doing similar things for years. They get self-righteous. They know what brings ratings: busting people on camera, caught on video, etc. But if you ask me, I think there’s a line being crossed here. The media’s acting as the judge and the jury too. They’re involved in the legal process and they’re not trained for it and it’s not their place. Everything’s dramatized and that’s not good. It’s like watching COPS on Fox.
Kenny Rogers was on on the plaza on Saturday’s Today show with his new face on. He sang a few songs including his current single, I Can’t Unlove You. (Too many uns in it for me, i.e., unthink about you, unfeel your touch, unhear your words, etc., and it becomes trite.) But, in talking with show hosts Lester Holt and Campbell Brown about his appearance on American Idol a couple weeks ago, he mentioned some advice his mother once gave him that he passed on to the kids on the show: “Find a job you love and you’ll never work a day in your life.” Not bad.
POSEIDON. Pretty good disaster flick – if anybody cares about ‘em anymore. They’re all (Josh Lucas, Kurt Russell, Richard Dreyfuss, Emily Rossum, Jacinda Barrett, Andre Braugher, Kevin Dillon, Fergie (Stacy Ferguson of Black Eyed Peas) in it, swimmingly. The special effects are good and many times you feel like the characters are gonna run out of breath being underwater. The movie looks like it’s done on a big, huge scale but most of it’s computers, but you don’t – at least I – didn’t feel cheated. Josh is the leader and he’s good and he’s got star written all over that face.
. . . But not that many people cared and it was beat out this weekend by Tom Cruise and Mission: Impossible III. Those kinds of flicks are in now. So Poseidon will probably come and go, all $160 million worth (cost).
. . . Mr. Highfalutin saw it and thought that underwater, Kurt Russell’s face looked like a big pie.
WANTED PREGNANCY Russian premier Vladimir Putin’s offering money for babies with one-off payments of cash because the population over there is shrinking due to emigration, rising death rates and declining birth rates. They’re afraid the country’s gonna disappear.
FYI: According to a huge ad supplement that ran last Monday in The New York Times, Ted Koppel’s first Discovery Networks special will air in late summer and will focus on privacy and security. His new partnership with the company “will result in at least six documentaries and town-hall-style programs a year.” So let’s get on with it please.
Is that new nominee to head the CIA, Thomas Hayden Church, the funny guy who was in that wine movie Sideways? Oh, sorry. That’s Air Force Gen. Michael Hayden. Nevermind.
CURRENT CAUSE CELEBRE: Darfur. Let’s watch everybody flock there now.
My mother’s sick of the same people – Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt, Tom Cruise, Katie Holmes – on the covers of magazines week after week. She likes her dose of celebrity news but says, “They could put a lot nicer people on,” she said. And the “having the baby” thing … “You’d think nobody ever had a baby before, the way they go on and on about it.
. . . So she wants her celebrity news to be more varied.
MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE III. Good summer movie. Man, does that thing move. Directed by J.J. Abrams of TV’s Lost and Alias fame, the guy knows how to get that camera in there and make things action-packed and jolting. (NOTE: Some complained that there was too much hand-held/closeup stuff going on with the camerawork. I thought it was handled well and the movie definitely had a style.) It looked like it cost a million bucks. (It did. Try $185.) Cruise is good as Ethan Hunt, an IMF super spy, but it’s Tom the way we see him now in every blockbuster movie. Philip Seymour Hoffman (Capote) plays a good villain. Tom’s little helpers are good (Ving Rhames, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Maggie Q). Billy Crudup pays a fellow IMF-er and Lawrence Fishburne is the big boss. Keri Russell (TV’s Felicity) is in it and good but Michelle Monaghan plays his main squeeze who marries Tom and there’s that plot going on which seems a little too Tom and Katie Holmes-ish to me. Overall, good flick. Critics are blasting it because it didn’t make the numbers in the opening weekend box office but it may rally and have some life.
NERVE RACKER: The new tones that you hear on Washington's Metro system when the doors open (2) and when they close (4). They sound like electronic vibraphone chimes or something. (The same terrible sound is now being used at Bank of America’s touch-tone ATMs.) It’s combined with the new Voice of Metro advising passengers to step back and do other things. And they even have a mind of their own: when it’s detected that people are not stepping back as they should, the chimes sound “annoyed” and they’re chimed in a more forceful fashion.
. . . So the whole world’s ruled by some man behind the curtain
That Ted Kennedy “kid” (Patrick) who got in trouble on Capitol Hill a couple weeks ago by wrecking his car looks more like his mother Joan than his father. People say that “classic” Kennedy look has dissipated now and that the later offspring of the core family from Boston is now not as distinctive-looking. I think this might be true. But Rep. Kennedy also reminded me of the guy (Ray Bolger) who played the scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz.
NOTICED: Linda Evans’s (a k a Krystle Carrington) lips, on that Dynasty Reunion: Catfights and Caviar show. She never had lips like that (Angelina Jolie-ish) back in the eighties. They used to be thin. Ask hubby Blake (John Forsythe). Collagen, we suspect. She looked entirely different. I was disappointed.
UH . . . Funkytown – Lipps, Inc. , on Casablanca, 1979.