Random Acts

Random Acts of Ali Larter: Fun

Today, Ali Larter is having fun. Is it because she’s just recognised Matt Parkman as the guy she threw out a window earlier in season 1 of Heroes? No, because that’s fiction. Is she having fun because she’s just been voted Cosmopolitan magazine’s Fun Fearless Female of the Year 2009? Maybe – wouldn’t you be? Or is it because she’s found out that Manatees have just made their annual trek to Wakulla Springs State Park in Florida and there’s now a spring in her step? Almost certainly. I know it fills me with joy. 

What do you think, though?

Today's Joanna Page

Today’s Joanna Page: Miss Julie

I was going to do a great big review of Miss Julie, but although it does look a very interesting and important film, judging from the bits I’ve seen, Mike Figgis is the director and it got three nominations for various awards:

a) I’ve not had the time to watch it properly
b) It’s Strindberg so somehow something else always pops up instead
c) Joanna Page is only in three scenes as a servant so does anyone really want me to? In the first scene, she’s just peeling vegetables (see above) so that doesn’t even count.

So I’m going to leave you with these two clips from her feature film near-debut (This Year’s Love being her debut, assuming her Love Actually CV isn’t lying since I haven’t actually watched it yet). All you really need to know is that she’s a servant, and Peter Mullan (currently appearing in The Fixer) is a footman who’s contemplating an affair with count’s daughter Saffron Burrows (who’s just finished appearing in His Own Worst Enemy). She may still be young (21ish) at this point but there are certain mannerisms you might recognise already. This is it though – she’s not in the rest of it, apart from the vegetables bit at the beginning.

Next time, I might get round to a review. It’ll be brilliant, I promise.

Monday’s golden news

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Canadian TV

Review: Being Erica 1×1

In Canada: Mondays, 9pm, CBC

UPDATED 9/1/9: With new pic and vids
UPDATE 2: Apparently, the BBC is going to acquire this, although no airdate is fixed

There’s kind of a golden rule in time travel stories: never interfere with your own past. Don’t go meet your parents because your dad or mum will fall in love with you and you’ll never be born; don’t try to save a relative’s life because the wee timerous beasties will start eating you while you’re trapped in a church. That kind of thing.

The other golden rule is that you’re travelling in time to make a difference to the world. Let’s stop war being averted, aliens invading and taking over, or the future president of the United States from being killed by assassins.

Being Erica laughs – it is a dramedy after all – at that kind of jessie talk. It’s a time travel show in which the heroine does nothing but interfere with her own past, all because her life’s a bit of a mess and she’d quite like a decent job or boyfriend for a change.

Erica Strange is 32, lives in Toronto and her life has gone to pot. She has a Masters but works in a call centre – or should that be worked? She’s cute but always gets dumped or treated badly by rubbish men. Everyone she knows seems to be married and successful. If only she didn’t keep making such bad decisions.

After she wakes up in hospital after an allergic reaction to a nut-infused coffee, a mysterious, saturnine man called Dr Tom (Baker?) turns up at her door offering her therapy that’s guaranteed to fix her life. What he doesn’t tell her is that it involves travelling into her past to points in her life when she made bad decisions to see if she’d make a better job of things with the gifts of hindsight and maturity.

First ‘leap’: Prom Night.

Continue reading “Review: Being Erica 1×1”