The Body & Soul of Jessica Alba
Jessica Alba is hiking in Hollywood's Runyon Canyon with one hand gripping her left cheek. She is talking about her body. The body. Hers of the mesmerizing torso showcased to full, undulating perfection in several films, most recently Sin City and in this month's summer opus Fantastic Four, and bested only by the aforementioned ass, a heart-shaped beauty that sends men into fits of sputtering praise, but an ass that Alba nonetheless believes is a tad too large.
"I hear people in this industry talking shit all the time about how Jennifer Lopez is fat," she says tersely. "And I know if they're calling her fat, they're saying the same shit about me."
Rightly, Alba worries about this. At twenty-four, she has, thus far in her acting career, been largely defined by her body. Of her last eight films, she has been nearly naked in seven. She is five feet six and a half, 34-25-34, and weighs 120 pounds, depending upon her training schedule. But the numbers tell little of the story. Even beneath the baggy sweats she favors, Alba's body is a marvel of feminine proportion. A siren song. Everything slopes and curves where it should. Nothing juts or strains. Muscles blend into soft arcs.
As a result, Alba has consistently been ranked in the top ten on various men's-magazine fuckability polls. Web sites devoted to her celebrity hammer on her hotness with creepy persistence. Mark Wahlberg's reality-infused HBO show Entourage devoted an entire story arc to the conquest of Alba, her body hounded like the Holy Grail of scores by the young male cast, a quest Wahlberg himself has supposedly pursued in real life. Us Weekly even reported the rumor that Alba was Tom Cruise's first choice for a publicity girlfriend -- the plum position ultimately handed over to default pick Katie Holmes. The thinking: Alba's carnal appeal is so powerful it could endear Mr. Cruise to a youth audience and affirm his virility once and for all.
She is good-humored about the scrutiny, but she confesses the one-note quality of it all is starting to wear her out. "The scripts I get are always for the whore, or the motorcycle chick in leather, or the horny maid," Alba says as she climbs a hill, panting slightly. "I get all these screenplays that start, 'Tawnya is in the shower. The water streams down her naked, perky breasts.' " She sighs, then laughs a tired laugh. "I don't think this is happening to Natalie Portman."
There are many reasons for this, and Alba, to her credit, has a firm grasp on most of them. Cast as she is, she hasn't yet had much opportunity to "act." The closest she comes to a scene-stealing turn is as one of the popular snots in Never Been Kissed, where she is indisputably funny and natural. The rest of her curriculum vitae -- including schlocky thrillers, the short-lived James Cameron sci-fi television series Dark Angel and the ill-conceived hip-hop-heroine picture Honey -- is less impressive. Her turn in Sin City stands out, but largely because Alba plays a stripper with a heart of gold. And a lasso.
"It's not always so great to be objectified," she says. "But I don't feel I have much of a choice right now. I'm young in my career. I know I have to strike when the iron is hot."
Alba plans to capitalize on her God-given assets for the moment, saturate the market with her sultry image and then, when she "won't have to do that stuff just to get people's attention," she hopes to transition into someone like Diane Keaton or Goldie Hawn, women she admires for their kookiness and pluck. "I look forward to the day when I can do a small movie and act," Alba says, "and it's not about me wearing a fucking bathing suit or chaps."
Problem is, Alba isn't kooky. Kooky does not come with plum lips and amber skin and a beckoning grin. Alba, for better or worse, is a babe. More than that, she is a certain strain of babe -- the kind that invites rather than intimidates. She is a good girl, playing a bad girl. Her face is open and warm. She smiles often. She is fresh-scrubbed. She never struts, but ambles. She has normal-size breasts and no plans to enhance them. She points to pimples on her forehead and laughs. She eats -- a lot. In short, she is girlfriend material, and it is this accessibility, when married to her liquid body, that makes her walking kryptonite -- an effect in evidence whenever she exits the house and leaves a trail of double takes in her wake. Men on the street take note initially because she is pretty, but then, as she walks closer, it registers -- "Man, that's Jessica Alba!" -- and the admiration explodes into palpable desire.
"She doesn't even notice it," says her close friend and sometime personal trainer Ramona Braganza. "We went into Starbucks in Ohio, and all these guys were falling all over themselves and whispering. She had no idea."
Alba herself tells a charmingly naive story about how in L.A. she is never able to dine alone.
"Everyone feels bad for you," she says. "For some reason, waiters, cooks, they all have to come out and talk to you: 'How's the food? Did someone not show up?' I'm like, 'No, I'm reading my book. I'm totally happy.' "
When it is suggested that perhaps these concerned gentlemen emerge specifically to see her, that surely not every gal eating solo gets the pity party, Alba shakes her head. "Men in Los Angeles get uncomfortable when a woman is by herself," she says. "Unless she's shopping."
On any other actress, such an observation would smack of disingenuousness, but somehow Alba pulls it off. Maybe because she has been acting since she was twelve and has already in her short lifetime "had periods where I was in everybody's face and times when nobody knew who I was."
Alba has already been back and forth on the celebrity trip and has decided, ultimately, "Fuck it." Now she ignores fame completely, staying in a bubble of her creation, a sunny, insular place where life is as deliciously sweet as she wills it to be. A place where men talk to her because they are kind, not horned up. A place where the future has nothing to do with her haircut or her high-riding buttocks.
"I don't need to be famous," she says adamantly. "I'm not that ambitious. At this point, if I'm not sucked in, I'm never going to get sucked in. Being the so-called hot girl, I disconnect from that. It's not that deep."
(Excerpted from RS 977-978, June 30, 2005)
Chapman Flies With Flea
Tracy Chapman will release Where You Live, her seventh studio album and first album in three years, on September 13th. Co-produced by Chapman and Tchad Blake (Phish, Bonnie Raitt), the album features the Red Hot Chili Peppers' Flea on bass, Joe Gore (PJ Harvey, Tom Waits) on guitar, Mitchell Froom (Paul McCartney, Sheryl Crow) on keyboards and Quinn (Belinda Carlisle, Paula Cole) on drums.
"I made some great friends on this album," says Chapman, who in addition to acoustic guitar tried her hand at clarinet. "I had run into Flea a few times over the years, and he'd said to me at one point, 'If you're making a record and you want me to, I'll play on it.' So I took him up on the offer."
Flea makes his presence known behind Chapman's passionate vocals on the anthemic single "Change." Other standout tracks include the gospel-tinged "Talk to You," the jazzy, percussion-heavy "Before Easter" and the sparse, haunting "Never Yours."
"It's mostly recorded live," Chapman says of the album. "It's a new direction for me, sonically and thematically."
Chapman is planning a worldwide tour behind Where You Live in the fall.
Album sales down for midyear count
Unless the rest of 2005 ushers in Usher clones, the record industry could be backsliding into a familiar slump.
A year ago, album sales were ahead of 2003. This year, sales trail 2004 by about 7%, and that's before the weekly tallies go against last fall's streak of increasingly hefty hauls.
Hopes for a solid turnaround were pinned on 2004's tiny growth spurt, the first since 2000. That victory may be short-lived. So far this year, consumers have bought 282.6 million albums, compared with 303.0 million by midyear 2004, according to Nielsen SoundScan. Sales of digital tracks continue to skyrocket, with 158.8 million tracks sold this year vs. 55 million in the first half of 2004. But 99-cent downloads can't offset the losses of CDs costing up to $18.
"It's a disappointing first half, but it's probably too early to panic," says Geoff Mayfield, Billboard's director of charts. "The top 10 is not as strong as it was last year. At the same time, we've seen a few artists capture their best SoundScan weeks ever in this period."
Norah Jones and Usher dominated early 2004, with the latter winning the year-end race after selling roughly 8 million copies of Confessions. 50 Cent's The Massacre is on a similar track, but he'll need help. So far only three albums have exceeded sales of 2 million copies. At this stage in 2004, five had.
"There's reason for concern," Mayfield says. "But how a second half fares may have less do with what's out than with what's coming, and we know the last four months are always chock-full of big releases."
50 Cent is midyear heavyweight
50 Cent's Massacre, the top-selling album of 2005 at the year's halfway point, has almost double the sales of the runner-up, the resurgent Mariah Carey's The Emancipation of Mimi.
Seventeen albums have surpassed the 1 million mark this year.
Figures, supplied by Nielsen SoundScan, represent 2005 sales to date.
Rank/artist Title Sales (in millions)
1. 50 Cent Massacre* 4.02
2. Mariah Carey The Emancipation of Mimi* 2.30
3. The Game Documentary* 2.11
4. Green Day American Idiot 1.93
5. Kelly Clarkson Breakaway 1.60
6. Gwen Stefani Love Angel Music Baby 1.52
7. Coldplay X&Y* 1.38
8. The Killers Hot Fuss 1.31
9. various Now 18* 1.21
10. Eminem Encore 1.16
11. Jack Johnson In Between Dreams* 1.16
12. Ciara Goodies 1.16
13. John Legend Get Lifted 1.15
14. Rascal Flatts Feels Like Today 1.08
15. Ray Charles Genius Loves Company 1.05
16. System of a Down Mezmerize* 1.03
17. Usher Confessions 1.00
18. Dave Matthews Band Stand Up* .99
19. Kenny Chesney Be as You Are* .98
20. 3 Doors Down Seventeen Days* .94
21. Ludacris Red Light District .87
22. Rob Thomas Something to Be* .84
23. Fantasia Free Yourself .84
24. Lil' Jon & the East Side Boyz Crunk Juice .83
25. Toby Keith Honkytonk University* .78
* 2005 release
Jacko and the "Chocolate Factory"
The longish black hair. The pale skin. The ornate suit jacket. The--how should we say?--less than traditional adult male speaking voice.
That is fabled candymaker Willy Wonka as embodied by Johnny Depp in director Tim Burton's new take on the children's classic Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
One problem: "I think the casual viewer is going to see Michael Jackson."
So says Patrick Lee, news editor of online's Sci Fi Wire. And chances are the casual viewer wouldn't disagree.
"It's very scary," laughs Houston-based blogger Laurence Simon.
Like other moviegoers, Simon made the Depp-Jackson-Wonka connection almost instantly when he saw the Chocolate Factory trailer. An offhanded remark last month on his blog, This Blog Is Full of Crap (IsFullofCrap.com), about how much he wasn't looking forward to Burton's film led one commentator to crack, "What's the problem...? Don't have the stomach for Michael Jackson and the Chocolate Factory?"
The properly titled Charlie and the Chocolate Factory opens July 15. In a summer dominated by bad buzz about the less than blockbuster box office, it is one of Warner Bros.' brightest hopes, along with Batman Begins and The Dukes of Hazzard.
Having one of its prized properties--much less, a PG-rated kids' fantasy--linked to a fallen pop star with longish black hair, pale skin, a whisper for a speaking voice, a penchant for military garb and a recent acquittal on child-molestation charges is likely not what the Hollywood studio had in mind when it turned Burton and company loose on author Roald Dahl's beloved, if preternaturally creepy, tale.
And, according to Depp, who openly copped to stealing riffs from rocker Keith Richards for his turn as Captain Jack Sparrow in Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, it is absolutely not what the actor had in mind when he was conjuring the eccentric first brought to the big screen by Gene Wilder in 1971's Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. Children-show hosts like Captain Kangaroo and Mr. Rogers, these are the innocuous sorts who inspired Depp's Wonka, he has said.
"Everyone is entitled to think what they want," Depp said last week in a news conference in Nassau, Bahamas, "even while being violently wrong."
Wrong or no, the suspicions abound. At that press conference, Lee says the Jackson question came up "a lot."
Lee, for one, is more willing to give the benefit of the doubt to the filmmakers, perhaps because he's seen the movie in its entirety. "The nature of the character Willy Wonka is not Michael Jackson," he says. "Willy Wonka hates children--that there sets him apart from Michael Jackson."
Box-office analyst Paul Dergarabedian also has seen the film. Depp's Wonka, he says, "comes off more as Mr. Rogers than Michael Jackson."
If the trailer is creeping out audiences, says Dergarabedian, president of Exhibitor Relations Co., then that might not be such a bad thing for the film's box office. Dahl's tale of gluttony, greed and Oompa Loompas, after all, has never been confused for a Disney fairy tale. As such, the trippier the trailer, the potentially more intrigued the audience.
"They have come to expect the unexpected with Johnny Depp," says Dergarabedian. "Were it another actor, maybe it wouldn't come off as well."
The last time Depp arguably veered into Jackson territory, in Finding Neverland, the 2004 biopic about big-kid-at-heart Peter Pan author J.M. Barrie, the actor earned a Best Actor Oscar nomination.
As long as Depp doesn't earn sustained unwanted comparisons to Jackson in Chocolate Factory, the Oompa Loompas likely will go along their merry, vaguely unsettling way.
London Awarded 2012 Olympic Games
SINGAPORE - London was awarded the 2012 Olympics on Wednesday, narrowly defeating European rival Paris in the final round of voting to take the games back to the British capital for the first time since 1948.
After Moscow, New York and Madrid were eliminated in the first three rounds, London beat its cross-Channel opponent 54-50 on the fourth ballot of the International Olympic Committee vote — capping the most glamorous and hotly contested bid race in Olympic history.
"I'm looking forward to what I'm sure will be a fantastic Olympic Games," said Prince William, speaking from New Zealand.
Paris had been the front-runner throughout the campaign, but London picked up momentum in the late stages with strong support from Prime Minister Tony Blair.
Part of London's pitch was that it stepped in to help the Olympic movement by staging the games as Europe was still recovering from World War II.
The race had been considered too close to call as an unprecedented collection of world leaders and sports celebrities converged on Singapore to lobby for the bids.
London's victory handed Paris its third stinging Olympic defeat in 20 years, following failed bids for the 1992 and 2008 Olympics. Paris hasn't hosted the games since 1924.
IOC president Jacques Rogge opened a sealed envelope and declared the result in a live televised ceremony: "The International Olympic Committee has the honor of announcing that the Games of the 30th Olympiad in 2012 are awarded to the city of London."
The tan-suited London delegates in the convention hall leaped out of their seats, arms raised in jubilation and cheering wildly.
The voting figures weren't immediately released.
In London, crowds cheered and waved flags as they watched the announcement from Singapore on a giant screen in Trafalgar Square, and in the east London area where the main Olympic complex will be based.
The results of the first three rounds came as no surprise. Moscow was always considered the longshot, with New York and Madrid outsiders. Moscow went out with 15 votes in the first round, New York dropped out next with 16, then Madrid with 31.
Paris had the perceived advantage of bidding for a third time, especially since the IOC tends to reward persistence. The French capital also had a ready-to-go Olympic stadium in the Stade de France and embraced the IOC's blueprint for controlling the size and cost of the games.
But not even a personal appearance in Singapore by French President Jacques Chirac could secure victory.
"The heart of Paris and the heart of France are beating in unison in the hope of becoming Olympic host in 2012," Chirac said during the city's final presentation to the IOC. "You can put your trust and faith in France, you can trust the French, you can trust us."
Blair, who spent two days of lobbying in Singapore before leaving to host the G8 summit in Scotland, spoke in a video message — half of which was delivered in French, one of the IOC's two official languages.
"My promise to you is we will be your very best partners," Blair said. "The entire government are united behind this bid. ... It is the nation's bid."
London centered its bid on the massive urban renewal of a dilapidated area of East London. It's the fourth bid from Britain after failed attempts by Birmingham for the 1992 Olympics and Manchester for 1996 and 2000.
London got off to a slow start, but made big strides under Sebastian Coe, a two-time Olympic 1,500-meter gold medalist who replaced American businesswoman Barbara Cassani as head of the bid in May 2004.
Fincher Will Go Back-to-Back for Paramount
LOS ANGELES (Zap2it.com)- "Fight Club" helmer David Fincher, who hasn't directed a film since 2002's "Panic Room," is expected to return to the big screen in a big way, shooting two long-rumored Paramount projects back-to-back.
According to Variety, Fincher has officially signed on to direct "Zodiac" and "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" over the next year-and-a-half. "Zodiac" is currently in preproduction with a September production start, while "Button" will aim to begin filming next October. Fincher had been linked to both films in recent months, but the actual time table was unclear for the notoriously fickle director.
"Zodiac" is based on the pair of books by Robert Graysmith focusing on the famous serial killer. Robert Downey Jr., Mark Ruffalo, Jake Gyllenhaal will appear in the film, which will shoot in San Francisco and in Los Angeles.
"Button," adapted from the work by F. Scott Fitzgerald, will take advantage of Louisiana tax incentives by shooting in New Orleans with Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett starring in the tale of a man aging backwards. Eric Roth ("Forrest Gump") wrote the script.
Since "Panic Room," Fincher has been mentioned in discussions of the Anthony Bourdain adaptation "Seared," the supernatural thriller "Stay," the third film in Tom Cruise's "Mission Impossible" franchise, a remake of "The Reincarnation of Peter Proud," the skateboard epic "The Lords of Dogtown," the war drama "Fertig" and an eternally gestating version of "Rendezvous at Rama."