Monday, October 11, 2010
WELL, THIS WILL NOT BE HOW LINDSAY LOHAN MAKES HER COMEBACK: In a somewhat surprising move, Esquire's Sexiest Woman Alive (Who Was Willing to Pose In Her Underpants For Us) is former Friday Night Lights star Minka Kelly. It's an odd choice, given that Kelly's sole major credit is FNL, along with a tiny role in 500 Days of Summer. Kelly's undoubtedly gorgeous, but I'm puzzled by how creative types seem to fall for her as an actress (both Jason Katims and Peter Berg have used her in multiple projects) given that she has limited range (though she got considerably better during her time on FNL)--heck, she even got canned from her midseason show this year.
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Her other major credit is dating The Classiest Yankee, which, as it was 50 years ago, is sufficient to count. (Odd that I just read yesterday the Klosterman essay on Marilyn Monroe v. Pam Anderson which talks about how we'd never today see The Sexiest Woman Alive dating The Greatest Baseball Player ... oh, just read it.)
ReplyDeleteSo, she learned limited range from Jeter?
ReplyDeleteShe's been showing up in a recurring role in Katims' newer series, Parenthood, as a behavioral therapist for Max (the character with Asperger's).
ReplyDeleteMaybe it's just her still-developing acting skills, but her flat line delivery and oddly blank demeanor in Parenthood has caused some debate in various forums about whether her character has an issue with other characters, a hidden agenda, or is even autistic herself.
I particularly enjoyed the not-at-all-dated sentence at the top of pg. 79 that refers to the quiet nature of Tyra Banks and the relative upopularity of Steve Nash vis a vis Elizabeth Hurley.
ReplyDeleteI was thinking about her in Parenthood, too, although I think her flat delivery is a combination of 1) her being a not very good actor, and 2) probably to an extent a character thing about trying to maintain distance with a patient - she's a therapist, not a sibling or parent and in the same way that doctors and nurses need to maintain some professional separation, I ascribed it to that.
ReplyDeleteAnd Benner's remark is brilliant.
Thanks for that....
ReplyDeleteI actually really like her in Parenthood -- and while I recognize that she's being given wheelhouse roles, I wonder if it's not just that she's a good character actress whose directors know how to best utilize her. Not everybody can do everything, and also, she is really hot. I do want to mention that. She's insanely beautiful. I can totally accept this assessment (although I was more of a Palicki man).
ReplyDeleteSo it wasn't until the press surrounding her Esquire "honors" that I realized her father was in Aerosmith. So, does that mean she is the TV equivalent of Liv Tyler? Like Tyler, she is someone who is indisputably beautiful, but talented only within a certain range, and if well-cast in that range, she can deliver without question. But, if cast outside of that range, well, she leaves many sensible people kind of scratching their heads.
ReplyDeleteI suspect that in FNL, she might have been in her range, but Parenthood places her in her range in some scenes and outside of her range in other scenes, so she's giving off kind of an odd vibe. It's possible that she can grow as an actress and can start to expand her range. But it seems like in the meantime she needs some strong direction to deliver what is needed in a scene without distracting the viewer with an odd, blankly-pretty demeanor. (And part of what may be going on in Parenthood is that she is surrounded by incredibly strong, nuanced actors who have been rising above, what have been in some cases, uneven scripts. So her blank slate of a performance stands out more than it would have normally.) For all I know, she may be an incredibly nice and deep person IRL, but her performances in Parenthood have kind of left me going "huh?".