Zacharek has _every_ right to discuss anything that affects Kidman's performance. And plastic surgery affects many of the physical tools actors use to act--facial muscle movement, fluidity of expressions when they change...even voice modulation--in addition to being a major distraction on-screen. Back when CHARLIE'S ANGELS: FULL THROTTLE came out, I had no idea Demi Moore had had work done. (It's not like I follow her career religiously--:)) But as soon as I saw her first closeup, I knew something was off--her lower face seemed immobile and her mouth was so pursed and thinned-out it was hard to believe she could form words. It was hard to concentrate on the character she was supposed to be (well, as much of a character that was there, which ain't saying much--g!) because Moore not only didn't look like herself, she looked somewhat inhuman. I would defy anyone to watch recent performances by actresses like Melanie Griffith and not see that something isn't right.

>It is disorienting and frustrating to say the least when someone has disfigured herself so much that she is unrecognizable.<

...or she has turned her face into a plastic mask.

>Clint Eastwood, in an interview, said as a director he doesn't want to work with actors (actresses) who have had plastic surgery because (as I remember) they are not the people he expected to see and because they have shown themselves to be vain in the extreme, and that is not attractive.<

Clint Eastwood has always been one of the smartest men in Hollywood...:). And he's right--if an actor cares more about their looks than giving up a performance, they are usually difficult-to-not-worth dealing with.

>The model many women go for in becoming 'pretty' is actually sameness. There is a look that passes for pretty or beauty which is just becoming....like all the rest.<

Hey, Number 12 Looks Just Like You...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_Twelve_Looks_Just_Like_You

(Poor Rod Serling. So many things he predicted in THE TWILIGHT ZONE not only came to pass, but turned out _worse_ than he foresaw. :( )

The LW doesn't respect his wife; she doesn't respect him. And neither one of them is thinking much about the kids--instead, they are well on their way to making them collateral damage, if the kids aren't already. Where's the marriage here? Answer: there ain't one. End this, LW. Don't look back, don't try to get payback--and don't at all make out like you are totally the wronged party here. You both screwed up and it's time to quit what essentially is an in-house feud.

>The bad stuff I have to say is this: if you don't like porn, why the hell did you subscribe to Showtime? It has nothing else.<

It has DEXTER, which is excellent stuff...

>The time is long past when they taped the full version of Sweeney Todd with George Hearn and Angela Lansbury. Or, for that matter, since they made a sitcom of Steambath, did the groundbreaking Brothers or gave one last season to SCTV.<

It's a sin and a shame Showtime _and_ HBO gave up on Broadway once they started getting big. How often will something as great as THE COAST OF UTOPIA be revived, much less taped so that the rest of the country can see it?

>David Duchovny's embarrassing Red Shoe Diaries, introducing soft core nudie stuff while he rambles along some Canadian seaport with a dog, with some mumbling narration, should have been your first clue that Showtime had stopped competing with HBO and was aiming for the lonely-businessman-in-a-hotel-room market.<

Heh. RSD was arguably better than CALIFORNICATION, you have to admit...;)

>Both Freidman's and Dowd’s columns are ultimately about just who can swagger and strut the best among the candidates – who can best portray the “resolve” that we need to show the world.<

Can't _wait_ for the third Jabberwocky head--David Brooks--to be heard from tomorrow. :PPP

>Looking at it that way, it is hard not to reach the conclusion that there is absolutely nothing for an intelligent woman, with qualities of leadership, to be had in a relationship with most men because in order to sustain the relationship in any kind of peaceful harmony she would constantly have to be pretending to be less than she is.<

Shoot, don't just blame the guys who think like that. The women who eagerly grab onto a man who wants that from them because said women are 1) afraid to be alone; 2) don't want to be like those "dykey or pathetic unfeminine women" deserve even more opprobium. They are dislikeable because they usually don't just stew in their self-created misery, but just have to take it out on other women.

>Anybody remember how Dowd treated Howard Dean's working physician wife--mocking her for how she dressed, etc.?<

That was what made me really start discounting her. (I wasn't getting the Times back around the Clinton scandal, so I missed most of her Hillary columns.) But that snide mess about Ms. Dean was utterly uncalled-for (not to mention shallow) all the way--and revealed Dowd's ongoing commentary about other women as worthless and ignorant as it is. Hell, what kind of woman _would_ meet Dowd's approval, anyway?