Fug The Cover

Because apparently, 2007 is the year that we learned all August covers are painful:

Loving the color of the dress -- though maybe not on Winona, actually -- but if I were her, and planning on making some kind of comeback (which I assume she is, as the cover tells us she's STARTING OVER AT 35, like this is SO VERY VERY CHALLENGING because 35 is SO VERY OLD OH MY GOD I BETTER GET STARTED ON MY LIVING WILL),  this isn't exactly the way I'd want to kick it off.  She doesn't look 35 to me. She looks....older. Tired. Mildly to moderately anemic. Like her allergies are kicking up in this field and she is stifling a sneeze. Hungry. Fighting back from the heartbreak of scoliosis.  As though she used whipped egg whites in the place of hair gel. What's the deal? Did she lift something from Anna's office?*

*Sorry, Wino, but I couldn't resist. Loved you in Heathers.  Hate to see you looking like you just chugged a mug of Drano.

And she's back! After a brief hiatus while she was dating John Mayer and simultaneously was accosted with my favorite headline ever, namely, "IT'S NOT A FAT SUIT," my nemesis Jessica Simpson is BACK.  (I like to have a nemesis at all times. For a while it was a woman I worked with [NOT HEATHER] who used to correct my grammar all the time, except she'd change it so that it was WRONG. Another time it was my landlord, who charged me for DEPRECIATION ON THE WASHING MACHINE. That ass. And then, of course, there was Paul Giamatti. HE KNOWS WHAT HE DID.) But Jessica Simpson is my favorite nemesis, because she's always doing totally dumb stuff.  Sure, I suppose it's exciting to have a brilliant, Lord Voldemort-y nemesis, because it challenges you and all that, but I'm lazy. It's so much easier to have a nemesis who's likely to hoist herself on her own petard. In fact, I suspect her petard is exactly what Jessica is hoisting in the cover shot below:

Why else would she have her arm all stuck up in the air like that, in what might be the most AWKWARD-looking cover I have EVER SEEN? The good people at Glossed Over (also not fans of this cover) swears that J Simp is holding a bundle of balloons, and I'm sure that's true. What's also true is that they appear to be about ready to rip her arm right out of its socket.  It doesn't even look like HER arm. Hell, it barely looks like AN arm. She looks like she just happened to wander in front of a narrow, flesh-colored pillar. (There's a dirty, easy joke in there, isn't there? I'll give you a moment to make it to yourself.) She also sort of looks like she's got fangs, a development I never noticed before. With the new darker hair and the new sharper teeth, is she a vampire now? And shouldn't that information be on the cover? Hell, I'd totally buy a magazine that promised "A Look Inside Jessica's Dark New Blood-Sucking World."

You'd think Cosmo could have found a shot of Julia Stiles in which she wasn't making a "What the hell? I'm leaning against this wall anyway; guess I might as well pose for Cosmo. Hurry up and take the picture, though" face.

You'd also think they'd run out of "Sex Extras," tips on how to "be closer to him," and stories about girls who got killed in a way that will probably ALSO HAPPEN TO YOU if you don't read the article, but that's apparently not the case.

However, I do have to give them props for juxtaposing the triad of "Her Boyfriend Killed Her For Breaking Up With Him" right next to "Why He Just Won't Propose,"  and  "Guys Uncensored: Their Get-Naked Fears Will Make You Laugh Out Loud."  Maybe he doesn't want to marry you because you're laughing at him when he's naked, honey.  That could make anyone feel a little bit homicidal.

I have not yet watched General Hospital: Night Shift, the GH spin-off that's currently airing on SOAPnet, although sources tell me that Billy Dee Williams is on it! This is exciting to me for reasons I can't quite pinpoint -- maybe I have unresolved Lando Calrissian issues? At any rate, I feel like I don't watch General Hospital very often, but of course I am aware that it features or has featured BOTH Luke and Laura  AND Dr. Rick Springfield, and every time I read a synopsis of something that's happened in the last five years, I find myself thinking, "oh, I totally remember when that happened to Carly!" In other words, GH watchers, I get where you're coming from, I salute you, and I suspect I may have a televisual version of that thing people get where they eat in their sleep, except I'm watching soap operas. Anyway, I hear from reliable sources that GH:NS is sort of entertaining, but what I want to know is why no one realized that they accidentally replaced Kimberly McCullough, who plays Dr. Robin Scorpio (who, Wikipedia tells me, not only originated the role as a child, but also sang back-up on "Toy Soldiers" by Martika[!!]) with Jennifer Love Hewitt. Behold:

The GH:NS ads:

Versus everyone's favorite Ghost Whisperer:

I mean, it's fairly obvious that J Lo Hew's got  Kimberly McCullough locked away in a cage in a mine shaft while she takes over her life so as to enact some terrible revenge because they're secretly twins who've been kept apart their whole lives and J Lo Hew is tired of people coming up to her and a) asking her about Bailey b) asking if she can tell their dead grandmother hello c) starting sentences with the phrase, "well, I don't know about you, but I CAN'T HARDLY WAIT...."

Frankly, I can't believe no one has caught onto this yet, but I just hope J Lo Hew will find herself so busy with wig wrangling when the next season of Ghost Whisperer goes into production that she lets poor Kimberly out.

The coverage of the Harry Potter kids has been out of control lately -- which  makes sense, given that the most recent of the films opens this weekend, and the final book comes out on the 21st (not that I've had that marked on my calendar since February or anything). And, with only a few be-feathered mis-steps, Emma Watson's mostly been looking adorable in Chanel at all the various associated events. Which is why she needs to sue Parade magazine for dressing her in this:

Unless I blacked out during a section of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix in which Hermione decided to chuck the whole wizarding thing and become a winsome tap-dancing orphan, this just makes no sense at all. I get the books -- since Hermione is brainy -- but what's with the top hat? She's not a MAGICIAN. She's a WIZARD. It's DIFFERENT.

Although I don't know why I'm all that surprised. Parade magazine is noteworthy mostly because it's so bad (sorry, Parade staffers. It's not your fault. I blame the crappy newsprint you're forced to work with). When I was a kid, my mother would read the Letters From the Readers section every weekend and get enraged because all the questions therein were SO STUPID and clearly chosen/faked because the person charged with answering said letters had some kind of beef he really wanted to passive-aggressively address that week. Like, one of them would be all, "Dear Parade, Could you please explain to me why every young actress in Hollywood today is a PANTY-LESS WHOOOOORE? When I was young, our actresses WERE PARAGONS OF VIRTUE. I AM APPALLED."  (This would run like three years after the panty-free fad had passed, of course.) And the answer would be like, "I WISH I KNEW. You are so right, reader. The youth of today DISGUST ME and I WEEP FOR THE FUTURE. It's the fault of all those dirty hippies who had children in the 70s. LOOK TO THE GREATEST GENERATION FOR GUIDANCE."  And then after my mother would complain about how Parade Magazine is totally out of touch, my father would complain about Marilyn Vos Savant ("she's clearly a fraud. What is the likelihood that the person with the world's highest IQ is named SAVANT?") and then we'd all eat pancakes.

Great, now I want pancakes. Thanks a lot, Parade.

So, here's the thing. Mischa Barton is quite lovely, without any help from anyone. So why did British Elle feel the need to Photoshop her into looking like an entirely different woman?

I mean, this lady is very pretty, too, but she looks sort of like she might be Mischa's older cousin, who was once fresh and promising but who suffered a traumatic failed love affair with a quasi-royal man who promised her marriage in exchange for the pleasures of her body, but who then promptly left her to marry a less attractive but more highly born woman to whom he'd secretly been betrothed for years.  And instead of just pulling herself up by her bootstraps and getting an incredibly glamourous job as, say, a model/photographer/ad copywriter and making him regret his treatment of her for all the days of his life, this Mischa just sunk lower and lower into a downward spiral, becoming a high-class escort, then a sort of mid-class escort, then getting addicted to something that's bad for you but doesn't totally ruin your looks, and then dying in, like, a fire started by one of her Cigarettes of Tragedy. In other words, THIS woman is a secondary character in a Judith Krantz novel, the one who's having all the kinky sex but who is also sort of weak-willed and unhappy. While the actual Mischa Barton is obviously a primary character in a Judith Krantz novel, the one who bounces back from terrible treatment at the hands of a handsome but douchey man by growing ever stronger and maybe just a little bit emotionally stunted, but in a way that a handsome, non-douchey man can break through in order to love her that much more perfectly. Catch a clue, British Elle.

PS: Nice bracelets. Presumably you can also use them as weights.

Here's my question: If you have made the decision that you want Anne Hathaway on your cover, why not make sure she LOOKS like Anne Hathaway?

I'm not saying you can't be avant-garde with the styling, but something about her face in this photo just doesn't seem right. It compels me to take deep breaths every time I look at it, because her expression reminds me of having a cold and being unable to breathe through my nose.

Actually, even worse, it's giving me disturbing flashbacks to when I was young and I would squeeze Barbie's head at the ears and laugh at how her face got all narrow and distorted (I was not a Barbie Girl -- I only had one; my true love was My Little Pony, even if I did sometimes yank their tails out and give them the occasional bad haircut). I guess that bit of dementia made me a bit like an ahead-of-my-time Kids In The Hall sketch, except that guy was crushing actual people's heads only in theory, whereas I was pinching a doll's head for real. And, I've said too much.

So, before I reveal anything else that's weird about a childhood toy, let's sum up: It's not the dominatrix look to which I object, so much as the fact that the photo looks like it's been vertically stretched. Not a great picture, and kind of a distracting choice for the cover. Also, I gave away that Barbie a gajillion years ago, so nobody has to worry about it suffering any more cranial torture at my ghoulish hands.

Now that my new issue of Entertainment Weekly is (theoretically) about to arrive on my doorstep, I can finally chuck last week's -- which is a relief, because the cover photo of Katherine Heigl was giving me a severe case of what doctors call "the creeps."

Not that this is Heigl's fault. She's turned into a terrific actress, for one thing, and she's also completely adorable. To all those haters on message boards who say she's fat just because she isn't a twig like Ellen Pompeo, I say, A POX ON YOU. That is CRAZY TALK. We should all be so lucky as to be as "fat" as Katherine Heigl, what with her perfect curves and her pretty face and her completely NORMAL, healthy body (not to mention the fact that she's probably still a size 4 or something, because this town is totally dysfunctional).

Just look how nice she looks inside EW:

See? She's cute! She's playful! Her eyes are open! She looks sober, or at the very least, mildly buzzed enough that she's still fun but not in danger of drooling on the pavement and flashing her privates before accidentally deigning to go home with Calum Best like everyone else does!

You'd think those last two wouldn't be important distinctions, but they are when you consider the photo they used on the actual COVER of EW (a really unfortunate acronym for the mag, come to think of it, but also sort of apt in this case).

Photography, at least in The World According to Tyra Banks, is all about angles. [Supplementary cautionary texts for the lesson: All my personal albums.]

So in theory, for a magazine cover shoot, one would want to find the best angle possible on the subject's face, so that when the photo is blown up on a cover and gazing at the masses from newsstands everywhere, the aforementioned masses do not immediately become huddled masses yearning to breathe free of the fearsome visage of Celebrity X.

Unfortunately for Fergie, I think the Seventeen photographer who shot her for the June cover flat-out gave up on her.

First, though, consider the Rolling Stone cover she graced last fall:

I actually like this picture -- yes, the hand positioning looks really unnatural and uncomfortable, like a finger-gun she's about to lock and load, but overall she looks kind of dirty-hot. Her nose looks delicate. She's pouty. She's got the smoky-eye thing going on, and her hair looks fantastic. In all, it's a pretty solid effort, and she makes me wish I had cause to wear tiaras more often.

Now have a gander at what Seventeen did to her.

Based on this description, would you go see this movie?

"A Gainesville Florida auto upholsterer attempts to transcend his mundane life by taming a wild, red-tailed hawk. He chases his passion while caring for his autistic nephew, and becoming caught up in an abstract and uneasy relationship with a young psychology student." [Source.]

I can tell you right now that I would run, not walk, away from the theater. I mean, obviously, it's incredibly relatable to try and spice up your life by taming a rare bird, but I am guessing the random insertion of the young psychology student came because whoever developed the script turned to the writer and said, "Where are the boobs in this movie? Where is the illicit tongue? People like illicit tongue more than they like birds." Incidentally, that is a valuable lesson for everyone to remember. Otherwise, the whole thing seems rife with depressing and potentially pretentious discourse about growth, plus annoying metaphors about wildness versus obedience and the spreading of one's wings. And bird feet. Lots of bird feet.

Next question: Does this poster make you any more inclined to see the movie?