Hey all

Ok, these are the main news items from the past week.

I guess the biggest news of the past week is this article featuring pics of Natalie smooching Jude, off screen. Natalie’s kissing partners are definitely on the upswing. From Lukas Haas and Moby to Gael and Jude. I’m almost jealous. Almost.

But before the tongues start wagging, check out this article from The Star.

From the STAR By MAx tracy & John Bell

(Showed 4 photos of Jude and Natalie kissing)

These red hot photos of Jde Law locked in a passionate embrace with his Closer co-star Natalie Portman were snapped by photographer Greg Brennan outside a London shopping mall center on March 10. :They looked like any young couple in love, “Brenna told Star. “Their body language said it all.”

Although the two stars play on-screen lovers int he film which was shooting in the mall, Brennan says there were no signs of a crew when he took the pics and notes that Portman drove off in a taxi afterward. Later on he was told by the movie’s publicist that the two actors, who have been filming a love scene nearby, were merely rehearsing the scene in a quiet spot when he spotted them locking lips.

Law’s and Portman’s reps were quick to insist the actors were just doing their jobs. “They’re co-stars and friends,” Law’s publicist told Star. “There’s nothing more to it.” “This was absolutely a scene from the movie,” Portman’s rep declares. The movie’s publicist said the same.

Innocent rehearsal or not, 31-year old Law’s girlfriend of 5 months, Sienna Miller, 21, has apparently became concerned over his close relationship with Portman, 22, on and off the screen.

Eyewitnesses say Milelr’s feelings were obvious while she watched the love scene being filmed earlier that day. As soon as the director yelled “Cut!” Miller ran to law, wrapped her arms around him and gave him a big, sloppy kiss.

“It was so embarrassing, “said our spy. “Sienna was acting like a teenage girl staking her claim on her man. Jude looked a little taken aback. Jude and Natalie certainly had a lot of chemistry, and Sienna did not react to it well at all.”

Closer is aptly billed as “an intriguing story of passion, drama, love and abandonment and Jude has ended up with his leading ladies before. His relationships with Sienan and ex-wife Sadie prove it. But Portman still seems to be quite close to handsome Mexican actor Gael Garcia Bernal, star of Y Tu Mama Tambien whom who?s been dating for months. Sienna is surely hoping that lasts. Let’s watch!

A big thanks to Amidoll for both of those.

Of course it’s not all fun and games on set, they’re also shooting a movie. Jeff Wells recently read the Closer play and was singing it’s praises. He also highlights the one potential problem with the film.

You’re going to want to see Mike Nichols’ CLOSER, trust me. I know because I’ve finally read the play it’s based upon, and because it’s been made clear that the film will pretty much be the play….thank the stars.

Patrick Marber’s “Closer” is a lacerating, award-winning piece about painful off-and-on relationships in contemporary London. It opened seven years ago in London, five years ago in New York, and played at the Mark Taper Form in Los Angeles in the fall of 2000.

All these years and I never saw it, never read it. But I’ve been thinking about it more and more. The moment finally came last Tuesday afternoon after a screening of THE LADYKILLERS at Harmony Gold. I walked over to Samuel French books and bought Marber’s play, and then read it the following night.

It shattered me. It’s a staggeringly good work that cuts right to the emotional core of the poking and stabbing games played by today’s romantically entwined heteros. It’s about longing, sexual desire, deceit and the illusion of love between four characters — Dan, Larry, Alice and Anna — as they slip in and out of each other’s hearts and beds.

Imagine Harold Pinter, Noel Coward, Samuel Beckett, and David Mamet writing in unison with the same guilty, anguished hard-on, and you’ll have a general idea.

Don’t get the idea from this that it’s a “man’s play.” It gets all sides, exposes all hurts. A lady friend and I read the play aloud on Wednesday, and she agreed with me that it plays no favorites and exposes everyone’s underbelly. On top of which it’s funny…but take no notice of anyone who calls it a comedy.

Nichols’ film, which wrapped two days ago in London, costars Jude Law (Dan), Nathalie Portman (Alice), Clive Owen (Larry) and Julia Roberts (Anna). Columbia is opening it on December 3rd.

Now that I know what it actually is I can’t imagine it not being put up for Oscars in all the prestige categories — acting, direction, adapted screenplay, etc. It has to be a contender. It’s too good, too pulverizing.

Whether or not it’s Best Picture material is another story. There’s never any telling until you see it. Emotional summonings are a tricky business. Marber’s play isn’t a tearjerker, but it sure as shit makes you feel sad and exposed. A bit shell-shocked, even.

Does it sound too drippy to say it makes you want to be gentler and less hurting in your relations with the opposite gender? That was one reaction I had.

To hear it from Marber, his play hasn’t been chopped up or movie-ized, even though he himself was ready to do this when he sat down to adapt it. He told a Scottish journalist last year that Nichols “is dead set on being faithful to the play. He’s Mike Nichols [and] he knows what he’s doing.”

Working it through with Nichols, he said, led him to the conclusion that “we don’t need to chop it all up into what a movie is. We can make a more original movie with long scenes and two actors in a room. It’s an actor’s piece. That’s his view, and I’m persuaded of it.”

He’s saying this, but I’ll bet he’s spiffed it up to make CLOSER feel a bit more like ’04 than ’97…. you know? Seven years is a long time.

There won’t be any British accents coming out of Roberts or Portman. Anna and Alice are going to be transplanted Americans.

Owen played Dan in the original ’97 London stage production. Larry, his role in the film, is a slightly less appealing character than Dan, although both are revealed by the play’s end as deeply flawed, if not diseased.

Roberts is my only concern. The idea of that giddy laugh and toothy smile of hers in any way messing with the carefully calibrated Anna makes me cringe. Roberts got the role when the original hire, Cate Blanchett, had to drop out due to a pregnancy.

Consider these excerpts from two VARIETY reviews — one by Matt Wolf, the other by Charles Isherwood, written respectively in ’97 and ’99.

Marber’s “altogether bruising take on love wring fresh emotions from a time-honored topic,” enthused Wolf. “As acted for keeps by a keen cast under Marber’s lethally sharp direction, the play is sure to leave audiences arguing — not to mention reeling — on both sides of the Atlantic for years to come. Theater doesn’t hit much closer to home.

“Covering almost four years in the lives of two couples who fall in and out of love (and sometimes in again), the play is so intricately plotted that its structural finesse may go unnoticed by those caught up in the narrative.

“In fact, it’s as dense with reverberant detail as [Tom Stoppard’s] ‘Arcadia,’ with which ‘Closer’ shares an interest in the emotional equivalents to chaos theory alongside an examination of a love so fierce that it can eventuate only in death.”

Isherwood called Marber’s play “a brilliant and bracingly adult [work] that lights a scorching fire under this lukewarm theater season.

“Directed with propulsive rhythm by the author himself, and acted by an incomparable quartet of performers, ‘Closer’ is both bruising and beautiful, shatteringly funny and devastatingly sad. It feels ripped from the heart, an organ memorably described here as looking like ‘a fist wrapped in blood,’ and it leaves a lasting scar there.

“Indeed the play’s dialogue has a raw emotionality rarely heard in art or life. It cuts like broken glass, rending flesh with every syllable, and is full of bitter, intelligent, unvarnished truth.

“Despite the stylishly seductive package and charismatic performances,” he concluded, “‘Closer’ is often hard to watch; its truths are painful, its honesty makes you wince.

“The play’s sad message is that the truth of the heart is ever-changing, and tainted by other equally liquid emotions: jealousy, pride, selfishness, lust. Love’s a paltry, unreliable, painful thing, Marber’s bleakly beautiful play tells us — how grim and how funny, then, that it is all we have to ward off the terrors of life and death.”

Okay?

Okay!

The New York Post reported that Nat attended the Anti War/Bush rally in New York with Gael (good on you, Nat). You can read the whole article here.

Among the throng of demonstrators was actress Natalie Portman, who was decked out in full hippie garb and holding hands with actor boyfriend Gael Garcia Bernal.

Onto something exciting, in case you haven’t heard, the Garden State trailer is playing in front of the wonder Eternal Sunshine And The Spotless Mind and made a couple appearances on US shows like E! It should be online before the weeks end so hopefully we’ll have it for download any day now. The word is that it’s fantastic and Nat features prominently. Even the Pope was heard saying, “it is as it was”.

There’s a pretty cool article (altho slightly rehashed quotes) about the Israel situation, among other things, over here. Thanks to Gordo for that.

Cal from the AQMB found these great pics from the Israeli Ambassador’s ball, which was held a little over a year ago.

Between anti-war rallies Nat likes to get in a bit of Outkast and Black Eyes Peas. Here she is attending a concert and wondering where the love is. Thanks to Nat-ah-lee, Amidoll and Cal. Girlpower!

Ok, that’s all the big news. I’ll be back soon with more on the battle of the nat pics and a new comic strip.

Oh, and regarding the server outage, I’m considering setting up a mailing list, which would come into play if the server is down.

Cya.