Monday, October 9, 2000

Premature Burial

British director Michael Apted, he says, didn’t want American Denise Richards in his otherwise strictly European cast, but MGM saw her as a box office draw and forced her into the picture. The fan argued that Denise’s admittedly poor performance as the over-the-top Bond Girl was not so much the result of a lack of acting talent as of a lack of direction from the resentful Apted, and that the reason I didn’t remember her sucking in Wild Things or Starship Troopers is because she didn’t.

The fan may or may not be right about this alleged tension between Apted, Richards, and MGM (I’ve never been interested enough in that movie to find out for myself), but it at least sounds plausible. God knows Angelina Jolie has nothing to prove as far as her acting goes, but I didn’t buy her at all in Girl, Interrupted (although everyone else did).

So for the time being, the jury’s still out on whether or not Denise can act, although the verdict hardly matters: No one went to see Wild Things for the acting, after all, even though it was well acted and was an entertaining story in its own right — they went to see the sex scenes with Neve Campbell and Denise Richards. That’s what people want to see from Denise, and until she delivers something like that again, most of her movies will garner little more attention than the talent portions of any other beauty contest.