Monday, September 24, 2007

The Talented Ms. Alba

From the box office report at Entertainment Weekly:

So let’s take a moment to talk about the lovely Ms. Alba. I adore a sexy woman as much as the next guy, but her box office track record has yet to prove that she is, in fact, more than just a pretty face. Certainly, that face has been at the front of the marketing campaigns for the mind-bogglingly popular Fantastic Four franchise, so Alba deserves some credit for the $356 mil combined domestic gross of the two FF movies. Then again, I’d argue that those films had a built-in audience that was going to see them no matter what, and when you subtract her work as Sue Storm from her résumé, her track record gets iffy. While the ensemble film Sin City (another existing story that attracted already dedicated viewers) was a decent hit, Alba’s lead-starring efforts — Honey (which opened with $12.9 mil) and Into the Blue ($7.1 mil premiere) — have stumbled. To be sure, it’s not a good thing when Good Luck Chuck’s mediocre $14 mil debut is your best yet. Anyway, that’s it. She hasn’t taken a big role in any other movies; otherwise, it’s all magazine covers. I write all this not to gang up on the actress, but merely to point out, once again, that the stars whom we tend to think shine brightest in Hollywood often, by box office standards at least, don’t. Then again, at least Alba has good company on this financially overrated list, including, oh, Angelina Jolie and Nicole Kidman, to name two.

None of the media’s observations about Jessica’s track record are wrong, per se, but they do miss the point of her. It doesn’t matter if her films succeed or fail. It doesn’t matter if she can act. Only one thing matters, and she’s already got that covered.

“What do they do?”, asks a befuddled client of the posse of Robert Palmer girls standing mutely behind born-again chauvinist pig Billy in an old Ally McBeal.

“They’re doing it now,” Billy answers.