Before You Email Me...

A lot of people have been emailing me objecting to my little comments about Leelee Sobieski, the complaints usually centering on one of two themes: (1) How dare I suggest that Leelee is anything less than drop dead gorgeous? (2) How dare I suggest that Leelee’s career will be more familiar to video renters than moviegoers unless her top comes off?

As for the first objection, Leelee has admittedly been looking a lot hotter recently than she did a couple years ago — which is to say that she’s developed more cleavage to show off at premieres — but if she didn’t have the cleavage, I probably wouldn’t be getting all the mail I’ve been getting. Don’t get me wrong — she has a cute face, too — sometimes even a beautiful face (it varies from photo shoot to photo shoot), but it’s the sort of face that needs a tight T-shirt or low-cut dress to really attract attention.

Which brings us to her career in general. Many of the emails I get seem to confuse talent with commercial success, and feel that I wrongly say that she has neither. Let me just say for the record that I think that Leelee is very talented — certainly more so than a lot of the other, more popular actresses her age. (And by this I mean a talented actress; that Shatneresque poem of hers that she read on Leno was as painful to listen to as the actual terrorist attack it was about was painful to watch.) But an actress without a ready audience from a hit movie or popular TV show, no matter how talented she is, is still primarily a video actress. Which is why I believe that tight tops alone won’t be enough to stir up interest in her at the box office, especially if the movie itself isn’t that good. Nudity, though, is hard to ignore. Consider Denise Richards. Not that many people went to see Wild Things, but her (very) brief moment of toplessness in that film made her a household word overnight. Same with Uma Thurman in Dangerous Liaisons. It’s not that talent doesn’t matter; it’s just that most audiences respond better to 90 minutes of hooters than to 90 minutes of Stanislavsky.