Last week, I caught a cold. Despite my prickly exterior, I have a basically generous nature, so I passed my upper respiratory infection along to the Disco Biscuit. When Friday night arrived, we both had the cold, so we decided to skip the socializing and settle in with some takeout and a movie. While the Biscuit phoned out for sushi, I prowled the aisles of West Coast Video, searching for the cinematic balm that would soothe our troubled sinuses and honking as quietly as possible into a Kleenex, and I had to prowl quickly, because the store had My Best Friend’s Wedding on the monitors and I didn’t want to start projectile vomiting on top of blowing my nose every three minutes, because that movie BLEW CHUNKS, which I can say definitively because the Biscuit and I actually paid money to see that movie, even though we did not see all of it because we went to a drive-in and after about ten minutes the Biscuit invited me into the back seat to “make the most of the drive-in experience,” and also to avoid having to watch the movie which we could tell sucked rocks after seeing only the credits, and he had to reassure me about ten thousand times that the windows in the back seat had dark enough tinting, and I won’t say any more about that little escapade because my parents read this page, but anyhow, our visit to the backseat did not prevent Julia Roberts and her ten-story fish-face from reaffirming my belief that she should give up acting and go back to her day job at Sea World impersonating a trout, nor did it hinder me from absorbing some of the plot, which made no sense since even a mackerel would not find Dermot Mulroney attractive, much less chase him all over Chicago in a bread truck while pretending to make out with her gay colleague, all while talking on a cell phone and doing karaoke and crying, so I had to increase the vid-browsing pace from a prowl to something more like a brisk traipse, and just as I felt my gorge rising irretrievably, I spotted Youngblood, grabbed it, rented it, and hit the sidewalk without having to hurl, though I knew that a hurl awaited me later when I would have to watch the Rob- Lowe’s-character-visits-Patrick-Swayze’s-character-in-the-hospital-
and-their-jaws-twitch-to-denote-bonding scene, not to mention the apocalyptic vision of Rob clad only in a jockstrap. Beeyarf.

Frankly, though, I would rather watch Lowe and Swayze in a college production of Waiting For Godot than watch Julia Roberts in just about anything. Julia Roberts does not have a single molecule of flair. She turns in – or perhaps I should say “phones in” – the same performance in every film. She has never varied her formulaic portrayal of the brave, wan, searching, fallen princess in modern dress. She cannot do accents convincingly; she cannot even do straight hair convincingly. She has played the same bony, boring character for ten years. Granted, Janeane Garofalo also plays the same character – herself – in every film she makes. But filmmakers do not ask us to believe that Janeane could kindle an obsessive romantic fire in the breast of every man who looks upon her. Hollywood has consistently held Julia Roberts up as the joy of every warm-blooded leading man’s desiring, when in fact a boiled vegetable has a better chance of stirring his loins.

Actually, I can think of several so-called actresses that stomp on my last nerve way harder than “Jules” does. At least La Roberts doesn’t fancy herself the equal of Meryl Streep (unlike Demi Moore), and at least she has a normal speaking voice (unlike Joey Lauren Adams), and at least she didn’t have to give herself a total makeover in order to accept kudos for playing herself in a movie that sort of sucked anyway (unlike Courtney Love). At least we hardly ever have to see her emaciated body naked. But would it kill her to modify the presentation just SLIGHTLY on occasion? How many times does she expect us to sit through some minor variation on the “nice girl from wrong side of tracks gets heart broken but learns to love again despite her messy past and obvious resemblance to an albacore tuna”? What makes casting agents read a script and think “Julia Roberts,” when Julia Child would do just as good a job?

The crying. Julia Roberts cries more perfectly, more gorgeously than anyone in show business. We mere mortals get red and blotchy; our faces swell up; we look damp and icky, and we frequently start hiccuping. Julia does not do these things. First, she turns down the corners of those extra-wides just a little bit; then she presses them together for a moment, preparing them for the trembling intake of breath that comes next. As she reaches the top of the inhale, she lets the breath quaver, and her eyes begin to fill up with glassy water. Then she presses her lips together again, and when she releases them, one small and speedy tear zips down her face, and one or two more jewel-like tears follow their leader down Julia’s thin face. By this time, her lips have reddened, and her lashes have begun to clump together, making them appear even longer. Water pools beneath her eyes, and her voice comes haltingly if it comes at all. Before we know it, a small man in a beard has begun to build an ark in the hollow of her cheek, and the wobbling of her lips has set off seismographs around the country. No glycerine tears, these – she can’t tell a joke to save her life, and she looks like a clam, but Julia Roberts can cry better than any other actress. Michelle Pfeiffer can do red-eyed tears of betrayal, and Winona Ryder can bring forth a convincing solitary tear of grief, but nobody does a sincere bawl like Julia.

And Julia does a sincere bawl in every single movie she makes. She seems to find roles that require her to cry – women from the wrong side of the tracks who find love with a rich man and get their hearts broken (Mystic Pizza, Pretty Woman, Dying Young, Something To Talk About); women with mysterious or painful pasts that must confront these pasts in order to find love (Flatliners, Sleeping with the Enemy); women with successful careers who can’t seem to find love (Pret-a-Porter, I Love Trouble, Everyone Says I Love You, My Best Friend’s Wedding); and women who scare easily (Mary Reilly, The Pelican Brief). Above all, Julia’s roles require her to cry, and then sit back and wait for the leading man to rescue her from herself, or from her past, or from some contrived dangerous situation, or from some combination of all three. When I saw Everyone Says I Love You last year, I thought that we might make it through the whole film without Julia turning on the waterworks; she didn’t have a very big role, after all. But no – she cried, and she cried WHILE SINGING. If I tried to cry and sing at the same time, the sound would rouse bats sleeping soundly in a cave in the French Alps, but that didn’t stop Julia, because Julia has to do the cry, and this leads us at last to the question of WHY Julia has to do the cry.

Julia has to do the cry because Julia makes chick movies. Now, it might seem hypocritical for me – a person who watches The Bold & The Beautiful while she eats her lunch, a person who squeals with delight at the very thought of a fluffy kitten, a person who has certain passages of Little Women memorized, a person who still sleeps with stuffed animals – to use the term “chick movie” disdainfully. But let’s face it – how many men do you think saw Steel Magnolias? Well, actually, my first boyfriend did, because we went on this date and we went to the movie theater and everything else had sold out and we had to see “Steel Magnolias,” and I distinctly remember sitting there, rigid and mortified, on the second date of my entire life, next to this guy who had driven an hour from his COLLEGE to go on a date with ME, a HIGH SCHOOL STUDENT, and what if he thought I actually LIKED this movie, what would that say about me, never mind the fact that five minutes after he arrived at my house I had opened a closet door and whacked myself in the upper lip and therefore at that particular moment, ironically, I looked a lot like Julia Roberts but with bangs, and let’s not even talk about my senior-year hair-don’t. I like chick movies a lot sometimes, like right before I get my period, when even those cute little Saturn commercials make me feel a little misty, but as a rule they don’t have enough cursing, they don’t have enough funny dialogue (at least, not intentionally funny), and the chicks don’t usually have enough backbone, and thus the patented crying of Julia Roberts annoys me on this weird level because it makes me feel sort of manipulated and I feel like telling her character to put her foot in someone’s ass already and stop being a baby. I mean, crying over Richard Gere makes zero sense. The guy puts gerbils up his dupa for fun.

Jeez, speaking of things that make zero sense . . . um . . . this article . . . makes . . . zero . . . sense. I do love NyQuil so.

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