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    Aftershocks

    What a cold, cruel cad Frasier turns out to be: Even Camille Grammer deservesbetter

    Theodore Bale
    Joseph Campana
    Jan 14, 2011 | 10:31 am
    • Kelsey Grammer informed his wife their marriage was over in a phone call.
    • Still, he wanted her to play the dutiful awards show wife one more time.

    No one knows regret like a woman.

    This week The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills was a study in dashed plans and desperate hopes, proving the ladies of 90210 are just like their counterparts across America. Of course, not every housewife is ready to face her regrets.

    The episode opens at Lisa and Ken’s restaurant, Villa Blanca in Beverly Hills, where Kyle shows up for an informal “catch-up” luncheon with Lisa. Kyle is wearing a simple white blouse, both shoulders exposed tastefully, in perfect harmony with the white décor. Lisa, however, is entirely in black, foreshadowing the dour conversation to follow.

    Their rendezvous seems harmless enough until Taylor crashes it with a text. Her dullard husband Russell has just dropped her off and she’d like to stop by and say “Hi.” Not that she needs emotional support for her loveless marriage.

    Lisa’s body language shows how pissed-off she is, and then Taylor shows up in a strange white dress with the word “emotion” stitched in black cursive letters along the waist-line. Really, we didn’t make this up. If you can’t wear your heart on your sleeveless arms or botoxed faced, you might as well advertise it over your gut.

    Lisa avoids the black hole of regret altogether by looking every situation straight in the eye. It’s the first we’ve noticed her suspicions about Taylor. Before Taylor arrived, Lisa advised Kyle to be cautious, saying that Taylor was responsible for “the fiasco” in New York with Camille.

    But Kyle and Taylor seem to wallow together in their regrets, and as soon as Taylor sits down, the two hold hands in support. Taylor regrets marrying Russell, but she won’t just come out and admit it, even to her closest friends. Instead, she laughs hysterically and evasively.

    “Will you stop doing this, because I feel like I’m at a table with a pair of lesbians,” Lisa quips impatiently. She’s fed up with Taylor’s giggling, and tells her that the situation is serious, really serious.

    Why have regrets when you can have children instead? We’ve seen housewives in all the franchises force their unrealized dreams on their only-sometimes-willing daughters. But we had no idea that for Kyle and Kim Richards, regret stretches across generations.

    As Kyle prepares for the momentous occasion of her eldest daughter’s graduation from college, she reflects on her past. Her mother studied the dramatic arts in the hopes of seeing her name in lights. When she became a mother instead, it was her dream to make her daughters stars. By all measures, Mama Richards succeeded. One daughter gave birth to the most famous socialite in the known universe, Paris Hilton, and two became child stars. Beware of what you wish for.

    Kyle regrets never going to college, so she pins all her hopes on daughter Farrah. In fact, she seemed to spend most of the episode swaning about and stealing the show. While shopping for the perfect graduation gift at XIV Karats LTD, Kyle confesses, “It’s very hard for me to look for a gift for someone without looking for something for myself.”

    Kyle throws a lavish graduation party at Il Cielo, and her husband Mauricio’s charming mother Estrella shows up. She is a psychiatrist with a specialty in sex therapy. Of course Adrienne is quite taken with her, and begs free marriage counseling during the luncheon. She’s got regrets, of course, since it’s obvious that she married a vulgar clod who doesn’t appreciate her.

    And Paul (who’s earned the nickname Shrek in our household) doesn’t seem to regret anything. He thinks their problems are just a matter of bickering. Then he talks to Estrella about the possibility of a facelift.

    Kyle’s sister Kim has also drunk deep from the well of disappointment. She has always maintained that she happily and voluntarily ended her own acting career. But when Kim confesses that she might like to act again now that the kids are grown we could detect the same scent of regret in the air.

    If there’s a guy on the show who understands regret, it’s handsome Cedric, Lisa and Ken’s “permanent” houseguest and adopted son. On the way to a vineyard to taste some Pinot Noir to pep up the bland menu at Villa Blanca, Ken tells Cedric it’s high time that he moved out. Later, Lisa remarks that it’s difficult to spit out the wine after tasting it, though she lets several mouthfuls dribble into a decorative ceramic jug. Bravo’s cameras catch Cedric gulping his down, and it’s clear he’s worried.

    Later, as he serves Lisa coffee in her all-white bedroom, which looks very much like the Villa Blanca, he reveals his own true disgust with himself. It’s shocking. He tells Lisa that his mother believed that he was the unfortunate consequence of being raped. “Would you love someone who reminds you that?” he asks Lisa.

    Regret after regret piled up, and suddenly Camille Grammer was playing dutiful wife in the Big Apple for her soon-to-be ex-husband at the Tony awards.

    We won’t lie. We couldn’t wait for Camille to find out this week that Kelsey was tossing her out like last week’s trash. After a season of Camille’s bitchy and often insane behavior, we can’t pretend we didn’t sit on the edge of our microfiber cushions and eagerly wait for the axe to fall.

    We found ourselves doing an about-face right in the middle of our living room. The truth is we didn’t enjoy it at all. The one who deserved the axe was clear Kelsey Grammer, who has now earned the distinction of the slimiest househusband of all.

    Truly, we could have anticipated this after 11 seemingly endless seasons of Frasier, but let’s be clear about just how badly Kelsey behaved.

    After finally returning one of the many unanswered calls Camille worried about last week, he drops the bomb that their marriage is over. She begs, he refuses. But suddenly Kelsey’s begging when Camille refuses to attend the Tony Awards. He offers to fly her to New York.

    Camille explains that he promised they could “spend quality time together and see what happens …maybe spend a romantic weekend.” What a cad. And if he was going to dump her anyway, why didn’t he just wait until after the Tony Awards to spare her the pain and discomfort of playing husband and wife? La Cage aux Folles, indeed.

    Ever hopeful, Camille dons a gorgeous long-trained red gown despite the rain and Kelsey’s creepily cool demeanor. He’s put her up in a hotel for her final performance as Mrs. Frasier.

    And all for what — a failed Oscar nod? All we can do, Frasier, is paraphrase a favorite crazy housewife from the Garden State.

    Karma’s an even bigger bitch than you are.

    unspecified
    news/entertainment

    Movie Review

    Meta-comedy remake Anaconda coils itself into an unfunny mess

    Alex Bentley
    Dec 26, 2025 | 2:30 pm
    Jack Black and Paul Rudd in Anaconda
    Photo by Matt Grace
    Jack Black and Paul Rudd in Anaconda.

    In Hollywood’s never-ending quest to take advantage of existing intellectual property, seemingly no older movie is off limits, even if the original was not well-regarded. That’s certainly the case with 1997’s Anaconda, which is best known for being a lesser entry on the filmography of Ice Cube and Jennifer Lopez, as well as some horrendous accent work by Jon Voight.

    The idea behind the new meta-sequel Anaconda is arguably a good one. Four friends — Doug (Jack Black), Griff (Paul Rudd), Claire (Thandiwe Newton), and Kenny (Steve Zahn) — who made homemade movies when they were teenagers decide to remake Anaconda on a shoestring budget. Egged on by Griff, an actor who can’t catch a break, the four of them pull together enough money to fly down to Brazil, hire a boat, and film a script written by Doug.

    Naturally, almost nothing goes as planned in the Amazon, including losing their trained snake and running headlong into a criminal enterprise. Soon enough, everything else takes second place to the presence of a giant anaconda that is stalking them and anyone else who crosses its path.

    Written and directed by Tom Gormican, with help from co-writer Kevin Etten, the film is designed to be an outrageous comedy peppered with laugh-out-loud moments that cover up the fact that there’s really no story. That would be all well and good … if anything the film had to offer was truly funny. Only a few scenes elicit any honest laughter, and so instead the audience is fed half-baked jokes, a story with no focus, and actors who ham it up to get any kind of reaction.

    The biggest problem is that the meta-ness of the film goes too far. None of the core four characters possess any interesting traits, and their blandness is transferred over to the actors playing them. And so even as they face some harrowing situations or ones that could be funny, it’s difficult to care about anything they do since the filmmakers never make the basic effort of making the audience care about them.

    It’s weird to say in a movie called Anaconda, but it becomes much too focused on the snake in the second half of the film. If the goal is to be a straight-up comedy, then everything up to and including the snake attacks should be serving that objective. But most of the time the attacks are either random or moments when the characters are already scared, and so any humor that could be mined all but disappears.

    Black and Rudd are comedy all-stars who can typically be counted on to elevate even subpar material. That’s not the case here, as each only scores on a few occasions, with Black’s physicality being the funniest thing in the movie. Newton is not a good fit with this type of movie, and she isn’t done any favors by some seriously bad wigs. Zahn used to be the go-to guy for funny sidekicks, but he brings little to the table in this role.

    Any attempt at rebooting/remaking an old piece of IP should make a concerted effort to differentiate itself from the original, and in that way, the new Anaconda succeeds. Unfortunately, that’s its only success, as the filmmakers can never find the right balance to turn it into the bawdy comedy they seemed to want.

    ---

    Anaconda is now playing in theaters.

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