Aftershocks

It's a pretty girl fight on Real Housewives of Beverly Hills as Kelsey Grammerwalks around in heels

"The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills"
Photo by Adam Olszewski/Bravo
Camille Grammer is ready to square off against ...
Kyle Richards.

When heroes in action films get ready for combat, they arm with guns and ammo. When housewives get ready to fight, it’s manicures, shopping binges, and a trip to see Kelsey Grammer in La cage aux folles.

There’s a moment in every branch of The Real Housewives when the polite facades fall away and the show descends into bitch-slapping mayhem. Thank goodness. All those children’s parties last week got to be a bit of a snooze.

Most reality television is driven by the American taste for girl-on-girl violence: Why should The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills be any different? We could tell, weeks ago, that Camille Grammer and Kyle Richards would be about as compatible as Barack Obama and John Boehner. No one expects the two prettiest girls to get along.

Like most disasters, the episode begins calmly at the home of Lisa VanderPump, who rousts her live-in-gay Cedric incredibly early so they can head to the flower market. We love that VanderPump plumps up her own arrangements for Villa Blanca, and it’s refreshing to see that early in the morning Cedric’s too groggy to don his International Male wardrobe and settles for a sweater.

Peace is as fleeting as Cedric’s last trick, however. It doesn’t matter how many white camellias you buy at the market when there's an invite from Camille for all the girls to fly to New York to see her husband don women’s underwear. At least, that’s what Lisa’s looking forward to.

First the girls pair up for a little retail therapy. Kyle and Taylor Armstrong visit pink-wigged Nony (from the House of Petro Zillia) to find cute dresses for the fight with Camille. Kim Richards and Adrienne prefer Sydney Michelle. The cross-cut shopping scenes reveal that of the sisters, Kyle inherited the taste. Kim keeps honing in on leopard prints that were no doubt in fashion when she was still a child star.

But before the true depravity of Kim’s fashion sense can be revealed, poor Adrienne learns of her uncle’s sudden death. She rushes off while Kim hovers longingly around a rack of leopard prints. Sadly, this sidelines Adrienne for the entire episode, and we suspect she’s the only housewife who would have been tough enough to referee the fight.

Adrienne calls Camille to break the news and cancel out on NYC. Camille is hosting what looks like the saddest dinner party ever, mostly populated by staff members. She’s beside herself when she finds out. No doubt, she thinks, it’s the new moon. Really, though, she’s just worried about Adrienne’s bad luck.

Could bad luck — and sudden death — be catching?

A little wine with the bores and flunkies she surrounds herself with seems to calm her down. Our favorite party guests were the flirtatious Nick and his wife Tricia who jokes with Camille that she’s OK “loaning” Nick out to her.

Lisa’s way of preparing for the fight — we mean trip — is with a little treatment for Kyle’s fear of flying. Thank goodness hypnotherapist Tom Silver is available to bend their minds with his EEGs and witchy ways. Lisa fears the EEG is electro-shock treatment. Besides, it might ruin her hair. They examine a 3-D graph of Kyle’s brain waves, which is enough to induce dizziness and phobias. They don brown headbands (“like Pocahontas!” Kyle chirps) as Tom Silver begins the treatment.

He says, “Now I want you to fall into a really receptive state for hypnosis.” Is it really that simple? We can’t tell, but it seems like he just might be taking them back to witch mountain.

Camille heads to New York early to see the newly decorated apartment. At only 3,500 square feet, it’s a depressingly “confined space.” I suppose with all the staff, flunkies, and hangers-on, there’s hardly any room for Kelsey to practice walking in high heels. If we had a 3,500-square-foot townhouse in Manhattan, I’m sure we too would develop claustrophobia. Perhaps Tom Silver is available to treat Camille’s phobia.

As she prepares for the girls to arrive, Camille makes a little time to squeeze in a visit with her dear-old cancer-ridden Mom — while she gets her nails done, that is. Thank God she didn’t have to travel all the way to New Jersey to see her!

Camille recites her day planner, reminds her mom that Kelsey found her a doctor, and reports her own quest for cancer screening. She’s positive for certain possible future mutations. Thank the stars genetic testing now allows over-privileged Americans to find whole new ways of blaming their parents. Camille’s mother nods, smiles, and spouts a few clichés about positive energy.

It’s a heart-warming scene almost as touching and intimate as the interaction between Camille and her manicurist.

By the time the other girls arrive in New York, the last minutes of the episode are already ticking away. It’s another Bravo cliffhanger, but we were pleased to get at least a few juicy tidbits. The plot thickens as Kyle admits that sexy hubby and real-estate agent Maurizio has business with Camille and Kelsey. She’d hate this little fight to impact her husband’s business, but we can tell Kyle is thinking about other kinds of impact and she and Camille pretend to make up before a night out on the town.

It’s all air kisses and regret in Taylor’s suite at the Dream Hotel, but once they hit the restaurant, all bets are off. Camille believes Kyle has belittled her, and she’s not going to take it. Kim tells us in a video diary that Kyle doesn’t like to fight, but she certainly won’t back down. At last, the gladiators descend to an appropriately low back-and-forth as the other girls look on, horrified:

“You’re such a f@cking liar, Camille.”

“You’re just covering your ass.”

“That’s such bullshit, Camille.”

“I’m so above this.”

Watch out, Camille. Kyle is turning out to be the most beloved of the housewives. Besides, it looks like the Lynda Carter-esque beauty is about to go Wonder Woman on your ass.

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Movie Review

Meta-comedy remake Anaconda coils itself into an unfunny mess

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.

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Anaconda is now playing in theaters.

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