PROBING THE EMPTY SPACES
Madonna tongue, Britney head.
JUST IN CASE ANYONE THOUGHT THERE WAS SOMEONE SHE HADN’T KISSED
After the Madonna-Britney kiss on the MTV Music Video Awards made newspaper front pages, Christina Aguilera’s people let it be known that she also had kissed Madonna on the telecast.
BEAVIS AND BUTT-HEAD FIND WORK IN AIRBORNE ADVERTISING
Promoting the debut of multimillion-dollar anchor Diann Burns, Ch. 2 paid to have a banner flown over the Columbus Day parade downtown. It said: “Watch Diann Bums tonight.”
WAIT TILL YOU SEE HER SCHWARZENEGGER INTERVIEW
The art of the celebrity “get” — as well as lesbian chic — reached a new low when Barbara Walters coquettishly asked a cooperative Julianne Moore to kiss her during her March special.
WHAT DO YOU KIDS EXPECT FROM THAT SUBVERSIVE REBEL MUSIC?
Four Creed fans sued the band over its abbreviated Dec. 29 Allstate Arena concert in which lead singer Scott Stapp was so “intoxicated and/or medicated” that “he rolled around on the . . . stage in apparent pain or distress” and “was unable to sing the lyrics of a single Creed song.” Creed’s response: “We hope that you can take some solace in the fact that you definitely experienced the most unique of all Creed shows and may become part of the unusual world of rock ‘n’ roll history!” Siding with history, a Cook County judge dismissed the suit in September.
MORE BAD NEWS FOR CBS: KARL ROVE DOESN’T LOVE RAYMOND
Preemptive conservative protest of a mini-series, “The Reagans,” that was insufficiently worshipful of the former president led CBS to back down and shunt it over to Showtime. When it finally was telecast, critics scratched their heads that so much fuss was wasted on a typically tepid TV movie.
QUICK QUESTION
Has Catherine Zeta-Jones sued you yet?
ARE YOU STILL AROUND?
Ashton Kutcher
Trilogy means there’s only three, right?
“The Matrix Reloaded” and “The Matrix Revolutions” came out after the Wachowski brothers nixed the original titles: “Great Big Bag of Wind” and “Hoo, Boy, Another Great Big Bag of Wind.”
HEY, EW: RUSH HAS BEEN CALLED LOTS OF NAMES, TOO
After being flattened by the patriotism steamroller for lead singer Natalie Maines’ wartime comment that she was “embarrassed” to be from the same state as President Bush, the Dixie Chicks took the high road: They posed naked for an Entertainment Weekly cover, with the names they’d been called written on their flesh.
IT COULD HAVE BEEN WORSE: THEY COULD HAVE ASSIGNED EDDY CURRY TO GUARD THE MUSEUMS
When the U.S. military rolled into Baghdad, it assigned multitudes of soldiers to guard the petroleum fields and left museums and other cultural sites open for looters, who seized some 14,000 Mesopotamian treasures. Only about 4,000 have been recovered.
THEY FOUND IT ON A REMOTE ISLAND
To celebrate its 40th anniversary, “Gilligan’s Island — The Complete First Season” is finally coming out in a DVD package featuring 36 digitally remastered episodes — plus the long-lost pilot episode.
NO, REALLY, IT’S SAD WHEN MEN GET BEATEN UP
We try to ignore the revolving door marriages and divorces among Hollywood wackos, and we’d been keeping to ourselves our general sense of creeped-out-ness every time we saw plastic surgery victim David Gest alongside his sad-sack wife Liza Minnelli. But when he sued her post-split for $10 million for allegedly kicking his butt, all we could think was: No jury will convict you, girl.
CHICAGO’S GUINNESS BOOK ENTRY FOR WORLD’S LARGEST TIC-TAC-TOE BOARD
In a springtime late-night blitzkrieg, Mayor Daley’s bulldozers carved Meigs Field into something resembling public art.
THAT’S WHY THEY CALL IT BRASS
Henry Fogel’s retirement as Chicago Symphony Orchestra Association president occasioned the most self-aggrandizing march into the sunset since Gen. Douglas MacArthur, including a six-page program-booklet tribute titled “Henry Fogel: The Right Man at the Right Time.” Was the CSO board upset that Fogel left the orchestra with a $4 million deficit it had to dip into its cash reserves to eradicate?
BUT SHE REALLY WANTS TO JUST BE A NORMAL PERSON AGAIN
Fox gave Monica Lewinsky a job hosting a reality show, “Mr. Personality.” It tanked.
YOU LIKE ME! YOU LIKE ME! YOU HATE ME!
Nia Vardalos’ movie sensation “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” was turned into the CBS sitcom “My Big Fat Greek Life.” It ran for only six episodes.
SORRY, DEAD END
George Clooney and Steven Soderbergh threw their star power behind “K Street,” a smug, pseudo-realistic look at a Washington lobbying firm, starring James Carville and Mary Matalin as caricatures of themselves. Audiences found the HBO series, now canceled, just as captivating as a Democratic presidential debate.
IT WAS THE OXYCONTIN TALKING
Talk radio host Rush Limbaugh, serving as an NFL commentator on ESPN, alleged that slumping Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Donovan McNabb was being propped up by the “social concern” of a media “very desirous that a black quarterback can do well.” After the remark, the Eagles shot to 11-4 and McNabb to a Pro Bowl berth. Limbaugh lost his football gig and went into rehab for a pill addiction.
GOSH, THE NEW YORK TIMES SAYS IT’S ATTRACTIVE, SO THAT MUST MEAN IT’S NOT ACTUALLY A HIDEOUS COLONNADE-FLANKED SPACESHIP-CUM-TOILET BOWL MASQUERADING AS A VETERANS MEMORIAL BUT ACTUALLY SERVING AS A LAKEFRONT EYESORE.
We love the new Soldier Field.
OH, YOKO
While the astonishingly insecure Paul McCartney continued to hype his own Beatles role with the Paul-heavy “Let It Be . . . Naked” release, Yoko Ono embarked on some historical revisionism of her own: editing herself into her late husband’s “#9 Dream” film clip (on the DVD release “Lennon Legend: The Very Best of John Lennon”) so that she mouths the words that actually were sung by May Pang, Lennon’s lover when the song was recorded. You know, she should be in “A Hard Day’s Night” too!
I KNEW I SHOULD’VE CHANGED MY NAME TO C-ASSAULT!
Rapper C-Murder was convicted of — can you guess? — second-degree murder in September in the nightclub shooting death of a 16-year-old.
EVIDENCE THAT HOLLYWOOD STILL NEEDS SCREENWRITERS
“The Real Cancun,” a loathsome, reality-TV style movie that celebrated drunken exhibitionism. It bombed.
EVIDENCE THAT HOLLYWOOD STILL NEEDS BETTER SCREENWRITERS
Somebody actually wrote “Dumb and Dumberer:
When Harry Met Lloyd.” It bombed.
SOMEONE WE’D LIKE TO SEE A LOT LESS OF (AFTER WE’VE SEEN 42 MINUTES MORE OF HER)
Paris Hilton.
I’M SORRY, NOW PAY MY BILLS
Five years after getting caught fabricating stories for The New Republic and other magazines, Stephen Glass publicly repented for his sins in a series of interviews — done in promotion of his new novel “The Fabulist,” about a journalist named Stephen Glass caught fabricating stories.
MAKES YOU APPRECIATE STEPHEN GLASS
After disgracing The New York Times and causing the ouster of the top editors who supported him, fabricating, blame-everyone-else reporter Jayson Blair was rewarded with a lucrative book deal from New Millennium Audio & Press.
MAYBE THEY’LL GIVE THEMSELVES A DUBIOUS ACHIEVEMENT AWARD
Esquire Magazine revealed over the summer that it had hired Blair to review “Shattered Glass,” the movie about Glass’ misdeeds. Weeks later the magazine killed the piece because Esquire editor David Granger said the news of Blair’s involvement had spoiled the “joke.”
MAYBE HE WAS JUST TIRED OF BEING KNOWN FOR AL CAPONE’S VAULT
The U.S. military asked Fox News reporter Geraldo Rivera to leave Iraq after, in one of his first wartime reports, the swashbuckling correspondent drew a map in the sand detailing his outfit’s location and future plans.
UNFORTUNATELY, IT WASN’T A THANKSGIVING RELEASE
Come on, “Gigli” wasn’t that terrible, even if it did have J. Lo requesting a sex act from B. Af by saying, “It’s turkey time. Gobble, gobble.” OK, it was that terrible.
BESIDES, HOW COULD A SERIOUS MOVIE WITH “BROWN BUNNY” IN THE TITLE BE BAD?
Taking exception to Roger Ebert’s characterization of “The Brown Bunny” as the worst film ever to screen at the Cannes Film Festival — an opinion not unique to Ebert — filmmaker Vincent Gallo called the celebrity critic a “fat pig,” and placed a curse on his prostate. Ebert still had the best line:
“I had a colonoscopy once, and they let me watch it on TV. It was more entertaining than ‘The Brown Bunny.’ “
WAY TO CLASS UP THE JOINT
The storied Drake Hotel was the setting for the high-class introductory press conference for “The Puppetry of the Penis,” in which the show’s genital origami specialists offered staunch renditions of The Eiffel Tower and a hamburger while the various handlers presumably hoped no one wandered into the wrong room for tea. Another feather in the cap of Chicago live entertainment.
COMING SOON: “CATS” IN SENSURROUND
Arguably Andrew Lloyd Webber’s worst musical, which is saying something, “Starlight Express” rolled back into town last June in a national touring edition. Its big chase sequences weren’t staged; they were relayed via bizarrely ineffective three-dimensional film footage. Which was two more dimensions than the show itself.
FUNNY, THAT’S WHAT CRITICS DID AFTER SEEING THE SHOW
Forget “Kill Bill”: Calixto Bieito, the ever-perverse enfant terrible of European opera directors, turned his production of Verdi’s “Il Trovatore” at Germany’s Hanover Opera into an orgy of sex, violence, blood and death. He set the opera in a faceless industrial wasteland characterized by rape, sadism, necrophilia and slaughter, and one singer had to run, bloodied and hysterical, around her prison cell, smearing herself and the walls with excrement.
