They Mean The Movie

I did a double take when I read this in "Huffington Post" about Julia Roberts:

Roberts, who was raised a Catholic but is a practicing Hindu, said ["Eat Pray Love"] offered her a chance to draw from her own experiences, but said she had been interested in Hinduism before she came across the book and that she did not convert because of the shooting.

Oceans Two

In "Duplicity," Julia Roberts and Clive Owen, red-hot lover-haters in 2005's "Closer," reunite as secret agents who quit their government jobs to run a $40 million con on rival cosmetic CEOs, marvelously played by Paul Giamatti and Tom Wilkinson. You'll have to see the movie to find out who really gets played. Written and directed by Tony Gilroy ("Michael Clayton"), it's heavily influenced by "Oceans Eleven Through Thirteen," determinedly cool and ironic, with a dizzying number of flashbacks. Keep the dates in your head or else. Even then, there's a glaring hole in the story. If you see "Duplicity," please tell me how Owen gets out of the jam in Duke's lab 15 minutes or so before the end.

The corporate espionage angle has such a broad satirical coloration (American businessmen? What boobs!) that the stars sometimes have trouble keeping hold of their love story. In one scene, Roberts shows up unexpectedly in Cleveland, where Owen has taken a job as security chief for a food company. When she tells him that it's time to come to New York to join the big con, he says he's about to make a key move in connection with his boss's new product: Double-crust frozen pineapple and ham pizza. "That's never been done before," Owen says as Roberts looks bored.

Us, too, almost. But their chemistry is strong enough that you''ll probably hang in there, despite the plot's intricacies. Me, I figured they'd get each other or the money, but not both. They'd first met six years before the action of the movie, when the U.S. assigned her to seduce Owen (a dashing British agent) and steal the secrets in his briefcase, which she accomplishes after drugging his champagne. Just before she scoots, she tucks a pillow under his head. They meet again in Rome two years later and hatch their plot. But he never completely trusts her, nor she, him. It's an occupational hazard, of course, though the idea is that even civilians keep secrets from one another. "Nobody trusts anybody," Owen says during their passionate reunion in Rome. "We just cop to it."

RN's Buried In Yorba Linda, FL In The Part

When actor Frank Langella visited Yorba Linda two years ago while preparing to portray RN on stage, he talked as much about his working-class, Garden State roots as his days of fashionable Nixon-hating on Long Island. As every interview he does comes over my e-transom (with journalists paraded through a suite at the Ritz Carlton in New York, just like with Julia Roberts at the Savoy in "Notting Hill"), it feels more and more as if whenever he's talking about Mr. Nixon, he's also talking about himself. And now this, from an interview by Stephen Schaefer:

“When you talk to really successful people they were the runts of the litter, the middle kid or the funniest one. I was one of those kids, a four-eyed kid who was very shy and backward. I had to fight. Whenever I wanted to go out with a girl she wanted to go out with the football captain, not a skinny kid who wanted to be an actor. The characters I often play are fighting.”