Is it pile on Kate Hudson time here at Box Office Weekly? Maybe.

According to Variety, Kate Hudson, the star of The Four Feathers and You, Me and Dupree is set to star in Big Eyes, the biopic of Margaret Keane. If there is some sort of contest for least necessary movie, we’re looking at a two-fer: a “Force-Fed Celebrity” playing the creator of some of the kitschiest art ever made.

I’ve mentioned this before in a commentary, but I’ll explain it again: A “force-fed celebrity” is typically a movie star who keeps getting lead roles, even though the public seems to be indifferent to them and resistant to their charms. Ms. Hudson premiered in Almost Famous, and she was perfect for the role: a sexy, fresh-faced, emotionally naïve character with a heavy investment in self-denial. Character and actress meshed perfectly. Pretty much all of her subsequent roles have had less success lining up with her screen presence. She’s too lightweight for RomComs, too delicate for thrillers, and she seems to lack essential comic timing (which is odd, because her mom is Goldie Hawn, her dad was a Hudson brother, her stepdad is Kurt Russell, and they all made me laugh). But probably due to her Hollywood pedigree she keeps getting shoved into lead roles.

I wonder what the end-game of this force-feeding is? I’m guessing the studios and her agents (and mom and dad and Kurt Russell) are willing to keep throwing her in and keep hoping she’ll click with the public one day. Since she hasn’t joined the ensemble cast of a TV drama that OTHER, inevitable end-game hasn’t arrived yet.

And as for Keane paintings: the term is it’s own punchline. Margaret Keane (American, b. 1927) specialized in paintings featuring depressed-looking children in depressing-looking environments staring out at the viewer with huge, huge damp eyes. Exceeding normal eye-head proportional indices was Keane’s ouvre, much as Warhol did with soup cans and Picasso painted people looking like halibuts. Large eye indexes elicit an immediate, primal emotional reaction: “Awww… cuuute!” Babies, puppies and kitties have, for developmental reasons, rather prominent eyes (eyes start out large, as the tissues they’re made of grow much slower than other parts of the body), and since we’re hard-wired to feel empathy for small, defenseless creatures, well… Big eyes are cute. One could build a pedagogy based on the contrast of this atavistic appeal versus the bleak tableaux of Keane’s high-mannerist works, but really it’s just junky, sentimental mass-market art, as artistically deep as the layer of acrylic they’re made of.

A celebrity who nobody really wants to watch is starring in a biopic about someone who created art most people find laughably superficial. Amazing– but not unprecedented.

The Notorious Bettie Page featured Gretchen Mol (who in the interest of full disclosure, was a pointless, Kate Hudson-like “it girl” years before the film came out) playing the title character, the improbably winsome 1950s bondage model. I suspect Mol got the lead gig because of her unflinching willingness to do nude scenes (and then some!) but she turned in a remarkably polished performance. More than I can say for the film overall– which, even with the titillation factor taken into account, was clichéd and painfully obvious (America in the 1950s was sexually repressed– gasp!). Comparatively, I’ll admit Bettie Page ain’t a Keane painting, but both films seem to be based on 21st century retro-kitsch re-evaluations, be it bad art or pornography.

Of course, Keane paintings are now considered campy classics and originals fetch very high prices. Bettie Page is now elevated to a sort of 50s pin-up goddess, as iconic as Marilyn Monroe. As for Kate Hudson (and to a lesser extent, Gretchen Mol): To paraphrase Van Halen, “only time will tell if [they] will stand the test of time.”

–Skot C.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 7th, 2008 at 9:08 am and is filed under Acting, General, Long Tail, Motion Pictures. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.