Ask any woman.
Copyright 2000
Here even a classics professor falls for Crowe while analyzing the movie's authenticity or not:
Interview: Professor Elaine Fantham, Princeton University, talks about the historic accuracy of the movie Gladiator, on Weekend Edition Saturday, 5/13/2000
SUSAN STAMBERG, host: The cinematic spectacle Gladiator opened this past weekend. It's a bloody tale of revenge in which a father, Emperor Marcus Aurelius, seeks to deny his son the throne and bestow it on another, in this case, Russell Crowe , who plays a hunky warrior named Maximus, but the son, Commodus, will not hear of it. And the whole mess gets hashed out on
the floor of the Coliseum. It is Rome, 180 AD.
(Soundbite of Gladiator)
"Maximus": In this life or the next, I will have my vengeance.
STAMBERG: Gladiator is bringing in the crowds all right, including Princeton University classics Professor Elaine Fantham. Professor Fantham joins us on the line from her office.Thanks so much for talking with us, Professor.
Professor ELAINE FANTHAM (Princeton University): It's good to be talking with you, Susan.
STAMBERG: Tell us...
Prof. FANTHAM: And I must say, you know, that if I had been Marcus Aurelius or, in fact, just myself, I would have preferred Russell Crowe.
STAMBERG: You bet. So you liked Crowe. But tell us what it is about these gladiators--now how come they fascinate us as much as they did the ancient Romans?
Prof. FANTHAM: Well, I'm inclined to think it was something to do with the fact that by the time the gladiatorial gangs became a really popular activity Romans from Rome no longer fought in the legions. They were not regarded as good fighting material. Of course, there were plenty of Roman citizens fighting in the wars, and that's why we have that perfectly splendid battle at the beginning of the movie.
STAMBERG: Mm.
Prof. FANTHAM: But the people in Rome, the ones who thronged--well, who would throng Coliseum once it was erected, around 80, didn't get to fight themselves, and they probably needed this to carry it through.
STAMBERG: Huh. Much like football today, eh?
Prof. FANTHAM: Yes.
STAMBERG: OK. So you were talking about the battle. What about it? How wellwas it portrayed in this film? How realistically?
Prof. FANTHAM: Well, it was an absolutely splendid battle from the point of view of the sort of horror and disorder and, of course, the way it laid waste of a perfectly respectable German forest. The one thing about the battle that was perhaps not quite, you know, authentic was that, besides all the tactics you might have used in the battle in those days, they had thrown in some of the perfectly splendid artillery siege engines which are
firing off arrows that are set alight with camphor, probably, or something like that. And it's a splendid sight and very theatrical; but I doubt they'd have used them in the battle.
STAMBERG: I wonder how you felt as a scholar being able to look at Rome reconstructed through all of those fancy computer devices to look as it did in its day before it fell into ruins.
Prof. FANTHAM: Yes. Well, you know, the sad thing is that the fancy computer devices produce a very flat effect.
STAMBERG: Hmm.
Prof. FANTHAM: I mean, it's not that it was inaccurate, you know. I don't want to be petty about that. As far as I know, the architecture was perfectly likely to be right. It just looked two-dimensional.
STAMBERG: Mm. What about the story that Gladiator tells? Is it
historically correct?
Prof. FANTHAM: It's historically possible. What is, perhaps, extraordinary about it, they've invented Maximus the hero. And I'm very grateful to them for doing so, because it gave me a chance to watch Russell Crowe; but they have invented him.
STAMBERG: Now what about Commodus? This is not a name that leaps to mind. You know, you think about Comodeous, maybe, or Comode, but what about the reign of Commodus?
Prof. FANTHAM: Well, the name is really totally false to his nature--if only he had been. It would be like calling somebody Felix, which means happy, or Pius. Commodus should mean gracious and obliging and pleasant.And as far as I can see, he was probably the nastiest emperor of the lot...
STAMBERG: Oh, dear.
Prof. FANTHAM: ...totally cruel, vicious, constantly drunk, indulging in every sexual perversion that the historian can think of; he exiled and then executed his own sister.
STAMBERG: Ah.
Prof. FANTHAM: It must be said, however, that his own sister was conspiring against him because she realized what a disaster he was.
STAMBERG: Gee. You know, this sounds as if it's a made-for-TV miniseries. I don't know how the networks and all have overlooked it for all these years.
Prof. FANTHAM: Yes. Certainly, Commodus' life has--if you want horror,you've got practically every kind of horropr.
STAMBERG: Mm.
Prof. FANTHAM: And you have some fun stuff. For instance, apparently, the concubine, who ultimately killed him, he used to ask her to dress up as an Amazon, to please him. And he even--when he changed the name of the months,he called December Amazoneous after her.
STAMBERG: You see, there's nothing new under the sun.
Prof. FANTHAM: Well, right. So he left nothing unchanged. He tried to change the name of Rome, which must have pained everybody.
STAMBERG: Well, what did he want to call Rome?
Prof. FANTHAM: Carmodiana.
STAMBERG: Oh, sure.
Prof. FANTHAM: Yeah, after me.
STAMBERG: What about the film's depiction of sort of ordinary daily life in Rome in that period, how well does it do that?
Prof. FANTHAM: Well, we didn't see an awful lot of ordinary daily life in Rome. What we did see was some very good street scenes, some extremely good scenes in the gladiatorial school--whether at Rome or in Africa. One of the amazing things about the Roman Empire that the film could have made a bit more fuss about is that it was all these different geographies and climates
and cultures. In fact, all the great Roman writers, after the age of Virgil, were Romans from Africa and Romans from Spain.
STAMBERG: Huh. So what is your rating of this film Gladiator Professor, shields up or down?
Prof. FANTHAM: Definitely thumbs up, I think. And, you know, there's a nice pun implicit in the title. I don't know if it was intended by the author. We think of it as describing Russell Crowe, who, in fact, has to achieve his vengeance as a gladiator, but when Commodus was killed, everybody rejoiced. And we've got preserved a rather rabid denunciation of him by the
senate. It says,`'Let Commodus, the gladiator, the parasite, the enemy of his fatherland, let him be taken to the Channel House. Let him be cast in the Tiber.' He is also the gladiator.
STAMBERG: Ah. Terrific.
Prof. FANTHAM: Yeah.
STAMBERG: Professor Elaine Fantham teaches classes at Princeton University. Could I sign up for your class next semester, please?
Prof. FANTHAM: I wish you could, but I'm going to be in England.
STAMBERG: Oh.
Prof. FANTHAM: It was a pleasure to talk to you.
STAMBERG: Thanks.
Prof. FANTHAM: Goodbye.
Copyright 2000 National Public Radio, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
And even in the New York Times!
LIBERTIES: Freud Was Way Wrong By Maureen Dowd, June 11, 2000
Picking up where we left off . . . (The previous column dealt with last week's Sex and the City which posited that women just want to be rescued.)
In those far away, long ago days of feminism, there was talk about equal pay for equal work.
Now there's talk about "girl money."
A friend of mine, in her early 30's, says she hears the term bandied about the New York dating scene.
"What I find most disturbing about the 1950's-ification and retrogression of women's lives is that it has seeped into corporate and social culture, where it can do real damage," she says. "Otherwise intelligent men, who know women still earn less than men as a rule, say things like: 'I'll get the check. You only have girl money.' "
My friend also notes that at three wedding showers she went to this year, the presents were always very 50's -- soup ladles and aprons were unwrapped with see-through nighties and push-up brassieres.
So, are we evolving backward?
In The New York Observer this week, Nina Burleigh writes about how depressing it is to see former "national nymphet" Jane Fonda, former Yale Law School superstar Hillary Rodham and former Miami TV news anchor Donna Hanover all scrambling to recreate careers and patch up dignity, after their men took up "with younger or more pliant females."
"Feminism wasn't supposed to mean brokenhearted women in middle age," Ms. Burleigh says. Of Jane, Hillary and Donna, she asks: "Couldn't they conduct themselves with a little more spite and spirit?"
It's true that we've made some evolutionary miscalculations.
We started out, in the 70's, wanting to ape men. Dress like them, in navy blue suits and floppy ties and sensible shoes. Joust for that big office and those big stressful jobs.
But once we got far enough along to see that we could achieve male status and power, we recoiled at the idea of doing it on male terms.
Why be rats on a treadmill, butting heads constantly, drinking too much, having heart attacks and falling into affairs with office playthings?
Women are not not going backward. We're moving ahead, at home and at work -- in any combination of the two. We're just moving in less predictable and programmatic ways. We can be rescued or choose not to be.
"We can't replicate men -- and who would want to?" says Natalie Angier, who writes about biology for The Times and in her book, Woman: An Intimate Geography.
Women, she says, are in a new phase.
"Female primates have two goals," she explains. "They want control over their reproduction and access to resources." Unfortunately, male primates have the same two goals; they want control over female reproduction too.
We have a conflict of gender interest, so it turns out to be counterproductive for women to imitate men.
In the old days, right up through Hillary Rodham, the best route to status and children was through a powerful husband. "But now, because men often don't stick around, the husband route no longer looks as good to women," Ms. Angier says.
Freud believed that men had something that women wanted. But it wasn't what he thought.
Women don't want to be men -- except in the way men often grow more attractive and powerful as they age and are so easily able to start fresh, in their 50's and 60's and even older, with younger women.
Ms. Angier suggests that someday women in their 20's will be freed from a biological deadline by routinely freezing eggs for use at any time.
Women's liberation now means being liberated from stereotypes about what women want. Consider this: Hollywood, which is always rediscovering the obvious, is shocked that female moviegoers prefer Russell Crowe in Gladiator and Martin Lawrence in Big Momma's House to chick flicks like the Natalie Portman-Ashley Judd movie Where the Heart Is or Kim Basinger's I Dreamed of Africa.
Girls have always gone for the cute guys slaying the dragon, or in the case of Gladiator,the tiger. And they always will.
Tom Sherak of 20th Century Fox told USA Today that women must have liked Big Momma because the Fox marketing execs brilliantly created ads to appeal to them. While Martin Lawrence in a dress was holding a gun in the outdoor ads, the newspaper ads tried to lure women by switching to Mr. Lawrence in a dress holding a rolling pin.
It's pathetic that they think that is why women went to see the movie.
Besides, women like guns.
Just ask Dr. Freud.
Copyright New York Times Company 2000
Dowd's not making this stupidity up: here's an excerpt from Catherine Applefield Olson's 4/22/2000 "Soundtracks and Films Score News" column in Billboard, the trade magazine of the recording industry:
"[Lisa Altman, senior VP of crossover music for Universal Classics] notes that Gladiator is poised to attract an audience similar to what Braveheart did--males ages 24-40--although Gladiator undoubtedly will bring in the younger set as well. [ Did no one tell her about the R rating?] DreamWorks began addressing that target audience in January with a commercial that aired during the Super Bowl and has subsequently showed during selected televised auto racing, NHL, and NBA events. . . The film studio may be putting its money on the most obvious audience, but [film score composer Hans] Zimmer had a different aesthetic in mind when he composed the music. 'You hear Gladiator, and it's such a boys' movie,' he says. 'My ambition was, I didn't want a single woman to leave the theater. I wanted to get everyone involved in the emotional aspect. Even the battle sequences are very much a part of the emotional texture of the movie.'"
Ah, so the creative people knew what they were doing even if the marketing executives didn't. And in case you thought only crones or Americans react to Crowe like this, here's the view of Brits:
Keegan must look to his laurels by Rachel Cooke
Daily Telegraph (London), June 14, 2000
It is now more than a month since Gladiator opened at the cinema, yet the spell it has cast on almost every woman of my
acquaintance shows no sign of being broken just yet. Only yesterday, a colleague arrived at work with a glow about her that I have come to recognise - a kind of joyous incandescence born of blood and breastplates, tyrants and togas.
"I finally saw Gladiator at the weekend," she said, before she had even taken off her coat. "You're right. It's unbelievable. I want to see it again as soon as possible. Russell Crowe is just. . . well, you know." She sounded like the swooning heroine of a Thirties romantic novel, rendered blushing and speechless by some implacable hunk with strong arms and brooding eyes.
Not since the heyday of Douglas Fairbanks Jnr have so many women been so in love with one so unattainable - or, in the case of
Crowe, so unlikely. For the Australian actor is an unusual sex symbol. His face is soggy and yellowish and, in Gladiator, he wears a horrible beard throughout.
Then, of course, there are the costumes. Although, thankfully, Crowe's Maximus never scampers about in a tiny loincloth the way
Kirk Douglas did in Spartacus, he must still stride hither and thither in a skirt and sandals - and we all know what that did for David Beckham's image.
And yet, the audience does not titter. Instead, as Crowe gets on with the ruthless business of dispatching his enemies, you find
your heart is beating as fast as the drum machine on Norman Cook's latest remix.
Finally, a director has given us a hero who has no time for tears or for frolicking with his number one fan (in this case, Lucilla, the new emperor's duplicitous sister), for bonding with his fellow men, or for getting in touch with his feelings. Here, at last, is a man who just gets on with the job he has been asked to do. This is such a relief that you leave the cinema feeling as though you must track down the actor's telephone number at once, and beg him to sort out the owner of the car alarm that has left you and your neighbours exhausted through lack of sleep and just teetering on the brink of sanity.
Once you have seen Gladiator, images of Maximus's sallow, determined face arrive in your mind, unbidden, on the most unlikely of occasions. On Monday evening, for instance, as England lost to Portugal, I longed for Kevin Keegan to stop wearing his emotions on his tracksuit sleeve and adopt, instead, a poker face worthy of an angry Roman general. Why hadn't he explained to Shearer and Co that, metaphorically speaking, you should give up fighting only when your foot is firmly on your opponent's chest for all the world to see?
Keegan could certainly do with some tutoring in the ways of the gladiator. In the film, Crowe sits apart from the other fighting
men, silently contemplating the gruesome tasks ahead, and they only come near him with some trepidation. Keegan, on the other
hand, thinks leadership is all about being approachable.
One player, Phil Neville, has said that he likes the England manager's matey attitude, and the fact that he feels able to eat his lunch with him. However, as he also admitted, he would be unlikely to approach his other, much more successful boss, Sir Alex Ferguson, with a cheery smile and a tray of shepherd's pie.
And then there is Tony Blair. As I read the latest deliciously bitchy profile of the Prime Minister in Vanity Fair, I thought of
Maximus again. Sometimes, those who accuse Blair of arrogance seem to be barking up the wrong tree. He needs more certainty
in his soul, not less. He is too chummy, too desperate to be liked, to attack NHS waiting lists - or anything else - with any real gusto.
It's all very well complaining that you don't enjoy wearing a suit. But open-necked shirts, deck shoes and steaming mugs of tea are not suitable accoutrements for battle, especially if they are backed up only by so much hot air. Mr Blair needs to stop being one of the boys, and to try to grab back a little mystique. He also needs to get out there, in the dusty ring. We want chariots, not people carriers. We want swords, not sound bites.
Glad to be a gladiator By Barbara Ellen
The Observer (London), May 21, 2000
I had the best time at a gay porn movie the other day, or at least what I took to be a gay porn movie. Before people start
writing in, ranting about impressionable young minds, maybe I should explain that I'm referring to Gladiator, the new Roman
blockbuster, directed by Ridley Scott and starring Russell Crowe as Maximus.
Considering men are supposed to think about sex every few seconds, you can't help but wonder just whom they're supposed to be ogling in this overwhelmingly male epic. For those who've yet to see it, there's one strong female character, Lucilla, played by Connie Nielsen, but it's Crowe's Maximus who gets to wear the short skirts. Despite, or maybe because of, this garb, Maximus emerges as cinema's most potent symbol of male physicality and integrity since Marlon Brando's T-shirt-splitting turn in Streetcar.
All of which testosterone conversely helps to make Gladiator one of the gayest movies of recent times. And isn't that always the
way? Like Top Gun with togas, Gladiator has that special brand of homoeroticism that's deemed good enough for straight guys.
It's the very all-hetero, gender extremism evident in Gladiator that seems to be the gay clincher. Indeed, ultra-males, by which I mean straight men other straight men are actively encouraged to 'admire', seem to be making a comeback generally. It says something that when I went to see Gladiator, there were so many lone males in the audience, the cinema had the ambience of a very dark football match. Like certain sports, action movies seem to give men the excuse to stare at other men (fit, sweaty, under-dressed men) for hours on end without their sexuality being called into question. With so few female fans of the action-movie genre, it has to be seen as peculiar that the likes of Arnie, Jean-Claude and Sly spend the bulk of their careers in loincloths or wisps of combat gear.
Watching Gladiator, you wonder what modern men are so starved of, what spiritual and psychic emaciation is going on, that this
kind of beautifully paced, almost balletic machismo and bloodlust still manage to push all the right buttons.
That other Roman epic, Caligula, made the mistake of playing the sex card, but the makers of Gladiator were clever enough to
realise that men find violence far sexier. There is also the sense that the violence in Gladiator is happening in the name of a principle, and guys are suckers for that, too. Men keep raving about the 'technical brilliance' of the fight sequences, but I suspect what they really love is the primitive allure of righteous violence.
It can't be seen as a coincidence that, early on, Crowe is given a slain wife to establish his Death Wish BC credentials. Then it's 'guy stuff' all the way. Never mind the dead missus, it soon becomes clear that the real loves of Maximus's life are honour, valour, brotherhood, and hitting people in the face with an axe. The message rings out loud and clear: then as now, chicks are just holding guys back from their natural destiny. All men would live their lives in a blizzard of testosterone if they could.
Delusional codswallop, of course. Indeed, if you believe that 'Just Gay Enough' stuff currently doing the round of magazines, the only blizzard modern man is likely to encounter is when he drops his tubs of exfoliating scrub on the bathroom floor. Then again, do we believe the 'Just Gay Enough' stuff? Women are supposed to be finding themselves attracted to guys with girly faces like Leonardo DiCaprio, but I have yet to meet a female over 12 who doesn't scream with laughter at the thought of DiCaprio naked. However, even if no one buys into the 'Just Gay Enough' principle, is the overkill of Gladiator really a healthy example to set for the youth of today?
After all, it's not just men who find Crowe attractive. As Maximus, Crowe has a unisex appeal, exuding the same quality, a
combination of grizzled stillness and certainty, that made Steve McQueen the most attractive male chauvinist pig in Hollywood
history. So much so that when even the most right-thinking feminist females heard that he'd kept his wife, Ali McGraw,
downtrodden, barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen for years, the only possible response was: 'Jammy cow.'
But that's fantasy, just as Gladiator (based on real events) is pure unadulterated male fantasy. Gladiator is such a guys' movie,
most women are probably feeling like I did - that they were spying on the male population. In a movie filled with images of
speared tigers, squealing livestock and upturned horses, one half-expects to see the final disclaimer: 'No gender stereotypes were harmed in the making of this movie.' For, in this ultra-male role, Crowe shows that, in movies as in life, androgyny is so over, and absolutism is back in. The essential triumph and tragedy of Gladiator is that it holds a flashlight to the dark, hairy, knuckle-dragging corners of the male psyche which neither time nor evolution seem able to exfoliate away.
At last, something burly for us girlies By Zoe Williams
The Evening Standard (London), June 2, 2000
It's good to be reminded every now and then that there is such a thing as All Man. Yes, that's All Man, not two parts man and
one part bloke, chap or fellow. You won't find him in a Bond film - in fact, you won't usually find him in a film at all. His job is not jokes or wearing eyeliner. His job is not to have tidy hair or persuasive dialogue. He is not there to outwit, to dupe, to seduce, to escape, to chuckle, to charm, to grin, to frolic or to have a shower. He is there to win, not with cunning nor well-placed pals - with nothing on his side but the love of God and the muscles of the very devil.
Yes, obviously I'm talking about Gladiator. Of course I'm talking about Russell Crowe. And I'm talking from the standpoint of one who had precisely no interest in seeing an epic film about a curiously uninteresting period of Roman history where all they did was wrangle, kill one another and belch. I hate long films, I don't think much of random nastiness to tigers and I used to weep into my French homework at the sight of Elizabeth Taylor ruining my Sunday afternoons with her silly headgear and improbable breasts. I went to see it, against all odds and a fortnight too late, because every woman I've ever met is in love with this man. And they're right to be. No red-blooded anything could possibly not be.
Here was a film which would only work with a new kind of hero, and here was a man who could do it. Not with a human face
and a patch behind his ears which the right kind of girl could scratch to hear him purr, but with the kind of manliness that whole nations wouldn't come close to if they pooled their testosterone and did a dance of rage.
How exactly does he do it? It doesn't hurt to open a film with 5,000 burly men cheering you and doing what you say, even if that includes marching into a line of giants in bearskins. His strong words, softly spoken, didn't do him any harm either (Russell, you couldn't be righter. What we do in life does echo in eternity). Who could deny his low growl of majesty? Who could watch him
stride barearmed through the snow, with a small (but probably very sore) cut, unheeded, across his nose, and fail to want him? And here's the coup de theatre - in this film, I want doesn't get. Not even the chick with the fundamentally good heart, the quivering vulnerability and the pretty neck can have him this time.
Here's definitive proof that it's not just women whose appeal rockets with a bit of unswerving unavailability. More than that,
though, here's a lovely, coppery death knell for the days of the baby-faced hero.
In tandem with the rise of Leonardo DiCaprio came the obligatory, half-scientific research into why we like him. Women respond to men with feminine faces because they trust them to stick around, the theory goes. The trouble with it is, what on earth would you want with a film star who looks as though he might stick around? Celluloid, like any fantasy medium, is about the quick fix, not the long term. Early-teen audiences may not have grasped this yet, and may still hold out for the girlish superhero. But we've got more pocket money than them, and the return of the All Man is, commercially, culturally, spiritually, long overdue.
This isn't to say that all current heroes are baby-faced. Some of them are real men - Christian Slater, Bruce Willis, John Malkovich (until recently, when he turned, quite charmingly, into all joke). But a real man isn't the same. Where a real man needs to want women very badly indeed, an All Man needs to want just the one. Forever and a day, and then some more when he hits
his echoey but otherwise pleasant eternity. He can be happily married, then he can be desolately bereaved, but he can't change his mind halfway through and decide that another model will do for the time being.
A real man needs to think about things, maybe be a bit philosophical on the side, but an All Man can't think at all - he's on the side of the thinkers, but his actions come from within, from the hunk of burning manliness which bypasses reason and reaches the same point twice as fast. A real man needs muscles, but an All Man needs to have acquired them in fields and on battlefields, in pursuit of the simple pleasures of a simple soul, without sophistry or showmanship or playfulness. A real man knows how to saddle up a horse, but an All Man's horse puts its own saddle on, against all the odds of only having hooves, just for the love of him. A real man needs to understand the word on the streets, but an All Man needs to be able to see into another chap's soul just by looking at the sweat on his brow. A real man can ultimately triumph; an All Man can't. He's fighting against the evil, the sorrow and the injustice of the human condition.
He has to win, but he has to die.
All real men have had All Man moments; no, not just Kevin Cost-ner lugging Whitney about in The Bodyguard. Anyone with a bit of genuine-article stubble can pull it off for short periods. Only Russell Crowe, though, says it all about the new heroism. The wheel's come full circle, and nobody wants a wordsmith any more, or a sensitive type, or a wily rogue. We all want a fireman
rescuing a kitten, except, actually guys, can we get a bit primeval and have him fighting off some vicious, kitten-hating barbarians first? No, scratch that, can we have a whole school stuck up a tree, which is, like, on fire?
Generation Angst
The Express (London), 5/15/2000
When my girlfriends suggested that we should go to the cinema last Saturday night I thought it was a good idea. When they suggested that we should see Gladiator I thought it wasn't such a good idea.
The main reason was that, being a girl, I don't much enjoy spending two and a half hours watching a load of blokes beat each other up in a testosterone-fuelled frenzy.
They reasoned with me, however, that Joaquin Phoenix was in it and that he would more than make up for all the unnecessary violence.
So I agreed.
And actually, I loved Gladiator. We all loved Gladiator. Every woman in that darn cinema loved Gladiator.
And not because of the wonderfully pretty Phoenix but because of the wonderfully less pretty Russell Crowe . Russell, a big, bulky bear of a man, a man with five o'clock shadow and dark eyes and muscles that would make TV Gladiators Wolf and Hunter jealous.
Russell, a man who is so strong he can pick off 27 barbarians from Germania without breaking into a sweat. Oh Russell, you are the man for me. And it was then that I realised it was official: I am getting old. I no longer fancy pretty boys. Instead, I fancy ugly men. Men who look like men and not like girls.
Russell has replaced my crushes on American beauties like Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt. The not very aesthetically pleasing Arsenal defender Tony Adams has kicked wonder boy Michael Owen right off my pitch.
It is no longer Dawson from Dawson's Creek that does it for me - it is Pacey, who may not be an Adonis but nevertheless oozes sex appeal.
And why have Ritchie from Five when you can have J, who is a huge hunk of a man? The crushes I used to have were on men who didn't look threatening -they looked kind and nice and almost weak.
Now, however, I like dangerous men, men who look a bit more charismatic, men who are a bit of a challenge (not, of course, that managing to snare Leo wouldn't have been a challenge, but you see what I mean).
But maybe it's not just to do with age; maybe it's to do with the fact that in the late Nineties men took the girl power thing just a little bit too far and decided to turn into girls themselves.
They missed the point, and the only men we were left to fancy were pretty boys. Now, however, the likes of Russell Crowe have emerged to redress the balance and give us back the macho men that we so badly missed.The tragedy is, though, that while women grow up and out of pretty boys, men - whatever their age - never grow out of pretty girls.
Copyright (C) 2000 The Express; Source: World Reporter (TM)
And on into the next generation
Young hearts aflutter on the wings of Crowe
by Susan Reimer, The Baltimore Sun, July 1, 2001
I am not sure whether it is the residual hormones in meat or the sexual desensitization of society, but my 15-year-old daughter and her 15-year-old friends think Russell Crowe is, like, seriously hot.
Gladiator has made it to HBO, where no one checks IDs, and it has been playing in my family room like it is on a video loop.
Jessie and her friends are not put off by the adult content, adult language and graphic violence from which the R rating seeks to protect their tender souls. They consider it the boring interruption of a wonderful love story. They sigh with annoyance during the bloody killing.
These friends recently celebrated the birthday of one of them, and Russell Crowe was the character-theme, the way Barbie or Winnie the Pooh used to be. Instead of a big purple dinosaur, it was a blood- and mud-streaked warrior in a tunic that showed to great advantage his thighs and biceps.
The gifts included a copy of the Gladiator video, a Russell Crowe poster and the soundtrack to the movie. When the girls departed, I found a Russell Crowe screen saver had been installed on the computer.
The passion of these young girls for the Australian bad boy is as sudden and turbulent as a summer storm, but with no signs of abating.
Someone acquired a copy of L.A. Confidential, which also has adult content, adult language and graphic violence and also features Russell Crowe. One of the girls previewed it to the other by saying: "You have to get used to his hair, because it is really short."
"Is his shirt off?" the other asked in reply, and when she was informed that yes, his shirt was off in at least one scene, that appeared to compensate for the fact that his hair was short in this movie, and he had no beard and no sexy accent.
In addition, these friends waited outside Blockbuster for the release of Proof of Life, and they were as eager as they would have been six months ago if tickets to an 'N Sync concert were about to go on sale. They did everything but camp overnight on the sidewalk.
I did not have the heart to tell them that the movie disappointed critics because it paled in comparison to the tabloid romance between the stars.
But I did try to make one important point with these young girls: "Listen to me! He dumped Meg Ryan because she had too much emotional baggage. Is that what we want in a boyfriend?"
No one was listening.
(I have said nothing about Crowe's chubby turn in The Insider. Children should be allowed to hold onto their fantasies for as long as they can.)
One night, a celebrity-driven cable channel was featuring a Russell Crowe retrospective - I imagine it was brief - and there was so much squealing in my house that you'd think the Beatles had deplaned in the front yard. And the delirium renewed itself when People magazine arrived with Crowe on the cover as one of its most eligible bachelors.
I am trying my best not to overreact to this movie star crush. After all, these girls are closer to womanhood than not, despite the dated pictures of them that I carry around in my head. And I do not need to be reminded by anyone of how I felt about Richard Chamberlain when he played Dr. Kildare on television.
But Russell Crowe is more of a gritty, sexual beast in Gladiator than the good doctor ever was in his white coat.
And that spooks me.
There is a scene in the promotions for Sex and the City where Sarah Jessica Parker emits that signature gal-pal squeal after she and her friend respond simultaneously to another woman's question: "Who are you fantasizing about these days?"
Their answer is "Russell Crowe."
My daughter and her friends think this trailer is a hilarious coincidence - what we adults would call "art imitating life."
I didn't like it. The trailer made me squirm. Probably because "Russell Crowe" would have been my answer, too.
Copyright © 2001, The Baltimore Sun
And a masculine insight noting the link between Crowe's performance and his Australian-ness, from fellow Ozzie Thespian Simon Baker (in The Age, "Fallin on his feet," May 22 2003, by Debi Enker):
"I love the stoic nature. Growing up in Australia, I saw so many of those people. You watch a football game in Australia and someone scores a try under the post and you don't see too much self-congratulatory behaviour. It's sort of, well, OK, put your head down, try not to smile.
"You're playing pool and you sink the black after sinking seven balls, and the other guy hasn't sunk a ball yet, and you put the black down with a tremendous shot, you don't go 'Yeah!' and Tom Cruise-ify it. That, to me, is interesting. I think Russell Crowe played a South Sydney footballer in Gladiator. You know that shot where he runs on to the field? He was a bloody footballer going out for the Grand Final. For me, it was fantastic. I loved to see that. It's so Australian. I mean, c'mon, high-fives and all that crap? It's not our way."
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Copyright © 2007
These Web pages obviously aren't joining the campaign to boycott Yahoo, but shame, shame, shame:
“Suppose that Anne Frank had maintained an e-mail account while in hiding in 1944, and that the Nazis had asked Yahoo for cooperation in tracking her down. It seems, based on Yahoo's behavior in China, that it might have complied. . . .( Representative Chris Smith . . . drew the Anne Frank analogy.) . . . Chinese court documents . . . say that Yahoo handed over information that was used to help convict [dissidents]. We have no idea how many more dissidents are also in prison because of Yahoo. . .Yahoo sold its soul and is a national disgrace.”
From China's Cyberdissidents and the Yahoos at Yahoo by Nicholas D. Kristof, The New York Times, February 19, 2006