Caught in the Act

And now on to the consideration of Anna Nicole Smith. This barn-shaped hussy has been loitering around in the public eye as an all-purpose breast joke, multimillionaire's wife, bleary booze tramp and Playboy icon for so long that it may be hard to remember she started out as the popular proto-Jayne Mansfield model for Guess? jeans. I've always liked Smith because I heard she takes baths in lime Jell-0 (turns out it's a lie, but you can picture that, can't you?). Anyway, Smith has been good enough to accompany her chest in cameos for The Hudsucker Proxy and N_aked Gun 33 1/3: The Final Insult_, and she starred in her own straight-to-tape sex thriller To the Limit, which adequately describes her dress size if not the entertainment value of the film itself. Smith has the acting ability of a yak, but the good sense to acknowledge the fact that if you're going to get breast implants that big, you might as well have a few laughs with them on the way to the custom bra shop. She measures a generous 7, because she's the closest we've come in a long time to Anita Ekberg.

Also getting clocked with provisional 7s, although their scores will probably climb toward the Crawfordian ideal once we actually see their movies, are Claudia Schiffer, Shalom Harlow and Vendela. Each has her first significant film emerging this year: Schiffer is in Abel Ferrara's The Blackout, Harlow's in In and Out (with Kevin Kline), and Vendela debuts in the relatively plum role of Mrs. Freeze, opposite The Arnold, in the highly overpopulated Batman and Robin. Our hopes aren't up for any of them: Schiffer, whose dumpling-heavy German accent has been a long-running impediment to her efforts at acting (and see her turn as an aerobics instructor in Richie Rich for illustration), is bland even by model standards. Harlow displayed little verve or personality in her House of Style stints, and Vendela has so far only provided some dead air in guest appearances on The Larry Sanders Show and Murphy Brown. I'm looking forward to their performances like I look forward to my next periodontal scaling.

Still, models can surprise you--I'd have thought Tyra Banks would turn out to be as animated and believable as a deer corpse strapped to a station wagon, but in John Singleton's riotous Higher Learning she is endearingly inept. She is unearthly to look at--she comes off like a Dr. Moreau-like morph between a panther and Nichelle Nichols--and yet, as the college track star/model conscience of the film, she reads the majority of her lines believably, and has a great I-just-smelled-a-dog-fart expression that she lays on costar Omar Epps whenever he succumbs to the racial tensions in the paint-by-numbers script. It's only when she has to use Ebonics casually ("You trippin'!") or when she has to seem particularly smart (her how-to-write-an-essay lesson for Epps is a scream) that things get icky. When Banks points to her head and says, "I fight with this!" you're thinking she must head-butt her roommates. She gets extra points in the end, however, for getting shot in the belly by a sniper and spitting up blood in slow motion. Let's give her a 6.

With only one sizable part in one film, Banks is being a lot choosier than compatriots like Kathy Ireland, who is apparently some kinda anytime-anywhere movie slut. Ireland's saving grace is that she has a rousing propensity toward self-parody, however wasted it may be on scores of lousy movies--_Mom and Dad Save the World, Backfire!, Side Out, Necessary Roughness_, etc. True, Ireland is so absurdly, ludicrously beautiful that when she attempts serious acting, all you want to do is throw a pie into her face. She can be funny, though, notably in National Lampoon's Loaded Weapon I, where she chirps lines like, "I'm just a gal like any other gal--I want a home, a family, an occasional spanking ..." with guileless finesse. In a stupid comedy, a model's performance can best be measured by the degree to which she's willing to seem unmodel-like, and Ireland scores big when she, after being shot, begs reluctant hero Emilio Estevez to kiss her while she's choking and splurting gruesomely. She's no comedienne, but she's no fence post, either. Crawford rating: 5.

In terms of screen presence, possessing the dewy bloom of an adolescent is an unquestionable advantage, and Milla Jovovich has the smudgy glow of a virgin flushed from seeing her first excited penis. Jovovich has spent most of her screen time blushing, whether at her own demure nude scenes in Return to the Blue Lagoon, or at Christian Slater's overacting in Kuffs, or at her part as a child bride in Chaplin. The best and worst you can say about Jovovich is summed up by her appearance amid the high-schooler ensemble of Dazed and Confused, in which she was believable. We'll see how she does in The Fifth Element, but for the moment she warrants a 4.

Landing an edge-of-your-seat 1 is supermodel deluxe Elle Macpherson, whose visage is dangerously bland, however ravishing, but whose larky personality and relaxed attitude bring her precipitously close to being a real actress. After the obligatory model cameo in Woody Allen's Alice, Macpherson appeared nude in virtually every scene in Sirens, a silly but sober Australian comedy about a stuffy clergyman (Hugh Grant, ironically enough) who gets all flustered staying at an artist's house where the live-in models prance and lounge about naked all day and night. Macpherson doesn't have much to do here except seem saucy and amused, and look great, but she handles her quaint dialogue like a pro and even gets laughs.

In If Lucy Fell, Macpherson plays nudnik Eric Schaeffer's urban love goddess, and insofar as she convincingly acted romantically interested in the irritating and plug-ugly Schaeffer, Macpherson gave the performance of the year. (Their first meeting, when she calms his nattering flow of inanities with a simple "Sssshhhh ...," is bewitching; unlike most models, Macpherson doesn't seem like she's planning to bite into your heart when she smiles.) Her sojourns into Hollywood have been spotty since: she was merely passable in the barely passable Jane Eyre, and served only to deflate Barbra Streisand's already flaccid beauty balloon in The Mirror Has Two Faces. Next she's Bruce Wayne's fiancee in Batman and Robin, the kind of high-visibility role that might just snag her a real movie career. More telling could be her upcoming costarring role opposite Alec Baldwin in Bookworm. If Demi Moore can swing it, why can't Elle? Frankly, I'd put my money on her. Then again, keep in mind that I believe in Bigfoot.

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