by Kenneth Eissberg 04.10.07
I am using the podium of the Internet's Fourth Most Popular Website Made Famous By A Farting Bear to exclaim what I have known all along, but what now has also been proven by science- I am not the father of Anna Nicole Smith's baby Framadoodle or Deebledork or whatever the urchin's name is. I love a good rumor as much as the next guy, but I must profess that I do have standards and I am comfortable with the possibility that I may be the only practicing lawyer that never railed that human parade float.
Many have claimed that Smith's addlepated demeanor was the result of the Olympic intake of prescription medications she casually indulged in, which ultimately cost her her life. That may be so, but I think the truth was we weren't dealing with a chess wizard. Witness her 1997 film Skyscraper. In it, Smith plays a helicopter pilot who ferries commuters around Los Angeles rooftops. On one of her trips, she becomes embroiled in a terrorist hostage situation.
Okay- did you get that? Anna Nicole Smith flies a helicopter. I wouldn't trust Anna Nicole Smith with a plastic puddlejumper. There are numerous close-ups of her hand working the throttle, and for the love of god, her freaking fingernails are like three inches long. How does that work, I ask you? It's like getting rung up at Wal-Mart. I don't understand how these witches can operate a goddamned register.
I think if I got into a helicopter and saw that Anna Nicole Smith was the pilot I would run in terror. She would fly into buildings thinking they were giant cakes. In Skyscraper, Smith manages to make running from gun-wielding terrorists look like a bothersome annoyance. She wears a bulky black jacket for most of the movie and has her hair pulled back and it just looks silly. The most action you see out of Smith is in the sex scenes.
And oh, the sex scenes. I'd say Skyscraper roughly qualifies as a soft-core porno, more or less in the neighborhood of Color of Night and Original Sin. Neophytes to the world of surgical breast augmentation will no doubt be distracted by the rings of scar tissue and other equally unappealing telltale signs of surgery. Smith is nearly raped a couple times, which means that for the second half of the movie her giant fake tits flop around unbound and confused. I couldn't even tell you who the guy she fucked in the movie was, or what his relationship was with Smith. Quality storytelling always leaves a lasting impression!
You'll also notice if you happen to suffer through Skyscraper that a kid more or less pops up out of nowhere, riding a Big Wheel in the building for some reason. Apparently his mom (in the movie) is your typical oblivious parent type. Mom eats a bunch of bullets, and the kid, oddly unfazed, ends up in the baby-craving arms of Smith. (Seriously- 75% of her lines are "I wanna baby", bleated in that wonderfully grating Wal-Mart cashier drawl. Am I bashing on Wal-Mart too much? Eh, tough.) The kid gets a reasonable amount of spotlight time for the third act, which confused me because for all intents and purposes the kid sucked moreso than even the other aspects of this hellish movie.
Turns out the kid was played by Smith's biological kid Daniel, the one who also made news recently when he croaked. So there you go, if you were some sort of mythical thing that fed on failure and human anguish, you could pop in Skyscraper and it'd be like a steak buffet. There's a plethora of delights to be sampled, from the earnest expressions of the punch-clock actors just there to collect a paycheck, to the impossible stupidity of Ms. Marshall herself as she mumbles her way through the most basic lines. Even the buzz-phrase "Die Hard with Boobs" doesn't fit when the boobs in question are fake and on the torso of a person who comes across as borderline retarded. Also Die Hard was good and this isn't.
In any case, all of this is moot, as America prepares to fill the gaping pair of voids left by Anna Nicole Smith with the likes of stinking chav Katie "Jordan" Price, who seems to be counting on Americans' inability to look up people on the internet. We'll all have two final chances to relive the Anna days; one in the form of an upcoming Playboy retrospective, and one in the form of "Illegal Aliens", Smith's final film, co-starring Chyna (aka "Gigantoclit").
Anyway I'm supposed to mention that tumbleweeds are possibly discussing this topic in the new Pod Forums. So, uh, I guess check that out. I don't have anything else to add and I think I fulfilled my word quota for this period or whatever. Speaking of periods I hope you've done your taxes by now. What? Really? You live on the edge.
