A heads-up to Ellen Page

It would seem that one John Derbyshire finds you physically attractive. 

UPDATE: By popular, or maybe I should say semi-popular demand, my Ellen Page Cannes anecdote. Not that the above bit wasn't sufficiently entertaining, I think. But I'm all about added value.

For a long time I was something of what you might call a hard-partying fellow, but honest, it only took me a couple of film festivals to figure out that the best way of working them was to avoid over-late, over-imbibing evenings.  By the time I started going to Cannes in 2005, I had become something like a model citizen in this respect. The press screenings there started at 8:30 in the morning, and I developed a routine that was in effect when I was there in 2006 and staying at the lovely, and spectacularly expensive, Hotel Martinez. Said routine being: up by 6:15 or 6:30 a.m. Call to my soon-to-be-wife in the States. Shower. Dress. Down to the restaurant and its very nice breakfast buffet by 7:15 at the latest. Eat, read the trades, smoke a couple cigarettes, drink a lot of coffee. Off by 8 a.m., at the Palais by 8:10 or so. And I did that every day, without fail. Interestingly, every day without fail for the first few days of the festival, another couple beat me to the restaurant and its breakfast buffet. 

The first thing I noticed about this couple, who were very young—the male looked about 18, the female about 12—was that they were clearly not a couple in the romantic sense. They were very friendly with each other, but in a way that cousins might be. Another thing I noticed was how put-together they were. They were young enough that one might have expected them to have been out partying all night, and were just now dragging themselves to the hotel to get a spot to eat before collapsing. But that wasn't the case. They were both very fresh, cleaned-up, newly dressed. Neither smoked. And again, they were up and at-em before I was every day, and I had been leading what I considered a relatively monk-like festival existence. 

And, of course, they were staying at the lovely and spectacularly expensive Hotel Martinez. So they had to be, well, somebodies. And they looked kind of familiar. But I couldn't place them. Until that Friday morning, when they weren't in the restaurant anymore, but on the front page of Variety, in a group shot of the cast of X-Men 3, which had had its red carpet premiere the night before. Ben Foster and Ellen Page.

Huh. And also, what the heck? Cut to January of 2007, the Sundance Film Festival. I'm walking down Main Street and I see producer Christine Vachon on the front patio of the Clam Shucker or the Claim Jumper or whatever the hell it is; she's having a smoke; inside is a party for An American Crime. With Ellen Page. Who's just coming out to the same patio. Christine graciously introduces me to Page, and I say, "I have one question for you, if you've got a minute," and Page is like, "Shoot." 

"How was it that you and Ben Foster got to the breakfast buffet at the Martinez at Cannes earlier than I did, three days running or so? We were the only ones in there that early!"

Page shrugged. "Well, it's a simple question with a simple answer. I've always been an early riser; I like to get my day started in a timely fashion. Ben's the same way."

"I have to admit, I didn't recognize either of you at the time. It was driving me crazy."

"Yeah, I think we were wondering who you were, too."

Comments

[otherbill]

Perhaps she can at least take some solace in the fact that the first link indicates he has no interest in her breasts. Those things are 23 years old!!

[Frank McDevitt]

I wonder who is creepier when it comes to raphsodizing the features of ostensibly attractive actors, this guy, Jeffrey Wells, or Dan Schneider...

[Jose]

Wow, so women are only hot between the ages of 15 to 20? Nope, nothing creepy about that at all.

[c.t.h.]

Judy, Meg... and Lindsay?

[Jeff McMahon]

More to the point, Judy Garland as 'sexy without being pretty'? When was Judy Garland ever sexy, especially considering that she played juveniles in most of her film roles?

[Glenn Kenny]

I feel a teensy bit bad picking on the man his colleagues call "The Derb," as he is far and away the smartest of the National Review Online crew...if you wired together the brains of Goldberg, Lopez, Foster, Steyn and Nerdlinger, the resultant, erm, organism still wouldn't be able to beat Derbyshire at checkers, even. (Rick Brookhiser is close to his intellectual equal. And is indeed perhaps smarter, given the infrequency with which he tends to check in at The Corner.) And quirks and affectations of super-cold crankiness aside, Derbyshire appears to lead a relatively decent existence, in stark contrast to the likes of Breitbart, who's proving himself a more complete and utter scumbag with his every breath. But still. The Derb's eccentricities ARE doozies...(And his other complaints about "Inception" are not without interest!)

[brad]

He's basically the male version of Ann Coulter, of course he doesn't like grown women who can tell him to fuck off for being a complete loon. teenagers or people with teenaged brains are the only ones that can take his hate-filled rantings.

why did you post to a link from 2005 though?

[LexG]

D'ah... where is my awesome comment that I spent four minutes on?

GRRRRR...... PAGE POWER SO HOT, BOW TO HER.

YUM.

[Glenn Kenny]

Lex G: I wish I knew. Maybe the humidity is making TypePad eat things.

Brad: The point of the 2005 link was to create an icky juxtaposition between "Jennifer Aniston's objectively perky breasts are too OLD" and "Ellen Page, yum!"

This reminds me, have I told you guys my Cannes story featuring Ms. Page?

[Chris O.]

No. Please do. There are never too many anecdotes!

[LexG]

"Wow, so women are only hot between the ages of 15 to 20?"

Well, expand it out to 17-25, and that's about right. Yeah, there's an occasional Jessica Alba or Angelina Jolie who stays hot after 25, but usually women don't.

Kristen Stewart, Dakota Fanning, Taylor Swift, Taylor Momsen, Amanda Seyfried, Mia Wasikowska, Keira Knightley, AnnaSophia Robb, Carey Mulligan...

The most beautiful women in the world UNEQUIVOCALLY, and not a one of them is older than 25.

And show me a guy from 8 to 80 who doesn't still fantasize about 18 to 25-year-old girls, and you've found one lying motherfucker, or a dude who's majorly gay.

[Jeff McM]

Nobody cares who you fantasize about. Just keep it to yourself, please.

[LexG]

Jeff McDouche:

See the last paragraph of the post above yours.

[Adam R.]

Show me a guy who fantasizes about 18 to 25-year-old girls with the bodies of 14 year old boys and I'd say that dude's majorly gay.

[Dan Coyle]

Or trying really, really, REALLY hard to impress us with what he considers his "uniqueness."

[Owain Wilson]

You've got to love a young woman who uses the term 'timely fashion'.

[lazarus]

I know X-Men 3 wasn't very well-liked or remembered, but surely I'm not the only one who got to the end of Glenn's story and imagined his unprinted response to Page's last line as "I'M THE JUGGERNAUT, BITCH!" in his best Vinnie Jones impersonation.

[LexG]

In the aforementioned post that was lost to the sands of time, I had a kernel of a good point that I'll now unofficially direct at Dan Coyle, Jeff McDouche, and Adam R...

Can one really trust a critic who doesn't lay his fetishes and perversions on the table? You can freely dislike my writing style or "shtick" if you will... But one of my ETERNAL COMPLAINTS about Film Criticism is too many starched-shirt, backrow ironists who have to be chronically detached and unimpressed.

I realize it comes with the territory when most film writers have journalism training, combined with the Marxist socioeconomic tenets of Film Studies discourse. And I'm not saying every critic has to be Joe Bob Briggs chugging beer and pointing at hooters on the big screen...

But, damn, critics are the most ASEXUAL bunch ever. I much prefer a Wells or a Roeper or whoever just laying it out there that they're smitten with some HOT CHICK. Other than the apparently acceptable-to-critics Amy Adams-- because she's "incandescent" and "effervescent," ie reminds these old fogies of some Classical Hollywood Screwball shit from a hundred years ago-- you never see a Ken Turan or Nick Schrager or AO Scott writing, "Holy shit did Scarlett Johansson give me a GIANT BONER."

Why not? What IS criticism but a SUBJECTIVE ART FORM? Why not take the GONZO approach and filter every review through a laundry list of your own lustings, desires, impulses, fetishes?

It seems a shitload more honest than how most critics tap-dance around the issue all PC. Maybe that's because film writers probably aren't giant pussyhounds, but most of them write about pussy like they're grade school kids who still think girls have cooties.

I don't trust anybody who doesn't talk about vag and just lay it all out there. And Dan Coyle, my shtick has the ear of James Wolcott, LA Weekly, Defamer, Gawker, HuffPo, and every major film critic in LA and NYC. Obviously I'm as interesting as a motherfucker, so back off, fool.

And that other douche who I'm too lazy to scroll up and look for his name: If you can't tell the difference between a smoking hot, super feminine 20 year old girl like Taylor Swift or Amanda Seyfried, and a "14-year-old boy," you got some major issues.

[Oliver_C]

Sigourney Weaver was 37 at the time of 'Aliens' and still perfectly (and Hawksian-ly) "hot".

PS: LexG, ZodiacMotherFucker from AVClub.com called, he wants his schtick back.

[Glenn Kenny]

Ahem. While I don't want to encourage a lack of civility here, I must say that, while I don't at all approve of his ad hominems, I also don't think Lex G is entirely wrong in some of his larger points. Which is to say that, while I have never been particularly enamored of critics using the term "boner" (and in fact I think I gave Nathan Lee some shit about it back in the day), that there is within criticism a certain tendency for practitioners of the craft to try and cast what one might call "crotch votes" and disguise them as semi-objective assessments. I've seen Jeff Wells do it (he seems very partial to British girls with thespian chops and peaches-and-cream complexions) and I've seen Robin Wood do it (in an incredibly disproportionate paean to the multiple talents of...wait for it...Ethan Hawke, I think in CineAction). Remember when Gawker used to give Elvis Mitchell a hard time (ar ar ar) about his high professional regard for Zooey Daschanel?

I mock John Derbyshire for his peculiar assertion that women lose their sexual attractiveness pretty much at the same time their adolescence goes, but you gotta give him credit for laying it on the table, even if he thinks he's only putting forward a self-evident universal truth rather than admitting a festish. But surely there must be a way for a critic to skirt disingenuousness and admit his or her, ahem, biases without being vulgar about it. I recall, vaguely, a short Martin Amis piece for one of Esquire's old "Women We Drool Over"-by-multiple-famous-authors packages that began "I've got a sick thing for Joan Collins." (This was at the height of her "Dynasty" fame.) That's the spirit! And for some reason I recall, a whole bunch of years ago, sitting with my future wife and a few friends, some of whom were couples, and somehow the subject of the fantasy celebrity "freebie" came up, and my choice was Stephanie Swift (this was before she had "retired" for the first time). "That doesn't count," somebody said. "She's a porn star." But I held, um, firm.

This might be an interesting topic for another post. I also sympathize to an extent with Lex's complaint that critics sometimes seem an epicene bunch. Also, I can't much argue with Taylor Swift, speaking of Swifts, or the woman I've suddenly decided to call Das Seyfried...

[otherbill]

I don't know how much fidelity you employed in reproducing Page's exact words in the above post, but it makes me think they should have just let her ad-lib JUNO. She could've come off as bright and grounded without all the "honest to blogs".

[Glenn Kenny]

@ otherbill: Pretty reasonably accurate, I'd say. I have a particularly vivid recollection of the "simple question" bit...

[Frank McDevitt]

@Oliver_C: ZMF is funnier than LexG. In fact ZMF is one of the only things that makes the AV Club comment sections tolerable.

[Ryan Kelly]

I understand these things are subjective, but I find it alarming that a grown man could watch "Inception", which features Ellen Page and Marion Cotillard, and think Page is the sexy one. The mind...boggles...

[bohmer]

so...she's going out with ben foster?! damn it! :(

[Fuzzy Bastard]

His pedophilia aside, I do give Derbyshire credit for noting what a better dream movie WAKING LIFE is. And for writing that piece years back about how Middle Americans are for conservatives what South American natives are for lefties---symbols of authenticity with which you really have nothing in common.

[Tom Russell Still Has a Major Boner For Shelley DuVall]

Sometimes Mr. G's comments make me feel a little scuzzy, but they're EASIER ON THE EYES THAN ZODIAC AND ALL HIS SWEARING AND FRICKING RUN-ONS IT IS REALLY UNNERVING IT KIND OF SCARES ME A LITTLE.

[SJ]

I guess this an opportune time to bring this up: http://hollywood-elsewhere.com/2010/07/shakedown.php

[Glenn Kenny]

@ SJ: Very funny. Also: that's a MAN, baby...

[bill]

Hey, everybody, what'd I miss?

I'm trying to think if I have a "thing" or a "deal" for an actress which be considered off the beaten path (that's a poor choice of words, I just now realized). Jesus, off-hand, I'm not sure I do! How said is that!?

Ellen Page is awfully cute, though.