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'Skin'
Has A Little
More Than
Sex Going For
It
October 18, 2003
Fox's latest drama, "Skin," has all
the ingredients of a big fat hit: love, sex, money, sex, politics, sex, a catchy
title, sex, a classic theme, sex, an attractive cast, sex, sex and sex.
Plus, it has a lot of sex, which
doesn't hurt.
Before the sensitive reach for their
smelling salts, they may want to know that "Skin" is based loosely on "Romeo and
Juliet," the sexiest of Shakespeare's plays. Or did you think all that
adolescent moping and moaning was about platonic friendship?
'Skin' |
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Photo/File |
Jewel (Olivia Wilde) and Adam (D.J. Cotrona) struggle
with their forbidden relationship in "Skin," a
Shakespearean-inspired drama set in Los Angeles.
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The setting is modern Los Angeles. Her
family is white and Jewish, his Mexican-Irish - but it's something more than
ethnicity that comes between Jewel Goldman and Adam Roam (newcomers Olivia Wilde
and D.J. Cotrona).
As fate would have it, entrepreneur
Larry Goldman (Ron Silver, "The West Wing") is a hugely successful producer of
adult entertainment, while L.A. District Attorney Thomas Roam (Kevin Anderson,
"Nothing Sacred") is an anti-porn crusader who believes Goldman is trafficking
in the worst sort of hard-core stuff. This battle of Dad vs. Dad soon becomes a
classic clash of Capulet vs. Montague, with Jewel and Adam caught in the middle.
The family conflict takes place on
another level as well. Though they're not wealthy, Thomas and Laura Roam (Rachel
Ticotin, "American Family") - she's a judge - embody the respectability of the
establishment. Larry and Barbara Goldman (Pamela Gidley, "The Pretender") -
she's a socialite - have all the wealth they could want, but their money has an
unsavory aroma.
Potboiler though it is, "Skin" is more
interesting than most melodramas on several counts.
For one thing, there's the fact that
the parents of this golden girl and boy aren't evil - irrational, opportunistic
and unfair, maybe, but with understandable motivations and visible love for
their offspring. That makes all four of them genuine participants in the drama,
not just plot devices.
Then there's the twist that takes
place in the second episode, after the D.A. comes down on Larry, and the furious
businessman retaliates by sending one of his minions to dig up dirt on Roam.
What the guy finds isn't exactly what Larry's looking for. It's better.
There's also real romance in the
meeting and courting of Jewel and Adam, a dreamy-eyed teen infatuation
reminiscent of those two crazy kids from Verona. Wilde is lovely and Cotrona
looks like a young Keanu Reeves, which is not a bad way to look.
But, given the nature of Larry's
business, Adam and Jewel's handsome hides aren't the only skin on display in
"Skin."
A scene in this week's pilot features
a bevy of barely dressed maidens parading across a long table-top with their
maidenhood - I use the term loosely, of course - on display to a pair of gaping
corporate customers.
On one hand, it's a pretty ridiculous
scene, since these two seemingly worldly men are completely flummoxed by the
sight of naked ladies and immediately sign a preposterous deal with Goldman.
On the other hand, I'm grateful for
small favors. If it happened on HBO or Showtime, there's no way we'd be spared a
closer look at all that maidenhood.
Short takes
Fresh-faced Tony winner Marissa Jaret Winokur ("Hairspray") stars in
"Beautiful Girl"
(7 tonight, repeated 9 tonight and 7 p.m. Monday, ABC
Family), a lighter-than-air
comedy-drama about a plus-sized music teacher who
takes on the wonderful, horrible
world of beauty pageants. Fran Drescher ("The
Nanny") is her (mostly) supportive mom,
Mark Consuelos ("All My Children") is
her (mostly) adoring fiance and Deborah Gibson
wrote Winokur's unfortunate
songs. Despite references to eating disorders, self-esteem
issues and - would I
make this up? - the plight of Amish teens, it's two hours of pink,
fluffy cotton
candy.
Chipping, the British schoolmaster of
James Hilton's sentimental classic, has been
famously portrayed by Robert Donat
and Peter O'Toole (and, less famously, in a 1984
English miniseries, by Roy Marsden of the Inspector Dalgliesh mysteries). Now Martin
Clunes takes on the
role in this "Masterpiece Theatre" version of "Goodbye, Mr. Chips"
(8
tonight, PBS) and makes it his.
Viewers of the digital cable channel BBC America may recognize Clunes as the
oafish anti-
hero of "Men Behaving Badly." His transformation here into a
sensitive teacher,
love struck husband and late-blooming achieveris, in a small
but satisfying way, what
acting is all about.
I can't imagine whom Comedy Central
hopes to reach with "Kid Notorious" (9:30 p.m.
Wednesday, repeated 11:30
p.m. Wednesday, Comedy Central), a new weekly cartoon
based on the adventures of
elderly movie mogul Robert Evans. Fans of Robert Evans?
Friends of Robert Evans?
Robert Evans?
Insider-y but
uninteresting, brazen but stubbornly stuck in antique stereotypes, this
week's
half-hour introduces Evans (voicing his own character, as well as serving as
executive producer), butler English (Alan Selka, Evans' real-life English
butler) and
enormously fat, drearily "sassy" black maid Tollie Mae (Niecy Mash,
"Reno 911!").
The plot, about a
hip-hop Broadway version of "The Godfather," gives Evans a chance to
make a
dozen nasty jokes about the gangsta scene and a dozen more about a rival play
called "Sharon Stone's Vagina."
When this sort of comedy flops, the
people behind it always complain that they're just
too, too politically
incorrect for these cautious times. Somehow, the thought that they
aren't funny
doesn't seem to occur to them.
Intent on documenting their own
act of terrorism, the Chechen separatists who took 700
Russians hostage last October
shot hours of videotape inside the theater where the
act
took place.
This remarkable footage forms the basis for "Terror in Moscow" (6
p.m.
Thursday, HBO), a one-hour
film of stunning impact. The three-day siege was
extraordinary in many
respects: the presence of 19 bomb-carrying women among the 41
terrorists; the capricious,
frequently bizarre behavior of the captors; and, most
tragically, the fact that the
bungling Russian authorities caused the death of 129
hostages with the
experimental gas used in the rescue.
This British-made film is out of the ordinary,
too, not just for the Chechen footage but
for the interviews with
survivors, who describe their steep, swift descent into a
totalitarian world in
miniature.
E-mail:
jweintraub@journalsentinel.com.
From the
Oct. 19, 2003 editions of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
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"It’s
actually been really fun. We get along really well, Olivia’s a cool girl and
we’ve had fun doing it. It’s probably easier than it is most times with the boys
that they bring on the show to be my love interest."
~ Mischa Barton
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