From the Dept. of Too Much Information Dept.

I don’t need a critic to step back and act like he’s speaking from the clouds. But neither do I need to know what’s in his dreams. Ben Brantley, however, doesn’t care what I need. What he needs, apparently, is Julia Roberts. In today’s New York Times he reviews her Broadway performance in Three Days of Rain, calling her “so deeply, disturbingly beautiful that you don’t want to let her out of your sight.”

And before we go any further, I feel a strong need to confess something: My name is Ben, and I am a Juliaholic. Ms. Roberts, after all, is one of the few real movie stars—and I mean Movie Stars, like the kind MGM used to mint in the 1930’s—to have come out of Hollywood in the last several decades.

[. . .]

Like a down-home Garbo, she is an Everywoman who looks like nobody else. And while I blush to admit it, she is one of the few celebrities who occasionally show up (to my great annoyance) in cameo roles in my dreams.

Comments

[yellojkt]

He then goes on to compare her to an "industrial lightpole". As I found out when I saw the show, fan devotion to Julia makes the actually quality of her acting a moot point.

[Brendan Wolfe]

I liked this from your post, yello: "A woman my wife recognizes as Julia’s mother comes out and gets in the SUV." How in the hell does one go about learning what Julia Roberts' mother looks like? File Under No Shit, but I'll say it anyway: We live in a weird, celebrity-obsessed world, one where Julia can only be a Movie Star and not an actress, where I cannot read a review of her play without it being more a review of Her.

[reader_iam]

I'm just deeply grateful that he didn't outright use a particular modifier before the word "dreams."

Ooh. Ick.

[Mike Smolinsky]

Before we go any further, I feel a strong need to confess something about myself that is personal and urgent and important: I am the kind of person who thinks that Brantley should have excised that first sentence.