Following Charlize Theron, Most Beautiful Woman in the World

Any questions?


One of the early Charlize Theron movies was "That Thing You Do" in which she played the Gorgeous Girl every high school boy thinks he wants instead of the lovely but maybe not so ravishing Girl Next Door.  Yes, she broke Tom Hanks' heart.

(Ed:  how cold!)

I'm tellin' you.

You still want her, tho.

There's a brief bit of her being her precious self in the clip below.  It's hilarious and must have been a riot for her to play it.


"That Thing You Do" is an end-to-end delight featuring a one-hit-wonder band, The Wonders (originally The Oneders).  Tom Hanks directed it, wrote much of the music, and also stars in it.  The result is something I've enjoyed at least three or four times.  Hanks didn't write this one but the theme song of the movie became a hit in its own right.  If you check the credits, you may be surprised to discover how many of the songs Tom Hanks wrote.

Note:  there's little to be found on Tom Hanks' musical training although there's a great deal about how his acting developed.  Was he, in effect, a garage band in his private life?


The clip features the first public performance of "That Thing You Do" and Guy Patterson, the drummer, jacks up the beat to a rock tempo but Crooner Boy, the band's snake, freaks until he sees how people react to it.  As the crowd builds he starts getting into it.  By the end, the whole place is shaking.



This has for me the same authenticity as Foreigner with "Juke Box Hero" as it's every kid's dream coming true.


Maybe the most recent Theron movie was "Fury Road" and the femmes were all in a tizzy over this one as the best movie ever filmed or some such.  For me it was like an endless Bourne movie with a car chase which never stops from the start to the end.  The best we have to say for the movie is that it wasn't as bad as "World War Z," the Brad Pitt stinker which has the lauded position of the worst movie which will ever be made and that includes future efforts.


There's no intention to trash Charlize Theron since we have seen multiple of her movies and simply didn't regard "Fury Road" as the best one.  Maybe the fever about it was because Theron played the lead but that was hardly the first time.  "Monster" was filmed over ten years earlier and that was one of the most astounding and horrifying jobs of acting you may ever see.  She played Aileen Wuormos, a female serial killer in Florida.  She gained weight for the part and, impossible as it may seem, made herself look hard and ugly to fully portray the demented vibe of her life.

That one film got so much attention relative to the other is puzzling since that asks us why.  We don't have an answer but it still asks.  She didn't play 'pretty women' in either of them since both were seriously hard females but she always injects more so still the question hangs.


Of those three movies, if I'm to watch any of them again, it will almost certainly be "That Thing You Do" and it's one of those ridiculous dream-come-true movies but, wtf, sometimes they do.