Gossip should have no friends

[January 9th, 2008]

ONCE UPON A TIME IN PDX: It may feel like winter here, but filmwise, it couldn’t get hotter. Esquire mag’s “Sexiest Woman Alive” for 2007, Charlize Theron, disrobed on the balcony of the McCormick Pier Apartments and shot a nude scene as “Sylvia”—a Portland woman who must endure an “emotional odyssey”—Monday morning, Jan. 7, for her new flick with director Guillermo Arriaga , The Burning Plain . A little background: Arriaga wrote the screenplays for director Alejandro González Iñárritu ’s Amores Perros , 21 Grams and Babel , but when Arriaga claimed credit for the partnership’s success, the two filmmakers ceased to be amigos. The feud turned public when Iñárritu blocked Arriaga from attending last year’s Cannes Film Festival. Now, with Charlize and Burning Plain , Arriaga is trying to prove he was the brains behind Babel . Smokin’!

STRIPPED BARE: A bestseller in 2001, the self-help tome Feel Good Naked, by local writer and fitness spokeswoman Laure Redmond , has helped many women feel hot in the buff. But who’s going to help Redmond now that her ideas have all but been swiped by Queer Eye’s Carson Kressley ? On January 4, Lifetime Television’s new series, How to Look Good Naked , hosted by Kressley and closely resembling Redmond’s product, became the most-watched reality premiere in the network’s 24-year history. “I’ve been building my Feel Good Naked brand since 1996,” said Redmond. “And yes, my trademark attorney and I are ‘in discussions.’ [But] in the meantime, I’m [thinking] of it like the pizza-parlor theory in NYC: The best thing that can happen to a pizza-parlor owner is when a competitor opens across the street.”

AIR EGYPT: “I didn’t ‘make out’ make out with a dog. ..I kissed a dog on the face.” So goes the blog entry of Neveen Ismail. Known locally as Egypt on Jammin 95.5’s The Playhouse, Ismail is one of the breakout stars on Season 2 of the Oxygen network’s incredibly awful guilty pleasure The Bad Girls Club (Tuesdays, 10 pm). BGC brings bad girls’ together “[who] have issues with anger, trust and control, and claim they want to change.” On the show’s website, badgirlsclubonoxygen.com, Ismail says she did the show to “find herself” and teach girls how to “not act like a dumb snatch.” This isn’t Egypt’s first time onscreen (she was on the short-lived FOX reality show Forever Eden and is still on Playhouse TV ), but on BGC she’s already spit in a fellow cast member’s face and shared the fact that another “whorish” one liked “anal.” All righty, then.

LET’S GET PARANOID Sick of waiting for Paranoid Park to hit Portland? Wait no longer: Gus Van Sant ’s latest movie will open at the Portland International Film Festival on Monday, Feb. 18. After a year of globe-hopping, Van Sant will return home to introduce his skater-punk opus.