Evan Rachel Wood and Kate Winslet
It's the kind of role an actress would kill for — it won Joan Crawford a 1945 Oscar and is likely to reap Emmy and other honors for Kate Winslet — but I wish I could say HBO's deluxe but draggy miniseries redo of Mildred Pierce was to die for.
"From now on, honey, you're fast." So says a jaded neighbor lady (newly minted Oscar winner Melissa Leo) to Mildred, left by her failure of a husband to raise two girls alone in the Depression, as the unhappy Mrs. Pierce considers taking her hubby's lumpy business partner as a lover.
Mildred begs to differ. She's desperate, but not...
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Anna Torv
Fringe (Friday, 9/8c, Fox)
This entire season has been a tour de force for Anna Torv. Doing double duty as dueling Olivias from parallel warring universes, she most recently spent an episode channeling her inner Spock — aka Leonard Nimoy — as the ghostly soul of William Bell inhabited her body for a very clever outing. (In the climax, the dormant Olivia resurfaced briefly, freaking out Peter and the viewing audience.) This week, we're back in alt-world, as the pregnant Alt-livia faces mortal danger from several fronts. It's a very harrowing hour, deserving a far larger audience than it's likely to get, tucked away on Fridays. Fox, stand by this show!
Norm Macdonald: Me Doing Stand-Up (Saturday, 11:30/10:30c, Comedy Central)
The sardonic comic...
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Mildred Pierce
She's won an Oscar. She's starred in one of the most successful movies of all time. Now, Kate Winslet is about to conquer another first: television.
"It never occurred to me, beyond the moment of reading those scripts, 'Wow, this is television, therefore it's going to be different somehow,'" Winslet said Friday at the Television Critics Association's winter preview sessions. The actress is starring in HBO's 5-part adaptation of Mildred Pierce. "Sure we have more to shoot ... but the level of determination and level of focus was so much more intense than certainly any...
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The New York Post's "Page Six" gossip column gets a nice plug in the new romantic comedy Laws of Attraction (opening Friday), but the film's leading lady, Julianne Moore, is questioning the scandal sheet's accuracy. The Oscar-nominated actress cites one particular story from several years back that claimed she had been taken to the hospital from the set of Far from Heaven.
"It said somebody had slipped me a piece of birthday cake that had a lot of sugar in it, and that I was highly allergic to sugar," she recalls. "So, they shut down production and rushed me to the hospital, where I managed to come out of my sugar coma and was back at work the next day."
Moore insists there was "zero" truth to the item. "I don't know where it came from," she says, "Anyone who knows me knows that I have quite an affiliation with sugar and no allergies at all."
Still, the down-to-earth thesp admits she was "flattered" the Post devoted
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