LOVE HEWITT: GOOD ACTRESS WITH BAD ROLES

by C. Brooks Kurtz
Columnist

Does the term “belligerently tired” mean anything to you? Well, this is the state in which I’m writing this little contribution to the perpetual pollutification – yes, I know that’s not a word, but it should be – of Mother Earth, but I’ll still saw logs as I always do: footloose and guilt-free.

To the point shall we head, yes. Although I fear my subject matter of late is starting to head off into the soppy, sloppy world of the trivial, I must progress in a direction that the more intellectually snootified might find a bit, shall we say, irrelevant. Irrelevancy, though, is not something one is prone to contemplate while getting blind drunk and playing blind darts with cutie-pie coeds during a given Sabbath morning.

As a subscriber to Rolling Stone, I – like many of you – was a bit surprised to see none other than the lovely and talented Jennifer Love Hewitt on the cover. More excited, even still, was to not only see the stunningly Maxim-esque and titillating photogs of her inside and, even more excited, still, was I to read a story about a young woman who is either the least fake celebrity I’ve encountered via ink or the most calculating p.r.-persona in the history of wo-man.

I would tend to avoid the latter and agree with the former, for the omnipresent Hitch hung out with her at the Viper Room sometime back. He reported that Hewitt not only danced with one of his friends, but unpretentiously sat down for a drink with the relative rubes from the Dust Bowl State.

But I digress. Allow me to float a rather Hellerish set of circumstances: I hated “Party of Five” (cornball laissez-faire goofiness unrivaled even by the cornball God-fearing antics of the 7th Heaven cult), I hated both “I Know What You Did Last Summer” as well as its criminally named sequel, “I Still Know What You Did Last Summer” (my reaction to that one can be vita’d with a line from a long-last classic – “What’s the name of the sequel?” “Bodybags 2”), and I marginally liked Hewitt’s last album, for all its sugar-coated poppiness, the likes of which would rival opium for its smiley likeability.

With all that said – and bud, it’s a mouthful – I still can’t help but adore Hewitt.

It should be said the Hewitt is the perfect actress who has never been given even a modestly perfect part. She’s either been wet down while donning a white tank top or vamped up, a victim of the “overalls or sunglasses” theory of casting. But, even falling victim to such prey, she has still managed to churn effectively along, something which obviously owes more to the resilience of the person as opposed to the quality of the material.

My case, as follows. First, she has the rare quality of being able to pull off the girl next door or the milky bosomed bombshell, often vicariously – such a trait is typically fleeting but she’s been able to do it for quite some time.

Second, she is – one man’s opinion – one of the better, more genuine young actresses working today.

To take that a step further, it should be noted that the worst thing to happen to her career was overexposure. While the saying is that no press is bad press, in her case I fear people simply got tired of seeing her everywhere. PR folks may cringe at such an idea, but there is such a blotto concept as too much of a good thing.

Finally – and this is an odd one but nonetheless interesting when it comes to the likeability quotient – for whatever reason, she lives with her mom. As something of a momma’s boy – not too much, mind you, for I have spent fewer than 20 days at home in the past nine years – I find a young lass who somehow foregoes the trappings of celebrity-dom in Babylon rather refreshing, though I can’t say I’d be able to do the same.

A larger statement is necessary – since “Scream” came out, there has been a dirty rash of the young, vulgar and talentless thrown at the general public with such abandon we cannot recall a time when it was not there.

Pre-“Scream,” everything made sense. Post-“Scream,” we have been led to believe that teens – a group which Hewitt is no longer a part – are obsessed with either knifing each other, screwing each other or watching through a peephole as a pair going through some form of copulation is knifed by another who was prevented from getting in on the action.

And, to be truthful, that’s all there is to say about that.

Ciao.