Sunday, August 13, 2006
Geek Pin-Up #8: Heather Graham
Heather Graham embodies everything the male geek looks for in a fantasy woman. She can be lusty and shy at the same time. In various movies she has played the smart girl, the ditzy girl, the awkward sex-pot and the ultimate teen dream. She's a card-carrying indie chick, but she's also not afraid of wading in the mainstream from time to time. For some of the dweebier variants of the geek race, it's enough that she was Judy Robinson in the 1998 Lost in Space film (shut up dweebs, I'm trying to make us look cool here). I say this 5'8" Wisconsin-born stunner is desirable because she often appears unsure of just how incredibly gorgeous she really is. Her enchanting cupie doll eyes seem to invite you closer, but it's the rest of her assets (including her natural magnetism, perverts) that make you never want to walk away.
Heather solidified her place in the hearts of hormone-fueled adolescent boys the world over in 1988's License to Drive, starring the Coreys (Haim and Feldman, please try to keep up). She played a tall, heavenly blonde named Mercedes, the girl with whom Corey Haim's character Les would do anything to secure a date, including messing up his grandfather's prized Cadillac. Can you blame the guy? She wore pink high-heels and white socks rolled down to her ankles, for Christ's sake! Between those socks and her short denim skirt were the most wonderful legs I'd ever seen in my young life.
Ms. Graham spent the next set of years building her arthouse creds in films such as Gus Van Zant's Drugstore Cowboy, the Twin Peaks TV show and feature film, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (another Van Zant film), Six Degrees of Separation and the stodgy, period drama Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle. Even though Heather had emerged from this stage of her career a more confident and skilled actress, she went back to her role as the perfect date for loveable loser Jon Favreau (he of the enormous, meatloaf-shaped head) in the 1996 comedy Swingers.
She fully accepted her status as red-hot meteor of sexuality in two 1997 films, Two Girls and a Guy and Boogie Nights. The latter film permanently imprinted the image of a naked Heather on rollerskates in the collective male consciousness. The next year she co-starred in the previously mentioned Lost in Space before achieving her greatest exposure to date (figuratively-speaking, that is) as slinky seductress Felicity Shagwell in Austin Powers 2: The Spy Who Shagged Me. For more literal exposure, you'll want to fast forward to 2002 and the uncomfortably kinky, rather stupid Killing Me Softly, in which Joseph Fiennes gets to do all sorts of nasty things with Heather. The lucky POS.
To this day, Heather continues to pop up in some interesting roles, from a would-be mother of twin Satans in the movie Blessed to guest appearances on TV series like "Scrubs" and "Arrested Development". Graham also gave her own series a try in 2006 with "Emily's Reasons Why Not", but it didn't survive past the first few episodes. I don't see how network TV could turn down this still fresh-faced thirtysomething if she decides to try another series. I'd sit down once a week to watch her fold laundry if she did it with skates on.
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Yass, yass, yass!
-Rob
She's too ugly and way too fat.
Heather Graham, while able to give impressive performances in good-to-great films (See, respectively: Drugstore Cowboy and Boogie Nights) largely remains a suck-hole of talent.
In truth, she offers only one thing consistently: eye-candy appeal.
Which is fine, as these things go. But she's far from the geek ideal. Unless that ideal is a woman who's beautiful, but unable to project anything deeper than a sullen two-dimensionality, or a perky, flat-as-cardboard sense of idiocy.
Give me a woman who projects intelligence, true sensuality and depth.
Give me Rachel Weisz. Give me her, right now.
Great actresses do not always make great pin-ups, but Weisz is a good example of both. Just wait, I'm sure she'll make the list at some point.