Famke Janssen vs. Bridget Moynahan
Battle of the Black(-Haired) Beauties

We are far from being the first to observe that there is a kind of homogeneity in the landscape of post-September 11 entertainment. There is a reason the new TV shows picked up for the 2002-03 season all seem to fall into one of three rather safe, time-tested categories: cop shows, lawyer shows, and doctor shows. There is a reason the #1 "indie" movie of the year -- which is now the top-grossing indie movie of all time -- is not an edgy, challenging, morally ambiguous outsider's vision, but an utterly conventional, predictable (if feta-stinking) romantic comedy. There is a reason that all three of last year's CIA-set TV series are back this year. It's probably much the same reason that interchangeably dark and sexy Famke Janssen and Bridget Moynahan are both playing CIA molls at practically exactly the same time, in I Spy and The Recruit: and that reason is that imagination comes at a premium these days, and no one wants to do anything terribly different or unusual for fear of spooking the horses.

If the current creative recession continues, both Moynahan and Janssen will benefit. Both are pleasing to the human eye. With such dubious credits to their names as Coyote Ugly and The House on Haunted Hill (and, really, does it matter who was in which? No), they probably charge a lot less for their services than do Sandra Bullock and Jennifer Connelly. They both have brown hair, which signifies seriousness and brains and whatever else the opposite of "blonde" tends to signify on film. They're so much the same that it doesn't even matter that one is Irish-American and the other is from Bulgaria or Hungaria or some such place the citizens of which have vaguely Slavic accents.

So if we can agree that both Janssen and Moynahan are comfortably nestled on the second tier of Hollywood actresses -- and, what with their sketchy supporting roles in The Sum of All Fears, Rounders, Serendipity, and Don't Say a Word, surely we can -- the question for our purposes here is which of them is closer to breaking through to the top tier. Conventional wisdom suggests that Janssen has the edge, given her role in the big-budget behemoth that is X-Men (and its forthcoming sequel); after all, that worked out pretty well for Hugh Jackman. (Maybe the credit on his career is owed less to his X-Men role and more to the fact that he has got an absolutely huge ackman.) But here Janssen is, thinking she's inherited Lena Olin's mantle, becoming the first name on the list of Young Maybe Iron Curtain Refugee Hotties, and here comes Bridget Moynahan, accentless, and still poaching jobs that could just as easily go to Janssen. What's next -- Anna Paquin starts losing roles to Avril Lavigne?

Advantage: Janssen, by the skin of her post-Soviet teeth