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Once upon a time, a friend of mine named David was living at the home of parents of another friend of ours, for the summer, because he was living in Toronto, because he was working at a huge theme park called Canada's Wonderland, because he was singing and dancing in a musical revue called "Hot Hits." And so he spent that summer singing and dancing and sleeping and eating and hanging out at the home of parents of another friend of ours, at which also lived the grandmother of the other friend of ours, who was Hungarian and known as Oma. And Oma wasn't quite clear on exactly what David was doing at the house, or what a "Hot Hit" is, or who David even was exactly, and why he kept sitting on the couch watching TV and eating yogurt. So one day she came into the living room while he was sitting on the couch watching TV and eating yogurt and asked, in her high-pitched, Hungarian-accented voice, to no one in particular, and with a philosophical clarity and succinctness that would have done Sartre proud:
"Why is David?"
I mention this story because, in light of the recent cover of InStyle "The Look" and the small burble of publicity accompanying the release of Beautiful, I would like to pose a very similar question, much in the spirit in which the first question was posed:
"Why is Minnie Driver?"
You see, I know there are people out there who like Minnie Driver, I just don't know why. Or why I still see her on the cover of magazines, or still hear about her at all, as if she's someone who's done more than, I don't know, one and a half well-known movies, and whose claim to fame is something more substantial than, I don't know, one ugly public dumping. Yes, it was ugly, it was public, and it was a dumping of the first degree, but when did all that with kerfuffle with Matt Damon go down, anyway? 1998? And what's happened since? Hard Rain? The Governess? An Ideal Husband? A whole lot of nothing?
Minnie Driver is crafty. Oh, she's a crafty, crafty lady all right. She has craftily managed to keep herself in the public eye by (a) showing up at every premiere within a hundred-mile radius of Los Angeles, and (b) rigorously dating celebrities, to the most recent of which, Josh Brolin, she is now engaged. Of course, we wish her nothing but happiness and well-being, but we do offer this one friendly warning: Dear Minnie Driver, You are in danger of becoming a professional celebrity before you even become a celebrity. I, and a good chunk of the world, now think it's much less likely that we'll ever see you at the Oscar™ podium than that we'll see you in the bottom left-hand square, for the block.
Or to put it another way: let's just say that fame is like a shopping cart at the top of a hill. And let's just say that Minnie Driver got into that shopping cart when she did Circle of Friends in 1997, and that the cart got a real good push when she was unloaded by Matt Damon on Oprah. Well, there's only so long you can coast on that one push, and Minnie Driver's running out of steam. And starring in a movie with Hallie Kate Eisenberg -- who, at this point in her serial overexposure, is about as cute as a car alarm -- isn't going to help Ms. Driver's momentum.
Long story short: Minnie Driver -- out of the cart.
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