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Oh, those crazy Fondas. It used to be quite easy to tell one from the other: Henry was the legend, Jane was the heiress, Peter was the wastrel, and Bridget was the up 'n' comer, the torch recipient, the slinky embodiment of Fonda Dynasty 2.0. (That's all of them, right? Did we forget any? Carrie Fonda, the coke-addled memoirist? Bob Fonda, the low-brow overweight comedian? Rhonda Fonda, the thrice-divorced sitcom doyenne?)
Then suddenly: anarchy. Henry shuffles off this mortal coil, Peter gets an Oscar nomination, Jane loses Ted and finds religion, and Bridget wakes up one day in the career of Mira Sorvino. What the heck happened?
Maybe it's just us, but the sight of Bridget playing the sneering, greasy-locked, torn-stocking-clad damsel in Kiss of the Dragon seemed queasily familiar to that of seeing Sorvino in the same role in the final-nail-in-the-career-coffin that was The Replacement Killers. We're sure that Kiss of the Dragon will do boffo box office and prove a big boost to someone's career, but we're guessing it won't be Fonda's, whose presence in the movie has the distinct odour of one of our favourite perfumes, Name Actress Available on the Cheap. Hey, everyone's gotta eat, but when you're playing third fiddle to (1) the male star and (2) the wire-fighting scenes, it doesn't augur well for the health of your career. We're not sure when exactly Bridget Fonda went from Promising Young Actress (Godfather III, Singles) to Bride of Flopenstein (Lake Placid, Monkeybone), but we suspect it was sometime around Single White Female, the title of which, in hindsight, seems like a thumbnail description of Ms. Fonda's main attributes as an actress. Sure, she's had some lauded turns, notably in A Simple Plan and Jackie Brown, but neither role really stands up, and both together can't generate enough good will to airlift her out of the career quicksand in which she's currently mired.
Being Hollywood royalty gets you a leg up in the family business, no doubt. But it can also be a curse: the public has a limited attention span for Hollywood brats who don't pan out. (Just ask Jake Busey.) Sadly, the segment of our collective attention once reserved for Fonda: the Next Generation now seems amply distracted by The Adorable Kate Hudson and her husband, Barnyard Spook. Fonda may yet recover -- if Peter can get an Oscar nomination, anything is possible -- but to do so, she must not only scramble out of the Sarlacc pit that swallowed Sorvino and Marisa Tomei alive, but also overcome America's inherent aversion to the congenitally lipless -- all in all, a tall order. A tall order, indeed.
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