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Is the presence of Annabella Sciorra enough to get me to watch Law & Order: Criminal Intent? Here's a clue: it was enough to get me to watch Mr. Wonderful, Mr. Jealousy, Romeo Is Bleeding, Cop Land, and The Night We Never Met. It was not, however, enough to get me to watch What Dreams May Come. But that should be taken less as a testament to my Sciorra crush than a testament to my near-allergic aversion to Robin Williams.
(A side note: in an amusing video-store variation of "Would You Rather?", a friend of mine and I used to pull movies off the shelf in an effort to find the one movie in the whole wide world one would like to watch the least. The game ground to a halt, however, once my friend located Jack, the Francis Ford Coppola-directed comedy in which Robin Williams plays a fifth-grader who looks like a forty-year-old man. Seriously, in "Would You Rather?," that film is unbeatable, both by other bad films and also by a surprisingly varied array of torture techniques.)
Yes, I have a film crush on Annabella Sciorra, and have ever since she and Wesley Snipes toppled drafting tables in Jungle Fever. I know I'm not alone in this -- nor am I alone, I suspect, in wondering why, when I look at her résumé over the past five years, I recognize only one credit: The Sopranos.
Can anyone fill me in on the following films: Above Suspicion, King of the Jungle, Once in the Life, or Jenifer? (That last one being a TV movie and, apparently, not a typo.) Can anyone further illuminate for me why Sciorra was starring in Above Suspicion, a film with -- ye gods -- Scott Bakula!? Hollywood, have you no taste?
I can't pretend to know what conversations go on behind the closed doors of casting rooms, or why certain actors go through certain periods of relative paucity in their careers. But I do know this: after a very promising period in the early '90s that included both charming indies (Mr. Wonderful) and mainstream hits (The Hand That Rocks the Cradle), Sciorra has more or less disappeared for several years at a time. And I also know this: then, as now, I would be happy with more-a Sciorra.
Annabella Sciorra is exactly the kind of smoky beauty who should be doing dark roles like The Sopranos six to eight times a year, then playing Harrison Ford's wife on her weeks off. She should be cast a lot more than Rene Russo, Charlize Theron, and Halle Berry combined. Sciorra and Maria Bello should be getting first crack at pretty much every role in Hollywood, even the male ones. Because Romeo is Bleeding, Cop Land, and The Night We Never Met -- especially, emphatically The Night We Never Met -- are all pretty bad films. And there's a part of me that would sit through all of them again, simply because they contain the charcoal-tinged charms of Annabella Sciorra.
Granted, I also watched Cop Land in part because of Ray Liotta, another puzzlingly underused actor. In fact, the two of them make a pretty good onscreen couple. Maybe they should get an HBO show together, in which they play disgraced dirty cops exiled to the suburbs.
In any case, I'm very happy to see Ms. Sciorra land on the Law & Order franchise, since those kind of procedural shows seem like pretty laid-back gigs, and are rapidly turning into the MacArthur Genius Grants for long-suffering character actors looking for a comfortable wage. And you know what? I think I may well tune in, as long as they promise not to bring on Robin Williams as a special guest star. And IMDb lists her next film as something called Find Me Guilty, which I originally misread as Find McGuilty. And I'd probably even go see Find McGuilty, too.
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