May, December

If you want to, you can find with no effort whatsoever the music video for Hayden Panettiere's new single "Wake Up Call." I watched about half of it; the song's fine generically - I wouldn't wince if it came on in public somewhere - and her voice reminds me of someone else's that I can't place right now, but it's also OK. I mean, good enough for pop starlet-dom, but (to judge her by the standards of people who are now, shudder, her elders) it's like Britney-good (though they don't sound alike), not Mandy Moore good, and nowhere near "restrained Christina Aguilera good". The notable thing about the video though is, well, the video, which I gather is getting press because Ms. Panettiere seems to be trying to play up her public barely-legal-maybe-sexpot image (which heretofore I'd thought of as having been unwillingly, uh, thrust upon her) vs. her cheerleader image from Heroes. Anyway, the point is that she's rather inept at it. In an interview with Britney Spears from the post-Timberlake pre-Federline era, Chuck Klosterman spent some time trying to untangle Britney's appeal from a variety of angles, but one dominant throughline is that however immature she may be (have been) in so many, many ways, she either intentionally or intuitively was able to walk a line between mature and frank sexuality and girlish innocence. Not a girl, not yet a woman is basically the whole point of the first five or six years of her career, and it's all there in the "Hit Me One More Time" video and etched in granite by the time we get to "Oops!...I Did It Again". (Aguilera, only one year older, by my estimation basically hit the big time already jumping to a youthful but definitely adult take on her sexual image [which went with her more overtly R&B-influenced music], although the Dirrrrrrrrrrrrrrty era kind of became a caricature of this. Of course, with that voice, it's not like she really had the option to play the coy sixteen year old.) By comparison Panettiere's underwear-flashes and attempts to eyefuck the camera are embarrassing because it's clear that she's trying, which is pretty much the antithesis of everything she's shooting for. I don't know her in her personal life, obviously, but as a performer she can't summon up "smoldering" and shoots right to "glaring". I stopped halfway through the video because I felt bad for her.

If you want to, you can find with no effort whatsoever the recent pictures of Dame Helen Mirren in a bikini. Now, if you know me in real life then you probably have gathered that I'm pretty frank about the fact that I look at pornography and stuff that can be observed for similar purposes (like, say, non-porn pictures of attractive women). However, I don't intend for this to be That Sort of Blog. Nonetheless: Daaaaaaaaaamn. The Dame is literally days away from her 63rd birthday and in addition to her ever-luminous face (evident in umpteen-hundred red carpet photos) has a figure that's...I'm not even going to try to put it politely. Let's just sidestep the descriptions and say that she has a body suitable for a woman half her age. A really hot woman. Sexual attraction is actually almost edged out by pure curious amazement. I must confess that I've never actually seen one of her films (which I intend to rectify, and no, not just because she's beautiful now and was beautiful forty years ago), but I'm pretty sure that by this point in her life, at least, when Helen Mirren sets out to eyefuck you, you stay eyefucked.