MOVIES: Ugly Is as Ugly Does

  Some people need to get a life. Including the woman who left an extended rant on
Review-Journal features editor Frank Fertado’s voice mail over the weekend (and contributed two shorter outbursts on Neon copy editor/TV critic Christopher Lawrence’s telephone message system. Listen to the call below.).
  The earth-shattering topic? Her contention that “Sex and the City” star Sarah Jessica Parker is not the greatest beauty in the history of the cinema.
  This person took great pains to assure the Review-Journal that she considers appearance a priority and spends four hours a day in the gym putting that theory into practice.
 Oh, and she’s a “good person” — which she proceeded to disprove by complaining that the Review-Journal featured Parker’s ugly mug (her words, not ours) in stories last week focusing on the release of the “Sex and the City” movie last Friday.
  Heaven save us from the “good” folks of the world, who consistently exalt the pettiness of their prejudices by reassuring us of their self-professed goodness. But, as that exalted 18th-century writer Dr. Samuel Johnson once reminded us, the road to hell is paved with good intentions — no doubt belonging to “good” people.
  We won’t repeat the ugly details of this indignant caller’s ignorant invective; suffice it to say that it offended her delicate aesthetic sensibilities that the Review-Journal was behaving in the grand tradition of newspapers everywhere by reporting the latest news — including the imminent arrival of “Sex and the City’s” movie adaptation, starring Sarah Jessica Parker. 
  Apparently audiences were able to stomach Parker’s hideousness; “Sex and the City” topped the weekend box office with a $55.7 million take, proving that six seasons on HBO (and countless hours in reruns) weren’t enough to satisfy the collective appetite of viewers who managed to stomach looking at SJP for two hours and 25 minutes.
  In addition to finding Ms. Parker’s looks repugnant, the caller complained that Parker can’t act her way out the paper bag that should be covering her face. (Again, that’s a rephrasing — cleverer than the caller’s, but expressing the same thought, and we use the term “thought” loosely.) I guess Parker won those two Emmys and four Golden Globes for her sparkling personality.
  And perhaps that’s what bothers our obnoxious caller most — the fact that others think Parker is talented and worth watching, regardless of her appearance.
  Of course, we’ll never have the chance to ask the caller, because like most gutless wonders with small-minded complaints, she left neither her name nor her telephone number so we could respond to her comments. Which is why we’re doing it here.