POTPOURRI

I love Bonnie Hunt*. Looooove her. And her appearance on this week's Celebrity Poker Showdown only strengthened that love. At one point, alleged TV heartthrob Scott Wolf is low on chips. "What would I have to do to get you to give me one stack of those purple chips?" he asks Bonnie. She grins coyly and jokes, "French kiss me." When Wolf pushes back his chair as though he's going to do it, she screams, "No, no, no" and giggles hysterically, blushing bright red. It was such an endearing, adorable, girlish reaction. She's swell. (Also, she won! And she beat J. Jonah Jameson to do it.)

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Watched the first two episodes of Deadwood on DVD last night, and I liked it, but it didn't quite grab me the way Carnivale did.

The acting is everything it's been cracked up to be, especially Ian McShane as the violently unstable unofficial master of the town, Al Swearengen (and does he ever swear!). Timothy Olyphant is also very good as Swearengen's foe, Seth Bullock; Bullock is meant to be the hero of the story, I guess, but he's almost as hot-headed and ruthless as Swearengen, which I like. Keith Carradine gives a strong performance as Wild Bill Hickok, but if you know anything about poker and the dead man's hand, you know he's probably not going to be around for too many episodes. Other stellar performances include Robin Weigert as Calamity Jane, Brad Dourif as Doc Cochran, Molly Parker as prospector's wife (and drug addict) Alma Garret, and I always get a kick out of seeing William Sanderson, aka Larry ("This is my brother, Darryl, and this is my other brother, Darryl") from Newhart.

The dialogue is great, savage and clever and terrifically vulgar. And I've always been a sucker for Westerns. But I was bugged by the poor sound quality; I had to keep rewinding and turning on the subtitles to catch lines that I missed due to all the ambient noise in the saloons or the streets. And there's so much going on in the first two episodes, so very many characters to meet and so many relationships to establish, that my head was spinning. I do like it so far, and I'll keep renting the DVDs; it just hasn't amazed me right off the bat the way other HBO shows have.

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San Francisco Chronicle TV columnist Tim Goodman spends an entire column talking about his Celebrity Fuck List, and why Jennifer Garner is no longer on it.

Think about that: somebody's paying him good money to write about which famous girls he'd like to pork. God, what a great job! I want that job! All you do is watch TV and write about it, and when there's nothing good on TV, you talk about which actresses make you tingly in the giblets. And then someone gives you a paycheck? That's awesome. How come nobody's paying me for all the stupid crap I write about TV?

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*Her IMDb Bio page says, "Has never done a nude scene or posed nude in her career." I just think that's a very strange thing to specifically take note of. If you're going to pay special attention to something she hasn't done, why stop there? "Has never bungee-jumped from the Eiffel Tower." "Has never eaten an entire cow in one sitting." "Has never killed a man just to watch him die."