By now I was supposed to be married to Elijah Wood,

and we were supposed to be having our first child. Clearly that did not happen, for many humorous reasons, like the fact that we've never met.

I was reminded of this plan that I had created for myself in middle school when I saw Up in the Air this week. In the movie, George Clooney's new young colleague Natalie explains that at 23, she expected to be driving a SUV with a baby, and married to her boyfriend, whom she doesn't really like, but who fits her expectations because he has a one-syllable name. That made me laugh. Marrying someone because his name is Matt or Dave.

Anyhoodle, I really liked Up in the Air. I know, it's crazy! It is the one movie I have seen in a theater this year that I liked. And it only took till December.

* Spoiler alert for those of you who want to be surprised. *

I liked that there were strong, honest roles for women. Of course, all of those roles went to white women who were fairly thin. There was one black woman with a speaking role in the movie, but by the end of the story, she was no longer with us. Also, I did not need the naked bum-bum or side boob in the first hotel room scene, unless that bum-bum happened to be George Clooney's. Alas, it was not. So yet again, as throughout most of film history, the woman with the biggest role in the movie had to be naked in it. And she is 12 years younger than her male counterpart. Well done, sister suffragette. Votes for women, step in time.

In addition to having realistic female characters who were not berated for their life decisions, I also liked that there were not happy endings for most of the characters. This was the kind of movie I had hoped for when I saw (500) Days of Summer, but my hopes were not met.

My favorite part of the whole movie was George Clooney's sister, Kara. She was played by Amy Morton, whom I almost immediately recognized as Thomas Ian Nicholas's mother in Rookie of the Year. I know! The best part was that she has not pulled up her face past her eyebrows like many other actors in Hollywood. She looks like a normal woman living in Northern Wisconsin.

.

This is one reason I like Free Radio:

the characters look like and act like relatively normal people, including the two women on the show. Though, this is not the normal situation in mainstream media:

Fat Actors vs Skinny Actresses, by Melissa Silverstein, Women & Hollywood.


What’s the Skinny on the Heftier Stars?, by Michael Cieply, The New York Times.

A scene from the new journalistic thriller “State of Play” says it all.

Jeff Daniels, as the politician George Fergus, squares off with Russell Crowe, as the pen-wielding journalist Cal McAffrey.

Two men. One notebook. Four chins.

Hollywood’s pool of leading men is getting larger — and not necessarily in a good way.

Based on a close look at trailers, still photos and some films already released, at least a dozen male stars in some of the year’s most prominent movies have been adding on the pounds of late.

In “The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3,” a subway heist movie due from Columbia Pictures and MGM in June, Denzel Washington, 54, goes cheek-to-jowl with the bulky John Travolta, 55 — and they are beginning to look like a matched set. Mr. Washington is no longer the lean, mean boxing machine he portrayed in “The Hurricane,” 10 years ago.

[. . . ]

Even Leonardo DiCaprio, the young heartthrob from “Titanic,” is better padded these days, at 34. Photos from the set of “Shutter Island,” a thriller on tap from Paramount Pictures and the director Martin Scorsese in October, show a little bit more to love.

Hollywood’s women may have weight issues of their own. But it is somehow less noticeable, possibly because actresses who expand do not often get roles to showcase that growth. Kathleen Turner, 54 and the onetime seductress of “Body Heat,” last December put in a rare film performance as Ms. Kornblut, the plus-size dog trainer in “Marley & Me.”

[ . . . ]

Appearing on the “Today” show on Tuesday, Mr. Crowe, 45, said he was working his way down to fighting trim for his current role as Robin Hood in a new film for Universal, but he confessed that pounds were dropping more slowly than he had hoped.

He might want to get some diet advice from Jason Segel.

Mr. Segel, 29, was fairly hefty in “I Love You, Man,” a comedy released by Paramount Pictures and DreamWorks in March. But his face looked surprisingly thin on billboards advertising the film.

The advertising photos were done some weeks after the film shoot, with a slimmer Mr. Segel, said Katie Martin Kelley, a publicity executive with Paramount. “There was no retouching done,” Ms. Kelley said.

I had not noticed Russell Crowe's increased "insulation" in the State of Play trailer. Though I did notice Jason Segel's in I Love You, Man; Jason had even more cushioning than he did in Forgetting Sarah Marshall. Yet the women allowed to appear in all three of these movies are painfully thin, completely overshadowed--literally and figuratively--by their male counterparts.
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