J’adore.
Pretty much the moment Richard Linklater cut to the extreme close-up of Michelle, the character played by Milla Jovovich in the wonderful “Dazed & Confused,” as she rolled a joint, I was smitten. Smote. However you want to say it. Same thing happened when she held up that ID to the security guard and insisted that her name was “LeeeeelooDallasMoooolteeeepass.” It’s absurd how adorable she is as the divine being in Luc Besson’s “The Fifth Element,” and she gives one of those performances that is so dedicated that even if you don’t like it, you have to marvel at it. Throw in the album she recorded in her teens full of personal, lyrical doodles, and I never really stood a chance.
I am fascinated by the way Screen Gems has essentially been handed over to two married couples at this point. I recently chatted with Kate Beckinsale about working with her husband, Len Wiseman, in the “Total Recall” remake, and Jovovich has a similar set-up with her husband, Paul W.S. Anderson. They seem like a pretty self-contained unit, happy to keep cranking out these increasingly strange and oddball zombie epics, and she seems like she loves the fans whenever I see her talking about these movies or showing up on a Comic-Con panel. I may not like these films very much (and I’ll have a review of the new one for you on Friday), but I like her enthusiasm, and I like that she’s found a niche where she seems really happy.
I wish I had our first attempt at an interview. It got cut short because of a technical glitch, but it was a perfect Milla moment. I had Toshi and Allen with me at the press day, and when I walked into the room with the two of them, Milla was loudly talking about her “bazookas.” When she saw the kids, she flushed and told me she was sorry, she didn’t see them, and she didn’t mean to talk about boobs in front of them. She proceeded to spend almost three minutes talking about talking about boobs in front of the kids and telling them to ignore her and that they are only for milk but they probably don’t remember that but sooner or later, they’d get interested in them again and…
Honestly, by the time they called cut and told me there was a tech error, I half-suspect it was just a matter of the cameramen realizing that she was totally off the reservation at that point. You see that photo on the article, right? That pretty much sums her up completely. She’s really pretty, she’s pretty goofy, and she seems to be having a blast 24 hours a day.
“Resident Evil: Retribution” shambles into theaters Friday, September 14.