Almost Infamous

The following was posted here way back in August of '06. I'm rerunning it because with the release and subsequent critical panning of Bride Wars, I'm finally forced to throw in the towel and admit that my love affair with Kate Hudson is over -- crushed by her own lousy judgment when it comes to picking movie roles.

I usually do my best to ignore the wellspring of celebrity rumor and conjecture that passes for legitimate news these days. I figure I have more important things to concern myself with than whether or not Nick Lachey has a small penis, and how many minutes of manual strangulation it would take to put Jessica Simpson into a permanent coma for publicly suggesting one way or the other.

But despite the claims of several ex-girlfriends, I'm human -- and every once in a while something gets my attention.

The fact that the marriage between Kate Hudson and The Black Crowes' Chris Robinson is coming to an end isn't much of a surprise. I won't be one of those people who makes the case that their attempt at inter-species mating was doomed from the start, but I'm willing to bet that a near-constant barrage of this sentiment from everybody else on the goddamned planet would've constituted enough pressure to break even a marriage made out of titanium.

Now, though, the New York Daily News (motto: "The Second-Best Newspaper to Train Your Puppy on in the Tri-State Area") is reporting that Owen Wilson may have had something to do with Kate's ultimate decision to leave her husband.

Understand something: To me, Kate Hudson will always be Penny Lane. She turned in one of the best performances, creating one of the best characters in possibly the best rock n'roll movie ever made -- Cameron Crowe's almost perfect Almost Famous. Thanks to that movie, and her role in it, I'll always love Kate in much the same way that I'll always love Zeppelin: She just had the ability to speak to my soul without saying so much as a word.

She could make Raising Helen IV: Annihilation, and I'd still sigh like a smitten schoolboy at the thought of her.

Owen Wilson on the other hand represents one of the most baffling cinematic curiosities since, well, the canonization of M. Night Syhamalan (sorry, I don't think that's ever getting old). He's made an entire career out of playing the guy who lived down the hall from me, and everyone else, in college -- the borderline autistic whom you wouldn't bother with if it weren't for the fact that he's a near-bottomless reservoir of pot, and even then you're wary simply because to gain access to his drugs you have to endure hours of ridiculously fucking giddy observations about why refrigerator magnets work or how Emily Bronte is the thinking man's Charlotte Bronte or a vast array of other crap that employs stoner-logic.

There's only one Wilson in the history of film that's turned in a duller, more lifeless performance, and he starred opposite Tom Hanks in Castaway.

Now I have to live with the possibility that a guy who couldn't get me into a theater for any of the movies that he's made, somehow got himself into Kate Hudson's heart and nether-regions.

In the immortal words of Weezer -- say it ain't so.