“Quotable quotes are coins rubbed smooth by circulation. What Michael Douglas did say in ‘Wall Street’ was ‘Greed, for lack of a better word, is good’ … Everyone distinctly remembers Michael Douglas uttering the words ‘Greed is good’ in ‘Wall Street,’ just as everyone distinctly remembers Ingrid Bergman uttering the words ‘Play it again, Sam’ in ‘Casablanca,’ even though what she really utters is ‘Play it, Sam.’ When you watch the movie and get to that line, you don’t think your memory is wrong. You think the movie is wrong,” wrote Louis Menand.

——————————

Julia Roberts is the revived movie star of the hour with her appearance in “Duplicity,” costarring Clive Owen. But Julia insists she is no longer catnip for the paparazzi. “Not many follow me now. It’s just the slow ones who haven’t yet figured out I’m not the one to follow.” 

What next for Julia? Well, she has a movie coming soon which she made two years ago, with her husband Danny  Moder as the director of photography. It is a family drama called “Fireflies in the Garden.”

——————————

Madonna’s ex, Guy Ritchie, is now getting kudos in the foreign press simply because his marriage ended. They are saying he’ll come into his own with a remake of “The Wild Geese,” a big-budget film that will have real star names. This is being made by those folks who gave us “300” – about the Battle of Thermopylae.


Guy Ritchie and Madonna pre-divorce © AP

——————————-

The Brits seem to have turned against their pet favorite, Dame Judi Dench. One critic refers to her now as “a magnificent and once-discriminating actress whose reputation alone can turn a show into a guaranteed hit.” Then he refers to her “formidable old-boot mode (which) she has honed playing such roles as Queen Victoria, Lady Bracknell, Elizabeth I and M in the Bond movies.” Since this critique, Judi sprained her leg and is functioning onstage with a cane, performing in “Madame de Sade,” a play by the late Yukio Mishima. The critics hated that too.

(I think they’re just mad that Dame Judi Dench has made pots of money of late in commercial movies as 007’s boss.  Actors are supposed to starve, you know.)

——————————

The wizard actress Debra Winger, who says she didn’t make a comeback in “Rachel Getting Married” because she had never retired, has this analysis of current moviemaking: "I find it sort of hair-raising … celebrities are pulling the films along with them to hold them up. It used to be that the film was the thing – the film opened and we showed up to support it. Now it’s all about the red carpet and celebrity. This stupidity about celebrity is just crazy. We just need to stop feeding it so much and start to talk about real things again.”

——————————

Sarah Jessica Parker wore a black dress when she wed Matthew Broderick. Now she says she was wrong and, if it were happening today, “I’d wear a beautiful, proper wedding dress, like I should have worn on that day.”

——————————-

Jennifer Aniston says she doesn’t understand the hoopla about her divorce from Brad Pitt and his relationship with Angelina Jolie and she has not discussed any of this with her ex. She says of the continuing interest in her past, “I’m baffled.” 


Jennifer Aniston © AP

And I am grateful to writer John Hiscock for so many fabulous quotes right from the horses’ mouths.

——————————

You’ll be hearing the name Quinn Bradlee a lot now that this son of Sally Quinn and Ben Bradlee of Washington media fame has finished A Different Life: Growing Up Learning Disabled and Other Adventures.