pühapäev, 18. aprill 2010

What the years do to people

Here's an edited and complemented posting, which I first wrote as a reply to a forum posting I originally made on an IMDb forum:

Only that he was about 25 while playing an 18-year-old (the film was released on 15.03.1991 and Grieco was born 23.03.1965), but this might have been a running gag about how much older actors play teens. The movie was funny, but not necessarily because of Richard Grieco.

To provide some context, then I am gay, too.

I should say that I kinda fail to see anything hot in him, despite his above-average looks at that time (I had to Google to see what he was like back then :-).

When watching the movie, I only passingly noticed him as the lead there, where the best-performing actor was actually Linda Hunt. Thereafter, I often confused Hunt with Mindy Sterling, who played Frau Fabrissina, a cohort of Dr. Evil in Austin Powers movies. Granted, Hunt's Ilsa Grunt and Sterling's Frau Fabrissina were both very similar characters and I think that Fabrissina may have in part been modelled after Ilsa Grunt: both characters are evil, diminutive, authoritarian and murderous women who are not in their first youth anymore and who have or have had an affair with the main antagonist.

In Estonia, "If Looks Could Kill" (will be referenced below as ILCK) was never seen in cinemas, with the reason being that the film was released in 1991, which was the year when Estonia regained its independence from the Soviet Union (the first widely seen and distributed Hollywood flicks were "Home Alone" and "Hot Shots" or "Hot Shots 2").

Instead, ILCK had a few airings on TV many-many years after 1991 (2000-ish and later), when I wasn't young enough anymore to see what was it in Grieco that charmed the generation before me.

When searching for pictures of Grieco in Google Images (using "Richard Grieco" with quotes for the exact phrase search), I stumbled upon a blog called "My New Plaid Pants" with a post ("The Hall of Hubba-Bubba", dated April 5, 2007) praising the various famous male physiques of the era (mostly 1980's and very-very early 1990's). There, one of the images near the top was the Diet Coke Guy, or Lucky Vanous (who I think was much hotter than Grieco). Since I had then just seen from my Google image search what Grieco looks nowadays, I was intrigued to see what Lucky Vanous looks now...

Despite both having had different fates (Grieco evidently continued acting; yet while Vanous (born 1961) became instantly famous, he struggled as an actor, so a few years back he opened a successful healthy fast food restaurant in L.A.), it is my judgment that Vanous now looks much-much cuter than Grieco:


From then-and-now comparisons of Grieco, I thought that his face does not look as natural than it did in his youth or in 12-year-old basketball images on his IMDb profile's gallery page, when his face appeared more natural.