According to Mental Floss magazine, in their tribute to the HBO series Entourage, they list the most famous entourages in history. Mental Floss considers “Jesus & Co.”, the second most famous entourage. MF’s page quote says: “During his public ministry years, Jesus is estimated to have legged about 3,125 miles, and you better believe his boys were with him most of the way. That’s a pretty impressive series of road trips - and they didn’t stop there.”

 

He Brought Us to Las Vegas.

 

Las Vegas native son Robert Bigelow is mentioned in the upcoming October issue of Vanity Fair magazine and he’s in mega-elite company! Bob joins PayPal’s Elan Musk, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Microsoft’s Paul Allen, Google’s Sergey Brin, Virgin’s Sir Richard Branson, and John Carmack, co- creator of the Doom and Quake video games. This quasi-clan of titans are pioneering private spaceflights. Bob plans to put an inflatable space station-hotel in orbit. Our anti-publicity-seeking dear friend (this is considered a bad thing in a climate where being a fame-whore is a career goal), Robert Bigelow, who brought us to Las Vegas from Santa Fe, is a private person who has been encouraged to welcome the media to promote his dream, space tourism. Vince Beiser, wrote a profile of Bob for Wired Magazine in October 2007 called “Castles in the Air”. Wired ran this headline to accompany the article: “Hotel Biz Zillionaire's Next Venture? Inflatable Space Pods.” Here is the opening of the article on the “supersecretive, super-rich owner of the Budget Suites hotel chain, Robert T. Bigelow”.

 

 

Supersecretive? I have lots of photos of Bob. Bob funded and published “The Alexander UFO Religious Crisis Survey: The Impact of UFOs and Their Occupants on Religion” that I conducted in 1994.

 

Beider begins his Wired profile with this: “A uniformed guard, his pistol holstered on his hip, waves me to a halt outside a sprawling compound 15 minutes north of Las Vegas. On either side of the main gate, razor-wire fence stretches out into the Nevada desert. The rent-a-cop leans inside the open window of my van, giving its contents and me a quick, professional appraisal. On his shoulder is a military-style patch. But in place of an insignia denoting rank is an oval alien head.

 

"Morning," he says affably. "You can just follow me."

 

“They've been expecting my visit. No one comes here without an invitation — or without having their identity verified in advance. The guard takes me into a trailer, where someone else checks my driver's license and pats me down to make sure I'm not carrying weapons "of any kind," as he puts it. For good measure, I will have an armed escort at all times while meeting with The Boss: the supersecretive, super-rich owner of the Budget Suites hotel chain, Robert T. Bigelow.”

 

Madame Meg's Find Your Sexy.

 

Thanks to Susan Stapleton and her PR firm, Ink by the Gallon (http://www.inkbythegallon.com/), I have been invited to Madame Meg’s Find Your Sexy. Join me on September 17 at The Harmon Theater. We’ll gossip and take free burlesque dance lessons. I’ve seen Dita Von Teese perform – anybody can do faux-stripping!  Madame Meg’s Find Your Sexy, billed as the Most Uplifting Show on the Strip, opened yesterday after a long engagement elsewhere on The Strip. It should be the perfect venue after shopping at the expanded mall mecca that has become the Miracle Mile Shopping Extravaganza. Meg’s show begins at 3 p.m., the New Happy Hour, with free appetizers and 2-for-1 drink specials. You can swan with the cast and take free Find Your Sexy dance lessons with cast member Emily Lauren. Tickets: $39.95 plus tax and processing fee for general admission and $49.95 plus tax and processing fee for VIP tickets. Madame Meg's Find Your Sexy runs Sunday through Thursday at 3 p.m. Theater Information: Harmon Theater (located next to Planet Hollywood Resort and the Miracle Mile Shops) with valet parking on Harmon Avenue, next to the Miracle Mile Shops. Box Office: 702-836-0836. (Photo of Madame Meg)

 

Movies this Week

 

Transsiberian

 

In 1991, two months before the official fall of the Soviet Union, I toured the country with a retired Major-General of the Army and my best friend at the time and the general’s inamorata, a controversial psychiatrist. We were on a fact-finding mission to the infamous Russian parapsychology laboratories and attended a UFO conference. Villagers frequently spotted Bigfoot and his tribe.  Soldiers also had Bigfoot sightings. We had a tour of Star City, stayed on a warship, and were hosted and watched over by the KGB. We stayed in Moscow at a hotel for KBG dignitaries. Yes, we were watched and our rooms monitored, but I thought that was a good thing!

 

We had plenty of food, sometimes feasts, while the public stores were empty and lines snaked around blocks. It was very cold.

 

Nothing got done unless you knew someone. Nothing! Bribes had to paid and gifts exchanged for everything. It was a heroic task to get us overnight train tickets from Moscow to St. Petersburg.

 

One of our hosts, a well-known psychic healer, had to give a healing treatment to the ticket seller for our cabin at the ticket office. While waiting, we were told not to talk and try not to look like foreigners. Considering the amount of luggage we were standing next to, it was impossible. (Photo of a Bigfoot painting based on a first-hand sighting, our warship stay, and manning the table at The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg)

 

Today, all I read about is the Russian oligarchs and vulgar mega-billionaires. Director Brad Anderson (who co-wrote the screenplay for “Transsiberian” with Will Conroy) obviously was charmed with the idea of setting a film on the train route from China through Mongolia to Russia. Train travel in some Asian countries is dangerous, but after doing the Trans-Siberian Railway research online, and seeing the ice-cold, cramped glamour of Anderson’s vision, I’m up for it!

 

Woody Harrelson, who I just saw as a gay political insider in “The Walker”, plays man-boy Roy, a sweet hardware store owner and train enthusiast who, with his reformed alcoholic, wild wife Jessie (Emily Mortimer), after finishing up their Church mission in China, take the Trans-Siberian train to Moscow. They buy 2nd class tickets for a 4-berth compartment. Their companions are twenty-year old Abby (Kate Mara) and her sexy older boyfriend Carlos (Eduardo Noriega). Abby is very beautiful, but Carlos only has eyes for plain Jessie.

 

They happen to be on a train targeted by Russian detective Grinko (Ben Kingsley) as harboring a drug shipment. Grinko and his partner, Myassa (Thomas Kretschmann) are ruthless cops hunting for a drug dealer’s money.

 

Soon Roy is confiding in Carlos and Jessie is confiding her wild past to Abby. Jessie clearly has picked up the signals from Carlos. And he’s damn sexy!

 

It doesn’t take long for spacey Roy to miss the train on one of its stops, leaving Jessie with Carlos and Abby. They decide to wait overnight with Jessie at a hotel. For some unclear reason, Abby leaves Carlos allowing him to flirt with Jessie and invites her to spend the day with him instead of waiting around in the lobby for Roy to arrive on the next train. At a beautiful relic of an orthodox church deep in the snow-covered forest, Carlos comes on to Jessie. She returns alone.

 

“Transsiberian” is an adult thriller with a complicated scenario that is involving and intriguing. It is also quite clever, as Anderson gives us false leads and a volley of misdirection of intentions. Mara, Noriega, (pictured) and Kingsley are terrific, only Harrelson overplays the role of a naïve lovesick hayseed. Kingsley takes his supporting role as an outsider and is the dynamic terror that is pivotal to the story. 

 

“Transsiberian” delivers a fascinating and exotic location and the wonderful claustrophobic pleasure of third world train travel. As this movie was just slipped in theaters, if you have a chance to see it, you will be pleasantly satisfied.

 

 

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The Women

 

I want to visit writer-director Diane English’s world. How much does a spaceflight to the planet HD 209458b (in the constellation Pegasus) cost?

 

I was ashamed to be a woman after seeing this movie and glad I have no women friends. Diane English, who has nurtured this pet project for decades, updated and revised the original and much beloved play by Clare Boothe Luce and the George Cukor 1939 film, “The Women”. 

 

The Vanity Fair style socialites depicted here would be far more sophisticated about dalliances by their Wall Street millionaire husbands. In real life “high society”, Jackie Kennedy takes pride of place. As long as the husband doesn’t release a home-made sex tape with an 18 year old Russian bar girl and demand she get on the Board of Trustees of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, these socialites would know revenge trumps divorce.  

 

Mary Haines (Meg Ryan, who now shows emotion solely by flapping her arms and tossing her halo of fake blond curls), is a cherub-happy, privileged wife of a powerful and very successful tycoon. She lives in a Connecticut mansion with her tween daughter, a housekeeper, a Danish au-pair gal in braids, whose job is to keep the housekeeper company, and a gaggle of high-maintenance girl friends from college: Sylvia (Annette Bening) is the editor of a women’s magazine without a personal life; Edie (Debra Messing) is a woman of privilege with three small daughters and a house filled with chaos and helpers; and Alex (Jada Pinkett Smith), the token lesbian writer.

 

A Saks Fifth Avenue manicurist, telling everyone who will listen, even the New York homeless, that the perfume countergirl, Crystal (Eva Mendes), is having an affair with a highly visible, very wealthy married man. He’s Stephen Haines!

 

Saks would immediately fire the loudmouth manicurist for gossiping and not knowing her clientele.

 

Clueless Mary, the good child-woman, is utterly shocked, as are her horrified girlfriends, that Stephen is cheating on her with the tart at the Saks perfume counter. When Sylvia and Mary nurse the wound of Mary’s betrayal at the Saks lingerie department, they run right into Crystal.

 

Except for the really clever lines I assume was a gift from Carrie Fisher in exchange for a one scene pivotal role, “The Women” is poorly directed and even worse, dated. It’s embarrassing. Fisher is known as a brilliant script doctor and she wastes great lines here. I’m impressed that Diane English, who has had a long career in television, doesn’t know more about tycoon husbands and their Ritalin-prescribed wives.

 

“The Women” kills the hope for more women-oriented films like “Sex and the City” promised. And to all the actresses who turned down “The Women”, the studios and executives who passed on this project, this time you got it right.

 

 

 

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Bangkok Dangerous

 

 

A Nicholas Cage movie slipped into theaters this weekend. A Nic Cage movie not previewed for the press and no promotional screenings? Even “yahoos” know what that means. Ignoring that, I made it over to the Brenden Theaters at The Palms for a Friday night showing. It’s moody, dark and the story is ridiculous. I now know why there are no senior citizen hitmen! They have a pull-the-trigger change of heart moment. And, they spend all their money so they always have to do one last job before retiring! Yes, it was lousy, but I liked it. Why must Asian ingénues in these movies have disabilities?