Michael Douglas

Michael Douglas and Jodie Foster were picked yesterday as the 1992 Man and Woman of the Year by Harvard's Hasty Pudding Theatricals. The actress will get her traditional parade through Harvard Square in Cambridge, Mass., Feb. 11, and he'll get his a week later. They'll each get their own "pudding pot" and be treated to the group's show this year, Up Your Ante. Hasty Pudding has been honoring stars with doses of mild, good-natured humiliation since 1967. Their honorees have included Clint Eastwood, Lucille Ball, Glenn Close, Katharine Hepburn, Robert De Niro and Kevin Costner.

Examinations of love and desire in the worlds of American politics and English art top this week's list of new movies on video. The American President 1/2 (1995) (Columbia TriStar) 114 minutes. Michael Douglas, Annette Bening, Martin Sheen, Michael J. Fox, Richard Dreyfuss. A droll comedy with Douglas as the president and Bening as the lobbyist his enemies brand the "first mistress. " PG-13 (sexual innuendo, profanity). Videodisc available.(CC) Carrington 1/2 (1995)

QUOTE "I had her home telephone number, and I daren't call it for a week. I was like, 'Should I, should I?' " - Scary Spice Mel B, on approaching R&B star Mary J. Blige to suggest a duet Ah, young love. Well, it's young love in the case of actress Catherine Zeta Jones, 29. Not so young, of course, in the case of her paramour Michael Douglas, who's 54. In the afterglow of their recent vacation together on a Spanish beach, the Welsh beauty appears smitten with crusty actor Douglas.

Michael Douglas is no Shirley Temple Black. But the movie star is enough of a statesman, apparently, to be appointed a United Nations Messenger of Peace. U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan yesterday showed the star of "Wall Street" and "Fatal Attraction" around the U.N., where Douglas said he would use his new role to campaign for nuclear disarmament and the control of small arms. "I hope to use the entertainment communications ability we have . . . to talk a little less about movies and hopefully a lot more about some of the issues pertaining to the United Nations," Douglas told reporters.

Yes, says Michael Douglas, he was addicted, to booze and maybe some other stuff, but never to sex. The movie star, in an interview in January's Vanity Fair, addresses his fabled sexual addiction for the first time by saying that the story took on a life of its own after being fueled by his sex-driven roles in the movies Basic Instinct and Fatal Attraction. "The media got this great handle from the film and rode with it," said Douglas. "I can't believe people are so titillated by this made-up stuff.

Four years ago in Falling Down, Michael Douglas gave us a memorable and underrated reading of an unhinged defense worker who feels he has toppled from the bottom rung of the ladder and vents his rage on the streets of Los Angeles. Dour and pessimistic in a different way, The Game is a stylish set of enigma variations that puts Douglas at the top of the ladder - but in circumstances beyond his control. For a man like Nicholas Van Orton, as cold as the calculator in his tooled-leather Mark Cross briefcase, the ultimate nightmare is to confront the idea that someone else might have total charge of not just his life, but even more.

Falling Down traces one man's escalating descent into derangement, but the pertinent mental problem with Joel Schumacher's relentlessly dour movie is schizophrenia. In the beginning, a recently fired defense worker sits seething and sweltering in a car trapped in L.A. gridlock. He incenses the other drivers by abandoning his vehicle and declaring that he's going to walk home. It seems like an "I'm-mad-as-hell-and-I'm-not-going-to-take-it-anymore" gesture that echoes the defiant anchorman Howard Beale in Network.

NOT EVEN a movie company would be this crass, so it's surely a coincidence that "Solitary Man" arrives on DVD as star Michael Douglas goes public about his cancer. The movie features one of Douglas' better recent performances - he plays a self-destructive business tycoon doing emotional damage to himself and those around him, including Mary Louise Parker, Jesse Eisenberg and Susan Sarandon. The movie is unusually well written, even if the writers provide a third-act revelation that tries too hard to undo the riddle of Douglas' character.

Not long after Glenn Close boiled Michael Douglas' bunny in Fatal Attraction, Kathleen Turner froze his assets in The War of the Roses. And in Wall Street, he patented the prototype for the raging yuppie, equal parts materialist and misogynist. Let the star and jut-jawed antihero be the first to joke about what he calls his "Prince of Darkness period. " On the horn from his Manhattan pied-a-terre, the guy who has made a career out of playing the weasel women love to whack talks about some recent changes of heart.

In his latest thriller "The Game,' which opens Friday, Michael Douglas is back on the streets of San Francisco but in a better neighborhood. Instead of pounding the beat as a cop, this time out he's super-rich tycoon Nicholas Van Orton, a man who would seem to have it all - a huge gated estate, a vast fortune, a lavish lifestyle and all the accouterments of a protected czar. Of course, his private life is an utter mess. He's a ide control freak, recently divorced, who spends lonely evenings at home eating sandwiches prepared by his housekeeper.

In his first TV chat since being treated for throat cancer, Michael Douglas says he's "relieved" that the tumor that plagued him for months has disappeared. "I feel good, relieved. The tumor is gone," Douglas tells Matt Lauer in a chat set to air Tuesday on Today . "But, you know, I have to check out on a monthly basis now to maintain. I guess there's not a total euphoria. " Catherine Zeta-Jones ' hub adds, "It's been a wild six-month ride. " Douglas' treatment hasn't all been fun and games: There are side effects.

Music M.I.A. With Rye Rye. Maya Arulpragasam doesn't want to be a proper pop star. "It's like people want me to become some kind of Cinderella," says the rapper known as M.I.A., 35, who will be found headlining the Electric Factory on Sunday, with her protege Rye Rye opening the show. Talking on the phone this week from Montreal, where Arulpragasam was preparing for the start of a U.S. tour in support of her confrontational third album, Maya, she spoke about "the spirit of punk, of not lying down and accepting things.

Oliver Stone's bookend to Wall Street , his brazenly entertaining 1987 melodrama that seemed to explain the stock market crash two months prior, Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps glistens and bursts like the 2008 banking bubble it chronicles. It boasts sharp performances from Michael Douglas reprising his role as slimy financier Gordon Gekko and Shia LaBeouf as stock analyst Jake Moore, engaged to Gekko's estranged daughter. The film whipsaws between hyperbolic character study and preachy account of the recent financial meltdown.

You expect Oliver Stone to smash his big socialist hammer over the head of high finance in "Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps," but it's a blow that never lands. The movie is short on outrage, long on character, even longer on anticlimax - it's like heading out to a heavyweight prizefight and ending up at the avant-garde theater. Stone, who farmed out the writing to Allan Loeb and Stephen Schiff, is surprisingly soft on the subject of the recent mortgage-bubble meltdown. The movie ruminates thoughtfully on bubbles as an inevitable outgrowth of human nature, of nature itself, and is resigned to the idea that boom and bust cycles are part of life.

NOT EVEN a movie company would be this crass, so it's surely a coincidence that "Solitary Man" arrives on DVD as star Michael Douglas goes public about his cancer. The movie features one of Douglas' better recent performances - he plays a self-destructive business tycoon doing emotional damage to himself and those around him, including Mary Louise Parker, Jesse Eisenberg and Susan Sarandon. The movie is unusually well written, even if the writers provide a third-act revelation that tries too hard to undo the riddle of Douglas' character.

Larry King , 77, is replaceable after all. CNN said Wednesday that the avuncular talk-show host, whose suspenders, owl-eyed glasses, and penchant for collecting ex-wives (six to date) have made him a myth, will be replaced in January by Brit tabloid journo and self-made myth Piers Morgan , 45, best known here as a judge on America's Got Talent . "I have watched Larry King Live for much of the last 25 years, and dreamed of one day filling [his] legendary suspenders," says Morgan, who calls King "the greatest TV interviewer of them all. " Morgan, who was top dog at News of the World and the Daily Mirror, hosts a chat show on ITV, and has penned eight books, including his third memoir, God Bless America . One thing's for sure, he won't be boring: He says he likes to spark media feuds and has been reviled as "arrogant," "smarmy" and "self-satisfied.

FOLLOWING HER most recent arrest (this time for exiting an Escalade reeking of marijuana and shortly thereafter dropping a little bag of coke from a purse she claims wasn't hers), Paris Hilton was banned yesterday from two Wynn resorts on the Las Vegas Strip (Wynn Las Vegas and Encore). Presumably she is still welcome at the Las Vegas Hilton. Maybe even the Paris. And her boyfriend Cy Waits , who was also arrested in his pot-mobile, is now out of work. He was "separated" from his job after less than a week as top managing partner of two Wynn nightclubs, Wynn Resorts spokeswoman Jennifer Dunne said in a statement.

Well, it's official - nobody's better at playing narcissistic megalomaniac rich guys than Michael Douglas. For conformation, you don't have to wait for his Gordon Gekko reboot in September's "Wall Street" sequel. You get the full Michael right now in "Solitary Man," featuring Douglas as Ben, a disgraced businessman in the throes of colorful midlife(ish) self-destruction. When we meet him, he has junked a great marriage (to Susan Sarandon), has imploded a string of successful car dealerships and seems determined to sabotage things with his new girlfriend (Mary-Louise Parker)

Michael Douglas is at his best when playing a character at his worst. Solitary Man is a wafer-thin film with a river-deep, mountain-high performance from Douglas. For its unpitying look at a pitiful man, it rivals the actor's turns in the underknown Wonder Boys and King of California . This time he is Ben Kalmen, disgraced New York businessman, who amuses himself and appalls everyone else by bedding women and girls with daddy issues. Some might describe this incorrigible lech, a sexagenarian in more ways than one, as Hugh Hefner with Gordon Gekko hair and a gecko's reptilian ethics.