Jodie Foster

Jodie Foster, who earned an Oscar nomination 32 years ago for playing a child prostitute in Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver, plays a more cultured character in The Brave One, an illegitimate heir to that incendiary mid-1970s masterpiece. Here she's a radio personality who reports poetically on the changing face of New York until her own face is beaten to a pulp. Then the whole thing turns into trash with flash. The Brave One (Warner Bros.) Starring Jodie Foster, Terrence Howard. Directed by Neil Jordan.

"Contact," based on the late Carl Sagan's novel about what happens when a dish antenna in New Mexico picks up signals from outer space, is an expanding-universe movie. Jodie Foster, who more than anyone has enlarged Hollywood's view of what women can be, is an expanding-universe artist.Foster stars as Ellie Arroway, an astronomer passionately lobbying Congress to be allowed to blast off to the distant galaxy that responded to her radio probes."It would be crazy not to believe in the possibility of there being life out there," Foster says.

"For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbors, and laugh at them in our turn?"-- Jane Austen Yes, yes, of course we all watched the Academy Awards last night to see who won what.But, admit it: Long after we've forgotten who won the Oscar for Sound Effects Editing or Animated Short Film, we will remember who wore what on Hollywood's Big Night Out.The Bad. The Beautiful. The Glitzy. The Gaudy. The Sexy. The Tacky.And, of course, everybody's favorite: The Just Plain Wacko.It really was, wasn't it, an absolutely fabu night.

In the 1950s, the pop question was "Why Do Fools Fall in Love?" In the 1960s, it was "Where Have All the Flowers Gone?" In the 1970s, it was "Voulez-vous coucher avec moi?" And in the 1980s it was "What's Love Got to Do With It?" So will we recall the 1990s with "Who Will Save Your Soul?" the sweetly vindictive musing that has made singer-songwriter Jewel Kilcher into a pop star and glossy cover girl?According to the July Details, the magazine's annual music issue, the Alaskan beauty is saving her own soul along with a few multiplatinum records, with the help of a cultish following that may soon be nominating their ethereal, angelic leader for sainthood.

History buffs, take note: Today's offerings include the first episode of "Taxi," a vintage "Saturday Night Live" with Jodie Foster as host (though you'll need to get up pretty early to see it) and a movie featuring just about every comedian alive in 1964.* "National Geographic: On Assignment" (8 p.m.-9 p.m., MPT, Channels 22 and 67) -- "Water Blasters" takes us down inside the New York City water system to see just how all that water gets to all those faucets.* "Sisters" (10 p.m.-11 p.m., WBAL, Channel 11)

Talk about star-power and Oscars and glamour all you want, but the real star of Baltimore's gala premiere of "Home for the Holidays" was a 76-year-old retired carpenter and the simple two-story house he's lived in for more than 40 years.Bayard Russell doesn't have much in the way of charisma, and he's certainly not used to being the center of attention. But at the Senator Theatre Thursday night, no one was a bigger draw than the man whose home played the movie's title character.Even director Jodie Foster, the two-time Oscar winner whose presence was designed to put the gala into the big-premiere category, brightened when she happened upon Mr. Russell.

Jodie Foster brought "Home" to Baltimore last night and more than 1,000 people showed up at the Senator Theatre on York Road to give her a rousing Charm City welcome."

The world premiere for the film "Home for the Holidays," directed by Jodie Foster and shot in Baltimore, will be held at the Senator Theatre at 6:30 p.m. Nov. 2. Ms. Foster and actress Peggy Rajski will take part in the premiere, which benefits the Maryland Producers Club. The ticket price is $60 and includes a sidewalk block unveiling in front of the theater, a champagne dinner reception and a showing of the film, followed by a dessert reception. Tickets are available at the Senator Theatre daily from 1:30 p.m. to 7 p.m., cash or check only; call (410)

A trio of actresses with four Best Actress Oscars among them -- Jodie Foster, Holly Hunter and Anne Bancroft -- will make Baltimore their temporary home next month during the filming of "Home for the Holidays," a romantic comedy.Ms. Foster will co-produce and direct the movie, in which Ms. Hunter and Ms. Bancroft play a daughter and her mother coming to terms during a hectic Thanksgiving celebration.Over the past two weeks, Ms. Foster and a film production team have been in Baltimore scouting locations, auditioning for smaller cast parts and interviewing for production employees.

It would be so pleasant to report that once upon a time, Jodie Foster had an absolutely hellish Thanksgiving and has ever since harbored a grudge against turkey day. Then it would follow that her new filmed-in-Baltimore movie, "Home for the Holidays," was an auteur's revenge, charged with meaning.She decided to do to the holiday what the holiday had done to her: slice it to pieces.And that, in turn, would turn Thursday night's gala premiere of the film at the Senator theater (Foster will attend)

Is Jodie Foster psyching herself up to play the Cowardly Lioness? Why else would she follow her role in The Brave One as a fearful New Yorker who becomes a vigilante with a phobic San Franciscan who becomes a woman of adventure in Nim's Island? Foster may be working out some personal dilemmas with these forays into the bold and the timid, but not, I think, any artistic issues. The escapist comedy in Nim's Island is as coarse and cheap as the vengeance drama in The Brave One. Her character typifies everything that goes off course in this all-over-the-map movie.

THE FANCY FORMAL AFFAIR WAS ALIVE and well at the Marriott Waterfront Hotel last weekend. In fact, the bi-annual fundraiser for the Hospice of Baltimore and Gilchrest Center for Hospice Care was so eagerly anticipated, the party had to be moved into a larger ballroom to accommodate more than 800 guests. Not only were all the gentlemen in their tuxedo best, but most of the women wore floor-length dresses. "I'd say [that's] because of Mr. and Mrs. Modell," said retired stock trader Roula Passon, referring to honorary chairs Art and Pat Modell.

LOS ANGELES -- The Jodie Foster vigilante flick The Brave One scared up $14 million at the box office to become the weekend's top film. The Warner Bros. tale of revenge transcended gender, appealing to older women as well as men who might naturally be expected to enjoy the violent, R-rated film. "Revenge movies often appeal to men, but the fact that Jodie Foster was in it brought in the women," said Paul Dergarabedian, president of box-office tracker Media By Numbers. "That combination worked."

Jodie Foster, who earned an Oscar nomination 32 years ago for playing a child prostitute in Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver, plays a more cultured character in The Brave One, an illegitimate heir to that incendiary mid-1970s masterpiece. Here she's a radio personality who reports poetically on the changing face of New York until her own face is beaten to a pulp. Then the whole thing turns into trash with flash. The Brave One (Warner Bros.) Starring Jodie Foster, Terrence Howard. Directed by Neil Jordan.

INSIDE TODAY WHAT THEY'RE SAYING TODAY'S SUN COLUMNISTS Now appearing ... The city police department's ousted spokesman finds a new crime-and-media combo, at America's Most Wanted. Maryland baltimoresun.com/vozzella C. Miles visits Baltimore Former radio shock jock C. Miles returned to Baltimore recently, nine years after he was was canned at WOLB. Maryland baltimoresun.com/kane OTHER VOICES Tanika White on N.Y. Fashion Week. -- Today Rob Kasper picks tomatoes -- Food Jay Hancock on Ferris Baker Watts -- Business 5 THINGS TO DO TODAY Judy Chicago -- The artist best known for her pioneering feminist work The Dinner Party, ' pays homage to her secular Jewish upbringing during the 1940s and '50s.

Compulsions are ideas or impulses that repeatedly well up in the mind: They can infect dictators and inspire filmmakers. We were reminded of that by a forthcoming autobiography by Kola Boof, 37, a Sudanese poet and novelist. She claims to have been Osama bin Laden's sex slave and contends in her book that the al-Qaida terrorist leader was so obsessed with the singer Whitney Houston, he wanted to marry her and contemplated killing her husband, Bobby Brown. The item, first reported in the New York Post, summoned other peculiar fascinations of madmen - suspected and confirmed: North Korean dictator Kim Jong-il, best known for threatening nuclear brinkmanship with the free world, has long been a fan of basketball star Michael Jordan.

Vincent J. Fuller, 75, the star Washington attorney who defended would-be presidential assassin John Hinckley, died of lung cancer Wednesday at a hospice in Montgomery County. During his career, Mr. Fuller defended a number of notables, including boxer Mike Tyson and Teamsters Union boss Jimmy Hoffa. But he was best known for his successful insanity defense of Hinckley, who shot President Reagan, press secretary James Brady and two law enforcers outside a Washington hotel on March 30, 1981.

Critic's Pick-- In Siam to tutor his kids, a British teacher (Jodie Foster, above) clashes, then bonds with a ruler in Anna and the King (8 p.m.-11 p.m., AMC).

A recently widowed mother, her young daughter in tow, flies across the Atlantic, her husband's casket in the cargo hold. Mid-flight, she awakens from a nap to discover her daughter is nowhere to be found. No one on the plane remembers seeing her. The flight crew doubts she ever existed. Eventually, the mother, distraught with grief, begins questioning her own sanity. But she never stops looking. ... Jodie Foster appears in a movie every other year or so, and Flightplan reminds us why her films are worth the wait.

For Jodie Foster, it's all about transformation. That's what attracted her to the role of Kyle Pratt in Flightplan, her first American movie in three years. The two-time Oscar-winning actress plays a widow whose claims that her daughter has disappeared during a trans-Atlantic flight are met with skepticism and then denial by the flight crew. Foster says what drew her to Flightplan, which opens today, was the opportunity to portray Kyle first as a coldly analytical career woman, then as a self-doubting, possibly delusional widow, then as a fiercely determined and protective mother, all in the space of 88 minutes.