The stars of the film Speed Racer were out for the premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival in NY on Saturday night. Christina Ricci looked incredible in a one-shoulder black dress. I like the way she’s grown out her helmet hair or has added extensions, it’s hard to tell, and is now wearing it in loose waves. She did a silly pose and showed off her line-drawn lion tattoo on her shoulder. When you’re a celebrity it seems like you should be more judicious about getting tattoos since you rely on your body for work, but they’re so easily covered up it doesn’t matter. Tattoos are for you not other people.

Ricci explained that the lion is Aslan from “The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe,” and explained that “It’s a symbol of my hellish childhood. I struggled through my oppressive teenage years and when I turned 18 I escaped. Like Aslan I was finally free.”

Ricci has plenty of other tattoos, including a bird on her left breast, praying hands on her lower stomach, the words “Move or Bleed” in script on her ribs, the name “Jack” on her thigh for her dead dog, and I could go on. I had a friend in college who loved tattoos and would get one whenever she had a momentous event or a hard time in her life, and it sounds like Ricci does that too.

Ricci’s costar Susan Saradon owes up to a couple of tattoos, including having her children’s initials on her back. She says that it hurt like a bitch, basically:

“I got my kids’ initials tattooed on my back,” Susan Sarandon, the 61-year-old Hollywood actress, disclosed at the premiere of Speed Racer, at the Empire, Leicester Square.

“It really hurt. It hurt so much more than I thought it would.”

“I got another tattoo on my wrist afterwards,” added the Oscar-winning star of Dead Man Walking.

“But I’m going to save the next one until I’m 70 or 80.”

[From Telegraph.co.uk]

And as for other needles, 61 year-old Sarandon says she’s not getting Botox either, and not just because it pricks. She says it makes you look like you’re wearing a mask and that she wants to get parts for her age group:

You can see I haven’t had Botox [or] these things would be gone,” she said, pointing to her frown lines. “I can’t afford to have my face not moving…”

In a few years, “I’ll have an advantage of being the only one who looks 60,” she said with a laugh. “Everyone else looks so much younger. [I’ll] probably get all those parts!”

[From People.com]

Sarandon doesn’t take hormone replacement therapy and relies on antioxidants, dermabrasion and exercise like Pilates to help maintain her beauty. She really is an example of how to age gracefully in Hollywood.

Sarandon has two three children, Eva Amurri, 23, with her ex, Italian director Franco Amurri, and Miles, 16, and Jack, 19, with longterm love Tim Robbins. She had Miles when she was 45 and he might help keep her young too. Or at least on her toes.

Speed Racer is in theaters in the US on May 9th, and is out around the world in most countries around that time or in early June. It’s getting mixed reviews and is said to be campy and visually appealing with a less than satisfying plot.

Christina Ricci has an opinion on Lindsay Lohan – don’t we all? – but for once it has to do with her acting roles and not her private life. Ricci says that Lohan somehow glamorized stripper roles in films, and that’s stupid.

Ricci claims stars like Lohan, who peeled off in 2007 movie I Know Who Killed Me, have created a culture of women who find flattery in misogyny.

She says, “It used to be something that we (women) were sort of ashamed of. You didn’t want to admit to people that you were a stripper.

“But now, the hottest thing to say is, ‘I can work a pole!’ Who gives a f**k? But it’s a huge weird thing.

“I mean, you see actresses, and their passion project is to play a stripper. It’s just stupid.”

Contact Music

A few years ago women were changing their attractive appearances to win Oscars. Remember Nicole Kidman’s nose in ‘The Hours’, Charlize Theron in ‘Monster’? Christina Ricci is currently doing it in ‘Penelope’ by wearing a pig’s nose on her otherwise flawless face.

There’s a little article this week in the Sydney Morning Herald about the volume of men now going full frontal in film, and how women don’t seem to react in quite the same way as men.

The 28-year-old comedian (Jason Segal, in Forgetting Sarah Marshall)is presented in full-frontal glory during a break-up scene that involves Segel naked, dripping wet and sobbing like a baby. No clever Austin Powers-style genital obfuscation with props. No artful lighting to preserve any mystery. And the camera cuts away from close-ups of his teary face (he’s being dumped by his girlfriend, the titular Sarah, played by Kristen Bell) to wider, phallus-inclusive shots three times.

At the South by Southwest festival, Segel almost brought the house down with laughter every time he was shown au naturel.

Segel wrote the film’s script, basing the scene on a real-life naked break-up of his own. The actor-writer contemplated inequalities between male and female film nudity before putting himself on display.

“When a woman does nudity in a movie, men immediately switch into a sexual mode,” he says. “For women, from what I understand, it’s not like that. They see a naked, out-of-shape man crying and it’s funny - something weird, disturbing and disgusting we can all laugh at.”

Maybe it is the increase in male nudity that is encouraging women to do more confronting nude scenes as strippers. Or maybe it’s just a result of the pole dancing work out craze, why bother to develop a skill if you can’t use it at work?

I tried the whole pole dance work out phenomenon. You really have to be very coordinated not to injure yourself. I think I gained 5 pounds waiting for my arms to stop hurting.

Picture note by Celebitchy: Christina Ricci and the cast of “Speedracer” are shown at the Grand Prix on 4/19/08, thanks to PRPhotos. Susan Sarandon looks great! Also shown are Matthew Fox, Emile Hirsch, John Goodman, and racers Gerardo Bonila and Ben Devlin.

Julia Roberts received a standing ovation last night on the official opening of her broadway play “Three Days of Rain.” Many celebrities attended the show and after party, and people said they loved it. Unfortunately the critics trashed Julia’s performance.

The play is a huge box office success, though, thanks to Roberts’ star power. All 16 performances are sold out, and have grossed nearly $2 million.

Celebrities pictured attending the show include James Gandolfini, Dave Matthews, Marcia Gay Harden, Thaddeus Scheel, Rosie Perez, Kristen Johnston, Susan Sarandon, Tim Robbins, Elaine Stritch, Oprah, Gayle King, Mario Cantone, and Michael C. Hall. Roberts is shown on stage and at the after party with her co-stars, Paul Rudd, and Bradley Cooper.

Sienna Miller’s new extensions look terrible, and she’s a total mess. The girl needs to get a stylist right away. Even one of those anorexic blonde boho stylists would do a better job at dressing her than she does herself. Hell, a random person on the street could probably pick out a better look for the actress.

The only recent news about Miller involves a mystery guy she supposedly had a date with, and the fact that she made an ass of herself at the Oscar parties, which we already reported.

Here she is in NY yesterday wearing sunglasses she could have replaced with a more stylish pair off the street. She is also seen on Monday wearing paint-splattered boots and running into Susan Sarandon. [via]

Update: Some images removed on request.

The launch party for the architect Frank Gehry’s jewelry line was held at Tiffanys in New York last night. Gehry uses different materials to create unique, modern pieces:

Plenty of stars attended the event, including Ashton Kutcher, Kyra Sedgwick, Kevin Bacon, Susan Sarandon, Rosie Perez, Famke Janssen, Kristin Chenoweth, Jamie-Lynn Sigler, Billy Crystal, Ashton Kutcher, Dennis Hopper, Lake Bell, and Lorraine Bracco. DJ AM performed.

12 pictures total.

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