Billy Zane isn't bad, just misunderstood

Billy Zane has played his fair share of villainous roles -- more than his fair share, actually, even though he was a pretty dang nifty Phantom -- but he insists that the pistol-waving, jealously inflamed dandy he memorably portrayed in Titanic really wasn't such a bad guy after all.

"Look," he told me a few weeks ago, sounding extraordinary comprehensible for someone whose tongue was firmly implanted in his cheek, "he had every right to be upset. I mean, his girlfriend cheated on him with this other guy. So of course he wanted to shoot him."

Even while the great ship already was taking on water?

"Well, yeah. And, see, that wasn't his fault. So you can't say he was the villain here. It wasn't like he was the iceberg -- that's what killed those thousands of people."

On the other hand: Zane co-stars in Hannah's Law, a well-done made-for-cable Western airing at 7 pm CT Saturday (June 9) on the Hallmark Movie Channel. And yes, he's pretty dastardly in this one. You can read by Cowboys & Indians Magazine interview with Zane here.

The Ghost Who Walks (Again)

For more than a decade, I've counted The Phantom -- Simon Wincer's likably lightweight 1996 action-adventure based on the Lee Falk comic strip -- among my favorite guilty pleasures, if only because it's one of the very few movies of its kind in which a superhero actually enjoys doing derring-do. So I have to admit that I'll be tuning in when the Sci Fi Channel airs a four-hour Phantom movie that's intended as a back-door pilot for a weekly series. I just hope Ryan Carnes has as much fun as Billy Zane did when he donned the purple body suit of The Ghost Who Walks.