BEFORE: Working with the loose theme of mortality this week. Linking is made simple by the fact that Will Smith was also in "Men in Black" with Tony Shalhoub (last heard in "Cars 2"), who appears tonight.
THE PLOT: A reporter interviews a homeless man, who tells her that she's going to die and her life is meaningless.
AFTER: I just watched a show that aired on the National Geographic Channel, called "Comic Book Heroes", which profiled the staff of Midtown Comics, a popular comic book store in Manhattan. The show also depicted a few of the customers, including my least favorite type of comic book shopper: the guy who picks up 30 or 40 copies of the same book, looking for the "perfect" one, the one with no nicks or folds or imperfections, meanwhile getting his grubby fingerprints over all of the others, including the one I'm probably going to buy. Not cool, and I assume the fact that this guy buys so many books regularly is the reason they don't throw him out on his keister.
But even worse is the fact that he doesn't read the books he buys (probably because he spends so much time hunting for the perfect copies), which he admits while holding a large stack of books and shedding his slimy epithelials all over them. So not only is he damaging other people's comics, he's missing the entire point of the exercise, to read and (hopefully) enjoy the books.
I can get away with this tonight, since the film made a similarly horrible analogy comparing a relationship to Altoids mints: life is like a comic-book shop, and we may be there for different reasons, but the goal is to find the items in the shop that have personal meaning for us, without infringing on the goals of others while we are there.
This is essentially the lesson that the main character of tonight's film needs to learn - of course the film couldn't make her too obnoxious at first or we would hate her, so it had to drop little hints that this is a career-oriented woman who doesn't realize how her 5-year plan impacts others, and that she's not a team player in any sense of the word. She's got a high-profile boyfriend, refuses the most demeaning parts of her job (as a TV reporter/talking head), and harbors resentment toward her sister who appears to have the "perfect" family.
It takes an encounter with a homeless man who appears to have the gift of prophecy for her to confront her own mortality, and (perhaps) get a better sense of the urgency of existence - somehow the acknowledgement of our limited life-span can be a motivator, a wake-up call to get things done, and a humbling factor as well.
I figured that the film would find a way to weasel out of its own prophecy, but I wasn't exactly sure how it might accomplish that. Because it still surprised me, and also because it referenced my high-school yearbook quote ("Live every day as if it is your last, because one day you'll be right"), I might be going easy on the rating tonight.
I guess I haven't told the Ed Burns story yet, since this is his first appearance in the countdown. I sat next to him on a plane to Miami in 2002, and may have talked him out of making a comic-book movie. I recognized him by his voice when he ordered a drink, and noticed he was reading a screenplay for "The Punisher". When he saw me reading comic books, he started asking me questions about which books I read, which heroes I liked, and he said he was a fan of the Silver Surfer. I let slip that they had made a film about the Punisher before (the Dolph Lungren one) and he was unaware of that. He said that his agent was pressuring him to make a superhero film (the X-Men franchise was hot at the time), but since he didn't appear in or direct any Punisher film, maybe his conversation with me had an impact on his career, but whether for better or worse, I can't say.
Starring Angelina Jolie (last seen in "The Tourist"), Edward Burns, James Gammon (last seen in "The Cell"), Stockard Channing (last seen in "The First Wives Club"), Christian Kane (last seen in "Friday Night Lights"), Gregory Itzin (last seen in "Law Abiding Citizen").
RATING: 5 out of 10 segues
There comes the time when you need to do a careful self-assessment of your habits and routines. It's hard to pinpoint the exact month when the reason why you do something stopped being "Because it gives me pleasure" and started being "Because I've always done this and it's never occurred to me to stop."
ReplyDeleteFirst I stopped organizing the comics I bought every week. Then, I stopped saving them (I now throw away or give away most of them, after a few weeks). These days, even my monthly volume of comic book purchasing trends closer to zero every year.
("Fantastic Four" was a minor revelation. After my nth month in a row of closing the back cover and thinking "I hated that. I absolutely hated that issue" it finally occurred to me that it was OK -- really, OK -- if I were to stop buying the comic that's been on my pull list for most of my life.
I wonder what I would have done, in your position there next to Ed Burns. If I had only two shots to help him make a good movie, what idea would I want to leave him with? "Don't waste the whole first third of your movie on an origin tale that nobody cares about; let us learn about this character by what he does"? Or would I try to get him to read "Usagi Yojimbo"?
I've tried over the years to imagine what Ed Burns' version of "The Punisher" would have been like. Would he have directed the film, or played the John Travolta role, or appeared as the Punisher in place of Thomas Jane? I just don't see that working any possible way.
ReplyDeleteMy theory now is that Ed Burns' agent was pressuring him to get on board a comic-book project, and that just happened to be the first one that came his way.
The mind boggles...