BEFORE: I've got the cable guy coming out to the house today - again - because my DVR's been doing that thing again where it crashes every 20 minutes or so, which makes it very frustrating to try and watch - or record to tape - a full movie. I've been trying to dub "Bad Times at the El Royale" to DVD for three days now, and every time I start it, it crashes 20 or 30 minutes later, and I have to start again. This is not helping to clear space on my DVR, which acted up like this last year - and of course the cable company's first solution is to just swap out my DVR for a new one, but then if I let them do that, I'll lose about twenty or thirty movies that are stored there, so that's out. I paid for those movies over time, and just because I haven't gotten around to watching them, that's no reason why I should lose them. (Why they can't transfer the contents of my old drive to a new drive, I don't quite understand.)
So, hopefully the problem's with the signal coming in to the house, or possibly some new software system that was downloaded to my DVR in the middle of the night, with no notice - because they do that from time to time - and the new software doesn't work on the old DVR, and nobody's reported any problems yet, so they don't know that some kind of patch or signal needs to be sent to the DVR to make it work right. I really should just watch everything and try to clear the box, but that would work against my OCD-based viewing order system. At least the DVR is only 69% full right now, I've had it as full as 80% and at that point, it could be the lack of space causing problems. But it's probably new software, that's what I remember it being last year, and the machine stopped crashing after a couple of weeks. I think. Look, I don't care if it crashes once a day, in the middle of the night or whatever, I just can't have it crashing every 20 minutes.
If I knew for sure every movie I want to see is available somewhere else, on one streaming service or another, I could drop the cable box entirely and save a lot of money - but then I'd miss the few network shows I watch, and also I'd STILL need to keep paying for internet, because that's how I access all the streaming services, so I guess I can't really make any big changes after all. What am I going to do, STOP watching a movie almost every day? I've come too far now to stop, it's become my thing, a big part of who I am.
Peter Dinklage carries over from "I Care a Lot".
FOLLOW-UP TO: "Fantasy Island" (Movie #3,787)
THE PLOT: A look at the life of French actor Hervé Villechaize, co-star of the hit 70's TV series "Fantasy Island", who took his own life in 1993 at the age of 50.
AFTER: There's a lot to be said for movie magic, also TV magic. What we see on the screen becomes our reality, even if that's just for a half hour, we're immersed in what we see and we're not distracted by what we don't see. We don't see the crew lingering just out of camera range (usually) and through the magic of editing (and costuming, and continuity) we don't realize that by stepping inside a building, an actor maybe just moved from one location to another one hundreds of miles away. Back in 2018 my wife and I visited Southfork Ranch in Dallas, where they filmed parts of the TV show "Dallas". She's seen every episode, and that was her reality, only it wasn't reality at all. They only filmed the outdoor scenes there, the interiors were sets in Los Angeles - it makes sense when you see behind the curtain, the ranch needs to look like a ranch, which it is, but interior sets need to be a certain way, to allow space for cameras and sound equipment, and on some shows even a live audience, so there are usually three walls to a room instead of four, every room is custom built to order, there are set designers and decorators and costumers who all work to make things look a certain way, and mostly the audience at home has no idea how much work goes into making that reality look like nobody built or designed it at all, it just IS.
When I was a kid, I didn't understand any of that - through "Star Wars" I learned about much of this, because I figured out they didn't really go into space with a bunch of cameras and film what happened, it was all built and manufactured and decorated to look a certain way, and once my brain learned what goes on behind the scenes, a mental adjustment was made, but after that I could never quite turn that off and believe 100% again, though better CGI came along to help with that. I'm still finding myths from my childhood that need to be dispelled, because I watched "Love Boat" and "Fantasy Island" before that - at the time, I really thought that the cast of "Love Boat" went on a cruise every week, not realizing that they mostly used stock footage of Caribbean islands and the cast worked on a set in L.A. that resembled the Lido Deck. By the same token, there were exterior shots at the start of "Fantasy Island" designed to make you think that this week's guest stars were in that plane heading to Hawaii (or whereever) but it just wasn't true - that was the same exact footage of a seaplane, week after week. You never saw the actors getting into the plane, just stepping out of it, just like you never see a magician trading places with his assistant via the trapdoor in a box.
So, that building exterior from each week's opening of the "Fantasy Island" show is the Queen Anne Cottage, and it's in the L.A. County Arboretum and Botanic Garden. There's a lagoon behind it, where they built a fake plane for the guests to "arrive" at the island, and after that point, the filming moved on to interior sets, which could have been anywhere - yep, mostly Warner Bros. Studios in Burbank, with exteriors shot at the nearby Warner Ranch. This means that Hervé Villechaize, the actor who played Tattoo, only had to climb the bell tower, ring that bell and shout "Da plane! Da plane!" ONE time, and they used that same footage every week. It also means that actors are basically treated as meat puppets, executives don't care if they have to travel between, say, Dallas and Los Angeles to shoot both interiors and exteriors, or hundreds of people have to work really hard to remove all evidence of how the sausage is made. All that matters is what shows up on the screen, that it makes sense and that it looks nice.
Of course, Hervé ended up saying "Da plane! Da plane!" a lot more than once, because people wanted him to say it anywhere and everywhere. He even said it in a famous Dunkin' Donuts commercial, where he couldn't decide what type of donut to order, chocolate, no wait, cinnamon, then suddenly had an epiphany ("Da plain! Da plain!") and Dunkin was able to tap into that lucrative market of customers who simply love homonyms when they order food. But what of the man himself? What effect did this have on him, to be suddenly recognized everywhere, known and loved instead of hated or ignored, paid more money than he thought he ever would, and welcomed into America's homes each week by the magic of TV? He blew it, that's what.
Maybe it's an all-too-common story - because fame and recognition are always fleeting, to some degree, and the IMDB is filled with actors who were once on top of the world, made sitcom money for five or six years and then had long gaps in their careers, or were in a series of hit movies and then reached a point where they'd take just about any job, or become that guy who makes you say, "Hey, it's THAT guy!" when you see him in a small role. You can talk about ageism, sexism, racism or Hollywood's general ability to dispose of people when they're deemed no longer useful, but you also have to consider any one person's inability to keep their ego in check or save their money, plus there's all kinds of temptation out there in La-La land, drink and drugs and casual sex and stop me if you've heard this story before, maybe a hundred times over.
Hervé Villechaize was born in France, and after being bullied for his short size while growing up, he showed promise as an artist - he studied at the École des Beaux Arts when he was 16, and was the youngest person at the time to have work displayed at the Museum of Paris. But he wanted to act, and got his break in the James Bond film "The Man with the Golden Gun", playing Nick Nack, a diminutive assassin, whom Bond defeated by locking him into a steamer trunk. The Bond films were always a bit ridiculous this way, and maybe nobody clued Hervé in on the joke or something, but he saw this as the first step in an acting career that was sure to be long and fruitful. Yet he was living in his car when his agent brought him the script for "Fantasy Island", and then after three years on this hit show, he was propositioning actresses on the set and arguing with the producers. Finally he demanded more money, a salary equal to the one Ricardo Montalban was getting, and this got him fired and got Mr. Roarke another assistant.
This led to, well, not much - a couple guest star roles on TV, one movie role in 1988 ("Two Moon Junction", well known by fans of "Twin Peaks" actress Sherilyn Fenn) and a lot of inactivity and regret, I assume. Also, what this film depicts, him giving what would become his last interview to a magazine writer, which really happened, though the name of the writer's been changed. The writer of that article eventually wrote the screenplay that became this film, and I usually HATE seeing a writer writing something at the end of a film that becomes the film we're all watching, it's just too meta and cutesy, but here it's all true, and kind of the only way to end it. Villechaize shot himself a few days after giving that interview, and so that leads to the question over whether he'd been planning this for some time, or whether the interview dragged up all those old regrets and made him feel all the pain of his life choices again.
It's National Mental Health Awareness Month, not an occasion I usually mark, but this is a perfect opportunity to mention it - if you're having thoughts of suicide, please talk to someone or seek professional help. Maybe that's my loose theme for the week, "Otherhood" was all about male adults having relationships with their mothers, and getting everything unspoken out for discussion, that's like a form of therapy. All those sons were screw-ups, and Hervé Villechaize was a screw-up - face it, we're all screw-ups in some form or another, and with the pandemic year we've had, people out of work, people quarantining and feeling disconnected from others during lockdown, then feeling anxious over health issues, dealing with unemployment, paranoid over unseen viruses and don't get me started about politics, we're all pretty frazzled. We all may need to ask for help at various times in our lives, and with everything going on in the world, if you're having trouble dealing with it all, please check yourself before you wreck yourself.
What I was most concerned about, going in to this, was seeing Peter Dinklage - or, rather, HEARING Peter Dinklage play Hervé, who had a particular way of speaking, which I now realize was a French accent, though I didn't think of it as such back then. He also had a rather limited acting range, to be honest, though I think in his mind he thought he deserved to be called the greatest French actor of his generation. (If only he'd stuck around to see Gerard Depardieu get taken down by the #metoo movement...) Dinklage did a HELL of a job here, though, he nailed the Villechaize voice, plus he's a damn fine actor. I'd say one of the greatest, pound for pound, if only that didn't sound like a little person joke. And I promised, none of that. But I still wonder if a hotel room's minibar is considered a full-sized bar to a shorter person. (Can I say that? I want to still be P.C. about this.)
One of the few reality shows that I watch is "Little People, Big World", and it's just returned for season (good God) 22. Yeah, I've watched that all - I think at first because I knew the parents in the Roloff family had played Ewoks in "Return of the Jedi", but they weren't named characters, so I never collected their autographs. But I did get hooked into the family drama, and I'm glad that this TLC show has subsidized the family's income from their Oregon farm over the years, but at some point, this show's got to end, right? RIGHT?
Also starring Jamie Dornan (last seen in "Robin Hood" (2018)), Andy Garcia (last seen in "Smokin' Aces"), Mireille Enos (last seen in "Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far on Foot"), Oona Chaplin (last seen in "Quantum of Solace"), Harriet Walter (last seen in "Rocketman"), David Strathairn (last seen in "Godzilla: King of the Monsters"), Daniel Mays (last seen in "1917"), Alex Gaumond (last seen in "Hampstead"), Félicité Du Jeu (last seen in "A Good Year"), Wallace Langham (last seen in "Ford v Ferrari"), Mark Povinelli (last seen in "Water for Elephants"), Helena Mattsson (last seen in "Seven Psychopaths"), Alan Ruck (last seen in "Captive State"), Michael Elwyn, Ashleigh Brewer, Mark Umbers (last seen in "A Good Woman"), Robert Curtis Brown, Jim Sturgeon, Laurence Ubong Williams, Savannah Stevenson, Doug Cox (last seen in "The Hero"), Adam Shapiro (last seen in "The Female Brain") with archive footage of John Wayne, Jack Barry, Bob Eubanks.
RATING: 6 out of 10 hot dogs from Pink's
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