Month: December 2006

It’s over: the year-end issue clocked in at 406 pages, and it’s all out the door (except for a couple of house ads that our art dept. is putting together)!

I officially apologize to everyone whose e-mails I’ve failed to reply to, and I also apologize in advance for the lateness of holiday presents, which I’ll likely ship tomorrow and will almost assuredly not show up in time for whichever holiday or festival you celebrate.

On the plus side, the issue’s done!

It was the Nicholas Hoult Appreciation Weekend at Chez VM (and Chez MI)! Sure, it wasn’t on the official calendar, but that’s never stopped us before!

Saturday night, Amy & I settled in to watch Wah-Wah, the directorial debut of Richard E. Grant. It’s an autobiographical take on his youth in Swaziland, leading up to its (and his) independence. If even half the story Grant tells is true (and I haven’t read anything that indicates any of it is fictive), watching this movie will make you want to give him an “it’s not so bad” hug.

The depictions of his father’s alcoholism and his mother’s adultery & abandonment are harrowing. Somehow, Grant manages to bring whimsy to the story, in the device of a local performance of the musical Camelot, in honor of the pending visit of Princess Margaret. In fact, Grant’s take on the dynamics of day-to-day life in Swaziland c. 1971 are filled with charm, but always manage to show the dark side — the alcoholism, the faithless marriages, the classism, xenophobia and racism — of it all.

Which is to say, you really oughtta see it, at least to see Gabriel Byrne, one of the great “charming drunk” actors around, and Emily Watson, who doesn’t work enough. Julie Walters was also sublime.

Anyway, when Richard E. Grant’s stand-in in the movie returns from boarding school at age 14, Amy asked, “Where have I seen that kid before?” Thanks to IMDB, we found out that “Ralph Compton” was played by Nicholas Hoult. She said, “Oh, that kid! He sure grew up from About a Boy!”

Which led to last night’s conclusion of Nicholas Hoult Appreciation Weekend. Coincidentally, we TiVo’d about a boy in HD a few days earlier, when Amy & I were about to settle in with Olive the Other Reindeer, which I didn’t remember as having such dated (c. 1999) animation.

I’m going to roll into “tooting my own horn” territory now, but hey. See, back in 2003, on two separate occasions a few weeks apart, women told me I looked like Hugh Grant. “You mean in the mug-shot?” I asked both times.

No, said the wife of the German journalist who was on our press junket in Puerto Rico.

No, said the Yemenite matchmaker on the Upper East Side.

“It’s when you smile,” they each told me.

I was flattered, but perplexed, with that perplexity growing the second time I received the comparison. It wasn’t as flummoxing as the Matthew McConaughey lookalike I once received, but a compliment’s a compliment. I think.

Anyway, Amy admitted that she never “got” the Hugh Grant thing, after I told her about it. Until she saw About a Boy.

I held off on watching it partly because I feared it would be one of those “oh, aren’t those wacky British people charming and better than we are?” sorta flicks, and partly because the previous Nick Hornby adaption I saw, High Fidelity, was one of the worst movies of all time (except for the Jack Black stuff, of course).

So we tuned in last night and — tooting my own horn — I had to admit that I’m the bizarro clone of Hugh Grant. All I’m saying is, if everything about his face wasn’t quite right, you’d end up with me: far less than the sum of the parts. I’m much happier with this comparison than I was back in college and bore far too strong a resemblance to Jake Johannsen.

As it turns out, I was pretty entertained by the movie. I thought Grant put in a good performance as a cad. Sure, the character’s “growth” was pretty predictable, but I didn’t find it embarrassing or insulting. In all, it was a good-natured flick about boys not growing up.
What was incredibly freaky about it is the presence of Nicholas Hoult. See, as far as I can tell, this film was shot about 2 years before Wah-Wah. Evidently, Hoult spent that time taking Philip McKeon-grade growth hormone. The short, pudgy, geeky 12-year-old in About a Boy became a gaunt, long-ass stand-in for Richard E. Grant in about 24 months. It’s an amazing transformation.

Anyway, the kid’s a good actor, even with his freaky eyebrows. Go catch Wah-Wah and if you see Richard E. Grant, give him a hug for me.

Time magazine says Whitney Houston has it wrong: it is All-Everybody Day.

I headed into NYC last night after work to pick up Amy after her office’s Christmas party. My company’s party is this afternoon, which’ll give me a nice break from that big-ol’ directory I’m laying out.

Our “holiday” party has had some entertainment over the years. I mean, in addition to the planned stuff, like our annual “Rodnac” rip-off of Carson’s “Carnac” routine, where we goof on various former employees. No, I’m talking about the astonishing levels of drunkenness that can only accompany an open bar at an unsuspecting restaurant.
In past years, we’ve seen one attendee “fall asleep” in a bar bathroom, another crawl into the back seat of an unlocked car (not her own) in the parking lot and “fall asleep” there, and a third who fell over on a serving table, shattering it and earning the scorn and laughter of . . . his wife.

So my question to you, dear readers is, “What’s the most embarrassing / funny thing you’ve ever seen at a work-related Christmas party?”

Before I got a Sirius radio, I used to listen to sports-talk a lot during my drive home. It was a choice of that, politics, or pop music that even I find unbearable. I grew tired of the institutional egomania of the Mike & the Mad Dog show, so I tended to listen to its alternative, the slightly less egomaniacal Michael Kay show on ESPNradio’s local NYC feed. Nowadays, I listen to Howard Stern replays, First Wave, the Big 80s, the Chill, Area 33, Classic Vinyl and, infrequently, ESPNradio’s national show.

In addition to the rampaging egomania, another thing that turned me off about these shows is the segments devoted to subjects other than sports. See, the funny thing about me is, when I tune into a station called ESPNradio, I actually expect to hear people talking about sports, not about how surprising last night’s episode of The Sopranos was, what the best John Wayne film is, or why the remake of Sabrina was better than the original. (Note: I have heard all three of these subjects discussed on “sports radio” shows.)

A few weeks ago, I clicked over to ESPN’s “The SportsBash” (a name that’s always made me uncomfortable. I mean, is it a party about sports? Is it about beating up sports?) during my evening commute. The host was talking about “cult classic” movies and, for some reason, I stuck with it. I guess I was hoping that he’d tell the audience about the transformative impact of Wax, or the Discovery of Television Among the Bees. Alas, what passed for “cult” movies was fare like Old School.

I was about to change stations, when the host said (paraphrasing), “I consider myself a little knowledgeable about cult movies, but I have to say, I’ve gotten about a dozen e-mails now telling me to see a movie called ‘Boondock Saints,’ and I gotta tell you, I’ve never heard of that one!”

The title was vaguely familiar, but I’d never seen it. I looked it up on Netflix when I got home:

Twin brothers Conner (Sean Patrick Flanery) and Murphy (Norman Reedus), feeling that their God-given mission is to cleanse the Earth of all human evil, set out to rid Boston of crime. But instead of joining the police force, these Irish Americans decide to kick criminal butt their own way — a la Charles Bronson. Willem Dafoe is the openly gay FBI special agent assigned to investigate.

We put the movie at the top of our queue, and watched it Saturday night. Amy asked, “Is it particularly important that Dafoe’s character is ‘openly gay’?” I told her that I didn’t know. Then he made his first appearance, at a crime scene. At that point he eyed one of the local cops for an instant, then put his headphones on, turned on his portable CD player — this was 1999, pre-iPod — and listened to opera while investigating the scene.

“Yeah,” I said, “I’m gonna guess that it’s kinda important that his character be out.”

His character goes on to engage in some pretty erratic behavior, as he begins to piece together the identities of the people who are knocking off Russian and Italian mobsters all around Boston. Dafoe’s crisis of conscience culminates in him showing up in a climactic scene in drag, the gratuitousness of which would be funny if he didn’t actually look halfway decent as a woman. It’s amazing what rouge, false eyelashes and a wig can do for a guy.

Sure, there are a couple of outlandish plot elements, and a lot of subtly gay moments of the twin brothers being all shirtless and pretty, but we also get Billy Connolly doing his Jean Reno / killing machine impression, Ron Jeremy as a mobster, and a closing-credit attempt at social commentary that’s unintentionally funny.

Which is to say, I’d recommend catching this flick (even though some of the cuts and transitions make little sense). It’s an entertaining post-Tarantino crime flick, in its over-the-top-itude.

So sports-radio shows can be good for something.

(Bonus trivia: the “ugly brother” knocked up Helena Christensen!)