Author: Gil

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Lucky!

Thursday night, Amy & I watched Soapdish, which she hadn’t seen before. She enjoyed the heck out of it, but marveled over how much I liked the movie. I’d seen it a few years ago after a friend of mine told me, “It’s one of the only movies he’s in in which Robert Downey, Jr. doesn’t have the best performance.”

Watching me cracking up over the over-the-top bitchiness of the women’s performances, Amy asked me, “How did you ever end up marrying a woman?”

I replied that at least I wasn’t an opera fan, but that didn’t provide much of a defense.

Last night, we were clicking around when I noticed that Sky High was just starting.*

While I was making drinks in the kitchen, I heard Amy say, “Ooh! Lynda Carter!” and “Ooh! Bruce Campbell!” within two minutes.

I walked back into the living room and said to my wife, “And you’re amazed that I got married?”

Thank gosh we found each other.

* I recalled a short writeup in GQ that mentioned this flick as one of the least appreciated movies of 2005. Instead of tedious Disney kid-fare, it was actually supposed to be pretty witty (especially with two Kids in the Hall making appearances in it) and entertaining for semi-developed adults. Unfortunately, GQ has the least-helpful website in the world, so I can’t pull up that recommendation.

But it turned out to be right. The movie was a hoot, at least for geeks like us. And with the, um, mature sexiness of Ms. Carter and a straight-haired, brunette, glasses-wearing Kelly Preston, Sky High may have the highest MILF-factor of any movie in years.

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On the DL

Dennis Leary goofs on Mel Gibson while he sings the praises of Jewish ballplayers during a Red Sox broadcast.

(Some of you may wonder why, as a Yankees fan, I keep a link to a Red Sox blog in my blogroll. It’s because Mnookin’s an awfully good writer, isn’t prone to flying off the handle, and needs all the pity he can get, since he cheers for a team whose fans I witnessed perform The Wave five times during the June 19 game against the Nationals)

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Smoking Grass

I wanted to write a long piece exploring the tension of Gunter Grass’ novels with his recent admission that he served in the Waffen SS during World War II, but I was stymied by the fact that I’ve never read a word he wrote, probably due to my irrational bias that all Germans from that era were Nazis.

Anyway, Grass’ “frolicsome black fables portray the forgotten face of history,” sez the website for the Nobel Prize, which Grass won in 1999. The site also tells us, “after military service and captivity by American forces 1944-46, he worked as a farm laborer and miner and studied art in Düsseldorf and Berlin.” Which is true-ish. As is Grass’ own comment in his Nobel lecture, “Humans have much of the rat in them and vice versa.” I probably oughtta read that whole lecture sometime.

Now, I’m actually going to cut some slack for the 17-year-old Grass. Given that my dad lied about his age to join the military when he was a 16-year-old in Israel, I can pretty easily imagine a young Grass who wanted to join up, get away from his family and “help the war effort” or something.

I can even imagine a situation where he didn’t really understand that this could lead him into the SS. I don’t know the facts of military allocation during the war, so I can’t say that he’s lying about how he was assigned to the Waffen SS. And it certainly sounds like that unit was more devoted to combat operations than to the running of concentration camps and mass executions that other parts of the SS were engaged in.

War sweeps a lot of people up into decisions that they couldn’t imagine making in other circumstances. For a 17-year-old in a duty-bound society like that . . . well, I’m just saying that I don’t hold that piece of his history against him.

However, I am stuck trying to figure out what’s more unconscionable: not revealing till he was 78 the fact that he was in the Waffen SS, or only revealing it so he could have a sales peg for his new book.

Don’t get me wrong: I’ve tried marketing literary books before and “I served in the SS” isn’t much worse than some of the angles I’ve seen.

(Oh, and to that writer at Time who argues that Grass wouldn’t have been such a good/important writer had he not kept this deep, dark secret all along: you’re a moral imbecile.)

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Murder, he wrote

In Page 6 today, there’s an item about the believability of Tom Cruise’s heroic exploits:

The wacky superstar and fiancée Katie Holmes were widely reported to have pulled over when they saw an accident on L.A.’s 101 freeway last Saturday, and waited with motorist Jon Henningsen and his wife until police arrived at the scene.

But that was hardly the first time that Cruise has supposedly come to the rescue of some lucky civilian. According to various press reports over the years:

* In 2003, while filming “The Last Samurai” in New Zealand, Cruise supposedly helped a local family change a flat tire on a country road and assisted a young girl in catching her runaway horse. He also donated $3,800 to a local school that needed a “sun shelter.”

* In 1998, Cruise rushed to the defense of a woman being mugged on a London street and stopped thieves from making off with more than $150,000 in jewelry.

* In 1996, he summoned an ambulance to help an aspiring actress who was the victim of a hit-and-run, then paid her $7,000 emergency room bill.

* While he and then-wife Nicole Kidman were vacationing on a 210-foot yacht in Capri in 1993, they were reported to have come to the aid of a family whose yacht had caught on fire. Cruise and Kidman allegedly rescued the family from their life raft and took them aboard their luxury yacht until help arrived.

* That same year, Cruise was said to have pulled two young boys to safety after they were almost crushed in a mob of out-of-control fans at the London premiere of “Mission: Impossible.”

The item (I’d link to it, but the page’ll be dead within a week) casts doubt on whether all this stuff actually happened. Cruise’s new publicist comments, “I don’t know about the rest of them, but the one on Saturday night actually happened. The others happened before I represented him.”

Now, I subscribe to the Howard Stern school of How To Tell When a Celebrity Has Gone Batshit. Namely, if the celebrity claims he has super-powers, he’s nuts. Think you can heal sick children by making a publicity-visit? You’re losing touch with reality.

But what if all this stuff with Cruise did happen? It doesn’t necessarily mean that he’s particularly heroic, nor a magnet for trouble. It could mean that he’s deliberately been causing these incidents just so he can step in to protect people and seem heroic!

I’d liken it to Angel Heart or Fight Club or something, but it reminds me more of the finale of Murder, She Wrote, when the viewer discovers that it’s been Angela Lansbury committing all those murders over the years, and framing a different person each week!

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Achieve

According to this NYTimes article, my coffee habit may reduce my risk of getting type 2 diabetes, cirrhosis, liver cancer and, if I were a chick, cardiovascular disease. Hooray, coffee!

I like that one of the reviewers of the article is named Rob Van Dam.