Babbling About Little Children

Well, this weekend I saw Little Children Babel. Or should that be little children babble? Nonetheless, I watched a film that had little to do with little children and more to do with Jackie Earle Haley being nominated for an Oscar (he's electrifying, I tell you!) and another film that had something to do with a girl being deaf, a couple of mothers being shot, and a maid being deported (maybe this one should be called The Deported?).

Little Children stars Patrick Wilson's naked backside and Kate Winslet's boobies. Kate has an American accent in this film so that's how you can tell she's acting. Phyllis Somerville played Jackie Earle Haley's mother, and she was as brilliant as he was. So, for my money, the pervert and his ma made for a better movie than the philandering suburbanites. And Jackie is so good at being a pervert everyone jumps out of the pool when he gets in! It's truly an electrifying scene.

On the other hand, Babel had excellent performances by Brad Pitt (so concerned for his wife), Cate Blanchett (so concerned for herself), Adriana Barraza (so concerned for Brad's and Cate's children), and Rinko Kikuchi (not very concerned about her nudity). They were all so good I wanted to give them all an Oscar! But alas, if Brad wins, it lessens the chances for Matt Damon, so to hell with him. This film is what Crash really wanted to be. But when Paul Haggis got in a bind while trying to tie his story lines for Crash together, he just took a tip from the The Talking Heads and stopped making sense. For Babel, Guillermo Arriaga made every moment count in a really big way. And sometimes, director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu made those moments count even more. There was a helicopter ride I swear took a half an hour!

This is a film that so badly wants to explore every moment, we get to see how Cate Blanchett's character both gets high and wets the bed (but at separate moments). Maybe I didn't really need to see that, but Cate sure made it all seem real! The real success story of this film for me, though, is Adriana Barraza. She plays a maid who just wants a little time off, but when she finally gets it she's punished so brutally she may never work again! If Adriana doesn't get an Oscar nomination out of this film there just isn't any justice in Hollywood at all! Hold on, wasn't it just last year that Crash beat Brokeback Mountain for Best Picture? So I already know there's no justice in Hollywood. But I'd really like to see this woman win. That's all I'm saying, you know?

And then, on the subway ride home from this great escapist fare, I was ever so lucky to have a baby buggy pressed up against my thigh as a mother of some international persuasion babbled to her little child in some unintelligible gibberish, who then proceeded to kick me continuously in the other thigh. Don't you just love little children? Well, good, then you can have them! All of them! The only child I ever liked was the one who grew up to be Matt Damon.

But now Matt has little children of his own. I'm sure he's the kind of father who dotes on his little girls, but I'm so grateful he doesn't babble on and on about them incessantly when the press is around. No, Matt is the consummate professional. He leaves that stuff just where it belongs - on the subway. Here's Matt and Luciana in the back seat of a car explaining to the press how they left their little children with their Mexican maid so they could build a tower of Babel out of Lincoln Logs. Mommy and Daddy needed some quiet time alone. Gee, I hope they're not headed for Morocco. Those people are crazy - they give their little children rifles! On the other hand, Matt's been on location with Brad Pitt several times now and nothing untoward has ever happened to him. So maybe Brad is bad luck for Cate Blanchett but not so bad for Matt? Maybe Matt and Brad are the ones who really ought to be together? Now there's a movie I'd take Jackie Earle Haley to see! Everybody out of the pool! Here comes Sam and Jackie and Brad and Matt...

And speaking of...

Well, now I've seen Barbra Streisand live, and all I can say is: "I can't wait for the DVD!" It'll be lovely to actually see what went on in that arena. Even with $50 binoculars, all I could make out was that Barb has put on a few since "retiring." The next time I hear there are cheap seats available for a big concert, I'm going to simply say "oh really?" and just go on with my life.

And speaking of going on with my life, I got a new kitty cat.
He's a two-year-old black tabby who was formerly staying rent free at the ASPCA and now has to work for a living. He keeps the mice out of my apartment. What the heck is it with New York these days? I moved out of Manhattan to escape a mouse infestation and one day while watching the pilot for Nip/Tuck (and by the way, ewww, so gross!) who should appear in my fifth floor penthouse but a rodent who wasn't invited in! So off I went to adopt a cat. This particular cat (and yes, that's my hairy knee in the picture) is named Matt Damon. Hey, there's a precedent...Lorelei Gilmore had a dog named Paul Anka and Charlotte York had a dog named Elizabeth Taylor. So why shouldn't I have a cat named Matt Damon? This way, when I say I slept with Matt Damon last night, I won't be lying. Any more.

And speaking of Matt Damon, I finally got around to seeing The Departed last Tuesday. It's so brilliant I don't know what happened! I'm not always able to follow these intricately plotted adventures where one guy is who he shouldn't be and another guy is not who you think he is. Then, at the end you find out there were two more guys who may or may not have been who they said they were. I was so relieved this time to find out I'm not the only one who missed stuff. My friend Allison wanted to know what was in the envelope Leonardo gave Vera and I just couldn't say. My friend Joe wanted to know how Mark Wahlberg knew who to go after at the end and I can't say that either. And when I discussed it with Sean at work, he didn't know and believe me, if Sean doesn't know then there's just no hope - he watches a lot of this kind of thing!

Nonetheless, I loved it. I thought it was riveting. It was 2 and a half hours and I didn't look at my watch once. Everyone in this film was perfect. Mark Wahlberg played the type of guy I'd never be friends with and he played it perfectly. Leonardo DiCaprio was so vulnerable I thought he was going to self-destruct. Vera Farmiga showed just the right amount of duplicity for a woman who's dating a cop and sleeping with a hood. Or was she dating a hood and sleeping with a cop? And hey - whose baby was it anyway? I usually find Jack Nicholson to be waaaay over the top, but this time, I thought he was just far enough off the ground and yet, not exactly on the roof. And speaking of the roof...no, I can't discuss it, that would give too much away and you've just got to see this flick for yourself! So was Matt any good? Um, is this your first time reading this blog? Matt was fucking brilliant! Matt deserves an Oscar for the way he delivered the line "I'd run an ice pick through some poor slob's heart if it would get me a date with you" alone! Priceless, Matt, priceless!

Yes, Matt is a really, really bad guy in this movie, but, well, I'd still do him. I just probably wouldn't stay the night. I mean, his character was really, really creepy and anyone would be more than a little paranoid to spend too much time with this guy. But Matt is so outrageously yummy that he could be covered in mud, sitting on a park bench reeking of sweat and holding a Budweiser between his legs and I'd still beg him to let me lick him like an ice cream cone. Oh, honey, I've got it bad and that's not good! And speaking of good, don't you think he looks good in those knee socks? But then, he can make tube socks look hot.

What I Did For Love

Yes, The Departed opens today. But I'm not going to talk about that. Instead, I'm going to ask what the hell is wrong with New York theatre critics. A Chorus Line, that old war-horse from 1975 has returned and after its opening night I sat down to read the reviews and they're mostly...not so great. Seems many are saying it's too much a copy of the original, but the dancers seem to be acting this time, whereas the original players were living their lives on stage. I beg to differ.

Even when one is playing one's life, if there's an audience while one is doing it, then one is acting. Okay, I didn't see the 1975 cast. By the time I saw it, Tommy Aguilar had taken over as Paul, and Eivin Harum was playing Zach, but it was still the show Michael Bennett had directed. The actors were not playing themselves, they were playing parts set down on the page for them, and they were charged with making those parts come to life. In my mind, that's what they did, just the way Jason Tam and Michael Berresse did in this revival. So for the NY Times critic to say "It doesn't feel fair to the cast members to have them stand in the same poses and the same clothes as their predecessors" seems a trivial point, at best. It may not be fair, but it's what is required in this particular show. Would this critic have preferred a radical rethinking of the piece, as we recently witnessed for Sweeney Todd? Would he like the dancers to play their own instruments as they tell us the tales of how they were sexually abused in 42nd Street theatres, or watched indifferent parents go about their separate lives?

This show is what it is: a moment in time when one director (Michael Bennett) had the thought to dig inside the minds of his cast and share all that he found with an audience. I mean, really, is any audition actually like the one we witness on stage; where the director forces each job applicant to reveal embarrassing, humiliating, personal events from their past to show how unique and individual they are in the hope of attaining a chance to blend into a chorus line of unknowns behind some unnamed star? Um, no. Michael Bennett just thought it would be neat for an audience to see what dancers go through in their lives on the way to kicking up their heels on the Great White Way.

So this production is the same as it was in 1975, with replicated costumes, lighting and choreography. Sometimes revivals do that - they show you what all the fuss was about for the original audiences. And sometimes Coriolanus is performed in Matrix-like black leather jackets with Christopher Walken spewing Shakespeare's lines to a percussive accompaniment. Both kinds of revival are valid and both can be illuminating. In the case of the new Chorus Line, its illumination is on the validity of the rabid success of the original. We see 16 years later, why this little show about dancers is One Singular Sensation.

Also one singular sensation is Matt Damon. Although none of his movies has been remade or revived yet, he has taken a second look at some of his roles. In The Bourne Supremacy, Jason Bourne uncovers more painful memories and attempts to atone for what he sees as an immoral past. In Ocean's Twelve, Linus Caldwell is still trying to keep up with the professional thieves, doing his best to impress them even as his mother breaks them all out of prison. Perhaps it's some measure of Matt's success in these roles that both of these franchises will be placing a third product into the market place before too long. Perhaps some would like to see what happened to Will Hunting after he drives away from the only world he knew, or if Rudy Baylor and Kelly Riker made a future for themselves after he won his landmark court case. But please, Matt, don't revisit Gerry, whatever you do. Two hours of wandering around in the desert is plenty. Even another five minutes of marching through gravelly-sounding sand could be enough to put me over the edge. God knows I think the world of you, Matt, but that film was a chore for me, even though whispering your name in my quieter moments is What I Did For Love.