Twisted Spinster

While this brief burst of creativity lasts…

I spent this past Saturday at a friend’s house, and she wanted me to see Man of the Year, a movie starring Christopher Walken Robin Williams. I’m a big slave to Mr. Walken fan of Mr. Williams so of course I assented. Here is my review in brief:

There were some amusing lines, but Williams seems mostly squashed, a bit intimidated, by the very idea of the presidency. This attitude is at least preferable to the current notion that certain people (cough certain  aggrieved “minorities” cough) are somehow entitled to the Oval Office and red phone access, and is a bit of a reminder that as a nation we still somehow take our governing bodies seriously. The day may yet come when when the country is run by an analogy to Pirates of the Caribbean if the crew of the Black Pearl had been real psychopaths instead of actors hired by Disney and if they were all at the opposite end of the spectrum in handsomeness from Johnny Depp, but we have not become a superpowered version of Zimbabwe yet. Someone please tell CNN and the BBC.

Anyway, for most of the movie, except for an underpowered paranoid subplot involving a cute blond programmer and buggy voting software, was just like how I and my friends would have reacted if one of our crew had by some fluke gotten elected PUSA. In other words, we would have tooled around town in our limos, chaffered with our new, ironically bemused secret service detail, visited with the current prez and found he was not such a bad (or as this movie had it, stiff, boring, and unimaginative) guy after all, tried to help beleaguered friends in trouble (the cute blond programmer), and so on. Oh, and Christopher Walken walked away with the show in his pocket, as usual. Christopher Walken is a kind of god.

One last thing: this film featured Jeff Goldblum as a baddie. What intrigued me about his performance is the fact that he played this bad character (an evil lawyer working for an evil software company, natch) with the exact same mannerisms he uses when he is playing a good guy in other films. This is true of every film I have seen him in. And he somehow manages to be convincing both as a baddie and a goodie using the same facial, vocal, and bodily mannerisms. I can’t recall another actor being able to bring this off. It’s a unique talent, whatever else you might think of it.