I Blame, Michael Caine.

The Cockney Bastard

Recently I read Michael Caine’s second memoir. His sequel to the first one he wrote in 1992 thinking his career had gone the way of the dinosaur. I find it marvelous that Michael is one of the few actor’s who was lucky enough to find a resurrection in his career. Just when he thought that the leading man, for which he was famous, was no longer within his grasp, life slapped him on the back and told him to quit whining and get back in front of that camera. Having read both memoirs it’s clear that this is a common theme in his life.  Continuance. Just when things look bleak, life slaps you in the face and says continue. I hope life does the same for me. 

At just about the same time I resigned the leafs of his book to the abyss that is my shelf collection; I lost my day job. Now this job was nothing special, a banal activity to give me a little mula to pay the landlord for my moldy underground shit box, so it was not an emotional loss at all, but it did cause a kind of crisis. Now I had no excuse to stay in Toronto. You see I had always felt kind of out of place in that city. All the stylish folks with their skinny jeans and handle rim glasses seemed to stab their disdain into my chest every time I walked through the cracked streets of downtown. It was like they could tell that my clothes didn’t fit and the body underneath was somehow wrong. I don’t mean wrong in the sense that a malformed beast is wrong. I just mean out of place like a salt shaker on a gourmet chef’s dinner table. I felt useless in the city and, what is more important, that it had no use for me. 

Being cast out from a job I hated and without theatrical prospects; I decided to call it quits. No more was I going to force myself to buy into the ‘Toronto store’. I was going to get rid of the junk I had accumulated through years of stupid struggle and launch into the larger world to find myself, yet again. I have done this many times. Myself seems very tough to find.

Was this a good choice? The jury is still out on that one. I have seen no better theatrical prospect, I have felt even more inadequate in that realm. I know that I am suited for it yet still it feels like French to me. There are moments when the stage feels like second nature and there are moments where it feels like I am a fish swimming up stream. The mantra I have been quoting in my head has been from the example of Michael. Survive. 

You see throughout his life, in the acting realm, he was beset by people who pegged him as this or that. Some called him too feminine to play butch, others called him too erudite to play working class; an utterly absurd claim as he comes from one of the most poverty stricken lives I have ever read about and I am an avid reader of Dickens.  All through this, though, Caine repeated: Survival is key. 

It’s really the only important thing in any artistic life; living with art and not allowing life’s pressures to crush you into a slave. Speaking as someone who suffers the creative journey there are many terrible things that you must contend with. They join conference every night and form demons that haunt you. Demons that sit on a panel that judge you for existing. The key is to survive their nightly trials and just continue marching into that great yonder sunshine; hoping one day to find an oasis that will sustain you.

One sentence that sticks out for me in his long busy life: “Just survive and soon you’ll be the last body in the room and all the jobs will come to you no matter if you are right for them or not.”

Though I am a vehement Atheist as anyone with two eyes, ears and knows me, will tell you, there is one valuable thing to take away from the many legends of the religious. That is the idea of tribulation. A prophet goes through many tests to prove his faith. Sadly, in their existence, this “faith” is in something that is absurd. Never minding that it should be admired in a roundabout way. My faith in coming success, no matter how far, bears striking similarity to these zealots. I know if I remain persistent and send out my cover letters and applications, someone, somewhere, will return and allow me to jump from my life’s motorbike to their minivan. 

A depiction of journey of the artist. 

Survival. 

I blame Michael Caine for causing me such an outlook that keeps me from being satisfied with the mundane. I cant work at a banal job or troll the bars for my future spouse because to me it is my self actualization that needs to be recognized above all else. I cannot feel fulfilled by existing only to exist. I am surviving to create and enrich. 

Curse you, Caine! You cockney bastard.       

Owning Absurdity

Tonight my good friend and I decided to take in a movie. We tossed

The Wolf Pack. See that's a funny picture.

around many ideas of what to see as we had no plans and this has become an almost weekly outing. We the merits of venturing to the latest Shyamalan travesty; After Earth. That was an early veto when it became clear that neither one of us could stomach a foray in to the twisted travesty that surely another Shyamalan piece would be. We ultimately decided to venture into the abyss of a threequel and went to see Hangover III. 

Both of us, many winters ago, went to see the dark sequel to the original masterpiece and we were fascinated by the prospects of further adventures of the Wolf Pack. We had heard that this new film was dark and quite unforgiving. Some critics had suggested that devoid of humour. When the projector (do they use projectors anymore?) began to roll and the audience was taken by the flashing wallpaper to become distracted from their mouthfuls of popped corn, I was surprised to find a very odd experience. This Hangover rejected the premise of the last two other films and decided to go on a kind of screw ball fantasy journey. This film decided to follow the North By Northwest premise and place its heroes in a state of unknown persecution.

Somehow this is less funny. Hangover III Wolf Pack.

In the past two films, the group was already in a position of play as they had awoken from a night that was forgotten in a drunken (roofie) filled nightmare. The room around them was nothing but a mishmash of evidence from the last night’s escapades.  The Wolves had to become ‘Morning After Sherlocks. This led them on a series of odd adventures and scenarios that not even Hunter S. Thompson could imagine. This was a situation that focused around one of there greatest foils from the last two films played by that brilliant Korean-American comedic force, from CBS’ Community, Ken Jeong. All of these changes to classic narrative of the two last films added a refreshing take on the gritty drug-filled chaos of the last two films. 

The comedy, in the previous two movies came from the hunt to track down the previous night’s goings on. III is focused on the present. This should have worked and nearly did. It ultimately failed.

When walking along the squalid streets of Toronto’s answer to San Francisco’s multicultural hellhole Chinatown, Spadina and Dundas, we, my diminutive but nevertheless brilliant friend and I arrived at the conclusion that it was not the failure in chaotic humour that hurt this movie. Its failure stemmed from the need to instill an unneeded and depressing reality into the film’s world. When the flurry reached a moment of true chaos the film pulled back into the very real reaction. There was always some very real consequence to the absurd action. A character would make an outrageous move then suddenly shocked by realistic results of his action. So the audience followed suit. They could sense a comedic payoff coming but it was suddenly and cruelly slaughtered like a pack of humourless butchered cows. For example, death is hilarious. A child crying out of grief is not. Hell, at one point a character witnesses a death and has an outrageous childlike reaction which is befitting his man/boy status, but then is immediately undercut when he wets his pants. The wetting of the pants should be uproarious but because of his choice to play genuine embarrassment (or the director’s) served to only undercut the comedy and make it not okay to laugh.

In comedy a commedian must embrace the absurdity of the situation and

One, very accurately, can see the dynamic. 

not comment on it. In Michael Caine’s second memoir, which I’m reading like a bat out of hell at current, that old Cockney brings this very point up. When he was shooting with Steve Martin on set of the brilliant film Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, Michael was forced to play opposite to Steve Martin in his prime. A man who was right the middle of Steve Martin’s epoch of comedic genius. Michael found this insanely difficult so he soon found that he was drowning. Therefore Michael resolved to play everything completely straight. He partnered Steve, sometimes stealing scenes from him, by making no comment on the performance and treating his behavior as being completely normal. What this did for the film was create a relationship that was even more absurd. It was and is an instant of comedic genius. 

Likewise, in the first Hangover film, the Wolf Pack did the same, they did not explain the insanity. They had bigger fish to fry then exposition. Hell there was a baby lying on the plush vomit covered carpet of the Las Vegas bachelor suite! They excepted the absurdity and added. They went with it.

Comedy is ‘owning it.’ Going with it no matter how absurd. Tragedy is fighting against the environment and finding that you can’t win. Comedy is freedom. Tragedy is rules. Freedom is tougher then Rules.