Finally Figured it Out: A rumination on a certain possibly transgendered harbinger of Armageddon

Emily sent me this article from Slate's Summer Movie Week (an idea which excites me to no end). I immediately fired back that I already read the same thing in The Tyee two years ago.

I can't say I disagree with either one, which basically state, as Chris Rock did at the 2005 Oscars, "If you can't get Russell Crowe, just don't make your stupid epic." Don't get Brad Pitt or Colin Ferrel or, for the love of peace, Orlando Bloom. I'll give Clive Owen a pass because I don't blame him for that mild disaster, and I stand by my belief that Bloomers was at least serviceable as Paris, Eric Bana rocked the hizzouse as Hector, and Gerard Butler is a jack of all trades. It has something to do with a certain fleshy masculinity that allows these actors to transcend time and space.

It was also bizarre that the common link in these articles was Bloomers, as I had been thinking of him recently.* I was having yet another conversation with myself along the lines of, "Have I been him or her an unfairly bum rap?" See, I have been listening to Elton John's "My Father's Gun" a lot lately, which put me in mind of that scene in Elizabethtown where all his relatives are standing around trying to tell Drew what a great man his father was and how much they are going to miss him, and all Drew is doing is standing over his father's coffin, changing the angle of his head, and puzzling out what the look on his father's face is supposed to be. When he finally hits upon it, "whimsical," he sort of lets out this sigh of bittersweet relief. It's well done, to be honest. There's a lot in that movie that isn't nearly as well done (I could begin and end my whole case by asking why Claire was interested in Drew to begin with), but that part is nice.

And that's my problem with Bloomers. Most of the time he's just plain bad, all miscast and adolescent and scant, but sometimes, just sometimes, he's pretty good. So I thought back to when I liked him, if at all, and the answer was Pirates of the Caribbean. In a movie where I detest 2/3 of the stars, it's a wonder that I like it so much. Perhaps Depp is just so good that he rubs wonderfulness off on everyone else, but I think it's a little more than that. I think the problem with Bloomers is that, right now, he's Heath Ledger circa 2001.

Ledger just kind of appeared in 10 Things I Hate About You and magically elevated the movie from flash-in-the-pan to something more lasting. The other stars of that minor hit? David Krumholtz has got his TV show, Joseph Gordon-Levitt is carving out a nice indie scene It-Boy career, and the rest of them stagnated or disappeared outright. But, boy, were people all over Ledger. Soon he was Mel Gibson's tragically heroic son, and then - poof! - a leading man in his own right. Not just leading, in fact, since the whole poster was his face. And that movie went? Nowhere. Because it blew.

In the very same year, he also had a very affecting turn as Billy Bob Thornton's suicidal son, but he was in the movie for maybe twenty minutes, and everyone else was busy focusing on other things.

So Ledger's career goes down the crapper pretty much the instant it starts, and, to be honest with you, I thought that was the end of him. But then Ang Lee decided gay cowboys and New Yorker short stories would translate well to film, and the rest of that story is bound to go down in film history.

And that's the problem with Bloomers, too, I think. Or, rather, that's Bloomers' problem. He's doing this leading man stuff because people think he should be, but he shouldn't. He's just not leading man material. And maybe he could be, but right now he's young and inexperienced and it shows. And maybe, just maybe, if he sort of steps back and gives it time, he could stumble into his very own Brokeback.

Or he could blow even worse than he already does. Too early to tell.

But, yes, Slate and The Tyee, no one is Russell Crowe. Perhaps you should give another guy a chance before you get too caught up in your self-congratulatory criticism, though.

*Yes, for the record, I sit around thinking about movie stars and their careers. Piss off. You do it, too.