Obscurity Hall of Fame: Confessions of a Dangerous Mind

Often I find myself asked whom I would like to play me in a movie. This is not because I likely to become the subject of a biopic, but because these are the sorts of things my friends and I talk about- in any case my answer is always the same: Sam Rockwell.

We don't look that much alike, other than both being white guys with brown hair and a tendency to smirk. And yes, I am aware that I am not yet twenty four, while Sam just turned thirty nine (on Guy Fawkes' Day). I don't care, he's that awesome. When the time comes we'll use CGI to do it: he's my man.

He can certainly embody my spirit, if he can successfully turn himself into the man that ruined modern television and claims to have assassinated 33 people for the CIA in the mid seventies. Which brings me to my next inductee into the Obscurity Hall of Fame: Confessions of a Dangerous Mind.

Based on the "unauthorized autobiography" that Barris wrote in 1984, it was George Clooney's directorial debut, and one of my favorite films. I didn't realize until after I bought the DVD that it was also written by Charlie Kaufman (!)- there were reports of Clooney irking my favorite screenwriter by shutting him out of the film making process. If I had known that beforehand, it may have tempered my love for Confessions based on my admiration for Kaufman's style, but it turned out great, either way.

Barris, for us dang young whippersnappers, is the creator of countless early exploitative game shows like "The Dating Game" and "The Newlywed Game," low-culture icons that arugably led to modern day things like Jerry Springer and "A Shot at Love With Tila Tequila." But he's most famous for two seasons as the host of "The Gong Show," the grandfather of the first couple weeks on "American Idol" where they boot off rejects and losers.

In Confessions, he's a man constantly concerned with his degrading legacy, afraid of commitment to girlfriend Drew Barrymore, and drawn into the CIA by something dark within him (as well as Clooney's mustachioed CIA recruiter). The cast is rounded out by a brief Maggie Gyllenhaal appearance, and a grossly miscast Julia Roberts as a "sultry" fellow assassin, obviously doing Clooney a favor.

But it's Rockwell who steals the show by nailing Barris's manic energy as a rung-climber at NBC and as a TV host, and somehow manages to play both crass game shows and botched killings for some bitingly dark humor. The film is interspersed with documentary-style interviews of real life colleagues like Dick Clark and Gene Gene the Dancing Machine, and leaves you to decide whether or not Barris made up the whole CIA bit. (Barris consulted and visited the set, but Clooney and company made it a point to never ask him about it.)

The style of the film is a mixed bag of seventies throwback fun, with hippie music, all in-camera special effects, and a dark color palette that makes it feel like something much older. The disparate plot elements don't really sound like they would fit together, and I suppose they're rather extreme, but Confessions of a Dangerous Mind is primarily a rumination on the disparate tastes of pop culture anyway, so the more I watch it the more it all makes sense.

I know it has a lot of big names for the "Obscurity" label, but I only know a handful of people that have seen it. You should join them.

Obscurity Hall Of Fame: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

Hey folks- it's been a busy week. It looks like I'm a little ahead of myself in trying to become the Bill Simmons of movies (for non-Espn.com fans, he's a sports columnists that frequently gets complaints that he never posts enough). But hey, you try taking six classes at once sometime.

To make up for lost time, today's post is extra-long and extra-dear to my heart. It's not often that people as into movies as I am can definitively name a "favorite movie of all-time," but Michel Gondry's Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, passes all the tests for me: gun to my head, desert island, etc.

I saw this movie six times in theaters (once at a budget theater across town), bought it immediately on DVD, traded with Dave later to get the two-disc special edition DVD, watch it at least three times a year- the list goes on and on. The centerpiece of my living room is this poster, my girlfriend and I quote minor lines from it all the time, and here's the best part- this year for Halloween we're going as Joel Barish and Clementine Kruczynski.

And I thought that everyone had seen this- after all, the great Charlie Kaufman took home the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for it. But in trying to describe our Halloween plans to people that I know, even the young, trend-setting hipster crowd I run with, not that many people had even heard of it- and the ones that had watched it did so only because we forced them to, A Clockwork Orange style.

So consider this the honor position, magna cum laude inductee into the Obscurity Hall of Fame. For the uninitiated, it's about Joel (James Carrey), who discovers that his recent ex-girlfriend of two years, Clementine (Kate Winslet) has had him erased from her memory by a company called Lacuna, Inc. And he decides to do the same thing.

Much of the movie takes place in his head, as he navigates his memories of Clementine and realizes that he may have made a mistake. The memories start to disappear in roughly backward order, giving the film a very Memento-like structure, though Kaufman is quick to point out that he was writing it well before Memento came out. It's a complex film in structure- some may say needlessly so, but if you watch it more than once it's simple to understand.

The performances are brilliant: Jim Carrey is not my favorite comic actor, but he transforms himself into an introverted, nervous artist so well that you really feel for him. Kate Winslet is going to win one of those "body of work" Oscars pretty soon, even though she's only 32- she's so convincing as the impulsive Barnes and Noble worker that I do double takes every time I see her speaking in her British accent elsewhere. She is Clementine to me.

Tom Wilkinson, currently earning Oscar buzz for Michael Clayton, leads a terrific group of supporting actors as the head honcho of the oddly ramshackle Lacuna memory-erasing service ("Lacuna," if you're wondering, means a gap or missing part). Kirsten Dunst got an inordinate amount of press for her small part, but she plays a naive assistant well. Mark Ruffalo and Elijah Wood are excellent as one eccentric and one creepily pathetic memory technician, respectively.

This film is the whole deal- excellent acting, Gondry's expressive visual interpretation of having your memory erased, an excellent score and soundtrack production by Jon Brion, one of my favorite musicians of any format. It's not often that a film leaves me speechless immediately after the credits roll, but I had nothing to say after this one.

Unless I met someone that hadn't seen it. Then I can talk your ear off.

Obscurity Hall of Fame: Primer

Hey, another new feature! I'm sure you're just as excited as I am. This one is a series of profiles of movies that I own, watch once a month, and quote in everyday speech, but nobody has ever seen unless I force them to at gunpoint.

I'm calling it the Obscurity Hall of Fame: personal classics of mine that barely made an impact on the pop-culture world. The first inductee is one of my favorite time-travel films (look forward to that list): Primer.

Primer is a relatively simple idea, and a universal theme: the accidental nature of invention, and the boundaries of trust. Two friends (David Sullivan and writer/director Shane Carruth) experiment with fiber optic cables (or something) in their free time, and find out they've created something that can transport objects backward in time.

They decide, naturally, to play the stock market a little to take advantage of their discovery. But of course, time travel is never simple, and mistakes and betrayals quickly send the movie spiraling into a hall-of-mirrors of duplicate main characters, odd side effects, and convoluted situations that require multiple viewings to logically understand.

It's a great film, and a great exploration of the theoretical questions that time travel would bring up (which, as my friends can tell you, I could talk about for hours on end. In fact, everyone should read Time Travel in Einstein's Universe, by Richard Gott, and then get back to me. Great book.). And it doesn't dumb any of the science-type-stuff or the complicated ending down, which is refreshing.

So it's an awesome film. That's one reason to see it. The other reason I love it is that it doubles as a crash course in cheap, independent film-making: it was shot on a $7,000 budget, and listening to the commentary by Shane Carruth, it's fascinating to hear how they had to beg, borrow, and improvise to get everything to come together.

They rented cameras, edited it on laptops, shot in Carruth's parents' house and his brother's apartment- his mother even provided the catering. They had so little money for film that there are no deleted scenes- you can even see Carruth's character saying 'cut' under his breath to end scenes, but they couldn't edit it out because it would cut the scene too short.

I don't know about other movie fans/critics/etc., but I always daydream about shooting a movie myself. And even though it's not a success that's likely to be replicated, knowing that some people in Dallas can put this together on seven grand and then win the grand jury prize at Sundance gives me hope.

EDIT: Obscurity be damned! You can watch this on Google video, right now! Do it!