THERE WAS an obituary in the paper the other day about someone described as equally comfortable dining on escargot at a posh French, restaurant in New York or sipping a pint in the backroom of a Dublin pub.
Given the choice, I myself would, be more comfortable dining on escargot at the posh French restaurant in New York. I would be even more comfortable dining on nightingale's tongue, potage a la reine, olla podrida, salmagundi, jugged hare, poitrine de veau, nectar, suckling pig, huitres a l'ecaille, pumpernickel: bread, lobster Newburg, apple fritters, seaweed scallops, avocado, fritatta, charred tomato, black beans, piccalilli, kidneys turbigo, shelled almonds and macaroons at the best Creole restaurant in the New Orleans French Quarter.
I want to put this on record, CDrom and digital tape in case any obituarist of the future thinks otherwise.
By the way, even if I were "equally comfortable" (dining wherever) I would not be equally "at home" in New York. I am obviously more at home in Dublin because that's where I live.
And if pints come into it I hope there will be no mention of sipping, in back rooms or anywhere else, because that is no way to deal with draught beer. It might be all right for champagne.
I say all this not in any spirit of laddishness or macho assertion but in the interests of accuracy.
All right. On the subject of drink, I was disappointed but not too surprised that Nicholas Cage won the Oscar for Best Actor in Los Angeles the other week.
I recently went to the film Leaving Las Vegas in the hope of seeing a realistic depiction of drunkenness and degradation by a man intent on self destruction, all served up with gratuitous sex and violence. This is the sort of thing I am keen on in the movies, though like many another I can get it all at home any night of the week. It is a subconscious thing I suppose.
Instead the film was a mixture of implausible romance and seedy glamour. It was not accurate. The Cage character was seen early on filling a supermarket trolley with all kinds of liquor. No alcoholic would behave like this, as Jeffrey Bernard, an expert in the booze area, has pointed out. (He has also noted accurately that one bottle of liquor consumed at a sitting is a fatal dose medically speaking).
Anyway it is quite clear I would have been better off watching Ray Midland in The Lost Weekend, or Jack Lemmon and Lee Remick in Days of Wine and Roses.
Critic/novelist Kim Newman says: (accurately) that Oscars are given not for the best acting but the most, acting: "One popular winner who I thought was over rated was Daniel Day Lewis in My Left Foot. It wasn't really a performance: it was an imitation of the symptoms, and Roger Moore could have done that. It's quite easy to play a catatonic or a cripple; what's difficult is playing, say, a bank manager.
Kim is right. But opportunities for playing bank managers are limited, in contrast with those for playing a bank clerk or teller (as they say Stateside), the type that usually turns up in crime dramas as an "inside man" or else with bit parts as the poor fellow being told to hand over the cash (and quick) (or else).
But there is a lot of hot air generated about movie inaccuracy, most of it - the air and the inaccuracies - harmless enough.
Disney's Pocahontas, for example, purports to tell the tale of this heroine of early colonial times who died of smallpox at 21.
The real Pocahontas was hardly 12 when she first met the captured settler John Smith. But the film presents the child as a sort of cartoon mix between Dolly Parton and Sigourney Weaver, tripping through gorgeous forests with Smith (in reality a con man and smalltime crook) who is given Arnold Schwarzenegger's physique and the dubbed voice of Mel Gibson.
Am I upset about this depiction? Not particularly. No more so than the remaining members of the Mattaponi Indian tribe. One of Pocahontas's direct descendants, Gertrude Minnie ha ha Custalow, has been quoted as saying she would like to see a documentary "from the Native American point of view" but doesn't object to the sanitised Disney version. Her brother Chief Evening Star is more direct: "You can't fault Disney it's their job to make money.
Historical inaccuracies in film are not half as objectionable as inaccuracies about states of mind or body, far more prevalent in the Hollywood output.
