LOCKER ROOM:A movie about a dog who chews things up and defecates endearingly provides much needed column inches, writes Tom Humphries
BEFORE WE got into the mandatory review of the year column can I be the first to observe that you see all sorts of odd things in America. I mean the other evening there was David Beckham wearing the most ludicrous beard since Abe Lincoln went to the theatre. And Dave was appearing on Oprah with his poor emaciated missus who looked like something Oprah would snack on. They wished to pay tribute to Tom Cruise.
Tom was surfing the sofa again in a show mounted to celebrate his 25 years in the movie business; a quarter century worth of smiling in which he has done little worthwhile except sell sunglasses and star in Magnolia.
Anyway (and most movingly) Posh and Becks first date turns out to have been a trip to see Jerry Maguire (one imagined a fragment of buttered popcorn passing down Posh's digestive system like an ostrich egg through the belly of a python) and they duly recounted how Tom had been special to them ever since. Some people have lives like that. First date with a Spice Girl turns out to have been to see movie of future best mate.
In search of inspiration I got up and went straight out to see that mutt movie Marley Me. On a surface level the flick is supposed to be about a Labrador dog and his amusing misadventures. Disappointingly all these years after Francis the Talking Mule, the hound does little else but chew things up and defecate endearingly. Anyone who has ever worked for Vincent Brown would have had a better story to tell.
The film is redeemed though by its uplifting subtext, namely that the true super heroes of life - from Lois Lane to Oscar Madison to Ray Romano - are, of course, newspaper columnists. The Me of Marley Me is a newspaper columnist, a knight of the quill, a princeling of qwertyuiop. A Man's Best Friend type.
Okay okay okay. He is a newspaper columnist played by Owen Wilson a man who apart from his nose has the least lived in face in cinematic history. I know that in interviews Wilson speaks very highly of my own physical appearance. Nevertheless I would be less than honest if I didn't suggest that his nose looks like he bought it on eBay off Brian Cowan.
The decision to set such a difficult nose down in the midst of a face of such unalloyed blandness as Wilson's was a stroke of genius and forms the basis of Wilson's entire credibility as an actor. Look kids, a man with California surfboy looks and holy cow, what's that? There's a three-nose pile-up in the middle of his face. How can he not be interesting? He bears as hideous and badly deformed snozzle as has been seen outside the confines of a carnival freakshow . . . He knows life.
In that sense Wilson was the man for this job. If you can get an acting career together on the basis of severe deformation of the nose you are the man to play the sort of newspaper columnist who can make a decent living from writing columns about his dog.
Wilson plays John Grogan, a real-life newspaper columnist. Now I have never read his work but I worship Grogan with a fundamentalists' lack of humour. For me he is Woodward and he is Bernstein and he is Mencken. I came to his genius late.
A few years ago at a think tank session with a publisher Grogan's book, Marley Me, was held up as proof that nobody knows the limits of what can be gotten away with in the publishing world.
I went along with the general tut tutting and head shaking and expressed my fears for civilisation but like a Cork hurler with a soft spot for Frank, I was overcome with a love that dare not speak it's name. I investigated further and discovered that Grogan had for sometime gotten away with writing newspaper columns about his dog. Fanbloodytastic I mean R-E-S-P-E-C-T. Big ups. All the intrade awards to Grogan. NOW. And is it too late for me to get a puppy?
As somebody who has tried filling 27 to 40 columns a year with the charms of juvenile camogie and received nothing but abuse and zero Hollywood interest for his trouble, I was so moved and impressed by the simple genius of Grogan's wheeze that uniquely for a more successful fellow professional I found it impossible to bear the man any ill will.
I mean columns about your dog! Will he sue? You're doggone right he won't. Will he argue the facts of an embarrassing anecdote you relate? Do you need to get his quotes spot on? Does he ever run out of material (apart from when, carelessly in my view, Grogan let the doggie die). Will he look for a points off the backend of the movie deal? And the dog comes in especially handy at times like this when the expectations are low and the options uninspiring.
It's the Christmas season and the columnists dreary lot is yet another wistful look back at the year just past. This can be done either of two ways. Tongue in cheek/the sideways look/a wry look (to use the newspaper terms for anything lamely humorous).
Or else it can be done to the accompaniment of some Wagner music and a thunderstorm as the writer as stern-jawed as a skipper off the Deadliest Catch wrestles on board a bulging net containing a gargantuan writhing conclusion of apocalyptic proportions. This conclusion the writer will then fillet and slice and serve up as a fast forward leap in sports Darwinian progress.
Wouldn't you just prefer if we'd gotten the kids a damn puppy when they wanted one or if the first movie we went to see was Mickey Hart in the Manchurian Candidate.
The third option of course is the one you are currently being exposed to. The column length digression, the deliberate avoidance of either sideways glances or epic conclusions or pat anecdotes.
This was the sort of year we have noticed (well most especially in these couple of weeks in the US) that is tailor made for hauling the big conclusion in out of the broiling sea of hype.
In the US it has been an Olympic year which finished with the uplift of the Obama election. There has to be a big theme in the nets hasn't there?
So Bolt's sprints and Phelps' Man from Atlantis turn and Lance Armstrong's pending comeback and the return of the Lakers versus Celtics rivalry and Obama's comfort executing a jump shot have all been adduced as evidence that whatever the dismal economists might be saying, the bad days are in one very real sense all behind and sport will be soon something that all God fearing people can believe in again.
You envy them the optimism. Bertie is gone and though Biffo was an Offaly Under 21 in his day he doesn't exude the calming sense to us that the world is grand just as long as there is a game on in Parnell Park on Sunday.
The Trapattoni thing is beginning to feel creaky, isn't it? Stephen Ireland didn't swoon and come back. Andy Reid is in a whole pile of troubadour. On the club scene the league of Ireland is a bust again and Keano has removed himself from us.
Our Olympics were gold free even if Billy Walsh and the lads cheered us up when we needed it.
The hurling and football ended without too much novelty and in Cork the year ends with the county board trying to drive its own hurlers over the cliffs and into the sea.
The rugger is veering back to service as normal and Pádraig Harrington was such a hero and such a role model before he won any majors at all that it is difficult to summon the superlatives for him now, you just hope he stays the same.
It was an okay sort of year, made better by Pádraig's wins and a few fleeting moments of inspiration which have been picked clean from the bone by now.
Listen when I was younger I had this cocker spaniel who liked eating onions and who would moan in a low growl whenever he heard Billie Holiday. Back in a sec, I just have to take a call from my agent.
