Archive for January, 2003

Chuck Bar­ris pro­duced many suc­cess­ful tele­vi­sion game shows, such as “The Dat­ing Game”, “The New­ly­wed Game” and “The Gong Show”. He wrote a song I sort of like, Pal­isades Park (What does the guy do to the girl in the tun­nel? He gives her a hug, how whole­some). Chuck, dap­per gen­tle­man that I’m sure he is, also claims to have killed 33 peo­ple work­ing for the CIA as a con­tract killer in his book “Con­fes­sions of a Dan­ger­ous Mind”. He searched and searched for his niche in soci­ety, think­ing it was as a TV pro­ducer, but it sounds like, in his mind, he was bet­ter at snuff­ing out the ene­mies of the US government.

My take? None of the film is real. But it’s a movie, so who the hell cares?

Chuck (Sam Rock­well) starts out his career in tele­vi­sion as a page at NBC in the early 1960’s, lead­ing tour groups and work­ing his way up the cor­po­rate lad­der until he gets to pitch the idea for “The Dat­ing Game” to NBC exec­u­tives. Dur­ing this time he’s been in con­tact with Jim Byrd (George Clooney), who even­tu­ally becomes Bar­ris’ CIA han­dler and con­fi­dant. Byrd guides Bar­ris through his train­ing and even­tu­ally, dur­ing the actual pro­duc­tion of “The Dat­ing Game,” sug­gests that the win­ning cou­ples go on dates to such won­der­ous and beau­ti­ful locales as Berlin and Roma­nia. While the new love­birds are hav­ing their jol­lies, chap­er­one Bar­ris is tak­ing care of his true “busi­ness” in the shad­ows. While on one such globe jaunt in Berlin he meets Patri­cia Wat­son (Julia Roberts), a fel­low con­tract killer who will even­tu­ally be one point in a love tri­an­gle with Chuck and Chuck’s live in girl­friend, Penny (Drew Bar­ry­more) and lead to rather dire cir­cum­stances for one of its members.

Adapted by Char­lie Kauf­man (Eter­nal Sun­shine of the Spot­less Mind) from Bar­ris’ own book, the film begs the ques­tion: Why hasn’t George Clooney decided to direct a film before now? If all of the lead­ing indi­ca­tors are cor­rect, he should be win­ning count­less Oscars by this point. He’s got a new one com­ing out this fall that I’ll prob­a­bly catch, Good­night and Good Luck, but the boy has an eye for style, and being a fre­quent col­lab­o­ra­tor with pal of Steven Soder­bergh can’t hurt. he’s def­i­nitely learned from one of the mod­ern mas­ters of visual grandeur. I liked Clooney’s style here, adding just the right amount of goofi­ness to the game show scenes as well as a dash of malaise as Chuck begins to spi­ral down into depression.

I’ve liked a lot of movies that Sam Rock­well has had small parts in (In the Soup, Light Sleeper, The Green Mile) and I loved him in Galaxy Quest, prob­a­bly one of the most under­rated come­dies of the past ten years. He’s also good at the cagey, slightly off char­ac­ters, like Jimmy Silk in Heist or Frank Mer­cer in Match­stick Men. He was a bold choice for a lead­ing man and I think he does a pretty good job of it. He’s not a very good look­ing guy, but hell, even Woody Allen, who’s a total toad of a guy, still gets the ladies in his films.

The sad truth about this great lit­tle flick is that it was a fail­ure at the box office. Mira­max has a ter­ri­ble habit of pick­ing up pic­tures left and right and then either hang­ing onto them for eons (see Shaolin Soc­cer or this fall’s The Great Raid) or releas­ing them and then not sup­port­ing them with any ad cam­paigns. Con­fes­sions of a Dan­ger­ous Mind fell into the lat­ter cat­e­gory. They tried to pathet­i­cally re-release it to gar­ner some Oscar buzz, but it was sim­per­ing and too-little-too-late. Since it’s too late for this one, it’s well worth check­ing out on DVD.