Yes, I went on another movie-watching binge. Big Fish was first. Ewan MacGregor has to have the most earnest smile in film history. Helena Bonham Carter, one of my favorite actresses (and the granddaughter of Winston Churchill’s one-time flame, Violet, and, later, his trusted political advisor) appeared as a blonde and carried it off, Southern accent included. Alas, she lost MacGregor to Alison Lohman/Jessica Lange, as MacGregor’s wife in younger and older versions. I guess that’s understandable.

Then Elizabeth and I watched—believe it or not, for the first time— Almost Famous. We were enchanted. I guess that’s the right word. Kate Hudson’s eyes are amazing; they are small and slightly hooded, but the directness of their look is fierce. Her eyes, in that look, are brilliant green torpedoes. I’ve seen that look once before, in the eyes of a girl I dated more than fifty years ago. She had a pet raccoon who detested everyone except for her. She had long blonde hair, Rapunzelian, when girls ironed their hair to straighten it, and rode her Quarter horse in the Upper Valley bareback and barefoot. I was a bedazzled oaf, one on the small side. Maybe a bedazzled Hobbit.

The impossibly handsome Billy Crudup was in Almost Famous and in Big Fish, too. I had a hard time at the end of Big Fish, when Crudup’s estranged son reconciles with his father—Ewan MacGregor is by now Albert Finney—and, in the son’s mind, he carries his dying father, who is insufferably delighted to see all his old friends and lovers, down to the river to die. When Crudup lets his father slip beneath the surface, he suddenly becomes the legendary, immense catfish he’d always said he was.

When you’re seventy, a moment like that is vivid and real. My time, in a relative and so indeterminate sense, is running short.

So, thank goodness for youth and for Almost Famous, which included Jason Miller (My Name is Earl). And Jimmy Fallon. And Ryan Reynolds. And Anna Paquin. And Jann Wenner. And Zooey Deschanel (I still miss New Girl. I wrote an essay about that show, which New Times, perhaps when the staff was gloriously drunk, actually published.) And Rainn Wilson. And Philip Seymour Hoffman.

I missed somebody, I’m sure. Had he been alive, Abraham Lincoln might’ve been in it. (In the credits: “Tall and Immensely Strong Roadie/Philosopher.”)

I admit that the very idea of a fifteen-year-old getting the go-ahead from Ben Fong-Torres for a 5,000 word Rolling Stone piece made me insanely jealous. And then, when the fifteen-year-old, Cameron Crowe, grew up, he got to write and direct the film about Cameron Crowe. Then it became a Broadway musical.

Something not that deep inside me hopes that a seagull poops on Cameron Crowe’s head tomorrow.

I did get a letter into Rolling Stone once, about Michael Douglas and the film China Syndrome. I think it was maybe 125 words. After reading an excellent piece about Bonnie Raitt, my letter to her was unanswered. Alas.

If a Hunter Thompson piece was in Rolling Stone, there went, except for the record and film reviews and the advertising space, the whole issue. We had  jalapeño poppers wrapped in bacon as part of dinner tonight. If a Hunter Thompson piece was in Rolling Stone, I pretty much devoured it the way I do  jalapeño poppers wrapped in bacon.

The same went for other “New Journalists” like Gay Talese or Tom Wolfe or Joan Didion or Jimmy Breslin. Or even (The Executioner’s Song), Norman Mailer. Or, before they’d invented the term “New Journalism,” Truman Capote–In Cold Blood was, to me, a supreme accomplishment, given, and perhaps because of, the density of Capote’s emotional freight, as heavy as Marley’s chains. My tastes now run to popular historians who also happen to be women: Laura Hillenbrand, Elizabeth Letts, Lynne Olson.

Then it was Bridget Jones’s Diary, because I could even watch Colin Firth do something as mundane as prepare a meal, which he did. It reminded me of another favorite actor, Michael Caine, breaking an egg with one hand in The Ipcress File, a marvelous 1965 spy film. (Alas, it turns out that the real cook was Len Deighton, the novelist who wrote the book on which the film was based. He had to break the egg for Caine on camera, so it’s Len Deighton’s hand you see in the film.)

And I enjoy the fight between Firth and Hugh Grant. And I like Bridget’s dad, too.

A sniper (and former lover) shot Colin Firth dead with a rifle bullet placed squarely in his forehead in a later spy film, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. There were a tragic few seconds, thanks to masterful direction, from the rifle shot being fired, with a silencer’s cough, the entrance wound appearing, a small and precisely round red dot, to Firth, his eyes widening slightly, realizing something was wrong in the last moment of realization granted him, to his collapse.

Even though Firth was a thorough bastard in the film, I was bummed for a day or two after. That film was based on the John LeCarre novels, and my friend John Porter and I are LeCarre devotees. They are so thickly plotted that I understand about 58% of them, but the protagonist, the British espionage bureaucrat, George Smiley, (below, played by Gary Oldman, with Benedict Cumberbatch as his neophyte) is brilliant and reserved. What he reserves is his venom, injected without passion, for those who deserve it. Like several modern American Congressmen. Or Colin Firth.

(Incidentally, Firth was Darcy in BOTH Pride and Prejudice and Bridget Jones. So there.)

I am posting about none of them especially. What amazed me about Big Fish is that I’d forgotten that Steve Buscemi appears in it, when he recruits MacGregor as an unwilling accomplice in a bank robbery.

I would just like to state, for the record, how much I admire Steve Buscemi. I think almost any film he’s in exceeds its expectations.

Frances McDormand co-stars with Crudup in Almost Famous and with Buscemi in Fargo, one of my all-time favorite films. And her Marge Gunderson is one of my all-time favorite characters. Don’t EVEN get me started on her.

Anyway, I hope you get some time to watch movies over Christmas. The turkey’s starting to defrost, we’ve got wassail and egg nog, our little tree with white lights, four dogs (Cousin Rocky is visiting) and we have Rick, Sally and Rebecca over for Friday and Saturday. We might even watch a movie together. (Or a football game.)

Shoot howdy, I just might invite Steve Buscemi over, too. I have a hunch he’d like my mashed potatoes. Oh, and I’d be careful, given the opening scene in Reservoir Dogs, to turn down any tips.

I bet he’d like those jalapeño poppers, too.