Unsolicited Advice

Confession time: I did not watch the Golden Globes. I don't have a TV. The reason I don't have a TV is not because I am an ironic hipster douchebag that thinks that television is for the masses of intellectually stunted sheeple -- I want to punch these people as much as the rest of you -- but because I didn't own the one we had in the living room and it went with the roommate who moved out, and we didn't subscribe to any of the TV channels on our cable service when we had one anyway. The internet and NetFlix were fine, and since the TV has gone walkies the internet will do. Also, I was ready to throw something at the wall after watching an entire Emmys presentation where Sherlock  was nominated for pretty much everything short of Best Formulaic Jerkass Sitcom and then won nothing. After the ABC people spent half an hour on the red carpet asking inane questions about hobbits of absolutely everyone there except Martin Freeman and Benedict Cumberbatch , who were about tw...

There are a number of current musicians and actors I like to use to illustrate my examples about how people work. Mostly, they're people I find very easy to read, although I have learned, kind of stupidly slowly, that what I think is obvious and what other people think is obvious are two really very different things. I jam my foot straight into my eagerly-waiting mouth on a regular basis by commenting on things I think everyone is aware of, thereby finding out the hard way that I'm the only one. I also get in trouble an awful lot because for some reason, people think that if I remark that I've noticed something, I'm implying I think it's bad or weird or wrong, when in fact it just means 'hey, I noticed this thing, thought you might want to be aware you were broadcasting it'. No one is aware of absolutely everything that crosses their face or affects their posture, not even scary people like me; I just think of it like letting them know something's about...

Chaplin (15th Anniversary Edition) It's more than a little unnerving to watch an actor whose tells I've come to know pretty well play another actor whose tells I've come to know pretty well, and get it right. Particularly when the party of the first part is still having a lot of his infamous drug problems, and the party of the second part isn't around anymore to complain about anything they got wrong. His kids were, though. Geraldine Chaplin, eldest daughter, played her own grandmother Hannah, and one of the sons was involved enough to interview for an early VHS extra. Apparently they started out going, "Well, I guess he looks a little like our father, sorta," and then by the time he came over the hill in full costume to film a scene with Geraldine, she caught her breath and went, "Oh dear God, it's Dad ." Downey's impersonation would be almost frightening if I didn't think he felt it was a genuine honor to have the part. Obs...

I've been raiding BPL for things to watch lately, and as it transpires, they have several copies of the 1992 film Chaplin. This, I think, might be interesting. On a scale of "informative" to "meaningless fluff", biopics are usually closer to the latter than the former, particularly in cases where the subject is not alive to inform the writers that their first draft is a 'rubbish soap opera' and tell them to do it again, as Stephen Hawking did. The sine qua non of getting into someone else's head, of course, is an autobiography, and I love those -- even when the author is completely bonzo-doo-dah crazy they manage to tell you lots about themselves, although not always what they intended to when they wrote it down. It's also very rare that I have any chance to compare the body language of the original to the actor. If someone decided to make a film about Dorothy L Sayers, I could assess pretty well whether any of what the actress spouts sounds ...

Just for shits and giggles, here's RDJ with a host he actually likes: Doing press for Due Date . Which I haven't seen. No idea if it's any good. Part of Ferguson's bit seems to be to maneuver people into saying embarrassing things by just stuttering and being abrasively Scottish at them until they can't wiggle out of it. (Note: Actual Scottish people are not like this any more than actual American people are obnoxious fucks who shout at foreigners. Which is to say, some are, but it's not the national hobby or anything.) This is absolutely not necessary with RDJ. If you give him a topic and let him talk long enough, sooner or later he will come up with a hilarious anecdote in which he comes out looking like a complete ass, and he will tell it loudly, at great length, and with a variety of illustrative hand gestures. Letterman leads with an innocuous question, which he could take in a few different directions -- he could go along with the puzzlement, for...

Time for a pop quiz on your people-reading skills. I'm involving Robert Downey Jr again, because He's funny He's pretty I could reproduce the 2006 Natick telephone directory, and if I got RDJ into it somehow, that entry would still get hits. Allons-y. He's doing press for a movie called Tropic Thunder , which I have not seen, largely because I have reached a point of quasi-catatonia where I am so insomniac and cranky that I cannot be arsed to go out into the living room and pull my roommate's copy out of the DVD shelf. I gather it's one of those things where the humor comes from watching people do incredibly stupid things while taking themselves far too seriously. First: What do you think the guest thinks of the host? Why? Second: What do you think the host thinks of the guest? Why? Third: What do you think the audience thinks of the interaction?

[spoilering. spoiler spoiler. for seventeen seconds of Avengers . when can I stop doing this?]

Do I get a prize for calling these things while the actors are still in character? I think I should. I spend so much time IRL telling people that their new boyfriend/girlfriend/roommate/boss sends up so many red flags it's a wonder they aren't drawing the attention of bulls that are still in Spain that it's always a wonderful break when I notice that two human beings actually get along . For those of you who hang around strictly for the technical breakdown: There are a number of standard sociocultural cues that indicate that two people are friendly. None of them are 100% accurate by themselves; you need to go for the 'balance of the evidence'. Even that will sometimes fail, particularly if one of the people involved is a manipulative sociopath -- if you want to know the tells for that, you should probably visit Eyes for Lies , who gives seminars for law enforcement and is in the habit of reading criminal cases. I deal more with the chronically ...

[Note: This entry has been edited from its original publication. See here for details.] A commenter on another entry asks: "Any thoughts on why Himmmm would give some in-depth details on RDJ in a sympathetic way, then pretend to be him, even though it could get RDJ in trouble?" Well, the obvious one is that he's a fan and he didn't think that far. I don't think it's especially suspicious that he defended RDJ first. A lot of people have done, over the years, some of the loudest being people who know him personally. Hell, I would, and all I did was watch some movies and spend like three days going through Google. As far as I can tell, some other commenter guessed that was who was behind "Himmmm" sometime last March, and "Himmmm" responded with a lot of comments that played off of Downey's recent success with the Sherlock Holmes  films. It was slightly later, when he was really involved in the game, that he "confirmed" tha...

I lost interest in "Himmmm" after the internet pretty much proved to me that it was a random obsessive nutter, rather than a famous obsessive actor nutter. The famous obsessive actor nutter is way  the hell more awesome to watch, so for the last few days I've been prodding YouTube and Google to cough up what they have on Robert Downey, Jr. First things first: Dude is weird. And I say this in a completely value-neutral way. It is completely independent of the drugs and the acting and the living in Hollywood, and has apparently been a lifelong thing. Everyone who personally knows him agrees that he's weird, without otherwise appearing to care. His wife will say it directly into a microphone, to his face, in front of an audience, with a grin. Downey just smiles back. I'm guessing this is a Thing with them. Watching them together makes it pretty obvious to me that he adores her. Downey credits falling for her with being one of his biggest reasons for cleaning up; I ...

I've finally dug myself out of a load of other stuff and looked at Jezebel again, and apparently someone has finally told RDJ what was going on. Hilariously, he does not seem to care that the world thought he was a bored internet gossip. The actual answer was his rep assuring us that, "Robert's a much better writer than that." I have no reason to doubt it, personally; he seems pretty on the ball when he's speaking. But there's no way for me to know without actually having seen something he's written, ideally something fairly long. (If anyone knows of him having written an op-ed for a paper or a blog, or even a lengthy sarcastic letter to the editor that got published, please kick it over so I can have a look at it, because I'm curious now.) The thing about forensic documents examination, which is basically what I was doing here, is that you can get a limited amount of information from the document in question without having some known samples to comp...

[Note: This blog entry has been edited from its original publication. See here for details.] Whee. Whirlwind of gossip this week. One of the more recent posts by "Himmmm" thanks [someone] for basically falling on his sword to 'protect my career/privacy'. Whether this is real or just a couple of frantic guys with a lot of sock puppets, it's kind of hilarious. Seriously, it's just like the infamous Something Awful thread, " Solve the Mystery of the Internet Whore! Win a Fabulous Prize! " Only better, because this one involves me "investigating" by sitting down and watching YouTube videos of Robert Downey, Jr., being a complete smartass to people who are unwisely trying to conduct a serious interview with him. Yannow, he's not the first person I ever would have thought of for Sherlock Holmes, but if you really want an actor who knows what the world looks like from the wrong end of a two-week coke binge, you could do way worse. My se...

[Note: This entry has been edited from its original publication. See here for details.] The whole kerfuffle about "Himmmm" and who he is and whether any of the stuff he says about starlets and their parents and skeezy on-set tutors is true has unfortunately overshadowed a lot of the things "Himmmm" has actually said. First off, as I said the first time, what the current commenting "Himmmm" says sounds legit like someone who has had serious drug/alcohol problems and has, through rehab and support and a hell of a lot of stubbornness, come out the other side of them. And probably even used the experience to make goddamn sure he is a better person now than he was then. There's a lot of detail in his descriptions, a lot of personal investment in his writing, and a sort of black sense of humor peeking around the edges -- all things you get from actual ex-rehabbers. Not saying it can't be faked -- almost anything can be faked on the internet -- but m...

[Note: This entry has been edited from its original publication. See here for explanation.] The gossip blogs are alight today with the breaking news that some dude who leaves a lot of comments at a site called Crazy Days And Nights  under the screen name "Himmmm" is "really" Robert Downey, Jr. Nobody has any proof, of course, and there has been no comment from RDJ -- possibly because the story is too new, possibly because it's true and he'd rather not have to lie, possibly because it's not true and he thinks it's too funny for words. Normally, I just laugh at these things, because really, who the fuck cares beyond the entertainment value? But one of the more interesting things about "Himmmm" is that he seems to have made it a point to go after people who have done Really Bad Things. He's most famous for popping in and letting other commenters play 20 Questions about who's being talked about in the most recent blind item, and  c...