Ah, Viggo--Why, Viggo?

The other night at the Co-Op, some idiot was wandering around talking very loudly on his phone. Why do people do that? They can be having a normal conversation, using their indoor voices, but the minute they answer their cell phones, it's like they took an icepick to the eardrum and they can't hear anything so they suddenly start talking ALL IN CAPS. WHICH PISSES ME OFF.

Bonus idiot points are scored for the people using their bluetool devices which causes them to get that expression on their faces, that far-away, concerned expression that babies get when they're pooping in their diapers. Or in their pants. Either way.

So the idiot on the cell phone in the Co-Op was annoying, but I was trying really hard to listen to his conversation because he was talking about having seen the movie Appaloosa and one of the stars in Appaloosa is Viggo Mortensen.

I'm struggling at the moment with a minor Viggo Mortensen addiction and, man, it's killing me. How can such a handsome guy have been in so many crappy films? Seriously. The other day I watched a Sylvester Stallone movie because Viggo had some bit part in it. (I turned it off when his character got killed.) And I couldn't, of course, make myself watch Carlito's Way, but I did find a clip the featured Viggo (in the bit part he had in that movie), and it was bad. I hate it when The Brain goes all gaga over some mildly talented actor type. (Past addictions have included Martin Donovan, Brent Spiner and, the earliest example of The Brain going haywire for some dud actor, Mark Hamill. There have been others. Those are the ones I'm willing to admit to.)

The most recent Viggo film was Appaloosa, which was a Western, which is a genre that already tries my patience. Like any young feminist, I loved True Grit, and, like any American, I have the requisite number of John Wayne films under my belt, but Westerns in general? Not unless it's Joan Crawford in the inadvertently hilarious Johnny Guitar, or The Red Elvises in the unexpectedly compelling Six-String Samurai. But like any old feminist, I appreciate reviews like the one Walter Chaw of Film Freak Central gave Appaloosa:

Appaloosa is macho juvenilia that espouses the idea of "bros before hos" and, thus, renders all the men unflawed in their limited, brutal glory and all the women bimbos, sluts, or bimbo-sluts. [. . . ] Appaloosa falls on its ass because its worldview is arrested and incurious, content to offer that women are mercurial trollops and men, good or evil, are the bedrock of civilization. When Appaloosa is described as "old-fashioned," hear spin on more accurate terms like "ossified" and "badly-dated" and "naïve" [. . .] Sexist because it's ignorant and not because it's trying to illustrate a point about sexism, the film is the logical, populist end-point of anti-intellectual entertainments that (and leaders who) steadfastly fail to challenge ideas.

I appreciate this kind of review. I appreciate the hell out of it, and--goddamn--I wish this guy wrote movie reviews for The New York Times. (Because their reviewers? Are asleep at the goddamn wheel, let me tell you.)

Chaw further identifies why Viggo is not a bigger star:

Mortensen elevates the material as he is wont to do, but something Mortensen has never seemed entirely capable of is fixing a movie by himself.

See this is the caliber of celebrity crush that The Brain gives me to work with. (Of course, I did also have a massive crush on Richard Feynman at one time, too, so yay that I guess.)

The idiot on the cell phone (remember him?) had a few complaints about Appaloosa, namely the story, the acting, the cinematography, and the lack of people in the town in which the movie was set. In the final analysis, he declared it "more like a movie you'd see on TV, the kind that's made for TV, not a real movie."

I'm in negotiations with The Brain right now. The Brain may--sigh--insist that we see it anyway.