Saucer-Eyed in Babylon

I don't watch the Golden Globe Awards - as a matter of fact, I don't watch television. (You can scream and run away now, if you like.)

I'm not going to go into a long polemic about how it's a virtue not to watch TV.  The fact is, I got out of the habit because ten years ago we decided that Time Warner was charging rip-off prices in Manhatan and we stopped paying for it.  Recently after we moved to Rockland County we got basic TV thrown in as part of our telephone/Internet package, so we said, "great, why not?" and once it was all up and running I flipped channels for maybe fifteen minutes, decided that it wasn't very interesting, went upstairs and returned to my book, and that was that. As any of our Puritan forefathers will tell you, it's no virtue to abstain from doing something that doesn't appeal to you.

Resisting the cheesecake at Peter Luger's - now, for that you get points.

I do, however, like movies, and I go to them if the review sounds like it's not going to turn out to be an utter waste of time and of seven dollars. (Did I mention that the movies up here are cheaper?)  And I do read the Times online, so when Amy Adams won Best Actress in a Comedy, I had actually seen Big Eyes.  And it puzzled me very much indeed, having seen the movie, that Ms. Adams won as Best Actress in a Comedy, because it's a movie about a newly-divorced naif who marries slick con man/artist manqué Walter Keane, who starts passing her kitschy portraits of big-eyed kids of as his own work as soon as they start achieving inexplicable success. (I don't know why I just said that "kitsch sells" is inexplicable - this is, after all, America.)  As soon as Mrs. Keane pipes up that she doesn't find this very honest of him, Mr. Keane sets fire to the very nice house they bought with all those Big Eye big bucks.  The husband is played by Christoph Waltz, so the audience pretty much knows where it's going from the start... I guess Christopher Walken was unavailable.

So while it was fun to see San Francisco at the tail end of the Beat era (the extras are costumed like the Mad Magazine beatnik parody of My Fair Lady, and I kept waiting for somebody to start warbling "Wouldn't it be Kerouac?") and the courtroom scene where nasty Mr. Keane runs frantically from one side of the witness stand to the other as he ineptly represents himself (and here, I was irresistibly reminded of some of William Shatner's more bravura moments as Captain Kirk) was certainly good for a giggle, I wouldn't exactly call the movie a comedy.

I will, however, admit that when Terence Stamp, representing the haute and haughty Times art critic John Canaday (you remember John Canaday? No? The one who wrote the four volume boxed set The Lives of the Painters?  Not to mention The Artful Avocado?) reads aloud that Mrs. Keane has gone public with the information that it is she and she alone who has perpetrated the Big Eye paintings upon the American public, lowers his newspaper in disbelief, and demands, "Good God...Who would admit to that?" I guffawed aloud.

Sadly, nobody else in the theater seemed to get the joke.  I'll bet they all have Big Eyes hanging on their walls.