(Excerpt from an essay).
Hugh Jackman makes a brief cameo in the third Night at the Museum movie aptly titled Secret of the Tomb, where he plays himself playing King Arthur in a stage production of Camelot. Jackman as Arthur gets visited by Sir Lancelot, played by Dan Stevens; but he’s not Dan Stevens playing Dan Stevens playing Lancelot, he’s the real Sir Lancelot brought to life via a magical Egyptian tablet. Lancelot breaks into the theater and jumps on stage, expecting a warm welcome from his sire. But Arthur is no Arthur, he’s simply an Australian actor pretending to be a funnier and less gay version of himself playing King Arthur. “Buddy, this is all just pretend.” Jackman as Arthur tells Lancelot, who by this point is having a violent crisis of meaning. “None of this is real.”
Right about then was when I realized just how fucking grossly drunk I’d gotten off of the green apple BeatBox. That was my first time trying one of those drinks. I kept seeing all the little badass Mexican kids in my neighborhood drink them at 8 in the morning on their way to school. 11.1% ABV seems about right. The drink was disgusting, but appropriate. I needed to get very drunk very fast. I had a long brutal night ahead of myself. 5 more Ben Stiller movies I had to get through, and it was only 6pm.
I’m still not sure why I decided to do that on a Saturday afternoon. A subtle homage to the degeneracy of the pandemic era perhaps. Wasting your time was so much more fun when the rest of the world was joining in.
I didn’t really expect a Night at the Museum movie to be so lore heavy. Lots of mystical ancient Egyptian curses and macguffins. Not enough jokes. I think Ben Stiller was embarrassed to be in this. Lifeless in every scene. Apparently the sentiment was shared by the entire cast, a movie full of actors who think they’re well beyond this kinda stuff. All except for the monkey, who shocked me with her nuanced performance. Her name is Crystal the Monkey.
In college my thesis professor told me a story about Ben Stiller. How he helped Stiller shoot a skit that landed him a gig on SNL, his first big breakout. A parody of a Scorsese film The Color of Money. And apparently Stiller was such an entitled nepo-baby piece of shit, overworking his unpaid cast and crew going full Kubrick, that my professor got into a fistfight with him. Which supposedly is why he’s blacklisted by “the big comedy” to this day. I’ve always had a suspicion that Stiller was up to no good. The story’s most certainly fake. But good enough for me. From that point on my beef with Stiller was personal. That was 5 years ago.
5 whole years ago. Crazy! Time flies even when you’re not having fun. Los Angeles in the middle of the pandemic was a special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Most likely it didn’t. But there was madness in any direction at any hour. The People’s Coalition reclaimed Round Two Hollywood. We had successfully shut down Tenants. There was a universal sense that whatever we were doing, it must’ve been right. Because we were fighting for something. Or something like that.
Permanent Midnight is a 1998 addiction drama that is nothing new. Every actor has the impulse to drop 30 pounds and play a junkie to get taken seriously. But who’d want to watch a movie where Derrick Zoolander sticks a dirty heroin needle up his neck while his infant baby watches him tweak? What a sweaty, boring time.
Right around when the LAPD found a dead 18-year-old inside a homeless encampment in Echo Park is when the wave finally broke and rolled back. She was an honors student from Oceanside, “met and fell in with the wrong crowd at a BLM protest” her mother said. Died of an overdose. What followed was one of the largest police actions in LA history, and hundreds of brand new surveillance cameras were installed all around the park. Out with the old and evil, in with something much, much worse. At least the boomers stopped Vietnam before rendering themselves useless. We learned how to coexist with our war. We were simply playing pretend, to no effect.
Who is the real Ben Stiller? What is Ben Stiller?
I tried watching Meet the Parents on Roku TV via Hulu, but it required a separate Showtime Plus add-on. None of those things sound real. And I was not going to pay 4.99 to Meet the Parents. So instead I put on Tropic Thunder.
Tropic Thunder means a lot to me, as much as I don’t like to admit it. I think it was the first ever naughty movie I got on DVD. It’s easily Stiller’s best work, maybe his only meaningful work. A movie about hacks and has-beens. An interrogation of the very idea of pretending. There’s a scene where Robert Downey Jr is in a yellowface on top of a blackface—all while he’s playing an Australian (Aussieface?). This is a story about what’s real and what isn’t.
It was around 5:30 in the morning when I finished my 6 movie Ben Stiller marathon. Some other titles include the Meyerowitz Stories, Reality Bites, and Brad’s Status. My beef with Stiller now extended to the entire Gen X population. So damn whiny. My head was spinning and my nose was numb. An inexplicable wave of sadness came to me. Beautiful way to start your Sunday.
When I said earlier that every single (human) actor in the third Night at the Museum movie was phoning it in, that’s everyone besides Robin Williams, returning as President Theodore Roosevelt. In what would be his final film appearance before his tragic passing, Williams delivers such a tender and loving performance that feels grossly out of place. The film ends with him, alongside all the other museum exhibits returning to their still, lifeless forms. Shenanigans no more. Magic was dead, so was the franchise.
“It’s time for your next adventure,” Teddy Roosevelt says. Repositioning himself one final time before his consciousness ceases to exist. “I have no idea what I’m gonna do tomorrow.” Stupid fucking Ben Stiller says. No idea why he’s the one getting consoled and not the other way around. And Robin Williams says, “How exciting.”
And I’m not watching no fucking Severance.
