25 November 1999

Happy Thanksgiving! Well, it's not quite 2 in the morning, and I haven't been to bed yet, so even though it's technically Thanksgiving, it doesn't feel like it yet. I want to write a little, and then I'll crawl into bed and sleep sound and warm beside my husband, and wake up in time to hopefully catch at least the last bits of the Macy's Parade which is for me the official beginning of the "holiday season" and try to figure out how to get my two pies to my parents' house without too much damage.

I had a very fun evening - met up with K.T. and Kevin and Greg and T and we all went to the movies. We saw Toy Story 2 - which was fantastic, with a lot of "in" jokes from other movies, especially the Star Wars saga - and then went and had dinner, and came back to the movie theater to see Dogma, which was both funny and thoughtful, which is something I don't often get from a movie, and I enjoyed it very very much. I'll recommend both movies very highly - if I had to pay $14 to watch two movies, then I'm relatively satisfied with what I got.

I thought about discussing Dogma, because some of the ideas in it are very much on the forefront of my mind. But those thoughts aren't really organized well at all, so I don't want to spew them out until they've germinated for a while. They may never come out, though, because my mental meanderings concerning spirituality and religion tend to dry up with the morning dew.

I thought, instead, I'd talk about this weird phenomenon that's been happening to me lately when I watch movies.

Last night (um... Tuesday night) I watched most of a movie on HBO about Orson Welles' struggle to make and release Citizen Kane. The movie was called RKO 281 and starred an actor I'm not familiar with, by the name of Liev Schreiber, in the role of the young Orson Welles. I knew as I watched that I hadn't seen this actor before except perhaps in bit parts, but something about him kept nagging at me. Finally, halfway through the movie, I made the connection: His smile was almost exactly the same as Alec Baldwin's. Not really anything else - Schreiber was sandy-haired and somewhat round-faced, while Baldwin is dark and lean. But it was the same boyish smile.

That weird sense of deja-vu hit me full force during Dogma.

I have always thought that Matt Damon and Leonardo DiCapprio look very similar - they're both excellent actors; young, fair-colored, and I associate both of them with character personalities that tend to be playful and mischievous but can be terribly serious. When the character Loki walked onto Dogma's screen, I wasn't sure which actor it was until I saw his eyes: Damon's are dark blue, and DiCapprio's a pale green.

The character Bartleby in Dogma, played by Ben Affleck, put me in mind of Ben Stiller's character in The Mystery Men - full of rage without a satisfying outlet. And the look was very similar - short, dark, almost spiky hair and not-quite-sane grin. Stiller's character in Mystery Men took both to further extremes, but that character called for the rage to be much closer to the surface.

Something in the way Jason Lee (Azrael) moved and carried himself reminded me of Dan Aykroyd. There was symmetry, too - Azrael wore a white suit and hat that almost matched to a line the black suit Aykroyd wore in Blues Brothers. I kept waiting for Lee to say, "We're on a mission from God."

And the female lead, Linda Fiorentino, had a scene with Janeane Garofulo in which they were dressed and made up similarly, and I was terribly, terribly confused until I figured out that one of them was wearing her hair down, and the other had it up in a bun. It took me until the end of the scene to see the differences in their facial features. (I think this similarity had a point in the movie, but I'm not sure I want to expound on it until I've slept on it a bit.)

I wonder what's causing these weird comparisons in my brain. It's like all the movie actors I've seen were made up from a common bin of parts. "You know that smile Alec used in Red October? Wonderfully charming; let's give it to Liev for that Welles picture." "Hey, can I borrow Dan's slouch - oh, and that quirky smile - for Jason for a bit?"

Or maybe like those silly, fun mirror games we always played in drama class: "Ben, meet Ben. The exercise is you're angry, and tired of suppressing it. Okay, Ben, you lead first."

Oh, forget it. I'm going to bed. Maybe I'll have something rational to say in the morning.