Part of my first double feature to date, a risk the crazy summer schedule forces me to take. Risk because, having sensitized myself, the double dose may burst me. “Sensitized”—Christ, listen to me. Based on a French film in which a group of corporate savages compete to see who can bring the biggest idiot to a dinner party. Maybe Carley and I will take the two ladies sitting behind us, who share aloud their registration of each basic fact from which the story unfolding onscreen is constructed. But the “idiots” in the movie are really just sad, devoted hobbyists, lost artists, stunted and insistent, not to say holy fools.
The Yiddish is either from “smok” in Polish: dragon or snake—makes sense—or possibly “der Schmuck” in German: jewelry, as in the idiom “family jewels.” The hero keeps pulling, from his pocket, a diamond ring his girlfriend can’t decide whether or not to accept. And he’s Paul Rudd and this is Park Slope, so everyone’s all, What’s she thinking? That clever little guy wouldn’t make it half a block, here, before the mob pulled him apart.
We trade looks when the guy from Flight of the Conchords, as a bombastic artist—Matthew Barney?—dons costume of goat horns, furry legs, and hooves not unlike the flamboyant get-up Carley helped me make one fateful Halloween. You just buy fake horns and spirit gum, eyeliner, a couple yards of fleece. When people saw the end result they predictably lost their minds, it’s just no joke to invoke misrule. Steve Carell is a cuckold who pours himself into taxidermy—glue trap dioramas. “The Last Supper!” says the woman behind us, when thirteen little robed mice at a long table appear. It’s not that you don’t know what you are, idiot or whatever, but that it doesn’t even matter once you’re told. So if the Last Supper was a dinner for schmucks, who brought the Son of God? Do the math—it’s got to be that unseen Holy Ghost.
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