Don't Try this at Home, Part 3

Here, I'm going to make a long story short. At 4 p.m. on March 31, 1998, with the outside temperature in the low 80s due to a record-setting spring heat wave, I rambled onto a beach a few miles from my suburban Westchester home and got ready for a quick dip. As soon as my wife had the stopwatch ready, I plunged into the water fully clothed and tried as hard as possible to behave like Leonardo DiCaprio. I reckon I was underwater for about 30 seconds before I felt my nuts starting to turn blue. Because I'm a crusty old gamer, I tried to stay submerged as long as I could, but I only lasted 47 seconds. At no point in my ordeal did the thought of repeating even one of DiCaprio's assorted remarks to Kate Winslet occur to me. The only thing I thought about was how blue my nuts were turning and what a stupid way this was to earn a living.

Because I had the option of lifting myself out of the water and retreating to the safety of the beach--an option not available to DiCaprio--it is entirely possible that I simply pussied out and could have lasted another couple of minutes in the water before my nervous system started to shut down. So the question of how long I would have survived is still open to debate. What is not open to debate is this: once a fully clothed male plunges into the water of the Atlantic in early spring, before the ocean has had time to warm up, he's not going to be thinking about love, honor, grandchildren or ironic, postmodern epistles to the White Star Line. And he's definitely not going to be very chatty. He's going to turn blue in the face, and the last thing on his mind is going to be women. This is, to my best knowledge, the only situation a heterosexual male can place himself in which women would be the last thing on his mind.

In summation, Titanic is pure horseshit. Almost without exception, pure horseshit is what I encountered in my subsequent investigation.

Conspiracy Theory is a treasure trove of stupefying scenes that will not work in real life. This is the movie where Mel Gibson plays a deranged New York cabbie who is both a menace to public safety and a garrulous conspiracy theory nut. How this would distinguish him from any other New York cab driver I have ever met is anybody's guess. Abducted by a shadowy organization that preys on deranged New York cab drivers, Gibson is bound hand and foot and locked in a basement in the deserted wing of a mental hospital previously occupied by the people who financed this movie. Julia Roberts, playing the same likable nitwit she played in The Pelican Brief and I Love Trouble, sneaks into the hospital in search of Gibson, and eventually hears him shouting to her through the heating vents. She then follows the shouts to their source, tries to rescue the dysfunctional cabbie, and basically screws everything up, but that's a whole other story.

From my point of view, the only thing of interest here is the premise that if you are ever bound hand and foot and locked in the basement of the deserted wing of a mental hospital, a fate most movie critics fear, it will be possible for you to escape by shouting through the heating ducts at a beautiful woman who just happens to be out for a morning constitutional because there's not much happening in her career. Well, I tried it in three different buildings, including a local hospital. And it didn't work. It flat-out didn't work. So if you're ever trapped with hands and feet bound in the basement of the deserted wing of a mental hospital, just lie there and hold your breath and try to take your mind off your predicament by figuring out brain twizzlers like: why would a bunch of villains under the command of the typically over-the-top Patrick Stewart take the trouble to bind me hand and foot and lock me in the basement, but not gag me? What kinds of morons are they?

Screenwriters?

Another scene in Conspiracy Theory that will not work in real life is the one where Gibson, strapped into a wheelchair with his eyelids taped open, escapes from his captors by madly pedaling the wheelchair down a long corridor and then bouncing down two flights of stairs, all without sustaining serious physical injury. First off, unless you're a person who has spent a substantial amount of time in a wheelchair, you are not going to be able to escape from your captors, mats because they are not in wheelchairs and are armed with guns.

Second, as soon as you try careening down a flight of steps in a wheelchair, the device will begin to pitch forward, meaning that you'll land on your head and probably die. While it is possible to descend two flights of stairs in a wheelchair if you grab the railing with one hand and brace yourself against the wall with the other, this will seriously impede your progress and enable your pursuers to catch up with you, even if one has just had the front part of his nose bitten off like Patrick Stewart did. Actually, here I am engaging in pure speculation because while I did climb into a wheelchair and try to descend a flight of stairs in it, I never actually bit off the tip of anyone's nose. I think the reader will be willing to make allowances for this slight deviation from orthodox movie reenactment techniques.

Almost without exception, my attempts to reenact scenes from other recent movies met with crushing failure. In Romy and Michele's High School Reunion, the fetching pinheads played by Mira Sorvino and Lisa Kudrow try to pass themselves off as the inventors of Post-it notes but are humiliated when their claim is proven false. I, on the other hand, didn't have any trouble persuading people that I had invented Post-it notes, not only because I know a lot about epoxies and resin substitutes, but because people I know never really believed that I bought my gorgeous house on the money I make writing articles like this, so they were relieved to find out that my principal source of income was derived from a more conventional revenue stream.

Other reenactment attempts met with similar failure. When I called my mom and asked if I could move back in with her and try to find myself the way Albert Brooks did with Debbie Reynolds in Mother, she said, as always, that I was "a sketch."

When I asked a couple of my friends if they would re-create the premise of The Full Monty and strip for money, they told me to go fuck myself. Not a single one even asked how much money, and, based on what I've seen of their bodies, I was not entirely disappointed by their disinclination to participate in the experiment. And frankly, some of my friends look like they could use the money. My friends were similarly unenthused when I suggested that a bunch of us get together and reenact the key party from The Ice Storm, in which suburban wives agree to sleep with whomsoever's car keys they pull out of a bowl. "That only works if one of the women looks like Sigourney Weaver," a male friend sagely explained. "But it's a better suggestion than that Full Monty idea of yours. Keep trying."

I also didn't have any luck doing the one-handed push-ups Demi Moore pulls off in G.I. Jane. Nor was I able to learn Portuguese in 20 minutes the way John Travolta did in Phenomenon. No, when I went to a Brazilian restaurant and tried to order my meal in the native language of Vasco da Gama after 20 minutes of full immersion in the idiom, the waiter dearly had no idea what the hell I was talking about. At this juncture, purists may complain that in the movie John Travolta inherited prodigious autodidactic skills after being knocked flat on his ass by some supernatural force. But I think that even after being pulverized by some amazing supernatural entity, a guy like John Travolta would still have gotten a lower score on his SATs than I did, so if I couldn't learn a foreign language in 20 minutes, neither could he.

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