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You know how behavioral scientists do studies on animals raised in captivity, and how if the first thing a newborn gerbil (or whatever) sees is a ball of twine, it'll think that twine ball is its mother? We sometimes wish there were a Department of Fame that could bankroll a study of child pop-culture consumers, and how the stars a child watches in her formative years can imprint themselves on the child forever -- make her not just feel nostalgic affection for those actors once she's reached adulthood, but believe in their talent and defend their career missteps in the present day by making arguments that rest heavily on the work she may have watched when she was a kid. And God help that now-adult's friends if one of those disproportionately beloved actors somehow falls ass-backward into an Oscar nomination. "See? You see?" that now-adult will say. "He is not washed up and flabby!" And the now-adult's friends are all like, "Thanks a lot, The Academy. She'll be dining out on this one for years."
We know there are some of you reading this who are like, "Yeah, it's just like my friend Betty with John Travolta. She loved him so much from Grease that she owned all the Look Who's Talking movies, and we were all like, 'He sucks, Betty, and he's a Scientologist,' and then he got nominated for Pulp Fiction and we were like, 'Shit.' But what does any of this have to do with Matt Dillon -- whose Oscar nomination for Crash may finally get him the respect he deserves and make people take his more challenging work in the current Factotum more seriously?"
Oh, some of you. Don't you see? Matt Dillon is John Travolta. And you are Betty.
Some of you saw The Outsiders (or My Bodyguard, or Little Darlings) on your first date (or Betamax, or HBO), and you saw a young man with creamy skin and worried eyes and a slight underbite that kept him from being entirely perfect, and you vowed that you would "do it for Johnny," if he ever asked you to, and you took his slightly...uh, "delayed"-sounding line delivery for extreme sensitivity. Hey, a future generation would cut Keanu Reeves exactly the same slack. You figured he'd grow into that forehead and jaw and that practice and training would whittle away all those dopey teenaged mannerisms and reveal the great actor hiding within the block of wood. "He has to be talented!" you told yourself. "He's so cute!"
But, look. We've all had the experience of pinning our hopes and favoritism on someone based on early evidence of excellence, only to have him choke -- perhaps due to the pressure our hopes and favoritism placed on him -- and fail to realize his potential. This commentator had precisely that experience this season with Robert Best on Project Runway. Just as Robert couldn't keep coasting on one great mini-dress made out of sheets and a wall hanging, so it is with Matt Dillon and The Outsiders. At a certain point, even his most deeply imprinted fans have to realize that he's just a ball of twine, wrapped around a block of wood, being cradled in the arms of John Travolta. Simply put: he sucks.
Dillon has, since his time as a teen idol, gotten very good at making us overlook how much he sucks by weaseling his way into movies that are either overrated by their cultish fans (Drugstore Cowboy, Beautiful Girls), or that are genuinely good but in which he is actually the worst thing (To Die For, There's Something About Mary). In between the Matt Dillon movies people remember are a whoooooole bunch of other ones like City Of Ghosts, Albino Alligator, Kansas, and Women & Men 2: In Love There Are No Rules.
"Hey!" some of you are protesting. "That last title sounds embarrassingly straight-to-tape-ish, but it also starred good actors like Kyra Sedgwick and Ray Liotta and...well, Andie MacDowell hadn't completely disgraced herself yet back in 1991!" Fair enough; I wouldn't necessarily want some of the things I did fifteen years ago to be held against me, either. So let's look at the present day. Dillon does make big-budget studio films with other famous people -- like Liv Tyler and Lindsay Lohan -- that come out when they're supposed to and play on thousands of screens in their opening weekends. Movies of this sort are no measure of an actor's talent, of course, but they are suggestive of an actor's fame; Dillon's fame probably wasn't bolstered much by his having appeared in Wild Things, Herbie: Fully Loaded, or One Night At McCool's. Well, maybe Wild Things -- it did end up in the "cultishly overrated" bin -- but all most people remember is a three-way in which he was upstaged by his two co-stars, Neve Campbell and Denise Richards, when they started making out with each other. Believe it or not, kids -- yes, now I'm speaking to the some of you who, in ten years, will be making excuses for Jesse Metcalfe -- the sight of girls kissing was actually considered racy and taboo within your own lifetime. To see the amount of boob Britney Spears showed Matt Lauer in her big interview this summer, we had to walk two miles, uphill, in the snow.
"But Matt just makes those dumb movies for the money, so that he can have the leisure to make indies he's really passionate about!" some of you interject. "He's just like George Clooney!" I see where you're going. But Factotum is no Good Night, And Good Luck. Playing a drunken loser wasn't interesting when Nicolas Cage did it, and it still isn't, even if Dillon's doing it Bukowski-style. The only way that career move could be more cynical Oscar-baiting is if he did it in a wheelchair, with a Serbian accent. And Crash is no Syriana. Sure, it's important to know the difference between a Mexican and a Puerto Rican, but if I never get the chance to sleep with one of either kind, how am I to learn why I shouldn't kid them about filling their yards with rusted-out cars? And in the midst of this Tableau of Tolerance, Dillon gets Oscar-nominated for playing a white cop who may abuse his power (in Los Angeles? Surely this is the stuff of science fiction!), but who can still rise to the occasion when called upon to save a person from a fiery car wreck, even if that person is a black woman. All sarcasm aside: Dillon's played dozens of lunkheads with (suspicious) ease; a bigoted lunkhead may be Dillon's Truman Capote, but to this viewer it wasn't so impressive to watch. There's also the curious fact that Dillon's indies take forever to make it into theatres. Crash may have (somehow) won the 2005 Best Picture Oscar, but IMDb still has its release date as 2004; similarly, Loverboy and Factotum, both in theatres this year, were apparently in their cans in 2005. For smaller movies, made without studio backing, it's not uncommon for release to be delayed for various reasons. What is notable is that Dillon's name apparently isn't enough to rush his last several movies into cinemas; furthermore, Dillon also made a movie called Employee Of The Month in 2004 that couldn't scuttle the use of the title for this year's eagerly-anticipated big-box-store romp starring Dax Shepard (MTV's Punk'd), Jessica Simpson (MTV's Newlyweds) and Dane Cook. When you've been in show business since the '70s and you're getting upstaged by the standup who makes the contestants on Last Comic Standing look edgy...well, it's enough to make you want to unleash a rant on an underpaid insurance caseworker that could make an Aryan Brother blush. Or, play a guy who does that.
Matt Dillon's actual last movie -- You, Me And Dupree -- had him playing a dull straight man (he's even married! How much duller can a guy in a comedy get?) opposite the anarchic antics of Owen Wilson (rapidly aging) and the naggy wifeliness of Kate Hudson (rapidly becoming irrelevant). This is what we need Dillon for -- to marry Kate Hudson in a movie and spend some time pretending to be torn between his love for her and his fondness for his aimless buddy but ultimately choose her (I assume) and reassert the traditional value that is marriage. We don't need him to try to be a charming alcoholic (as in Factotum) or a brilliant but troubled musician (as in Grace Of My Heart) or anywhere near any greasers who aren't named Sodapop (Deuces Wild). Now that Dillon's been honoured with an Oscar nomination, though, he'll probably make a bunch more of the kinds of movies in which he just shouldn't keep trying to overreach, which will be bad for all of us. Mad City and White Man's Burden may have been hard for Betty to defend, but their analogues of 2007 and 2008 are going to be even harder on us this time around, when they star a block of wood.
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