Matt Bomer a Christian Shock!

Is Matt Bomer too openly a Federal Agent and professional conman to play Christian Grey in the movie version of the book Fifty Shades of Grey?

    

Of course he is. Anyone who watches White Collar knows the reality, and the idea that he could put his day job on hold to pretend to be someone he is clearly not is, of course, ludicrous.

    

I have to be honest, upon hearing that he was being considered for Christian, I was shocked. How can you have a man wearing an ankle tag, stripping off and slapping a woman around? Anastasia would be bound to notice and comment upon it – “Hey, I can’t wait to get those handcuffs on and have you beat me black and blue, but what’s with the leg jewellery?” Talk about putting a dampener on the proceedings.

   

Heck, it’s like a man who can’t walk on water being asked to play Jesus. 

If I were writing a film about the Son of God, I would insist that the casting director check out the individual’s credentials for the role. After the walking on water bit was established, I would insist that he fulfil other criteria essential to convince us that he is Jesus. 

Was he born in a stable? Was his mother a virgin? Can he turn water into wine and wine into blood? Can he transform a couple of sardines and a baguette into a feast for 5000? Can he persuade a dozen fishermen to leave their families and go on a road trip? Most important of all, can he rise from the dead? 

Unless the actor’s life completely resonated with the character I had written, he would not get the part.

    

Robert Powell would never have landed the part of Jesus had he not displayed all these qualities at the audition, and the fact that he is still with us is evidence that he really did rise from the dead. Rumours of a Second Coming have, however, been greatly exaggerated.

    

Similarly, Daniel Radcliffe had obviously served a long apprenticeship as a wizard before he landed the role of Harry Potter. How else could he have mastered all those tricks? And if bicycles were not really able to fly, what would be the point of watching ET?

    

The importance of art mimicking life to the letter provides a particularly pertinent point when it comes to casting gay men as straight and vice versa. Could David Hyde Pierce have delivered so convincing and hilarious a performance, lusting after Daphne in Frasier, if he were gay? Of course not. It was clearly something that only a full-blooded heterosexual hunk could have mustered.

    

Would How I Met Your Mother be remotely funny if it contained gay people purporting to be straight, all in the name of entertainment? How ridiculous would that be?  

   

If people start pretending to be people they are not, where does that leave us as a society? It’s like telling someone they have licence to be a chameleon, casting a spell over the lives of others to help them suspend their disbelief. What sort of a world would it be, if everyone went around kicking reality in the teeth?

    

Before long, you would have special schools set up to teach people the art of this deception. People might start paying to go and see it, even. They might start giving out awards for some people doing it better than others.

    

So, Mr Bomer, I find it inconceivable that, having returned to New York to continue your work with the Feds, you could convince me that you spend your days in a basement, constructing wooden crucifixes on which to fix women with ropes and chains.

    

That is a job for a man with psycho tendencies. Someone who might conjure up the image of a hungry rodent in a woman’s vagina, feasting on her sexual organs to induce a slow death, for example. But you would have to ask Bret Easton Ellis about that.

  

If this deception thing ever takes off – stranger things have happened - I have no doubt you could pull off the part of Christian Grey brilliantly, and I would pay good money to see it. 

In the meantime, back in the real world, look after Peter. He’s a good friend.

     

  

    

   

Dallas, Dallas, Wherefore Art Thou, Dallas?

You know you’re old when the oil barons are getting younger. 

The remake of Dallas has brought us a new breed of Texan magnates who look barely out of their Lego and I don’t like them one little bit.

    

At best, Bobby’s son Christopher is Thunderbirds’ Scott Tracy after a day at the spa; at worst, Norman Bates after a week of bad bookings. JR’s son Christopher has a walrus sitting on his face and is about as sexy as . . . well, a walrus sitting on your face.

   

 John Ross’s and Christopher’s fathers, who were once such magnetic personalities, are no longer appealing, either. JR’s eyebrows look as if they need their own Visa to enter the country, and Bobby looks as if he has had the kind of eye-lift that turns people Chinese overnight; in fact, his eyes appear to have been eaten by his forehead. Lucy looks as if she has spent 20 years eating all the pies she never got to consume when the wind swept the food away every morning on the breakfast terrace, and all the allegedly glamorous women make a Stepford Wife look like Personality of the Millennium.

    

I so, so wanted to like it; but it is bad. So, so bad. Lame writing, lame acting, and a lame Bobby, who keeps clutching his leg in pain, as the cancer he is trying to keep secret takes hold. Sue Ellen appears to be the only character who has survived the fallout. And Linda Gray still brilliantly plays it for the laugh it always was.

  

 I first watched Dallas when it was broadcast in the UK on BBC2 in the afternoon; I think I was probably its first UK fan. Although I did not know the term soap opera when growing up, I knew it must be something very, very naughty, because my parents always sent me to my room when Peyton Place was on.

    

Never having watched Coronation Street, I took to Dallas because of the shoulder pads, the pools, the glamour. It was a world so far removed from my own in South Wales, I could fantasise about riches, fine clothes, magnificent dinners, and take joy in the knowledge that for every material wealth these people had, they were still miserable as hell. That made me happy. Being poor. With no fine clothes. And, in a bad week, rather hungry.

   

 I specially liked Dallas’s annual Oil Barons Ball, where the oil magnates would gather to celebrate the industry but end up fighting and/or murdering each other. WestStar oil head honcho Jeremy Wendell always featured heavily on these occasions, though I swear he never washed his shirt from one year to the next.

    

Dallas lost its credibility with the “death” of Bobby, quickly resurrected and made the subject of wife Pam’s dream, when the ratings plummeted following the departure of Patrick Duffy, who played him.

   

 The biggest problem was that the sister show, Knot’s Landing, was still in production and had a lot of episodes in the can; so Bobby’s brother Gary continued to grieve on one channel, telling everyone how momma had never been the same since Bobby’s death, and nobody ever bothered to tell him that an entire year had all been in his head.

    

But it was the ludicrousness – the complete lack of believability – that, strangely, made it work. The new mob are playing it as if they have landed parts in Henry V, and they are about as menacing as a dead mouse in a Camembert.

    

After two episodes, I’ve already wiped it from my “series record”; life really is too short. 

And I really, really don’t want to watch Bobby dying from cancer – well, not unless he emerges wet and glistening and we discover that it was Christopher’s dream after all.   

    

Marc's Cherry On The Cake 3/25/12

Nicollette Sheridan’s Edie Britt did not stick out like a sore thumb on Desperate Housewives; it was more of a sore torso.

The final series of what has, for me, been one of the most brilliant TV dramas ever, is ending with more than a touch of controversy (and I don’t just mean Mike’s inability to buy a change of shirt). Nicollette Sheridan has been in court, suing the show’s creator, Marc Cherry. She claims that he got rid of her for reasons other than those he claimed (you will have to read up on this elsewhere; I don’t want to enter the legal minefield), and it’s allegedly all heading back to court.

Obviously, I know nothing of any of this, other than what I have read about the court proceedings, but as a TV critic, I was always 100% behind Sheridan’s departure – in fact, as passionately as I was against her arrival in the first place. To me, her character never worked; she just sort of landed on Wisteria Lane with about as much at-home-ness as ET arriving to address the Senate.

It wasn’t just that she was new. The central four – Gabby (Eva Longoria), Bree (Marcia Cross), Susan (Teri Hatcher), Lynette (Felicity Huffman) – have made relationships with several newcomers, including, among my favourites, the character of Katherine, played by the sensational Dana Delaney (now the star of Body of Proof).

I could just never get to grips with who Edie was supposed to be. She was a vamp, certainly, yet without the charm of vampishness that Vanessa Williams has brought to the part of Renee – who, despite outward appearances, still has layers that often expose her vulnerability. By comparison with both Renee and the foursome, Edie was . . . well, very one-dimensional and predictable.

I’ve been pondering these matters today as I’ve sat indoors, despite it being a beautiful sunny day outside, catching up with the series – the eighth, which will be its last. If you’re in the UK and watching Channel 4, don’t read on if you don’t want to know what’s coming up (even though some papers have already ruined the surprise).

I’ve been weeping uncontrollably at Mike’s funeral, as characters’ flashbacks of him steer them in different directions in their lives. If you are still reading, you would be well advised to stock up on Kleenex as you prepare to say goodbye to this wonderful character – and Hatcher delivers her best performance ever.

Yes, yes, I know that it will be the end for everyone soon, and I have stocked up on tissues for that day, too (anyone on for a DH end-of-life party, by the way?); but Mike’s death took me by surprise.

I don’t know how I’m going to live without the show. Eva Longoria’s beauty and Gabby’s hilarious selfishness; evil Orson and his determination to destroy Bree, the wife who spurned him; the gorgeous Tom, who has yet to realise that Lynette and he belong together; Susan as grandmother, supporting her daughter as she prepares to become a mother – I have loved every minute (even the daft bits).

It’s a shame for everyone that it’s ending on such a sour note and in court; but for some of us, Ms Sheridan’s exit really was the Cherry on the cake – literally and metaphorically.

Escape From Alcatraz (The TV Show) 3/13/12

Alcatraz.

It’s one of those words that sends a shiver down your spine.

It’s that movie you vaguely remember about a bunch of blokes who swam away from the horrible guards on a rock in the middle of an ocean no one had ever heard of.

Well, it seemed like that when I was growing up in Wales at the time. But then the biggest excitement our parents allowed us in Newport was a Cadbury’s flake sticking out of a Mr Whippy cone of a Sunday afternoon.

I saw Alcatraz "The Rock" last year. I was living in LA at the time and, as everyone told me how much I would prefer San Francisco, decided to head up there for the weekend.

I hated it. If I tell you that Alcatraz was the highlight of my SF week-end, that will give you an indication of quite how much I loathed it. And I didn’t even get to Alcatraz. Just the view of it was enough to make me feel better after the horrors of SF.

No restaurants serving after 9pm, an attitude to women dining alone that was positively prehistoric, and by far the scruffiest, dirtiest place I had ever been in the US.

Apart from that, I loved it. Ha!

But I will go back. If only to visit Alcatraz. Which is more than I can say of the TV drama. That, I hope never to visit again.

It promised so much. Big hype, big sets, dramatic music . . . but ultimately never delivered. A better example of style over substance it would be hard to find, and in the absence of a decent script (barely any script, come to that), it relied on stereotypes against a glossy background (grey, of course – apparently, it’s the new black, amongst people who know about such things).

So, we had the unshaven hunk with a mysterious air; closely followed by the petite, pretty, blonde, female cop, whose partner had (of course!) been killed; and then the proverbial Fat Bloke who, quelle surprise, got on rather well with said blonde, when she declared that she wanted him to be her new sidekick.

He could hardly contain himself (actually, that’s a lie: he looks as if he could contain not only himself but at least three families of refugees and a multi- storey car park). I predict his sad demise round about episode eight, series two, all providing the doughnuts and the Big Macs don’t get to him first.

Then there was the proverbial Bad Guy, who turned out to be running what appeared to be a cryogenics spaceship and . . .

To be honest, this IKEA showroom killed it for me at the end of the episode, because by then I really didn’t know where I was and, more importantly, didn’t know whose side I was supposed to be on.

For me, it’s important to know for whom you are rooting at the very beginning of a show, and Alcatraz didn’t have a clue. The hunk who drew us in turned out to be a nutcase and, worse, a nutcase convict from another era.

They missed a trick here and they should never have made him a killer in the pilot episode. There was just too much happening and they over-egged the pudding to such a degree that we had – and still do not have – any idea who the hero is.

Any show, TV or film, must address the fundamental question that any viewer or cinema-goer asks before their seat is even warm: whose side am I on?

After episode one of Alcatraz, I’m on the side of . . . well, any side that isn’t the channel it’s on.

Not only is it the poor man's Lost; it's the poor man's Lost behind bars.

A sad case of not getting my Rock off.

Or this jailhouse not rocking.