The Finch Formerly Known As Gold

7 May 2005

The crankiest guy in movies

Somewhere in the distant past (well, here, actually), McGehee proposed Paul Giamatti as the person who, in Blogosphere: The Movie, should play me.

Giamatti shows up answering 20 Questions in Playboy this month — the same issue in which I am proven, once again, to have predicted the Playmate of the Year wrongly — and he sounds a little bit like me on some of these:

When I got that part [in Sideways] I thought, Who's going to believe Virginia Madsen would fall for me? But it was great that my looks weren't used as a gag, gimmick or joke. Hey, I could probably lose some weight and get my teeth fixed, but I don't want to.

Whom would you switch bodies and faces with?
I honest to God think it would be interesting to be Paris Hilton or Cameron Diaz, just to see what it's like to be one of those hottie glamour women. Or Jessica Simpson or Britney Spears. It sounds strange and warped, but I think it would be fascinating. What would it be like to walk down the street and be that person? The world must literally look different. I'd definitely sign up for that.

What's your biggest concession to vanity?
Keeping my nose hairs trimmed, although I think I'm sporting a few right now. I don't make many moves to assuage my vanity. There's certainly a lot I don't like about myself physically, but I don't do anything about it.

Growing up, were you an irritable, misanthropic little kid?
I wasn't out there on the pep squad, but I wasn't a strange, miserable, pulling-wings-off-flies type or somebody who threw small furry animals into barrels of acid.

I demur only on the "hottie glamour women": while I can imagine being Cameron Diaz for a day, a weekend, or whatever, I'm not so sure about Jessica Simpson (the loss of 60 IQ points), Paris Hilton (the possibility of spending long afternoons at the clinic) or Britney Spears (the thought of having to spend time with Kevin Federline).

Still, while obviously I don't have Giamatti's charm, his not-entirely-inexplicable appeal to the babes, or any discernible talent, we seem to be walking in similar shoes. And I definitely liked this bit:

I've done plenty of crud. I'm fine doing crud, but it's nice to be in some noncrud now.

Although noncrud, they tell me, is much, much preferable.

Posted at 2:36 PM to General Disinterest


Heh.

Posted by: McGehee at 2:58 PM on 7 May 2005

Only 60?

Posted by: unimpressed at 3:27 PM on 7 May 2005

In some magazine article last year, Simpson's mom claimed that Jessica has an IQ of 160. Since I have occasionally tested higher than this and yet am still dumb as a post, I figured the least I could do is give her a portion of the benefit of the doubt.

Posted by: CGHill at 4:27 PM on 7 May 2005

Having listened to her talk, her mom was off by -at least- a factor of two.

Posted by: unimpressed at 4:40 PM on 7 May 2005

I don't think old guys wanting to switch bodies with hot women to be so strange--otherwise, why would so many women in chatrooms actually be old guys pretending to be women?

Posted by: sya at 8:10 PM on 7 May 2005

Which I actually did, back around the dawn of Internet time, although the less said about that, the better, and this was more of a message-board than a chat-room simulation anyway.

Interestingly, my usual chat name is not gender-specific, and often as not I am read as female, mostly because (1) I can spell and (2) I don't make a practice of hitting on the babes. Surely this says something about the cultural milieu. :)

Posted by: CGHill at 8:40 PM on 7 May 2005