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Movies 2: The Giant Mechanical Man
But speaking of anguish, we saw a very good movie this week, one of the movies chosen last Sunday by all four of us. I’m not talking about Operation Little Brother, which we watched last night. That’s a Bond spoof from 1967 that stars Sean Connery’s brother Neil in a role where he plays Neil Connery, the brother of the great 007. Neil is a world renowned plastic surgeon, an American working at Columbia University, who is also a hypnotist and karate expert. It’s actually a spaghetti western in the spy genre and even filmed partially in southern Spain where many of those movies actually were filmed and where Paula and I visited a couple of years ago. It’s mostly English dubbed over Italian with lots of Italian Bond-like beauties on screen and not that bad though exactly what you’d expect. I have no idea how it was received at the time or even if Neil Connery went on to other movies.
No, friend, I’m talking about a movie called the Giant Mechanical Man (2011). I don’t know how this one got picked but we watched it when we got back from the Persian Room on Wednesday and so Paul slept through most of it. I, on the other hand, was mesmerized. It’s the sort of movie that I wish I’d made. First of all, the heroine is a fan of silent movies and so she’s seen sitting at the local art theater - filmed in Detroit - where they have a silent movie night and on this night the movie is The Kid. That immediately endeared this movie to me but as I watched and took in the dialogue or lack of such, it occurred to me that whoever was making this movie was serious about silent movies and was making a talkie that was as silent as a talkie can actually be. The dialogue is sparse, especially on the part of the heroine, a girl who admits that she’s totally lost when she gets fired from a job of just standing in front of an empty closet in a museum to ward off anyone who might try to make their way into that empty closet, i.e., no one. That job, of course, she is not suited for.
The hero, on the other hand, is an artist. But an artist with a talent that doesn’t take him very far and likely never will. Maybe that’s what truly endeared me to this movie, given that I’ve gotten nowhere as three different kinds of artist at this point.
4:44 p.m. Please Please Please. VB #4
Mitch Ryder, of course, and while I’m calling this #4, it’s actually the third of the four 16 ounce Valley’s that I’ll drink tonight.
The hero is the giant mechanical man and it’s perfect for what this movie is depicting - a world where human beings are turned into machines. The film starts with him painting his face in a metallic gray, putting on 2 foot stilts along with a gray suit and then strolling out onto the street where he poses as this gigantic mechanical man who moves like a robot and never speaks, just hopes to collect a little change in the case he’s got at his feet.
There’s very little comedy other than the shots taken at what it takes to succeed in this world, personified by a guy with a self help book that tells you how to have “winning” conversations. This, of course, recalls Little Miss Sunshine but it’s ripe enough to be used in other ways. This time the author who knows how to talk to people to the extent that he can get published on the subject is an asshole who clearly has no idea how to talk to anyone, which fits into the silent movie motif since when he’s with the heroine, he’s got a lot to say, all of it asinine, while she mostly sits silently watching this him workout, impressing no one but himself. It’s brilliant.
She gets fired by the temp agency that sent her to the museum because she doesn’t come across as someone people like to deal with. The mechanical man gets dumped by his girlfriend, who is apparently making most of the money and hoping to get ahead in life. She decides that the mechanical man act is going nowhere and gets out. This leaves the mechanical man in a state of self doubt to the extant that he takes a job at the zoo cleaning everything including toilets because he figures that that is the only way to get along.
IMAGES INSERTED: Movie Poster / Still
Meanwhile the heroine has also taken a menial job selling grape fruit cups at this same zoo and so, of course, they run into each other. They realize that they are compatible and in a way that they’ve never been compatible before. She is aware of the giant mechanical man who stands around town doing his thing though she doesn’t recognize him out of costume. In fact, she’s actually spoken to him in her desperation though, of course, he doesn’t talk back. He just does his mechanical moves, which are very robotically good, by the way. So when they start talking at the zoo, reminiscent of the zoo scene in The Graduate, they get along and when he starts to tell her that he is the giant mechanical man that she’s seen around town, he gets interrupted by the fact that they are made for each other and so it doesn’t come out just then.
So that when she finally has it out with her sister and the idiot writer that her sister has been trying to set her up with, the little sister with whom she’s been staying since being fired and evicted, she ends up on the street with nowhere to go, talking finally but to herself as if she’s living in a silent movie of her own. But she’s not talking to herself. She’s talking to the silent being who inhabits the streets of Detroit, the giant mechanical man, who realizes that he misinterpreted seeing her with the writer so that when he turns toward her and offers her his hand, she finally recognizes him. They’ve found the one person they need - the one person being a theme that runs through the entire story. You only need one person to support what and who you are and then you can get through life no matter what life might throw at you. They’ve both found that one person but it’s not as it is in romantic comedies. It’s not that they’ve found that person who happens to be as beautiful as they are. It’s that they’ve found that person who has the same understanding of the mechanical essence of the modern world and who requires the companionship of a likeminded participant in that world. While both the heroine and hero are nice enough looking, neither is conventionally beautiful enough to be the star of a big budget rom-com. But what they are is real. They’re real people to whom real people can relate, particularly people who have a talent that goes unrecognized or who is lost but is smart enough and intelligent enough to do something worthwhile if they could only get noticed or get the opportunity. Most of us, in other words.
P.S: The music is garage band. Real.