What if a great-looking actor showed off his dedication to his craft by gaining a lot of weight for a role...

... but you were just watching the movie not particularly knowing who that was and wondering throughout what's the deal with his pot belly? I mean, we're watching this movie (on TV) last night, and the main character strips down to his underwear early on and we are getting closeups of his distended belly. It's an unpleasant sight. Why are they showing us this? Later, we see him walking around with that belly straining against his too-tight shirt. Much later, there he is, walking — on another long trek from the forest to the city — and I'm so mystified at the unexplained importance of this belly that I'm saying out loud: What's up with the pot belly? It's like it's a character in the movie that nobody talks about. And who is this actor anyway? Is that supposed to be Colin Farrell?

The movie came out last year. I remember that it got a good review in The New Yorker, so I'd put it on my Amazon Prime playlist, but I'd forgotten what it was I was supposed to be watching and why it was said to be good and even how good it was said to be. This morning I see that it had a 90% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, that was indeed Colin Farrell, and he'd deliberately packed on 43 pounds to do that role:

Yeah, I ate like my life depended on it. I put on quite a pile in eight weeks. About 43 pounds.

What was the motivation behind that?

Well, he [the character in "The Lobster"] wasn’t written that way. He wasn’t written with any physical definition at all. But myself and [director] Yorgos [Lanthimos] had spoken about it and because this world was so unusual I wanted to have some physical separation from what I was used to. I’ve messed around with my body for roles, whether it was losing a load of weight or bulking up for action films. And so Yorgos and I talked about me dropping a bunch of weight and looking quite famished. But then I said, “I bet this guy was something of a comfort eater.” He’s probably not someone who ever realized that there was such a term as “let yourself go,” because there really is no consideration of the self. But he might’ve liked his grub.

Well, I had never seen a Colin Farrell movie before, but I understand he's a very nice looking man. But I don't have any particular feeling about him, and I certainly wasn't watching the movie thinking that's the famous actor Colin Farrell who was so dedicated to his craft that he discerned that a character written without "any physical definition at all" was a man who "might’ve liked his grub" and undertook the drastic (yet common) stunt of getting fat for a movie role.

I've asked this question before: If a movie calls for a fat actor, why don't they just hire a fat actor? Is it some kind of anti-fat statement, that the audience needs to know this person is not really fat? There's a great-looking guy in there. Well, I didn't know. The stunt was lost on me. I didn't have the psychological boost of "seeing" the unseen handsome guy inside the artificially pot-bellied man. I was just distracted wondering why the filmmaker insisted on all the hey-look-at-his-belly shots.

And it could have been a plot point. Because this movie was about the formation of male-female relationships based on a single corresponding trait — a "defining characteristic." Much is made of a woman who gets nose-bleeds and a man who bashes his head on things so he'll have nosebleeds and thus be able to couple with her. But our main character does not attempt to couple by matching his pot belly to some woman's pot belly. His defining characteristic is that he needs glasses — he's "short-sighted." And the woman he finds is also short-sighted* and has no discernible potbelly whatsoever.


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* SPOILER ALERT: And ultimately, she is beyond short-sighted — blind — and the man must decide whether to blind himself too so he can maintain the paired defining characteristic. See? "The Lobster" is a big old claw-snapping allegory.

"Gilliam... was standing outside a restaurant in Soho when a car backed into him. 'Yes, a man can fly,' observed a bystander as he flew past."

Hilarious assholes they have in England, it seems.

He broke his back, but seems fine now, despite a cracked vertebra and dislodged disc. "Yeah, I'm a lizard," he says, cackling.

From an article on Terry Gilliam's seemingly cursed movie "The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus." Other problems: The producer died suddenly. And so did the star — Heath Ledger.

"It just isn't possible that he's dead," [said Gilliam.] "There's nothing he can't do, it just flows out of him with ease and grace. He lifted everybody. He wasn't like Marlon Brando or James Dean or any of the more neurotic actors, his was all positive energy. I knew he was tired but that Saturday he had been doing all his own stunts, he was leaping off wagons, indestructible. On no level did his death make sense.... "

We're not all flying men/lizards.

"I ... looked at how to do the remaining scenes without Heath, and realised that, since his character goes through a magic mirror three times, we could get three actors to play the role."

He got Johnny Depp, Jude Law, and Colin Farrell, who are all donating their compensation to Ledger's 3-year-old child Matilda.

Other interesting things in the linked article:

1. George Harrison believed that the soul of The Beatles transmigrated into Monty Python when The Beatles died.

2. Monty Python broke up because the guys "got bored of each other."

3. "[Gilliam] renounced his American citizenship in 'disillusionment' with the Bush years, but he retains a pigtail which makes him look like an ageing hippy." You know what I don't understand? The role of "but" in that sentence.

4. Gilliam has never taken drugs, out of sheer fear of losing the distinction "between fantasy and reality." "It was only 15 years ago that I discovered I couldn't fly. I have such a 'sense memory' of flying around the world at the height of a table that when someone asked me to show them, I really thought I could do it."

5. In lieu of drugs: Dali, Ernst, Breughel, Bosch, and Mad magazine.

News about "Alexander."

1. Those Greeks who were suing to vindicate Alexander's sexual reputation are calling it off until they get a chance to see the film. Critics caution against it.

2. Angelina Jolie reflects on her performance as Alexander's mother:

"I connected to her as a mother. I don't think I could have played her if I wasn't a mother... As a mother, I truly understand that you will do anything to protect your child. Yes, she is a dark, wicked person, but as an actress, you have to make the audience believe that her motives were pure. She always put her son first."

Judging from this article, motherhood has totally undermined the once-great entertainment value of Jolie's private life. Oh, well. 

3. Here's quite a sentence from Anthony Lane's review in The New Yorker:

Farrell comes across here as twitchy, straw-haired, and buzzing with sexual mystification, as if he had researched the life of Anne Heche by mistake, and he seems bewildered by the film’s demands, uncertain whether to opt for a stiff-backed action man—an unironic legend, the sort of role that nobody has been able to master since Charlton Heston retired—or a tortured, more modern spirit, his taste for love dulled by his addiction to fame

4. The bogus homophobia angle appears in the Philippines press:

Would a big sector of our society raise hell about the film if it did not present without doubt the sexual and love choices of Alexander, the man? Look at all the tirades, they all point to things like the shaved legs of Farrell, his blonde locks and how they are wrongly dyed. One smells here the ether of homophobia rather than the essence of good taste.

Is anyone raising hell? I'm sure Stone dearly wishes hell had been raised.

5. Colin Farrell raises some hopes about the DVD version:

“I have no problem showing my ****,” says Farrell. “In fact, I did go naked in A Home at the End of the World, but they cut it out. During test audience screenings, they were advised it was too distracting. I don't know. I see my **** every day and am not distracted. But, hey, who knows? Maybe you'll get to see it in the uncut DVD version.”