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Should you find yourself with an idle Saturday, you could do worse than to program an Owen Wilson film festival. Start around noon with Bottle Rocket and a bowl of Honeycombs. Then move on to Meet the Parents -- though you might want to fast-forward to Wilson's scenes as Kevin, the carpentry-loving, Christian ex-fiancé who gets all the movie's funniest lines. (On being told that Ben Stiller is Jewish: "Great -- so was J.C.!")
After that, order in a pizza and screen Rushmore. Wilson didn't appear in it, of course, but he co-wrote it, and it's always worth rewatching. Then clear your palate with Zoolander, in which Wilson and Ben Stiller play feuding male models. (The phrase "That Hansel -- he's so hot right now" has earned a treasured place in our personal concordance of non-sequitur inside jokes, to be spoken aloud without prompting or provocation -- just to make us smile.)
Then welcome the onset of evening -- the Chinese food should be arriving about now -- with The Royal Tenenbaums, the film that best showcases Wilson as a formidable double-threat. He co-wrote that one, too, and also has a few great scenes (and brilliant line readings) as Eli Cash, cowboy novelist and speed freak.
Or you could skip those movies altogether. That's the beauty of the Owen Wilson oeuvre -- you can leave out his five best films and still have a pretty good time.
Sure, this will mean programming your personal festival with such films as Armageddon, Anaconda, The Haunting, and The Cable Guy. But then again, you'll be watching Owen Wilson, who is reliably hilarious, even when he's being eaten by a really fake-looking sixty-foot snake.
With his unconventional good looks (he resembles a young Warren Beatty if Beatty had sported a surfer's blond mop and taken a barstool or two across the nose) and oddball timing, Wilson has won a deserved reputation as a comedic King Midas. He may not be able to transmute whole movies on his own, but he's always good for a couple of 24-karat scenes.
For example, if you watched last year's Oscar telecast, you'll remember that Wilson and Ben Stiller provided the show's funniest moment. In a pre-taped segment, they quarreled over their relative successes. Wilson was hilariously patronizing, in that manner he's perfected. Finally, Stiller quipped, "I hear you're making a sequel to Shanghai Noon. What are they going to call it? Shanghai 12:30?" Exit ginger ale, out our nostrils.
The sequel in question, of course, is called Shanghai Knights, and it's about to open at a movie theatre near you. And you might as well admit it: You sort of, kind of want to see it. And, Jackie Chan notwithstanding, we're guessing the reasons you want to see it can be counted on one finger: the Owen Wilson finger.
We're not going to say you should ignore this impulse. We, too, feel its powerful tug. In fact, this tug was so powerful that it tractor-beamed us straight into a Saturday-night screening of I Spy. You remember I Spy, don't you? The lifeless buddy comedy that co-starred Eddie Murphy, and featured the duo trading lifeless quips, often while ducking bullets or preparing to run, in slo-mo, from conveniently sluggish fireballs?
If you saw that movie, as we did, you might have asked this question, as we did: What is Owen Wilson doing in the middle of this mess? It wasn't, of course, a total surprise: after all, he also appeared in the aforementioned Anaconda and The Haunting, as well as the depressingly generic Behind Enemy Lines, in which he did little more than scamper across the frozen plains of Bosnia, looking scared -- when he wasn't serving as a catchbin for Gene Hackman's spittle.
But what can we say? We're smitten. This despite the fact that Wilson's repertoire has been pretty evenly divided between critically adored gems and big-budget lumps of coal. For every Royal Tenenbaums, an Anaconda; for every Zoolander, an Armageddon.
Upon seeing Wilson on the I Spy poster, one fan we know remarked, "What's he doing? Is he Nic Cage-ing himself?" It's too early to sound the alarms, but those of us who remember Cage back when he, too, was an edgy, unconventionally attractive comic talent whose scenes were often worth the price of admission can't help but feel a little nervous. We'd hate to see Owen Wilson in Con Air II. For that matter, we'd hate to see Con Air II.
See, that's the problem with keeping one foot in the megaplex and the other in the art house, as Wilson thus far has done: It's great as long as you can keep your balance, but it's kind of like keeping one foot in quicksand and the other on a patch of black ice.
Wilson's golden rep is well-earned and, truth be told, we'll still march out to see pretty much anything he does, up to and including Shanghai Knights. But we just want to let him know that it's possible to have a long and fulfilling movie career that doesn't involve Eddie Murphy. In fact, it's advisable.
And we'd like to pass on this word of well-intentioned advice: Please remember the cautionary end to that King Midas story. Even if you have a golden touch, you still have to be careful about where you apply it. Sure, Midas could turn anything to gold. But if he touched a piece of crap, all he'd end up with is a piece of gold crap.
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