The Two Sides of Hollywood

I’m not a film buff. I love movies, but I probably couldn’t tell the difference between Truffaut and Fellini if my life depended on it. Nevertheless, the two “entertainment” news stories that most captured my interest last week were of the Hollywood variety. Circulating the Internet last week was a moving Esquire feature about Roger Ebert, the Chicago Sun Times film critic whose cancer and subsequent surgeries have taken away his ability to eat, drink, or speak. Putting aside the fact that I had a bout with lymphoma in college, I’m not sure why this article hit me as hard as it did, but it’s stuck with me since reading it a few days ago. I think part of it is Ebert’s grace, which is evident throughout the article.

What I am grateful for is the gift of intelligence, and for life, love, wonder, and laughter. You can’t say it wasn’t interesting. My lifetime’s memories are what I have brought home from the trip. I will require them for eternity no more than that little souvenir of the Eiffel Tower I brought home from Paris.

The term is thrown around a lot, but I think Roger really gets it. He understands himself and the world around him, and while I generally view film critics as pretentious, he’s become my new favorite person to follow on Twitter, with witty and insightful things to say. I never thought Ebert was the coolest guy around and regarded him as the epitome of cheeseball (two thumbs up!), but this article, coupled with his new online personality has made him decidedly hip. On the other side of the coin is Kevin Smith, who was kicked off a Southwest Airlines flight earlier this week for reportedly being “too fat to fly”. Kevin Smith is one of the rare people in entertainment whose personality I enjoy more than his work, and his weekly podcast, SModcast, is the highlight of my week. I’m also a big fan of his “Evening With…” DVDs, which have been filmed during his famous 4-hour-long Q&A sessions with fans. It’s not that I dislike his movies, but I really like him as a person and find his point of view on things refreshing and anti-Hollywood. That’s why, being the young left-leaning New Yorker that I am, I stood at the ready to defend him after the tweet that was heard ‘round the world, lambasting Southwest Airlines for kicking him off the flight and starting his week-long campaign against the “man”. Let it be clear that in no way do I support Southwest’s behavior. From the way it sounds, they had no real reason to kick Smith off the plane, and they’ve handled things poorly. However, it’s Kevin Smith’s behavior that irritates me the most. In the days since, Smith’s Twitter feed has been chock-full of tirades against Southwest and it’s all that he’s talked about. He recorded a special 1.5 hour episode of SModcast detailing the experience and once again calling out Southwest and how they handled the situation, and also recorded a 24-part (!!) series of YouTube clips explaining himself further. In these kinds of stories, I’m usually first in line to take huge corporations to task for shady business practices, but not here. Smith, whose humor often revolves around self-deprecating jokes about his weight, went from the guy who could laugh at himself, to the guy who asked – practically begged – for Southwest to publicly acknowledge that he wasn’t “too fat to fly”. Kevin Smith can call himself fat, but heaven forbid if someone calls him out on it. Mr. Smith, who is certainly overweight, will never be mistaken for thin, and while I applaud him for saying that his weight doesn’t bother him, I think he’s naive, and perhaps a bit selfish, to think that it wouldn’t (or shouldn’t) be a sticking point for someone else, let alone Southwest Airlines, a company in an industry known for consumer-unfriendly regulations and red tape. I’m not saying that I’ll never see another Kevin Smith movie again, but his behavior this week has soured my opinion of him a little bit. David Pell of Forbes seems to agree. One week, two articles, two reversals of opinion. Life can be surprising sometimes.