This week, I’m reviewing “Paintings of Cole,” which I didn’t like, because the press screening was all the way uptown, and there were huge delays on the J train.
The movie, which was written and directed by Steven Kern, who also stars, tells the story of a young man named Cole, who is tasked with bringing down the Italian Mob. Cole uses his paintings to send secret messages to the police, which pisses me off, because in grad school I wrote a short story with basically that exact idea. And I failed the grad-school class, but Mr. Kern is getting early Oscar buzz. Justice? Not in this life.
Before the film started, the studio girl who set up the screening smiled at me and thanked me for coming. She told me her name, but I wasn’t paying attention, because I was trying to work out whether sleeping with her would be a conflict of interest. I think her name started with an “R,” though. Rebecca? Rachel? Or it could have been something weird. Reba? Are people still named Reba?
In the movie, Cole, a happily married father of two, is an abstract painter, which raises the question: How can he afford a brownstone in the West Village? I’ve been writing movie reviews for a blog that attracts more than eight hundred and forty-five unique views a month, and I live in the kind of housing complex that rappers brag about escaping.
Cole’s wife is played by the supermodel turned actress Stephanie Anderson, who looks kind of like Jenny Kramer, a girl who was nice to me in middle school, and whom I probably could have dated if she hadn’t transferred high schools. I wonder what Jenny’s doing right now. She’s probably wondering what I’m doing. Funny.
Anyway, Cole witnesses a murder and is pursued by members of the Mafia, who start buying his art. I couldn’t figure out if they were buying his paintings to see if they somehow revealed who the murderer was, or if they were buying his paintings to get close to him, so that they could kill him. This confusion could have been the fault of Kern’s screenplay, or it could have issued from my sneaking out of the screening room to pee during an important scene.
When I got back from the bathroom, I asked the critic next to me (from the Times) why the Mob was pursuing Cole, and he whispered that it was the same reason “the French colonel pursued normalcy in Buñuel’s ‘The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie.’ ” No help there. Pretentious jerk.
I thought about asking Reba, or Raquel, but I didn’t want her to think that I hadn’t been paying attention.
And the Times critic seemed to love the movie, which is no surprise, because the Times loves everything. Well, everything except me. I went in for an interview three years ago, with a résumé and a packet of my reviews, and they rejected me. But the joke’s on them, because I cancelled my subscription, and now I use my friend’s password to break through their paywall.
The standout performance was by Peter Jaworski, who played the Mob boss’s son, Sonny. Sonny is a ladies’ man, even though Jaworski is at least two or three inches shorter than I am. Kudos to you, Mr. Kern, for your casting choice. If a shrimp like Jaworski can sleep with Stephanie Anderson, then I could certainly date a little studio intern like Ramona. Or was it Rosalind?
After the screening, I approached the studio girl and said, “Hey there, Rhonda, how about you and I make some abstract art of our own?” She gave me a look that simultaneously said, “You’re a disgusting person” and “My name is not Rhonda, or anything remotely similar to Rhonda.” And, with that, my already bad day was ruined.
In sum, these are the main problems with “Paintings of Cole”: it was inconveniently shown on the Upper West Side, written by a guy I envy, screened by a cute intern whose name was too confusing to remember, based on an idea that I poorly executed in grad school, and praised by the Times, which rejected me.
Nonetheless, “Paintings of Cole” is easily the best movie of the year. I’m saying this only in the hope that the studio might print my name after a blurb on the movie poster. And I’ve always wanted to have my name on a movie poster. How cool would that be? Like, back in New Jersey, Jenny Kramer will be at her local multiplex, and she’ll see my name on the poster for “Paintings of Cole” and be, like, “His opinion is on a movie poster! I should call him and ask for his opinion about sleeping with me.” Then we actually would sleep together. And she would give me a great review. ♦
