The Chris Moeller Archives

The best essay you'll read this week...

...excluding some thoughts I may have later about Hamas and the Palestinian question.

It's Buzzmachine's Jeff Jarvis, on Tom Cruise and the hazards of being a star in the modern world.


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I was traveling and missed last night's Emmy's telecast, an event I so enjoyed covering on the blog last year. Ironic that the awards show would be airing opposite the season's final episode of television's best program, "Deadwood."

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Texas has the Jewish Cowboy Kinky Friedman, but northeast Iowa has Pirate James Hill.

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I wanted to say something about the death last week of 57-year-old acting great Bruno Kirby, who passed from complications of leukemia in Los Angeles. The New York Times, among others, pinned the label "character actor" on him in their obituary, but that phrase is terribly inadequate to describe what he-- and others like him-- do on stage and screen. It's a misnomer in fact. The phrase's implication is that these men and women are always playing the same character when, in truth, they're really actors who are so possessed of spark and verve that their immediate distinction is unavoidable. Peter Lorre and William Sanderson are archetypes, but I would open the club to also include Cary Grant and Marilyn Monroe, two lead performers whose personalities could not be bound by written roles.

"When Harry Met Sally" is an example of a Hollywood film significantly better than it has any right to be on paper, and that's due largely in part to Kirby and his supporting cohort, Carrie Fisher. Kirby also illuminated "This is Spinal Tap," "City Slickers," "The Freshman" with Marlon Brando and Matthew Broderick, and "Donnie Brasco" costarring Johnny Depp and Al Pacino. Kirby's characters, as written, almost always seemed an afterthought, but he brought them into vivid existence. Though nearly unrecognizable, even with the hindsight of a successful career, he portrayed the young Pete Clemenza in the turn of the century New York scenes of "The Godfather, Part II" alongside Robert De Niro, a role in which the christened Bruno Giovanni Quidaciolu delivered each of his lines in Italian.

The screen will miss his distinctive voice-- that literal husky, high-pitched one, along with the figurative. It will miss his energy and flair. I'll be recalling most fondly the scamp who stole the Broderick character's luggage in "The Freshman" on the boy's first day in the city, and who made off with his best friend's blind date in Harry and Sally. He stole our hearts as well.

posted by CM @ 9:10 PM