The Pecan Park Eagle

It happened again. Last night my wife and I went to see what first sounded like it would be a neat sci fi movie. It turned out to be another of those bad-to-the-bone failed chick flicks that is spoken mostly in whispers to the ears of only those females in the audience who still possess the ability to understand hush-spoken words above the torrent of their own broken hearted tears. The only people crying at our Sunday showing in Cinemark Memorial City were me and all others who couldn’t stop thinking of what they had just paid good money to watch.

The storyline is simple enough: As a child of about 8, Henry De Tamble (Eric Dana) is riding in the back seat of a car driven by his mother when she looks back to give him a goofy smile that is far too slow on delivery. Henry’s eyes widen to twice their size as he looks past his unconditional love-ogling mom to see the oncoming rush of a head-on collision in the fractional second away in-the-making future.

It is under these circumstances that Henry first learns that he suffers from a genetic anomaly that will, in this case, spare his physical life, but condemn him to an eternal search for lasting love and soul-weary rest. You see, Henry has the ability, under duress, to travel through time and away from threat. In his first trip, Henry suddenly disappears from the back seat of the car as his mom takes the highway hit on her own normally guaranteed path to the cemetery. It’s not clear exactly where Henry quickly went on this first trip, but it was away from harm long enough to spare him from becoming the second bug on the windshield of the truck that slams into the mom-mobile.

Of course, Henry’s guilt is monumental that he survived while his mom died. As we soon learn in patchy, hard-to-follow flashbacks and flashforwards, Henry’s life beyond the first trauma now becomes one long unending succession of involuntary trips to and from other time zones, as his classic violinist father slips steadily into alcoholism from his inconsolable grief. One of only two things are constant about Henry’s trips through time: (1) Clothes don’t travel. Anytime Henry travels, his clothes drop to the floor and he arrives nude at his new destination; and (2) Henry is looking for love in all the wrong spaces. Once Henry lands nude in the brushes near a dense forest, he finds a little girl about 8 years old having a picnic by herself in the nearby meadow. The little girl turns out to be Clare Abshire (later played by Rachel McAdams when Clare reaches a more appropriate dating age for the now fully grown, time-truckin’ Henry.)

In their first time travel meeting, the voice of Henry calls out from the bushes to reassure the frightened little girl that she has nothing to fear from him. He says something like, “Don’t worry about me. I’m just a time traveler. Throw me that blanket you’re using and I’ll come out and talk with you.” This wierdo approach apparently wasn’t covered by Clare’s parents or teachers in their warnings about stranger-predators. She takes the blanket to the bushes, allowing the now covered Henry to come out in the open for a brief and mildly inappropriate conversation with the little girl.

Henry continues to make these little trips over time to visit Clare until she finally grows old enough to marry him. They marry, of course, but Henry is still disappearing on a fairly regular, but uncontrollable basis. Clare is very understanding of her husband’s absences, but coming from a really rich family, she’s a little unhappy over their lack of income. Henry works as a lbrarian and cannot afford to support Clare in the style she had known from birth. No problem. On one of his time trips, Henry takes with him an old lottery ticket from a recent, slightly later-in-time trip and plays those numbers again at this earlier moment in time to win five million dollars. After a brief struggle with the ethics of such an unfairly gained windfall, Clare grabs the money and shuts her mouth. They buy a bigger house.

A big part of  the couple’s problem in marriage is their difficulty having a child. Clare keeps having third term miscarriages that they fear are being caused by Henry’s time travel gene. (Don’t ask me how that works!) They finally have a kid, but she turns out to be a time traveler too. SPOILER ALERT! I’m almost ashamed to admit that I recall this much of the plotline, but you may want to stop here, if you plan to go watch this dog chase its tail on your own dollar. I’m about to spoil the ending for all those who continue reading.

Henry finally makes a fatal time trip. He lands in the middle of the woods, standing between a big buck deer and his big game hunting, but visually challenged father-in-law.  Dear old Pa-in-Law shoots Henry instead of the deer, but Henry manages to time morph home before he dies nude in the foyer of his own home in the caring, blanket-covering four arms of his wife and daughter.  From that point on, wife and daughter only see Henry one more time, when he comes back to say a longer goodbye. Once Henry reassures them both that he will miss them, he begins to fade out, section by section. As always happens, Henry’s clothes fall to the ground when he disappears. After Henry drops his pants for the last time, Clare picks them up, as per usual, and walks back to the house with the clothes under one arm and the other arm around their daughter, and probably wishing all the while that Henry had played, at least, one more lottery numbers combo before taking his final leave.

Fade to black, with credits rolling.

Need I say more?

Producers/Directors/Writers Peter and Bobby Farrelly have been trying to put together a biographical movie on the lives and careers of the infamous “Three Stooges” for about ten years now. Just when it appeared that they had nailed down their cast and were ready to go into August 2009 production in time to make a 2010 release date, the cast commitments are falling apart. First to back out was Sean Penn, who had been set to play “Larry,” the bald-on-top, fuzzy-on-the -sides character in the right of our photo. Penn cited personal reasons and a desire to spend more time with his family as the causes behind his decision.

On the heels of Penn’s back-out, Jim Carrey, who had signed on to play the bald and stout “Curly,” our guy in the far left of our photo by putting on fifty pounds for the role, is now rumored as the second actor who will be pulling away from the production. Only Benecio Del Toro, the great Spanish actor who signed up to play the dominant “Mo” character in this crazy mix is still on board, but that could change also with the departure of the two big name stars. The Farrelly Brothers have their script and other production needs in place, they are just stopped for now by a scattering, escaping cast of big star chicken outs! I understand that Paul Giammati is the probable replacement for Penn as Larry, but there is no word on the street about who may replace Carrey as Curly.

Like many of you, I grew up watching the Stooges and their inane physical assaults upon each other through all those countless episodes of “dumb and dumber” adventures with wine, women, and work. It’s undoubtedly no coincidence that the Farrelly Brothers are behind the Stooges movie. These are the same guys who brought us that “Dumb and Dumber” movie series a few years ago.

Moe (Moe Howard) was always my favorite Stooge because of his early behavioral resemblance to some of the grocery store managers I encountered as a kid worker, just starting out. To my profound surprise, I later encountered “Moe” again on my doctoral dissertation committee, and also at insurance agencies, banks, repair shops, and even in the presence of some traffic cops and co-workers. Do you remember “Moe”? He was the guy who was forever pretending to be smart enough to do the job that was always over his head.

Curly (Jerome Howard) was Moe’s real life brother – the idiot child who usally caught the brunt of Moe’s displaced anger and aggression for everything bad that happens. Totally hapless in his ability to immediatelystand up for himself, Curly absorbed the pain with a frustrated cry of “NYUK! NYUK!” and a rapid-fire, self-inflicted hand slap of his own face.  His memory for passive-aggressive revenge wasn’t bad, however. A few minutes after each absorbed asault, whenever Moe had returned to his total state of unawareness, Curly would then get him back in some equally painful physical way. – Hammers to Moe’s head were effective, but Curly’s “floating hands butterfly slap” was the real bomb. Moe fell for it every time.

Larry (Larry Fine) was the non-descript, non-relative member of the original Stooges trio. Larry always gave you the impression that he might escape the fate of the Stooges by taking these two easy steps: comb his hair and get far away from Curly and Moe. He was just too dumb to ever do it. As a result, he got his hair pulled, his nose sawed, and his eyes poked on a regular basis by the two Howard boys – and in whatever comibination they came after him.

When Curly Howard had a stroke, he was replaced on screen by brother Shemp Howard, who then played (What do you know?) a character called “Shemp.” (Sadly, Curly later died.) Shemp brought his own brand of creative physical idiocy to the screen. On the broadest band of description, however, Shemp was the guy who looked like Moe and acted like Curly. When Shemp Howard also died and was then serially replaced by the characters named “Joe” and “Curly Joe,” I never watched again. The Three Stooges were then dead to me after the passing of Shemp. Plus, I was older then – and too cool for a while to watch anything like the Three Stooges. Now that I’ve rounded third and am headed for home, I’m a Stooges fan again all the way!

I hope the Farrelly Brothers can get this Stooges movie act finally off the ground and through the force field of all the human egos that are bound to get in the way of making a film of this nature. If they don’t, somebody needs to grab a saw and put it to good use on each of their Farrelly noses.

Editorial Note, 10/01/09: I want to thank Paul Groner for “gently” writing to point out three  errors of fact in my original article: (1) I misspelled Moe Howard’s name as “Mo”; and (2) I neglected to note that Curly Howard’s birth name was “Jerome,” not “Curly;” and (3) I stated that Shemp Howard replaced Curly Howard as one of the Three Stooges upon the death of the latter. In reality, Curly left the ensemble after he suffered a stroke. Shemp replaced him as the result of Curly’s illness. – Curly died later, after Shemp was already established in his replacement role.

Those of you who really know me undertsand how important “getting it right” is to me – and how unimportant “being right” is to my psyche. As a result, I have corrected those mistakes today in the piece above in the hope that they will straighten out these facts to any readers I may have misinformed. My apologies also go out to any Stooges fans who were offended by my mistakes.

I may not remember the Three Stooges perfectly, but the perfect joy they brought to my childhood shall live forever. Next time you find I’ve made a mistake, and I will make some,  just let me know, matter of factly. I listen a lot better to reasonably expressed opinions snd information.