Dream Log: Cast Reunion Of "Gilligan's Island"

I dreamed that I was a cast member of "Gilligan's Island," and that some surviving members of the cast had gotten together at a resort hotel for some reason. It was not clear what role I had played on the show. Outside of the guest rooms and suites, all of the walls and doors of the hotel were white, as was much of the furniture.

Besides people associated with "Gilligan's Island," some people I actually know in waking life were there. Some of the latter were doing some pole-vaulting at a track-and-filed facility close to the hotel. A friend of mine suddenly got upset for some reason, and I hugged him and did my best to console him. I did some pole-vaulting. In waking life, I have never attempted pole-vaulting. In the dream, I was clearing 10 or 12 feet, rather unrealistic for right now, given my age, 55, and weight.

Suddenly I realized that I had no money on my person except for a trouser pocket full of nickels and dimes.

Robert Downey, Jr was there, and was connected to "Gilligan's Island" in some way. He had been pole-vaulting with us, and now he was sitting on a white chair in the white hallway outside of our hotel suites, dressed all in white: white button-down shirt with the sleeves rolled up over a white T-shirt, white trousers with a white belt, white loafers and white socks. He was handling some of the finances related to the show. It was not clear whether, in the dream, he, and not Russell Johnson, had played the Professor on the show. I mentioned my residuals to him, and he said that I could get a daily payment of $170.00 if I so chose, beginning the next day. We agreed that I would take the $170.00 per day. The lodging at the hotel was being provided without charge. Whether the money was being taken out of our residuals payments, or if some person or company or other entity was footing the bill for the hotel, was not clear.

I went out to the beach next to the hotel. Dawn Wells, who played Mary Ann on "Gilligan's Island," was sitting on the white sand of the beach on a white towel wearing a white one-piece bathing suit. I said hello to her a couple of times but she didn't answer. It wasn't clear whether she was ignoring me, perhaps because she'd heard I was broke, or if she had become hard of hearing, or what.

Suddenly I felt very hungry. I didn't know what the prices for food were around here, but, it being a resort hotel, I thought they might be rather steep. I didn't know whether my pocketful of small change would buy me any food at all. I went back inside and asked Robert Downey, Jr, whether he could loan me the price of a sandwich. He handed me a $100 dollar bill. Then he pointed to the door beside him, the door to his suite. Suddenly for some reason he had a British accent which lasted for the rest of the dream. He said, "The kitchen in there is very well-stocked, you could make yourself a sandwich." I thanked him and tried to give him back the $100, but he refused to take it, and also told me that it wasn't a loan. He also mentioned that there was some pasta salad in the fridge in his suite which was very good, and that I should try at least a bite before I even started to make a sandwich.

Then he pulled me close and muttered, "There's a full bar in there, too. Go nuts. Mi casa su casa. I insist."

Then another man, I don't remember who, pulled me aside and thrust a $100 bill at me. Somehow he had heard I was nearly broke. "Thanks," I said, "but someone already beat you to it."

"Good," he replied, forcing the bill on me. "That just means you're another $100 ahead. Please. It'll hurt my feelings if you don't take it."

I went inside Robert Downey Jr's suite. In stark contrast to the whiteness outside, in here the walls were painted dark colors and the floor was covered with dark carpet, and there was a lot of exposed wood and leather and stained glass. The lighting was pleasantly subdued. I was intensely looking forward to the first bite of that pasta salad when I woke up.

I Don't Call Them "Guilty Pleasures --"

-- because I'm not the the slightest bit guilty, or embarrassed, about saying that I loved parts of Tropic Thunder,for instance, or Armageddon.I like what I like and I don't mind saying so. Note that I said that I like parts of those movies. I couldn't be the sort of movie critic who gives a movie a number of stars or an A-to-F grade, saying, for instance, that a lot of the cinematography and action sequences in Armageddon are brilliant, but that a lot of the dialogue is so bad it makes you wince, and as a result giving the movie two stars out of four, although I completely agree that a lot of the cinematography and action sequences are brilliant and that a lot of the dialogue is wincingly awful. To me brilliance more than makes up for bathos, I can close my eyes and hold my ears during the awful parts, and a movie which is part genius and part stupid is infinitely preferable to me to one which is all fairly competent mediocrity. There is already much too much mediocrity in the world, I feel, and not nearly enough brilliance. Therefore I will heartily sing the praises of the brilliance, even if it is brief, and located in the midst of much awfulness.

There are significant parts of Armageddon -- voice-over montages, mostly, which I can describe neither as brilliant nor awful, but only as... closely resembling those commercials ones sees a lot on TV on Sundays, during the weekly political-news programs and golf tournaments: those commercials with high-contrast, often slow-motion visuals and baritone voiceovers, both the visuals and the voice providing non sequiturs, and you're not at all sure what they're selling, but you know you've got to be pretty well-off to be in the market to buy it: big insurance policies, or investment advice, or luxury SUV's. Sometimes the commercials are not explicitly selling anything, they just give you a lot of platitudes and a series of visuals intended to give a sense of the common humanity of all the people of Earth and stirring yet muted orchestra music in the background, and at the end of the commercial the baritone narrator merely intones the name of a company while its logo appears, and then he recites one more platitude, like, "Working For Tomorrow," and six months later you find out that the company makes nerve gas or nuclear warheads.

I can only recall seeing those sorts of montages in TV commercials and Michael Bay movies: Armageddon, The Rock,Pearl Harborand so forth.

I liked Tropic Thunder more than I thought I would. It's over-the-top, shameless silliness, but it's mostly very well-done silliness. I didn't like Ben Stiller's character's forced performances as Simple Jack while he was a prisoner of the drug smugglers in the jungle. (I don't mean that there was a halting quality about the performances, merely that Stiller's character was forced at gunpoint to perform.) It's not that I object to comic portrayals of the mentally-challenged -- or, more accurately in this case: to portrayals of dumb, insensitive actors condescendingly portraying the mentally challenged. It's just that this part of Stiller's performance didn't come off for me, didn't work. Robert Downey Jr's portrayal of a white Australian method actor, in surgically-applied blackface, portraying an African-American made me laugh, and it also made me wince a lot. I guess that's what it was intended to do. (There have been a lot of portrayals of Americans by Australian and British movie stars in recent decades, I wonder if Downey's character was intended in any way as a comment on them.) Matthew McConaughey is very funny playing a stereotypical Hollywood agent. There are a lot of nice touches in the movie, many of them imploding the pretentions of previous Hollywood blockbusters about Vietnam. Somehow, before Stiller pointed it out to me, it hadn't occurred to me how very seriously those earlier movies had tended to take themselves.

But for me, far and away the best part of Tropic Thunder, and the only reason I'm writing about it today, is Tom Cruise's performance as studio executive Less Grossman.



You must see this. Cruise wore a fat suit for this part and either shaved his head or wore a bald wig, he wore thick glasses. Still, it's not about the prosthetics and props. Cruise acts his buff little ass off here. His Les Grossman is a gloriously amoral and aggressive balled fist of a man. I don't want to ruin it for you, in case you haven't seen Tropic Thunder yet, by telling you too much about what Grossman says and does. Perhaps part of what's so funny here is that Cruise's performance rings so true: when it comes to big-time Hollywood players, over-the-top is no exaggeration. There are some very colorful characters behind the scenes in Tinseltown.

There are some rumors that Cruise may reprise his role as Les Grossman. This makes me very happy. I just checked and, no, he was not nominated for an Oscar for Tropic Thunder -- whaaaa?? Seriously!

Ah well, the Oscars never were a very good guide to the very best that Hollywood has done, this is just the 3,576th example of that.