Tales & Trails of a Traveling Wiseguy

Today film actor Val Kilmer died. He was 65. He starred in dozens of movies; in many of them he made his characters memorable. Here are a few memories of Val Kilmer movies I've seen and enjoyed:

Kilmer's first film was Top Secret! (1984). He starred as Nick Rivers, an Elvis Presley-like rock star sent to a festival in East Germany to draw attention away from an American spy operation. I saw that movie not when it ran in theaters but probably not too many years after that on video. I think I saw it before the fall of the East German regime in 1990, when it was actually topically relevant rather than a quaint historical piece. And as a Zucker-Abrams-Zucker film it was hilarious, full of slapstick humor, sight gags, and Vaudeville-style straight-man lines.

The first Val Kilmer movie I saw was 1985's Real Genius. As a middle school/high school student really interested in STEM it was meaningful to me to see his slacker/genius portrayal because it showed me that smart guys can also be cool. Prior to that I'd only ever seen smart people in movies made fun of as stereotypical nerds.

For a lot of people Kilmer's co-starring role opposite Tom Cruise in Top Gun (1986) might be his most iconic. For me that movie was forgettable except as some big-budget special effects vehicle that involved a 110% predictable love triangle.

Willow (1988) was another movie where I remember Kilmer's portrayal as being special. His character of Mad Marnigan was not the star but he brought a special verve to it, frankly a bit of scenery-chewing— but in a good way— that made the character bigger than it was written.

Tombstone (1993) might be the movie in Kilmer's filmography I like best. It was an amazing movie. And Kilmer's portrayal of legendary gunslinger Doc Holliday was amazing. He took a character that in many other tellings of the story of Wyatt Earp is portrayed as two dimensional and made him actually more interesting than Wyatt Earp. Plus, even the way he committed to portraying Holliday as a person suffering from tuberculosis was special. He acted as if he had such trouble speaking that you really wanted to pay attention to every word he said; like a person who didn't have that many words left sure wasn't going to waste one.

As I peruse Kilmer's list of film credits on IMDb I realize there are many of his movies I haven't seen— and should see. Tops on that list is The Doors (1991). I'm a big fan of The Doors' music. And just today I learned that Kilmer actually sang all the parts as Doors' front man Jim Morrison in that movie.

BuzzFeed posted an interesting listicle yesterday, "Everyday Things People Are Too Old For" (26 Mar 2024). The subheading is that it's according to Millennials and above. I'm... above... and I agree with most of the list. To be clear, these are not "Kids get off my lawn!" grumbles. These are things I embraced or at least tolerated in, say, my early 20s that I decided by my 30s weren't worth it. The listicle counts from 1 to 21. I'll call out just Five Things:

If I'm not having fun, I leave [#1]

This is the #1 item in the listicle and it's pretty high on my own list, too, of things I've changed as I've gotten older. I won't stay long at an optional activity I don't enjoy just to satisfy others or meet expectations. And especially if people there are being jerks, as in the example given in the listicle, I'll nope out. My leisure time is too precious to waste.

I don't try to be friends with jerks [#2]

This is #2 in the listicle and also high on my own list. When I was a kid... and up through college age... I wasted a lot of time trying to be friends with people who were jerks. One part of it was my upbringing that if someone was treating me poorly it's because I must have done something wrong and needed to make amends. The other part of it was me yearning to be friends with the "cool" people, even if they were jerks. I learned the hard way through years of experience that, one, some people are just assholes. And two, abasing myself to win the praise of jerks isn't worth it. It's far more worthwhile to invest my precious time with people who like and respect me for who I am.

I'll stay at a hotel [#8]

I've always loved to travel. When I was younger I lacked time to do much of it, and even more so than time I lacked money. Thus I always looked to crash with relatives or friends. That included sleeping on a couch or the floor a bunch of times. As I got older I found that to be less and less comfortable. Fortunately as I've gotten older I've improved my budget such that I can afford to stay at a hotel when I travel. That gets me not only a real bed to sleep in but also a private space I can withdraw to at the end of the day. Even when the trip's purpose is visiting those friends and family, it's better when we're not crammed together 24/7. I'll note, though, that staying at a hotel is not a rule. When someone has real space for me in their house, for example my inlaws, I'm happy to be a sleepover guest.

I hate loud music in restaurants/clubs [#13]

This is one where I'm tempted to say, "I'm not sure if it's just me..." but I know it's not just me! And it's not just a thing of getting older. Restaurants and clubs have gotten louder. I noticed it when it was happening. I studied architecture enough to recognize the trends years ago toward designs and materials that made social spaces thunderously loud. Similar to the first item on my list, if I'm not enjoying myself somewhere, I'll leave. And that includes leaving because the environment is unpleasant in addition to leaving if the company is unpleasant.

A lot music, TV, and movies are crap [#16]

This one veers a bit toward "You kids get off my lawn!" old-fogeyness in the BuzzFeed listicle, but I agree with it with a bit of nuance. Like the complaint in the article mentions, one basic problem is that the talent threshold is lower today than years ago. But even that has a root underneath it: the increased number of publications and media channels clamoring for content. Consider just TV for a moment. When I was a kid, there were, like, 5 channels of TV. Today there are hundreds. And while there are some amazing things on TV today, there's also tons of crap because of all those channels scraping the bottom of the barrel. All that crap makes it challenging to find the relatively few things that are genuinely worth it.

In movies there's a different problem. The problem there is formulism. Almost everything nowadays is a franchise sequel, prequel, or reboot. And almost every franchise is a based on a comic book, a line of toys, or a theme park ride. Producers choose and fund these franchise movies because they're seen as surer bets for making money. The audience is already known and the marketing tie-ins already exist. Too bad it results in increasingly insipid, repetitive stories.