popular thinking

MEETING VAL KILMER: Don't go dissing Val. I know what some people have said over the years about Mr. Val Kilmer, but don't believe everything you hear. I'll stick up for him even more after having met him earlier today as part of a press thing (is it a junket if it's within walking distance of the paper and all I got was a Red Bull?) for Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, which screened Sunday night as part of the Boston Film Festival. He was polite, charming and affable in the time I spent with him and writer/director Shane Black. I told him how last night, my remote control landed on an HBO showing of Spartan, a 2004 Mamet film he starred in that didn't get enough attention from anyone (and for the purposes of chitting the chat, does include a scene in which Kilmer's character stops to look at the front page of the Boston Herald!). I did not tell him how I can still quote lengthy passages from Real Genius, which remains a seminal moment in my teen experience. That movie, and his performance therein, helped shape my decision to turn to subversive wit as both a strength and a coping/defense mechanism. I remember him much more for that than his turn as Iceman in Top Gun (although when Black used Mr. and Mrs. Smith as an example of this summer's movie malaise, I retorted with a reference to this also being the summer of Mr. and Mrs. Cruise, which did get a glimmer of a smile from Messrs. Black and Kilmer). At any rate. Interviewing two people in 20 minutes won't always reveal as much as you'd like, and having the results then distilled into six newscolumn inches for the paper's Inside Track means relaying even less to readers. Let's hope it turns out OK.

I saw Kilmer and Black again tonight at a Boston Film Festival party at Bonfire (yes, chef/owner Todd English was in attendance) in which Kilmer received something called the Long's Jewelers Excellence in Film Award, which means, well, I'm not sure what it means. But that helps explain why Kilmer was in town today. It doesn't explain how, after making the rounds in Toronto, London and Venice in the past few weeks, how movie stars ever get adjusted to all of this hobnobbing and media junketeering and paparazzi-like attention.