Read Online My Year of Flops by Nathan Rabin - Free Book Online Page A

Amanda
) to a schmuck (
Then She Found Me
). The man has range.
    Apatow reconceived the story as a dark riff on thrillers like
The Hand That Rocks The Cradle,
which boldly exposed the furtive menace posed by nannies, temps, cops, and myriad other professions that quietly house sociopaths intent on murdering you and your family. He also turned it into a meta-commentary on the way television warps the human psyche, a recurring motif in Stiller’s films.
    In
Reality Bites,
Stiller plays a man so twisted by working in television that he looks at Winona Ryder’s homemade footage of her and her friends goofing around and sees a
Real World
–like reality show instead of an avant-garde masterpiece. In
Zoolander,
Stiller’s sentient mannequin is more or less rendered mentally challenged by prolonged exposure to the fashion industry. In
Tropic Thunder,
Stiller plays a pompous actor who has been coddled and flattered by the culture of celebrity for so long that he’s unable to delineate between movies and the real world. In
Permanent Midnight,
he plays novelist/screenwriter Jerry Stahl, a man driven to shooting junk by the indignity of having to put words in Alf’s mouth. So it’s no surprise that Stiller’s dream project has long been Budd Schulberg’s seminal showbiz morality play
What Makes Sammy Run?,
the archetypal tale of a man who makes it in show business by losing his soul.
    So it’s fitting that in
The Cable Guy,
Stiller once again plays a pathetic show-business figure, a disgraced former child star accusedof killing his weak-willed identical twin. Stiller’s dual role amounts to little more than a cameo, but he makes an indelible impression with a minimum of screen time. Playing a combination Menendez brothers, O. J. Simpson, and Todd Bridges, Stiller nails the furrowed-brow expression of intense concentration ubiquitous on the faces of celebrities on trial, a dour look that implicitly conveys, “If I just sit here quietly and look remorseful and serious, we can let these silly homicide charges slide, right, guys?”
    The Cable Guy
opens, naturally enough, with Broderick’s Steven Kovacs flipping through the vast wasteland of the cable universe. We stumble through one garbled, staticy corner of the television hellscape to another: inane talk shows,
My Three Sons,
superhero shows, and tabloid coverage of the sibling murder trial. Stiller’s unblinking camera renders the familiar creepy and unnerving. It’s channel surfing as the preoccupation of the damned.
    The Cable Guy (his actual name is never revealed) is four hours late, yet he appears enraged when he finally shows up. An unseen Carrey pounds relentlessly on Steven’s door while repeating “Cable guy!” with mounting exasperation. The title character annoys us before his first on-screen appearance.
    Steven unwisely takes the advice of his best friend (Jack Black, one of many future superstars in the supporting cast) and offers Carrey’s Cable Guy $50 to hook him up with all the movie channels—even the dirty ones—for free. In doing so, he becomes complicit in his own undoing; that ill-considered nosh on the apple of knowledge leads to Steven’s fall from grace.
    Like Christian Bale in
American Psycho,
Carrey seems to be merely impersonating a human being. He’s empty and vacant on the inside, so he throws himself into playing roles he’s seen on TV: the affable cable guy with an overflowing roster of “preferred customers,” the aggressive jock with the menacing tomahawk jam, the drinking buddy out to get his best pal laid, the love guru who hips Broderick to the aphrodisiac that is
Sleepless In Seattle,
and the karaoke rock star.
    In the film’s funniest sequence, the Cable Guy takes Steven to hisfavorite restaurant, a medieval theme eatery where he seems to know the beats of every line better than the dinner theater’s cast. Janeane Garafalo, one of