This takedown of Matt Dillon at Fametracker is pretty funny. It begins:
You know how behavioral scientists do studies on animals raised in captivity, and how if the first thing a newborn gerbil (or whatever) sees is a ball of twine, it’ll think that twine ball is its mother? We sometimes wish there were a Department of Fame that could bankroll a study of child pop-culture consumers, and how the stars a child watches in her formative years can imprint themselves on the child forever — make her not just feel nostalgic affection for those actors once she’s reached adulthood, but believe in their talent and defend their career missteps in the present day by making arguments that rest heavily on the work she may have watched when she was a kid. And God help that now-adult’s friends if one of those disproportionately beloved actors somehow falls ass-backward into an Oscar nomination. “See? You see?” that now-adult will say. “He is not washed up and flabby!” And the now-adult’s friends are all like, “Thanks a lot, The Academy. She’ll be dining out on this one for years.”
We know there are some of you reading this who are like, “Yeah, it’s just like my friend Betty with John Travolta. She loved him so much from Grease that she owned all the Look Who’s Talking movies, and we were all like, ‘He sucks, Betty, and he’s a Scientologist,’ and then he got nominated for Pulp Fiction and we were like, ‘Shit.’ But what does any of this have to do with Matt Dillon — whose Oscar nomination for Crash may finally get him the respect he deserves and make people take his more challenging work in the current Factotum more seriously?”
Oh, some of you. Don’t you see? Matt Dillon is John Travolta. And you are Betty.
Thanks to Jill for the link.