Later, Deaver gave me a look suggesting I should find a new job. Deaver attended to a long line of fans while I pleaded with a bookless woman who’d paused to ask directions to stick around and chat to me. My beard and I once sat next to bestselling crime author Jeffery Deaver at a book-signing session. I didn’t want a disconnect between that photo and the chap who looked lost at writers’ festivals. Still, I stuck with it for a while – mainly for consistency. And I now file my author photograph (looking serious as well as literary) under W for What was I thinking? Doctorow.īut both my beard and my novel didn’t hit their heights. Until I had a novel published and decided I needed to look like an Author. That’s how things were for another couple of decades. Then taper to a number 3 guard on the cheeks and a number 2 guard on the sideburns. You’ll want to create a taper from the sideburns to the chin, so you’ll need a Beard Trimmer with various length guards. Wandering out, cheeks tingling with the house cologne, I realised something else: I’d missed the shaving ritual time to take a good hard look at yourself. To get the short boxed beard, let your beard grow for two to three months. The barber needed one look to see what was required. Once stranded on the island, time is really the only thing he has more than enough of but short on resources thus challenging or testing a transformation of character. It lasted until I got to Morocco, where barber shops thrived. In the beginning, Chuck is a Fed Ex associate who has more than enough resources but is only short on time delivering packages and performing his work. My face resembled what happens in an abandoned vacant lot: weeds will sprout, but unevenly and in surprising places. It was when I was young and took off overseas with a backpack and vague plans that did not include shaving. Twice, actually – though I’m unsure the first time counts. John Sayles's Limbo was a far more convincing and terrifying account of being marooned. Hanks comes out of it the regular guy he was when he went in. Zemeckis's film is blithely uninterested in any of the serious personal or social implications of becoming a modern Crusoe. Castaway or no castaway, Mr Hanks has clearly been visiting the location catering van three times a day during principal photography. He's got a paunch! Even after four years, he's got a right old gut on him. But Tom looks very, very well on his coconuts and occasional fish. None of this applies to cheerfully robust Tom! He looks dishevelled, sure, and he's got a modest Tarzan-style loincloth he looks like the Michael Palin character who used to run up to the camera and say "IT'S." before the Monty Python's Flying Circus title sequence. What happens when you are stranded alone, forced to survive in the wild? In real life, you grow skeletally thin, and become deeply traumatised by the solitude, unable to communicate properly for months afterwards and in dire need of therapy. The FedEx packages washed ashore help our Tom to survive - and even, finally, to find love. But if you thought this was a critique of FedEx in some way, or a comment on the absurdity and meaninglessness of globalism and the ever-expanding imperatives of commerce, then boy would you ever be totally wrong. Then his FedEx plane crashes and he's stranded on a desert island for four years with nothing to do but grow a very big and unattractive beard. We see him first haranguing the local hirelings in the Moscow branch - a picture of Lenin is being unscrewed from a wall in one shot - generally kicking their asses and imbuing them with the ethos of the dynamic, beat-the-clock service economy. Tom Hanks plays a driven, work-obsessed systems engineer for FedEx helping them to expand triumphally around the globe. H aving given us his preposterous sub-Hitchcock snorefest with What Lies Beneath, Robert Zemeckis has followed it up with a giant two hour, 20 minute advertisement for FedEx.
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