Not that I'm complaining, mind you, but the life of a film critic is not all cocktail soirees at Cannes and glamorous film premieres. I, in fact, have never been to any kind of party at any kind of film festival, unless watching swarms of kids get their faces painted at the street festival at the first Tribeca counts. I did attend a screening for some Z-grade horror movie a few years back that was touted as a "premiere," which was very exciting: they gave us free popcorn!

No, mostly, it's sitting on your butt for long hours, writing notes in the dark that you know you'll never be able to decipher later, and then sitting on your butt for long hours in front of a computer, trying to find something fresh to say about National Lampoon's Bikini Vomitorium that you didn't say about National Lampoon's Sorority Boob-and-Bong Fest.

The other day, this past Wednesday, for instance, I saw three films back to back to back, running from screening to screening with no time in between to eat or check my voicemail -- about the only thing I managed to think about aside from the films themselves was calculating the best way to get to the next screening: would it make more sense to take a cab or the subway? would there be time to walk? I was pure on-the-go film critic, thanking the gods that watch over such creatures as myself that I had run into a critic-friend at the first screening (Infamous, the second Truman Capote movie) who offered to save me a seat at the third, sure-to-be-packed screening (The Departed, the new Scorsese), to which I would arrive just in the nick of time, assuming the gods of mass transit were with me.

And a funny thing happened over the course of those three films. I often see the same faces in screening rooms -- New York is, of course, full of critics and entertainment editors and pop culture journalists, and we all go to the same screenings -- but I don't often see the same faces on the screens over the course of a day. But on Wednesday, I saw Gwyneth Paltrow in Infamous, in one memorable scene playing a 1950s nightclub singer, looking very chic and very sad as she sang a torch song. And there she was in the second film, Running with Scissors, playing a character who couldn't have been more different, a probably-crazy overgrown adolescent who dresses like something out of a Heidi movie and does very bad things to her pet kitty-cat. And Alex Baldwin was in Scissors, too, as a drunken suburban dad, and then he turned up in the third film, The Departed, as a tough, wise-cracking Boston cop, again, a character very distinct from the other.

It drove home for me something I've always appreciated intellectually but have rarely been confronted with so dramatically (no pun intended): the fact that most actors, even ones with names and faces we instantly recognize, are working actors, people doing a job. This year it seems like Maggie Gyllenhaal is in every other film I see (though not on the same day); a couple years ago, it was Jude Law showing up in absolutely everything. But of course, if you're an actor and you wanna work, you take the parts and you do the job, and then you have no control over when the finished movies hit theaters.

I know it's only the illusion that Gwyneth and Alec ran from screening room to screening room with me that makes me feel this way, but I suddenly felt a little kinship with them both. Though they probably had time for lunch between their jobs.

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
MaryAnn Johanson
author of The Totally Geeky Guide to The Princess Bride
minder of FlickFilosopher.com

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