What are the chances?
My youngest son and I go to see a movie on Sunday, Into the Blue, starring Paul Walker, Jessica Alba, Scott Caan and Josh Brolin. This is not a film review so I'll spare you comments about how good Jessica looked and how much I actually liked the film as a story.
The two friends played by Paul Walker and Scott Caan are Jared and Bryce. This is no big deal except that my son's name is Jared and my name is Bryce. In the credits, they're even spelled the same. Each character's name must have been said out loud about 75 times each.
And, true to form, whenever film or TV has a character named Bryce he's usually not evil but some kind of friend to the main character who has some kind of moral drawback. This happens a lot (or at least because it's an unusual name and it happens to be mine, too, I notice it a lot). I think the first time I started paying attention to this was on the TV series Veronica's Closet where Kirstie Alley's ex-husband was such feeble little dweebish moron that I had to stop watching. Since then I've seen it often enough that I've started checking the credits to see if I actually know the writer.
Anyway, back to my latest homage. As Roger Ebert points out in his review: "But Bryce is greedy and wants to push them in a direction that Jared and Sam are ethically opposed to." Or as the film Jared pointed out in the movie, his Bryce was "such an asshole." A random survey of reviews from "Rotton Tomatoes" describes the character I share my name with as "smartass", "brash", "hotshot" and the simple and elegant "idiotic."
Oh, well... at least they spelled the name right...
