Now Steve's Elastic

I am by no means an aficionado of Steve Martin's rise to recognition. There were the glaring white suits, which only someone like Martin could wear; there was the King Tut bit, his appearances on variety shows, about which I can no longer be definitive. Those who knew who he was before these breaks are on the inside of the comedy circuit, much as I was once on the inside of the Rust Belt's literary matrix, but I was never particularly enthusiastic about his satire, which falls under the heading of not knowing why certain people stay famous, but Leap of Faith, like his later film, Shopgirl (2005), is n outlier, despite the fact that Pearce gives way at the end to populist sentiment, as I wrote here, in a revised "Ecclesiastical Concerns".

Not so faithful in my viewing of the film that I can recall the script and dialogue with exacting nuance, I can still make certain observations about Pearce's modality within his Midwestern contextual globe that these actors inhabit convincingly: Martin's hair on the bus in the opening shot, when they are on the road just before they break down in Hick Town USA, has an exaggerated drag queen aspect to it which I find off putting, which is part of my problem with liking Steve Martin in the first place. His "jerk" character seems to have an authentic reality somewhere inside of his crazy guy act, although in recent years, now that we're in sobering mode, the last time I paid any attention to him was when he was on a program proclaiming the virtues of the banjo. We'll return after I take my usual sore buttock pressure sore break. Hopefully I will not overshoot my mark for later this afternoon.