“[INSERT RANT AGAINST ORANGE COUNTY HERE.]”
-Reclining passenger Claire Bennett (Jennifer Aniston) to her loyal housekeeper Silvanna (Adriana Barraza), who is driving her boss from Los Angeles to Tijuana to score painkillers in Cake.
]
Originally, this post was going to begin with one of the funniest lines in the new indie movie Cake, which was screened to members of the Orange County Film Society Tuesday night at Lido Live in Newport Beach. Keep in mind that Cake is more dark than light, more bitter than sweet. It's BITTERsw …
The funny line that was to begin this post rolls into a short rant against the County of Orange, so I thought it might be of some interest to readers. Yes, it yet again resurrects the hack stereotypes of this place we call home, something we here at the Weekly routinely damn (when we are not resurrecting them ourselves, of course).
Anyway, in the light of an unseasonably warm morning, I got second thoughts about including even the one funny line because I did not want to spoil the scene for the one or three people reading this who will go out to a theater and see Cake. I think back to two movies I saw back-to-back in Las Vegas: The Sixth Sense and Bowfinger. I don't think I would have appreciated either as much as I did that day had I known anything about them going in.
So instead of running that funny line let's replay a funny thing that happened after last night's screening. Max Naylor, the Newport Beach Film Festival programming director who expertly moderated an audience Q&A with Cake director Daniel Barnz and screenwriter Patrick Tobin, essentially asked the filmmakers to defend the Orange County slam to Orange County Film Society members.
Cue nervous giggles from the audience …
Barnz did what a good director does: delegate. He kicked it over to the scribe who created the movie's lines, and Tobin dutifully began sputtering a response. Tobin explained that he had lived two years with his husband in Tustin, and that the rant was based on his experiences with his immediate neighbors, which included a Thai joint and a pot dispensary, if memory serves.
So, no, he explained, it was not a slam at this entire slice of paradise, however naturally it just flowed out of Aniston's potty mouth.
And the award for Best Deflection by a Screenwriter goes to …
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OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.