Hey, this is a tough one! My name is underutilized by scriptwriters. Oh, there are plenty of interesting name-brothers in real life, both in front of and behind the camera. There’s Murray, McCrea, McHale, Edgerton, for instance, and my statehood idols Hodgson and Coen. (We will skip Schumacher. And Rifkin.) So when my name is used as a character’s name, I sit straight up in the theater seat, because it is odd and rare.
In Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Jim Carrey’s wonderfully quirky ex-girlfriend is often calling his name as he erases her from his memory. He is a bookish introvert, secretly romantic, willing to go to great lengths to find the right girl. You got the feeling that his face could be rubbery but he reins it in most of the time. He hangs out in bookstores. When I saw this movie, I was getting over a longish-term breakup. I thought I had a lot in common with this guy. Charlie Kaufmann must have saddled this character with that name because it’s pretty uncommon but not weird.
In Adventureland, the post-Freaks & Geeks, pre-Silicon Valley, roughly-contemporary-Party Down star Martin Starr is not quite content to be the sidekick, though he is certainly not the hero of this story. He doesn’t get the Twilight girl, he’s interested in studying literature, he is less annoying than Jesse Eisenberg. He has learned the ways of the world by looking at it quietly through thick spectacles from a corner of a room. I’ve never worked in an amusement park, and his character must have been ten years older or so than me, but I also had a soft spot for him, even though he’s basically the sidekick. I hope he got a grad degree in Russian Literature and went on to find happiness and maybe founded a dot-com startup in the '90s.
Finally, I hear they’re making a movie based on the video game The Last Of Us. I’ve refused to play that game, even though I’ve heard good things about it. Why? Because I have a little sister named Ellie. I don’t want to play through a whole game where a Joel keeps a vulnerable Ellie out of danger, no matter how rugged and capable the hero is. I think it sounds too emotionally wrenching. But if the movie adaptation is good, maybe I’ll go see it.
Runner-up: Well, this is for a Loel or Lowell, but there was one of the annoying kids in Schwarzenegger’s Kindergarten Cop. He was the one that, when Arnie complained of a headache, replied, “It might be a tumor.” It’s not a tumah, but that pale kid with the rings under his eyes and the bleak worldview really appealed to me the first seven times I saw that movie. His name was close enough to mine, too.