Wonder Boys

Grady Tripp (Michael Douglas) is a professor who likes to sleep with married women and get high. He’s also a critically acclaimed novelist.

Katie Holmes plays a beautiful young student who wants to crawl all over his Grapes of Wrath because he once wrote a brilliant book. I wonder where the line is drawn for literary groupies. Could a mossy skeleton from a shipwreck at the bottom of the ocean get a girlfriend if he published a prize winning book?

“The Hip Bone’s Connected to the Heart Bone” is what he’d call it. By Skully Skeleton. Once you’re a skeleton you have to take a name that describes what you are, even if you’re a famous author.

Tripp’s editor Terry Crabtree (Robert Downey Jr.) shows up in town looking for another book from Grady because he’s about to get fired. He ends up getting a writer boner for Grady’s protégé James Leer (Tobey Maguire).

Downey Jr. & Maguire were later cast in superhero movies as Iron Man and Spiderman, respectively. There’s a joke there, right? Something about showing him his “Iron Man”, maybe? Spidey-sense? I have literally nothing.  Skully Skeleton would know a good double entendre. Something about his “bone”, I bet. I wish he was here right now, waving his seaweed wrapped sword around.

Grady Tripp should have wrapped his sword in seaweed before having sex with his university’s chancellor Sara Gaskell, because now she’s pregnant. Oh yeah and the book he’s been working on is two thousand pages long and he can’t stop compulsively writing! Reminds me of the time Skully Skeleton was cursed by a mermaid editor who hit him with a magic pen and he couldn’t stop writing, either. He had to swim into the molten belly of a fire whale to break the curse. He ended up marrying that mermaid.

This is one of the best movies I ever saw. I wish I was a college professor, driving around smoking weed hanging out with Robert Downey Jr.. One time on a dating website in the ABOUT ME section I wrote “I’m Grady Tripp” in a misguided attempt to woo the Wonder-Boys-is-my-favorite-movie-too demographic of the online dating community.

The last time Skully Skeleton went on an online date, the next day he’d aged seventy years (which was OK because he’s a skeleton) and fathered twenty babies with a Polynesian belly dancer.

Tagged Michael Douglas, movie, Robert Downey Jr, Wonder Boys