I watched, well, mostly watched the Gavin McInnes film How to be a Man. It was free through Amazon so I gave it a shot, figuring it would be horrible and I’d turn it off after 20 minutes. It was better than I expected. It is a short film, by today’s standards. I’m not a heavy consumer of video these days so I have to rely on this fabulous invention by Mr. Gore for my data on films. According to this the typical movie is 2.6 hours. That seems interminable to me. No wonder I have not been to the theater in years.

Gavin McInnes is a likable guy on screen. He plays a middle-aged beta male, Mark McCarthy, who thinks he used to be a real man. In fact he was a stand-up comic who had brief success and then took a job at an adverting agency. At middle age he lives in an apartment with his pregnant wife. He has just learned he has terminal cancer and therefore will not be around to raise his unborn child. He hires an old friend’s kid, Bryan, out of film school to help him create a series of videos explaining how to be a man. The rest of the movie is these two bonding through a series of adventures.

An idea lingering in the background of the movie is that Bryan may be McCarthy’s son. Bryan never knew his father and McCarthy used to party with Bryan’s mother in the old days. As the two work through adventures, creating videos about life lessons McCarthy wants to teach his unborn child, a father-son relationship develops. In the end, McCarthy has learned how to be a father and Bryan becomes a man. In between we get some yucks and corn-pone advice about life, as told by urban elites.

In his articles and TV appearances, McInnes keeps returning to the issue of drug use and his allegedly wild youth. I say allegedly because I have no evidence to suggest his was an unusually wild youth. It is all relative, of course. When you live in the places I prefer to live, drugs, crime and regular gun fire is just part of the rich tapestry that is the ghetto. Disheveled dudes with lots of ink and drug problems are a dime a dozen. But, in the swank coastal enclaves it may seem outlandish.

Anyway, the movie is sort of a walk down memory lane for McInnes. He is credited as one of the writers and I suspect the adventures were written by him. Through the movie, I kept waiting for the main character to have the revelation about his life that seems to be standard in these films. You know, the good guy who is miserable suddenly sees how good he has it. We never get that. Instead there’s some suggestion that maybe the main character is figuring it out, but it is left unresolved.

For a short free movie it is a fine option if you have time to kill.