I watched a good bit of the Gavin McInnes film How to be a Man. It was free through Amazon so I gave it a shot.  Maybe it would not be that horrible. 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 the internet for this stuff. According to this the typical movie is 2.6 hours. That seems terribly long to me. Maybe that’s why I have not been to the theater in many 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 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, as 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 a place like Baltimore, drugs, crime and regular gun fire is the wild life. 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. McInnes actually has some talent, but something seems missing with him. He’s one of those guys who is above average at a lot of entertainment stuff, but not great at any one thing. It seems that people who do well in that business do one thing really well. Then again, maybe we just notice it, because they end up doing that one thing in movies or TV. The entertainment rackets are a strange business.