\u201cI\u2019m afraid of being alone,\u201d intones William Shatner in the opening minutes of \u201cYou Can Call Me Bill.\u201d It\u2019s a sentiment that, as he tells it, has pervaded every moment of his life both on and off camera. As Captain Kirk, he barrels out into the universe to satisfy his curiosity about what\u2019s out there. In real life, he battles loneliness and the ever-encroaching specter of oblivion here on Earth. And in front of Alexandre O. Phillippe, cinema\u2019s most dogged chronicler of eccentric movie minds (\u201cLynch\/Oz,\u201d \u201cLeap of Faith: William Friedkin on The Exorcist\u201d), he lays bare all these anxieties with all the self-effacing charm of his on-screen persona.<\/p>\n
Playing like a stream-of-consciousness monologue, \u201cYou Can Call Me Bill\u201d is content largely to just plop a camera down in front of the \u201cStar Trek\u201d icon and just let him riff. And riff he does, musing on everything from his childhood relationship to animals and nature to his pragmatic approach to acting. The results are magnetic, if a little fluffy, as his musings grow more and more introspective and lyrical.<\/p>\n
Like so much of the man\u2019s career, stretches of \u201cYou Can Call Me Bill\u201d play out like parodies of Shatner\u2019s decades-long relationship with fame and notoriety. He notes that his two earliest acting role models were Laurence Olivier and Marlon Brando, which tracks for the two modes the stammering, pausing thespian has balanced all his life: Shakespearean silliness and Method sincerity. Phillippe illustrates this pull between the grand and the goofy with smartly laden clips of Shatner\u2019s body of work, from early \u201850s Westerns (and an Alexander biopic, where he first cultivated his love of horseback riding) to self-parodying Priceline commercials and autotuned State Farm ads.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Smack dab in the middle, of course, is Captain James T. Kirk, a mythic pop cultural figure whose association to himself Shatner once reviled (\u201cGet a life!\u201d he once assailed Trekkies) but has now accepted. He admires the phrase \u201cGo boldly\u201d; most of us live our lives, he says, as if sitting in a waiting room when we should be giving all of ourselves to our dreams. Even when recounting his now-famous trip to space at the tender age of 90 via Jeff Bezos\u2019 phallic Blue Origin rocket, he talks himself out of taking the chance to back out before liftoff. He can\u2019t do that. He\u2019s Captain Kirk.<\/p>\n
Really, it\u2019s hard to tell where James T. Kirk ends and William Shatner begins, and the material Phillippe ekes out of ol\u2019 Shat bears out the two men\u2019s similarities. \u201cEvery human being is limited by who they are,\u201d Shatner says of his talents; an eminently practical Canadian actor, he admits to never taking his work home with him. In this respect, Shatner has only ever been who he is, which makes Kirk the closest thing to an avatar the man could imagine. (This bears out in his execrable-but-interesting \u201cStar Trek V: The Final Frontier,\u201d a shaggy-dog story about Shatner\/Kirk reconciling life\u2019s accumulated pain as a fundamental part of one\u2019s self.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u201cI\u2019m afraid of being alone,\u201d intones William Shatner in the opening minutes of \u201cYou Can Call Me Bill.\u201d It\u2019s a sentiment that, as he tells it, has pervaded every moment of his life both on and off camera. As Captain Kirk, he barrels out into the universe to satisfy his curiosity about what\u2019s out there. …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[43],"class_list":["post-1306","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-documentary-movies","tag-documentary"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1306","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1306"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1306\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1306"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1306"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1306"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}