Thursday in the Dark With Jorge

I like going to the movies with my family, because for a change, it’s two hours of non-awkward silence. So this Thanksgiving, my parents, uncle, and I went to see Rachel Getting Married. It’s a heavy but very nice piece of work from Jonathan Demme, with solid performances all around.

Yet for the entire film, I couldn’t quite place the groom in the titular nuptials. (How dirty does “titular nuptials” sound? I digress.) Wow, the guy looked familiar. But from where? Where? And the name in the credits, Tunde Adebimpe, also rang a distant bell.

This was 24 hours before I started watching Mad Men season 1 on DVD, so I had no chance whatsoever of recognizing “Rachel” the bride. But I’m enough of a music geek that I should’ve known Mr. Adebimpe. He is one of the singers from the popular band TV on the Radio. I even consider myself a fan of the band, if not yet at a level which would entail legal digital ownership of their recordings.

And yet, once this musical connection was made via the Internet, I still wasn’t satisfied. I knew this dude from somewhere else. So I dug deeper and deeper into the Google search results. All the way to the second result. The answer shocked me.

A decade ago, I costarred in a film with Tunde Adebimpe.

That’s me on the far left, losing my religion. And you remember Mr. Adebimpe, I presume.

OK, OK. Maybe “costar” is a bit of an exaggeration. Maybe “Tunde Adembimpe had the title role in the 1998 short film Jorge, and my friend the producer let me be an extra” is a shade more accurate. Perhaps I wasn’t asked to repeat my peformance when the short was expanded into the 2001 feature Jump Tomorrow. And quite possibly my band, Stopwatch on the Toaster Oven, hasn’t exactly made our “big splash” yet.

But you cannot tell any of that from the illicitly reproduced movie still above.

Tunde and I are looking at a summer 2010 release for our raunchy buddy comedy, Titular Nuptials. We’ll save you an aisle seat.