The other night, when I needed a chuckle, I found it on BBC with a movie simply titled BEAN. Bean is a comedy character on BBC television. He has big protruding ears, a long nose, bug eyes, and a bass voice.

The movie was so ridiculously funny! Bean gets a job just sitting in a room as a guard, protecting the portrait of Whistler's Mother, which is on loan to the museum where he works. Museum officials are in a dither making sure humidity, light, security--everything is just right to make sure nothing happens to this iconic portrait.

So Bean sits and sits and after a while he thinks he sees dust on the portrait's face. He goes up to it and pulls out his hanky and makes dusting motions over her face. To his horror, he then realizes that a ballpoint pen has leaked ink all over his hanky, and he has smeared ink on her face.
He pulls out his shirt tail, spits on it and the portrait and tries to rub the ink off. All this did was smear the ink until Whistler's Mother looks like a smurf.

He takes the portrait off the wall and tries again. He pushes so hard against the canvas it falls out of its frame.
He's stepping on the canvas and frame, and frantic, takes it up, covers it with a room service cloth and goes down the hall with it into a janitorial room. He looks around for something to clean it with and sees a can of turpentine. Aha!
He wipes her face with turpentine and voila! All ink is gone. He turns and replaces the can on the shelf, looks back and sees her face is bubbling and melting. He tries to wipe it off, and the oil paint--and her face disappears. There's nothing left but a round circle of unpainted canvas where Whistler's Mother's face used to be. He draws a cartoon head and nose on the canvas and sneaks it back in the viewing room.

Later, he finds his buddy has a poster of the portrait. He takes the poster and lays it against the real painting and concocts some chemicals to smear on it to make it look aged. It ends with Bean being mistaken for an art professor and he stands at the dias to discuss the portrait and makes disparaging comments about her looks. Silly but enjoyable.

susil