Best movie I've seen today: Stephen Tobolowsky's Birthday Party. Tobolowsky is one of oft-forgotten creatures, the hard-working actor in Hollywood. His IMDb page shows him appearing in a handful of movies every year, although you might remember him best, like I do, as the slimey dweeb in Sneakers who asks Sigourney Weaver, "Shall I call you or nudge you?"

In the film, a documentary, he comes across much differently, as a well-tempered, broadly-interested man with serious acting chops—his vocal training and impersonation skills, as well as a hint of physicality, come through in the stories he tells here, on his birthday in 2004.

It's a showcase of what's really admirable about actors: that they're sponges for experience. Tobolowky keeps telling these amazing stories from his life, like the time he was held hostage at gunpoint or shooting a film in Bermuda. The stories shaggy-dog a bit, but as true stories, of course, a neatly tied ending would be too much to expect. Without any particular moral or comic punchline, what lingers is the sense of a person who has simply walked into a lot of crazy experiences, never avoiding them, never running away, and always keeping his eyes open, remembering, and keeping the flame to tell the story.

And unlike, say, a Werner Herzog or a Sean Penn, he never seems to court disaster so easily, the way those showmen seem foolhardy in the pursuit of a good story. Tobolowsky has a healthy sense of fear, but manages to tame it and render it into storytelling craft.

This feeling—of people absorbing and re-emitting experience in comfortable coils—used to be a common part of my life. My recent life has become, as actors say, "too cerebral."