The Elephant In The Room

Good Evening

Have just come back from the cinema, where I saw Good Night, And Good Luck. It was wonderful. I like it when a film doesn't treat me like a moron whose only reason for watching is to see big firey explosions. In fact, it's been quite a good run for the cinema lately - I have seen Walk The Line, Jarhead, Brokeback Mountain and Munich so far since New Year. Fandabbeedozee.

It can't last, though. I saw trailers for Mission Impossible 3 and Superman. The season of big budget, low IQ toss will soon be upon us, so I am making the most of this winter purple patch before the hordes descend again. I love going to the cinema, and since we started driving to Vue at Meridian instead of suffering the Odeon in Leicester, it's been immesurably improved. Coffee in the cinema is one of the most civilised things I've seen in a long time. Even the tweenage girls taking the piss out of my Atari t-shirt didn't faze me. Plus they were all going to see Big Momma's House 2, so they suffered in their turn.

I see as well that another horror remake is in the offing. The Hills Have Eyes, a nightmare of mutated hillbillies and bloody revenge. The trailer was decorated with lots of big crashes, creepy children and a presumably unbelievably beautiful teenage woman pleading not to have her fingers cut off. I saw the remakes of Texas Chainsaw Massacre and House of Wax too. Hateful. Needlessly sadistic, exploitative and gory. I have no problems with zombies or aliens or that kind of thing - it's clearly fanatsy. The Devil is not going to mainfest himself in the form of a man with no skin and nails in his head. He will look like a certain un-named senoir American politician. This much we know. But I do find more than a hint of mysoginy in repeated examples of fresh young women being sliced up in detail whilst begging masked men for their lives in a cellar lined with chains and meathooks. Hostel has managed to piss off the entire populaton of Slovakia for making them look like a nation of psychopathic blood-crazed axe-murderers, desipte Eli Roth saying that "it's just a satire". It's not satirical. It's needless. If you want to take the piss out of American ignorance and moronic jock attitudes, just watch Fox News for half an hour. Much more effective - it's absolutely fucking terrifying.

And aside from that, most horror films aren't even scary, just gross. Any tension that there might be is destroyed by either very obvious music or utterly stupid plot devices - "Don't climb the wax stairs!" The ones that are generally contain only as many intestines as are needed to eat our popcorn. The original versions of The Ring or Dark Water. Even Alien, but not Aliens, as that was just ridiculous.

I suppose you could say I don't have to watch it. It's not supposeed to be too serious, and I don't complain about Slipknot, who do the same thing to an artform I care about far more. It's probably the same thing as me not liking rollercoasters either. I was born aged thirty-five and not every film can be made by Stanley Kubrick or Wes Anderson. Oh well. I still love the cinema, and even paying a fiver for a hotdog is something I can put up with if something good's on.

Probably won't get that at home, though. At the moment I can hear the theme music to the BBC's radical and revolutionary celebrity singing contest, Just The Two Of Us. I for one am not enticed by the prospect of one of S Club 7 and a memeber of the cast of Casualty murdering Beyond The Sea for the crowd in the contemporary Circus Maximus of a TV studio. Couldn't carry a tune in a bucket, and there is of course a panel of judges (Trevor Nelson, Stuart Copeland of The Police, and also Lulu) to tell them in graphically harsh terms. With a bit of luck, someone will cry. Some lovely emotional exploitation to compliment the disasterporn of BBC News 24. I also see that there is a documentary on glam rock on after the news. In the light of Gary Glitter going to a Vietnamese jail for interfering wth kids, this is fine scheduling.

It wasn't always thus, though. I remember Rik Mayall doing George's Marvellous Medicine on Jackanory when I was about eight. Fantastic - loads of shaving foam and dry ice everywhere, plus Quentin Blake's timeless drawing of an eighteen foot high chicken. These are the memories childhood are made of. Apparently, at the time it was shown (about 1987, I think) some parents complained that it might influence their children unduly, and convince them to mix up a batch of shoe polish, milk of magnesia and fabric softener. The way I see it, if they are stupid enough to do that then they deserve a good stomach pump. Teach them a valuable lesson.

Good night, and good luck,
Dougal