What are you looking at?

We’re all matter in motion, hurtling senselessly through space and time till our brief spark of sentience is snuffed out and I don’t really feel like parcelling out parts of that process and devoting them to an obviously too old Ben Stiller

Posted by Graham Martin on January 13, 2012. Filed under Graham Martin,Opinion. Posted with the tags:Culture, Film
Both comments and pings are currently closed.

Airplane, 1980 - rubbish film

You know what? I hate films.

Films are rubbish, even the good ones. Before writing this, I sat down and tried to make a list of my ten favourite films, and it’s a pitiful sight.

I’m not being deliberately low brow here, I don’t think, but the ones that seem to come top of the list are your bog standard comedies, the Airplanes etc, that get hardwired into your cultural DNA from an early age.

I honestly enjoyed watching George of The Jungle (watch out for that tree!) with the kids recently than almost anything by Ken Loach.

Of course, I’ve pretended to like films, in the past, to impress people. There I am, being a dick, giving it, “oh, have you not seen Goddard’s Un Poo de Clog? It’s an intensely visceral two hours of the most profound cinema, featuring an unnamed actor weeping over a jobby in a shoe in a Silesian pension before detonating the Nazi stick grenade he’s lodged in his bum, it’s my favourite film EVER.”

If you are ever unfortunate enough to be in my company and find me talking about films, I am DRUNK and am LYING and should be laid low by an ashtray or whatever else comes to hand.

I suppose there’s just something about the whole process of film watching I can’t abide. This idea that you have to make a contract with whatever film producer/Hollywood Evil Corps to give up at least two hours of your life to something that will, like as not, be shit.

And that it’s rude/impossible to read during.

We’re all matter in motion, hurtling senselessly through space and time till our brief spark of sentience is snuffed out and I don’t really feel like parcelling out parts of that process and devoting them to an obviously too old Ben Stiller trying to hide a stiffie at his high school prom, with hilarious consequences, or, for that matter, a man looking at a poo in a clog set against a back drop of the Nazi annexation of the Sudetenland, with not so hilarious consequences.

Then there’s the hellish ritual of going to the cinema. Awful. Three hours of failing to get comfortable, miserably rocking about from cheek to cheek, in a fart-filled stasis chamber full of sniffling and (who knows, it’s dark) spunking strangers before being birthed back into the light and staggering about on the weakened legs of a foal That’s Not Going To Make It.

That, comrades, is not an experience I enjoy. And just when I thought film couldn’t get any worse, there has been an unholy amount of jibber­jabber over the past week or so about that Thatcher movie.

Fantastic. A Thatcher film. With Meryl Streep in it. Sounds great, eh?

At least it’s got us talking about old Davros again. In fact, ignoring for a moment the fact that her joyless spawn are in power just now, it’s been hard to avoid her and her ideological cohort over the past few weeks.

Tebbit was exhumed from whatever ghoul-hole he now infests, tempted out no doubt by the promise of flesh, to talk about the film and, coincidentally, we have had the utter joy of Michael Forsyth, the Breath of Death made animate, popping up like a gas filled sea monster to tell us why We Must Obey Cameron’s referendum proposals.

I’m glad to see this repugnant lot again for at least one reason.

There’s been a bit of sniffiness, even on the left, about whether we should celebrate when Thatcher finally pegs it. Some, I’m guessing those mostly too young to have been there at the time, feel that we should act with magnanimity and not ‘lose our humanity’.

To touch on films again, to me this would be like standing in the background tutting while the Ewoks play the bongos on the Stormtroopers’ helmets at the end of The Return Of The Jedi.

Socialism is not just an intellectual exercise, there’s a heavy justice element and, at a very visceral but highly motivational level, a revenge element to it as well. Take one look at Tebbit, Fosyth, Cameron et al and consider the crimes these people have committed/are committing on our communities, and tell me, really, that you won’t be glad when their ideological Godhead is sent screaming into the Sarlaac Pit to face eternal digestion.

Personally, I’ll be exercising my humanity and celebrating her passing by getting steaming and making whoopee with the Wookies, even if that probably is one Star Wars reference too many.

Anyway, this film, the Thatcher one. It’s probably shit. I don’t know, I’ve not seen it. The fact that it’s a film in the first place kind of suggests it will be.

However, in a Rogue Reporter first, I’m going to end on a cliff hanger and state that in a fit of journalistic endeavour/massive self loathing, I’m going to go and watch it. In a cinema, one with teenagers and hot-dogs and stuff. And report back.

To be continued. As they say in stupid films.