The Impotence Of Being Honest

The Mystery of the Narnian Sardines

Thus speaks Mr. Tumnus, everybody's favourite cosily allegorical paedophile. I mean… obviously, right? Okay, maybe I'm just cynical. Anyway, quite apart from the deeply sinister mood conjured by a sinister bachelor enticing a child home for tea, I find myself unsettled by another detail here. Sardines. Sardines… in Narnia. Let us consider what this means...

1. Sardines come from the sea. I think it's safe to say that Mr. Tumnus doesn't live in walking distance of a fishing village, what with him being in the middle of a forest and everything. If Mr. Tumnus has sardines, they've probably been tinned, and if they've been tinned, they must have been caught on a large-scale and tinned en masse. Ergo there is a canning factory near to the Narnian coast.

2. If there is a canning factory there must be a distribution network with heavy vehicles that can cope with heavy snow.

3. If these sardines are distributed, and given that Mr. Tumnus is very obviously on his way home from shopping when Lucy meets him, then there must also be shops.

4. Possibly even a supermarket. Or even a Narnian Shopping Centre.

5. We may therefore deduce that the White Witch's regime in Narnia is a good deal more progressive - even capitalist - than has previously been allowed. Aslan's puppet government also follows a patriarchal model, ending the emergent feminism of the White Witch's regime.

6. We might also wonder at the notion that Narnia has been under snow for a hundred years or whatever. If this is indeed correct, then food will be somewhat scarce, since Narnia appears to have been a primarily agrarian landscape. You could reasonably expect cannibalism to have become commonplace by the time of Lucy's arrival - except obviously food supplies come in from elsewhere. Clearly then, the enforced winter conditions were imposed by Jadis so as to ensure that everybody had to go to the Narnian shopping centre for supplies. Clearly Jadis is a major investor in this shopping centre, and also in the fishing industry.

We may also wonder, therefore, as to the impact of the war fought by the itinerant medieval hippies against Saruman etc. In killing Saruman, our 'heroes' have strangled at birth the closest thing to an industrial revolution that Middle Earth has. Therefore, the development of civilisation on Middle Earth was grieviously put back by 'our heroes' and so generations will remain stuck in a mire of backward traditionalism with associated high morbidity rates. Noticeably, having stunted the development of Middle Earth, Gandalf and the Elves scarper. This sounds to me like typical Imperialism.

"Oh, come on! It's not every day I get to make a new friend! And there's a... roaring fire! And toast and cakes! And maybe... we'll even break into the sardines."

Fridays

Friday In The Office

Friday in the office

Drizzly sky outside

Possibly the best day ever

Except when my grandma died

It doesn't sound particularly amusing

I realise it sounds strange

But you really had to be there

Standing in viewing range

A pack of terrible ferrets

From the local zoo had come

Tearing through the neighbourhood

Stealing all the rum

They happened on my grandma

Like weasally privateers

And tore her limb from limb from limb

And gnawed off both her ears

"Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha"

I said to Evil Derek, while we stood and watched

Evil Derek opened up the drinks cupboard,

Poured us both a scotch

We watched the carnage unfold below

Hilarity did ensue

Small dogs were taken by the stoaty flood

Cats turned into moggy stew

It was the best day ever we both agreed

We vowed to do it again

Evil Derek and I are planning it now

This time with the lion's den

So in the cosmic scheme of things

When asked how my day is going

I'd say it simply cannot match this sight

A thousand evil ferrets, horrid red eyes glowing.

20 Ways To Liven Up The Archers

I happen to really like cross-overs in general, and so it just occurred to me recently how many exciting plotlines could be developed for The Archers, just through the simple expedient of borrowing from other places...

1. Mysterious projectiles are launched from Mars and subsequently crash down onto Ambridge, before opening up to reveal the Martian War Machines, which then proceed to lay waste to the area, while the British Army attempts to fight them.  The beauty is, after a couple of weeks there wouldn't be any more Archers left, and we'd have something decent, i.e. The War of the Worlds, to listen to in the same slot.

2. A mysterious Nicole Kidman look-a-like called Grace turns up in the village, obviously on the run from some terrible past.  Tom Archer takes her under his wing and persuades the town to accept her, but after refusing Brian Aldridge's advances, Grace finds the town turns on her, increasingly exploits and ultimately enslaves her.  Then, her father arrives, who happens to look like James Caan and have a lot of gun-toting gangster buddies.  They wipe out the town, except for Tom Archer, who Grace personally executes, and depart, leaving only Eccles The Peacock alive.

3. Ambridge turns out to be the headquarters of a den of drug lords led by Matt Crawford, all competing with a mysterious Turkish gangster called Keyser Soze. A team of thieves is sent in to disrupt their operation, with predictably brutal results. The only survivor is a TB-infested badger, whose interview doesn't exactly ring true. 

4. Ambridge is overrun by the animals who, under the guidance of the pigs, institute a socialist republic and carry out a two week reign of terror during which time Brian Aldridge is strung up from a lamp-post, and Phil Archer and Geordie Woman are put on trial before being clumsily beheaded with various farm implements, under the direction of the new republic's grand inquisitor, Eccles The Peacock.

5. A mysterious Antiques Dealer moves into town, buying a large house in the name of a Mr. Barlow.  Soon the more irritating members of the cast start to vanish at night.

6. In the eleventh hour of a global crisis, as Bruce Willis and his bold crew of oil-rig drilling engineers struggle to implant a nuclear bomb into the crust of a huge asteroid hurtling towards earth, a random splinter enters Earth's atmosphere, and by freak chance hits, not Paris, but Ambridge, completely annihilating the town.

7. A fresh batch of Chickens bought into the village by one of the Archer clan turns out to be carrying a new strain of Ebola.  The government quickly acts by dropping a fuel-air bomb, sterilising the whole area.

8. Nicholas Angel takes a wrong turn on his return journey to Sandford, and ends up in Ambridge.  Realising his mistake he decides to go on a rampage with lots of handguns anyway.

9. A mysterious secret agent resigns, and is gassed, only to wake up in his new prison - 'The Village' of Ambridge.  Labouring under his newly imposed identity as Patrick Grundy, our hero attempts to escape every week, yet somehow always fails.  Every episode will have him suddenly shouting "I am not a Grundy, I am a Free Man!"

10. Randolph Carter investigates 'The Ambridge Look' and the disturbing occult practices of the villagers.
11. Borsetshire declares independence, and Ambridge becomes the new Stalingrad as government troops struggle to retain hold of the county. 

12. Dustin Hoffman moves in with his young wife Susan George. Later he wipes out the whole Grundy clan with a shotgun and a bear trap in a night of violence when they try to storm his house. 

13. Flashing lights in the sky make everybody blind, and then Eddie Grundy's Triffid crop breaks loose.
14. A nuclear war erupts, and we follow the survivors from the Ambridge community in the desperate rural aftermath, full of misery, poverty, subsistence farming, mutant babies, and execution by firing squad for looters.

15. A stern and uptight Scottish policeman comes to investigate the reported disappearance of a local schoolchild; resisting the temptations of Brenda Tucker slapping sauasages against his hotel room wall at night, he tracks down the schoolgirl but realises too late that the strongly pagan people of Ambridge plan to offer him as a sacrifice to their unholy gods.  Just as he is about to be burned in a huge wicker man, a police armed response unit turns up and shoots everybody, and Officer Howie is saved!  Ambridge isn't.

16. A minor rat problem down by the river starts to become increasingly problematic as mysterious disappearances are reported, until finally Phil Archer discovers the truth - that huge floods of ravening rats are swarming by the river, and ready to move inland.  After a terrible week of violence and rat-fighting, Brian Aldridge turns traitor and is elected King Rat.

17. In a freak timewarp accident, a battallion of Nazi stormtroopers surround Ambridge, declaring it a degenerate ghetto, and then liquidate it.

18. Threatened with ravaging bandits, the people of Ambridge hire seven samurai to defend life and property who, in a bizzare twist, fail.

19. In a rare crossover, a medical conference is being held in Ambridge, at which the various medical personnel from Dangerfield, Silent Witness, Holby City, A&E, and Casualty are all present.  By eerie coincidence a super-virulent strain of The Black Death is released from a local burial pit on the site of one of Matt Crawford's property developments.  Half of Ambridge is wiped out, but the outbreak is tamed.  The various medics return home to their native series, little realising that they are carrying the plague with them…

20. Brenda Tucker is brutally murdered, wrapped in plastic, and dumped in the river.  A peculiar CID officer who talks to his dictaphone all the time arrives in town to investigate.

Satan Is Your Friend!

I always thought that Satan was rather misunderstood.  I'm not, of course, referring to The Devil, in the traditional sense - all that mediaeval propaganda strikes me as negativity for the sake of negativity, and all the stuff about the devil tempting humans into doing evil... well that's just an excuse!  I think it only takes one newspaper article about snipers in Sarajevo who shoot five year old kids who are being evacuated from the city, for any reasonable person to conclude that a devil is either quite unnecessary for the human being to bring forth evil, or that he's just an excuse, a convenient baddie to pin the wickednesses of the morally responsible human being onto when the whole moral responsibility thing seems a bit too much like hard work.

With this in mind, I know that if I was the devil I'd probably be rather disgusted at some of the things that he gets blamed for.  Especially when you consider that the Devil is probably not such a bad guy, really.  No, really.  For a start, he's a rebel - the Patron Saint of Rebels, dare I say.  And we like Rebels, don't we?  James Dean.  Luke Skywalker.  The Founding Fathers, for those of you in the US.  Okay, there's that whole treachery thing, but I'm sure we can get past that.  I mean, after all, 'treason never prospers', not because it's innately unsuccessful, but because if it IS successful, 'none dare call it treason'.

I mean, I dare say - rather blasphemously, I'm sure - that we have absolutely no guarantee that the god of the New Testament is the same one as in the Old Testament.  He certainly seems to have chilled out somewhat.  How do we know that Satan's Rebellion wasn't, in fact, successful and that once he got the top job and assumed his old boss's title, he turned out to be a lot more relaxed and benevolent than his predecessor?

Okay, not very likely, I agree.  Even so, let's not forget that Satan was Lucifer, the light-bringer - the brightest and best, until the boss brought his itinerant hippy son into the firm, anyway.  I always thought it was rather interesting to consider that in the whole King Arthur thing, the brightest and best of the knights is the wayward but thoroughly peerless Sir Launcelot - it's Arthur's son who is the treacherous, rebellious, usurping little squit. 

(Milton actually considered writing an Arthurian epic but wrote Paradise Lost instead, if that Arthurian digression seems a bit left-field)

The striking thing about this is that in this case, as in a number of other mythologies, the figures we would equate with Lucifer and The Devil are not necessarily the same.  For example, in Ancient Greece it's Prometheus who angers the greatest of the gods by giving forbidden knowledge to humanity, and is sent to a rather nasty kind of hell involving vultures and liver.  If you're looking for a Devil in Ancient Greece, it's probably Tiphon The Terrible.  Or maybe Cronos, especially in that Goya painting.  Intriguingly, in Ancient Greek myth, the chief God Zeus did in fact start off as the rebellious son of the tyrannical, child-devouring Cronos, and only became top god when the old one had been defeated.  So Zeus spent some time in the role of rebellious Satan, too - and he was successful.

Anyway, my point is, the concepts embodied by The Devil (evil, sin) may in fact be quite distinct from those embodied by Lucifer and Satan (pride, excellence, folly, rebellion).  Prometheus is absolutely a Lucifer, but absolutely not The Devil.  Or, to use a more contemporary mythology, The Emperor is The Devil, the source and personification of greed, sin, and corrupting evil - while Darth Vader is Lucifer, the greatest warrior ever produced by an order of righteous warriors... an Archangel, pretty much... but corrupted by pride and arrogance, and fallen into darkness.  Of course - and once again, intriguingly - Darth Vader is also the messiah, virgin birth and all.  Or at least it seems this way until The Emperor drops his hints about Anakin's true status as the antichrist, conceived by demonic intervention.

So, if we can drive these two notions apart, and seperate the rebellious archangel from the cancerous source of human moral corruption... and if we feel that it's both unnecessary, and a bit of a cop-out to subscribe to the existence of a Devil when it's very clear that the human being needs no such influence in order to be vile... then we can scratch the Devil out of the equation altogether.  The Devil is Us, so let's not fob it off on a mythological personification.

So, this leaves us with poor old Satan, the universal manifestation of The Wrong 'Un.  Except, I believe we can argue that not only is Satan misunderstood, but that it's very, very clear on available evidence that Satan may in fact be a good deal nicer than is accepted.  In fact (and this is the bit I really like) I feel it's possible to say that if Satan is NOT a benevolent figure, then that undermines the faith in a loving God that Christianity insists upon.  So, hold tight, and indulge me:

God is a loving god.  This is very clear, and is an inarguable point if we subscribe to Christian theology.  And if this is indeed the case then we must accept that his love for mankind is like that of a parent - stern but caring.  Children sometimes have to be punished of course, sometimes they incur their parents' anger, but this doesn't stop the parent from loving them.  Jesus was making this pretty clear, I feel, with all that prodigal son stuff.

Well, with this in mind, consider the notion of Hell.  Traditionally Hell is depicted as a torture chamber, which we have to reject if we believe in a loving god.  Not because of the idea that god would never send anybody to hell, but because it is generally established that Hell exists as part of god's plan.  It's easy to accept that God may feel punishment necessary, that God may feel a form of spiritual exile to be warranted... but do we believe that he would commission a torture chamber as a means of punishing sinners?  Not if he's a loving God, surely?

Some people seem to think so, but compare god to a head of state.  Generally speaking if a head of state uses torture and mutilation against his own citizens - even for crimes they HAVE committed - then we regard that head of state as a dictator or as a monster - a force for evil.  And clearly, any parent who indulges a wicked sadistic devil and all his demons, commissioning them to carry out unholy punishment on his own children is no parent at all.  And we are clearly told that god is a loving god.

Therefore, we have to assume that a loving god would mete out a more progressive form of punishment.  Incarceration, exile, perhaps hard labour, perhaps simple imprisonment - but none of the mediaeval excesses of the torture chamber.  In fact, look at it like it was a prison or something.  Imagine you were president of a country and you had to appoint a minister of prisons.  Would you appoint Derek The Sadistic Butcher, a former war criminal and renowned sadist who advocates torture and capital punishment..?  Or would you appoint Hard But Fair Harry, the morally righteous but strict and thoroughly decent?  If you want a decent prison system, you put a GOOD person in charge - albeit somebody capable of being hard and strict, as any punishment regime requires.  You certainly don't put somebody in charge who would abuse the prisoners.  In fact, to prevent it you would have to put somebody completely trustworthy and decent in charge - or your own claim to being good and decent would be undermined by the horrible conditions you allow to exist in your prisons.

Therefore - can it really be a coincidence that Lucifer, the best and brightest of the angels, got the job?  Especially when we recall again the Greek Myth about a lesser god called Prometheus.  Prometheus incurs the wrath of Zeus by giving Knowledge to mankind, to help them survive the coming punishments of Zeus.  In his case, the knowledge was how to make fire.  The interesting thing is that in the Greek story this is unquestionably an act of benevolence, since Prometheus had originally been made caretaker of mankind and wanted to help them.  Consider that motivation and then look at the acts of the Serpent in Eden, giving knowledge to Adam & Eve - supposedly from jealousy.  Except everything we call good in our human culture, every advance of medical science, every cure for the ravages of a disease, every legless person who can walk, every astonishing benefit gained by the progressive accumulation of self-awareness and wisdom - music, literature, art - ALL of it is founded in the simple act of succumbing to the serpent's temptation and changing from a mere beast of the field, to a being capable of recognising Good and Evil, and making the choice between the two.  Are we generally of the opinion that all human civilisation is thoroughly and irredeemably evil, founded on the single sin of our ancestor, and that God created us to be simplistic animals..?  Jaze, if that's how he saw us, it's hardly a wonder that he ended up populating Oceania with comedy giant hopping mice and a billion different forms of dealy poisonous animal.  I'd need a laugh too.  I'm just saying - is human consciousness really down to the actions of a small lizard?  Wouldn't that be rather like buying a PC in the mistaken belief that it's a piece of modern art until your cat teaches you to plug it in and turn it on?

So we are faced with the logical conclusion that Lucifer has been unfairly misrepresented, and that his position as Bloke In Charge Of Hell is actually evidence of his upright moral character.  After all, if God is a loving god, then how could he put anybody but his best in charge?  Since Lucifer is in charge we must assume that this is an indication of his own capacity for love and compassion, making him the perfect steward of a punishment system intended to purge people of their sins.

And for my next trick, I will explain how The Matrix is pro-terrorism.

EXCLUSIVE!!! Extract from Stephen King's New Novel

Myopic Scribbler Commits Daylight Robbery

Volume 1 in his new interminable ‘Thinly Veiled Autobiography With Added Spiders' quartet.

By Stephen King

Chapter I

"Dangerous Place, Maine" Bob Author thought this to himself as he drove his '58 Plymouth Fury down the state freeway toward the town of Meaningless Biblical Allusion.

"Goddamn." he thought to himself. If only he hadn't murdered his evil double years earlier when he was 12 years old. It had been the fault of Jonny Switchblade, the kid in school who wore that goddamn leather jacket.

"Goddamn" he said, out loud this time, and lit up another cigarette. The leather creaked under him; it sounded like a sigh.

Goddamn.

Small paragraphs. The review from the paper the day before passed through his head once again. Small paragraphs, the critic had said, may be extremely readable, but they should not be mistaken for a legitimate way of conveying impact or seriousness. In fact, you know what the goddamn critic had called that device? Do you know?

Juvenile.

Goddamn.

At that point a large rabid dog crossed the road, chased by a giant spider. Bob Author didn't blink; as a child he'd got used to giant spiders and rabid dogs. This was Maine, after all.

Star Trek Must Die!!! (awaiting completion)

Oh, yes, Star Trek is a vision of a perfect future.  It's a future to which we must all aspire, where all problems are solved, there is no money, and all is peaceful...

Except...

1. First of all, it's a frickin' Utopia.  'Utopia' literally means 'No-Place', as in 'not possible' - that was the point of More's Utopia, and is usually the point of most Utopian fictions, spilling over into Dystopian fictions.  Except Dystopias like Brave New World and 1984 and Gattaca are in fact Utopias as well, in so far as they are perfectly functioning societies where every person has a place.  The only practical difference between these Dystopias and a Utopia is that you really wouldn't want to live in a Dystopia.

It's overwhelmingly apparent that if you look at the propaganda of dictatorships, the vision of society they give is usually a Utopian one.  Hitler was one of the greatest Utopian-dreamers of modern history, with his talk of a 'pure' society, a land of Germanic heroes... to you it's a Dystopia, to me it's a Dystopia, but to him and his followers it was a vision of Utopia.  That's the point, really.  For that matter, Soviet Propaganda explicitly declared the USSR to be the 'Worker's Paradise', a state run by rationality and without the corruption of religious superstition.  Of course, we don't need to know very much history to be distrustful of such a perspective, so why do people buy this crap when we're talking about Star Trek?  The very fact of it being a Utopian vision should be a bit of a tip-off from the start!

2. Let's review... Star Trek shows us a future where...

There is no money

Everybody has a job working for the good of society

There are no elections

Everything is run by the military

The benevolent Federation polices space and brings peace with it's huge, heavily-armed warships.

Rather like Soviet Russia then.

I mean, seriously, the place is a f*cking Dictatorship!  It's so obvious!  Star Fleet runs everything, they all carry lethal weapons, there's no political representation, and not even the faintest talk of actual government - there is only Starfleet Command.  And we're supposed to believe that everybody is happy and lives in little cottages and personal dwellings on Earth.  Presumably the population is much reduced, then, given that they have no need of tower blocks and housing estates, and there is still plenty of room for nice little houses in the country, like Kirk's, or Picard's brother's.  It would be tempting to wonder if the class divisions of society were removed simply by exiling the working classes when technology made them redundant to the maintenance of luxury on Earth.

3. The Vulcans are a nice and rational people, apparently.  Which makes it interesting to consider that after 30 years of them being on TV, Tuvok was the first black Vulcan we'd seen.  I mean, presumably this means that the Vulcans have a strictly racist society that made it difficult for any of their ethnic minorities to reach a position of significance during Kirk's day.  Hell, their society is probably segregated.

Mel Gibson Of Doom

Today I'd like to rant at you over something which I have already ranted about elsewhere. Strictly speaking I could be accused of repeating myself, but I actually quite enjoy this particular rant, and in fact it gained some small acclaim when I first 'exhibited' it over on IMDB.

IMDB, for those of you who are yet to step in it, is the Internet Movie Database, a combination of Useful Resource and House of a Million Gibbering Lunatics. It's good for looking up the details of films, not so good for finding intelligent conversation. Unless you stumble upon Me, that is. Though that does presume that you find me in the mood for sensible conversation, and not in the middle of talking about the contribution of Cormorants to World War 2, or the finer points of Dalek history.

Anyway, point is - I liked this particular rant, and so I feel like writing a new version of it.

I've long been an intrigued observer of Mel Gibson's career. Actually, if you look up the word 'career', it has some interesting alternative meanings. It can, for example, describe the way a car swerves all over the road when it's being driven by a drink-sodden misogynist anti-semite. It can also be used in relation to the word 'checkered', rather as you might describe a man who has made good films and has also made a number of Randall Wallace films, as having a 'checkered career' - which here means 'a bit shit'.

Sure, sure, 'checkered' actually means 'containing both good and bad', but I take issue with that liberal interpretation of the term. Hitler was kind to children, apparently, but I do not apologise for overlooking this in my general assessment of his character. Now don't get me wrong. Mel Gibson isn't really like Hitler, and he did once make a film in which he acted - and nobody can take that away from him. In fact, there is solid evidence to suggest that he made more than one of these films, but these days it's rather difficult to remember efforts like 'Tim' and 'Gallipoli', since they're blotted out by the various films he's made about a man with staring eyes and a gun.

However, I recently gave more serious consideration to the matter and realised that I had terribly misunderestimated Mr. Gibson's efforts throughout his career. You see, I thought he was just making cynical, stupid, mindless action movies, but then the penny dropped and I saw the truth! When analysed closely there is a wonderful pattern in Mr. Gibson's film-making career. And when you study this, you realise that many of his films over the last 30 years have been chosen specifically to further his overarching artistic endeavour, which is a deep and thoughtful exploration of that most interesting and poignant of modern cinematic archetypes, The Ultraviolent Nutter With A Dead Girlfriend.

Consider his career path (his films I mean, not the negligent careering path of his driving, nor his wildly veering navigation of good taste).

1979 - Mad Max

Mel plays the improbably-named Max Rockatansky. Max is an ice-cold gladiatorial road warrior who fights against the collapse of civilisation by running hell's angels off the roads. For some reason the biggest threat to civilisation in the future will be dangerous driving, you see. But Max is a really nice guy who loves his family… until a biker gang murder his pretty wife and ickle babby child. So, Max gets a big gun and a big car with a big engine with a big supercharger that makes big VOOM! VAVAVA VOOM! noises, and goes driving with a big cold expression on his big teddy bear face, and wipes the lot of 'em out! Plus, he invents the plot of 'Saw' as an encore.

1981: Mad Max 2

Big Bad Max is out in the Big Bad Wasteland, dealing out more Big Bad Revenge to Big Bad Bikers cos his wife is dead you know. But, having got the whole dead wife thing over with in the first film, there isn't any need for, you know, actual women to appear in this film unless they're scatty blondes or sexy warrior women or moaning old crones.

1985: Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome

His wife is still dead. He's still mean, moody and magnificent. The films aren't still good.

1987: Lethal Weapon

Max… sorry, Mel plays the more sensibly-named Martin Riggs, a suicidally mad cop whose wife is dead. I feel we can, in all fairness, call this film 'Mad Max Cop'.

1989: Lethal Weapon 2

Mad Max Cop 2 - in more ways than one! Not only does the accidental death of Martin's wife Victoria turn out to have been murder, providing him with a revenge motive, allowing him to perpetrate wild slaughter with complete moral righteousness, but he also falls in gratuitous sex with a South African schoolgirl, who is promptly murdered - wait for this - by the SAME man who killed Victoria! Double trouble!

1990: Hamlet

William Shakespeare's sublime tragedy tells the story of how Danish Prince Hamlet discovers the truth of his father's murder, and contemplates this at length with soliloquies and stuff, before finally going nuts and killing everybody after his girlfriend dies. So, 'William Shakespeare's Mad Max' then.

1992: Lethal Weapon 3

Mad Max Cop 3! Only this time Max gets a girlfriend who is considerate enough to not get murdered (though she does take a hit in the closing stages, allowing for a certain amount of armour-piercing-bullet fury from the Baretta-Wielding-Berserker.) The viewers can take heart - just because Max hasn't had his girlfriend murdered in ages, that doesn't mean he can't still be mad.

1995: Braveheart

Mad Jock McMax comes home from the wars and marries an attractive wee lass who is promptly slaughtered before she can even get a chance to act. Max naturally goes berserk and starts killing people in large numbers. After all, his wife is dead. But then what can you expect when the lad was raised by Hannibal Lecter? Oh, his dad's dead too. Obviously. Mr. Burns From The Simpsons guest stars as King Edward The Evil.

1998: Lethal Weapon 4

By rights I should call this Mad Max Cop 4, but in truth it's more like a cross between a martial arts film and an episode of The Cosby Show, with Mad Max Cop occasionally gibbering to remind everybody who the star is.  Dead Girlfriend Count: Nil.  A real low point in Max's career.

2000: The Patriot

In a radical departure, Mel plays a man who gets through an entire film without his wife or girlfriend or father being murdered - though his son gets murderered instead, by the evil English evil officer, the evil English Captain English. Mel then kills lots of English people by way of retaliation.

2000: Gladiator

Or 'Mad Maximus' as I somewhat obviously call it. I know, Mel wasn't in this. My question is - why not?

This is a film being made about an ultraviolent man who spends the film slaughtering people in retaliation for the murder of his wife. And he's called Max.  And in the event he's played by an objectionable Antipodean - Russell Crowe, the world's first Human Tribute Band to Mel Gibson.

2002: What Women Want

This doesn't actually fit the general trend, but I mention it because I find the title so interesting. Is it really an accurate title? What kind of ego does a man need to have his teddy-bear-face appear on a poster above the words 'What Women Want'? Isn't this film really 'What Men Think Women Want'? Perhaps it's "What Women Want Men To Think Women Want To Think Men Think Women Want"? Or something? The big revelation of this film, for other egotistical misogynists out there, is that women quite like it when men shut up and listen occasionally. Mel doesn't seem to have taken this on board, however.

2002: We Were Soldiers

This isn't a revenge film either, but it truly stinks, so I can hardly leave it out. And Mel does kill a lot of people in it… Oh, he's got a wife. Yeah, his character has a wife played by Madeleine Stowe. Well, I say 'wife'… I think really I mean 'little wife'. You know, 'little, doting, dutiful, mumsy wife who stays at home and talks about laundry with all her giggly mumsy army wife friends'. Not one female death in the whole film this time, which on the one hand might be thought progressive, but which on the other hand rather indicates that for Mel, women just aren't really very important unless they can die to provide murky moral justification for his killing sprees.

2002: Signs

Hey, come on. Pay attention. Yes, I know this is that silly alien invasion film from the Sixth Sense guy. But did you not notice? Mel plays a man whose wife is dead! And he wipes the aliens out! Come on, this is well within his abilities. Oh, and you know what… this film has cornfields… Joaquin Phoenix… a man with a dead wife… a lead actor who previously played a vengeful character called Max… This is some kind of weird sequel to 'Gladiator', surely?

2004: The Passion

And to finish, Mel Gibson's Great Work reached a metaphysical crescendo with this thoughtful, measured, and respectful ranting gibberish.  By all accounts, the Pope himself said "hnnnggg' in his semi-catatonia after seeing this film, which when translated from the original Polish literally means "This film is an exact representation of the events depicted exactly as they occurred, God agrees, and oh yeah it was the Jews what done 'im in."  He didn't seem to express an opinion on Gibson's unintional Freudian self-analysis when he depicts the devil as a woman with a snake for a willy.  Ooer.  I bet he can't sit through that bit in Return of the Jedi with the Sarlacc pit either - it probably triggers this strange phobia he has...

Essentially, The Passion is Braveheart without the battles. Even so, it's quite difficult to reach the end of this film and not harbour the suspicion that when the stone rolls back on the third day, Jesus is going to be standing there with a sword, a serious look on his face, and uttering the line "It's payback time" in Aramaic. I daresay the evil English Emperor Caligula of Rome (which is in England) probably kidnapped Mary Magdaleine in the original draft of the screenplay, and the last half hour would have involved Jesus taking the fight to Rome.

Not that I have a problem with Mel Gibson films, you understand. I'm sure he's a lovely man.

Ancient Proverb

Beware of Righteous Men, for they can do no wrong.

Jane Austen's King Kong

It occurs to me that last year's film of King Kong had more than a few similarities to Jane Austen's undying (undead?) Pride & Prejudice. I have to confess at this point, I've born a certain enmity towards Pride & Prejudice - or 'pap' as I've been known to call it.

This is not really the fault of the book, or even of Ms. Austen herself - it's more to do with an unfortunate experience of sitting an English exam only to discover that after two years spent studying Pride & Prejudice it wasn't actually on the course after all. So strictly speaking that's the fault of my English teacher.

Nonetheless, I feel that there's no point in being bad-tempered about something if you go and compound it with rationality, so a little part of me has long harboured a certain low-level acidity toward Austen's charming tale of an arrogant young woman with a chronic delusion that she is a good judge of character, and the way in which she falls in love with the dashing Pemberley. Oh, did I say Pemberley, I meant Darcy of course. I'm sure the fact that Lizzy starts to dig Darcy after seeing his enormous edifice is pure coincidence.

To be fair, I am, in general, on good terms with the story these days, but I don't regard this as a reason not to find fault with it. I'm all too happy to contemplate how famous stories can be improved, believe me. And, these days, I cannot help but feel that there is nothing really wrong with Pride & Prejudice that could not be improved by having Darcy engage in hand-to-hand combat with a crocodile or two in the wilds of Surrey.

I developed this theory basically while watching Peter Jackson's King Kong. Now I know, people find fault with that film all the time, and perhaps rightly so. Its first hour is grieviously in need of editing, I recognise this. But I honestly don't understand how anybody can hold this against the monster extravaganza that is the middle of the film - what about that lovely moment when Kong lets the Vastatosaurus bite him instead of Anne, and we get a close up of his stoical face contort as he tries to hold back the pain? There you have it - "Love Is… Letting A Dinosaur Savage You Rather Than Your Girlfriend".  And are people really unmoved by the final hour..? I know a grown man who cried at the end. To be honest, he's not the slimmest or non-hairiest of people, so maybe it was just that King Kong reminded him of his mum. I don't know.

Personally however, I found that Kong was more than a little reminiscent of Colin Firth as Mr. Darcy. It's something to do with the furrowed brow, the stern silence, and occasional derisive snort. And really, when you contemplate the plots of these two stories, can anybody really tell the difference?  Girl Meets Big Brooding Furrow-Browed Alpha Male.  Alpha Male is monosyllabic and antisocial for a bit before she gets to see his pad, whereafter he suddenly demonstrates a total and sincere selflessness in defending said young lady from every threat, leading her to reconsider her judgement of him.

If you remain unconvinced, I'd suggest that the Wickham figure in King Kong would be one of the Tyrannosaurs - hold onto that thought, and then remind yourself of what happens in Bridget Jones' Diary between Darcy and the Wickham-figure, the lizardy Hugh Grant. Now really, I'd love to see a Director's Cut of Bridget Jones where Mark Darcy finishes the fight with Daniel Cleaver by breaking his jaw...

With this in mind, the possible improvements to both stories that suggest themselves are many. I'd really, really like to see a sequence in Pride & Prejudice where Mr. Darcy rampages through London in search of Lizzy, for example. He could end it by dragging Keira Knightley up Nelson's column and flailing angrily at the pigeons.

(Okay, any pedants wishing to point out that the Battle of Trafalgar took place in 1805, thus making it impossible for Darcy to climb Nelson's column, don't even think about it - I don't care.)

Actually, if anybody out there feels like trying this, I'll sponsor them, provided they leave Keira Knightley up there. "I am a binety hunter" indeed.

Harumph

I seem to have been away for a while.  Let's just say it was an Archers-related Brain injury.  However, I've managed to remember my blog password after fifteen attempts and so I've decided to announce the reopening of this blog.  I intend to drop the Archers stuff for several days at a time, and blather on about films and TV instead.

Oh, I should just say though - after a 'friend' kindly posted my Archer's rant to the BBC Archer's discussion board, I feel I'm obliged to compliment them on their graceful and reasonable response to it, especially since I described them as members of an army of handpicked madpersons and they didn't feel the need to get upset about it.  And yes, it wasn't Phil Archer but David Archer who murdered the badger.  I knew that, and am duly chastened.

Anyway, best be off.  But I'll return.