Doomsday

Perhaps inspired by a newfound awareness of how much it annoys people when I express enjoyment of trashy, lowbrow movies, I went to see another one yesterday. This one was called Doomsday, and while I couldn't in good conscience recommend it for anyone over the age of 14 or so, it was a decent bit of escapism, with a fair few explosions, completely preposterous plotlines, and... well, that's about it.

Somehow I had gotten the impression that this updated bit of Mad Max-style tomfoolery was set in New York City, which would have heightened the enjoyment for me, but in fact it took place in London and (mostly) Glasgow, and all the serious damage unfolded in Glasgow. There seems to be some perverse element of human nature that revels in seeing one's home town or former home town demolished in the movies, but although I've visited there once, I frankly can't be bothered about what happens to Glasgow. Anyway, apart from the street signs, it looked more like Edinburgh, which I also can't be much bothered about.

The premise, as if one were needed, was lifted straight from 28 Days Later: a killer virus has ravaged the UK, well, actually only Scotland, and the government has responded by doing what many an Englishman has no doubt fantasized about doing, building a 30 foot high wall along the English-Scottish border and leaving the Scots to bloodily expire. 30 years later, one of the few escapees from the Scottish holocaust is a crack SAS trooper or somesuch and stationed in a rather dark and down-at-the-heels London (one suspects that a Scot had something to with the making of this film, based on its assumption that the English economy and body politic would be all but ruined should the Scottish albatross be lifted from its neck).

The virus has just been discovered in London, and people's heads are beginning to explode on a routine basis; simultaneously it's revealed that there are survivors in Scotland, so an expedition is organized to travel into the Dead Zone, capture one of them, and use his or her blood to make a vaccine and save England. Well, you can probably see where this is going from here, although the crack SAS trooper also happens to be a beautiful female martial arts expert and cold-blooded killer, the English government officials are craven and corrupt (further buttressing my assumption that a Scot was involved with this), all except for good old Bob Hoskins, who spends most of his onscreen time lighting cigarettes and looking utterly bewildered as to what he's doing in this B-grade piece of crap.

Once north of the border, the commandos come tooling into a darkened, ruined Glasgow (apart from the vines growing on the buildings, it looked rather like a normal night) which appears to be completely empty until suddenly out of nowhere come thousands of 1984-style chaos and crusty punks (the mind boggles at how many unemployable tattooed-face 1980s burnouts must have supplemented their giros by working as extras) who have of course reverted to savagery, not that they had far to revert in the first place, and are bent on cannibalizing our intrepid English adventurers.

You'll remember that the entire country was blacked out and had been for 30 years, but suddenly, as though by magic, the crusties have sufficient electricity and microphones to have an impromptu punk/metal show complete with torture, incineration and cannibalism that looked as though it could have been filmed at the old Bondage-a-Go-Go club nights at San Francisco's Trocadero. Our heroes manage to escape - well, the ones who aren't eaten, that is - and in an even more amazingly magical turn of events, find a train sitting in Glasgow Central that still operates (and what do you know, despite 30 years of chaos and destruction, the railroad tracks are in perfect working order as well, without a single obstruction for the hundred miles or so that it takes them to journey out to the highlands where another bunch of survivors has taken refuge in an ancient castle and reverted to medievalism.

Much jousting, sword fighting, knights in armor, etc. ensues, and ultimately the couple of soldiers who have survived managed to deliver their prize, a living immune girl, back to the English authorities, who turn out to be not just craven and corrupt, but completely and utterly bereft of all human decency, and who are planning to let most of London die first in the belief it will convey some sort of political advantage (so sure was I that a Scotsman had to have made this that I just googled the writer-director, only to find out he's actually a Geordie - well, close enough).

Everything is more or less settled then, when the heroine comes up with some tape disc that exposes the English Prime Minister for the lying sod that he is (and England collectively shrugs its shoulders, one would imagine) before going back to kill the leader of the crusty cannibals and become their new leader. As you do.

Well, there you go; no need to see this movie now, I suppose, unless of course you're in the aforementioned under-14 demographic, in which case you'll have to sneak in, as this lovely little gorefest is rated R-17 for some reason. If you go, take lots of popcorn.

"Film" And The Overly Earnest 20-Something

As a general rule I think it's advisable to avoid criticizing, let alone getting into arguments about movies I haven't seen.

However, there are cases when I'm willing to make exceptions, and this argument qualifies as one of them. My prejudice against No Country For Old Men didn't emerge full-blown out of thin air; in fact, when I first heard about the movie, a month or two before it came out, it sounded like something I'd probably be inclined to see.

I'd never read the book, nor did I know much about the subject matter, but people seemed to be making a big deal of it, and the Coen Brothers not only have a decent reputation, but also have made some other movies I've enjoyed. But within a week or two of its opening, friends who'd seen it started reporting back to me that it was simply awful, the worst sort of pseudo-intellectual, quasi-artistic dreck.

Well, that's not exactly how most of them put it. To be precise, the critiques generally revolved around two points: "Makes no sense" and "Long, convoluted and boring." But when a few of my young friends, largely those of the painfully earnest ilk, the sort who speak of "film" in hushed, reverential tones and collect DVDs so they can make repeated studies comparing and contrasting the director's cut with the commercial cinema cut and the alternative ending cut released only in Bulgaria and the eastern half of the Ukraine, began raving that No Country For Old Men was a "stunning masterpiece," "hauntingly evocative," and all the rest of that cine-crit blah-blah, I felt confident that my initial instincts had been correct.

I mean most of us do this, right? We have two sets of critics who help us decide which movies, records, books, etc. we are going to take a flyer on and which we are going to give a miss. Doesn't matter whether they are professionals, amateurs, or just our friends and acquaintances; it's just that we've got enough of an idea about what they like and don't like that we can draw reasonable inferences about whether we ourselves would like the product in question.

One set, of course, consists of those people who tend to view life, love and art in much the same way we do; the other is what I would informally call the null set, i.e., you know that pretty much anything they like is going to suck on a stupendous scale.

Before too much umbrage is taken, snits gone into, and goats gotten, let me hasten to add that there is nothing remotely objective or scientific about this method; it's purely a matter of personal taste (or lack thereof). However, I've come to notice that one of the surest predictors of records I don't want to listen to, movies I don't want to see, etc., is its popularity with the beard and/or chin-stroking 20-something "artistic" crowd. You know the type, no doubt: the ones who shortly after leaving their teens begin denouncing the catchy, fun pop-punk music they used to love as "puerile" and "simplistic," replacing it with "more complex" varieties, the more obscure, atonal and unlikely to become popular, the better.

And heaven knows we can all be guilty of patronizing and condescending attitudes from time to time, but you haven't truly been patronized or condescended to until a mid to late-20s art school dropout has casually sneered something to the effect of, "Oh, I suppose that (your favorite band, movie, artist, etc.) sort of thing is all right if you're into mainstream pop culture."

If you read far enough along in the thread I linked to, you'll see that one such commentator dismisses my views out of hand because, "You have zero interest in film, you just watch movies because you're bored." However, I think he's got things backward; the only time boredom and movies (note, by the way, how I have zero interest in "film" and only watch "movies") intersect for me is when I see turgid, overblown melodramas like There Will Be Blood and, I'm guessing, No County For Old Men.

I once made a practice of seeing movies, especially those with subtitles because I thought I "should" or because they were "important," but as the Dylan song goes, I was so much older then. My critic also suggests that I go to movies to "kill time," but it's been many years since I've had too much time on my hands; time is one commodity that is perennially in short supply with me.

So when I choose a movie, I have only one criterion: will it entertain me? I don't care if its lowbrow, highbrow, or nobrow, whether it's a crassly commercial enterprise or ars gratia artis, if I'm laying out 10 bucks and a couple of hours of my time, I want to be pretty damn sure I'll have something to laugh and/or cry about, not something that forces me to ponder, "What the hell was that supposed to be and why did it have to take two and a half hours out of my life?"

That being said, I saw an excellent movie today called The Bank Job. Nonstop action, clever plot (and based on a true story, they claim; I certainly remember the phony-baloney black activist Michael X who features in it). Story aside, it always delivers a mostly realistic trip back into the gritty and gray London of the early 70s; I say "mostly" only because I caught one anachronism: one scene in the Baker Street Underground station includes the correct 1970s-style trains, but shows a wall sign reading "Hammersmith and City Line," a line which of course didn't come into being until 1988 (I'm not really that much of a trainspotter, honest; it's just that I lived on the H&C and it's predecessor, the Metropolitan, for a number of years).

Anyway, The Bank Job is my idea of a movie that does exactly what movies are supposed to do, informs, entertains and inspires (or at least one or two of the aforementioned). All you lovers of "film," feel free to have at me for my philistinism (yes, that was another charge leveled at me during the discussion, by an actual art student, as it happens). I'll only add that ever since I started picking movies on their entertainment value rather than their cultural significance, the quality of my leisure time has noticeably improved. Not to mention the added enjoyment derived from ruffling the carefully preened feathers of the art school booboisie.