Makes them sound like bad guys, huh? Not to worry; they’re not bad, they’re badass! In the conceptually moral void of the movie, the only way to make us stick with such repugnant characters is to amplify how cool they are, something which Repo Men takes such relish in that half the film might as well consist of Jude Law and Forest Whitaker walking in slow motion down the street to the “Oh Yeah” song from the end of Ferris Bueller.

At any rate, halfway through the movie Jude Law has “a change of heart” (very clever) and starts to see things from the point of view of the innocent people whose visceral dismemberment the movie has hitherto been encouraging us to enjoy. From this point on the new, pacifistic Law kills significantly more people than he managed in the first half, keeping things interesting with a shift in modus operandi from surgically eliminating credit risks to decapitating airport staff with hacksaws. Yes, in Act II Jude Law embarks upon a gruesome rampage directed exclusively against people who are just doing their job but without the extenuating circumstance of a chirpy Cockney voiceover heralding their every psychologically implausible action. Talk about having your cake and eating it! The movie is so mind-bogglingly uncritical of Law’s character throughout that it might as well have been directed by his mum.

Still, all’s well that ends well – only it isn’t and it doesn’t. The ‘twist’ ending is about as surprising as a gift-wrapped football, and only one-tenth as exciting. I could tell you what happens, but then I would have to start with a “Spoiler Alert” – and what an insult to your intelligence THAT would be! Forget GCSEs, let’s just divide the world up on the following basis:

1) The idiots who didn’t know what was going to happen at the end of Repo Men.
2) The idiots who did.
3) The people who weren’t paying enough attention. They are the only ones worth saving.

“Well, why don’t they…” Oh, but there’s no point in going through all that. The biggest strain on the viewer’s nerves during the whole sorry ordeal isn’t suspense but indignation. Most other movies conjure up some mumbo-jumbo or another to explain why this patently obvious plan won’t work, or that idea is impractical. Frozen doesn’t accord the viewer even the peremptory respect of dismissing his solutions; and when it does, it’s with the frank disingenuity of a peevish Dungeon Master.

The figure is apt. This movie comes right from the “Imagine” school of filmmaking, as practiced by groups of bloodythirsty teenagers sitting around a backyard lantern worldwide. “Imagine if….”, “Yeah, imagine THEN!….” For 70 minutes our heroes are plagued by a senseless succession of bland and cruel indignities like peons in a god-game grown boring; the wolves, the weather, the liquid waste. And in the meantime? Oh, the usual. The woman shrieks. Someone makes a speech about how he’s “going out there”. Blame is passed unaccountably around in a vapid game of Recrimination Tag. Deaths occur, are mourned and are promptly processed with a side salad elegaic anecdote. Someone makes a speech about what he’s going to do “as soon as he gets out of this mess”. String music. Somebody will notice that we’re gone! Nobody will notice that we’re gone! Someone makes a speech about regrets. We can’t just die up here! Somebody will come! People don’t just freeze to death on ski-lifts!

The last of these at least is a valid point, and would have looked well at the start of the movie rather than at the end – possibly even at the start of scriptwriting – but hey, it’s not like you can get your money back now, and you still ate all the popcorn, so whaddya gonna do? Fuck off home and go to sleep, maybe there’s something better on next week.

Guns of the Magnificent Seven deals in similar experiences, the provision of genuine excitement, awe or enjoyment being replaced by the expediency of reaction shots of a comic sidekick. Since it’s never clear whether what just happened was supposed to be funny or sad, or whether it even happened at all, the only way of keeping up with what’s going on, or what the director thinks is going on, is recourse to the expression on a Mexican’s face. I sometimes wonder why they bothered pointing the camera at anything else, a documentary of someone’s face whilst watching this film would be infinitely more interesting than the film itself.

And don’t get me started on George Kennedy as Chris Adams. It’s like one of those weird fan movies where someone tries to live out their dream of being Batman or Supergirl or James Bond or whatever, with only heavily-accented assertions that it’s supposed to be Yul Brynner’s character from the first films keeping us from concluding that it’s one of our mates’ dads. The best scenes play like an incredibly subtle pastiche of bad Westerns, Blazing Saddles by way of Douglas Sirk, whilst the worst ones are the cinematic equivalent of those puzzles where you have to shift the tiles around to make a picture; you could work it out, but why bother? When you think about the time and effort it takes to make any movie, it’s amazing that more of them don’t turn out like this; but when you think about Guns of the Magnificent Seven, it’s amazing that anybody bothers to keep making any at all.

“Sorry, what?”

“The kid! He’s playing poker!” His eyes gleamed merrily through his prescription glasses at the very thought of it.

“But I don’t get it. How’s it funny?” And the old chap, love him and bless him, would sigh in tolerant resignation of my habitual stupidity.

“It’s a kid. Playing poker.”

It’s a CAT! Wearing a MONOCLE! It’s an OLD LADY! Listening to RAP! It’s a NUN! Driving a MONSTER TRUCK! It’s a BABY! Dressed as DARTH VADER! It would be fashionable just to blame the fashion, but there’s no denying it; people still like Family Guy, long, long after it has jumped the shark. They’re not pretending – well, not all of them – and they’re not stupid – well, not… umm… hmm… – they just actually enjoy watching scenes from Star Wars re-enacted by a fictional fat guy and his talking dog. It makes them happy. And who is going to piss on that?

Who indeed?

Maybe I’m not the one to say anything. I laughed at Monty Python and the Holy Grail in Lego, and prefer Angryalien.com’s pastiches to most of the actual movies. Yes, perhaps all humour essentially boils down to “It’s an X! In the unlikely situation of Y!” And we should be pleased to find in ourselves this common ground, all of us liking different versions of the same thing. But, like all formulae and universal laws, it creeps me out, the tidying up of human nature, broompiling and rationalising for efficiency savings. Sooner or later, all we are will be pushed back inside the chalk outline of our humanity, the cut-out-and-keep, colour-it-yourself paper doll from the back of a cornflakes box; and there will be as much space between what we are and what we can be as between a cookie and a cutter. So fuck Family Guy and its comedic equations, fuck high-concept Hollywood and its marketing executives, pissing out the boundaries of human experience; let’s colour outside the lines a little.

Stephen Fry was on the radio, talking about Hamlet as far as I can remember, and as the steady stroke of his voice swept through the static it suddenly occurred to me that Stephen Fry, poster child for wit and ingenuity, Stephen Fry, the self-help Renaissance man, Stephen Fry, the acceptable face of modern intellectual discourse, that Stephen Fry was actually not very bright at all.

I say this advisedly. Not everybody could do what Stephen Fry does, as is evidenced by the fact that only Stephen Fry seems to get away with it. Most of my first year English Lit tutorial group could have, though, and I include in this a ginger-headed prick called Philip whose sole manner of self-expression was to catapult himself with affected huffiness back into his chair and announce that he couldn’t understand why we had to talk about all these books and poems and stuff instead of just reading them. Put him on the spot, y’see, and Philip could waffle. Boy could he waffle. He’d array all his facts, line them up like a bridge of broken tiles, and plod methodically along, swerving from one subject to another in a way which was meant to demonstrate scope of expertise but actually indicated that he’d exhausted his knowledge on the current subject and was leaping like Frogger onto the next one. Easy to plot a path through a forest that’s only six metres wide.

So Stephen Fry waffles. What’s wrong with that, you say? We all do it! Only we don’t all do it, that’s the thing. Yes, we all talk rubbish. Yes, we’re all boring cunts. But we don’t know that we’re boring cunts talking rubbish, which is exactly what the waffler does know. He is at all times fully aware that he is a pumper-out of noxious, know-it-all nothing in the aural atmosphere. What nerve it must take! What cheek! To stand there and think that you’re the only person in the world who doesn’t realise you’re talking a load of shite! To which Stephen Fry could quite casually turn around and ask, well, where are all these people who realise it? Where are they? And why aren’t they saying anything?

I was on the bus out of Edinburgh when I turned on my PSP and put in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and on North Bridge when my earphones started belching out its pompous, it’s-funny-because-it’s-Stephen-Fry narration. Talk about setting the tone! The rest of the movie takes its cue from Fry like he turned to it directly afterwards and pointed at it whilst pressing the side of his nose with his index finger. Smug from start to finish, H2G2 can only be interpreted as some kind of Funny Games-esque challenge to the viewer to sit through the whole thing. Who will survive, and what will be left of them? I don’t mind telling you that I nearly didn’t make it; there were times when I actually felt physically sick watching it, dry prickles of heat multiplying across my back and scalp like a gross transformation scene in an 80′s horror flick. I was so bored I could have wept, just for something to do. The Easter Egg? 15 watchable minutes in which Bill Nighy showcases the rebirth of the Earth; a feat considerably less impressive than Nighy actually managing to make something in this script sound funny, or touching, or something. When the final curtain drops, you can only wonder who decided which scenes were funny enough to be included in the film and which were only funny enough to be included as end-credit cookies. Then some poor cunt had to decide what was only good enough to be included on the DVD extras. Think about that next time you’re watching Sophie’s Choice.

I wonder if there is a precise moment, some freeze-frame during Blackadder Goes Forth, when we can see Stephen Fry starting to turn into a brand-name for bullshit. Or was it during Jeeves and Wooster, perhaps even watching the first, fabulous episode of House when that reptilian sheen glazed his eyes over for once and for ever? Don’t know, don’t need to.

Well, Woody was always old, I suppose, and so were his best audiences, but he was never this out of touch. The stilted, arch and sonorous platitudes of Match Point. Cassandra’s Dream, so unrecognisably the London underworld that it might as well have been Caracas, or the Matrix, or a scene from a new Fantasia. Vicky Cristina Barcelona, reheated French farce made dangerous by sex. And before that, well, before that people were saying he’d lost his way! Fancy that. Poor Woody. Lost in an England of his own devising.

At any event, he’s turned up again clutching his tiny suitcase in Grand Central, dug out an old script from the Seventies, and made a film which does not change the world but at least adds to it. A fantasy of wish-fulfillment, yes, but one that at least has the grace to admit that for most people who look or act like Woody Allen, fantasies are all they’re gonna get. Self-serving? Of course, but everybody’s worldview is; that’s what worldviews are for; to explain why we do the things we do. Larry David’s good, he can be a jerk in just the sort of brusque and dysfunctional way that keeps him on the right side of likable; Allen playing the same material would have been snide and whiny. Oh, and some of it doesn’t quite come off, but seeing as how the whole film is a paean to the grand and noble tradition of making whatcha can out of whatcha got, it seems churlish to say so. Out of an aging script, unpromising plot, no-name actors and a stand-up comedian, Woody Allen cobbles together something that’s more than functional. Whatever Works works.

I think I have hit upon the distinction between prose and poetry. Prose is allowed its little throwaways, its clichés, its bland linking paragraphs. Prose is shored up everywhere by the base foundation of the everyday, so that even when it falls apart we can see the scaffold beneath it and guess what the writer was trying oh-so-unsuccessfully to do. Poetry, on the other hand, has no such safety net. Nothing in poetry can be familar or commonplace, every single word must be load-bearing, nothing must go to waste. Poetry, far from being flowery or lavish, is the ultimate in artistic economy.

And so it only occurs to me now that Scorsese’s films are actual poems, stripped of all life’s fat and gristle, lean and hungry as middleweights. Look at Bringing Out the Dead. Is there a single shot in this movie you’ve ever seen before, or even one obligatory scene? No. Instead, there are moments of such dark, diabolical comedy that their very perfection moves us to tears, and every camera movement is like a word of obscure beauty we had never heard before.

So I’m watching all these scenes in which Bob Dylan looks on with a blank approximation of messianic pity whilst someone or other monologises on a life well or woefully spent, and I’m thinking “What, really?” Is it all a joke about the cult of celebrity, the way we take a bunch of answers and project them onto the guy at the top of the pop charts? Is it a step beyond that, even, a joke about those kinds of jokes? I mean, it can’t be serious, can it? Does the film really think we think Bob Dylan is Christ? But then, everything about those scenes… if they aren’t sincere, they’ll do till sincere comes along.

Bob Dylan’s films seem always to have been about his myth rather than his music, and something like Masked and Anonymous makes you wonder if what we care most and know least about, in the end, is what we mean to those around us. Poems, they say, are love songs to the world; too bad the world never writes back.

It’s funny. When I was young, my greatest fear was of things that looked and even acted like people, but weren’t. Robots, androids, aliens, clones, these were the stuff of my nightmares, not the unambiguous evil of a Jason or Freddy Krueger. Evangelists ought to strike terror into the heart of my remaining youth, as even ordinary men of god do. But the fear inspired by Gene Scott, as it seems to me, is dull, throbbing, like (I suppose) your conscience. His angry eyes, staring out of the screen, are to be propitiated, not avoided. A pensioner’s dream, that, to bask in the anger-turned-love of his gaze!

But the singers! Every now and then, whilst Scott takes (I imagine) a toilet break, a display of flashing telephone numbers foregrounds a couple of Las Vegas-like singers whose every eye movement oozes with oily professionalism, smilingly showcasing the love of God like it was for sale on the Home Shopping Channel, buy now, don’t pay later! They are the chilling ones, scary like the soulless sparkle of Daniel O’Donnell and his dead, unsmiling eyes.

Because when I watch The Pianist, I find it to be full of what Werner Herzog would call dead images, stale, lifeless, obligatory scenes which fail to bring home the Holocaust to anyone. Cinema has trivialised suffering to the point whereby eliciting an audience reaction is now a tightrope walk with Sentimentality, it is true, and The Pianist does well to eschew this high-wire gamble. But it doesn’t really have anything powerful to offer us in its stead, just cliché and convention. So because the movie doesn’t have anything new to say about the suffering of the Jewish people, I catch myself watching the scenes of women and children being herded onto cattle trucks and asking “Who would allow this? What ordinary human being could have done this for a living, and then went home and had dinner and played with the kids and read the newspaper?” But the movie is not really interested in such questions. No ordinary human beings could have done it. There were no ordinary Nazis. QED.

But there must have been, mustn’t there? What was running through the heads of the German soldiers when they witnessed scenes of heartrending misery a thousand times worse than anything Hollywood has to show us? Fear? Denial? Group hysteria? Was there genuine madness there? I sometimes worry about the way movies like these actually absolve us all of the Holocaust, allowing us to shake our heads in sad wisdom and sob chastely whilst ignoring entirely the fact that these unspeakable horrors where not committed by a bunch of fairy-tale ogres but by us, ordinary people, the rank and file of mankind. The Holocaust was not something the Germans did to the Jews, but something we did to ourselves.

I realise this film is not about the Germans, but it is not about the Jews either. It is not about anything much, so far as I can tell. Adrien Brody’s character survives the war through sitting impassively around and relying on the kindness of strangers. Maybe that’s how it really was, and those who emerged from the Holocaust with their lives were not necessarily the ones with great internal fortitude and guile, but the ones who were impossibly lucky over and over and over again. Probably that’s exactly how it was. But I doubt many of the people who managed to live through that kind of horror were as utterly devoid of mental and personal resource as Brody’s character is here, so completely lifeless and inert that the very fact of his still breathing takes on a kind of bizarre fascination.

And maybe that’s Polanski’s point, that the only way to survive was by being that kind of inactive, impassive, virtual non-entity, creeping below the registers of detectable life, and that any kind of desire to be involved in the business of living was what got people killed. That would be a truly horrific moral choice to make, between Dying and Not Living. I can’t imagine it. But neither, it seems, can The Pianist.