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.

I was quite ill over the weekend, and spent most of it in bed watching the documentaries on my Universal Horror Classics DVDs. Watching them, these odd cornucopias of commentators and historians linked only by one thing, a fanatical devotion to The Creature From The Black Lagoon or Bride of Frankenstein or The Mummy, made me realise what I have slowly been coming to suspect over the last few months; that the window of opportunity for respectable geekdom is passing me by with my youth, and I have never really taken advantage of it. I can see it shrinking like the sliver of light under a closing tomb door in an Indiana Jones movie, and with it all my hopes of an isolationist world into which to recoil from the cares and troubles of everyday life; I am gradually being boxed out into the real world, with no handy-dandy retreat remaining into dimensions inhabited by shambling shapeshifters, Cthulhu-like creatures and aliens with weird forehead wrinkles. Gone, GONE FOREVER are the days when I might have rubbed dandruff-speckled shoulders with greasy-haired, pizza-pimpled virgins over a bowl of Cheese Puffs and a game of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (Third Edition), snorting Dr. Pepper through my nose at yet another well-timed jab at the poor, puny fools who were still playing Second Edition! And instead of all those things? Bills to pay, jobs to do, responsibilities to hold, and promises to keep; oh, and self-respect. But what a price!

But I’m not tricked by it, you know. I know fine well that those movie geeks I saw are not silly little men retreating into made-up worlds which shield them from life like Batfink’s bullet-repelling cape; they are wealthy and successful individuals, distinguished enough to appear in documentaries which stumblebums like me must pay for the privilege of watching. They are not entry-level drones stacking shelves and serving customers deep into their thirties and forties, playing out the time left until they die with endless reruns of Deep Space Nine. They are not perpetual undergraduates living in knee-high sludge and rising damp and Games Workshop, if there’s even a difference. They have very probably kissed a girl, and their best friends are most likely not big stupid fat guys with curly hair who kids at their old high school used to call ‘Sadsack’. And yet somehow, despite all this, against all the odds, they like all those old Bela Lugosi movies.

Direct-to-video Disney sequels work like this. They are desperately poorly conceived crapola fests with corner-cutting animation straight from Dogtanian, EXCEPT! That they almost always have some song or another worthy of the original, and after several months of humming “Titanic Tip and Daring Dash” you sort of realise that that bundle of bullshit has ultimately brought you more in the way of happiness than the unmemorable, inoffensive humdrum you’ve been watching ever since, like getting punched by a smelly old tramp and finding it’s knocked your sore tooth out. So no childless person in the UK has seen more Disney sequels than me. They could’ve had me on You Bet! and no-one would’ve blinked an eye.

There is a twee Scottish comic strip called The Broons which, famously, has sustained itself for several decades on only four storylines. These are:

1) Paw’s DIY schemes.
2) The Bairn’s Granpaw-based misunderstandings.
3) Daphne/Maggie/Hen/Joe’s romantic capers.
4) The But ‘n’ Ben.

I have repeatedly moved that “Maw is black affronted” be added to this list, but popular opinion is that this was only ever a subplot loosely related to the main storyline. Anyway, Disney sequels are like this too. They have a very small number of trite stories to tell, and by and large restrict themselves to a subplot-shorn Diet version of the original’s. Fine by me, I’m only watching it for “My Lullaby”. Fuck story.

Pocahontas II is to me as the existence of Evil is to godbods. It is a chainsaw-wielding maniac let loose upon my fragile worldview; the very thought of it leaves my mind in a state similar to that of Gotham Art Gallery after the Joker has finished with it, an array of spray-painted portraits with gaping, Stanley-knifed grins and torn purple curtains fluttering in tatters over the broken window. I want to howl, I want to weep, I want to run down the streets in vain pursuit of my lost innocence, skywardly screaming “THEY’RE ALREADY HERE!”

Because, you see, Pocahontas II is not about Love Conquering All. It is not about Coming of Age, it is not about Facing Up To Responsibility, it is not even about Believing In Yourself, for chrissake! No, it is about Falling Out Of Love; it is about Pocahontas and John Smith realising that they don’t really love each other any more and she’d be better off with this other guy instead. I wish I had not hitherto in life adopted such a flippant attitude to everything so that you would now instantaneously realise how deadly serious this is. It is a Disney movie. About how people fall out of love with each other. Forever. Think about that.

Now, I am nobody’s sap. I am well aware that people do, in fact, fall out of love with each other. That is reality. I also know that Pocahontas really did marry John Rolfe, not John Smith. That is history. What business does Disney have meddling with either of these things? When I watch a movie whose supporting cast include a turquoise hummingbird and a whimsical raccoon, it is not because I feel insufficiently appraised regarding how fucking shit life is. But the worst thing about Pocahontas II is that, like a blubbering child of divorce, we are made to feel that this is somehow all our fault. As we sit there listening to Pocahontas’ and John Smith’s sad, loveless speeches, it is like the whole thing is some kind of dramatic payback, a fantastic nightmare of It’s a Wonderful Life wish-fulfilment in which all those times we laughed at Hollywood blockbusters for being such formulaic, genre-driven drivel comes back to bite us in the ass. “So all that Colors of the Wind stuff, with the running about the forest, that was just lies, then?” I petulantly demand; but inside, inside, I am already halfway up the stairs, throwing myself to the bedroom floor like Willem Dafoe on the cover of Platoon with pillow-pounding sobs of “WhywhywhywhyWHY?!”

And yet, nobody says anything. I suppose it’s a bit much, in this day and age, with tweenage kids watching Saw and stuff, to expect anyone to rise up and take umbrage at a kids’ movie about how love doesn’t always last forever. I dunno, though. I didn’t find out about that until I was in my early twenties, and I still haven’t gotten over it. I’ll remember Pocahontas II long after I’ve forgotten The Exorcist.