dir. jake scott
st. robert carlyle, johnny lee miller, liv tyler
showing at any "cinema" which delights in forcing contemptible mediocrity down the throats of people who should know better

Why are audiences so willing to accept a film as worthless as Plunkett and Macleane? What can inspire the average filmgoer to fork out an increasingly hard-to-earn 9/11 dollars just to have their intelligence insulted and their spirit crushed. Thanks to movies like this we all experience life a little less intensely. Cinema becomes the bastard craft once more. Yes, a cliched and often attempted song. Forget the death of cinema, the loss of a great art still preserved in all those old films. What about the art of entertainment? This pitiful waste of time destroys the possibility of having even a mindless bit of fun. Instead you can spend two hours thinking about how you love films that don?t make you think. It takes work to create something that makes audiences drift off to sleep peacefully. People should tear down cinemas which screen Plunkett and Macleane.

All the rich are toffee nosed fools. Fine...easier to kill a monster. Black Adder with more elaborate camera angles. Techno in the 18th century. Switched on to the classics. Good for sex scenes, gets the blood rushing. Twice daily. Liv Tyler? All American, pie-masticatin', pepsi-swillin' white trash with this years face (the same every year) designed for a million futile cinematic forays. Armageddon anyone? Cockney gits with guns. Director has technique, no? George Lucas on line two...eight miles high...I just wanna see Darth Maul, don't get me wrong...cinema as the spare appendage, the thing to be used when the train has well and truly hopped the rails. Lines and lines and lines. Top ten Star Wars euphemisms for masturbation. These sort of films only ever last two or three weeks. One week for the males, and their vomitous Livvy. One week because what-the-fuck-else-is-there-to-do-on-a-Friday-night. One week for the mandatory firearms appreciation.

Yes comrades, guns. The billboard on George St. makes its intentions clear. Two men with comically threatening faces point guns at us. The catchline? They rob the rich...and that's it. Indeed. I'll move beyond congratulating myself for understanding the paraphrased zinger, yet I still take offense to the way guns and their wonderful uses are being marketed. This isn't playful irony with a complex undertow or deserving target. This is pure cynicism. Violence is great, joyful and the only true method of successful communication. The iconography of the gun makes all human interaction futile.

Hollywood stars speak out against all the horrors of this world and wear their shiny red ribbons and then continue to exploit violence for the sake of money. A complete and utter lack of thought goes into these films. Without violence these films have nothing to keep the eye busy and the ear looking the other way as awful dialogue is spoken straight-faced. Violence isn't even a "key ingredient". Violence is all there is. Blah Blah, moral watchdog. As Bono once said, evil isn't the opposite of good, apathy is. Dreamin', dream dream dream...

adam rivett
comments? email the author