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2001-12-04 - 6:11 p.m.

�I go to her when I�m feeling slack, the girl�s using me as a punching bag, I think that I could help her out, but the girl�s got a lot to be mad about..�

As the song says: �Saturday night at the movies - who cares what picture you see?� I couldn�t agree more, because you may as well have been back on the bus for all the cinematic escapism to be had at my local multiplex last weekend. Even conceding that the film was vaguely mainstream-y (�Ghostworld�) , the crowd could at best have been diplomatically described as �frisky�, and at worst as �Fucking C*nts�. Ignoring the flagrant disregard for conventional methods of sitting down shown mostly by people in baseball caps, the opening scenes apparently contained some kind of Pavlovian signal for the couple in front to start discussing their mortgage options, whilst the rest of the film was punctuated by a popcorn-popping drug dealer happy to capitalise on lulls in the action to direct covert operations from his mobile phone.

�Well, what did you expect?� said my film-obsessed friend, who will only attend certain cinemas at certain times of day, who will walk straight out if the opening credits have already started by the time he arrives and who was the only boy in our school who knew the names of every Death Star commander in Star Wars by name and rank. He doesn�t do vaguely mainstream films on Saturday nights, that�s for damn sure as hiccups. Scarily, he knows his way round the Dagobar (sp?) star system far better than the tube network, as his extreme lateness for any social appointment demonstrates, and conversations with him about sci-fi films are plagued with expressions of painful exasperation as he takes anything less than comprehensive knowledge of the subject matter as a personal insult.

�Lisa met Chelsea at the knocking school, Chelsea didn�t feel like following the rules, so they left the place for another school, where the boys go with boys and the girls with girls��

Science Fiction is, of course, rivalled only by Fantasy as a genre that inspires insanely detailed knowledge of every aspect of a fictional world. This is of great curiosity to those of us who could happily (I use the term advisedly) sit through Harry Potter not caring if Quidditch was a sport or a brand of imaginary salad dressing. However, it seems that one film squaring up to bear the full brunt of the fanatics is the tale of adventure and hobbit-bothering baddies in the adaptation of �The Lord of the Rings�. The screenplay has apparently put the cat right amongst the orcs, and LotR websites are suddenly a hotbed of sweating, disgruntled fans decrying each scene that deviates even a fraction from the original descriptions of Middle Earth. There are loads of scenes listed, and though I wouldn�t doubt the possibly annoying inaccuracies of �Aragorn Battles Uruk-hai at Amon Hen�, doesn�t getting riled up about �Frodo reads book in a tree� seem a little�oh, I don�t know�over the top? I mean, at least it isn�t �Frodo rollerblades out of danger� or �Frodo endorses well known brand of fizzy drink�.

Taking the indignant outrage a step further, is the �Movie Integrity Petition�, sent to the producers and director of the film urging them to reconsider some of the heftier misrepresentations. Their main beef is seemingly that Arwen (daughter of Elrond, you brainless and inattentive layman!) is portrayed as a �warrior princess�, a deviation that they say has been allowed �to appeal to those unsympathetic to Tolkien's primary themes�. That�ll be your cinema going public, then, who presumably won�t mind too much seeing Liv Tyler leaping around with a big axe, provided they aren�t caught up in urgent mortgage discussions. I think the thing for the obsessives to remember is that the film isn�t the book. It�s a different thing. A thing where attractive young actresses are given large gleaming weaponry to draw in teenage boys with expendable income and baseball caps. The only way to experience the world that you imagined from what Tolkien originally created is to reread the books � though given that I pray daily for the time to be somehow returned to me that I spent with my head in those weighty tomes, I�m afraid I won�t be joining you.

And on a side note, if anyone comes to make a film of my life, feel free to add as many inappropriate warrior elf princesses as you feel necessary. God knows, it�ll need them.

�Chelsea was the girl who�s been abused, she changed her philosophy in �82, she says, �Inch for inch, and pound for pound, who needs boys when there�s Lisa around?��

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