WHAT CRITICAL FACULTIES?

I was going to write about the movie I watched on DVD last night, then stupidly ran a Google-check and blundered onto Rotten Tomatoes (Check out your personal, all-time favourite movie and see how wrong you were!) and came across a whole page of reviews carrying such words as ‘absurd’, ‘corny’, ‘ludicrous’, ‘inept’, ‘incompetent’ and ‘BAD’ in such abundance that I changed my mind!

However, I was struck by one verdict on this movie - which I dare not now admit to having seen! - by Claudia Puig in ‘USA Today’: “One wonders why Hollywood is so determined to churn out outlandish tales of manufactured peril when the real world is scary enough.” To which the sages and savants of contemporary society will doubtless trill: “Good question!”

But, I wonder… Might not the same have been said of, among many others movies (all admittedly in a different league to the one I watched last night), ‘Metropolis’, ‘Nosferatu’, ‘Frankenstein’, ‘Things to Come’, ‘Planet of the Apes’ and ‘Blade Runner’?

Surely Fantasy Cinema - like its literary equivalent - exists, in part, to make us look at the ‘real world’ with different eyes: to be scared and warned about the dangers of paths we are treading or simply to laugh at outlandish fears and perils so as to put those encountered in our daily existence into their true perspective.

Then I remember that the movie I was going to write about was (according to ‘Newsday’) indicative of “the rock bottom bankruptcy of subtle minds in pop culture” and realize that I know NOTHING…