Another Gray Day

Definitely another grey day as the snow continues, so went to see “10,000BC” en famille.
Another Roland Emmerich effects splurge, with lovely woolly mammoths, sabre-tooth tigers and the inevitable hide couture. It seems to me like RE is really more of a manager than a director, since all the SFX strands are pulled together efficiently, o time and on budget etc. But rather like Peter Jackson with “King Kong”, the film has no real emotional core. whereas you can look up Hollyoaks on Youtube any day of the week and find tragedy of epic proportions. In fact, Richard Thompson does a better job of tragedy in three minutes of “1952 Vincent Black Lightning” than Roland E does in 1:48 of 10000BC. Which isn’t really tragic since there’s a happy ending of sorts. And they all spoke perfect French, except for the Africans and Egyptians who were acting out their stereotypical roles, being slaves and pyramid-builders respectively.
Although the theme of the film is “the first hero”, it doesn’t really convey the feeling of there being something really huge in the balance, like the future of humankind or Becca’s love for Jake (Hollyoaks again). Sure, the main man’s beautiful girlfriend has been kidnapped, but that’s about it. The film assumes that the human emotional universe was up and running 12000 years ago, rather than evolving gradually into the state in which it is now. Which is not to say that emotions did not exist, but we can’t easily recreate how they would have felt. In some ways they are a luxury, to be indulged once hunger, thirst and cold have been overcome. And with mammoth on the menu, that probably took a while.

Due to an unfortunate series of events I’ve just watched what is certainly the new no. one in my top ten of the worst films of all time, Borat. No doubt I am asking for trouble, since the film seems to have been a critical success etc etc, and is of course deliberately and ironically offensive to almost everyone. I didn’t laugh, I cried at the waste of money which could have been spent making any number of other films. I’d even give the money to Woody Allen even although Match Point was my previous number one worst film.
Of course it’s seen as successful because people like me get annoyed about it. OK, no problem, but anyone who enjoyed this should be strapped to a chair and made to watch Klimov’s Come and see or Pasolini’s Salo until they repent. The most horrible thing about it is what it says about the mentality of the people who finance films. I just wish some of the punters who got annoyed on camera had actually kicked him (Baron Cohen) in the bollocks, which is less than he deserves and might actually have been funny.