Christian Bale: right idea, wrong reasons

The funniest thing about Christian "slightly too convincing as Patrick Bateman" Bale's silly on-set luvvie tirade is that he felt it was necessary to spill out the agonies of his tortured artistic soul over, of all things, a Terminator movie.¹

i mean, it's not exactly Citizen Fucking Kane, is it?

i'm all for artists who practically kill themselves and others around them out of passion to make the results greater than they would otherwise have been. Steve Albini can by all accounts be an abrasive dickhead, but he does it to push his performers to the limit of their abilities, and the results are demonstrable. The Velvet Underground were basically Lou Reed and John Cale's five-year confrontation with the whole of Western society, but they also happened to be geniuses. Bale's former director Werner Herzog, one of my favourite ever ever filmmakers, and Klaus Kinski, the man he described as his "best fiend", nearly killed each other multiple times over the filming of five separate pictures, but the pictures in question were incredible.

BUT THIS IS A FUCKING TERMINATOR MOVIE.

i blame the Batman franchise and its irritating aspiration to be Dark And Profound™ all the time for the fact that we now have to treat any given piece of Hollywood fluff devised for mere entertainment purposes as if it were a radical new Dostoyevsky interpretation or something.²

The only Batman film worth watching is the 1966 version featuring the spandex and the "KER-POW!"s and Batman delivering the line "some days you just can't get rid of a bomb" with an entirely straight face, not least because it just ADMITS that it's a jokey comic-book adaptation and then gets on with the task of being ace, rather than dicking about pretending to be Requiem for a Boring Dream.

In other words, everyone seems to be treating Bale's outburst as "bad but justifiable". Says Darren Aronofsky: "[a]lthough it's never good to lose your temper that bad for obvious reasons, we don't know what scene he was doing. He could have been doing a deeply, deeply intense emotional scene."

Surely that's completely backwards. The tirade? Big deal. It's the use of utterly specious and flimsy art to justify it that perturbs me.³

"He could have been doing a deeply, deeply intense emotional scene."

In Terminator Salvation? Could he? Really?

The problem here is not Bale's short temper. It's our expectation that "deeply intense emotional scene[s]" are the norm for big-budget major-studio summer action flick franchises these days. If you want harrowing emotionalism and intensity, go watch Through A Glass Darkly or something. If you want big dumb action thrills (who doesn't sometimes?), go get out Snakes on a Plane. But try and pretend that one's the other, and you just sell everyone short.

If anything good comes out of the current recession, it'll hopefully be an end to this kind of gratuitous posturing comic-book-goth pseudo-soul-searching, and a return to a mainstream that'd rather have a bit of fun than force itself to sit around chain-smoking Gauloises on pavement terraces all day with copies of something obvious by Nietzsche left lying conspicuously about. "'Ere's 'oping", as Camus would undoubtedly have said.


¹ Yes! This post has footnotes.
² And the Cult Of Heath™, too, for that matter — can you just give him the fucking posthumous Oscar so we can all stop talking about him, already?
³ Same with the whole Gordon Ramsey thing. Stop swearing at people, mate: at the end of the day, you're a cook. Know your place.

Endearing bungling; more Dark Knight

To Birmingham, and the news that the council there has printed up 720,000 leaflets to thank the residents for their diligence in recycling, but unfortunately illustrated them with a picture of the wrong Birmingham — the West Midlands city's redneck American counterpart of Birmingham, Alabama.

Sparing literally no expense whatsoever, they also appear to have lifted the image of the Birmingham, AL skyline directly from the aforelinked Wikipedia article:

Here's a picture of the Birmingham, UK skyline for comparison purposes:

Hmmm, yes. You can maybe see their point. Personally, i'm wholly in favour of this sort of thing; you can't fault their commitment to recycling stuff, at least.

However, the most charming bit about the whole story was the authorities' initial insistence that nooo, of course they hadn't made a mistake! Y'see, they were planning to display, ummm... a generic skyline "intended to symbolise an urban area"! Yeh, that's right! Any old skyline, that'll do! And... erm... it was just unfortunate coincidence that the skyline in question was from a city with the same name as theirs while also not being the right one. Yeh! Coincidence!!

That line of reasoning lasted for nearly a whole 5 minutes, until presumably everybody who'd heard it had been fully incapacitated with laughter and told the Council to stop pretending they hadn't been going in the biscuit tin, as everyone could plainly see the chocolate plastered around all their mouths. Sterling effort.

In other news:

Dear All My Friends,

I would very likely have come to see The Dark Knight with you if you'd told me Maggie Gyllenhaal was in it.

YouTube: Gang Starr — "Nice Girl, Wrong Place"

Keith Vaz fucks up / Starbucks fucks off

Another example of the current government's uncanny ability to deal with the really important issues in our society, the ones that affect us all, the ones we all carry so close to our hearts.

Yep, that latter-day Roger Cook Keith Vaz has fearlessly stuck his neck on the line, weighing in with his usual integrity and passionate on the deeply troubling and incredibly important issue of the cinema rating of the new Batman movie. Holy Totally Significant Issue, Batman!

According to the Beeb, Vaz told The Independent, "The BBFC should realise there are scenes of gratuitous violence in The Dark Knight to which I certainly would not take my 11-year-old daughter. It should be a 15 certificate."

Uhhh, got news for you, Keith. A 12A certificate actually doesn't admit an 11-year-old (the clue's in the numbers) unless you specifically ignore the BBFC's advice and take the kid in with you as its legal guardian. So, um, your 11-year-old daughter wouldn't in fact be able to see the film anyway, unless you were a wilfully negligent parent. So if you don't want her to see it, don't take her to it. Just don't try and impose your misunderstanding of the ratings system on the rest of us for cheap political points.

How does such an egregious dunderhead get to lead a Select Committee, anyway? Presumably "Select" is like a Labour euphemism for "backwards", like "special" or "cerebrally challenged" or something.

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In other news, three cheers for the Aussies! Apparently they've largely driven Starfucks out of the country altogether, corporate monolithery and shitty coffee and all.

When i got my mobile a few years ago, the inbuilt T-9 dictionary could accurately complete the word "Starbucks", but not "Shakespeare". So this news is not before time at all.

MP3: Don Caballero: "You Drink a Lot of Coffee for a Teenager"