Nucular Christmas.

Yesterday - twenty-four years too late - I finally got around to watching Threads, the harrowing UK docudrama about the aftermath of nuclear war. Man alive; that was one harrowing televisual experience and no mistake. It put me in a deep funk that could not be assuaged even with chocolate biscuits. There are only so many charred accountants and melted housewives you can stand on a Sunday afternoon.

Luckily for me, three hours later I had an appointment to see Wayne Coyne introduce his film Christmas on Mars at the Barbican. I was hoping for an antidote of sorts, but in fact it was suprisingly boring (imagine a student film aiming for “Plan 9 meets Dead Man meets Eraserhead” but ending up instead as a tedious semiotic montage of Nude Baby meets Giant Vagina meets Santa Claus).

Still: great nap. Best cinema nap ever! (Well, second best, after the one I had in 1997 during the re-released Return of the Jedi. That high quality hour of REM sleep - accompanied as it was by the roaring surround sound of speeder bikes zooming through the forests of Endor - remains one of my life’s high points.)

It must be said, however, that Christmas on Mars’s dullness was tempered by Coyne introducing it in person. He’s such a jaunty, life-affirming presence I’ll forgive him almost any transgression.

So at least I wasn’t thinking about nuclear winter when I left.

Which was nice.

Village idiot

I rather enjoyed these final two paragraphs of Ebert's review of The Village:

Eventually the secret of [The Village] is revealed. To call it an anticlimax would be an insult not only to climaxes but to prefixes. It's a crummy secret, about one step up the ladder of narrative originality from It Was All a Dream. It's so witless, in fact, that when we do discover the secret, we want to rewind the film so we don't know the secret anymore.

And then keep on rewinding, and rewinding, until we're back at the beginning, and can get up from our seats and walk backward out of the theater and go down the up escalator and watch the money spring from the cash register into our pockets.

Lovely.