Tetherd Cow Ahead

Sister Veronica has some kooky idea that we need to start getting the barn ready for the Christmas Nativity Scene.

I don’t quite know what she has in mind, but the cows seem to be making an awful lot of noise.*

Warning: NSFW (unless maybe you are a vet).

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*The explanatory notes for Brigitte Niedermair’s ‘Holy Cow’ are here. Personally, the artistic statement sounds to me like a big steaming heap of bullshit.

Thanks (I think) to jedimacfan for sending me to this image that will probably stick in my head all day.

Well Cow fans, The Cow and I have journeyed far, seen extraordinary sights, made wonderful friends and had many laughs along the way. Sadly, such travels inevitably turn back toward home, where I now find myself, huddled inside the cloister while the wind howls outside and the rain buckets down.

It’s a far cry from the heat and the swelter of the last two weeks.

As I suspected I wasn’t able to report to you too regularly while I was travelling, but I have accumulated a veritable milk-pail full of great stories, so I hope you don’t mind if we stay restrospectively in Vietnam over the next little while.

There is fun aplenty still to come.

Well, stalwart companions, this time tomorrow I will be in another country. Yes, The Cow and I are going on an adventure. I will be attempting to bring you news and even pictures from this foreign and exotic clime, but that will depend heavily on internet availability. It is, in theory, possible, though I expect it to be a little tricky.

If things go quiet, I apologize in advance, but rest assured, I will be accumulating Signs of the Times from another land for when I return in about two weeks.

Guesses to where I’ll be are now open (those who know just keep yer yaps shut).

Hint: I’m on a plane for about 11 hours.

[Waves goodbye, hoists little checkerd bundle and strides off down the road]

It has come to my attention that my readership numbers might be handicapped owing to the fact that I am not a cute twenty-year-old chicky-babe with a MySpace profile and nothing to say.

Now this may appear to be something of an obstacle for a forty-eight-year-old bloke who likes to shoot the breeze about the big topics like religion, science, net politics and accurate spelling, but as the Reverend of The Church of the Tetherd Cow I am ever-mindful that The Cow moves in mysterious ways.

Indeed, even as I was despairing that I may never see the likes of three or four hundred MySpace friends filling my life with inane platitudes and incomprehensible teenspeak, there was a knocking at the cloister door, and a destitute creature with no worldly possessions other than the clothes on her back stumbled in from the driving rain. As I towelled the poor wretch dry in front of the abbey fireplace, I knew that the solution to my increasingly barren Comment pages had been sent to me via a Divine Miracle.

So, faithful Acowlytes, let me introduce to you Sister Veronica* who will be popping by from time to time in order to help me make an unashamed grab for increased visitor numbers.

You can even write to her, for advice on personal matters or astrology, a field in which she tells me she is an expert.

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*Sister Veronica’s likeness appears courtesy of Scumbag Russian Spammersâ„¢ and Photoshop

Tetherd Cow Ahead: The Movie (TCA Films in Association with Echo of a Duck’s Quack) 2hrs 20.

Kate Beckinsale, Helen Hunt, Bob Balaban, Robin Williams, Matthew Modine

Well the hype has led us to expect big things from this summer’s number one blockbuster Tetherd Cow Ahead: The Movie, but does the multi-million dollar, no-holds-barred bio-pic extravaganza live up to expectations?

No-one can accuse producer Landon Flanagan (The Unusual Thing) and director Raymundo (Wild Oats) of taking the easy options with this thriller-cum-psychodrama based on the allegedly true blog of the enigmatic ‘Reverend’ Anaglyph. Bringing any such material to the screen is a challenge, and if there’s one thing that can be said in the film’s favour it is that it succinctly captures the aimless meanderings, disjointed musings and baffling asides of the source material.

The Reverend Anaglyph (Balaban) is a gun-totin’, cigar smoking dapper con-man with a penchant for wearing perfume, who through a series of unlikely accidents comes into possession of a ‘Radionic Machine’ which is believed by some to bestow mysterious powers on its owner. When The Reverend travels to New York and meets leather-clad machine-gun wielding assassin-for-hire Jill (Beckinsale), the extent of those mysterious powers becomes plain. I don’t want to give too much away here, but it is sufficient to say that you’ll be wanting to hang on to your vital organs (especially kidneys and bladders) for these scenes.

It is when evil mastermind Anne Arkham (Hunt) enters the picture that the action ramps right up. In a memorable opening dialogue volley, Arkham (she refers to herself as ‘The Atomic Bitch‘), manages to offend pretty much every known minority group, but still gets a laugh.

A highlight of the film comes soon after with Arkham and Jill duking it out, each attempting to assert superior sexual prowess. The two femmes fatale quickly forget their differences and join forces when the perfidious saltimbanque Joey Polanski (Williams, looking remarkably young on screen) enters the story.

Polanski, and his drooling henchman the cryptically named Jedimacfan (Modine), turn out to be the real villains of this piece. With their odd mannerisms and incomprehensible motivations they bring to Tetherd Cow Ahead the kind of menace that can only be truly appreciated in the knowledge that this is all based on true events. Frightening.

Polanski and Jedimacfan have evidently struck some kind of deal with clandestine US Military interests to create bizarre ‘incidents’ across the country, including the abduction of dairy cattle and the stealing of a nuclear submarine. Anaglyph, Arkham and Jill have their hands full dealing with this unhinged duo, as do the audience, the whole film having gained by this point about as much clarity as a Ken Russell thick shake. The action spans four continents before the key players finally arrive in Australia for the final showdown.

It has to be said that this is not an easy film to like, let alone comprehend. At almost two and a half hours long it is tempting to suggest that Raymundo could have removed the excruciating Polanski/Arkham karaoke scene and the turgid narcissistic ice-skating sequence with Jedimacfan and the stunted fruit-vendor ‘Pasquale’ (a surprise cameo by Tom Cruise). There are moments of existential transcendance for sure (Jill’s chilling semantic reduction of a Jehovah’s Witness’s spiel, Arkham welding Jedimacfan to a cyclone fence), but the net gain is that you leave the movie feeling like you’ve eaten a-half-a-dozen donuts, a couple of pounds of cinammon apples and a giant serving of cheese fries. Still, maybe that’s what’s expected of a big summer movie release.

Performances in the film are, overall, of a high quality. There are no Oscars here, but there’s an awful lot of Method. The music, by Glasgow thrashers ‘Half a Bladder’, is unsettling but catchy. Mr Leu Shan’s costume design is off-beat and engaging in a cross-dressy sort of way, and the digital effects by Simple Graphics Man are competent if a little two-dimensional.

See it with an undemanding friend.

☆☆☆