Tetherd Cow Ahead

Now that pretty much everything you can imagine has been turned into a movie monster, from the recombined pieces of corpses through cars, atmospheric moisture, dolls, dogs and dinosaurs, writer/director M. Night Shyamalan, director of such memorable moving pictures as, well, OK, only The Sixth Sense, has turned, for his latest effort, to that ultimate Creature of the Night: the larch. Yes folks, I’m giving away the plot. In his new film, The Happening, the trees did it.

You will recall that some time ago I wrote that I wasn’t going to get into the habit of reviewing movies here on The Cow unless they were very very special movies…? Well, this is a very very special movie. Oh yes – ‘special’ in the way we used to be told to refer to the kids with learning disabilities in school.

Like Danny Boyle’s execrable Sunshine, Shyamalan’s The Happening commits the Number 1 Crime of science fiction; it is dumb. And, as if it’s trying to get one up on Sunshine, it also commits the Number 1 Crime of movies-in-general: it is boring. This film is dumb and boring. And annoying.† About twenty minutes into The Happening I contemplated emulating one of the film’s pheromone-addled humans and seeing if I could stuff enough popcorn up my nostrils to kill myself.

The story begins with a relatively intriguing stage-setting sequence in Philadelphia’s Fairmount Park where a young woman begins babbling incoherently to a friend and then meticulously removes a chopstick-sized hairpin from her hair and inexplicably plunges it into her jugular. Other people around the park seem bewildered and disoriented, and screams echo from somewhere in the distance. Elsewhere in the city, Elliot Moore (Mark Wahlburg) a science teacher in a local high school, is enquiring of his class if they’ve ever heard of Bee Colony Collapse Disorder (a mysterious catastrophe that is, in actual fact, devastating honey bee colonies in the USA) and asking the students to put forth some explanations for this baffling phenomenon. The first kid to come up with a suggestion – “Some kind of disease?” – is in all probability right on the money, but this does not deter M. Night, via Marky Mark, from plunging headlong into the ridiculous.* Nope, Colony Collapse Disorder is nothing we could ever imagine: “It is,” pontificates Elliot weightily, “An Unexplained Act of Nature!™”

This scene, so very early in the piece, is an alarm bell that presages a series of inane pop-science clichés and baseless myths that will form the framework of the film. As Elliot strides around his classroom, attempting lamely to be Cool Mr Science Geek, all I could think was “Well, if American science teachers are anything like this, I now completely understand the success of the Intelligent Design movement in US schools”. It is true that Colony Collapse Disorder is perplexing and unexplained, but SO WHAT? Lots of things are perplexing and unexplained. Shyamalan quite obviously wants us to think that in this case it means that science is, somehow, inadequate for the job of providing any interpretation of CCD, and that is w-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o… SPOOKY!!!. Spare me.

It’s a real shame, because the premise of the film – that plants might evolve to react to humans as a threat, and consequently take measures to eliminate them – is actually reasonably original, The Day of the Triffids notwithstanding. It even has some slight basis in the natural world. It’s the kind of thing that a writer with more skill might have made into a decent yarn.

Meanwhile, in the picture’s only truly unsettling sequence, across town a bunch of construction workers start throwing themselves off the top of a building. It appears that the city is suffering some kind of mysterious pandemic (which in the paranoid US lexicon automatically means ‘an attack by terrorists’). It’s about here that the film turns rapidly brainless. And never recovers. News reports inform us that some kind of airborne agent is causing people in the city area to kill themselves. Early warning signs of contamination are confused behaviour and incoherent speech. The teachers in Elliot’s school are told to send their kids home and lay low. Elliot and his teacher pal Julian (John Leguizamo) decide to grab their families and head out of town.

We are next introduced to Elliot’s wife Alma (Zooey Deschanel) who appears from the very start to have been affected by the terrorist mind chemical, but as it turns out, that’s just her acting style and/or the witless script. Elliot calls by to collect her and they head off by train with Julian and his daughter Jess (Ashlyn Sanchez) in tow.

The train gets stopped in Nowhereseville USA, and after what seems like an interminable series of explanatory scenes, Elliot & Co manage to hitch a lift with a goofy guy and his wife who are some sort of horticulturalists. Goofy Guy is the first to offer the idea that maybe the source of the mysterious toxin which is affecting the humans comes from trees. On the way to a place that the group has perceived as ‘safe’ (Wha? Did anyone else understand how these fruitcakes decided this?) they stop by Goofy Guy’s greenhouse where we discover that he has a penchant for hotdogs (what the crap was that about?) and that he talks to his plants (and plays music to them).

“They respond to human voices!” he exclaims, rolling his buggy eyes around, “It’s a scientific fact!” And suddenly I see what he’s getting at – by now it is plain that the performances from the plants in this film are considerably less wooden than those of the actors, and this could be readily explained if you care to speculate that maybe M. Night Shyamalan spent more time on the set talking to the trees than to the people. Seriously. The dialogue and the acting in this picture must conspire to be some of the worst to hit the screen since Robot Monster or Plan Nine From Outer Space. Let me give you an example:

Elliot (talking about Goofy Guy’s theory that the trees are responsible): Maybe that guy was right…
Alma: What do you mean?
Elliot: I don’t know.

That’s the only one I can remember verbatim, but there are dozens of these kinds of clunkers. Mark Wahlburg, who is usually quite capable of turning in a reasonable performance, seems to spend most of the picture barely keeping the effect of the mind-altering plant toxins at bay. He stumbles around the countryside (and the film in general), as the ad hoc ‘leader’ of his little group, like a clueless boy scout about to fail his orienteering badge. In one memorable and quite absurd sequence he shouts over and over “Give me a second! Just give me a second! Why don’t you give me a second to think?! Just give me a second!!!”

All of which takes up more than a few seconds of his thinking time, but gives the audience plenty of time to think that they should have gone next door to see Kung Fu Panda. What Marky Mark comes up with in his thinking time is the brilliant strategy that the group should try and outrun the wind. I’m not kidding. This guy teaches science.

I won’t bore you with a blow-by-blow of the rest of the story.‡ And it truly is boring. Just imagine a confused road movie with panicked groups of people driving around the bucolic Pennsylvania landscape stumbling alternately across corpses and unhinged-people-who-will-eventually-become-corpses. When one victim throws himself under an industrial lawn-mower I was right there with him.

It’s hard to believe that a film can be quite this awful. With the vacuous substitution of scene changes and spectacle (in the form of shock-tactic suicides) for plot, and mawkish sentimentality for emotion, the movie plays to the dimmest of the dim. It mixes up scientific fact and the truth about natural events with hokum and nonsense in a mad mélange of glib throwaway hippie philosophy and post Cold War paranoid hysteria. It’s like Walt Whitman rewrote The Day of the Triffids after watching What the Bleep Do We Know? On crack. And, inexcusably these days for a science fiction film, it perpetuates the idea that scientists are either mad or bumbling, and that science itself is clueless and ineffectual. Or evil. These things are bad enough, but unbelievably, it’s even worse than just that. At times during the film Shyamalan seems not to know whether he is making a sci-fi thriller or a comedy. A bizarre scene with Elliot talking to a house plant is played, confusingly, first for tension then for laughs. In the cinema where I saw The Happening, the audience was laughing at, not with. Portmanteaus of people committing suicide in bizarre ways (a guy offering his limbs to lions in the zoo; the man lying in front of the lawn mower) are so blackly humourous that it’s hard to believe Shyamalan was oblivious to the effect they might have on the audience. If he was aware of this, one is forced to ask the question: “Why? What the heck is he getting at?” Sequences which I presume are intended to be symbolic and ‘meaningful’ (the Exhibition home with its fake sushi plates and prop wine glasses; the solitary ‘Earth Mother’ in her isolated homestead; the lame horror feint involving a rope-swing on a creaky branch) are flat and stupid and go nowhere.††

And the obligatory Shyamalan ‘twist’ ending, so obvious and soporific that it would have been rejected from the lamest episode of The Twilight Zone, is made even worse by ringing loud with a cinematic “Tsk tsk tsk: you humans don’t know nuthin’!”

As I said at the outset, M.Night Shyamalan’s The Happening is a movie with learning disabilities; it is to the science fiction oeuvre what Basil Fawlty is to the hospitality industry: an uncoordinated, unlikeable, nonsensical caricature that is a peerless example of what not to do if you at all concerned about pleasing your customers.

Did I mention it was dumb?

Right.

___________________________________________________________________________

*”Good theory Timmy,” says Marky Mark, metaphorically tousling the kid’s hair, “But it doesn’t explain why it’s happening everywhere at once!” No it doesn’t. That’s because, in all likelihood, Colony Collapse Disorder had already spread widely before it was noticed. It’s distinctly probable that it’s happening ‘everywhere at once’ in the same way as, say, AIDS is happening everywhere at once if you examine it right now. It does not mean that it didn’t start somewhere. Read about CCD here and get some understanding of how science is actually approaching this problem. (One is forced to conjecture that for a person writing about a phenomenon of nature and science and offering it up dressed in the robes of plausibility, M. Night Shyamalan was actually not terribly concerned with those pesky things like facts…)

†The film is peppered with scenes of people committing suicide in graphic and novel ways. It is the filmic equivalent of someone poking you every time you’re just about to doze off to a nice comfy sleep.

‡And there are SO many risible scenes to choose from: such as when Elliot confronts the train guards about why they’ve stopped in some remote town:

††If you want to see a movie about what an inexplicable event like this would be really like if it happened, try Michael Haneke’s Wolfzeit (The Time of the Wolf). I guarantee you won’t leave that film laughing.

___________________________________________________________________________

In Comments on the previous post about Julian Doyles forthcoming ‘Chemical Wedding’, JR made a remark that reminded me of a film that I saw quite some years ago – a cinematic treasure that I feel is my duty to introduce to all my devoted Acowlytes. Running with the tagline A Corpse is Bait in the Trap of Terror!, Michael Findlay’s Shriek of the Mutilated (1974) is a work that makes Plan 9 From Outer Space (a film widely held to be ‘the worst of all time’) look like Citizen Kane. Sure, there are many, many bad films – miles of wasted celluloid that is boring and incompetent and just plain unwatchable – but films like ‘Shriek’ fall into a very special category: Cinema that is so bad that it is entertaining.

I first saw SOTM sometime in the mid ’80s on late night tv, after I’d come home (relatively) early from a dull party and warmed up the tube to see what was on. A scene of a man attacking a woman with a broken gin bottle flickers into view, lots of slashing, lots of very fake-looking blood. Ho-hum. The man makes his way to the bathroom and fills up the tub, inexplicably climbing in fully clothed. Hmmm… I stay my hand from the off switch… Meanwhile, we find that the woman, lying ripped and bloodied on the kitchen floor is not dead. Slowly, painfully, she grabs the cord of the toaster, pulling it from the bench above and with her last remaining strength pushes it with agonizing effort down the corridor and into the bathroom, where she lobs it into the bath thereby electrocuting the man to death.

Awwright!!! I’m hooked! This couple has a toaster on a fifty-foot extension cord! With shameless disregard for the laws of reality like that at the fore, the film was plainly a work of genius! I fired the VHS into record (because my sixth sense told me I was watching a very rare event that might never repeat itself), rustled myself up some toasted cheese sandwiches and sat down for the most entertaining late-night movie fare of my life.

JR’s comment prompted me to see what I could find out about SOTM after all these years, and to my immense excitement I uncovered a YouTube vid of a trailer for the film. And, unlike most trailers of the modern era, it actually does capture a fairly true representation of the film you’re going to see, without giving away the best bits! So, without further ado, let’s crank up the Wurlitzer and give you a little taste of the kind of cinematic genius that they just don’t know how to deliver anymore (by the way, this is one of the very few film trailers where you can play ‘Spot the Armadillo’ – watch carefully, it’s cunningly disguised…):

“Sometimes… it almost sounds like… something human…”

___________________________________________________________________________

*Just one of countless memorable quotes from the film.

___________________________________________________________________________

Calloo callay, oh frabjous day! Or perhaps ‘Callow callay’ might be a more appropriate salute in this particular case, for next week sees the release of Julian Doyle’s Chemical Wedding, a film starring the wonderful Simon Callow, that has some misguided university types using ‘the world’s biggest super-conductive (sic) computer’ to resurrect the spirit of the redoubtable (if arguably substantially unhinged) Aleister Crowley to possess the body of a classical history professor.

Of course it all goes horribly wrong (as things necessarily must if one attempts to strike up a rapport with the self-proclaimed greatest Satanist of our time) when the reborn Crowley embarks on an effort to call up the Power of the Abyss to unite the Biblical Beast of Revelations with the Whore of Babylon in the Ultimate Satanic Rite – The Chemical Wedding. A showdown between the forces of magic and technology, and other jolly antics, thence ensue.

Oh how I look forward to this film! No-one can do this kind of high camp techno-occultism with anywhere near as much panache as the British, and when the director is the guy who edited Brazil and the writer is the lead singer of Iron Maiden how can it possibly fail to be worth the price of the ticket?!

___________________________________________________________________________

Props to Sean for the heads-up!

…and RaJ – how can I possibly have failed to miss the Number of the Post? And I call myself a Reverend. I’m definitely losing my touch.

___________________________________________________________________________

I don’t intend to make a habit of doing movie reviews on The Cow, but every now and then a movie experience comes along that just begs for a good slapping down, and I really can’t resist stepping up for the job. Director Danny Boyle’s science fiction indulgence Sunshine presents such an opportunity.

Just in case you hadn’t guessed from the acerbic tone, I really disliked this film. What makes me even more disinclined to cut it any slack is all the hare-brained praise it has garnered from reviewers so far. ((Critics evidently notice that a film is science fiction and then set their their standards to ‘Ga-ga Level’ or something. I don’t know how else to explain the widespread nutty adulation of this turgid mess… )) It is simply baffling that it has rated 88% over at Rotten Tomatoes, a barometer of movie reviews that is generally reasonably reliable.

I was in fact predisposed to like Sunshine – I thought Boyle’s Trainspotting was great and his 28 Days Later pretty credible too – but this film commits pretty much every crime it can in the genre, and then some. Truly, I prefer B-Grade efforts like Rocketship X-M and Zombies of the Stratosphere to this pretentious nonsense.

Shall we begin? A warning – if you intend to see the film stop reading here. I’m going to give stuff away. Not, in my opinion, that it makes any difference anyway, since the one ‘surprise’ of the plot is so stupid and laughable that one of my companions with whom I saw the film punched me in the arm because I made such a snort of disbelief when it happened (thanks for the bruise Dr. T.).

The basic premise of the piece is that the Sun, for unspecified reasons, is dying, and Earth has dispatched a bunch of idiots astronauts to fix the problem by dropping some kind of bomb into it to ‘kick start’ its nuclear engine.

I won’t quibble about the daftness of the physics of doing something like this – I’m happy to file that under Willing Suspension of Disbelief. Much better science fiction has worked with much flimsier material. And anyway, that’s not the film’s biggest problem by a long shot.

As our story begins, we join the intrepid (and, surprise, incredibly young and attractive) crew of the spaceship with its gargantuan nuclear payload – the ‘Icarus 2’ (Icarus, geddit? Flew too close to the sun and got his feathers burned. Clever, huh?) – some years into their journey, on their final approach to the sun. This is probably a wise dramatic decision, because joining them any earlier would have made for even greater screen boredom.

Almost immediately I knew I was going to hate the film, when the second-in-command lets loose with a whole bunch of pseudo-scientific claptrap about communications with Earth involving ‘packet data’ and ‘high frequency signals’ and other dumb technical talk written by someone who doesn’t know a Higgs particle from a hippopotamus.

If I’d been at home instead of at the cinema, I’d be yelling at the TV “Why are you telling your crew of supposedly above-average intellects stuff they would have learned in Astronaut Kindergarten?” Oh, that’s right, he’s not telling them, he’s telling us, but it’s something that could have been said like this:

“Soon, we’ll pass the point where messages from Earth won’t reach us in time for us to reply before we reach the Sun.”

Which they’d also know, but at least it sounds like he’s just reminding them of something, rather than treating them like morons. Okay, which they are, but that’s something we’ll get to in a bit.

Anyway, within minutes of the opening titles, after some risible scenes where the crew psychologist attempts to burn out his retinas in search of religious epiphany (this guy is a psychologist? These guys are in trouble…), the Icarus 2 has intercepted a distress call from… Icarus 1! Yes, Icarus 2 is the second ((Interesting how they had the forethought to give Icarus 1 a number. Almost like they knew it was going to stuff up. I’m surprised that NASA doesn’t pre-emptively give all its space shuttles numbers like ‘Columbia 1’ and ‘Atlantis 1’ under the same logic. Script writers PAY ATTENTION: real science doesn’t do stupid things like this!)) attempt to drop a bomb into the sun! All contact with Icarus 1 had been lost some 7 years previously under mysterious circumstances, just before it was due to complete its mission (DING DING DING DING!! – that’s a warning bell for those asleep in the back row).

Prompted by the crew psychologist (I told you!) the members of the team convince themselves, for reasons that are dubious at best, that they should abandon their (presumably, but who knows?) carefully planned mission to save humankind (or ‘mankind’ as the film quite politically incorrectly gaffs) and instead make a detour to rendezvous with the mysterious Icarus 1.

Pretty much immediately, the loony decision to stray from the Plan to Save the Entire Human Race (I just want to make sure you understand where you’ll stand if a bunch of cowboys like these ever has this much responsibility) comes off the rails. The least attractive (and therefore the most unlikeable, expendable and likely-to-commit-suicide) member of the crew sets the Ship+MegaBomb on the wrong course due to an error in his calculations. Even though it’s not explicitly stated, you get the impression that he jotted these calculations on a napkin over breakfast. He certainly didn’t do them on the spaceship computer, because as soon as he plugs in the course and fires up the rockets, the computer recorrects for his blunder causing the ship to take catastrophic damage from the heat of the proximal nuclear furnace that is the Sun.

“I stuffed up!” He sobs. “Fuck fuck fuck. I stuffed up!”

Yep, you really did pal. That’ll teach you to completely ignore Astronaut Computer Programming 101 and scribble your orbital insertion figures on the blank corner of a Cornflakes packet. And then just hit the ‘Do It’ button without checking them with a single other person on the ship. Or the fancy-schmancy girly-voiced computer. ((I swear, my mind started wandering about now, and all I could think about was how much this babe and HAL had in common, and whether they could have had some kind of happy future together if they hadn’t been sent to opposite ends of the solar system.))

Well, from this point you kinda know that the whole car-full of clowns is on a one-way ticket to flambé. And we’re only a fifth of the way in.

About now, the film starts with the first of its many efforts to distract the audience from the failings of the script by using fancy editing techniques and whooshy sound effects.

This is a personal affront to me because inevitably this is the kind of thing that a surprisingly large number of people seem to think is clever. In fact, it is nothing more than a cheap cinematic smoke-and-mirrors distraction. I have no doubt that many cinema-goers will walk away from this film thinking the sound was great simply because they noticed it.

Let me be clear: if you noticed it, it was because the film was failing somewhere else. In a truly great film, you don’t notice the sound (or the scenery, or the photography or the lead actress’s breasts). You just give yourself up to the experience. (Well, yes, OK, maybe the breasts). ((Not in this film though – there are none. But trust me, it could really use some.))

Of course, the damage that is done to the spacecraft by Unappealing Guy’s hasty joyriding means that we are going to get treated to the obligatory EVA sequence. Yep, that’s right, the problem is something that can only be fixed by suiting up and and taking a spanner to. Thence begins a series of events that would make the Keystone Cops look like better choices for crewing this mission.

Synopsizing:

•Two of the crew go outside.
•One of the pilots rotates the ship to give them as much ‘shade’ as possible.
•The computer takes exception to this by snatching back the controls and rotating it back again, but not before…
•The communications towers on the ship are scorched off…
•Some magnified bright sunlight is reflected into the ship’s oxygen-creating ‘garden’ causing it to burst irretrievably into flames… ((If it was me designing a life-supporting Oxygen Garden for a spaceship, I think I might put in some kind of efficient fire-extinguishing system. Like, oh, being able to vent the ambient oxygen immediately into space in the event of a fire. But maybe I’m just overly safety-conscious…))
•Another of the crew decides the best way to put out the fire is to flood it with the remaining life-supporting oxygen… (Wha?)
•One more of the crew attempts to get into the resulting firestorm, dressed only in jeans and a t-shirt, to… well… who knows what she was thinking of doing.
•And the two suited crew have gone so far out on the ship’s hull that they can’t get back.

It is hard to know how these people could be more inept. I wouldn’t trust them to do my laundry, let alone get behind the wheel of a flying nuclear weapon. ((I can almost hear the conversation in the planning stages of the mission back at Houston – You mean we’re going to trust these twits to fly this thing? Don’t worry – the computer takes care of everything! They’ll be fine. As long as they stick to the plan, it’ll all be swell! But what if they override the computer? Are you crazy? Why the heck would they do that? They have enough trouble working out how to do their laundry.))

And they do all this in order to visit a probably derelict vehicle in order to possibly recover its maybe functional payload. Meanwhile, we can only suppose that the very chilly People of Earth are thanking their lucky stars that they chose good-looking astronauts rather than smart ones.

Writers: here’s where we remember that the genre Science Fiction has the word science in the name.

Well, I won’t rattle on in too much detail with the rest of the ludicrous story. From this point it all just becomes vacuous and laughable: the crew docks with the Icarus 1 (amazingly, they have a docking port that fits exactly with the older spacecraft, and surprisingly, given their incompetence so far, manage to perfectly execute this most difficult of space procedures on the first go); the derelict craft’s crew is dead, having immolated themselves for reasons unknown – their remains coat the entire spaceship’s interior (Psychologist: “Over 80% of all household dust is human skin…”). ((Oh heck. Let’s do some maths. Assuming these people are average weight, allow a healthy 80kg for each of the seven who went up in flames. That’s 560kg. A great deal of the human body is water, which of course will just vapourize, but for the sake of argument let’s be extremely generous and say half of it remains as solids in the form of dry powder: 280kg. A quick kitchen experiment shows me that about a hundred grams of flour will coat an area of a metre square to a depth of something less than a millimetre. So about 1kg then, for a depth of 1cm as shown in the movie (still with me?) 280kg would therefore cover about 280sq metres. My small inner-city terrace has, again being quite generous, about 300sq metres of wall space.The space-ship in the film is wa-a-a-a-y bigger than my house… Along with all my other very liberal allowances, this is, of course, also assuming that the entire available body mass of the dead astronauts was turned into airborne powder, which in the film is plainly not the case – most of the bodies are still intact in the room in which they torched themselves (presumably to allow the inevitable and yawn-inducing moment where someone nudges one of the corpses so it can collapse into a pile of crunchy dust…) And this film had a ‘scientific consultant’. I wonder how I can get a gig like that?))

But not all of them are dead – the craziest, ugliest and most dangerous one has survived; he destroys the airlocks between the two vehicles, killing another of the Icarus 2 crew in a botched variation of the famous ‘2001 Airlock Manoeuvre’ and then manages, inexplicably, to get on to the surviving ship. Where he (of course) sets about picking off the crew gruesomely because he is, well, you know, unhinged by Communion with the Great Sun God and The Contemplation of the Hopeless Infinity of Space. Or some other such goofy quasi-religious buffoonery that ineluctably sets in when bad writers address ideas of any real weight (think of the end of The Black Hole or Brainstorm or Sphere. You get the picture).

Technically, the film then degenerates into huge slabs of jittery, overexposed blurry sequences of Nutso Flesh-Challenged Guy stalking the few surviving crew as the spacecraft is sucked inexorably into the sun. There are, through the last fifteen minutes of the show, lots of flashy filmic hijinks which add up to a great deal of sound and fury and signify exactly nothing. Some of my friends have praised the film for its technical chops, but for me, in a film of this nature that’s like saying Paris Hilton knows how to put on clothes and make-up – it goes with the territory and does little to change the fact that there is only a vapid non-entity underneath.

After all this aimless commotion ((And trust me, if you think I’m being pedantic so far, I haven’t even begun to pick holes in the half-baked science of this effort… Consider the film’s ineffectual space-suits (the temperature in the shadow of the ship is sub sub zero, so the reflective and cumbersome suits are useless there, but they are also hopeless in the direct light of the sun… Wha? What use, exactly, do they have?); Or the fact that the transport-end of the spacecraft (the bit that’s not the payload) has, apparently, about four minutes to clear the scene when the nuclear kick-start of the Sun takes place. Four minutes! Considering that the bomb also appears to be the shield that prevents the main part of the ship from frying, it is just another measure of the dimwittednedness of the crew that they don’t realize that they are toast no matter what the outcome of the mission.)) I was bored and tired and well and truly rooting for the remaining crew of the Icarus to be quickly consumed in a Fiery Barbecue Spectacular. For their own sakes, as well as mine.

Why am I so harsh on this film? Because it is dumb. Dumb, dumb, dumb. Even worse, it treats the audience as dumb too. It is devoid of any original ideas, opting instead to use a lot of fancy technique to wallpaper over its substantial shortcomings. Like some kind of celluloid vampire staggering in the glare of its own topic, it sucks material from a host of better films that have gone before, and succeeds only in being a parody of each of them. There is a tilt at the eco-message of Trumbull’s unaffected and important Silent Running. There are echoes of human solitude, grief and madness so beautifully examined in each of the Tarkovsky and Soderbergh versions of Solaris. There is an attempt to recreate the claustrophobia and paranoia of Ridley Scott’s Alien. Worst of all Sunshine has the arrogance to quote heavily from Kubrik’s masterpiece of the science fiction genre 2001: A Space Odyssey. But it has not one gram of the intellectual weight it would need to even come close to carrying off any of its stolen ideas.

Danny Boyle’s Sunshine is seeking, by association with much more significant and powerful films, to hijack some gravity in an attempt to slingshot itself into a higher orbit. Instead it merely succeeds in plunging headlong and out of control into the heart of the sun.

Rating: 1 Fading Star out of 5 (and that only because I pity the obviously skilled production crew’s valiant efforts to try and save this wreck)

My one and only feature film appearance.

___________________________________________________________________________

I also wrote the music.

___________________________________________________________________________

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.

☆☆☆