The Worst Movie of All Time
L takes no prisoners
Peter’s admirable list of anaesthetic films is frightening, truly scarey. To think that I have sat through all that rubbish. However, it lacks one thing – mention of the worst film of all time. That most tendentious, over-rated, over-blown, self-adoring snore-inducing piece of celluloid-poo of all time, starring the worst actor of all time. Yes, that’s it. Of course I mean LAWRENCE OF ARABIA. You know that scene in Donnie Darko in the cinema? You thought that Donnie, Gretchen and Frank were watching The Evil Dead with some distorted clock faces and stuff? Wrong. Obviously they are watching Lawrence of Arabia. Consider. One of them has…
Continue Reading →Avida Dollars
"I disanthropise chance." (photo by Roger Higgins) Dali (1904-1989)
Salvador, Feliz cumpleaños! (Born, 1904, 11 May) We had to write out the phrase Avida Dollars, to ensure that it was what we thought: the best anagram ever. Devised by Andre Breton for Salvador Dali, it nicely encapsulated the leftish surrealists’ resentment of Dali’s over-developed commercial sense, and most of all, his success. Since Hitler’s rise occurred about the same time, they tried to smear him as a fascist as well. As Clive James so justly wrote, Marxism will always be popular among artists without talent, since it allows them to blame society for the fact no one wants to hear what they have to…
Continue Reading →Anaesthesia
Image by Francis Dodd
TVC nominates the following pretentious and overblown Celluloid soporifics as the most narcoleptic films of all time: Absolutely Anything (2015) You’d have to go a long way to find a comedy without a single laugh but here we are! A Bridge Too Far (1977) The Arnhem campaign in Holland is re-staged as the 80 Years’ War. The ridiculous length serves to allow the countless star cameos, all of which add up to a big fat zero. Brooklyn (2015) Jesus, Mary and Joseph! What Eejit finagled this? Two hours of ennui, to be sure, to be sure!! Dances With Wolves (1990) Quick, Tom!! Shoot that…
Continue Reading →Don Quixote
"I shall be the more highly esteemed..." (poster by Georges Rochegrosse, 1910, for the opera by Massenet)
(Miguel De Cervantes) (1605 -15) The man of La Mancha is somewhat akin to Walter Mitty, braver and with dementia. A proud and hapless dreamer, he is perhaps rather the inverse of Mitty (a modest man who dreamed of himself as doing great feats) in doing silly things and imagining them as great. Not just silly, mind – proud and uncanny – some of his acts verge on the psychotic. Idealised as the first ‘modern’ novel, arguably post-modern, reading it today, you start to feel as mad as the faux knight after working through the artless courtly romances of his time. A minor noble…
Continue Reading →The Marriage of Figaro
(State Opera SA, 2008) Mozart takes an imperial opera buffa and outdoes Rossini, no mean feat. As directed by Neil Armfield, the sense of the composer’s wickedness is retained, with slight sets that actually add rather than detract. As the triumphant underlings, Figaro and Susanna, David Thelander and Teresa La Rocca make a lovely couple and were in fine form. Based on the subversive book by Beaumarchais, Mozart manages (apparently without effort) to give his frantic entrances and exits a hard edge. A great piece, worth seeing anytime – here done very well indeed.
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