Month: July 2003

For a movie about a rock ‘n’ roll band, there’s not much rock ‘n’ roll in this self-consciously goofy flick, and its tricksy stylishness — from Alex Proyas (Dark City), a master of style over substance — is more of a distraction than a tonic for the feeling that we’ve seen all this before. The … more…

It makes a geek sorta wanna cry to see how Hollywood takes something as pure and lovely and necessary as developing repetitive stress injuries and/or losing sleep in order to kill cute cartoonish nasty alien Nazi undead Mongol Education Advisors and turns it into something so deadly dull that playing your little sister’s Barbie Goes Shopping! CD-ROM would be better at getting your adrenaline pumping.

You won’t hear this from anyone else, but here’s the secret of the subtly startling *Dirty Pretty Things*: It’s science fiction. Ten years ago it would have been obvious that the lawless world of the film was not our own — today, it’s so close to reality that it’d be easy to believe that calling it ‘fiction’ is a stretch, never mind ‘science fiction.’

It’s kinda like *Two Weddings, A Funeral, A Baby, and Some Hospital Visits* for Mandy Moore fans, only minus Rowan Atkinson (he was busy with *Johnny English*) and plus a lot of tedious adolescent angst. God, were we *all* this annoying in high school? No wonder we drove our parents crazy.

This was shoved under the front door of Flick Filosopher World Headquarters, the 4-page document encased in a manila envelope upon which the red stamped ‘Top Secret Eyes Only LXG’ had been crossed out in purple marker, and hand-printed neatly under it, in blue Flair pen, ‘birthday card for JB — please sign and return to FM ASAP’ had also been crossed out in the same purple marker, and under *that* in a hasty scrawl in what could have been the same hand as the blue Flair was written ‘The truth is in here. Spread the word. — FM.’ So I’m spreading the word, though I obviously cannot vouch for the authenticity of anything you’re about to read.

There was this great TV commercial for British Airways a few years back, in which a guy wakes up in the morning, and the bed is empty beside him, and the streets of London are empty, and offices and shops are deserted, and he runs around the abandoned city looking for someone, anyone, and finally he yells, ‘Where is everybody?!,’ his desperate voice echoing through the uninhabited streets. The idea was that hey, airfares are so cheap, *everyone* took off for somewhere else.