when you fuck off overseas, all your friends want to catch up and say 'hai!'. really, i just want to go. it's you pack of miserable leeching cunts that i want to get away from
the last friend to see was butch. i had some hash brownies i sure as hell wasn't gonna eat so he came over to scoff the rest. scoff them he did. 20 minutes later he melted into the sofa. there was no moving him, but rather than spend my final night alone being a cockteasing prick to horny strangers on grindr i settled in and watched Hollow Man
"what?" muttered the stoned lump beside me, "oh... pffft!!" layer by layer the invisible man began to vanish on the operating table. it was never a highly praised film, but making Kevin Bacon disappear was something everyone could support wholeheartedly. "it wouldn't happen like that! if it is injected into him why would he disappear from the outside in?"
i drew a shallow breath. of course my friend was right. why would the largest organ that would have the least amount of blood flow vanish first? but i wanted to defend the trash film "it's more impressive from a visual effects point of view."
he grunted. unwilling to accept my reasoning. he had essentially turned into a belingerant
dakimakura rejecting his submissive cuddle purpose for barking insults at the screen.
this was worse than when i went to see Harry Potter with a South African. yeah, a white South African, shouting back at the screen. i should have taken my love pillow instead
then invisible man snuck into a make woman's apartment and raped her "throw paint on him! throw something on him!"
"what do you mean 'throw paint on him'? she's naked, she's alone and she's getting raped. she's fucking terrified! she has no idea there's an invisible man in the neighbourhood. she has no idea one even exists. so she's not going to start thinking rationally, 'oh i must splash a bit of paint on this fellow' she'll be too busy defending herself against the terror stabbing at her vagina!"
"okay. fair point."
eventually someone did throw paint/blood on the invisible man, but was this enough to satisfy? no
"why am i defending this? why do i need to? it's not Imelda bloody Staunton as Vera fucking Drake performing backyard abortions with a rusty teaspoon! this is mindless entertainment!"
don't waltz into my house, eat all my brownies, make yourself comfortable and then tear into one of my favourite directors, even one of his less impressive films like Hollow Man!
Vera Drake. does she get her tits out? no. she has a fucking cuppa tea
....and cries a lot
as a teen invisibility was at the top of my list for superpowers. not only could you sneak around noticed, fuck with people's minds, create mischief, steal stuff and follow hot dudes home and… well, not do much other than watch them naked, but as a rampant horny teen homo i was happy with whatever crumbs i could get
another favourite of mine, John Carpenter tried in the 90s, buy the only original thought added was cokehead Chevy Chase bemoaning: do you know how difficult it is to sleep with transparent eyelids?
so when Paul Verhoeven, responsible for some of my favourite films of my neverending adolescence (Robocop, Total Recall, Starship Troopers, Showgirls) expressed he was taking a darker turn on the H G Wells novel. i admit i had high hopes for the study of a man's descent into hell and abuse of power because of the empty hollow inside. unfortunately it digressed into a mediocre slasher that was disappointing.
i have known butch for 12 years now, and although i admire his love of independent cinema and gritty drama, going to to see a film together has been difficult. not that we haven't tried:
"do you want to see a movie tonight? it's a film set in communist romania in the final years of
Ceauşescu where two university students try to arrange an illegal abortion-"
"ugh... NO!!!"
"subtitles!?! NOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!"
we are great friends, but we don't agree on many things. i went through a heavy european cinema phase in my early teens when Krzysztof Kieslowski was the pin-up boy on every art-fag bedroom wall. fuck me i still own two copies of A Short Film About Love in fear that i may lend one out and it not be returned. still a favourite of mine despite it being neither 'short' or 'about love'
so it's not that i don't understand his taste in film, i just don't care anymore.
it's normal to not see eye to eye with your friends. these are the subjects that interest him. butch has admitted to living a rather mundane existence. although i disagree, he is one of the two people who inspired me to write this blog many years when he threatened to write his autobiography "Nuts I Have Known". on occasions he now sees his life as pointlessly shuffling papers for the government, studying too many hours and getting drunk one night a week to be able to afford his small inner-city apartment. he reminisces the debaucherous university years he had but has chosen to suffer for the moment to achieve the better life he wants in the future.
Butch is a Mike Leigh film. the gritty british plunge into realism no one really wants to make. he is an agonising character study in misery punctuated by rare moments of joy that hint at the lively character he once was and the audience prays he may become once again.
he is a Mike Leigh film. a depressing Ken Loach production. and i... i am a Paul Verhoeven film
i am the bigger budgeted, dumbed-down hollywood production under eurotrash direction. flashier. faster. an expensive large scale epic that never quite reaches the grand premise of the unique social critique material it is based on. bastardised. bombastic. and with more boobs. simultaneously misogynistic and insulting to men. a trash perversion that more often than not is a financial failure.
more sex, more death and more blood with less thought.
stupefying decisions of one dimensional characters that as a whole make no sense. i am the mind numbing escape from your pitifully boring existence that everyone wants to make but by the first hour will have you regretting spending your cash and your time. i will give you a few cheap laughs, but leave you feeling cheap and used. i will leave you feeling dumber than when you first walked in.
many will love it. many will appreciate the mindless entertainment, what it attempted to do. revered as a cult by some and others will just rewind it back to the scene with the boobs.
i did change Butch's mind once. i forced him to come see the epic disaster 2012. though it seemed only us and 2 other friends saw it for the subversive dark comedy that it was, pissed ourselves laughing alway through a full and mostly silent cinema. i thought we could relive the magic with HollowMan.
as the characters in the film were slashed and burned to only the chick from Adventures in Babysitting and the dude from The Goonies, things exploded and the credits rolled, butch ended the night with a surprise
"that was great. i thoroughly enjoyed that."
"you... what? really?"
"yeah. what time you fly tomorrow?"
"3pm."
"coffee tomorrow?"
"sure"
“If I die, pretend I said something deep and clever.”
Kevin Bacon, Hollow Man
