My panto safe haven turned into a cinematic endurance test

By Derek Lord

Published:

ONE of the biggest problems I have with appearing in a pantomime is finding some way of passing the time between the matinee and the evening performance.

This is a period of just over two and a half hours. I’ve tried sitting in a pub nursing a glass of diet cola but there’s always someone who wants to force strong drink upon me and I would be terrified that my drink demons would persuade me that one wee dram couldn’t possibly do any harm and that I would find myself lurching on to the stage a few hours later, mumbling incoherently, before taking a flier into the front row of the stalls and ending my theatrical career once and for all.

Fortunately there is a multiscreen cinema just a few yards from the theatre that I am currently appearing in. This has provided a safe haven for me for the last few weeks, but it has also been responsible for exposing my sensibilities to some of the worst movies I have seen.

I was really looking forward to the remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still, the 1951 sci-fi classic starring Michael Rennie as an alien ambassador who comes to our planet to warn us of the dangers of nuclear war.

I reasoned that, with more than 50 years of improvements in special effects to play with, the remake would be even more stunning than the original. How wrong could I be? It wasn’t long before it dawned on me that the project had been hijacked by the global warming brigade.

Keanu Reeves doesn’t come to warn us of the perils of wiping ourselves out with thermo-nuclear weapons. Instead, he has come to Earth to make it safe for polar bears by wiping out the entire human population. Computer-generated special effects do not come cheap so it would appear that the producers must have approached some large corporations in search of financial backing.

The incidence of product placement is the most blatant in the history of cinema. Keanu Reeves arranges to meet his only fellow alien in a McDonald’s restaurant. They could have had their tete-a-tete in the nearest chop-suey joint, but then we wouldn’t have been treated to the sight of the McDonald’s logo filling the screen.

Similarly, when Reeves was making his escape with the pretty woman and the cute little African-American boy he did so in a particular brand of Japanese car. Once again the car firm’s logo filled the screen and, in case you had missed it, the name of the car was read out by a newsreader on the vehicle’s radio.

Later we saw logos for companies producing everything from watches to car radios dropped into the action sequences for no apparent reason.

Of course, this blatant use of product placement could soon be introduced to your favourite TV programmes. The Tories have promised to consider doing away with the current curbs on the practice if they get into power. So there would be no more Newton and Ridley beer in Coronation Street.

Instead real-life brewers would be throwing shedloads of money at the producers to incorporate their particular brand of ale in the scripts. And it won’t necessarily stop there. Jackie Bird, before she reads the news, could inform you that she picked up her frock at whatever chain store paid her the most money to wear it.

You think I’m kidding? When I was in Australia in the 1960s the presenter of the most popular TV show, one Graham Kennedy, used to go through every article of his clothing right down to his shoes and socks telling the viewers the brand of every item, where he had bought it and how much he had paid for it.

That brings me rather neatly back to my lousy movies topic. My senses are still reeling from having endured Nicole Kidman’s latest film Australia, the biggest and longest turkey to appear this or any other Christmas. Set in Australia’s Northern Territory it purports to expose the practice of separating mixed- race children from their Aboriginal mothers and educating them in church missions in preparation for a life of servitude.

Had the director Baz Luhrmann limited himself to this storyline he might have made a meaningful film. Instead he has produced a mish-mash of truly horrendous proportions. The opening sequence features a bar-room brawl in Darwin that makes John Wayne’s scrap in The Quiet Man look realistic as Hugh Jackman’s character makes comedic asides to the camera in between smashing his fist into the face of one of the villains. He finishes his adversary off by hitting him over the head with a suitcase containing Ms Kidman’s underwear.

Ah, you think to yourself, this is a comedy – not a very good comedy, but a comedy nonetheless. And then the little mixed-race boy’s mother drowns in a water tank, but since you have established that you are watching a funny film the tragic element of this fatality is lost on you.

Just when I thought that the film couldn’t get any worse Judy Garland popped up singing Somewhere Over the Rainbow. After more than 50 appearances in The Wizard of Never Woz at the Pavilion Theatre, Glasgow, that was the last thing I wanted to hear.

The writer was trying to draw some sort of parallel between Dorothy’s desire to get out of Oz and back to her aunt’s farm and the wee black boy’s wish to escape from the church mission and get back to Kidman’s cattle station. The little fella had melted Kidman’s character’s stony English heart and released her maternal instincts, just as Hugh Jackman had released her more carnal instincts by displaying his manly torso – all soap suds and rippling muscles – in a scene that will ensure that the friends of Dorothy will be buying DVDs of this tosh in their millions.

That may go some way towards recouping the millions of dollars that the Fox corporation invested in this cinematic abomination, but I’ll be more than surprised if they break even.