Blog O’ Leaps

GLADIATRESS (2004)

THE WEDDING CRASHERS (2005)

I haven’t done one of these for a while, so it’s time to play some catch-up netball here.

Gladiatress stars the main players from the UK TV sketch show, Smack the Pony, namely Doon McKichian and Sally Phillips from various Steve Coogan TV projects, and the other one, Fiona Allen.

It’s kind of a historical fantasy comedy, which can’t quite decide if it’s sending up British legends and history, or being a bit of an affectionate head-tousling parody of fantasy, or a character-based deal, and almost kind of wants to be a feel-good movie towards the end, but can’t be bothered quite committing to that right now. Anyway, the confusion is amiable enough, and it does manage to kind of hold a tune throughout – a lightly nonsensical turn of breezy-whistling comedy that makes you happy enough to meander wherever Gladiatress wants to go.

The main players are all in pretty funny roles and make the best of it, in fact everyone seems to be having a whale of a time, and of those kind of movies, it’s happily one that lets the audience in on the joke. It’s kind of minor league Monty Python and the Holy Grail/Jabberwocky although the odds are reasonably good they won’t turn this one into a crap musical in thirty years’ time.

It looks all right considering the budget presumably wasn’t overwhelmingly enormous, the script by Nick Whitby (not a Smack the Pony guy – he apparently wrote for the Sean Hughes vehicle Sean’s Show some time back) has enough general malarkey to get over, the director Brian Grant got good value from the sets and let the comedy do the talking, and the likeable performers put the material over about as well as it was going to go over.

Don’t have any earth-shattering expectations – I stumbled into the thing about 20 minutes in on cable, and had no idea what it was initially, had never heard of it, and thus had no expectations whatsoever, which is probably the ideal way to see it – and you ought to enjoy it just fine. While I have plenty of time for the performers in Drop the Dead Donkey…err, I mean, Smack the Pony – in particular Doon McKichian just has tons of talent, and Sally Phillips has a real knack for a certain kind of light comedy (she was just great in Boy Town, an unrewarding pursuit given that that was kind of one of those minor tragedies of an Australian comedy movie), and Fiona Allen, well she’s real good in this movie – I didn’t generally find it funny at all, which is a bit of a problem for a comedy series, I’ve always thought. Smiley and giggly and silly are all well and good, but laughs in a comedy show are always appreciated and most of us prefer some bread slid under our butter. Anyway, Gladiatress is funnier.

300 and Mirrormask are both derived from comic book sources, kind of. 300 is an adaptation of a finite story in comics form (yes, I’m the last holdout against the peculiar expression “graphic novel”) written and drawn by Frank Miller, with artwork augmented (basically coloured) by his long-time collaborator Lynn Varley.

Mirrormask is a collaboration by two talents who have previously worked together in comics on many occasions, Neil Gaiman (writer) and Dave McKean (artist). In this case, it’s an original conception not adapted from their comics work, with both devising the story, Gaiman writing the screenplay, and McKean taking a director/designer credit, with that particular poncy-sounding hyphenate thoroughly earned several times over in this particular case.

There have already been a couple of movie projects which successfully translated the feel of the comics medium to the big woofy screen without completely arse-bargling both mediums at once. The ones that come figure-skating immediately to mind are Sin City – another Miller comics adaptation – and the Shari Springer Berman/Robert Pulcini adaptation of Harvey Pekar’s American Splendor.

By contrast, in the case of Terry Zwigoff’s movie version of Daniel Clowes’ Ghost World, that felt more like a successful transposition from one medium to another, in that he (and Clowes, who wrote the script adaptation) made a movie out of a comic that was ready and waiting for movie adaptation. I thought it was a good movie made out of an absolutely amazing comic book. (Actually, in many ways his Robert Crumb documentary Crumb felt more like a comic book on screen than Ghost World did.)

It’s not that there’s inherently more merit in one approach than the other. It’s all a bit of a matter of horses for courses, and probably the fundamental thing in extracting a decent movie out of a comic book property is a respectful approach to decent source material.

Sin City was brilliant at being a comic book on screen, but was a slimy piece of over-produced thin air, because the content pretty much broke down to sadism, internal body parts being externalised and a somewhat brain-challenged version of deviant sexuality. To me, it was a video game. If it hadn’t had Mickey Rourke’s performance, heroic as it was under 180 pounds of plaster and clag, it wouldn’t have had anything at all.

Ghost World and American Splendor both covered the gap of rendering what echoed through your head when reading the comics into viable three-dimensional movie form, as much as that task could reasonably be done. One went more “literally comics”, and the other had an element of that, but went more “movie naturalistic”. Both were valid approaches.

In the case of 300, I haven’t read the comics version, which probably holds for a lot of its audience. I was an avid Miller fan in my comics buying days, but I kind of went off him big-time many years ago, when all he seemed to be doing was the same sado-maso tension-release story mechanism over and over again, with a drift towards the extreme right wing, and I figured if the guy wants to have an elongated tug, the least I can do is give him his privacy.

I may have cut out too early, or at least for too long, because the movie 300 returns to one of the key themes that made Miller such an interesting (and in his time, along with Alan Moore, revolutionary) revisionist story-teller in superhero comics. Once again he’s concerning himself with the psychology and mind-set that makes a hero a hero, and the societal circumstances that not only make this valid, but absolutely, from Miller’s point of view, essential.

It’s an interesting idea, made gripping in this case, by the use of its historical/legendary storyline – the resistance of a tiny Spartan force to the conquering might of Xerxes’ over-powering Persian forces on behalf of all Greek civilisation.

The explanations of Spartan society are painless entertainment and make the points they need to. The guy playing the lead role of King Leonidas, Gerard Butler, is perfect once you get the hang of his peek-a-boo Scottish accent, which isn’t so much inappropriate in context as it is difficult to understand here and there unless you’ve done your doctorate research in post-Premier League soccer match interview accents.

Unusually, for this kind of action movie, and for most megaplex type movies for that matter, there’s a decent, strong, and under the circumstances, well-rounded female role in there, as Leonidas’s Queen, in which the special role of the Queen in supplying/maintaining values in the community is explored to some degree. Lena Headey probably gives it more than was on the scripted page, but that’s a credit to both her and the movie.

The one casting drawback is the guy playing the “God-King” Xerxes, Rodrigo Santoro, who, as shot and costumed, looks like a complete giant, but, unfortunately also a completely gay hairdresser stereotype giant. It’s not a movie-breaker, but it is something of a distraction, and for some reason I kept thinking of that bit from Marty Feldman’s Last Remake of Beau Geste when the French Foreign Legion guys are marching and singing a song about how they’re going to “Kill all the women/And rape all the men”.

They fairly obviously use someone else’s voice for this character, which may have been for the best, and anyway the synching is perfect, although the punishing amount of sound-processing they use on it sounds strangely reminiscent of an early 70s Pink Floyd or Yes album after a while.

The one other guy I had a little problem with was Australian David Wenham in the kind of narrator/storyteller/Greek chorus role. His pinched-mouth, adenoid-heavy, road-company Shakespeare ac-TOR delivery is pretty annoying early on, and it’s not impossible to find yourself wishing that someone had given him a clip over the ear and told him not to do the stupid cartoon super-villain voice. I guess I got used to him by the end.

Anyway, it’s a gripping story well-told, with a point of view, and if that point’s not too revolutionary, it is thoroughly developed. The battle scenes are everything they’re meant to be, and it’s hard not to get hooked.

Some will be put off by the heavily computer-generated look of the movie, but I wasn’t one of them. In this case (as opposed to the first Spider-Man movie for example) it’s quite deliberate, and Zack Snyder (director/co-adapter) nicely straddles the line between making a comic book into a movie, and adapting movies to a comic book source.

Mirrormask is an amazing transposition of Dave McKean’s hugely varied comics artwork approach into a viable look for a movie. McKean uses the expression ‘collage’ for his art style (in the extras on the DVD) and that probably undersells it. His comics art is an integration of a pen-and-ink style not a million miles away from Ronald Searle/Gerald Scarfe/Ralph Steadman, plus that hyper-realism vinyl paint style from (I’m guessing here – no art major me) the 50s and 60s, with heavily modelled airbrush work and more than a touch of the Gilliam cut-and-pastes thrown in.

He’s proven, against the odds for such a ‘busy’ style, that it’s effective in comics as a storytelling approach, and the look of this movie proves it all over again. Other than getting this style to work in the movies at all, the other surprise is how elegant it looks for the most part, and how smoothly it integrates with the live-action elements, namely the actors. Considering, again according to McKean in the DVD extras, they did it the “short-cut” way, on a budget, you won’t want for a penny of that budget visually, and it’s an amazing looking movie.

However some of you folks out there are sticklers for content with your candy-store visuals, otherwise I guess we’d all bend over and take Sin City as one of the greatest movies of all time. And this is where the minor problems lie.

Neil Gaiman’s script goes the usual way for him. It’s a reflection of childhood, a certain nostalgia for British fringe entertainment history (in this case the crap touring circus), with elements based in classical myth, and fantasy in general. In general it’s a blending of realistic elements – heavy on the psychology of young human development – with elements of the fantastic, with the apparent aim being to draw the humanistic underpinnings from the mythological story structures. In a way he’s a deconstructionist like Miller, only not as heckfired-up FIERCE about it, and in another way, he’s obsessed with following the train tracks out to the borders where fantasy and reality collide, like Terry Gilliam, but probably not as obsessive as Terry Gilliam. (Who is?)

Maybe what we needed here was something a little more fierce/obsessive and a little less well-mannered. It’s a nice little story about a young female circus performer, Helena, in a tattered little English circus run by her dad and mum, who is starting to feel those adolescent itches of rebellion.

(This is a Gaiman idea of a cack, no doubt – she wants to run away from the circus and join normality. Most of the time when he’s trying for thigh-slappers, it comes out a little moist, tiny, apologetic-English, and try-hard goofy. It’s one of the little voids in the movie that stops it having the classic-kids-movie-for-adults resonances that it so obviously seems to want to.)

Anyhoo, she has some big scene with her Mum, Mum all of a sudden gets tremendously old movie swoony-ill, and the stress of it all causes Helena to fall down into this bizarre fantasy dream world, by hitting her head, or fainting or whichever cockamamie movie device they usually use in these situations.

Helena is also, in one of the more memorably inelegant devices to introduce a director’s pet material, a habitual cartoonist of fantastic worlds, whose art happens to look amazingly like Dave McKean’s. It turns out the fantasy world she falls into is the one she’s drawn herself, and you can pretty much watch the psychology chips fall where they may from there.

Come to drink about it, this idea of a young girl’s fantasy world being a distorted reflection of people and events from her ‘real world’ experiences, and the business about a traumatic event triggering her departure to Fantasy Land, sounds awfully familiar. Hey yeah, it’s The Wizard of Oz!! Age the girl a little to where she’s starting to think about boys/cigarettes/how parents suck, dude, and chuck in a Quality Street assortment of extra decorations from classic old-school fairy-tales like Snow White and Cinderella, and that’s about the whole enchilada right there.

Not a problem telling new stories with old elements – that’s movies, and fiction, and comics and pretty much any way creative people choose to tell stories or convey make-believe emotions, pretty much – but this feels all a little too jury-rigged. If only it strayed off its own beaten path a little more. If only its guts just didn’t feel too determinedly one-dimensional for such a wild-LOOKING movie. If it only had a brain, the heart, the noive.

Well that’s a little harsh, but if this isn’t a tricked-up Wizard of Oz without feeling half as satisfying an experience, then paint me green and call me Margaret Hamilton.

Performances vary. Helena has both the irritatingly baseless adolescent pout-dom and the still child-like sense of wonder and delight down pat in the main role. Gina McKee should have got three sets of points in the salary negotiations for registering tremendously in three different roles, as the mother, and in fantasy-world, both the good and evil queens. However other performances are split on party lines. Rob Brydon is irritatingly weak and gormlessly genial as the circus dad, and yet a pleasing light-comedy presence as the Prime Minister in fantasy-world. Jason Barry is just the kind of diversion the movie needs more of as Helena’s blustering inept off-sider Valentine on the kooks’n’kastles side of things, and a complete wet-end as the real-life boyfriend.

Mirrormask raises its own audience expectation level with the amazing things it does right, and then clangs straight into the pole-vault bar on most attempts, because it just can’t quite get the lift it needs in the writing department.

However. There are still a lot of little pleasures in the latter area, and you’ve never seen a movie like it on the visual side. If the whole fantasy thing doesn’t remove all appetite, give Mirrormask a ride. Compared to that over-inflated piece of dirtbag, exploitative, cynical centaur-poop, Pan’s Labyrinth, this one has all the visual hocus-pocus of that, plus more, and has a lot more loaded into the content compartment. (Not to mention the enjoyment enclosure.)

I’ve got to add something about the seamless, imaginative and super-effective quality of the effects animation and puppetry. The Jim Henson Workshop really deserve (and got) co-credit as creators of this movie along with McKean and Gaiman. The Thunderbirds, it ain’t. And McKean designed these characters too. What a mind the guy’s got. If he ever gets blotto, it must be like all the crazier parts of The Book of Revelations crammed into a blender with scenes from Guns’n’Roses backstage circa 1987 in there.

Which brings us in no way but process of elimination to Wedding Crashers, in its own way the most bizarre fantasy movie of the bunch.

OK, so there’s these two yuppie slime-bags we’re apparently somehow meant to confuse with having endearing qualities but I didn’t get a copy of the code-book, played by Vince Vaughn and Owen “The Saints” Wilson.

Every weekend, they pretend to be guests at strangers’ weddings because the food’s free and it’s a great place to pick up chicks. No, really, this is the movie.

Eventually after thus winning their way into our hearts with their mystifying alternative to comic acumen, they go to this big-time wedding involving a Kennedys-like moneyed North-Eastern US family, with a politician-patriarch (played by Christopher Walken who apparently loves slumming in crap like this and The Rock’s movie Welcome to the Jungle/The Rundown, because he can have a ball doing Christopher Walken gimmicks and stealing the picture undisturbed.)

So it turns out that Wilson falls for one Walken-daughter for real this time, and Vaughn unfortunately picks a bunny-boiler in another Walken-daughter, and can’t get away.

That’s pretty much all you need to know, and roughly the whole picture, give or take some argy-bargy setting up some privileged rich bad guys (the Slobs vs the Snobs routine – remember all the way back to Animal House and Caddyshack? – only Vaughn and Wilson’s characters are slimy yuppies, so the dynamic doesn’t play here), and doing that whole feelgood comedy rodeo of getting our nominal hee-roes busted down to hell and back so that things can seem all the brighter when they win out in the end, yay team.

But I’ll be brocaded with a blowtorch if I can see where they put the comedy in this movie. Was it meant to be something in the slickster ad exec-style Vaughn/Wilson blither-banter at the start? Maybe if you were a college business major who works on Wall Street alongside all his college business major buddies, this stuff would be a real panic. It conveys jack-diddley-shit to me.

The wedding crasher part of proceedings just seems plain mean-spirited. There was a reason that Stifler was a valuable side-character in American Pie, but they didn’t make him the focal point. That would have been a different movie. That would have been Bachelor Party. That’s not a compliment.

I can see where people could find Vaughn’s line of relaxed confident bullshit funny, in a kind of Ray Romano but less de-ballsed kind of way. But I have to say I’m kind of guessing. Geez, he’s no Chevy Chase at that kind of thing. I mostly found him considerably less irritating than the other guy.

Wilson, I couldn’t even take a guess at. What is it, the lip-gloss, the pouting, the suits, the hair, the nose? There’s not one thing this guy did in the entire movie that struck a telling note for me on the glockenspiel of comedy, possibly excepting the nose. Maybe he’s the straightest straight man in comedy history. Next to this guy, Bud Abbott was an utter super-tanker of hilarity.

Credit has to be given to Isla Fisher as the crazy Walken-daughter who shows some real comic gusto and natural ability working against the grain of a thuddingly familiar caricature role and a deeply unhelpful scenario. Also Will Ferrell, as usual guesting in a nutbar role in someone else’s movie is much funnier than he normally is in his own marshmallow-core feelgood pictures, although given how horrible and pathetic his character is in context, he’s working miracles drawing petrol from fumes.

It’s probably most efficient running the ropes of its conventional feelgood story. Only you don’t want a comedy movie to be competent on a storytelling level, you want it to be funny.

Watching this and knowing that it was a pretty popular movie tells me one of three things –:

(A) People now have such incredibly low expectations of comedy movies that a cheese-wheel like this can pass muster on a sheer desperation level;

(B) People are now so horrible and devoid of values that this actually is comedy now

(C) They’ve started making comedy movies for people with no sense of humour, just like they did with sitcoms on TV a few years back.

The fact that this movie was in any way successful is the first thing in recorded entertainment history that’s made me think that American Pie Presents Band Camp could possibly be, in any way, slightly under-rated. Bear in mind that was the one they built around Stifler’s brother.

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All movies rated on the industry-defining Margaret Pomerantz Heads on a Hubcap scale:

WEDDING CRASHERS – 2.5 out of 11 MPHOAH
(That’s one for Walken, one for Fisher, and ½ for Ferrell, because he’s not in the picture as much. Purely as a movie it’s probably worth about one and a half.)
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(Howdy folks. I feel a word or two of introduction is necessary for this rant. This one’s been brewing for some time, and unlike the flasher recently convicted in a German court, I won’t say I didn’t have plenty of qualms about waving it about. I think I make it obvious amidst the typescript bonanza below, but I’m not remotely interested in endorsing or encouraging the practice of smoking. It’s not quite late-breaking news that smoking is hazardous to the health. However I thought there was a principle involved in this issue that was more important than toeing the general publicly acceptable line on that subject, so I finally went ahead and wrote the darn thing. Intrusive government and unnecessary interference/legislation is hazardous to the health of the community. They’re probably not going to put that line on a pack of anything though.)

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THAT SHINING CANCER TUBE OF FREEDOM

Or

ONE STEP CLOSER TO MANDATORY UNDERPANT-COLOUR LEGISLATION

Or

DON’T SMOKE ‘EM IF YOU GOT ‘EM

I sat down at an alleged food court the other day to eat some crap Chinese food. This food court has all the charm and amenity of the changing rooms at my local pool where we grew up, which in turn had a lot in common with the old concrete cages they used to keep the animals in at the Melbourne Zoo, only with more piss on the floor. Actually the food court has almost exactly the same atmosphere of sheer joy as the rendezvous point where office workers get together after a fire drill, not that this is entirely germane to the issue.

I sat where there was a magazine already there, since I’d omitted to bring any reading matter, and I’m one of those people who could read during the business end of a major earthquake, or Jesus’ third coming. The article on the front page was about the “fitness boom”, which was ironic since when I picked the magazine up an unending cascade of pastry crumbs shot out of the thing all over the table, like someone had peeled a sausage roll, eaten the central contents, and then shredded the rest and collected it all in the mag as a booby-trap for the next reader. Well, it pays to have a hobby, I guess.

The designated gushing air-head keep-fit babbler on the front page naturally was rattling on about how everybody is really into gyms these days, and in a stunning revelation added that hers is particularly popular. Then, in what seemed like a slightly lateral departure, Ditzy McQuads added that hardly anyone goes to pubs anymore.

Yep, this would be why the nation is currently fighting a crisis of a vastly overly toned populace, not to mention all those major breweries teetering on the edge of insolvency.

But unlike anything else the person concerned said in the article or will likely say in her wholegrain life, this comment resonated with me strangely.

Let’s just say for one wild minute that she’s right. Let’s say that the fit, responsible, sober-sides, box-headed folk are all now safely locked away down at the gym, or doing 6am cod-military “boot camps” in lieu of pleasure, or whatever it is they’re up to, and they’re safely out of the pubs, thank all the gods that are holy. So, all that’s left as the regular pub population now, according to this theory, is the absolute dregs of the manufacturer-to-retailer-to-consumer chain of the silly soup industry.

Well, if that’s the case, and I’m one of the latter, I want smokes back in the pubs where they belong. Yes, I’m finally going to be the one to say it. Much like many of the more-cherished initiatives of the Australian Football League commission, banning cigarette smoking from the interior of licensed premises was a stupid and unnecessary idea to start with, made only the more irritating in the thug-like execution.

The stated premise behind the frankly crackpot idea was that there were all these pink-lunged apple-cheeked people out there who really wanted to spend aeons of quality time down at their local hostelry, but were cruelly flummoxed due to those hateful clods who insisted on pouring out clouds of smoke like an industrial development.

So they went right ahead, stomped on the testicles of tradition, booted one tiny remaining simple pleasure in life for a field-goal, and banned smoking in pubs. The expected influx of the right-thinking neat-casual dress four-square citizens? Well that never happened, of course. What did happen was that many of the traditional local pumping stations, which didn’t have the benefit of being in locations where young idiots flock to get sillier on two shandies, took a major broadie in the till region, since their mainstay business was predicated on old soaks who smoked like a bushfire, and a lot of them figured that if they couldn’t smoke in a pub, then until a subsequent government completely loses their tiny mind and bans this too, that they might as well smoke at home, where the beer is cheaper as well.

Not that even some of the pubs in the more young rock-ape-friendly areas haven’t taken hits as well, particularly if they didn’t have provision for a vaguely non death-camp flavoured outdoor smoking arrangement. But the first time I walked into one of my regular haunts after the ban was imposed – and this is a joint which used to do a nice weekday afternoon business on a consistent basis – I was greeted by a vague and disconcerting aroma of lemon-flavoured disinfectant, one staff member, and a massed gathering of paying customers totalling precisely zero.

Admittedly things have stabilised somewhat since then. A little at least. I doubt that a bunch of suburban licensees are going to call a meeting to plan where they do their synchronised cartwheeling for joy over the whole business. But people still need to drink for whatever reason they do, and they still like to go out and do it, and many of them by necessity are learning the joys of drinkus-sessionus-interruptus where you’re having a couple, feeling cozy, enjoying the conversation and/or perving and/or staring moodily into the half-distance, and then you remember you want a smoke and grudgingly go outside for it, weather and facilities permitting. Like a whole bunch of other things that are relentlessly dismantled and disimproved by authorities for no real reason, this is something that people, and Australian people in particular, just get used to.

And they shouldn’t, and they shouldn’t have had to, let’s be honest. The whole premise of family groups and solid citizens and the we’re-ok-with-Jesus gym-goer sect all pummelling into the pubs as soon as the demon tobacco was excommunicated was a tremendous load of camel cakes to begin with.

These people never went into pubs in the first place. They were never going to go into pubs, smoke-free, clinically germ-free, or even alcohol-free, in the second place. If there was a nuclear strike and the only radiation-free sites left in Australia were pubs, these people wouldn’t go into pubs then either. They’d be down at the gym, making sure that if they were going to have three arms and two heads, that all of them were properly toned. And listening to girly dance music at annoying volume while they quietly mutated.

The government and the anti-cancer lobbying loons – and I’m sorry but general good cause and intentions aside, they’re demonstrably becoming bigger nutbars all the time and wouldn’t know a civil liberty if it galloped up to them, stood up on its hind legs, put its paws on their shoulders, said “I’m a civil liberty” and then bit them on the funnel – made a big deal out of all this polling they’d supposedly done to justify the lame-brained exercise.

The only problem was, by any logical analysis known to scientific methodology, the dingbats polled the wrong people.

Someone who goes in a pub once a year on temporary compassionate leave from his or her family with their mates and feels all strangely elated and outlaw-like because they’ve played a game of pool, had three beers, and giggled at their mates’ crass observations about the barmaid’s kazonga region – who gives a flaccid Fig Newton about what they think about anything to do with pubs? No change in the status quo will make these people abandon their fly-screen fixing/kids’ netball team chauffeuring/”I’m a big footy fan who sees my team play twice a year as long as it’s undercover at the Docklands” lifestyle and flock into pubs one iota more often than they already were. Not that they should, but why ask them anything about pubs?

If you don’t go into them, you shouldn’t have been asked in the first place, is the obvious conclusion. Do you think car manufacturers waste marketing survey forms on people that don’t drive? If you were setting up a brothel business in Europe, how much of your research resources would you allocate to Vatican City?

The reality as everyone knows, whether or not they choose to admit it, is that the people who regularly frequent licensed premises, and those venues in general, are not a reflection of the predilections of society as a whole. To put it in much plainer words, the people who regularly went to pubs prior to that famous science-fiction movie “The Day We All Went Nuts And Banned Smoking in Pubs”, either smoked in percentages far higher than those of the general community, or were non-smokers who didn’t let it worry them.

Just as nothing has changed in the bizarreness of the chopped liver logic used to justify the ban, nothing has changed with this either, except that now the majority of the pub-going community gets to smoke “roof-free” thanks to people who don’t go to pubs, have no intention of altering this plan, and wouldn’t care if all pubs were magically transformed overnight into lighting supply stores.

It was all a dog-in-the-manger crock, robbing your average Joe/Chad/Kirstie of a small pleasure they needed/wanted/revelled in in a quiet way, for the “advantage” of a “majority” that were never there to be offended by it in the first place. It was all, as Dame Edna Everage once remarked of the naked human form, “Unnecessary, dear.”

And while I’m doing my best Al Gore, with all the jowls but rather less of the suits, here’s another inconvenient truth that no-one ever says, even though those on both sides of the Great Dividing Range will recognise it as fact on a gut-level the minute I say it, no matter whether they would ever own up to it.

The objections people had to smoking in licensed venues weren’t REALLY mostly about health, they were about aesthetics. Hortense or Horatio, or Troy Cheese MP for that matter, go into a pub for one of their three teeth-gritted visits a year to see a band, or because a friend is having a function they couldn’t get out of, and their hair smells afterwards and their clothes reek. Well, Big Woop. As our Japanese businessmen friends no doubt sing at Karaoke haunts on a nightly basis worldwide, “Cry me a liver”. You should go to the Royal Show and get a snooter-full of what THAT smells like. Maybe they should ban animal poop on farms too. On that level I have not the slightest skerrick of an iota of a sliver of sympathy. You go into someone else’s church, you don’t complain about the quality of the incense.

(I should point out that I’m saying this as a person who for the first eight years of his pub-going life – and the occasional extended attempting-to-quit period since – was a complete non-smoker, and never cared, noticed, or gave a head-high full toss about whether other people were smoking or not. And I grew up with a smoker in the house. And I carry an inhaler for occasional asthma. You never heard Whine One out of me, unless you count wheezing. It went with the territory. And what I should be saying is, it goes with the territory.)

People will say that’s a crock, and it’s a health issue. And it IS a health issue to an extent. So just to make this all neatly folded, counter-signed and official, here’s the extent to which it’s a health issue, and beyond this it isn’t and it’s just cry-babies who have no real interest in the subject complaining loudly about nothing in particular, except their handbag smelled smoky when they opened it the next morning, or something.

For people who are non-smokers who work in licensed premises, it’s potentially a valid health issue. Mind you, nobody ever said that every single person was suited or able to work in every single occupation. If you can’t ride a motor-bike, and you want to participate in the MotoGP, they’re probably not going to change the rules to ban motor-cycles from the event to suit you. If you’re scared of heights, they’re not going to ban the construction of tall buildings so you can live out your dream of working on (very low) scaffolding. Some will say this is an absurdity and not the same logic as the pub smoking issue. I say it’s pretty much identical, logically. If you have health concerns about working in a smoky environment, and the industry concerned is based in, and prospers on, smoky environments, that’s probably not the industry for you, at the end of the day. (There’s another answer to this – and a mind-snappingly obvious one to everyone but the State Government that charged headlong down the wrong path and took a header into an abandoned quarry – but I’ll get to that in a minute.)

Here’s another valid extent to which pub smoking is a health issue. Smoking isn’t good for you. It’s actually really bad for your health, and it reduces fitness, and it affects the circulation and can give you cancer, and according to the typically Marquis De Sade-flavoured images on the cigarette packs these days, it can wind up with you having bits of metal paper-clips holding your eye wide open, although to what exact purpose, I’d have to defer to the medical experts in the paper-clip field.

None of this is exactly “Hold the front page, Irving!” stuff, but it’s all true, although I’m really just going along on the whole eyeball-paper-clipping business. But I’ll go even further, just in case there’s anyone out there who is a big enough soft-top to be influenced by some strange nurk raving on on the worldwide electromophonic inter-nurk about this subject. If you don’t smoke, don’t take it up. It’s incredibly addictive, it’s a slow poison, and one way or your mother, it’s got a decent-to-better chance of making you sick in some way. At a bare minimum, which is statistically unlikely to stay a bare minimum, you will feel lousy a lot of the time if you smoke. You can probably also find some better way to throw away your money, since this particular miserable habit has got plenty expensive over the years, although that’s not exactly a health issue unless you’re a fanatical household budgeter and also have what the American people would call “stress issues”.

However, it’s legal. And prohibition, as has been proven worldwide with just about every controversial substance/drug in just about every context to the satisfaction of every person with half an active braincell excluding actual governments and health lobbyists, doesn’t work. Never has, never will.

That it’s a legally available product carries an implicit right for informed adults to use it. There are limitations on such use for certain products, relating to context and concerns for others’ safety etc – whether it’s poisonous chemicals, alcohol, or whatever – but in the case of smoking in pubs the authorities concerned did not successfully make the case for extending those limitations. They just had a crackpot idea, ran with it and rammed it through.

Essentially, boiled right down to nuts-level, they played a joker, and the joker was “passive smoking”. Could passive smoking be dangerous to non-smokers in a confined space over time when experienced on a consistent basis? Well, it’s not really “could” – according to frequently cited research by people who know something about human health as opposed to me, it IS dangerous. I’m not exactly the tobacco industry – why shouldn’t I admit it? That’s another valid health consideration right there.

However. They also banned smoking in outdoor stadiums during sporting events. Was that the same, or a significant passive smoking risk? People drive and walk through, and work IN, peak hour traffic on a daily basis. I’m having a real struggle to believe that someone breathing in the occasional waft of a Stuyvo watching the football once in a blue AFL season was at anything like the risk of the average commuter/city worker on this score. Also the result was that they concentrated smokers outside into restricted foot traffic areas, where the passive smoke clouds resemble military camouflage and smokers and non-smokers alike got to reap the benefits of the brain-wave.

Of course that’s not the same situation as a pub, but it illustrates that sometimes these make-em-up-as-you-go-along laws are not brought in on a scientific or rational basis, they’re blithered into with very little forethought or logic, on the basis of current political-correct-think and, as I said before, aesthetics.

Specifically, in the case of the passive smoking issue regarding licensed venues, I refer back to what I said previously about employees who don’t want to work in a smoking environment. Their concerns for their health are doubtless valid. The only problem is, they’ve showed up in the wrong place. You don’t want to work in a smoky pub, and pubs are smoky because the majority of the people who consistently use them as venues of relaxation and entertainment either smoke or don’t care, then don’t work in a smoky pub. Just don’t expect an entire industry to change to suit you. It’s not like there aren’t other employment avenues open in hospitality. Or you could go into the rag trade like your mother always wanted.

Sounds harsh, but as I said before, every job has its funny little quirks. If you work in the frontlines of the building industry, there’s probably going to be an amount of dust and dirt and sweat and bollocking hard work to deal with. They’re not going to change any of that to suit you either.

Similarly, if you have fears about passive smoke and you’re looking for a night out, the option was always open to you to avoid smoky pubs. If you turn up at one, you’ve turned up to the wrong place. We’ve never had so many entertainment options right here in Poo-Town, Australia City. The obvious solution was to GO CHOOSE ONE OF THE OTHER ONES, fathead, and leave us confirmed smokin’ drinkers to our own crapulence.

And what really jams up the craw right back to the freeway entrance is that sensible, workable, non-blitzkrieg-like alternatives to an outright ban were available and would have satisfied the requirements of even the two groups I’ve just been tapdancing on the necks of. (And let me hasten to add, I’m much more sympathetic to the workers than I am to anti-smoking patrons, for all the obvious reasons, even though I think both were in the wrong on this matter.)

If the Government and the more fanatical among the frantically stethoscope-waving lobbyists had had a five-minute think and a bit of a scratch before they stampeded into a total ban as their idea of a fair and even-handed solution, they would have realised that both justice and cake could have been served and eaten too.

One alternative, which was already nominally in place, although not universal, was to insist on completely separated smoking and non-smoking rooms within licensed venues. With a bit of creative thinking and some warp-factor 73 air-conditioning, this possibly could have worked ok.

But there’s a more comprehensive and workable solution that wasn’t even trialled. Venues could have been either smoking or non-smoking but not both, and be required to clearly advise which they were, including, of course, signage outside the venue.

Then all these mythical non-smoking keen pub-goers would have had venues to go to, the employees would have had smoke-free pubs to work in, and those who chose to ignore the health-risks and pursue their choice of entertainment-lifestyle at their own risk would have been free to do so.

Even better, market forces would have ultimately decided the correct proportion of non-smoking to smoking pubs without the Government sticking its pointy great schnozz in an area which ideally should have been none of its concern.

And I’ll give you another inconvenient Al Gore type insertion: in my opinion the Government ignored this option for the same reason a tremendous proportion of Australian males avoid going to the doctor when they feel crook – they didn’t want to have their worst suspicions confirmed.

My guess is that, all the time some be-suited nurk in the State Government was trying to make a name and for himself and pee on the fire hydrant of posterity to mark his time in office, they knew that if they went down the route I’ve just described, they would have found out the hard way what I’ve already told you the easy way, that any clod could have worked out for him or herself by simple observation – the smoking pubs would have prospered, or at least gone as well as they always had, and a lot of the non-smoking ones would have struggled.

Why? Because within the pub-going population, the majority are people like to have the option to smoke in pubs, (including those “non-smokers who just have the one or two occasionally with a drink”), or are non-smokers who don’t care. But then I already told you that, and those of you who have spent any vaguely significant amount of time in pubs already knew that.

Still, under that plan, both options would have been available. As opposed to now.

One final thing. One of the reins the authorities tugged on this issue was that they have a responsibility regarding the health of the community, so they acted with grave consideration for the common good, or however they would phrase the verbal dandruff in question.

As no less an authority on both society and its government than Captain America once sagely observed: “In a pig’s eye.”

For starters they’re not our mommies, they’re elected representatives, whether or not they choose or have the ability to remember that they’re representing people from time to time.

Secondly, it’s not their place to sanction, proscribe or limit the use of legal consumer products by grown adults responsible for their actions. Cigarettes are a health hazard, but they’re not dynamite, rat-poison, or an armoured personnel carrier. Pubs where people smoked cigarettes and drank beer of their own volition weren’t primary schools, all-ages ballet classes or the State Museum. A freedom, even if you thought it was a grotty, unworthy one, was impinged on needlessly and arrogantly by a government who forgot, in the telling words of political analyst/thespian/wrestler The Rock, to “Shut their mouth and know their role.”

Thirdly, an option was available to satisfy everyone but the most rabid, eye-rolling, saliva-flying fanatics among the nay-sayers, and they didn’t even attempt to explore it for one scrawny second.

Fourthly, once all this was toxically dumped on the electorate, just when the pubs and the public were starting to feel the impact, two of those responsible waved their enchanted capes, clicked the heels of their ruby slippers together three times, and disappeared magically into the ether without a trace, leaving us, the rest of their party, the hotel industry and the remainder of the state holding the bag. Nice work, guys. Hope that back-door DID clout you on the dust-pipe on the way out. Maybe it would have kick-started your brains.

Whatever the reasons that some actual good-hearted people might have felt this was progress and a “good thing”, they are flim-flamming themselves, and they are wrong. Even with the best of intentions. We got robbed of a freedom, of an outlet, of an entertainment option, of a tradition. Even if it was a grotty one. Even if it was hazardous to the health of those who willingly chose to pursue it. Whatever. The decision was rushed, ill-considered and made on the basis of poor logic.

What was lost was greater than anything that was gained, and what was gained is nebulous and dubious to be kind, a circumstance made even more evident by some of the rousingly berserk claims made by some of the more lateral free-thinkers among the rabid health warriors.

Even pub-avoiding avid-non-smokers lost something major here along the way, but missed it because it didn’t resonate all the way up the sphincter of self-interest where their scone was lodged. Never mind, you’ll hear them yodelling loud and hearty later on when some punk government, encouraged by this particular “success”, stomps firmly on their corns.

The big cheeses screwed up, bottom-line, end of song, end of story. No-one will stand up and say it, let alone do anything about it because, short of Nazis, cancer and price-rises, there is no less popular cause around today than anything to do with smoking. But in this case, the law is a big, fat hairy ass, and should be reversed. In any case the principle of reasonable societal freedoms takes priority over cardio-vascular fitness and toned abs.

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WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO AUNT ALICE? (1969)

Mrs Marrable’s husband has just died, but she doesn’t seem all that broken up about it. Her true period of mourning begins when Jerry the dentist from the Bob Newhart Show (Peter Bonerz) comes in playing her husband’s lawyer, and tells her that Mr Marrable only left her a world-class collection of debts, plus his childhood stamp collection and some dead butterflies under glass.

Frankly Mrs Marrable (Geraldine Page) didn’t seem all that normal to start with, and we’re only about five minutes into the picture at the stage she goes completely demented with financial grief. She celebrates this by hiring housekeepers, mentally torturing them, persuading them to entrust their life savings to the care of her non-existent “stockbroker in Chicago”, and then clonking them over the back of the head and burying them in her front yard. On each occasion, she disguises the gravesite by planting a new pine tree, all of which flourish remarkably, presumably due to her unconventional choice of fertiliser.

After a few on-screen clonkings (with a small forest of pine trees in the front yard suggesting rather more) she employs a feisty if somewhat absent-minded and garrulous house-keeper, Alice Dimmock (Ruth Gordon), who seems to have a secret agenda of her own, which apparently has something to do with one of the previously vanished Marrable employees.

This unambiguously full-blooded piece of Arizona Gothic consists largely of a parade of murders. It’s not what you’d call a whodunit, and there’s a limitation on suspense, given that Geraldine is M-M-M-Maaaaad from pretty much the first time you see her on screen.

However the cat’n’mouse game between Mrs M and the Ruth Gordon character works in dragging the viewer in, mainly because Gordon was such a talent at sketching the hint of a full-blown characterisation around whatever she was given to work with, and she’s likeable, and Geraldine Page is having a complete party playing a full-blown, irredeemable, hideous monster.

Their one and a half set-piece scenes of playing hunter and hunted are the only real nerve-twangers in a movie that isn’t exactly starved for murder

What Ever Happened to Aunt Alice? generally zips along, only skidding to a halt intermittently when some of the younger acting crew, playing a variety of stunningly uninteresting nephews and nieces, interrupt the action to impersonate wood, with dialogue supplied to match.

It looks like a TV movie or a Columbo episode, or something. Credited director Lee H. Katzin and uncredited director Bernard Girard between them come up with a few shots and angles that get the job done, and the rest pretty much looks as flat as a pre-payday pancake.

(Both of them mostly worked in television. Girard also wrote and directed the 50s JD movie, The Party Crashers. Katzin’s best-known stuff would probably be a couple of handfuls of Mission: Impossible episodes he directed in the ‘60s.)

There’s nothing particularly done with the Arizona setting that makes anything detectably scarier. So why Arizona? Maybe the light was better over there.

What is scary is Gerald Fried’s score – not that it exactly enhances any effect of the on-screen action. Combining madcap atonal gypsy fiddling with sudden huge orchestral farts, it’s so consistently loud and annoying out of any apparent context that it becomes scary in and of itself.

Don’t hang out your amateur aesthetic detective shingle and look for a lot of subtext or anything. Content-wise, it is what it is and that’s all that it is. Unless you take one aspect of it as a fairly unusual gardening tip, it’s basically revelling in Geraldine Page being nuts and committing a string of qualm-free murders. There’s a nice ironic twist at the very end, but if you’re vaguely paying attention you’ve got better than a casino gambler’s chance of seeing it coming like a neon freight train.

Actually one of the more, and few, remarkable things about the picture is that this parade of gleefully amoral homicides containing one of the most thoroughly black-hearted characters ever to see movie action, is distributed by Disney’s distribution arm, Buena Vista, presumably due to the involvement of the American TV network ABC in the original production. I’ve got a feeling they won’t be putting a ride up at Disneyland to celebrate the fact.

Probably the only other remarkable thing about What Ever Happened to Aunt Alice? is that for all the on-screen mayhem, there’s not one drop of blood. The closest they get is a rather livid and unlikely-looking pink bruise courtesy of the make-up department, which I think if you look real close you can also see adding some accidental detail work to the car upholstery.

What Ever Happened to Aunt Alice? will kind of pass the time, and that’s about the whole deal. I guess the moral of the story is that, like I’ve always thought, gardening can be dangerous.

(6 out of 11 on the industry-standard MPHOAH scale)

(What Ever Happened to Aunt Alice? is part of a rambling, informal semi-series of pictures about homicidal granny fear that happened in the wake of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? only quite a few years later. That movie was a mind-frying piece of Hollywood Gothic, a cunning piece of movie biz self-examination, a before-its-time twist on the darker side of celebrity, and probably a way underrated mood-piece of a movie, as well known as it is/was. Robert Aldrich, who directed Baby Jane, produced this one. Other than that, and in terms of quality, what Aunt Alice mostly has in common with the earlier movie is four words in the title.)

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