Upon reading last night’s 28 Years Later pan and particularly a money paragraph that called Danny Boyle‘s newbie “the filthiest, emptiest, most repellent and nihilistic film of this sort…almost certainly the most physically disgusting film of any kind that I’ve ever seen in my life”, HE commenter “Tomosophy” called this “huge praise…exactly what I want from this kind of film.”
He will therefore “definitely be seeing this in a theatre,” he added.
Either Tomosophy was being flagrantly insincere or was flaunting his perversity for egoistic reasons…showing off for the commentariat. Or he’s simply one sick fuck. Because 99% of moviegoers (i.e., the sane ones) don’t want to wallow in miserableism, which is definitely what 28 Years Later is selling.
I’m the kind of guy who can laugh joyously at lines like “I wish I was in hell with my back broken” but being dragged through the malevolent and very bloody predations of Boyle’s film….forget it.
Two famous quotes apply: (a) “I’m a human being, goddamit…my life has value!” (Peter Finch in Network) and (b) “I’m not an animal” (Albert Brooks in Lost in America).
Like the headline implies, people may pay for escapism but they sometimes wind up neck deep in the grim.
Moviegoers are not interested in what willful auteur-level directors like Boyle are composing or assembling, much less what his actors are feeling or conveying unless the actor in question happens to be someone on the level of Ralph Fiennes.
Moviegoers, boiled down, are interested in what they’re feeling, and what I was feeling last night was profound disgust. And I don’t care what film critics who are filing from the planet Pluto (guys like Bob Strauss) are saying. For I am King Solomon…the ultimate arbiter, the one-man jury, inspector of the final product, giver or denier of the HE seal of approval.
A performance or a movie, in other words, is not about some idea or theme or cultural undercurrent propelling the filmmakers, but about how I fucking feel as I contemplate the finality of it. And what I wanted to do last night was throw up in a bucket.