The 1956 film version of "Moby Dick", depicting the final battle between Ahab and Moby Dick. For the time the special effects were pretty good, really.
I have always liked Moby Dick both as a book and as cinema, and I still find the 1956 version (Gregory Peck as Ahab) much faster paced than the 1998 one with Patrick Stewart as Ahab.

I guess Moby Dick could be called an early "creature feature" with this important exception - here the creature wins, as it should. It's in its environment, and the humans are the interlopers. How would YOU like to be hunted with a harpoon, huh?

Two men met in an office on the top of the world.

They were the greatest men, arguably, of their time; millions rose from their beds with their names on their lips, hearts aglow; and millions more waited with bated breath for the day when they would receive the blessing of witnessing, once again, the duo’s creations. It would not be an exaggeration to claim that, though perhaps they did not rule empires, they ruled the hearts of the nations.

They were alike in many ways; close friends, they both sported beards and had over the years grown to resemble each other; and they worked together, bringing their different skills to the table.

“So, what shall we do next?” asked Gorge Look-ass.

“I’ve been thinkin’ about that,” answered Stiff-‘em Spill-burg. “The last bit of the Intangible Bones franchise did pretty well, doncha know, the Crying Skulls thingie? Now I think we need to make another – while Carries-on Bored is still young enough to act.”

“Yeah, you’re right,” said Look-ass. “But what shall we have in it?”

“The same ol’ stuff, of course.” Spill-burg sounded exasperated. “You know the formula as well as I do. Bones and his bullshit-whip and something magic hidden in the Hell of Holes or some such godforsaken place. We’ll have car chases and Bored, I mean Bones, swinging on ropes and cobwebs and rolling stones…no, not those Rolling Stones…and we’ll have the bad guys greeding themselves to destruction. That’s understood. Our audience expects all that. They wouldn’t come to watch the movie unless all that wasn’t there. And, of course, snakes. We must have snakes.”

“I know all that,” said Look-ass. “I know the franchise won’t run unless we put all that in. I mean the bad guys. Who shall we have as the bad guys? It’s the bad guys who make or break the movie.”

“So who do we pick as the bad guys?”

“Who do Americans love to hate most these days?”

“Um…” said Spill-burg. “There’s so much choice. Arab terrorists? No, that’s been done and done. Iranians? Uh, maybe, yeah. We’ll keep that in hand for the moment, but people can’t really get worked up about Iranians unless we can get the media to co-operate, and after Iraq they might not. Commies?”

“We did that last time. Once again might be too much.”

“But those were Russian Commies. Chinks? North Koreans?”

“Don’t you try it. You don’t dare piss off the Chinks these days, they own half this country, or have you forgotten? And as for the North Koreans, who really gives a damn about Kim and his gang?”

“Huh, well, Sudanese in Darfur? How’s that?”

“You flipped your lid, Stiff-‘em? Sudanese in Darfur chasin’ some kinda magic charm to help ‘em rule the world? You might as well cast Mickey Mouse as villain for all the cred you’ll get outta it.”

“Hah, yeah. I know!!! Gas pumps!”

“Eh?”

“Gas pump workers will be the new villains. How’s that? Everyone hates gas prices, right? So we have these gas station workers who gang together and drive around in tankers to find a charm which gives ‘em control over all America’s gas supplies. Can ya beat that, or can ya?”

“You got it. Yeah, I think you really got it. And what is that charm?”

“Well, yeah, somethin’ like an image of an ancient astronaut or somethin’? Which comes to life when the bad guys tinker with it?”

“Right! And then God sends a UFO to destroy the bad guys and set Bones and his girl free. You really got it this time. I can just see it, a UFO like the Millennium Falcon…Bored will fit right in the role, too.”

“You’re the greatest in Jollywood, man. You know that, don’t you? I can just see the merchandising…the posters, T shirts, the toy UFOs, the bullshit-whips autographed by Bones…and what shall we call it?”

“How about, er, Intangible Bones And The Heavenly Astronaut? Will that do?”

”If people were stupid enough to watch something called the Temple of Doom, why ever not?”

“It’s lucky for us PT Barnum was right.”

“Yeah – you can’t lose money overestimating the stupidity of the people, can ya, now?”

  

        

I'm sure you remember this song though probably not this version.

    

I admit it.

Like half the world’s population, not necessarily all male, I like a dose of porn once in a while. However, once I've said that, let me qualify it a little.

I’ve rather gone off the hardcore stuff these last few years.

It’s so goddamn artificial that it isn’t even funny any more.

How many times can you be titillated by a performance so choreographed, so predictable, that you can predict exactly what’s going to happen three minutes before it does? It does get trying – by the second video you inflict on yourself. I mean, all that predictable groping and mouthing and those positions impossible in terms of comfort or pleasure but perfect for watching the (impeccably shaved for maximum visibility) genitals slide in and out of each other. That utterly preordained (unless you’re amnesiac, and maybe not then) sequence of oral sex – genital sex in woman on top position – genital sex doggy style – anal sex – genital sex woman sitting with her back to the man – man orgasming on woman’s breasts or skin. Bleh.  

No, I prefer the soft-core stuff (XX to those of you who prefer the X system of ratings). There’s at least some kind of an attempt, however farcical, at a story, after all. Some of these stories are so far-fetched they get more entertaining than the nudity itself…

Young reporter, for instance, female and presentable (but of course!) finds herself traipsing around the South American jungle, fending off anacondas and leopards (leopards?) while chimpanzees (chimpanzees?) leer at her from the bushes. She is then abducted by a long lost cannibal tribe and, uh, well, you can imagine what happens after that.

Or, and this genre is especially hilarious, the aliens land to conduct research earth sexual mores – seems as they’ve forgotten how to do it themselves and their population is collapsing. Somehow, they never ever land in that land of licentiousness and free sex, Saudi Arabia, or any of its cognates. Nor do they land in places like India where people are having the most babies, and, therefore, would be having the most productive sex. No.

They always, wow, always, land where people screw leaving the windows open so they can look in to their heart's (or whatever's) content. They then proceed to take the form of nubile young women to check things out for themselves. And so on…the funniest part of this is how often the “alien” women create human female bodies complete with navel rings and bikini tan lines. Awesome!

Well, at least the (simulated) softcore sex is (slightly) more natural looking than the real sex of the hardcore/XXX world. And the women don't wear those awful stilettos with clean soles to bed, either.

Don’t I wish I knew, though how the men manage to keep it outside in that position and at that time…     

Normally, I don’t watch Hindi films. I once told people I wouldn’t be caught dead watching a Bollywood film. And I kept my word. I wasn’t caught dead watching it. I was very much alive.
The reason I watched the film, in the first place, was all the gushing reviews – both word of mouth and on the web and in print – that I came across. Besides, it has been a sleeper hit; there was none of the usual pre-release hype of the type I absolutely detest; so I decided I had to have a look.
I decided; and then what? I found I couldn’t have a look. I couldn’t have a look because the damn film got to places like Kuwait before it got here – and it finally got here on Friday, just three weeks after it was released everywhere else.
Absolutely typical.
So I finally got around to seeing it only today.
OK, now the prelims are over, and I’ve finished explaining why I’ve watched it, let’s get to the review itself:

There is a genre of films about the sports underdog. The list of those films is long, and mostly originate in Hollywood, but I guess it’s time someone took a whack at it here. And they do.

The story: The final of the men’s hockey (that’s HOCKEY, as in “hockey”, damn it, not ICE hockey) world cup between India and Pakistan. Pakistan is leading by one goal with just seconds left to play, when India gets a penalty stroke. Kabir Khan (Shah Rukh Khan, in his first on-screen portrayal of a Muslim character), the Indian captain, decides to take the stroke himself. And fluffs it, losing the match in the process. As a Pakistani player, in a moment of camaraderie, hugs him in consolation, and the photo of him doing this is splashed all across the Indian papers (a clever touch, using front pages of real yellow rags like the Times of India) calling him a traitor and worse. He is finally forced even to move out of his own house while a man scribbles “Gaddar” (“Traitor”) on the wall in charcoal.
Cut to seven years later, when a women’s hockey team is being put together. There is just one applicant for the job that no one wants, that of the coach of a team that is bound to lose….Kabir Khan. By default, he gets the job.
What he gets is a team of scrapings from the bottom of the barrel, from all corners of the country, from Andhra Pradesh and Jharkhand, Punjab and Haryana, Maharashtra and the Railways, and even Manipur and Mizoram (nice to see people from this part of the country getting a chance to act in a mainstream movie). What he gets is a team of no-hopers, misfits, egotists and drama queens, who can’t even decide who gets which bunk without fighting among themselves, let alone act as a team.
Now of course you know what’s going to happen, without me needing to tell you. Except for “Rocky” (the first part, and I detest boxing) the underdog films always end with the victory of the underdog against all odds. So there was no surprise regarding the ending when I went to see the movie. I knew what was coming; what I wanted to see was how they went about presenting it.
The beginning is a disaster. The girls, on the field, are more intent on hitting out at each other than playing, and Khan is forced to bench several of them till they apologise to each other. In the end the anger against his training methods is so great that they sign a petition against him. It looks as if all’s over for the team, till the player’s suddenly and spectacularly bond at a MacDonald’s when a group of louts tries to harass them. They beat the living hell out of those men. Maybe not realistic, but entertaining all the same.
Meanwhile, the national selectors are fast losing interest in the team and are about to decide against sending it to the World Cup. Khan makes a desperate plea: he will have the girls play the national men’s team. If they at least draw, they will go to the World Cup. The selectors, many of whom are sleazeballs, want the team to lose. The men’s team walks all over them in the first half, leading three goals to none, but in the second they begin to TRY and they manage to put two back. Despite losing narrowly, the team is so impressive the entire men’s team and the spectators salute the girls and the selectors are forced to let them go to the World Cup in Australia after all.
As is usual in this type of film, they lose heavily in the first match (against Australia) before Kabir Khan, with his coaching and his pep talks, motivates them to claw their way back, till they finally reach the final, gathering sponsors and new kit on the way. And, of course, in the final, meeting Australia again, they win - as they would. You knew that all along.
And with the world cup in hand, they return to flowers and Kabir Khan, with his mother in tow, returns to the old house they had abandoned, with the same people who had reviled him earlier giving him an ovation…and a little kid scratches out the “traitor” written on the wall all those years ago. This scene was so maudlin it left a bad taste in the mouth.
All right, so that’s the story. There is much more to it, of course. There is the time when the girls are being registered at the hockey camp, when they’re all coming together, and the man at the desk is someone who has never heard of places like Mizoram and thinks Tamil and Telugu people are the same. There is the moment when Kabir Khan tells super-egotist Bindya Naik (the eminently kissable Shilpa Shukla) “There is room for just one bully in this team, and that’s me”. There are the repeated and very enjoyable digs at that national obsession and fifth-rated pseudo-sport, cricket (Kabir Khan calls a cricket bat wielding goon a eunuch, for instance). There are the girls goggling at the training facilities the Australians enjoy. There are the (really, this even moved me, and I’m a hardened cynic) bonding between the players at the end of the film, where even Komal Chaurasia (Chitrashi Rawat, who is a hockey player in real life) learns to pass the ball. There is Kabir Khan fingering his old silver medal and seeking personal vindication from a win. There is the delicious touch of irony when the team returns – the players are seen bargaining for the autorickshaw fare, as before. Just as it really happens in India.
The score is one jarring point – the music is loud and intrusive and more often than not unnecessary. At least there is no song and dance, one must be thankful for that. Also, while the on-field hockey action is beautifully shot and excellently portrayed, there is a loud yammering radio commentary in Hindi that is all but unendurable.
If this film had been made before the nineties, the players from the other teams (the Australians, British, and so on) would have been made to speak in Hindi and would have been portrayed as ignorant, conniving, evil racists. There’s none of that here; one even feels sorry for the Australian players after they break down and cry after their defeat in the final. Another plus!
I’m giving this film four stars, but really it deserves 4.25. I’m deducting half a star for the awful radio commentary and for the musical score. Another quarter of a star goes for that ridiculous last scene, where people still – after all these years – remember the old rancour, albeit this time to wash it away; Kabir Khan arrives pushing the same old scooter, and his mother returns too, looking not a day older. And the charcoal “traitor” is still there to be crossed out – after seven years. Bleh.
Kabir Khan’s story, incidentally, is based on the real life story of Mir Ranjan Negi, Indian goalkeeper in the hockey final of the 1982 Asian Games against Pakistan in which India lost 7-1. Negi was accused of taking bribes, his career ended, he was hounded for years – and he ultimately returned as women’s team coach. He was also technical adviser for this film.
Chak De! also deserves for not shying away from a brutal truth in India – the fact that an Indian Muslim is always forced to keep proving himself an Indian, the fact that he is not even allowed to make an honest mistake on the sports field without suspicion. This should ideally be studied in depth in another movie. Chak De! is a sports film; one can’t ask too much from it.
A superb effort, still. Infinitely better than “Lagaan,” the overblown Amir Khan film which was short-listed for the Oscar for best foreign movie a few years ago. Chak De! isn’t good enough to win; far from it. But it will still have me rooting.


Cast (names in the movie on the right…some cast members appeared under their own names, but not all):
Shah Rukh Khan...... Kabir Khan
Vidya Malvade...... Vidya Sharma
Anjan Srivastava
Javed Khan
Vibha Chibbar
Nakul Vaid...... Rakesh
Sagarika Ghatge...... Preeti Sabarwal
Chitrashi Rawat...... Komal Chautala
Shilpa Shukla...... Bindya Naik
Tanya Abrol...... Balbir Kaur
Anaitha Nair...... Aliya Bose
Shubhi Mehta...... Gunjan Lakhani
Nisha Nair...... Soimoi Kerketa
Sandia Furtado...... Nethra Reddy
Arya Menon...... Gul Iqbal
Chonchon V. Zimik...... Molly Zimik
Kimi Lalhming...... Mary Ralte
Kimberly Miranda
Nicola Sequeira
Raynia D'Souza
Mohit Chauhan
Joyoshree Arora
Vivaan Bhathena

The complete curriculum vitae of the girls are here, for those who are interested :
http://www.indianexpress.com/sunday/story/211123-2.html

The best or worst (depending on your viewpoint) horror movies (or, as i refer to them, hor-hor movies) for you to download.

If you didn't already know this (and I'm sure you didn't) - watch the next creature feature from Hollywood and you shall...

If there is any one of a hundred ways for a nubile young woman to get the chop, being eaten by a giant mutant beast will be it; she won't get robbed (this ain't a crime show) or raped (not a psycho flick); she'll get eaten, screaming. Hell, Jaws got away with it, didn't it? You want to quarrel with success?

Said mutant beast will quite possibly be the sole survivor of a species extinct a million years, but no one will ever ask the obvious question of where the eggs have lain all this time;or how, suddenly, they should rise now, and devour.

The intrepid team that goes to get the beast will be loaded down with weaponry like shiny new pistols that always miss, flare guns and whatnot, plastic explosives maybe; but never, ever, with a really useful thing like a few decent sticks of dynamite. I mean, a gigantic prehistoric fish has you trapped on a sinking boat and is trying to eat you. What do you do? Throw the dynamite into the water and blow his innards to smithereens from the concussion? Hell, no. How 's the movie going to go on then? You scream and shoot into the water and then one of your team heroically sacrifices himself so the rest of you can live.

Do not ever depend on the beast's appetite being satisfied; it can obviously eat many times more than its own weight, and have space left for more. It's no dieter, even if it somehow masticates a man and leaves his corpse with only a few morsels missing. Maybe that's why it's always in such a foul mood, come to think of it - poor thing. It's hungry.

Nor is it the target of conservation efforts. People will go into the water, after all; the beast may live in the water, but it must vacate that for people...and when the beast dies, it must blow up. Yeah, these beasts have the explosive properties of nitroglycerine when the time comes...

And remember this immutable law: the movie will not, cannot end, and the beast cannot die, without the team being whittled down to hero and heroine.

Now aren't you glad you got to know all this? Next time you go monster hunting, take your girl along.

She's your guarantee of survival.



    

It’s difficult to know how to go about reviewing one’s favourite movie of all, of all genres, all eras, everything. Where does one begin?

I first saw this movie as a teenager, back in the late eighties, on television. The impact it made on me was immediate and unforgettable. I bought the DVD in Russia, and watched it several times since then, the most recent occasion being this evening.

The problem with reviewing a film one loves more than any other is that one lays oneself open to incomprehension. Another person watching the same movie will be left cold. Someone else might have actively hated it. It depends on one’s tastes, one’s mindset, one’s outlook on life.

So, what is it about?

On the face of it the story is simple to the point of being simplistic. Soldier destroys two enemy tanks in combat, at his own request gets home leave as reward instead of a citation, and goes on a long train journey meeting a wide variety of people as he goes.

Simplistic.

Only, it is not so.

Alexei “Alyosha” Skvortsev, the protagonist, is a Soviet signalman who at the outset of the film destroys two German Tiger tanks with an anti-tank rifle. His general wants to give him a medal. Instead, he begs for leave, just for a day, in order to go home and repair his mother’s roof. He has left for the front before even being able to say goodbye to her. The general gives him leave – not one day, but six: two days to get home, two days to fix the roof, and two days back.

(Let me mention here that the director doesn’t play around with one’s hopes here – right at the outset he announces that Alyosha never returned from the war, that he lies buried in a foreign land, so that the movie is a continuing tragedy, and everyone knows it as such.)

Skvortsev, on his way to the train, meets other soldiers going up to the front, and one of them entrusts him with a message to his father and wife, who live in a city Alyosha must pass through, and gives him two large cakes of soap to give them. He had never seen this soldier, Pavlov, before. He never is going to see him again, but he takes the soap and the commission just the same. On the train, he meets a crippled soldier on his way back from the front who does not want to go back, minus a leg, to his young and pretty wife. Alyosha must, delaying his own journey, persuade and escort him till he reaches his destination. His wife meets him, tearfully overjoyed, at the station.

Alyosha – in the meantime – has bribed a guard on a goods train to let him travel in a wagon full of bales of hay. Into the wagon comes a stowaway, a young girl named Aleksandra (“Shura”) who tries to jump off the train when she sees Alyosha. He pulls her back in, and they form a sort of temporary truce until she can get off when the train stops. Only, she can’t. The train is under heavy guard whenever it stops and she can’t get off.

Stop by stop, little by little, Alyosha and Shura grow closer. The theme could have easily become hackneyed, but the director makes sure it does not. She tells him she is on her way to the bedside of her fiancé, an Air Force pilot who had been shot down and wounded. They are discovered by the commandant of the train, the dreaded Lieutenant, who turns out to be an extremely nice man who merely asks them to be careful not to set the hay on fire and puts the guard under arrest for accepting bribes.

Once, Alyosha gets left behind once the train sets off while he is fetching water for Shura. He has to hitch a lift on a farm truck and reaches the next station only to find the train has already left – yet Shura is there, having abandoned her journey to wait for him. This is the town where they are supposed to meet the wife and father of the soldier who had given Alyosha the soap. What follows is the most touching part of the whole film, where the wife of the soldier turns out to be living with another man while the father is in a shelter for bombed out civilians. Alyosha tells the father a lot of lies to make him happy, but he cannot wait long, and he and Shura are off again. They finally part on a railway platform where she finally admits that she is just on her way to meet her aunt. The wounded fiancé story was just a fabrication.

On again, with Alyosha already delayed far too much, and dreaming of Shura, and the train is bombed almost within sight of his destination. Somehow, Alyosha does make it home with a ride hitched on another truck – just in time to see his mother, hug her, and rush off to the war again.

As we have already been told, he will never return.

This is a film of heroism, but is not a film of heroes, just as it is a film set in wartime, but not a war film. It is a film of love, and friendship, and much else that cannot be easily categorised. It is ultimately a film about coming of age, but a coming of age that was cut short.

It could have been so easy, so very easy, to ruin this movie, especially by creating a happy ending. it is to the director's eternal credit that he didn't.

As I said, on the surface it is simplistic, but I liked it. I don’t know if you will.

Go see it yourself.

(Oh yes…the title in Russian, “Ballada o Soldate”, translates into “Ballad About a Soldier”; but the official title in English is “Ballad of a Soldier”, which doesn’t quite mean the same thing, but I have had to stick to it.

And a blooper or two: Alyosha never finds time to shave in the movie, but he remains immaculately shaved all throughout, and clean even after helping to push the farm truck out of mud. And the movie is set in 1941, just after the Battle of Voronezh – loudspeakers make announcements about that battle. But the tanks shown, German Tigers and Russian T34/85s, did not come into service till 1943. Sorry.)

It's not exactly surprising that gays (and lesbians) form a relatively high percentage of the acting fraternity, both stage and screen, just as they do in fields like fashion design, painting and music. After all, homosexuals do in general show a higher level of creativity than the average.

The thing is that the characterisation of homosexuals on screen tends to the overly insensitive. Sometimes - mostly - they are lampooned, depicted as effeminate men (in pink wigs and fingers in their mouths, for heaven's sake). Or else they are shown as highly negative, like the  brutal "butch" lesbians in prison flicks. I don't, offhand, recall any sympathetic and serious depiction of gays onscreen.

Given that many of the actors depicting homosexuals must be homosexual in their private lives, I wonder what they think about it? One of the film series I grew up with was the "Carry On" series of British comedies, where actors like Charles Hawtrey and Kenneth Williams played repeated roles as gay or sexually ambiguous characters - all of whom were lampooned. Both Hawtrey and Williams were gay in private life. What, I wonder, did they go through while filming these scenes?

Of course, homosexuality being - as we're repeatedly assured - against the "order of nature," I suppose they deserve what they got.  

Let's face it - Shakespeare was possibly the greatest playwright ever to have lived.
If you bypass his plainly unforgivable "The Merchant of Venice", he is just about the only person whose play, made for an audience of the late sixteenth century, could be put in a modern setting and still remain watchable.

I watched this movie several times - it's cheesy, but it's still about the best way of introducing Shakespeare to those who never would have touched him with a barge pole. OK, I admit it, I liked it - right from the first time I saw it. (I can already picture Kande sharpening her claws.)

The story? You know the story. They didn't change the story. When you come to Shakespeare, you can't fiddle with him - he's not H Rider Haggard.

So, what's so special about it?

Well - it's got everything from the original - dialogues, everything - set In Fair Verona, with the Capulets and Montagues as rival crime lords who have the city carved up between them. It's got Leonardo di Caprio, whom I don't like (I only liked him once on screen, as a retarded kid in "What's Eating Gilbert Grape") as Romeo, it's got Clair Danes (no, I'm not interested) as Juliet, it's got a lot of makeweights who really don't matter as long as they are competent, and they are...and it's got John Leguizamo as Tybalt. The film is worth the price of admission for his act alone.

"What, art thou drawn among these hartless hinds?"

He would have made my favourite villains list if it had been a modern story. Consider him there, anyway.

I've always loved movie villains, haven't you?

In the early, early days of cinema, the villain was easy to spot. He had to be, because otherwise how would the viewer know whom to hiss? And how did he manage the feat of making himself known?

In early Hollywood movies, he would wear a black hat. And, yes, the hero would wear white.

(Now I'm strongly tempted to make some crack about the palehead calling the other Afro-American...)

Another plot option was to make the chief villain kick a dog as he strode into a saloon (poor dog - what did he do to deserve it?)

Of course the villain was ugly, in contrast to the clean cut hero - in such contrast, in fact, that it was all but impossible not to feel a sneaking sympathy for that villain. Who doesn't hate the excessively handsome square jawed lump of testosterone?

But then, somewhere along the line, they tampered with the profile. Damn. Villains got kind of blurred and cute, unless - of course - it was the maniacal Muslim terrorist...

Now I've always rooted for the villain, more or less, or at least I have at least been indifferent to the hero. man, do I hate heroes. They make me sick.

That said, there are some villains who, er, grab me by the imagination and make me fall head over heels in love with them...

(And, Indians and Russians here - I am not interested in Amjad Khan's turn as Gabbar Singh in Sholay/Месть и Закон. I do not think anything of that film and I wouldn't be caught dead watching Bollywood anyway.)

Now of course I always back the villain. In any movie. But of course if one has to pick a shortlist of one's favourites, one has to have some criteria...

The first would have to be the fact that the villain must be fictional. So with great regret I have had to exclude my all time favourite - Ralph Fiennes as concentration camp commander Amon Goeth in Schindler's List. Goeth not only existed but did just about everything Fiennes showed him doing, including sniping at prisoners from his balcony. He was the perfect movie villain. But he existed, so I have had to exclude him.

There are other candidates, though. Since they are fictional, I chose them on the grounds of being simpatico. If I yearn for them to bash in the hero's face, I think, they can't be all bad. So, and also based on individual "other" reasons, here is a partial shortlist - of course, only from movies I've watched:

1. Top position goes to Edward Norton as Aaron Stampler in Primal Fear. The best portrayal of shifting personalities I ever saw. You can practically see him changing in his skin as he shifts from Aaron to the alter-ego, Roy, and back again. He stands, talks, even breathes differently.

2. Second position goes to Anthony Hopkins as Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs. No, not in Hannibal. That particular flick - and Red Dragon, the prequel - ruined Lecter's chances for Number One position so far as I am concerned.

3. Li'l Zé from City of God, played by Leandro da Hora. Don't ask why. See the film for yourself. He'd get top position but for the fact that I don't really consider him a true villain.

4. Damien, the Son of Satan, in Omen. Do you need to ask why? How often do you see the Son of the Devil win? I'm backing the underdog here, people!

5. Billy Zane in Titanic as whatzisname, Leonardo di Caprio's character Jack's rival for the love of Kate Winslet's Rose. Reason: the only thing worth a damn in that overcooked turkey of a movie. The. Only. Thing.

6. This one might come as a surprise. From the animated movie, Watership Down, the character of General Woundwort. Reason: Anyone know another rabbit who commands an army and fights dogs, single handed?

7. Art Malik's Arab terrorist in True Lies. Because I root for Muslim terrorist Hollywood villains and because - again - he was the only good thing in that movie.

Honourable mention: Bruce, the shark from Jaws, whom I did not include because he has hardly any screen time and because you can't make a shark wear a hat. Or, until the invasion of the animated tale, you couldn't.

And I have only contempt for Darth Vader and others who appear on the Top Villain lists, so don't bother me about them.

And hand me my black hat. It's hanging on the wall, behind your shoulder...

I wouldn't advise you to turn around.

From Shark Attack 3: Megalodon, a contender for the Worst Movie Of All Time Award. Actually, the "hero" said as a joke to make the "heroine" laugh, but they left it in the final cut.

Amazing, all the things I did not know.

For example, jiminy whiz, I was ignorant that, among other things

- The Mayans, who I was unaware were still around in the late fifteenth century, performed human sacrifices and were stopped by the kindly, civilising influence of the conquistadores;

- That Thermopylae had been a glorious Greek victory, not a  bloody, stupid defeat.

 
- That the British burned colonists alive during the American Revolutionary War.

- It was the Americans who won World War II all by themselves, and that the German Enigma code was broken when a coding machine was captured by them along with a U Boat. For some reason I thought the British at Bletchley Park had broken the code after capturing U 110.

- That D Day was an American show, not much of a role for the British and French, and that the Russians sent men into combat unarmed;

 

- That Oskar Schindler was a philanthropic do-gooder who could not bear to see the pain of Jewish suffering, not an industrialist who used slave labour and who played a most minor part in the war, basically in order not to lose his slave labourers, and who saved a grand total of eleven hundred Jews.

- That Vietnam was, well, maybe not quite a victory but not quite a defeat, at least not one that any patriot can call a defeat, since so many gooks were blown away by good honest freedom-lovin' ammunition;

 

- That the Munich Olympic massacre of 1972 was caused by terrorists murdering their hostages, not the criminal incompetence of German policemen whose wild shooting killed almost all the dead that day;

- That American soldiers in Somalia were actuated by feelings of brotherly love for the Somalis they were sent to help;

         

Undoubtedly, there are many more such that I am unaware of. But it’s my duty to be. After all, Apocalypso, The Patriot, U 571, The Longest Day, Schindler’s List, Enemy At The Gates, Blackhawk Down, Munich, or any of a myriad Vietnam films teach me history better than the encyclopaedias and other material invented by the “reality-based community.” Everyone else who loves freedom and would volunteer to be part of the battle against evil should join in. Hollywood is Democratic, not just democratic. Hollywood tells the truth.

 

Meanwhile, closer home…

 

Closer home, Bollywood says the ideal way to get a girl is to dog her steps, be obstreperous, trouble her every which way you can, make vulgar gestures at her, sing suggestive ditties, and she will at last be yours.

 

Closer home, Bollywood says the woman who is free and “loose” in the first half of a movie will become the quiet, domesticated Hausfrau towards the end.

 

And if she, horror of horrors, is not a virgin, it’s because she is the product of a broken home, and is fundamentally a good girl at heart. Marriage will redeem her in the end.

 

I believe in a world where one side is good

And victory over evil wins

I believe that the grass is blue

I believe that the sky is green

I believe all this, you know

‘Cause I saw it on the silver screen.   

 

I believe that does it.     

 

They are so much fun! Just think:

You don't have expectations, so you can't possibly be disappointed. When you're watching hairy monsters or maniacs with chainsaws roam through the night menacing nubile young women, you know you aren't exactly watching an Oscar contender, don't you?

And better still: you can predict the things that are going to happen. These films are as orchestrated and predictable as a dance routine. One can write, in fact, a script with little trouble. All you need to do is fill in the blanks.

Scene: a mountain road, many kilometres from the nearest town. Night. The wind moaning through the trees. A lone car, with a bickering couple in it, stalls. As they continue bickering, something goes bump in the night. The man, with suicidal heroism, gets out to see what it is, his woman's entreaties notwithstanding. She goes with him. They walk a few steps, and suddenly she disappears. There is a thud! and, oh my, what have we here, her decapitated corpse! The man looks up, screams, and runs back towards his car. It's too late. He trips and falls. A shadow looms up behind him. Screaming as the screen fades to black.

Daylight. A little town in the middle of the hills. A station wagon full of youngsters, bubbly, overflowing with clean cut looks and sexual energy, draws up at the local eatery or "gas station" (petrol pump). They are on their way to a little cabin up in the hills for a little vacation. They meet a grizzled old timer, the petrol pump proprietor or a patron of the restaurant, who in a voice like gravel warns them of dire happenings in the hills. Quite predictably, they laugh at his warnings and drive away to the hidey-hole...

And now you know exactly what's going to happen. They make a fire, talk, laugh, pehaps dance to music. And then the killer/monster gets to work...

Obligatory plot devices - these are compulsory for this genre. No self respecting B film can ever leave them out. And one can usually even predict accurately when any one of them is going to appear:

1. The phones stop working. Even cell phones stop working - the network fails. But the lights don't! Not ever!

2. Twangy, "eerie" music plays.

3. One of the couples quarrels, and one of the partners goes out and disappears. Snarl, grunt.

4. The obligatory tit shot. This usually happens with one of the girls taking a bath, orgasmically rubbing herself with her hands as the water pours over her. Plenty of close ups of her breasts and a distant shot or two of her pubic hair. None of her makeup ever runs. Nor does her hair get wet and stringy. And as she approaches the end of her extremely prolonged bath, a chainsaw/pair of claws slashes through the screen window and terminates her shower in a shower of blood.

5. The final fight. All others being now dead, the two remaining characters try to escape with their lives from whatever is chasing them. Slipping and sliding, injured, bleeding, they contrive a miraculous escape and "kill" the psycho/creature. Well, they always have to kill it/him twice. There is, just as they go into a clinch, a short lived and bloody resurrection before its/his final death takes place... just about the time the police, tipped off by the grizzled old timer, drive or helicopter up to the scene. They put the two survivors into an ambulance or helicopter, never doubting their unsupported account of the bloody shambles all around. And there is the end...

6. Or is it? No self respecting B movie ever leaves out the possibility of a sequel. So the psycho's body goes mysteriously missing. Or the creature is not the last of its kind. And its mate is ready for revenge...

All right, I think I'm ready to make one of my own now. Financial backing, please?

No, this is not a review of the film which got Forest Whitaker an Oscar – I have not watched it (if anyone has, I'd like feedback). But it did spark off a train of thought.

In the first place, Forest Whitaker, whom I first saw in “Platoon”, is someone whom I’ve long thought underrated as an actor. Certainly, looking at some of the people who have won best actor awards in recent years, one would get the idea that he should have won some time earlier. Just like Denzel Washington, who, also, had to wait inordinately long before winning an Oscar.

Of course, there is the little fact that these two men had their own low points – if Washington acted in “Glory” and “Malcolm X”, he also acted in “Courage Under Fire”; and Whitaker may have done “Platoon” and “Good Morning Vietnam” but he also did “Phone Booth”. That said, I must admit I enjoyed “Phone Booth”. It was so ridiculous it was funny. I watched it more than once.

Well, to get back to what I wanted to talk about, “the last king of Scotland” was

"His Excellency President for Life, Field Marshal Al Hadji Doctor Idi Amin, VC, DSO, MC, Lord of All the Beasts of the Earth and Fishes of the Sea, and Conqueror of the British Empire in Africa in General and Uganda in Particular."

Rather a grandiose title for a man who got noticed and promoted because of his gift for sucking up to his British superiors, being a keen footballer and boxer, and someone who got his nickname “Dada” because of his standard excuse whenever a woman was found in his tent – she was his dada (sister in KiSwahili). It’s kind of easy to think Amin was a cross between buffoon and homicidal maniac, but it should be remembered that his predecessor, Milton Obote, was so awful that the world heaved a sigh of relief when Amin took over in a military coup; and that Amin’s fall did not end violence and civil war in Uganda; and that the current Ugandan government of Youweri Museweni is as responsible as anyone else in stoking the flames of Congo’s never-ending civil war.

Nothing is ever as simple as it seems.