THE DUKE ON APOCALYPTO AND MEL GIBSON
I
Regarding Mel Gibson
By the multiplex doors an old man high on lighter fluid stands
screeching at the crowds wandering in for to watch Apocalypto, the
new Mel Gibson picture, his lips lost midst the splurge of
discombobulating foam done devoured the lower half of his face. His
feet stomping in the puddles ‘pon the steps, his right fist waving
manic round his head, thus he stands roaring and barking and
threatening.
“Would you give your green to the Gestapo so quick?” says he,
“Would you forgive Adolf half as fast if’n he made a picture show
about a man eats a boar’s bollocks for to coax you?”
Men and women huddle against other as they pass him, ducking their
heads, raising hands to the sides o’ their faces.
“Save us, if’n only they’d had a jungle film at Nuremberg! Thon
boyo’s would’ve been free by the afternoon, wouldn’t they just?”
Wandering up the steps, I’m slipping my hands into my pockets,
lowering my eyes, watching the rain pit-patting off of the
concrete. As I’m approaching him, the old fella steps front of me,
blocking my path. “You” he says, raising a finger. “What say you,
y'craggy-toothed faggot?”
I cautiously raise the mug. A cluster of tiny red and white spots
marks the end of his nose, same spots friends of mine used to
exhibit round the chops far-side of a fortnight spent scrunching a
bag fulla glue to the yaps. His eyes rattle with anger, his
shoulders trembling ‘neath his brown and yellow pullover.
“I say, what say you? Will you sleep well tonight knowing you done
shoved another tenner into thon skitter-faced get’s well-bustlin’
coin-sack?”
I give a shrug. “I like his films” I say. “I don’t have to like
him.”
“Oh is that right? And so he could say whatever he felt like
saying, he could stand up afore the laws of the world and say ‘In
case you were wondering, the gays killed Mohammad’ or ‘Incidentally
now, I must remark upon the blacks, for they’re a sore bunch o’
bastards’ or ‘What if we just set fire to the immigrants, would
anybody really miss them?’ and so long as he made a film about a
man gets whipped and spat on every couple years it’d be dandy-o? Is
that the gist of the situation?”
“Well”, says I, giving an apologetic twirl of the shoe, “Many’s an
arsehole’s produced a work of wonder afore now. I no more care for
Gibson’s stupid, twisted banter than I care for that uttered by D.W
Griffith or Leni Riefenstahl. But I still think all three have made
incredible motion pictures, arseholes or no.”
“He was drunk” a woman in a purple cardigan shouts. “Folks say a
lot of things when they’re drunk. I told me ma I was pregnant one
night I was wrecked on porter, and by Christ I’ve never even
flicked me own bean.”
“He crafts exquisite spectacles” says another.
“Spectacles, is it? I think I need spectacles, for I can hardly
believe what I’m seeing! A crowd from here to Auschwitz lining up
for observe the twisted brain-farts o’ some hateful Nazi bastard
just cause it has a bit where a cat bites the lips off of somebody’
s face.”
This said, he drops to his knees and roars to the heavens. “C’mon
then, Riggs!” shouts he, “C’mon y’great whelp of a goon, c’mon then
and call me to my face a beak-mugged money-huddlin’ torn-cock
swine, c’mon and tell me here and now! Where’s my phone-call,
where's my apology? Are you a man at all, or perchance are you as
the ropes o’ jelly dangle ‘twixt a cow’s fandango followin’ a good
solid calving?”
Walking on across the foyer, I turn to the woman in the purple
cardigan. “Still” says I, “You can see his point, sure as God, and
I wonder now how I can feel anything at all for those protesters
who stood up at the ballet in London Coliseum there for to shout
down Simone Clarke, on account of her being all BNP, when here I am
wandering happily t’wards the ticket booth for to pay to see the
latest Mel Gibson?”
“Did you support the protesters?”
“Well yeah, mean, the British National Party are a buncha
malignant, vicious, cancerous fuckers. All the same, mind you, she
was just performing a ballet, she wasn’t shooting swastikas out her
hoo-hah or nothin’.”
The brain jiving and jagging and jiggering ‘thin my skull like an
arse fulla jackals, I’m pressing a finger and thumb ‘gainst my
eyes, grimacing some. “This is gon’ have me awake for a month” I’m
sighing. “Why couldn’t he have blurted something I agree with, for
fucks sakes.”
“What does it matter” says she. “Mean, who knows what shit Orson
Welles or Pasolini or Lucio Fulci maybe gabbled when pished? Nobody
knows, because they gabbled it back in the day, back before anyone
gave a shit what drunken celebrities might splurge far-side of a
ruction with the fuzz.”
“Anyway” she adds, reaching for her purse, “It’s a flick about the
Mayans. What difference what he thinks of Jews in the 20th or 21st
Century? It’s surely not gon’ have anything to do with this.”
“But see, now” says I, “Pasolini, blessed Pasolini, thon was a
Marxist of impeccable intellect and humanity and sense, and when I
see, say, The Gospel According To Matthew or The Decameron or Salo,
I see that worldview fairly burning the celluloid afore me, whether
it’s set in Biblical times or Medieval times or whenever. By thon
same token, if’n perchance there’s some racist, right-wing ideology
slinking about the corners of Gibson’s head, it’s more likely than
not gon’ show up in his work whether it’s set last week or in the
footfalls of the dinosaurs.”
“So then you react to that, and you say that’s bullshit, but I like
this, with the frog dart things. Mean, by way of an example, I can
tell by those teeth of yours that you’d be a man fond of The Louvin
Brothers.”
“Jesus oh, you’d be right about that.”
“Right, and yet those trousers you’ve on aren’t the trousers of a
Christian man, so how come you can appreciate the beauty in a song
about ‘Broad-minded is spelled S-I-N’ even when, by the looks of
things, a fella in the street saying that to you would be met with
little more than a half-smile and a duck o’ the mug?”
“Aye, that’s a fair comment, now.” Reaching the green to the fella
pumping tickets out the doohickey ‘side the till, I turn back to
the woman there and say “And maybe, mean, maybe I just kinda feel
sorry for him. As you yourself pointed out, many’s a wretched
word's tumbled off of a grog-lashed tongue afore now, and I dunno
how just it is to hold anyone wholly accountable for such blather
in the gloom of the hungover morn.”
A series of fragmented screams and rages ring out back my eyes, the
cursing and the threatening and the. . . “I’ve said things I didn’t
mean” I continue, wandering towards the doors of Screen 1. “I said
things a decade ago that still keep me awake, and God knows I meant
none of them.”
She nods solemnly, then stops. “Balls” says she, “I forgot t’grab a
bag o’ peanuts. It’d be a quare time I’d have if’n I forgot to take
a bag o’ peanuts to the pictures.”
She races off to the sweetie stand, joins the queue behind a young
lad in a Deicide shirt with a haircut juts out a foot and a half
from his head at a 36 or 37 degree angle. Sucking the air through
my teeth, I give the collar a tug a time or two and proceed towards
yon screen.
“Alright, Mel” I’m thinking. “Don’t be making me look a pillock
now, y’hear? This best be fucking amazing.”
II
Regarding Apocalypto
“That was fucking amazing!” a fella’s roaring as he bounds out the
doors of Screen 1 with the erection gnawing the denim out his jeans
and the arms flailing frantically about him. “By God I’ve rarely
saw a finer flick about men cut others heads off in all my born
days and nights and noontimes!”
“It was alright” says another, “But I tell you, it’s a rare Mayan
tribeswoman would’ve referred to her mother as ‘mom’.”
“How do you know?” yonder zealot counters. “Where you there,
perchance?”
The foyer bristles with such banter, great clods of debate and
critique and lamentation and highest praises all spilling out o’er
the front steps and down into the car-park and lipping and lapping
at the walls of the KFC across the way.
Fidgeting in my jacket pocket for a packet o’ cigarettes, I stop by
the ashtray-bin things set out either side of the toilet doors. Two
lasses are stood there also, one puffin’ on a pencil-lead roll-up,
the other grimacing her way through a counterfeit Regal King Size.
“The thing about it all” says the roll-up woman, “Regardless of
whether it was good or bad, and I’d put forward the notion that it
leaned nearer the former than the latter, regardless of all of that
says I, it was still worth paying for, and why? If for no other
reason than it shows to the multiplex honchos that folks are more
than willin’ to watch a film has subtitles, if’n they have the
opportunity to do so.”
“Pavin’ the way for the rest of the arthouse lads” says herself
there with the bootleg fag.
“Well now, I wouldn’t go that far. It’s hardly an arthouse film.
It's an action flick with pretensions, and in that regard it’s not
an inch removed from those Steven Seagal pictures where he kicks a
man’s throat but then no, it’s about the environment, or it’s about
Buddha, or whatever.”
“I wonder what Seagal thinks of the Jews, now when you mention him?”
“Funny, I was wondering the same thing this morning. Or Van Damme.
Would you say Van Damme has any opinion on the Zionists?”
“It would be odd, now, if he hadn’t.”
An A4 sheet’s been folded up and tucked away within my wallet, an
A4 sheet upon which a number of points were noted and jotted
throughout the screening. Of these notes and jots, the following
might be considered a fair representation;
“The humour in the first half hour is by equal turns refreshing and
god-awful. The dream sequence around the end of the first act is
wretched and ridiculous and very very shitty.”
“Despite Gibson’s braying to the contrary, the film says no more
about the fall of the Mayan civilisation or about its parallels
with Western civilisation in the here and now than The Omen III –
The Final Conflict said about abortion. It’s altogether possible
that folks may well discuss said issues when discussing said
feature-flicks, but that doesn’t mean the works themselves do
anything in particular to justify it.”
“The last hour and a half is astounding. Nowhere near as violent as
folks’ve been led to believe, I doubt it’s got a solitary drop o’
guts more than Braveheart, but by God it’s as invigorating as a
shot o’ raw ether to the bell-end for all of that. As the recent
Empire review noted also, with regards Jungle Runnin’ Trials, all
the Big Hits are in evidence; Jaguars, quicksand, hastily-fashioned
traps and tricks, darts fashioned from the poison of indigenous
critters. Plenty crowd-pleasing catastrophe rained down ‘pon the
bellies and the faces and the tongues of both hunter and hunted.”
“Also, if a man were to fall asleep in the trailers and wake up 100
minutes in, he’d swear on all that’s holy he’s found himself sat at
a screening of Predator. There are moments when Rudy Youngblood’s
performance is uncannily similar to that of, I believe, Sylvester
Stallone’s in John McTiernan’s masterpiece, particularly the bits
where he’s all mucked-up and lain o’er tree-branches glaring at the
pursuers down below. It’d be a braver man than me would suggest
Gibson hadn’t watched the aforementioned Jungle Horror a time or
two afore he got to growing that beard and pointing thon cameras.
Maybe he also watched Predator 2 with Danny Glover who’s too old
for this shit.”
“That birth shot was glorious. Best birth shot since Man With A
Move Camera, or maybe Warlock – The Armageddon. Special mention
also to the birthing in Lars Von Trier’s The Kingdom, and the
similarly conceived (no pun intended, unless it made you laugh, in
which case it was well intended, and worked out months ago)
tomfoolery in Takashi Miike’s Gozu.”
Being well-smoked and a touch knackered about the head-holes and in
dire need of something feels like it was kneaded together from the
sweat of the damned and the arse-gas of lepers from out thon
establishment across the way, I made a final visit to the Gents
afore departing.
Within said off-white cocoon, two gentlemen are stood either end of
the trough with the filths in the paws and the yaps all tuned to
Gibson. “It was like Quest For Fire meets the trailer for The New
World” says the one stood nearest the sink, fella with a Nirvana
lyric tattooed around the back of his neck. “Or Ninja Scroll meets
Pocahontas.”
“To tell you the truth” says the one nearest the rubber dispensary,
“I thought it resembled nothing so much as The Passion. That bit
with them wandering through the forests and the villages en route
to the city, lugging thon wood about o’er their shoulders, sure
wasn’t it as near as dammit to Christ ascending yon hill, with the
slow-motion and the eyes of the onlookers all empty and cold and,
save us, lest we forget the evil children.”
“Aye, he’s a wild man for a sprog afire wi’ the devil, that Gibson.”
As chance would have it, I emerge from the pishers just as the
woman in the purple cardigan from earlier is herself coming a-
dandering out the Ladies. “Well” says I, “What did you think?”
She shrugs. “It was alright, aye, was really good sometimes, was
fuckin’ shockin’ at others. You?”
“I enjoyed it” says I. “Mean, it was no Passion, but it was as good
an action flick as there’s been since Face Off. Gibson obviously
learned a thing or two from George Miller, sure as God.”
“Sure as God is right. By Noah’s testes, I was half expecting one
o’ thon youngsters to fling a boomerang at the poor bugger.”
Stepping out into the sapphire nighttime, I bid farewell to herself
there, and as I’m wandering o’er to the Poultry Shack I see sat
beside the bins the protester from the opening paragraph. “Hows
you?” says I. He grunts and wafts his hand. “Away t’fuck” says he.
“What’d I do?”
“What didn’t you do? ‘An old man high on lighter fluid stands
screeching at the crowds’” he recites. “‘His lips lost midst the
splurge of discombobulating foam done devoured the lower half of
his face. His feet stomping in the puddles ‘pon the steps, his
right fist waving manic’. . . ‘roaring and barking and threatening’”
I run a hand about the back of my neck, stammering some. “Poetic
licence, like.”
“You ridiculed me by way of nulling any point I made, regardless of
how much sense said points done harboured. That’s right nice, oh
aye.”
He stands up, rubs the arse of his suit trousers, shakes the Rolex
a time and wanders on towards the BMW parked by the path front the
cinema. “Sorry” I shout. “I agreed with you, to some extent!”
He raises his right hand, then a digit, then lowers the lot.
“Poetic licence” I repeat, shuffling a shoe o’er the gravel.
Thanks folks.
Fling The Duke An Email or Sign The Mondo Guestbook
Regarding Mel Gibson
By the multiplex doors an old man high on lighter fluid stands
screeching at the crowds wandering in for to watch Apocalypto, the
new Mel Gibson picture, his lips lost midst the splurge of
discombobulating foam done devoured the lower half of his face. His
feet stomping in the puddles ‘pon the steps, his right fist waving
manic round his head, thus he stands roaring and barking and
threatening.
“Would you give your green to the Gestapo so quick?” says he,
“Would you forgive Adolf half as fast if’n he made a picture show
about a man eats a boar’s bollocks for to coax you?”
Men and women huddle against other as they pass him, ducking their
heads, raising hands to the sides o’ their faces.
“Save us, if’n only they’d had a jungle film at Nuremberg! Thon
boyo’s would’ve been free by the afternoon, wouldn’t they just?”
Wandering up the steps, I’m slipping my hands into my pockets,
lowering my eyes, watching the rain pit-patting off of the
concrete. As I’m approaching him, the old fella steps front of me,
blocking my path. “You” he says, raising a finger. “What say you,
y'craggy-toothed faggot?”
I cautiously raise the mug. A cluster of tiny red and white spots
marks the end of his nose, same spots friends of mine used to
exhibit round the chops far-side of a fortnight spent scrunching a
bag fulla glue to the yaps. His eyes rattle with anger, his
shoulders trembling ‘neath his brown and yellow pullover.
“I say, what say you? Will you sleep well tonight knowing you done
shoved another tenner into thon skitter-faced get’s well-bustlin’
coin-sack?”
I give a shrug. “I like his films” I say. “I don’t have to like
him.”
“Oh is that right? And so he could say whatever he felt like
saying, he could stand up afore the laws of the world and say ‘In
case you were wondering, the gays killed Mohammad’ or ‘Incidentally
now, I must remark upon the blacks, for they’re a sore bunch o’
bastards’ or ‘What if we just set fire to the immigrants, would
anybody really miss them?’ and so long as he made a film about a
man gets whipped and spat on every couple years it’d be dandy-o? Is
that the gist of the situation?”
“Well”, says I, giving an apologetic twirl of the shoe, “Many’s an
arsehole’s produced a work of wonder afore now. I no more care for
Gibson’s stupid, twisted banter than I care for that uttered by D.W
Griffith or Leni Riefenstahl. But I still think all three have made
incredible motion pictures, arseholes or no.”
“He was drunk” a woman in a purple cardigan shouts. “Folks say a
lot of things when they’re drunk. I told me ma I was pregnant one
night I was wrecked on porter, and by Christ I’ve never even
flicked me own bean.”
“He crafts exquisite spectacles” says another.
“Spectacles, is it? I think I need spectacles, for I can hardly
believe what I’m seeing! A crowd from here to Auschwitz lining up
for observe the twisted brain-farts o’ some hateful Nazi bastard
just cause it has a bit where a cat bites the lips off of somebody’
s face.”
This said, he drops to his knees and roars to the heavens. “C’mon
then, Riggs!” shouts he, “C’mon y’great whelp of a goon, c’mon then
and call me to my face a beak-mugged money-huddlin’ torn-cock
swine, c’mon and tell me here and now! Where’s my phone-call,
where's my apology? Are you a man at all, or perchance are you as
the ropes o’ jelly dangle ‘twixt a cow’s fandango followin’ a good
solid calving?”
Walking on across the foyer, I turn to the woman in the purple
cardigan. “Still” says I, “You can see his point, sure as God, and
I wonder now how I can feel anything at all for those protesters
who stood up at the ballet in London Coliseum there for to shout
down Simone Clarke, on account of her being all BNP, when here I am
wandering happily t’wards the ticket booth for to pay to see the
latest Mel Gibson?”
“Did you support the protesters?”
“Well yeah, mean, the British National Party are a buncha
malignant, vicious, cancerous fuckers. All the same, mind you, she
was just performing a ballet, she wasn’t shooting swastikas out her
hoo-hah or nothin’.”
The brain jiving and jagging and jiggering ‘thin my skull like an
arse fulla jackals, I’m pressing a finger and thumb ‘gainst my
eyes, grimacing some. “This is gon’ have me awake for a month” I’m
sighing. “Why couldn’t he have blurted something I agree with, for
fucks sakes.”
“What does it matter” says she. “Mean, who knows what shit Orson
Welles or Pasolini or Lucio Fulci maybe gabbled when pished? Nobody
knows, because they gabbled it back in the day, back before anyone
gave a shit what drunken celebrities might splurge far-side of a
ruction with the fuzz.”
“Anyway” she adds, reaching for her purse, “It’s a flick about the
Mayans. What difference what he thinks of Jews in the 20th or 21st
Century? It’s surely not gon’ have anything to do with this.”
“But see, now” says I, “Pasolini, blessed Pasolini, thon was a
Marxist of impeccable intellect and humanity and sense, and when I
see, say, The Gospel According To Matthew or The Decameron or Salo,
I see that worldview fairly burning the celluloid afore me, whether
it’s set in Biblical times or Medieval times or whenever. By thon
same token, if’n perchance there’s some racist, right-wing ideology
slinking about the corners of Gibson’s head, it’s more likely than
not gon’ show up in his work whether it’s set last week or in the
footfalls of the dinosaurs.”
“So then you react to that, and you say that’s bullshit, but I like
this, with the frog dart things. Mean, by way of an example, I can
tell by those teeth of yours that you’d be a man fond of The Louvin
Brothers.”
“Jesus oh, you’d be right about that.”
“Right, and yet those trousers you’ve on aren’t the trousers of a
Christian man, so how come you can appreciate the beauty in a song
about ‘Broad-minded is spelled S-I-N’ even when, by the looks of
things, a fella in the street saying that to you would be met with
little more than a half-smile and a duck o’ the mug?”
“Aye, that’s a fair comment, now.” Reaching the green to the fella
pumping tickets out the doohickey ‘side the till, I turn back to
the woman there and say “And maybe, mean, maybe I just kinda feel
sorry for him. As you yourself pointed out, many’s a wretched
word's tumbled off of a grog-lashed tongue afore now, and I dunno
how just it is to hold anyone wholly accountable for such blather
in the gloom of the hungover morn.”
A series of fragmented screams and rages ring out back my eyes, the
cursing and the threatening and the. . . “I’ve said things I didn’t
mean” I continue, wandering towards the doors of Screen 1. “I said
things a decade ago that still keep me awake, and God knows I meant
none of them.”
She nods solemnly, then stops. “Balls” says she, “I forgot t’grab a
bag o’ peanuts. It’d be a quare time I’d have if’n I forgot to take
a bag o’ peanuts to the pictures.”
She races off to the sweetie stand, joins the queue behind a young
lad in a Deicide shirt with a haircut juts out a foot and a half
from his head at a 36 or 37 degree angle. Sucking the air through
my teeth, I give the collar a tug a time or two and proceed towards
yon screen.
“Alright, Mel” I’m thinking. “Don’t be making me look a pillock
now, y’hear? This best be fucking amazing.”
II
Regarding Apocalypto
“That was fucking amazing!” a fella’s roaring as he bounds out the
doors of Screen 1 with the erection gnawing the denim out his jeans
and the arms flailing frantically about him. “By God I’ve rarely
saw a finer flick about men cut others heads off in all my born
days and nights and noontimes!”
“It was alright” says another, “But I tell you, it’s a rare Mayan
tribeswoman would’ve referred to her mother as ‘mom’.”
“How do you know?” yonder zealot counters. “Where you there,
perchance?”
The foyer bristles with such banter, great clods of debate and
critique and lamentation and highest praises all spilling out o’er
the front steps and down into the car-park and lipping and lapping
at the walls of the KFC across the way.
Fidgeting in my jacket pocket for a packet o’ cigarettes, I stop by
the ashtray-bin things set out either side of the toilet doors. Two
lasses are stood there also, one puffin’ on a pencil-lead roll-up,
the other grimacing her way through a counterfeit Regal King Size.
“The thing about it all” says the roll-up woman, “Regardless of
whether it was good or bad, and I’d put forward the notion that it
leaned nearer the former than the latter, regardless of all of that
says I, it was still worth paying for, and why? If for no other
reason than it shows to the multiplex honchos that folks are more
than willin’ to watch a film has subtitles, if’n they have the
opportunity to do so.”
“Pavin’ the way for the rest of the arthouse lads” says herself
there with the bootleg fag.
“Well now, I wouldn’t go that far. It’s hardly an arthouse film.
It's an action flick with pretensions, and in that regard it’s not
an inch removed from those Steven Seagal pictures where he kicks a
man’s throat but then no, it’s about the environment, or it’s about
Buddha, or whatever.”
“I wonder what Seagal thinks of the Jews, now when you mention him?”
“Funny, I was wondering the same thing this morning. Or Van Damme.
Would you say Van Damme has any opinion on the Zionists?”
“It would be odd, now, if he hadn’t.”
An A4 sheet’s been folded up and tucked away within my wallet, an
A4 sheet upon which a number of points were noted and jotted
throughout the screening. Of these notes and jots, the following
might be considered a fair representation;
“The humour in the first half hour is by equal turns refreshing and
god-awful. The dream sequence around the end of the first act is
wretched and ridiculous and very very shitty.”
“Despite Gibson’s braying to the contrary, the film says no more
about the fall of the Mayan civilisation or about its parallels
with Western civilisation in the here and now than The Omen III –
The Final Conflict said about abortion. It’s altogether possible
that folks may well discuss said issues when discussing said
feature-flicks, but that doesn’t mean the works themselves do
anything in particular to justify it.”
“The last hour and a half is astounding. Nowhere near as violent as
folks’ve been led to believe, I doubt it’s got a solitary drop o’
guts more than Braveheart, but by God it’s as invigorating as a
shot o’ raw ether to the bell-end for all of that. As the recent
Empire review noted also, with regards Jungle Runnin’ Trials, all
the Big Hits are in evidence; Jaguars, quicksand, hastily-fashioned
traps and tricks, darts fashioned from the poison of indigenous
critters. Plenty crowd-pleasing catastrophe rained down ‘pon the
bellies and the faces and the tongues of both hunter and hunted.”
“Also, if a man were to fall asleep in the trailers and wake up 100
minutes in, he’d swear on all that’s holy he’s found himself sat at
a screening of Predator. There are moments when Rudy Youngblood’s
performance is uncannily similar to that of, I believe, Sylvester
Stallone’s in John McTiernan’s masterpiece, particularly the bits
where he’s all mucked-up and lain o’er tree-branches glaring at the
pursuers down below. It’d be a braver man than me would suggest
Gibson hadn’t watched the aforementioned Jungle Horror a time or
two afore he got to growing that beard and pointing thon cameras.
Maybe he also watched Predator 2 with Danny Glover who’s too old
for this shit.”
“That birth shot was glorious. Best birth shot since Man With A
Move Camera, or maybe Warlock – The Armageddon. Special mention
also to the birthing in Lars Von Trier’s The Kingdom, and the
similarly conceived (no pun intended, unless it made you laugh, in
which case it was well intended, and worked out months ago)
tomfoolery in Takashi Miike’s Gozu.”
Being well-smoked and a touch knackered about the head-holes and in
dire need of something feels like it was kneaded together from the
sweat of the damned and the arse-gas of lepers from out thon
establishment across the way, I made a final visit to the Gents
afore departing.
Within said off-white cocoon, two gentlemen are stood either end of
the trough with the filths in the paws and the yaps all tuned to
Gibson. “It was like Quest For Fire meets the trailer for The New
World” says the one stood nearest the sink, fella with a Nirvana
lyric tattooed around the back of his neck. “Or Ninja Scroll meets
Pocahontas.”
“To tell you the truth” says the one nearest the rubber dispensary,
“I thought it resembled nothing so much as The Passion. That bit
with them wandering through the forests and the villages en route
to the city, lugging thon wood about o’er their shoulders, sure
wasn’t it as near as dammit to Christ ascending yon hill, with the
slow-motion and the eyes of the onlookers all empty and cold and,
save us, lest we forget the evil children.”
“Aye, he’s a wild man for a sprog afire wi’ the devil, that Gibson.”
As chance would have it, I emerge from the pishers just as the
woman in the purple cardigan from earlier is herself coming a-
dandering out the Ladies. “Well” says I, “What did you think?”
She shrugs. “It was alright, aye, was really good sometimes, was
fuckin’ shockin’ at others. You?”
“I enjoyed it” says I. “Mean, it was no Passion, but it was as good
an action flick as there’s been since Face Off. Gibson obviously
learned a thing or two from George Miller, sure as God.”
“Sure as God is right. By Noah’s testes, I was half expecting one
o’ thon youngsters to fling a boomerang at the poor bugger.”
Stepping out into the sapphire nighttime, I bid farewell to herself
there, and as I’m wandering o’er to the Poultry Shack I see sat
beside the bins the protester from the opening paragraph. “Hows
you?” says I. He grunts and wafts his hand. “Away t’fuck” says he.
“What’d I do?”
“What didn’t you do? ‘An old man high on lighter fluid stands
screeching at the crowds’” he recites. “‘His lips lost midst the
splurge of discombobulating foam done devoured the lower half of
his face. His feet stomping in the puddles ‘pon the steps, his
right fist waving manic’. . . ‘roaring and barking and threatening’”
I run a hand about the back of my neck, stammering some. “Poetic
licence, like.”
“You ridiculed me by way of nulling any point I made, regardless of
how much sense said points done harboured. That’s right nice, oh
aye.”
He stands up, rubs the arse of his suit trousers, shakes the Rolex
a time and wanders on towards the BMW parked by the path front the
cinema. “Sorry” I shout. “I agreed with you, to some extent!”
He raises his right hand, then a digit, then lowers the lot.
“Poetic licence” I repeat, shuffling a shoe o’er the gravel.
Thanks folks.
Fling The Duke An Email or Sign The Mondo Guestbook
