Shut Your Beak…

At the movie theater yesterday there was a preview of a new film. An Indian woman had gone to England for some reason or other, and had met some guy, who then said something, which upset someone else, which set a chain of events in motion, probably resulting in death or despair or deportation or something.

Frankly I wasn’t paying a great deal of attention.

See, I used to like movies that critics described as ‘thought-provoking’, but these days I’m realizing that I’m far happier with movies that are ‘thought-repressing’.

Take ‘Kung-Fu Panda’, for example. Best movie I’ve seen in ages. A fat panda becomes the dragon warrior and uses his fat belly to repel the evil dude!!! And I went to see it twice!!! Of my own volition!!! I even learned the secret Eastern power of Exclamation Mark!

How does it stack up against Apocalypse Now? One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest? 2001: A Space Odyssey?

Well – none of them has a fulsome indigenous Chinese relative of the bear in them, for a start. But more importantly, none of them make me want to watch them again.

See, that’s the thing with really good movies. They usually take you from A to B. They take their time, build it up, and eventually reveal to you some truth or other that you might not have figured out by yourself.

At the end of the movie, you feel sated. There’s a medium – the film. There’s a message – war is bad. Or mental patients might not be mental. Or computers have irritating voices. But having experienced it once… is there any real need to see it again?

With Kung-Fu Panda, it’s just… hey, that monkey is Jackie Chan! And the Squirrel, or Possum, or whatever he is, he’s just like Yoda! Except more hairy.

It’s thinking at the top level. Recreation through Recognition via Repetition. It’s what we already know, with the words in a different order.

I don’t really have a problem with it.

Sorry.

By the way, there was supposed to be some clever deal here using Jack Black, the voice of the panda, who starred in the truly abysmal movie Shallow Hal, and one of my illustrated examples of a great movie (2001), in which H.A.L. the computer was a protagonist. And I’m showing you how I have no depth. Right? Geddit? Geddit?

Ah fuck it, I’m way too lazy to explain it to the likes of you.