I remember when it was all fields round this cinematic classic

I hate old people whinging about computers. Oh, things were better when we whittled a pencil ourselves and scratched our pointless missives onto an unforgiving block of stone, were they? Brilliant. Why don’t you get on with really living your life in a remote cave and leave the rest of us to all this fabulous technology?

The first article I read on the Guardian site this morning was this snobbish column by Joe Queenan. He’s pissed off that the biggest grossing films of all time – the not-adjusted-for-inflation version – are all blockbusters. And worse than that, they all needed computers to make them work. GASP! SHOCK! BLOODY FUCKING NORA! He’s also pissed off that they were all funded by American money. Jesus.

Apparently, no-one makes films for people who were born before 1990 anymore, with the entire movie industry aimed at (are you ready for this?) “adolescents and tykes”:

“Hollywood doesn’t mind if grown-ups come in and see the films they make. But they’d much prefer it if they arrived with a bunch of kids. Theirs, or somebody else’s. Strays even, orphans: the industry is not fussy.”

And after blustering about The Youth (aka, the scourge of the modern world), he bemoans the fact that the likes of Jaws and Indiana Jones have been beaten off the list by the Avatar and Harry Potter. Oh yeah, cos those two films were intellectually weighty fucking epics, weren’t they? I really learned a lot watching a giant shark and Harrison Ford legging it from an enormous ball.

He also has a go at Titanic, bitching on about how it’s more about the love story than the sinking of the ship. NICE POINT! I BET NO-ONE’S ARGUED THAT BEFORE! Aside from the fact that moan has been done so many times it makes John Locke look lucky, it’s not even a justifiable one. I actually quite respect the choice James Cameron made with Titanic’s storyline, mainly because if you tried to make an audience care about a thousand people you would fail miserably. Make them care about two, maybe a handful more, and you get them to care about the others automatically. Jesus, is this guy really so stuffy that he can’t figure that one out for himself?

Here’s the thing: I like indie films. I like intellectual, stimulating, made-for-20p, depressing and dreary films starring bleak people dying alone. In fact, I fucking love them. However, I have also been known to like a blockbuster or two now and again. According to this guy, the fact I would happily pick Lord of the Rings as my desert island DVD (I can have all of them: my blog, my rules) means I’m a fan of films made for “teenagers, small children, and people who don’t want to grow up”; and you know what, that’s fine. I’d rather be labeled as someone who doesn’t want to grow up than to spend the rest of my short life as boring as this old duffer Joe Queenan.

Miserable wanker.

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