Paddington: A Nymphomaniac, Nihilist Masterpiece?

 Who's the bear that likes Marmalade sandwiches and is a sex machine to all the chicks?!

 Paddington. Apparently.

 This is what's to be inferred from the news that a new movie about Paddington Bear has been given a PG rating by censors because of sexual references.

 Those "sexual references," incidentally, consist of some bloke from Downton Abbey dressing up as a woman in one scene.

 I confess that I haven't actually seen the new Paddington film, and I suspect I never will. I'm actually allergic to any and all forms of childlike innocence. Still, I caught a synopsis of the plot on the radio earlier in a debate about the allegedly sexual nature of cross dressing.

 For the record, I don't think there's anything inherently sexual about men dressing up as women. For some reason that I've never really understood, it's a staple of British comedy and as a nation we seem to always find it uproariously funny. Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't, but it's never remotely sexual as far as I can detect.

Not pictured: Erotica.

 What should be troubling people more is the main thrust of the story. I don't mean anything sexual by that.

 According to reports, the plot revolves around Nicole Kidman's taxidermist trying to catch Paddington and stuff him. Again, non-sexually. 

 This seems like a confused message at best, as Paddington (major spoilers for the under four demographic) is, in fact, already a stuffed bear.

 Maybe not in the movie, but he's definitely a stuffed bear any time I've seen him in person. My mother has a stuffed Paddington bear from god knows how many years ago. I've known plenty of kids who had them in my own generation.

 So what is the message, here, exactly? Is the new Paddington movie in fact some sort of gritty prequel implying Nicole Kidman eventually succeeds, murders the bear and that's why he's now lying, dead eyed and full of stuffing, in your room?! Are we trying to tell the kids that all is futile, and that Nicole Kidman is some sort of cuddly-bear terminator?! Is the message that if you're special or unique, you will be hunted until the end of your days, gutted and left as a hollow shell of what you once were?

 The existence of actual stuffed Paddington bears is implication of all this and more.

 Which is way more traumatic than Hugh Bonneville in a dress. 

 Maybe it should have been an 18 certificate.

He's Not Dapper, And He Doesn't Make You Laugh.

 It's been a bumper week for sexist, pencil-dicked tosspots in the news.

 First came the shocking info that professional wanker Dapper Laughs had his show dropped by ITV. Not for being crushingly un-funny, but because he'd been caught making comments at a live appearance where he said that a female audience member was "gagging for a rape."

 It's kind of ironic that the only way I could ever find Dapper Laughs funny is if he went to jail and was viciously buggered against his will.

 Hot on the heels of Dapper "Cunt" Laughs and his show being cancelled, pick-up-artist Julien Blanc was in the news as a petition to keep him out of Britain gathered momentum.

 Blanc - who calls himself a "pick up artist" because the term "sad bellend" isn't a recognised profession in a lot of countries - is one of those people who travels the world, being paid to talk to men even more pathetic and sexless than himself, riling them up with misogynist rhetoric and trying to convince them that they can be the exact kind of attractive alpha male that he, himself, clearly isn't. He was just booted out of Australia after he said that white men in Japan were free to imitate him by walking around, grabbing women by the necks and forcing their heads against his penis whilst yelling "pokemon." I promise none of that sentence is made up. Sadly.

 When you're too uncouth and sexist for Australia, it's time to take a long, hard look at your life. I digress.

 I'd quite like to see the petition against Julien Blanc succeed and ban him from the UK, but I didn't actually sign it myself as I'd really like the petition to succeed with only female signatures on it. The entire female population of a country telling him to fuck off would be the ultimate justice, and I thoroughly encourage all the single ladies (ALL the single ladies) to tell this prick where to go. And the married ones, too.

 The real question, to my mind, is not how tossers of the Blanc/Laughs magnitude exist in the first place, but what, exactly, causes them? These people don't just spring up overnight. They're a product of society, and as a member of society, I think we've all clearly fucked up if this is what we're creating.

 Possibly Laughs and his ilk are proof that "lads' mags" really did have a negative impact on the Zeitgeist. At 27, he would be smack in the middle of the generation that grew up with Nuts and Zoo as their cultural touchstones during their formative, sexually charged years. Magazines that many of us thought were harmless enough - all the time ignoring the damage they may have been doing to the minds of the stupid and gullible.

 It could also be, perhaps, blamed on the tail end of the Thatcher/Reagan years. Kids who grew up in the nineties nicked their older brothers' videos saw gung-ho, ultra-macho movies from the eighties with shirtless, indestructible bodybuilders who shrugged off bullet wounds and laughed in the face of death. Real men were ultra-tough to the point of being invincible, and it led to a hell of a crisis of masculinity in the next generation.

 It's why there are no modern action stars - nobody believes that anyone of the modern generation can be tough, which is why Bruce Willis was about thirty in Die Hard, and now when we want a hero, we still turn to a nearly-sixty Bruce Willis. Modern men are so insecure in themselves they can only really trust action heroes of their dad's generation.

 Normally this doesn't result in anything worse than a few "Taken" movies, but amongst the truly dickless and impansied* it festered and wrankled. These guys knew they were pussies. They knew they weren't macho enough. They were scared of girls, scared they'd never lose their virginities. Fear turned to hate. And hate led them to the Dapper Laughs side.

 Fans of Julien "I'm Clearly Not Happy About My Girly Name" Blanc and Dapper "Suspected Micropenis" Laughs are seemingly actual grown men who are so insecure that they need classes on how to manhandle women. Think about that. Julien Blanc actually makes a living instructing adult males who don't fancy their chances against a girl in a fight and therefore need some pointers on how to physically assault someone half their size in the completely worthless hope of somehow getting laid instead of arrested.

 The solution to the problem is twofold, at this point. Either we get all the men who don't have the balls to talk to a real-life girl, give them a rifle and a parachute and drop them over Iraq in the hopes that the ones that make it back are at least now tough enough to build their own Tinder profile, or else we do something even more unthinkable: We try to get these guys to talk to actual women.

 The ones who don't get arrested or beaten up might actually have a shot at pulling their heads out of their asses.




*Dibs on that word. I think it's an original.

Movie Review: The Babadook.

If it's in a word, or in a look, this film might have worked better as a book...

 I've been looking forward to Australian horror movie The Babadook ever since I came across the impressively creepy trailer. For those unaware, a single mother with a problem child stumbles across a strange book ("Mr. Babadook") and after reading it, begins to suspect that the monster her son is obsessed with might not be imaginary.

 And it isn't. Except it is. Look, here's the problem: the opening two thirds of this film were great. Forgoing the normal horror movie rhythm of quiet moments interspersed with jump scares, the film is one long, tense, sustained note of dread and simmering madness. Or it is until it gets stupid.

 Generally speaking I try not to put spoilers in film reviews, but I really don't think I can talk about The Babadook without discussing the last act. So, if you want to drop out now and judge for yourself, all I'll say is that I'd give it three out of five, points for effort, and label it an interesting failure.




...still with me? Good.

 As single mum Amelia becomes more sleep deprived and stressed by her son's behaviour, she begins hallucinating Mister Babadook in the shadows everywhere she looks. In probably the creepiest scene, she lies in bed, terrified, as the Babadook slowly eases open the bedroom door, skittering into the room as a jerky, stop-motion hybrid of ventriloquist doll, serial killer, insect and mammal.


 Sadly, this is also the scene where everything goes to shit, as the Babadook possesses Amelia and she begins to grow increasingly hostile to her already problematic son. Which isn't bad, as horror plots go, except that we already saw "haunted parent goes mad" done in The Shining. It would be wrong to say The Babadook is derivative, but it's definitely fair to say its influences are on show. What really lets it down, however, is thuddingly heavy-handed symbolism and a devotion to its own metaphors above plot coherence.

 The only way to make this film scary, frankly, would be to have Amelia kill her son at the climax. Instead, the son fights back with home made weapons that briefly take us entirely out of the horror genre and into a Home Alone movie. Demon-possessed mothers trying to stab their children don't normally feature in scenes that draw laughs from an audience, but damned if people weren't giggling in the screening I saw.

 Eventually, Amelia overcomes the Babadook's hold on her and in the process, learns to protect her son. Because, in case the film didn't make it abundantly clear already (and fuck me, did it), The Babadook is an expression of her repressed grief over the death of her husband and her resentment of her son. This is spelled out when, finally confronting the Babadook, Amelia is made to live out the moment of her husband's death again. Which is already un-subtle from a story point of view, but becomes outright naff when bad CGI is employed for no real reason.

 The film then takes another unexpected turn when the Babadook goes to live in the basement. Yes, really. No, I don't know why, either. One minute the Babadook is an analogy for fear and repression, the next it's a real creature, and even the film makers themselves can't decide which is the case, so eventually settle for having it live in the protagonist's basement and fed on worms from the garden. Again, I'm not making that up. We get a happy ending in which Amelia learns to get over the loss of her husband and rebuild her relationship with her son, but also has to feed the monster in her basement. Which is yet another representation of her buried emotions. Except it's not, because it's a literal monster she has to feed, because this whole film can't quite get the hang of metaphor.

 Horror is always difficult to pitch correctly. Too subtle and the audience may not cotton on, too bold and things get trashy. In the case of The Babadook, however, what should have been subtle themes are instead used to bludgeon the audience over the head. It's possible that a longer run time may have given the eerie, nauseous qualities that are present in the first half more time to breathe and resulted in a better film. It may even have worked better as a TV series, giving time for the Babadook itself to be more ambiguous, the slide into madness much slower.

 As it stands, however, the film is ultimately a great buildup to what feels like a rushed, histrionic finale that never quite trusts its audience's intelligence.