The Trib (39 page)

I tripped lightly from the park resolving not to buy any more papers. As An Emotional Fish once sang: ‘That's the trouble with reality, it's taken far too seriously,' and I hadn't really taken reality seriously since the ‘incident' on a Something Happens tour in 1995. The one with the lesbian witches.

Ah yes, the lesbian witches! We'd been touring a while, you see, and the distinction between a bit odd and utterly barking had been wearing thin. Boston, where we were playing, was Salem, Massachusetts territory and a support band made up of witches was par for the course. The fact that they were also lesbians made it mildly more original but Boston's
Buy and Sell
magazine was full of second-hand gear from previously failed similar bands. The lesbian witch market was a notoriously competitive one. The dressing room was below the stage, so while they played, and we read poetry and discussed manly things, we couldn't help but hear their set.

Forty minutes in it took on murderous intent. The vocals had given way to insane Apache-like whooping and the onstage dancing seemed to have an American Indian war party quality to it. It felt like the ceiling would soon come in on us. What was happening on stage we wondered?

Our best guess was that it was some kind of Indian massacre. The most likely scenario was that a member of the audience was being burned alive on stage as the band danced around him naked. There were other theories but this seemed the least far fetched. It was time to investigate. It wasn't quite what we'd expected. They had just all gone a bit mad, jumping up and down and running around. You'd find more choreography in a bouncy castle. It was very intense so we stood side stage, sipping beer and trying to share the intensity.

Then we noticed the drummer. She had taken her top off. We gulped beer in unison. We were just the main band come to offer the support act a little morale uplift. We certainly weren't four lads from Dublin come to look at the topless drummer. Topless female drummers were commonplace to us, our demeanour suggested.

She was remarkable. Her torso made Christian Bale look flabby. There literally wasn't an inch of excess flesh and as she flayed that kit into submission we stood enthralled. Nothing north of the border moved an inch, literally nothing!

I handed her a towel as she left the stage. ‘Great gig,' I said. ‘Thanks, man,' she replied. I've thought about the way she said ‘man' ever since. I don't think it was an insult. As she dried herself off the reality/unreality debate ignited briefly in my head. I was going to enquire what sticks she used but thought better of it. Ah, we band of brothers.

21 November 2010

‘N
o mud ducks!' we used to say. We were unsure where it came from but it was written on the dressing room door to encourage only models and aspiring soap stars to enter. It must have worked. We were left safely unmolested for our entire time in music. I thought I was finished with that phrase. Until I saw the ladies of PricewaterhouseCoopers!

Keen to be as PC as the next man, I banged the table. ‘What kind of narrow-minded, sexist beasts would rate female co-workers on a scale of one to ten,' I cried. ‘Oh, those sleazy bean-counters.' I pointed the story out to our accountant, Doreen (an eleven, easily!), and our foreign affairs correspondent, Maureen (a twelve, possibly a thirteen, some days even a fourteen!).

But then the strangest thing about the story struck me: All of the girls in the PwC story were beautiful. Eleven random Irish people, all stunning: what are the chances? There were no exceptions. They were eerily similar in looks, with a whiff of The Stepford Wives about them, but you couldn't argue with the attractiveness. The phrase ‘No mud ducks,' just fell from my lips.

The following day, another photo adorned many papers. This time it was the girls, and one boy, of TCD. It was yet another ‘Faux Nude Calendar to Raise Funds for Charity'. It too was notable for an absence of mud ducks. There wasn't one amongst them. ‘This country is in a mud duck crisis,' I thought, ‘and once we had so many.'

And didn't we just. Not many people know this but the 1983 UCD calendar, then simply called ‘Semi Naked Hairy Students' was withdrawn due to a lack of same. Only two students could be found that wouldn't frighten the children and the idea of a two-month calendar simply wouldn't wash, much like its subjects. The follow up, ‘Hairy Lads in Wool', was also cancelled while ‘Hairy Girls in Sweaters' was a surprise hit in Denmark. It was the era of gender uncertainty. The engineer handbook of 1985 gave the class breakdown as 120 male, twenty female (definitely) and sixty students about whose gender the college authorities commented that they ‘wouldn't like to say'.

So what's happened? When did Ireland become beautiful? Somewhere along the way, improved diet, foreign travel, changes in the gene pool or exposure to
Beverly Hills 90210
seems to have made us a beautiful race of people. Children born after 1988 would seem to bear no comparison to the misshapen, malnourished and wizen creatures that brought them into this world.

This will have repercussions for those of us born prior to 1980. As the years pass and the new beautiful ones are in the ascendency, ‘mud ducks' born before the beauty miracle will become rarer and rarer. People will travel from over the world to see us. We'll be lucky if we aren't exhibited in zoos.

‘Look,' the tourists will say, ‘you can almost see the famine in their eyes.' I had experience of this once in Davis, California. We played there. The audience were unspeakably beautiful. Young, fit, tanned and toned, they looked at the stage with a mixture of pity and awe. Mostly pity though, which is not a great card to play when trying to seduce someone. Useful in marriage, however.

Film reviews

15 November 2009

2
012,
the new blockbuster from Roland Emmerich, is something of a disaster. But what else is new? You would think we had enough doomsday already, what with a global economic recession, never mind Hollywood being intent right now on remaking all your favourite 1980s movies. But Emmerich can't help himself. This is the guy who zapped the planet with extra-terrestrials in
Independence Day,
shook us almost to death with
Godzilla
, then fridge-freezered us en masse in
The Day After Tomorrow
. Now he's moving the ground beneath our feet.
2012
begins in 2009 as the sun begins emitting dangerous radiation and picks up in 2012 when the earth's core melts magnificently.

Stuck in the middle of this oncoming cataclysm is a sprawling ensemble cast running for their life. There's Chiwetel Ejiofor's Adrian Helmsley, a level-headed scientist who predicts the disaster. There's Danny Glover as the US president, and he's exactly how you would imagine Obama in three years' time: cranky and crumpled like an old suit. There's Woody Harrelson's quirky turn as prophet of doom Charlie Frost. While centre stage is John Cusack's Jackson Curtis, a crap novelist, limousine driver and ex-husband of Kate (Amanda Peet). His job is not just to save his kids, get rid of the ex-wife's annoying surgeon boyfriend, reunite his nuclear family and somehow get his family to the secret location where the world's governments have built mysterious ‘ships' to save an elect few [this is a thinly-disguised recession movie: the world is collapsing, the plutocrats are out to save themselves, good luck if you're an ordinary punter]. But he also has to tread a fine balance between solemn and cheesey.

Emmerich, meanwhile, goes to work with the Easi-Singles like a man making school lunches. Kate's beau (Thomas McCarthy) stands in a supermarket aisle. ‘I feel there is something coming between us,' he tells her. There certainly is. A giant crack appears right between them which then tears the supermarket into a canyon. Then we watch a spoof Arnold Schwarzenegger tell California: ‘It seems to me that the worst is over.' Thirty seconds later, California pretty much ceases to exist. Giant earthquakes toss the state into the sea, solving in one shake California's spiraling budget deficit. The inhabitants of
2012
are screaming. In the stalls, the audience is screaming laughing.

2012
careers with the campy tone of a 1970s disaster movie. I'm happy to get into the spirit, slurping on its hokum with only the occasional gulp of disbelief – for Emmerich cannot surprise you with his silliness. But for all his earthquakes, neither can he move you. Not once do you get a wobble in the gut, a stir of adrenalin, a rush of feeling for a character. It's mass destruction on a comic-book scale. Worse, whatever direction our hero travels in, the dismantling of the earth follows conveniently just inches behind. All that's left for you to do is figure out who among the film's many Russian characters will be killed off by our disaster-meister. (Answer: pretty much all of them). Our American heroes are never in doubt.

2012
is the kind of disaster movie where everybody has to keep telling you it is the end of the world. Now, you would assume most people who go to feed on this kind of falderal know exactly what they're in for. But Emmerich has absolutely no trust in his audience. Old bums are wheeled out wielding The End Is Nigh slogans. The US president tells us, ‘The world as we know it will soon come to an end.' Soon, everybody's mouthing it, with dialogue being delivered on screen as if it were written in bold underline with exclamation marks. (‘You need to read this! You need to read this now!!!' says one). All this leads us to believe Emmerich doubts his ability to communicate the importance of what's happening on screen. So he dials in the music on high alert. Or, failing that, he has a character comment on the patently obvious. From an aeroplane, Hawaii looks like a melted Terry's Chocolate Orange. ‘Thiz iz not good,' a soon-to-be-killed-off Russian tells us. Really? How so?

I put much of this down to the fact Emmerich believes you won't pick up on his telling details because you're so busy being wowed by his special effects. And the CGI is impressive. On a scale of one to ten, it goes to eleven. Having discarded any interest in human interplay, the Stuttgart native opts for global blitzkrieg. He demolishes Rio de Janeiro's Christ the Redeemer statue. He rolls a decapitated St Peter's Basilica around the screen like it was the Pope's salt shaker. He drops an aircraft carrier onto the White House. He sinks whole cities into the sea. He must have been a terror as a toddler.

You start to wonder, too, what someone like James Cameron could do with this kind of CGI muscle. But the thought is quickly squashed as Emmerich moves whole continents at finger snap. I imagine it was hell in the effects studio:

‘I'm afraid, Mr Emmerich, we can't make the global destruction any bigger.'

‘Say vhat? It must be bigger!!'

‘But Mr Emmerich, the computer is on the brink of a meltdown. And anyway, we've already blown everything up.'

‘Vhat! Vhat! But I vhant to blow up ze world again, again!! NOW!'