The Mole had been working very hard all the morning, spring cleaning his little home. First with brooms, then with dusters; then on ladders and steps and chairs, with a brush and a pail of whitewash; till he had dust in his throat and eyes, and splashes of whitewash all over his black fur, and an aching back and weary arms. Spring was moving in the air above and in the earth below and around him, penetrating even his dark and lowly little house with its spirit of divine discontent and longing. It was small wonder, then, that he suddenly flung down his brush on the floor, said “Bother!” and “O blow!” and also “stuff this for a game of soldiers!” and bolted out of the house without even waiting to put on his coat. Something loud and brash and with an accent! was calling him imperiously, and he made for the steep little tunnel which answered in his case to the graveled carriage-drive owned by animals whose residences are nearer to the sun and air. So he scraped and scratched and scrabbled and scrooged and then he scrooged again and scrabbled and scratched and scraped, working busily with his little paws and muttering to himself, “Up we go! Up we go!” till at last, pop! his snout came out into the sunlight, and he found himself rolling in the warm grass of a thin grass merge next to an enormous shopping mall.

“Er, OK,” he said to himself. “Well, it’s better than whitewashing!” The sunshine struck hot on his fur, soft breezes caressed his heated brow, and after the seclusion of the cellarage he had lived in so long the clamour of youthful screams and chavvy insults across the car park fell on his dulled hearing almost like a shout. Jumping off all his four legs at once, in the joy of living and the delight of spring without its cleaning, he pursued his way across the car park till he reached the first few shops on the further side.

“Oi! Big nose!” said a spotty youth outside a big sign that said ‘The Gap’. “Wot you fucken lookin’ at?!” He was bowled over in an instant by the impatient and contemptuous Mole, who trotted along the side of the shops trying to ignore the other kids as they peeped from under their hoodies to see what the row was about. “Onion sauce! Onion sauce!” he remarked jeeringly, and was gone before they could think of a thoroughly satisfactory reply. Then they all started grumbling at each other. “Fag, slag! Give us a toke on that J, you mong-” “Up yours, cockmunch!” “You gay-” and so on, in the usual way; but, of course, it was then much too late, and the Mole was out of ear-range.

It all seemed too good to be true. Hither and thither through the Mall he rambled busily, along the shopfronts, past the fast food joints and the pound shops selling needless tat , finding everywhere teenage mums, miserable kids, damaged pensioners, overweight yobs - everything grim, and boorish, and bored. And instead of having an uneasy conscience pricking him and whispering, “Whitewash!” he somehow could only feel how jolly it was to be the only happy being among all these hate-filled citizens. After all, the best part of a holiday is perhaps not so much to be resting yourself, as to see all the other fellows busy dying inside.

He thought his happiness was complete when, as he meandered aimlessly along, suddenly he stood by the edge of a cinema. Never in his life had he seen a cinema before — this sleek, chrome, full-bodied corporate beast, chasing and chuckling, gripping things with a gurgle and leaving them with a laugh, to fling itself on fresh playmates that shook themselves free, and were caught and held again. All was a-shake and a-shiver — glints and gleams and sparkles, rustle and swirl, chatter and bubble. The Mole was bewitched, entranced, fascinated. By the side of the cinema he trotted as one trots, when very small, by the side of a man who holds one spellbound by exciting stories; and when tired at last, he stood at the ticket office and bought admission to Kung Fu Panda, while the cinema still chattered on to him, a babbling procession of the best stories in the world, sent from the heart of the earth to be told at last to the insatiable sea of tide-washed unwashed humanity.

As he stood there, a dark hole opened and swallowed him up. Screen 6. Dreamily he fell to considering what a nice snug dwelling place it would make for an animal with few wants and fond of a bijou cosy residence,. As he gazed at the swathe of adverts for cars and fat-drenched bad-for-you food, something bright and small seemed to twinkle down in the heart of it, vanished, then twinkled once more like a tiny star. The film was starting! But it could hardly be a star in such an unlikely situation; this was the panda, wasn’t it? Then, as he looked, it winked at him, and so declared itself to be comedian; and a small face began gradually to grow up round it, like a frame round a picture.

A white fat face, with whiskers.

A grave round face, with the same twinkle in its eye that had first attracted his notice.

Small neat ears and thick silky hair.

It was Jack Black!

Then the two creatures stood and regarded each other cautiously.

“Hullo, Mole!” said the Jack.

“Hullo, Jack!” said the Mole.

“Would you like to watch the movie?” inquired Jack presently.

“Oh, it’s all very well to talk,” said the Mole, rather pettishly, he being new to a cinema and cinema life and its ways.

Jack said nothing, but stooped and let down a drawbridge, and asked Mole to step on it and follow him into the screen…Then he held up his hand as the Mole stepped gingerly down. “Lean on that!” he said. “Now then, step lively!” and the Mole to his surprise and rapture found himself actually seated in the screen.

“This has been a wonderful day!” said he, as Jack smiled devilishly at him again, raising a naughty little eyebrow again. “Do you know, I’ve never been in a movie before in all my life.”

“What?” cried Jack, open-mouthed: “Never been in a — you never — well, I—what have you been doing, then?”

“Is it so nice as all that?” asked the Mole shyly, though he was quite prepared to believe it as he felt the movie swagger lightly around him.

“Nice? It’s the only thing,” said Jack solemnly, as he smiled and gurned again out into the dark. “Believe me, my young friend, there is nothing — absolutely nothing — half so much worth doing as simply messing about in movies. Simply messing,” he went on dreamily: “messing — about — in — movies; messing—”

“Yeah, OK, I get that” cried the Mole sullenly. “Messing. What else do you do?”

But was too late. The movie struck a rock full tilt. The dreamer, the joyous Jack Black, lay on his back his heels in the air, guffawing, well, devilishly. Again.

“— about in movies — or with movies,” Jack went on composedly, picking himself up with a pleasant laugh. “In or out of ‘em, it doesn’t matter. Nothing seems really to matter, that’s the charm of it. Whether you get away, or whether you don’t; whether you say anything worthwhile, or whether you just fuck about pointlessly, or whether you never say anything at all, you’re always busy, and earning millions, and yet you never have to do anything original in particular; and when you’ve done it there’s always something else to do, and you can do it if you like, but you’d much better not. Look here! If you’ve really nothing else on hand this morning, supposing we make a movie together? You just have to shout and say silly things.”

The Mole waggled his toes.

“Is that it?” he asked.

“I think so,” said Jack, “there are other people involved, but really they’re only looking at me. I just riff on my usual shit.”

“Even dressed as a panda?”

“Yep.”

But the Mole never heard a word he was saying after that. Absorbed in the new life he was entering upon, intoxicated with the sparkle, the ripple, the scents and the sounds and the sunlight, he trailed a paw in the gravy train and dreamed long waking dreams of graduating from Saturday Night Live and making fat wodges of dosh.

I’m angry. Like the Hulk.

Since Nolan’s Batman showed the Superhero genre how to do the decent thing, I’ve been living in hope that someone else might have the cajones to take up the baton and do something similar, or, imagine this, do something even better. It can’t be that difficult, surely? Some character development, some insight, an arc or two to follow to make you care for the protagonists…? If the very best 25-minute sitcoms can get you to give a rat’s ass about people rapidly sketched out in stricter time constraints, surely a 90-minute movie can take time out from the explosions and destruction to do something similar?

I was delighted, then, to take in the first 50 minutes of Will Smith’s new blockbuster, Hancock, which really was trying hard to do something different, and dammit if it wasn’t actually more engaging that the Nolan effort, at least initially.

Hancock is more than a little washed-up, he is, in fact, a total bum. An alcoholic who we first find sleeping it off on a bus stop bench in central LA, with a little kid pulling his arm and pointing into a TV shop window where numerous screens are showing a news report of an armed chase on the highway. Hungover and clumsy, Hancock flies off, and apprehends the villains, creating untold millions of dollars’ worth of damage in the process. It’s a very funny sequence, utilising some seamless CGI that doesn’t detract from Smith’s terrifically grumpy performance of a man interrupted mid-snore by the tedious duty of trying to do the right thing.

It’s this incompetent stab at fulfilling his duty that is proving his downfall in the eyes of the LA population. Destroying everything in his path to bring the bad guys to book, Hancock is simply rubbish at the way he goes about it, and gloriously short-tempered in response to his critics. Stinking of booze, looking like the bottom of a dumpster and quick to turn on the people he’s supposedly helping (”I can smell alcohol on your breath!” “That’s cause I’ve been drinking, bitch!”, or, when a tubby chap has a go: “Somebody should sue you!” “You know what? You should sue McDonalds, cuz they fucked you up!”) is no great way of getting the public to love him, either. But it’s very very funny, and the wordplay of the irritable is always well worth listening to, as any Victor Meldrew fan will attest.

This situation is added to very neatly when Hancock rescues idealistic PR man, Ray (Jason Bateman), who decides to improve the anti-hero’s status by sending him voluntarily to jail, so that he can appear to be taking responsibility for his mistakes, and giving LA time to realise they actually need him. Cue a seriously funny example of how to ensure you never get any trouble in prison ever…

At this point, I’m settling in very nicely to what’s been served up. Much of the story inbetween the laughs is actually quite serious, and there are moments where Hancock suffers a lonely sobriety that make you think there really is more to the man than just a funny drunk. A thread of darkness never hurt even the most comical of characters, and there’s that here, certainly.

And then you approach the hour mark, and it’s ruined. And I mean, ruined. Totally broken in half by a groan-making twist of such epic unnecessariness that if you’re planning on seeing this soon, I’d suggest you actually get up and walk out at the midway point. After Will Smith carries a very drunk Bateman up to his room and then wishes him a good night, do yourself a favour; leave. At that point, get up and go. The twist in the next scene is one of the worst I think I can ever remember.

Seriously. The huge paradigm shift in Psycho when Marion is killed and the stolen cash plot evaporates, the vampire reveal in the previously crime/road movie From Dusk ‘Til Dawn, both of these turned those films on their heads. But in a good way. Here, Man Alive, here it’s just awful. I won’t give it away, I’m not that mean, and I still have the goodwill of the first half implanted in the back of my mind, but had I been on my own I’d have screamed “Whyyyyyy?! at the screen. It’s really that painful.

What I wanted was Hancock to go back to jail after each call-out and work his way through some kind of redemption, and search out his turn-to-drink demons and face up to his loneliness. What I got was mess of exposition and easy answers that created a WHAM!BANG! finalé, and then faded to nothing in the dying seconds.

What an awful waste. Can you hear that roar? It’s my primal scream of rage calling The Dark Knight to come to the rescue.

first half
second half
overall

Ah! Puberty! Marvelous. Who can forget those first stirrings of unknown longings and yearnings? That world-shattering, life-changing and life-affirming process of physical changes where a child’s body becomes an adult body capable of…oh, let’s not beat about the bush (hoho)…reproduction. Ah, and in a stricter sense, yes; the term puberty refers to the bodily changes of sexual maturation rather than the psychosocial and cultural aspects of adolescent development but, heck, that period of psychological and social transition between childhood and adulthood is all mixed in too, isn’t it? You betcha.

Although there is a wide range of normal ages, on average girls begin the process of puberty about 1-2 years earlier than boys and reach completion in a shorter time. In males, testosterone is the principal sex steroid; it produces all the male changes characterized as virilization. And fuck me, what a multitude of sordidly beautiful and beautifully sordid lonely adventures that introduces. In boys, you see, testicular enlargement is the first physical manifestation of puberty and then, let’s be honest here guys, we get to exploration. God! Yes! How memorable is all that? Butterflies in the stomach, tremulous muscles, the whole sparkling learning curve in the shape of that wonderful first hands-on handsome tumescence!

Where does one go after that? Out of the bathroom, usually. But after that. After that?

Back in the bathroom about an hour later, and then again and again ad not at all nauseum.

Oh, it’s a mess - quiet at the back - but it’s a wonderful mess, and if the energy of it all is harnessed effectively and in time, it finally develops us into proper, upright - hey, steady, we’re on the growing-up curve here - young adults who might even stand a chance of tethering the raging storm of hormones, fear, excitement and happiness.

Alternatively, it could fuck you up so royally, you end up making Wanted.

Eleven and Twelve year old boys will love Wanted: the guns will look and feel reminiscent of something they have an unconscious urge to explore; the women are either airbrushed, angular, tattooed comic-book representations of their burgeoning sexual fantasies where sex is all about looking and never touching, or they’re fat shouty harridans they can with destroy without fear or compunction; the car and train stunts are acrobatically stupid and consequence-free; the morality is a foggy video-game cut-scene of misanthropy and New Age nonsense.

Wanted is filled with extraordinary images, which, if you’ve seen director Bekmambetov’s Day Watch or Night Watch, you’ll know all about, and some of them really are quite astonishing. But it has no heart and no soul, and is a violent misogynistic pile of shit from beginning to end.

(for a slo-mo shot of a keyboard smashing into someone’s face, and the flying dislodged keys spelling f - u - c - k - y - o - u as they tumble through the air)

The house was filled with the rich odour of the local power station, and when the light summer wind stirred amidst the trees of the garden, there came through the open door the heavy sulphurous stench of the local chemical plant.

From the corner of the divan of Persian saddle-bags on which she was lying, reading, as was her custom, Dawn could just catch the view of the two filthy cooling towers which, at this angle, offered a lens shaped window of light reminiscent of a gigantic va-

“-Dawn!”

Dawn blinked and looked away from the window.

In the centre of the room, clamped to an upright easel, stood a full-length portrait of a young woman’s…part. Dawn’s, in fact, who had been posing for the thing. It was, she’d been told at great length, Artistic. Big A.

And in front of it, some little distance away, was sitting the artist himself, Mitchell Lichtenstein, son of the way more famous ‘pop art’ pioneer Roy Lichtenstein. You know, the Wham! picture, and that. That guy.

As the painter looked at the gracious and comely form he had so skilfully mirrored in his art, a smile of pleasure passed across his face, and seemed about to linger there, smugly. But he suddenly started up, and closing his eyes, placed his fingers upon the lids, as though he sought to imprison within his brain some curious dream from which he feared he might awake.

“It is your best work, Mitchell, the best thing you have ever done,” said Dawn admiringly. “You’ll be a wow on the indie circuit, and there’s even a stab at mainstream, too. What with the trailer. You must certainly send it to the Gérardmer and Sundance festivals. All the arty crowd. The Academy is too large and too vulgar. Whenever I have gone there, there have been either so many people that I have not been able to see the pictures, which was dreadful, or so many pictures that I have not been able to see the people, which was worse.”

“I don’t think I shall send it anywhere,” Mitchell answered, tossing his head back in that odd way that used to make his friends laugh at him. “No, I won’t send it anywhere.”

Dawn looked at him in amazement.

“Not send it anywhere? Er, why? You do anything in the world to gain a reputation. And now, as soon as you may have one, you seem to want to throw it away. It’s, like, totally whack of you, for there is only one thing in the world worse than being on Entertainment Tonight, and that is not being on Entertainment Tonight. A portrait like this would set you far above all the young men in LA, and make the old men quite jealous, if old men are ever capable of any emotion.”

“I know you will laugh at me,”he replied,”but I really can’t exhibit it. I have put too much of myself into it.”

Dawn stretched herself out on the divan and laughed.

“Too much of yourself in it! Upon my word, Mitchell, it’s a picture of me! More specifically, it’s a picture of my-”

“Yes! I know! But it’s been such an effort. I mean, trying to put myself in the position of an eighteen year old girl with strong views on celibacy and emotional commitment.”

“I can see how a 50 year old man might say that. But I didn’t know you were so vain; but looking at this now, I really can’t see any resemblance between me, with my rose-leaved loveliness and this monstrous image. I mean, yeah, actually, what are you trying to do here, Mitch? Huh? It’s…shit, is what it is. It’s a shitting outrage.”

“Why, my dear Dawn, I thought we were on the same page. This is a primal image of a universal and timeless theme, Man’s fear of the Female. An attack on Man’s thrusting, conquering destructiveness, through which he ultimately brings about his own destruction.”

“It’s a snatch with spikes.”

“No, no, no. Well, yes, it is. But, no. Think of Narcissus, and you- well, of course you have an intellectual expression and all that. But beauty, real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins. Intellect is in itself a mode of exaggeration, and destroys the harmony of any face. The moment one sits down to think, one becomes all nose, or all forehead, or something horrid. Look at the successful men in any of the learned professions. How perfectly hideous they are!”

“Sits down? Hmm. And eviscerates the sofa, presumably. It’s a toot-toot with gnashers.”

“Dawn, please.”

“You’re turning me into a monster.”

“I’m turning you into a post-Feminist avatar. An avenging angel. A cultural icon of womanhood. A-”

“-vag with fangs?”

“You don’t understand me, Dawn,” answered the artist. “Of course. You shrug your shoulders? I am telling you the truth. There is a fatality about all physical and intellectual distinction, the sort of fatality that seems to dog through history the faltering steps of kings. It is better not to be different from one’s fellows.”

Dawn made a face.

Mitchell continued: “The ugly and the stupid have the best of it in this world. Look at all the anti-women blockbusters you’ll get this summer, subjugating women into mere symbols of vapid sexuality while the men do the hard work of heroism. Can you deny that?”

“Of course not.”

“This portrait is a million miles from those images.”

“I get that, of course. I think you’ve opened out a very interesting debate about the fear of burgeoning female sexuality.”

“Thank you.”

“You’ve also opened my legs to show a fanny with dentures.”

“It will make men fear women, Dawn. The power they have, the primal forces they possess.”

“It’ll also make them laugh and lose the whole point.”

Mitchell grimaced and looked away, then stared long and hard at the portrait. He shook his head and tried to smile, but if there was humour intended in the gesture, it died immediately.

“Still,” he said, at length, “it is funny when the Rottweiler eats the Goth’s severed bell-end and then chokes on the Prince Albert.”

“Oh aye,” agreed Dawn. “You’ve got something there. I’d keep that bit in.”

The look at each other for a beat.

“You know what I mean, Mitchell,” she says, rolling her eyes.