Unguilty, or Five Films I Really Like That I Definitely Shouldn't Really Like But I Do

So blogging didn't really work out for me for the last, ooh, all of 2015.  But this is 2016, baby, and we're strapping the typing gloves back on and kicking things off with a good old-fashioned listicle, like what Ma used to make.  There will be opinions, and there will be capital letters.

This latest triumphant return to the blogosphere came out of a pleasant conversation on the Docklands Light Railway, which is sometimes a magical urban safari skyline, and sometimes sweaty and crowded and full of people who haven't yet learned to take their backpack off and put it on the floor, just like any other tube line, and then what is the point of you DLR just be underground think you're so fancy all up in the sky but you're NOT.

I refuse to call these guilty pleasures because to hell with the idea that a pleasure should be guilty, the mixing of high and low culture produces some of greatest cultural landmarks, namely The Muppets etc etc etc blargh blargh bleurgh starting listing the films already.  What this is instead, is a list of films that I will openly admit to liking while a deep-rooted sense of shame coils around my lower intestine. I know they are not good films, either artistically or morally. I am not proud of myself for liking them. But somewhere along the way, something went very wrong in my cerebral cortex and I wound up with a bunch of DVDs* taking up space in my life of which, whenever someone stumbles across them, I have to say, "Oh, well, yeah, y'know, but like, actually it's got this one really good…" and then trail off into justly abashed silence.

And these aren't ironic either, or films I watch to make fun of, or films I think have an unfairly negative reputation.  There are whole different lists for those. These are bad films and I really like them.

Have mercy on my soul.

5) Night at the Museum, and Night at the Museum 2: Another Night, Another Museum (or whatever) (2006/2009)

Ok.  Ok.  I know.  I just.  Bear with me here.

I know it has a 44% Rotten Tomatoes score (and that's the first one).  I know it has a scene where a monkey repeatedly slaps Ben Stiller in the face (actually, screw you, that's an entirely valid reason to enjoy a film).  I know it has Ricky Gervais putting in a level of effort that is only visible on an atomic level.

But.

I think, quite simply, the reason either of these two films are on my rainy day playlist is that they occupy the perfect centre of the Venn diagram between two things I like very much: movies with gangs where the members all have different special abilities, and the past.  All the members of the gang have special abilities, and they are all from the past.  This is not rocket science.

And the sequel, while lazy and derivative, had more people in the gang who were more from the past, and one of them was Amelia Earhart, so...feminism?

Basically, Owen Wilson is a tiny cowboy and Steve Coogan is a tiny Roman Centurion, and they're enemies and then become unlikely friends. It's both heart-warming and hilarious. Leave me alone.

SO HEARTWARMING

(Honourable Mention: National Treasure, for exactly all the reasons you think.)


4) Down With Love (2003)

Ugh. Ok, so. Ugh. Yeah.

Down With Love, a 2003 'homage' to early 60s romantic comedies starring Renee Zellweger and Ewan McGregor…no, I can't even finish this sentence.  There's already too much terrible. It's not that any of those things or people are terrible in themselves, exactly, but somehow when you combine them into one movie, it's a perfect storm of ugh.

Firstly, let's not forget that 2003 pre-dates the serious revival of interest in the feminist movement and things like the 'third wave' and 'post-feminism' were still grimly clinging on by their pink-painted-because-they-definitely-chose-it-themseves-and-it's-empowering-and-not-because-of-gendered-societal-norms fingertips. When you combine that with the sexual mores of the 1960s, in which the film is set, it's just a recipe for ugh, ugh and more ugh. Zellweger is Barbara Novak, plucky girl author of best-selling women's sex book about how to give up men and achieve equality in the workplace, and McGregor is Catcher Block (yep), the quickly-becoming-obsolete Don Draper-esque men's magazine journalist. Oh, but wait.

Between Renee's plan for workplace equality being 'replace sex with chocolate' (WOMEN LIKE CHOCOLATE, SOMETIMES MORE THAN SEX WITH MEN, THOSE CRAZY BROADS), Ewan's plan to nail Renee being 'lie about identity, emotionally manipulate woman into having feelings, bang', and the whole thing turning out to be an elaborate plan to ensnare Ewan into marriage, it could probably send the progress of women's rights back to the Sixties single-film-reel-edly if broadcast with enough frequency. In the name of feminism, we should be hunting it down and scouring its existence from the face of the earth.

But I really like it.

Why do I like it? It's super fun to look at and the design is awesome - it's Sixties, but it's our dumb idea of what the Sixties were like.  Renee and chain-smoking best friend/editor Sarah Paulson (of Studio 60 fame) swish around Manhattan in capes and stupid hats and I want all the things they have in this film. Renee has a remote controlled fireplace. A remote controlled fireplace.

Ahem.

And it's shot in a really fun way, with lots of split screen and simultaneous conversations and general badinage leading to the most inoffensive innuendoes a PG-13 certificate can muster.  In other words, if you've ever seen a Doris Day/Rock Hudson vehicle, then it's pretty much that, only with not quite enough irony or commentary to make it smart.

There is a part of me that knows it's not really ok to switch off your values for the ninety minutes it takes to watch a stupid film. I know the 'Battle of the Sexes' stuff on show here is retrogressive and not handled smartly enough to be a 21st century take on 20th century attitudes. But I think we're smart enough to watch problematic things, know they're problematic, and enjoy them all the same. More on that later.

Also there's a remote controlled fireplace, and David Hyde Pierce** gets swallowed by a sofa bed. Some days, I don't need much more than that.

Also Ewan McGregor makes this face.

3) Treasure Planet (2002)

Let's be clear: this is not on the list because it's a Disney film.  It's on the list because it's an utterly forgettable Disney film.  As you may be able to tell from the super cryptic title, it's Treasure Island IN SPACE.  That's pretty much it.  It's fairly faithful to the original novel - obviously not a patch on the Muppets version, but what is? - with the minor tweaks of making the ship's captain female (good), voiced by Emma Thompson (bad), and making Ben Gunn a comedy robot sidekick voiced by Martin Short (BAD BAD VERY BAD).

I mean, objectively, it's just disappointing.  It has a lot of individual things to recommend it but they never quite add up into a compelling whole. The animation is beautiful - Disney finally (in 2002) getting to grips with mixing CGI and hand-drawn animation (SPACE WHALES), plus doing this create-a-360-degree-virtual-set-now-manouvre-the-camera-like-it's-live-action thing, which means that the Outer Space in question has, well, space and depth and dimensions to it. It's pretty.

Basically, this feels like an animator's pet project, a really cool art school exercise and writers, what writers? We don't need writers. Get outta here. But the art, alas, is not why I like it.

So why do I like it? IT'S TREASURE ISLAND IN SPACE.  Troubled-but-cute teenage protagonist Jim Hawkins is a junior delinquent with an Absent Father so it's also TREASURE ISLAND IN SPACE WITH DADDY ISSUES. It gives me feelings.

So yeah, if you mentally delete all the parts with the robot, it's basically Catcher in the Rye meets Star Wars, and that is just fine with me.

MUCH EARLY 00'S SUCH ANGST SO HAIR WOW

2) Sliding Doors (1998)

I actually used to hold this up as an example of romantic comedy done well.  Smart, I would say. Funny and charming, I would say.  John Hannah, I would say.  But I watched it again and ah jeez, it's just terrible.

The 'smart' 'thought-provoking' conceit that Gwyneth Paltrow's life diverges into two distinct timelines (Gwyneth Prime and Gwyneth Beta is how the film does not refer to them) depending on whether she catches a tube or not is, let's face it, the most first year philosophy undergraduate idea ever, and isn't quite rescued by the eleventh-hour magical realism of the timelines converging.  It's aged very badly, sort of an unintentional period piece, from the weird-looking London Underground trains to brandy being the casual tipple of choice for partying yuppies. Forget every BuzzFeed article you have ever read, the most 90s thing to ever happen is Gwyneth Paltrow smoking in a bar while John Hannah tells her she can easily get another job. (As if to compound this, she does. She finds it in a printed newspaper.) And whatisthedeal with the bizarrely heavy-handed product placement for Grolsh? In my twenty-five years of living, I have yet to encounter anyone who says, "Let's go out for a [brand name here]", rather than just "a beer", if they weren't being paid to do so. Not so in the world of Sliding Doors.  In the world of Sliding Doors, they drink Grolsh. And they want you to know about it.

So why do I like it? Well, mostly John Hannah. He's lovely, and your mum probably fancies him. But on further consideration, even he makes a move way too soon after Gwyneth Prime has discovered her boyfriend in bed with another woman, and actually a lot of his hilarious quips come off like someone who sits alone in a darkened room all day desperately trying to emulate human warmth.  So, a screenwriter, I guess.

What could be said, interestingly, is that he represents an early male version of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope - he drops into over-worked, straight-laced Gwyneth Prime's life through a series of seemingly magical coincidences, takes her boating and shows her how to laugh/love again. What's also interesting is that this proves the MPDG apparently doesn't work in any iteration ever, not even as a male character, since - as with John Hannah's Manic Pixie sisters from others films - the quirkiness is incredibly forced. He quotes Monty Python! He makes hilarious gags about trying to give Gwyneth Paltrow cellulite! He quips to his sick mum about moving somewhere she can buy better crack! HE'S NOT LIKE OTHER GUYS!

And re Monty Python, if such a study could ever be done, it would be interesting to find out whether the percentage of conversation made up of endlessly quoting comedians/films/television shows until you actually have to kill one of the members of your group to put an end to it has risen since pre-internet days.  Whatever the answer, today John comes over like a cross between that Daniel Radcliffe interview where he thinks he's the only person in the world to have discovered Tom Lehrer and the tedious mate of a mate that you met in the pub who, for fuck's sake, won't shut up about Monty Python, like, we've all seen the Spanish Inquisition sketch SO MANY TIMES I KNOW HOW IT GOES.

And despite all this, I still like it. I will watch it again. What can I say? It affects me. It actually (there I go) does go to a darker place than most standard rom-coms, and it's painful to watch anyone slaving away to support a partner who's "writing their first novel" while in actuality copping off with their ex. Even Gwynnie Beta. It captures the humiliation of infidelity really well and, for what it's worth, does it while avoiding lazy demonisation of the cheating boyfriend, who has several scenes talking candidly about his conflicted feelings to another male chum. I mean, he's still the worst. But that's why there's John Hannah.

The message is that sometimes we get haircuts that don't work out for us and that's ok.

1) Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954)

Hahahahahahahaha you guys it's a musical about rape.  I mean, basically.  It starts when rugged tight-trousered woodsman Adam strolls down from his 1850s Oregon wood-house into town to find himself a bride (maybe made of wood).  Surprisingly Awesome Milly decides she's plucky and spunky enough to make a go of it, and weds him on the spot. So far, so consensual.

Then it all goes to shit.

S. A. Milly ends up keeping house for Adam's six younger brothers too, all of whom are also tight-trousered woodsmen.  She eventually implements a regime of starvation and occasional ladle-based violence until they begin to say "please".  They learn to dance, put pomade in their hair and meet some nice local girls, and it's all set to be lovely until Adam - who got his bride in matter of hours and thus is crushing it on the Man Leaderboard - tells his brothers the story of the Rape of the Sabine Women.  In song.  The song is called "Sobbin' Women".  It is equal parts insanely catchy and horrifyingly misogynistic.  It is the Blurred Lines of 1950s musicals.  He then encourages his brothers to follow the fine example of the Ancient Romans and erase the word "consent" from their vocabulary.

Thus, the titular forest-dwelling Seven Brothers set out to abduct the titular (hee hee, titular) Seven Brides from the town - really abduct, there are blankets over heads - blindfold them and carry them off to their wooden shack, causing an avalanche on the way so that the boyfriends and families of the kidnapped girls can't mount a rescue until the snow melts in spring.   They are only thwarted in their plans by the fact that a) they forget to also kidnap a preacher (see, it's fine, because they just wanted to marry the women against their will), and b) Surprisingly Awesome Milly kicks them all out of the house and makes them live in the barn all winter, while she and the women form a happy matriarchal commune wait for heteronormativity to reassert itself.  Which it does.  The brothers come to see the error of their creepy ways - except for Adam, who storms off to have a patriarchal huff and only realises he might be in the wrong when the news comes through of his newborn baby daughter, thus suddenly forcing him to reassess his worldview that women are objects - and the town girls start doing things like walking past the window in their underwear and throwing snowballs with rocks in them (the traditional mating displays of 1850s Oregon), and it all ends happily if you don't think about it too hard.

But oh gosh, it's SO CHARMING.  There are handsome beard-men wearing plaid and dancing while they raise barns.  They jump over axes.  I don't know what the point of jumping over axes is, but it seems to prove something to them.  They sing "I'm a Lonesome Polecat", which is approximately exactly as ridiculous and wonderful as it sounds.  The backdrops are so obviously, unapologetically fake, you can see the brushstrokes on the trees.  It has that haze of garish 1950s still-overexcited-about-technicolour innocence to it that makes it extremely possible to turn off the sensible, up-to-date bit of your brain, and enjoy it for what it is.

I mean, just do yourself a favour and take three minutes to watch this:

Did you watch it? Do you see now?  Do you understand how much joy this brings me?  The flawlessly timed petulant axe swings?  The almost heartbreakingly simple insight that "a man can't sleep/ when he sleeps with shee-eep"? The one guy out to the side going full Dream Ballet? The fact that it's done in a single take?

No, I cannot, in all good conscience, hate on Seven Brides for Seven Brothers.  It is a part of my psyche, and a part of my soul, and you too are not above it.  You simply have yet to surrender.

Also there's this unintentionally hilarious bit when the girls are starting to soften towards the boys over the winter and the boys start making excuses to come into the house to fetch blankets and things to catch a brief glimpse of their sweethearts and there's one girl who just looks delighted whoever comes in from the barn, monogamy be damned.

Basically, Seven Brides is - our favourite overused word - problematic when viewed in the above terms (it's maybe not actually as bad as I suggested, the movie makes it pretty clear that the girls are into the guys too, both prior to and once they get over the whole kidnap thing).  But it's also joyous and stunningly made and excitingly danced.  It stands apart from all the others on this list because it is, actually, a great film that maybe I think I shouldn't like. But I'm also a thinking human person with a brain, and I'm not going to go and kidnap anyone to get them to marry me because of it. I might sing Bless Your Beautiful Hide as a form of courtship though. I can make no promises otherwise.


*cunning code for 'illegally torrented files on my hard drive'.
**That marks two entries on this list that feature DHP in a supporting role.  Come on, man. You were Niles Crane.

We Do Not Have Nearly Enough TV Shows About The Biblical King David; Here Are My Thoughts

Friends, I've been thinking about the Bible a lot lately.  Not in any kind of way that might make me a better person - that would be ridiculous - but as source material.  In my continuing quest to slaughter as many cultural sacred cows as one person can fit into a lifetime of poverty and self-doubt ("making theatre"), I seem to have somewhat overlooked the Bible as a potential source of old, familiar stories to mangle beyond recognition.  Which is foolish, because there is a bit when God sends two bears to maul forty two children to death because they mocked an old man's baldness.  Straight up God-murder.

Now, the reason this is on my mind is that I am approximately halfway through the first and only season of NBC's cancelled 2009 series 'Kings': a kinda sorta modern-day-but-not-actually-the-world-as-we-know-it retelling of the King David story.  (David's not king yet though, he's just hanging around being inconveniently Chosen by God while Ian McShane - who is king - Ian McShanes his way through some speeches about butterflies.)  It's set in a fictional kingdom (Gilboa) with a fictional monarch (Silas, who in the Bible is Saul-no-not-the-Damascus-one-a-different-one) but all the clothes and technology and what have you are contemporary.  It's pretty neatly done, the problems of the shows (and there are problems) aren't really with the world-building element of it.  In fact, it's the kind of conceptual approach that you could easily see being theatrical: it's what you might do with a Shakespeare play or a Greek tragedy to keep it, y'know, not dull as fuck.

(Quick sidebar: Why don't we do more Bible plays?  Western theatre tradition practically evolved out of them, what with the Medieval idea that the only thing better than a play was a play on a cart.*  And yet Bible stories are pretty much screen adventures only these days - in fact, it's one of the first things Hollywood did once they figured out they could do picture and sound and colour at the same time.  The new technology came in and Cecil B. DeMille said, "Charlton, go up on that rock, talk to God, and make it sexy."**  And I guess that got into our heads somewhere along the way because, with the exception of nativity plays, I'm far more familiar with the idea of the cinematic Bible epic than the theatrical one.  (Of course, now I've written that I can think of at least three examples of Bible stories being done onstage but screw you brain, you came up with this lame idea for a blog, have the courage  of your convictions dammit.))

ANYWAY. The problem with 'Kings', I think, is that it starts the story in the wrong place. It's ok. Lots of people do it. It happens to the best of us, George Lucas, with our insistence that we meet Anakin at the age of ten and... and that is a different blog. Basically, 'Kings' would be much, much better with the same world-building, some of the same actors, and a totally different plot.  This is the biggest trick that 'Kings' misses: making David a pre-kingship blond-haired big-eyed innocent Luke Skywalker type. Biblical David? HUGE DOUCHEBAG.  The second biggest trick is not only the de-gaying of the David/Jonathan relationship, but the turning of Jonathan into a standard jealous, scheming villain.

A lot has been made out of the Biblical are-they-boning relationship between David and Jonathan, son of Saul, the king that David is nominally serving - Oscar Wilde cited them alongside Achilles and Patroclus as an example of "the love that dare not speak its name", and there was an awful lot of Medieval "THIS IS WHAT A HOMOSOCIAL RELATIONSHIP LOOKS LIKE AND THERE IS NOTHING ELSE TO BE SEEN HERE" wrangling.  My personal position is that you can explain away David and J-Dog kissing and telling each other that they love each other so much more than they love women as an extreme product of a patriarchal society that prized bonds between men above heterosexual relationships but why would you? It's not like there hasn't been enough queer erasure over the centuries, and no-one's going to prove it definitely one way or another, so yes, I am all for it: David and Jonathan, Bible Boyfs.

EXCEPT.  Except for David's aforementioned douchebaggery.  Really, the story of David and Jonathan resembles less Achilles and Patroclus, and more 'The Giving Tree'.  David turns up post-Goliath slaying, and Jonathan is so overwhelmed that he, on the spot, strips off and gives David his armour which, as well as being a real example of a Biblical striptease, symbolically gives David his position as heir to the kingdom.  That is how much he loves him.  David's response is something along the lines of "Oh thanks bro, yeah, did I ever tell you about how I killed a giant just now?" This continues, with David falling out of favour with Saul and running away, at which Jonathan immediately ups sticks, abandoning his father and people, to follow David into exile.  David's response, again, is, "oh hey, um... Jason? Jonathan.  Yeah, no, I knew that." The rest of the time it's Jonathan professing his love and David going, "Well, I am better than you and everyone else, Jonathan."  In the end, there's a big battle and both Jonathan and Daddy Saul are killed.  Then David expresses some affection, composing one of his trademark psalms on the lyre - but then again, maybe he was just the world's first douchebag to pick up a lyre at a party and say, "This is an original composition."

And through all of this, by the way, David is married to Jonathan's sister, Michal.  Whom he bought for two hundred Philistine foreskins.  (The asking price was a mere one hundred, but David knows you get what you pay for.)

So this should be a TV series in its own right, shouldn't it?  It deserves at least a few seasons to let the tragic inequality of the relationship hit home before Jonathan dies in David's manly arms, plus you can set it during the time D&J are in exile together - throw in some kind of Biblical supernatural demon-fighting alongside the overarching plot and you've got a monster-of-the-week set up fuelled by potential slash.  Jonathan is in love with David, while David makes it his mission to bone any man, woman or celestial being that looks at him sideways, along with the occasional implication that David's just scared of his feelings for Jonathan.  Then the series is cancelled before we get anything more than an obligatory drunken kiss episode.  There's nothing a network loves more than some good old queer-baiting, after all.

But it could be a fascinating study of unequal relationships: an opportunity to both loathe David and yet understand why Jonathan is so drawn to him, to empathise with Jonathan, to want him to break free of this toxic, unrewarding state of affairs, and yet still, with a tiny, terrible part of your soul, want him to hang in there because David might - might - one day love him as fully as he deserves.*** But while fighting monsters.****  As in 'Kings', Jonathan will be played by Sebastian Stan because he deserves a chance to do the character in a way that isn't horrible, and David will be played by Idris Elba, because we need to believe that we too would follow him to the ends of the earth on the off chance that we might get a snog.

Rest assured, there will be many such shots of Sebastian Stan crying.

Starting later in the story also allows us to visit the whole final-season Bathsheba debacle. This is where even the Bible has to start acknowledging David's douchebaggery.  Now king, replete with many wives (many wives), he goes for a stroll on the palace roof and sees naked babe (Bathsheba) having a bath - I've never been quite clear whether the aptly named Bathsheba was also bathing on the roof, as Leonard Cohen would have us believe, or whether David was a massive creeper on top of everything else, and once he realised he could see into some girl's bathroom window, did not think the decent thing would be to look away.  Either way, David's reaction is something along the lines of, "Damn, girl, let's get you impregnated." To this, Bathsheba says: WE DON'T KNOW BECAUSE THE BIBLE LITERALLY DOES NOT HAVE A SINGLE WORD ABOUT HER CONSENT IN THIS MATTER.  NONE.  IT JUST SAYS DAVID "WENT IN TO HER".  LIKE, WOW.  WOW, BIBLE.  EVEN FOR YOU.

So anyway, Bathsheba gets all good and impregnated, the only fly in the adulterous ointment being her husband, Uriah the Hittite, who is off fighting for David in a war that he should be in too but, y'know, roof-bath-chicks to nail.  So David calls him back home and does something along the lines of that Monty Python sketch, "Your wife, bit of a goer is she? Nudge nudge wink wink know what I mean maybeyoushouldgoandhavesexwithhersonobodywillknowthechildismine" until poor Uriah has to say, "Look bro, it's not that I don't appreciate the respite from the horrors of war and all, but don't we have this, like, incredibly sacred and ancient rule that soldiers on active duty don't sleep with their wives?" And David says, "Ugh, you are not making this easier for me. I mean, really you are bringing this on yourself." And he sends him to the worst bit of the fighting where he'll definitely be killed.  And he is.  And then David marries Bathsheba because hey, it's good to be the king.

The coda to all of this is that, as aforementioned, even God has to admit he might have not been totally on point when he decided that David was going to be his Super Special Bro on Earth, so - in the manner of people who hate being wrong - he totally overreacts.  The prophet Nathan pops along and tells David that a) his child with Bathsheba will die, b) someone he loves will "take all his wives" and c) everyone is done playing happy families.  Sure enough, the child dies (David, in one final defiant act of gold-medal douchebaggery, mourns while the child is alive and refuses to mourn after the child has died because he knew it was coming), and years later David's son Absolom starts a coup against him that is kicked off by Absolom having sex with all of David's concubines in public.  (I feel like Game of Thrones could step up a little.)  Bathsheba kind of does get hers in the end, as she makes the dying David promise that her son Solomon and not his actual heir can be king next, and I like to think she did it through pinching the tube on his morphine drip until he said yes.

So, obviously, this is the final season of, I would say, about five.  Four seasons of David and Jonathan hunting demons and almost making out, then Jonathan dies, a lot of the original cast departs, and you get one of those slightly weird situations where the show limps on for another twenty episodes before a kindly network exec shoots it in the head. But what a glorious mess it would be.

Or, even better, a PLAY. A big non-naturalistic Greek tragedy style play, in which the first half leads up to David marrying Bathsheba, then there's a time jump, and the second half is Absolom's coup and a big fuck-off civil war, ending with Solomon becoming king.  That's gold dust.  That's the lost Shakespeare play right there.  And someone clever and angry like Howard Barker should write it,  it'll be staged in the Olivier, and the critics will say things like "powerful but overreaching" or "impressive in scale and ambition if ultimately unfocused".  But I'll be happy.  And that's what counts.


Bonus Bible: The Book of Revelation as arthouse film

Like any rational person, I love (the first season of) Sleepy Hollow.  The Tim Burton film also, but specifically the current series starring my eyeliner idol Nicole Beharie, and the excellently-nosed Tom Mison.  If you don't know what I'm talking about - you poor thing - the current Sleepy Hollow series takes the Washington Irving story of the Headless Horseman and says, "Yes but what if it was actually about the Biblical apocalypse?" It's great, trust me.

But as much as I love Sleepy Hollow and its attention to detail when it comes to translating the most whacked-out book of the Bible onto the screen, I cannot help but feel there is a better way of going about dramatising the Book of Revelation.  Which is, essentially, not to bother with plot.

Revelation is the stoner's favourite for a reason.  Most of the Bible is written like an over-excited child taking twenty minutes to describe going to the bathroom - "And then...and then...and then..." - but Revelation doesn't even bother with these attempts at incident.  It just describes John of Patmos's big weekend on a vision quest (at one point a coyote voiced by Johnny Cash turns up).  The easy joke here (that I just made a couple of sentences ago) is to say "stoner diaries" and be done with it.  But it has too much structure and weird, terrifying logic for that. No, I am talking getting the heads behind Fantasia and A Field in England together and letting them have at it. It will feature only Tilda Swinton playing all the parts (probably), and will be so terrifying that the world will literally end.

Go in peace.

*Medieval Mystery plays: actually pretty interesting and often gross.
** Accurate.
***Just describing Sherlock now.
****Or Supernatural.