Waking up too early and feeling too tired to get on with work I decided instead to watch
"Seeking Justice" which had somehow ended up on my Lovefilm list - I think I'd seen the trailer and thought it looked awful and couldn't resist the urge to find out if I was right. I wonder how many film companies deliberately operate on that level. Let's put out something so toe-cringingly awful that people won't be able to resist renting it. I think probably all film companies. It's much easier to come up with something deliberately shit rather than something actually good. And Nicholas Cage always seems up for signing on to appear.
It's an odd film, based on the flimsy premise that there is a secret organisation dedicated to wiping scum like rapists and paedophiles off of the street. After Cage's wife is raped, Guy Pearce from off of Neighbours appears and tells him they know who did the crime (how?) and that the police won't find him and he'd get away with 11 months in prison if they did, but he will sort it out for him. All he asks is that Cage does him a favour in the future. It turns out that in return for having the rapist killed, Cage has to kill someone other criminal down the line. Which like Strangers on a Train means that he has no connection to the victim, but apart from that it seems like a really cock-handed thing to do (and yes I mean cock-handed, it's the kind of bungling and useless thing that someone with cocks for hands would end up doing). This doesn't work as an idea on so many levels, but mainly sending out an army of vigilantes who have no experience of killing anyone to kill criminals would not in any way work. They'd all fuck it up clearly or be unable to overcome their own moral repugnance to commit a murder, even if they were on board with the idea.
But it doesn't need to make sense - in fact to have any chance of making money by being shit, this film actively has to be nonsense. And it continues to be so throughout.
It passed the time, though I did wonder if I should be spending that time doing something slightly more worthwhile - even just watching a film that might possibly be good - but I had to see it through to the end. I spent most of the time wondering why any of the actors agreed to be in it. Cage, obviously, has to as this is all he does now, though I remember a time in the distant past where he actually appeared in films that were trying to be good and in which he acted rather than overacted. But January Jones and Guy Pearce - why are you signing on the line here?
I know you're thinking that they did it for the money and you're probably right, but these people are film stars - they already make an awful lot of money. How much money do they need? Do you just get on a conveyor belt where if you have a gap in your diary and a film comes up, you have to do it, regardless of what it is? You'd think when you got that kind of success and money you'd sit back and become more selective about what you chose to do, worrying perhaps that a bad film like "Seeking Justice" (a title that I had to look up even though I saw it yesterday and just had to look up again even though I'd just written it at the beginning of this blog) might do your career harm. You'd think that having got to a point where you were recognised you'd want to just be doing the good scripts. Or do you figure that it's such a bad script that no one will actually ever see the film and you're getting paid anyway - I guess I made a similar gamble by appearing on the ITV2 show, "Best Man's Speech", though that seemed to pay off as no one did see it. But that was one of the few jobs I've taken just for the money and I was hard up at the time - if things had been going better I wouldn't have needed to do it. Why do these multi-millionaires need even more money?
Maybe I just don't look at the world in the same way. I was offered a TV job today which would involve foreign travel and quite a lot of money for a show that isn't too embarrassing, but to do it I'd have to cancel or rejig one of my Leicester Square Theatre podcasts (and a few preview gigs) and stupidly I think I will thus probably turn the TV thing down. I think I'd rather do the podcast. It's stupid decisions like this that keep me nice and niche. Perhaps I don't want to be on the telly for all my claims to the contrary.
Still the film made me question stuff more than some more artistic movies have done, so perhaps it's super-clever and working on a meta level. Not so shit that it's good, but so shit that it actually profound revealing the meaning of existence.
I managed to get work done in the evening after having been to the gym and the supermarket. A man tweeted to say that his wife had seen me in Harpenden and texted him to say that I looked like a tramp. Which you might think is insulting. But a Harpenden tramp is a cut above your run of the mill tramp. Or would be if the snooty inhabitants of this town allowed them in. So it's actually a complement. I might be the trampiest man in Harpenden, but I would be a duke or a baron in any other town.
