Here’s a tip. If you go down to the beach today to go surfing by yourself in a remote cove, where although sharks haven’t been spotted lately you never quite know if they might pop by, be sure to wear your best earrings. It’s a pair of $150 Jlani Tusk Ear Crawlers (curved gold numbers with diamond studs) that helps save the life of the heroine in The Shallows, a fantastic new film shortly to wash up on these shores.
Its premise is basic. For about 90 minutes the fetching actor Blake Lively fights a shark, in a bikini, on a rock (to clarify: she’s the one in the cossie). The only resources at her disposal are the clothes she’s wearing, her medical training and her bling. Her wetsuit top becomes a compression bandage for a gangrenous leg; the earrings clasp her wounds together; she improvises stitches with a much-loved necklace, sterilised in salt water. And her hi-tech watch, she uses to time how long the shark takes to swim from a big dead whale to a nearby buoy. She could, of course, do such counting just in her head, which would probably make more sense: given that if she’s swimming at speed, hoping to outpace him, stopping to have a look her wrist isn’t a good idea.
But perhaps the ultimate redundancy of this watch (Casio Baby-G BG169R-8, $55) is a sly bit of commentary on the part of the film-maker. As the screens get bigger, the effects splashier and the projection geekier, the plots themselves are fighting back by cheerleading for straightforward human resourcefulness. Films feed us cautionary tales, urging both audiences and the industry not to invest too much in tech (Ex-Machina, for instance, warned never to trust a sexy cyborg). They also deliver pleasing sops to the stubborn luddite, as well as those too cash-strapped to buy a new iPhone.
So in Ghostbusters the crucial bit of kit turns out not to be a fancy nuclear blaster but a humble Swiss army knife. Basic bushcraft saw Leonardo DiCaprio through The Revenant. The Martian was at heart an ode to duct tape (which is, of course, the secret star of all American cinema – see Apollo 13, Aliens, Non-Stop, Panic Room, Fifty Shades of Grey etc). This week Matt Damon is back as Jason Bourne, a man whom the combined surveillance systems of the international espionage community cannot track, and who whacks baddies using not guns and knives but saucepans and chair legs. In fact Bourne has form with kitchenware – in 2004’s The Bourne Supremacy showing us how to blow up a building using just a magazine and a toaster. That’s public-service film-making.
RoboMop: I’d watch that
One fight I’d really like to see is between Matt Damon and a robot mop. Or, really, I’d just really like to own a robot mop. Or at least for someone to invent one, fast. Self-propelled vacuum cleaners already exist, and you can see videos of them online, pottering about rooms, bashing into skirting boards and sucking up small amounts of biscuit. Dyson unveiled a glamorous version earlier this month for £800, which bears so much resemblance to my late grandmother’s tortoise, Ossie, I’d be forever worried about squashing it. But vacuuming isn’t half so much puff as mopping, regardless how snazzy your kit. To watch a machine swooshing about the floor, the path behind it gleaming, would give me so much pleasure I’d actually consider funding one on Kickstarter.
The twilight zone
On Saturday night I saw three female glowworms in a churchyard in Kent, shining green and luminous in the hope of attracting a mate. I hope they got lucky. In Llandudno last year the males were so distracted by the charms of the sodium streetlights the council had to switch them off to encourage them to breed. There’s much for us humans to learn here, especially set against our own remorseless bushel-strimming. Monday night saw the first episode of Naked Attraction, a new dating show in which people pick a prospective partner solely only on how they look without clothes. Surely sexier to twinkle in the twilight than roast your genitals beneath the gaze of the nation? Discretion is the better part of allure.
