Grubby, vile, inept, witless, repulsive, stupid, sleazy, sordid. A disaster, apparently. 'Mirthless, worthless, toothless, useless,' was the delightfully unambiguous pay-off in the Evening Standard. Sex Lives of the Potato Men, what in film parlance we should call a 'vehicle' for Johnny Vegas, Mackenzie Crook and a cast of thousands of tedious unfunny jokes about men's willies (that's as opposed, of course, to the scarily brilliant new witty ones made by, say, one's spectacularly amusing girlfriend), has been universally panned over the last week.
It does sound truly terrible, the equivalent of paying £6.50 to be led into a cabbagey toilet and greeted with a sturdy green belch in the face from an incontinent tramp; and the critics have for once really done what they say on the tin, laid about it with hobnails and vigour and a stout tarred rope, then come back for a last stamp in case it's still twitching. The reviews are certainly the worst reviews for a film since the steaming pile of rhino-poo served up last year by J-Lo and-Ben Affleck ('Gigli doesn't need a review, it needs an inquest'); they are quite possibly the worst reviews, ever, for any movie not actually featuring Norman Wisdom or Madonna; and my but doesn't it all just lift the spirits.
I do love bad. Love it when something's so bad we're queuing up for adjectives, to howl at the badness. A book so bad you can actually find yourself walking across a room and opening a window, and taking aim, and gleefully letting fly (and a big hand here please for our old friend Mr Wilbur Smith); a book so bad a true review should only consist of one word, 'unpickupable.' A film, a book, a song, a play, which is a shambles of such buttock-clenching proportions that it unites us all in glorious revulsion, like the famous off-Broadway version of The Diary of Anne Frank in which Pia Zadora was so bad that when the Nazis came on stage the audience started shouting: 'She's in the attic.'
I'm refreshed, too, by the universal condemnation. At a time when postmodernism seemed in danger of robbing criticism of any value, in which equal space and brainpower and validity can be afforded to a piece of unalloyed dreck as a work of brilliance, we suddenly have people lining up to shout, actually, this is unbearably awful, in the same week as, across London, they're giving a standing ovation to Brian Wilson and telling the world that this is unbearably good: and the Film Council, which gave out £939,000 to make the dreck potato film, is having to defend itself, which it has attempted to do by saying, 'Fifteen to 20-year-old males go to the cinema too.'
Well, they shouldn't. Adolescent boys shouldn't go anywhere, actually: they should be locked in a box until they grow up. Don't you loathe them? I'd loathe myself if I came across the 15-year-old me. Lock them away for a bit, I say, and we'll all be spared the smirking and the boils and the huffs and the violence and the lies and the boasts and the tale-telling and the general skulking around like a Victorian factory snitch, and the poetry, sweet hell the poetry (Roses are red/Violets are blue/I hate my parents), and the cracking knuckles, and the tissues, and the stuff going on in the armpits and dear God the groins, and the inherent cruelty and evil. They are the devil's spawn, and we must lock them away until they've learnt to stop farting, and we must never let them make films.
