What an utterly, utterly dismal week. First Bowie, then Rickman, and it's starting to feel as though my youth is being dismantled piece by piece. It's a horrible feeling, an unwanted reminder of my own mortality during the darkest, coldest days of the year.
It's been weird, to be honest, watching other people's reactions and realising the celebrity they felt was theirs was so very different to the person you admired and almost loved. There's a whole generation who think of Bowie as the Goblin King from Labyrinth, and I maybe should have been one of them. My first exposure to him, though, was as the singer who did Let's Dance, and this is who he'll always remain in my head.
In a similar vein, I'll never be able to bring myself to think of Alan Rickman as Snape from the Harry Potter films, not really. I was seven or eight years too old for them, I suppose, and ten or twelve years too cynical, and it took me a long time to be able to appreciate them for the solidly-crafted pieces of fantasy and British actors' pension plans that they were. Die Hard was more my era, I suppose, but I was always turned off by the particularly senseless brand of violence it espoused - I distinctly remember it being the first film where I found myself feeling dreadful for all the collateral damage characters who got so mindlessly murdered for the sake of a few fancy-looking explosion effects.
No, the character when I think of when I think of Rickman is the Metatron. the voice of God from Dogma, Kevin Smith's cheerful meditation on the nature of modern Catholicism. There's a lot of things I love about Dogma, but I love Metatron the most, a snarling, whining ball of rage that initially looks like pure petulance but is gradually revealed as something both far warmer and far more melancholy. Rickman's performance makes me ache inside in the very best way, and returning to it yesterday was a genuine joy.
There's not much about the film that isn't a pleasure, though - Smith's dialogue is thoughtful but punchy, performed by a talented cast who mostly bring their A-game. Linda Fiorentino makes a fine lead as the world-weary Bethany, who hopes her church will never find out that she works at an abortion clinic, while Matt Damon and Ben Affleck are endlessly entertaining as Loki and Bartleby, the pair of rogue angels she's informed she has to thwart in order to prevent the unmaking of all existence. Damon in particular sparkles - it's not often he's allowed to play the villain, and if this is anything to go by that's actually a real shame. Here he displays a laid-back but gleeful sense of malice and fantastic timing that makes me wonder what he might have done if Marvel had cast him in a certain, ah, similarly-named role.
I seem to remember something at the time about movie theaters being picketed over the alleged blasphemy. I mean, as an atheist I'm probably not qualified to have an opinion, but I'm not sure I saw anything there to be offended by. God is presented as all-powerful, loving, funny and Canadian. Is there any kind of deity you'd rather believe in?
If you've missed this one - and I get the impression plenty have - it's definitely worth a shot. The combination of laugh-out-loud wit and transparent humanity are hard to beat, especially during a week like this.
No comments:
Post a Comment