A bastardly attempt to make Oscar go @#*! himself

Waj Syed

Bond. James bloody Bond. They say he died with the Cold War, that Brosnan chump is wasting his time. But what the bloody hell do they know? Bond has been the father I never had, the shrink I never opened up to, the messiah I never believed in. He emancipated me from the ranks of that horribly doctrinal romantic school of thought where young quasi-Wolves like myself live engulfed in Right Guard and edate.com, flinging me into the greener pastures of striking reality: covert operations and overt cleavages.

News Flash - Fight Club, the super-casted superthriller, was a chilling look into schizophrenia and its imposing dimensions, alongside a retrograde plot of cynical criticism against the artificiality of the materialistic and capitalistic nineties - Not Flashed On News Flash - That it took Fox Pictures $100 million movie, two of the biggest names in Tinsel Town and a marketing campaign smart and sexy enough to inspire a perennial bum like moi to drive to the theatre in his $229/month VW, buy an eight dollar movie ticket, complemented by a $3 Coke and a $5 tub of popcorn, and thus become an ardent proponent of the war against the Evil Globalized Economy.

O Yes, Commander Bond, my very own Dalai Lama, unflustered defender of the Crown, clad in his Seville Row suit that never wrinkles and tie that never lets him down, showed me the path. You too can see the light. Just look at the signs around you - Car and Driver has been running James' BMW's ad for a couple of centuries now. CNN takes cares of his Nokia commercials. That Fortune mag handles his Omega chronometer, and I know for a fact the Mt. Holyoke News ran an extensive piece on his briefs sanctioned by Lizzy II. So, do you feel ignorant?

News Flash - The Cider House Rules, Golden Globe close call and Oscar prodigy, is a beautifully subtle challenge of abortion and racism issues - Not Flashed On News Flash - Indeed, the movie is so beautifully subtle that many low spirited individuals who are not satisfied with lifegodlovefoodmoneysex have confessed that if given a chance of being reborn, they would choose to be orphans in the 1940s, preferably placed in the rural Northeast. When and where else could orphans be the Princes of Maine and the Kings of New England, and not the starving, horrid wretches which orphans from other places are bound to be.

I'll stop on that note. For those of you who are (still around?) reading this through your last Sammy Adams enhanced afternoon before the Big Break and could not deduce aptly, this whole column has been a bastardly, half-hearted attempt at thwarting the annals and rites of contemporary cinema. Bond has gone from noble to global. The schizophrenics at Fight Club preach, bitch and command us about the absolute nothingness which accompanies our pursuit of marvellous middle-class modality, only at the expense of our greenback patronage.

Writers like John Irving defile the reality of their own book to pen out caloric screenplays, pre-cooked for the censors, making underage couples hold hands and sniffle in the back rows of Showcase. Pepsi tries to sell the abstraction that the force will be with us every time we purchase 32 ounces of Jar Jar's favorite thirst quencher. Even the critics, the old guard of art and literature, rave in treason in their glossy weeklies. And it all comes tumbling down, right onto that laser-printed love letter from Visa or MasterGod which reassures me that the riches I am allocating in the quest for self assuring theatrical entertainment are good for my credit, the endangered three-eyed vogapoga bird and Lev Kamanev's portrait in the Politburo, just as long as I don't miss my minimum payment deadline.

So then. It's a Ten-Four. The crisis is under control. The American movie industry has initiated the new world order, defining passages of rite for moviegoers who are willing to live, eat, breathe and maybe sleep with the films they watch. Decrees of society and better living have been printed on celluloid. 8- mm has not only gone digital, its become a bloody delicacy. They're drinking cinema with caviar, seducing it in casinos, mining it with diamonds, dressing it in fur (no one dares to say that they are also pimping it on the Strip - that's against the Cider House Rules).

Film, my friends, is not just the toast of the town; it's also the first course. And the beautiful people need not fret. It's all low-cal.

- Waj Syed can be reached via e-mail at wajsyed@umich.edu.

Waj Syed