Maybe it's a stereotype but it always seems
to me like the Americans are so proud of their leaders and.. I'm not sure why.
As a young English chap I couldn't give two solitary fucks about the people in
charge over here as, since my birth, our Prime Ministers have all been reptiles
from the planet Cunt. Oh, and the less said about the monarchy the better. It's
not that I don't like the Queen as a person because, beyond being the frowny
looking bitch on my money, I don't really know her. It's just that as a matter
of principle, I'd much prefer to string her up from a lamp post like a
wrinkled, German piñata and beat the bullshit blue blood out of her before I
consider myself one of her loyal subjects. I don't mind our national anthem
“God Save the Queen”, but that's only because there's no such thing as God and
so I'm basically just singing, “Fuck it, she's on her own”. America however
does appear to properly idolise its presidents as though they don't seem to
realise that virtually every single politician is a selfish, greedy, cock wart.
Having said that, I might call the Queen a scrounging, work shy twat and feel
nothing but the yanks have a bad habit of taking a gun and blowing their
leaders’ fucking brains out... so who can know how they really feel!?
One of these presidents to have been shot
was of course Abraham Lincoln who famously ruined the performance of a stage
play when he rudely interrupted it with his disruptive assassination. It annoys
me when people cough in the cinema, so a case of full blown death would do my
fucking nut in. Well, in an attempt to learn a little more about the man and to
more importantly kill a few hours, I decided to watch the 2012 film Lincoln.
Well- to be honest, that's not completely true... I don't really care too much
about Lincoln, it's just that it got good reviews and I'm a fan of its
director, Spielberg. Anyway, it's obviously not an ironic title- the film does
tell the story of Lincoln and in particular, the last couple of months of his
life. The American Civil War is nearing its end as Lincoln battles to have the
Thirteenth Amendment passed before his nation stops shooting the living fuck
out of itself. He basically wants to abolish slavery and ensure that those
people that he has already freed during the war remain so once it's all over.
Considering he's been telling people that freeing all the black chaps will end
the war, it's vital that he gets his shit sorted before the fucking thing just
ends anyway and he loses the support of his nation.
 |
| We're gonna need a bigger vote |
If I have any criticism of the great man,
it's that perhaps when he does wander into the more serious films, it's clear
that it's not him doing what he does best. I enjoy... is 'enjoy' the right
word? Let’s try it... I enjoy Schindler's List ... Ugh no, ‘enjoy’ was
definitely was not the right word. Err, 'like' maybe? No, that doesn't help.
Err.. I think Schindler's List is as good a film as much as everybody
else does... Yeah, I think that's about as tactful as we're going to get.
However, as good as these more gritty movies are, they're clearly not as great
as when he just lets loose and has a living turd with a glowing finger ride a
bike across the moon. On the fun-o-meter, it should be obvious that Lincoln
is one of the more serious films with a disappointing lack of aliens, dinosaurs
or melty faced Nazi's. In fact, this film doesn't even mention the Vampire
Hunting that I've been assured Lincoln was involved in. Instead what you get is
basically just two and a bit hours of people talking. Sometimes they talk
really slowly and sometimes they talk really loudly. But yeah.. Lincoln is
a film about chatting and despite being one of the ‘Berg's more serious films,
it was fucking great. I loved it.
For a start it features pretty much -the world’s
greatest living actors- which helps considering the entire film is simply about
making words come out of people’s mouths. There's a scene in which Lincoln and
his wife have an argument during a lighting storm which is like watching the
final round of an act off in a small room on Mount Olympus. It goes without
saying that Daniel Day Lewis and Sally Field are amazing but one of the
surprises was in how great Tommy Lee Jones was too! I mean presuming you
haven't seen him as Prune-Face in Batman Forever, he's obviously always
great but he does tend to play similar characters quite a lot of the time. Do
you need a grizzled, old, cowboy type chap who mutters his lines through a haze
of grumpy, world weariness? Then, he's your guy! Here however he actually gets
quite animated at times and is possibly the only character in the film with a
proper arc. Perhaps this might even be the one criticism of the film that I
have which is that, despite being about Lincoln, we don't actually learn that
much about him. He appears on screen as a fully formed character and is
basically a Rorschach test for what you already think about him. You get a
sense of him as being good, conflicted, stubborn.. but that's basically the
same as what you'd get from looking at that massive white statue of him having
a sit down.
 |
| I'm behind you, you ignorant fuck! |
However, it was whilst watching this film
that I realised there's a couple of things that Spielberg never gets the credit
for that he certainly does deserve. Firstly, I can't think of a single bad
performance in any of his films and so he clearly knows how to work with
actors. I mean, the guy actually managed to get a good performance out of
hulking, spud-man Vin Diesel in Saving Private Ryan. Imagine! I think
the trick was to not let him talk too much and then kill him of as soon as is
humanely possible. Secondly though, I think is his skill in ‘world building’. Lincoln
is a full-on David Lean style epic and I completely bought what I was
watching. When I saw a battlefield featuring hundreds of dead bodies, I didn't
cynically wonder how many years of RADA the corpse-actors had studied for- I
just thought.. I dunno... I thought, 'fuck me this battle went a little bit
tits-up”. Spielberg might not have any obvious directorial ticks like Tim
Burton’s autistic obsessions with being gothic or David Fincher's ghostly love
of passing though sold objects, but so what? He knows how to tell a story and
so when at his best, there's no real reason to impose himself on the screen.
I mean Lincoln is almost three hours
long and I watched it on a sunny day because 'fuck the world', but I didn't
feel it dragged or anything. The film is interesting, well-paced, well-acted
and looks amazing so what more could you want? Well, vampire hunting obviously,
but other than that! You won't learn anything more about the man than is
already common knowledge but beyond the fact that I now have to do shit for
myself, I didn't really know anything about the thirteenth amendment. I guess
by accident that I'm a little more aware now though. Do the Americans love
their presidents as much as it seems? I dunno... Lincoln was more of a
procedural film than it was a biopic and spoiler alert, we never even get to
see him get shot. But as movies go, this was great and worked really well for
my self-esteem as Lincoln appears to be a good and mostly honest white man!
After seeing 12 Years A Slave, I've been wracked with guilt and
self-hate for my honky-kind and our evil, twattish past.. It's therefore nice
to know that even though we were responsible for one of the most horrific
things in human history, at least its end was thanks to a cracker with
perspective. Thanks for reading and see you next time, motherfuckers!
You can also visit the blog picture artist at _Moriendus_
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