I am, in general, a big fan of technology. But let me add a couple of important qualifications to that statement, for experience has tempered my enthusiasm markedly. I discount what might be called “selfish technology”, which is anything that improves things for you, while irritating everyone else. Mobile phones are the most obvious examples, and I’d also add those little folding scooters to the same category, having been nearly mown down – on the pavement, I might add – by some idiot yuppie more often than I’d like to remember. And can anyone over the age of 18 ride one of those things without looking a complete twat? I think not.

The second caveat is that the freakin’ stuff must work. Few things are capable of causing more irritation than lame gadgetry which fails to function in the intended manner. It should serve man, make progress through everyday life a bit smoother, yet some cases appear to have the opposite effect. My Walkman, for example, has been teetering on the edge of breaking down for the past year – never reliable, yet never quite faulty enough to merit buying a replacement. It’s one of those “soft logic” players, and this is perhaps the problem, since the buttons are so sensitive that stepping off a kerb can cause it to switch on, off, or change the direction of play. When this happens four times inside two minutes (beep-reach-in-switch-on-beep-reach-in-switch-on), I start to dream happily of the day when it ceases to work altogether, and I can take it out of my pocket, and introduce it repeatedly to the nearest hard surface. For the moment, it usually responds, at least temporarily, to a hard slap. So if you see an individual who appears to be punching themselves in the heart, Fight Club style, that’ll be me, releasing a bit of tension by smacking the shit out of the recalcitrant beast in my breast pocket.

Every bit as irritating is my current nemesis, a piece of software excrement called Front Page, which I have grown to hate with genuine venom over the past month or so. It is supposed to be an aid to web designers, allowing the easy creation and maintenance of pages and sites. If you still believe this after working with it for a few months, you probably also think that paperclip thing in Word 97 is an endearing character. I’ve never used Front Page and already loathe it, because it has reduced people I care about to the brink of tears. When I witness intelligent human beings reduced to nervous wrecks, by psychological terrorism on a CD-Rom, I get mad.

I am, I admit, biased, having learned HTML from the bottom up – Front Page is thus, to me, a redundant piece of software, doing nothing I can’t, and what it does, it does with a startling lack of efficiency. Just as a one-line Word document bloats up to 20K, so the output from Front Page is grossly top-heavy, with unnecessary tags and entire sections which are only of significance to…Front Page. If you want to try and debug the results, it’s hard to pick through the badly-formatted verbose garbage. For someone who hasn’t been grounded in HTML first, it must be almost impossible. Even more insidiously, it has a nasty habit of corrupting pages written by other methods. It tries to seduce them to the dark side of the force, by inserting additional code, or simply over-writes them with its own version, doing so without telling the user [It strikes me that if something arrived from the Phillippines and did this, it would be referred to as a virus — but since it comes from Seattle, it’s called a Microsoft product, and will probably be compulsory before too long.] Trying to prevent it doing so appears to be futile: it may be the first piece of software with an ego coded into it, which refuses to tolerate the existence of any other method of working.

I’m sure there’s a place for such programs, to take the hackwork out of generating large volumes of code – and I’ve heard some good things about Dreamweaver, which is a little more expensive, but apparently superior. But my bad experiences have left me feeling highly suspicious of the overall benefits. It seems to me that, just as with guns, radioactive material and Backstreet Boys CDs, access to the current generation of HTML editors should be limited to those who can prove a genuine need for them. The rest of us should stick to writing the stuff by hand; it may leave the Net less graphically groovy for a bit, but in the long run, it will turn us into lean, mean coding machines rather than coached potatoes.

Yes, a very pleasant weekend in New York, thank you. I’ll spare you the details – you’d only get jealous – but do want to mention a couple of airport incidents, which shed an interesting light on bureacracy and those that enforce it.

#1. On the way into America, you have to fill in a visa waiver form, stating you’re not a war criminal, drug baron or are coming to America to engage in “moral turpitude” (a great phrase – if I ever find out what it means precisely, I’ll let you know). You also have to give your address in America, which is where I hit my problem: I was being picked up at the airport, so didn’t know the precise address. When I realised this, I naturally spent the rest of the flight sweating in terror – though that might have been to do with the Better Midler movie they showed as inflight “entertainment”…quotes used advisedly.

Lining up to go through immigration, I speak to one of the queue-shepherds, resplendent in full immigration uniform, and explain the position. “Well, you can’t leave it blank. Just put down a hotel,” she says. “The Marriott’s the usual one,” she adds helpfully. I look quizzically at her to see if she’s serious: yep, she is genuinely suggesting I put down a complete fabrication. In somewhat shaky Biro, I do so, carefully noting what she looks like, so I can shriek “It was her! She told me to do it!” as they drag me away in chains. Needless to say, standing in front of the immigration official was somewhat nerve-wracking – every second, I expected “So which Marriott Hotel is it then?” to come from his lips — cue chains, shrieking, etc. Of course, it didn’t and this terrorist entered the USA without leaving a paper trail – I felt somewhat Carlos the Jackal-like. But it just goes to show how easy it is to bypass regulations. Which brings me to…

#2. Thanks to a couple of Chinatown shops clearing out their stock of laser-discs at $10 a time, my hand-luggage was pretty solid on the way out. They made me put it on the scales, and it weighed a bit more than the 13 lb limit…okay, it was actually 25.8. “Too heavy,” they said. I take the laser-discs out, and hand the bag over. It’s weighed, and is deemed close enough to pass. I leave the desk, go round the corner…and put the laserdiscs back in my bag. I board the plane with no further difficulty.

This isn’t the first time I’ve done this – on a previous occasion, I took stuff out of the offending case, and put it in my jacket pockets. Thus, honour was satisfied, the regulations were seen to be obeyed, and life proceded on after a slight annoyance. But you do have to wonder what the point is – why bother? I can understand an overall weight restriction covering all your baggage. I can even understand a volume restriction on hand luggage, since there’s a limited amount of space in the cabin. But within those limits, why should it matter whether your hand luggage weighs one pound or twenty? Of such things – the meaningless enforcement of petty regulations – are air-rages born. It’s interesting that the airlines put all blame for such things on the passengers, despite:

• banning smoking, leading to stressed-out nicotine addicts
• plying customers with drinks in a reduced-pressure atmosphere which enhances the effects of alcohol
• cutting back the air circulation to the bare minimum, especially in economy
• giving passengers – this is not an exaggeration – about two inches more room than slaves had while they were being shipped from Africa.

And slaves didn’t have to endure any Bette Midler movies either. Of course, there’s no excuse for berserk incidents involving passengers trying to open doors, and so on. But it might help if the airlines took some action to prevent the causes, as well as bleating about increasing punishments for the offenders.

[I’m off to New York this weekend – wheeeeee! – so the following piece from the Reuters wire seemed particularly appropriate. Within three months I’ll be living permanently in the country he describes… Can’t wait! :-)]

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Morris Berman has a good idea what he will do if George W. Bush is elected U.S. president in November: run to the toilet and get sick at the thought that Americans could elect a man he calls “as dumb as a stick.” Berman says it is a tough call, but he thinks if Bush wins he would be the dumbest man ever to hold the highest office in the land. He does not believe the Texas governor has ever read an intellectually challenging book and sees him as the poster boy for everything that is wrong with an America where being an intellectual is taboo.

But then Berman has been pretty angst-ridden about America lately. The Johns Hopkins University teacher, who calls himself a Marxist idealist, has just published his latest book, The Twilight of American Culture, and his prognosis is bleak. Most people cannot read, never mind spell, he says. Bill Gates and his billionaire buddies seem to have all the money, while the greatest country on Earth, which used to export ideals like life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, now flogs fried chicken and mind-numbing sitcoms. Spirituality is dead, Americans are Prozac-popping and directionless, families are falling apart and, even in the hallowed Oval Office, the business of nations has been put on hold for peccadilloes with interns.

It is a question of culture, of style as well as substance, and, for Berman at least, American culture is dead — if not totally dead, then twitching on the emergency-room floor with no health insurance and nary a doctor in sight. Berman sees Bush as the poster child for America’s collapse, which he likens to the fall of the Roman Empire. “I’m guessing George W. Bush has never read a serious book in his entire life. What does it say that we have a serious candidate for president in this country that is literally as dumb as a stick?” Berman asked rhetorically. “He can’t write a grammatical sentence and he can’t give a grammatical speech unless it’s written by somebody else and he’s reading it off a teleprompter. And the American public will probably elect him president.”

Berman, a fan of Green Party candidate Ralph Nader, recalled a recent article in an Illinois newspaper that asked people if Bush was intelligent enough to be president. “One woman said, ‘He’s pretty smart, but he doesn’t know very much.’ She’s the perfect Bush voter, and there are millions of her out there,” he said in mock horror. Berman, who talks in a Woody Allen-like patter, recalled a litany of statistics from his book that point to the demise of America as a home for middle-class intellectuals: The number of people reading a daily newspaper has halved since 1965. A 1995 survey showed 40 percent of adults could not name America’s Second World War enemies. About 120 million Americans read and write English at no better than an 11-year-old’s level.

As for the popularity of self-help books, don’t get him started on that one. “Self-help books are essentially watered-down sayings on tea bags that have been made into books. Chicken Soup for the Soul — every other book is ‘the soul.’ Why did we get so preoccupied with the soul? Because we are so dumb we can’t think of anything else,” he said. But it was not always like this. Back in the 1960s, Berman believes, America was different: “There was an allegiance to the basic notion that somehow the United States was a force for good in the world, that it really was doing valuable things in terms of democracy and the economy,” he said. “Now there is a spiritual apathy and a feeling that regardless of who you elect the government is corrupt. It’s become materialism for its own sake, as if there were no other purpose in life except to make money.”

Part of the blame for reading and being an intellectual falling from grace in America can be laid at Hollywood’s doorstep, Berman said. “In the case of Cheers, all the people that have any intellectual interests whatsoever are portrayed as pompous, full of themselves and pretentious,” he said of the TV comedy that enjoyed huge ratings for more than a decade. And the people (in Cheers) who basically don’t know their ass from their elbow are warm and authentic and the real grit of America, but they basically can’t spell a word like pretentious correctly.”

America’s malaise is not something that can be remedied with a Band-Aid or even a brilliant president. Things have gone too far for that, Berman believes. He predicts America will fall into a deep economic depression leading to a “dark age” like none before. “Every civilization in the history of the world comes to an end. There are no exceptions,” he said. “We are not going to beat the odds, American hubris and optimism aside.” Is there no hope — not even a glimmer? No happy, Hollywood ending? “Twilight implies a dawn,” he said. “So in some ways this book is a clarion call to people to do acts of preservation of the culture and leave a memory trace that then will get picked up maybe 200 years from how in terms of a cultural revival.” But there is some consolation: He does not expect the dark age to start until late in this century when, thankfully, most of us will have shuffled off this mortal coil.

Never mind Big Brother watching us, at times it seems that we are all watching Big Brother. Or everyone else at least, since the fifteen minutes I’ve caught of it have failed to pique my interest in the slightest. On the TC entertainment scale, watching dull and irritating people attempt to learn semaphore falls slightly below shampooing the budgie. But I think it is very interesting from a social phenomena point of view: this morning, I missed my train to work, because I couldn’t believe that the breakfast news had a lengthy report on Nick’s eviction. And this wasn’t even on the home of the brain-damaged, the Big Breakfast, it was the BBC. Clearly Something is Going On.

I feel a certain parental interest, having raised a flag about Big Brother, in its Dutch incarnation, all the way back in December 1999. It was clear then that it had the potential to go supernova, and this has been the case wherever it has been shown. However, it’s obvious that – as usual – the tabloid press are building their own castles. Even if 5 million people are watching, that means 50 million of us have better things to do. Though it’s impossible to avoid. At least until the football season starts again, coffee-machine talk here revolves around the exploits of the not-so-magnificent seven…no, make that six. Even people who wouldn’t touch Eastenders or Coronation Street with someone else’s barge-pole are touting its merits because it’s “real”. I suggest they try watching WWF wrestling instead – it’s patently bleedin’ obvious that the people in the house are playing roles every bit as artificial as The Rock or Triple H.

The show has been condemned in some circles – usually liberal, bleeding-heart papers like The Guardian – as “cruel” or “voyeuristic” – and it may well be so. However, I have very little problem engaging in cruel voyeurism, under scientifically controlled conditions, of course – such is human nature. A couple of thousand years ago, we’d have gone down the Circus Maximus watching people fighting wild animals. Nowadays, we go down the multiplexus and watch Russell Crowe fight computer-generated wild animals. This is what they call progress. We all like to experience other people’s lives; however, if you can’t find anyone’s better than a lesbian ex-nun, you perhaps do need to get out a lot more.

Say what you like about the people in the house – and if that was “they’re a bunch of annoying bastards whom you’d actively avoid in the pub”, you’re probably close to the mark – they’re taking part of their own free will. It appears to be a shock to some commentators, but give people enough incentive, and they will do virtually anything. In this case, I don’t think the money is particularly important: indeed, it may even be counter-productive, since the real loonies would do it for free. And real loonies = good television. Indeed, The man behind Big Brother has already got his next show sorted: Chains of Love. In this, a woman selects four men from 100 prospects to be chained to her wrists and ankles for a week, before she selects her dream date.

The question is not whether people want to watch such shows, for there’s obviously a market. The question is more whether the authorities will let them. The main news story which Nick’s departure drove from the front pages was the sunk Russian submarine – imagine if it had cameras inside, and pictures were broadcast over the Internet, 24/7. Would it get high ratings figures? Would you watch, right up until the last breath flickered out? You may not like the answers to these questions.

Dir: Jeannot Szwarc
Star: Helen Slater, Peter Cook, Faye Dunaway, Peter O’Toole.

“Supernatural forces of malevolent evil are seeking to bring the Earth to its knees. Only the summoning to the planet of a true superhero can save us from demonic control.”

Thus begin the strikingly po-faced UK trailer for Supergirl as voiced by Patrick Allen, best known perhaps as the man who “narrated” Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s Two Tribes. But as full-on nuclear holocausts go, the film probably trumps even “the last voice you will ever hear”. Oh, you can see how it could have made sense at the time, after three successful (albeit increasingly wobbly) installments of the Superman franchise. It’s just the startlingly bad execution which amazes.

You can’t knock the star power, right from the off. Peter O’Toole is Zoltar, creator of Argo City, some kind of extra-terrestrial hippy commune, going by the floaty dresses and wall-hangings favoured by the inhabitants, and his hang-dog expression suggests he saw the writing on the wall for the movie early. He is using the power source for the city, the Omegahedron, to…well, I’m not quite sure what, but it seems to involve making bad sculptures of trees. Supergirl (Helen Slater – sister of the then equally-unknown Christian) gazes enviously on, possibly contemplating the masturbatory potential in the rotating stick of sugar cane he wields for his tree-making. An clumsy and unfortunate incident sends the Omegahedron through a time-warp, and Supergirl follows in a sequence which combines the visual worst of 2001‘s climax and the opening of Doctor Who.

In one of those amazing flukes which tend to power Incredibly Bad movies, the Omegahedron, looking like a cloisonne paperweight, lands in the picnic of chief-villainess Selena (Faye Dunaway). What are the odds against that? Dunaway, while not looking round for scenery to chew (“Such a pretty world. I can’t wait until it’s all mine”), uses it to power the car radio, and abandons her sidekick, Nigel (Peter Cook). Supergirl turns up in the same spot, now in costume, and discovers her powers by crushing a rock to dust. Cue a montage of her flying cross-country, chasing second-unit footage of horses and sweeping over mountains in such a melodramatic manner, you expect her to break into, “The hills are alive…” Note that her skirt appears to be velcro’d to her thighs, to prevent it from ever rising more than an inch..

Selena’s lair is decorated in zebra skins and Turkish brothel off-casts, and one wonders whether she’s a lesbian, since the precise nature of her relationship with her assistant Bianca (Brenda Vaccaro) seems open to question. Indeed, the whole film sinks with surprising frequency into something bordering on the sordid, such as when Supergirl is menaced by two truckers. She escapes with the help of her breath power; I am tempted to make some kind of ‘blow-job’ comment at this point, but will refrain. The next morning, she wakes up next to a rabbit, and for one glorious minute, I thought it was going to go the same way as the rock, two paragraphs back. Sadly not, but Supergirl is soon disguised as a mousy schoolgirl, whose educational establishment just happens, by pure chance, to be the one where Nigel teaches maths. What are the odds against that? And if your credulity is not already snapping, she ends up rooming with Lucy Lane…yep, the sister of Lois. What are the odds, etc. etc.

Supergirl’s powers don’t win her any friends there, despite her lack of knowledge about bras. Meanwhile, Selena tests out a love-potion on Ethan, a handily-passing hunk, triggering a sequence that tries to be psychedelic, and fails miserably. He has to be rescued by Supergirl from a runaway digger — well, ‘walkaway’ is perhaps closer to the truth, since he could have saved himself with anything more than a sluggish amble. Mind you, the presence of Howard Jones on the soundtrack more than makes up for this. Viewers should also note the extremely obvious wires as Supergirl lowers the digger to the ground. Ethan falls in love with her instead, thanks to the love potion, which kicks in at just the right moment. It’s a good job the film isn’t set in Portsmouth, where drooling over schoolgirls tends to get you a brick through the window.

A miffed Selena unleashes an invisible monster, which speeds through the forest, Evil Dead-like, felling trees as Supergirl undresses, before dragging her into the woods where she is raped by the trees. Well, okay, I made the last bit up: she opens the window, says “Leave this place and do no harm”, and uses an electrically-charged lamp-post to zap the monster, in a scene nicked from Forbidden Planet, and its monsters from the id. After a brief pause for Ethan to spout some iambic pentameter – I guess that’s love for you – and get taken flying by Supergirl (whom he doesn’t realise is the same person as the mousy teenager with which he’s in love).

She has brought Nigel back into the fold, needing his knowledge of occult…things. Such as the Burundi Wand, which is “pure, unadulterated evil” (in stick form). Nigel shakes it. Ethan and Supergirl get it on, and he realises the connection to the object of his affections, proving that you can change the colour of your hair, but you can’t change the taste of your tonsils. A mountain has mysteriously appeared in the middle of town, with a castle on top — I presume the Burundi Wand had summat to do with this. To no-one surprise bar Supergirl’s, it’s a trap, and she gets imprisoned in a place with rocks even she can’t crush. She rapidly finds herself up to her neck in black tar, a sequence to gladden the heart of every lover of quicksand [you know who you are…] — oddly, the next time we see her, she’s all clean again. I presume the ‘hosedown sequence’ is in the director’s cut.

Selena installs a martial dictatorship, ruthlessly suppressing all demonstration – though since this more or less consists of Lucy Lane waving a placard, it’s not a major task. Supergirl teams up with Zoltar, who has been sent to the same place for losing the Octahedron (it’s nice to see that even super-advanced civilization prefer incarceration to rehabilitation). There is, inevitably, an escape route: the quantium vortex, which is a Wizard of Oz-like double tornado, resembling red and blue candy floss. Zoltar dies, but Supergirl makes it out, crashing back into Selena’s castle where the rest of the cast are enduring “the old dangling-in-a-cage routine”, as Nigel puts it.

The scene is thus set for a climactic battle between Selena and Supergirl, who looks a bit like Buffy – or maybe it’s just that all blonde, arse-kicking girls, look like Buffy. Will Supergirl defeat her evil nemesis, save the world and, most importantly of all, point towards a sequel? You’ll have to watch the movie to find out…

Any hopes of a sequel proved frighteningly optimistic – looking at it now, it’s hard to see how anyone could ever have released this and expected it to make money in the first place. The script never works out whether it is taking itself seriously, and while the cast is high-profile, they largely appear to be auditioning for panto. The two Peter’s, Cook and O’Toole, in particular have the same “I’d rather not be here” look seen on Gielgud and Mirren in Caligula. Rarely can hopes have been so high, not least for the previously-unknown Helen Slater, plucked from obscurity. One can only feel sympathy for her, a career sunk before it started, contaminated beyond all hope of recovery by one of the all-time turkeys. In the documentary about the movie, one of the creators says that Slater’s life will change after making Supergirl. I imagine that was likely very true: it probably had a great deal more laughing and pointing afterwards.

Footnotes

• Keep an eye out for Matt (Max Headroom) Frewer, as one of the truckers who try to ravish Supergirl, and Sandra (Hitch-hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy) Dickinson as a guest at Selena’s party.
• One of Supergirl’s costumes sold for $12,925 in May 2000 — I don’t know whether the velcro was included…
• Director Jeannot Szwarc’s career didn’t exactly take off as a result either; subsequent work such as Santa Claus: The Movie would suggest that a lot of the blame can be laid at his feet.
• The version reviewed is the 124-minute international version; a 138-minute director’s cut is also available, but there are some sacrifices I am not prepared to make.