Dir: Roger Christian
Star: John Travolta, Barry Pepper, Forest Whitaker, Kim Coates

It doesn’t actually begin too badly, though I don’t know about man being an endangered species, as the opening text claims – it’s John Travolta’s career that’s about to be put in extreme peril. In the year 3000, humanity has been reduced to a primeval state, harbouring vague memories of civilization, gods and demons. We can tell it’s primeval, because all the men look like Swampy. Hell, all the women look like Swampy. Our hero, Jonnie (Pepper, in his last starring role – trust me on this one) leaves the sanctuary of the mountains to find these mythical gods in a ruined city. I have to say, the effects and sets are excellent, and I was wondering if this was perhaps more a misunderstood gem.

How wrong I was. For then the invading alien race, the Psychlos, turn up and start firing. For some reason, the movie suddenly acquires a virulent green tint, the first of many totally gratuitous filters director Christian puts in front of the camera. Green, blue, orange – even more than one in the same shot. And when he hasn’t got out his Crayolas, he’s tilting the camera: initially, it didn’t make much difference since, hey, mountains are kind of tilty anyway, but this gets old fast on any level playing-field. The drinking game for this movie should involve taking a swig each time the camera moves off the horizontal: should ensure oblivion is reached by about 30 minutes, a best-case scenario for any viewer.

Anyway, Jonnie gets captured, pausing only to crash through a succession of plate-glass windows, all remarkably intact, despite the passage of enough time for cities to crumble. His attempts to escape bring him into contact – literally – with Terl (Travolta), the Psychlo security officer who is mean and grumpy even when he isn’t stuck on Earth “with endless options for renewal”, after being caught shagging a senator’s daughter. Bizarrely, there’s much in the film that revolves around office politics of the most banal sort, which is wildly out of place in a supposed SF-action pic.

“In order to feel safer on his private jet, John Travolta has purchased a bomb-sniffing dog. Unfortunately for the actor, the dog came six movies too late”
Tina Fey, Saturday Night Live

Hard to say which is worse, Travolta’s appearance or his acting. Things the movies teach us, #391: it is hard to exude menace, when you have tubes stuck up both your nostrils. And that’s excluding Terl’s funky dreads and the platform soles, clearly intended to increase his stature, but which actually make him resemble a former member of Slade as he clomps around. Travolta’s performance is no more comfortable, and would be barely acceptable as a pantomime villain at the Fairfield Halls, Croydon.

Our hero, meanwhile, is stuck with the other “man-animals” and fed something green and lumpy; it must be good, as a fight breaks out over its distribution, albeit only so Jonnie can give the “we humans have to stick together” speech. Terl, meanwhile, has his own plans. The Psychlos came to Earth in search of gold (coincidentally, also a rare element on their planet), and he wants to use humans to operate the mining machinery, which would be a breach of the rules. He also lets Jonnie and two colleagues out, purely in order to find out what humans like most to eat – I guess asking them would have been too much trouble – and comes to the conclusion that it’s rat.

He plugs Jonnie into a learning machine, force-feeding him, not just the knowledge necessary to work the machinery, but the entire Encyclopedia Galactica, including the bits on military technology. Oops. If Terl is supposed to be one of the elite, you wonder how such a dumb species ever discovered the wheel, never mind interstellar teleportation. He then brings Jonnie to the destroyed Denver public library, just to emphasise that knowledge is useless. Jonnie picks up from the rubble…well, for one glorious moment, I thought it was going to be a copy of L.Ron Hubbard’s Dianetics, but it’s even more cliched – the Declaration of Independence.

Terl can’t survive outdoors because radiation makes the atmosphere the Psychlos breath explode [This an Important Plot Point, once you can get past wondering about the dubious physics involved]. So he leaves Jonnie and his crew to mine for two weeks and wanders off. Jonnie uses his new-found knowledge instead to sprint around the United States, dropping off local cavemen at flight simulators so they can learn to fly fighter jets [miraculously still in working order after a thousand years or so], picking up nuclear bombs, oh, and looting gold from Fort Knox. Terl, of course, barely questions why his gold mine is miraculously producing bullion bars, probably stamped, “Property of US Government”.

Jonnie kicks off the revolt, and then…to be honest, I’m not sure what happens, exactly, as the story is edited in such a way as to border on the incoherent. Must have been damn fine flight simulators though, as the cavemen are now flying like Tom Cruise on amphetamines. The nuclear bomb is snuck through the teleportation gateway to the Psychlos home planet, where it blows up, causing the entire atmosphere to go with it. Kinda lucky such an unstable planet had survived the four billion years necessary to evolve intelligent life.

Terl meanwhile, gets his arm blown off – reacting with much the same depth of emotion you’d get if someone told him there was a thread on his suit jacket – and is kept hostage by Jonnie for reasons which remain unclear to this day. Estimated cost: $73m. American box-office: $21m. Watching John Travolta’s smug Scientologist face as his career goes down the plughole: priceless.

It’s impossible to list all the ways in which this film is jaw-droppingly awful. The plot makes no sense, the acting is awful, the direction woeful. I’ve read the original novel (hey, so shoot me) and it’s actually not bad, or at least not disastrous, in a pulp SF kinda way. Its miserable box-office doesn’t tell the whole tale, since it’s widely known that Scientologists were asked to go and see the movie multiple times on the first weekend. About the only thing in its favour is that, while I’ve no doubt Hubbard’s name is largely what got Travolta interested, it surely is too bad to contain any kind of cult-indoctrination message.

Rottentomatoes.com lists the final critical score at 69-4 against, an unprecedented tidal wave of hate. The Battlefield Earth FAQ goes even further, cherrypicking the bad ones. Believe the hype on this one: it’s every bit as poor as you imagined, and then some.

One year ago today, I got off the plane in Phoenix, ready to begin my new life… It seems like a millenium: I was single, the World Trade Center was still standing, and the first American with whom I had significant contact, was a Customs Officer, who grilled me for what seemed like an entire twelve months in itself over the plaster of paris in my luggage, suspecting it was drugs. How things change – nowadays, he’d probably assume it was anthrax.

Yes, I’ve survived an entire year in Arizona, and have reached the end of it without (fingers crossed) acquiring any malignant melanomas. Despite what I said above, the time has actually flown past, and I feel sure I must have hibernated for three or four months at least, entering a state of suspended animation when the air-conditioning broke down, or something like that. Actually, the heat, originally suspected to be a major problem, turned out to be nowhere near as much of a problem. Back in my youth, my mother spent most of the summer trying to persuade me to play outside because it was a “lovely day”. She also tried to make me eat vegetables. Now I’m an adult, I don’t have to do either.

I’m now thoroughly used to all the stuff that seemed so strange to start with: cinemas in which you can’t book actual seats, just a vague promise of admission; free refills on soft drinks in restaurants; commercials on the BBC [or at least, BBC America], interrupting the likes of Fawlty Towers and Red Dwarf to sell you compilation CDs of the best ukelele ballads, volume 3. Coping with this is now all part of regular existence, and demonstrates the remarkable flexibility and resilience of the human spirit. Er, or something like that.

Credit where credit’s due though: that the process of transition has been so painless must largely been due to my fiancee [a word I’m still formally getting used to!] Chris, who has smoothed over all the bumps in my road, and is undoubtedly the #1 thing I’ll be giving thanks for tomorrow – it being my second Thanksgiving in America. “Second”: more proof I’ve been here for a complete cycle of the seasons, and I’ve learned from last year’s mistakes, not the least of which might be that there is such a thing as too much honey-baked ham.

Meanwhile, progress towards getting married is slowly being made, though my Mother appears to be well ahead of any vague plans we have formulated – she has had some 34 years start on us. Part of me doesn’t want to get married any more: but before Chris (sitting next to me), has a fit, I should point out that I do still want to be married – it’s just the actual ‘getting’ part that seems to be as much a chore as a pleasure!

Right, that’s your lot – we’ve closed up shop for four days (we’ve got a lot to be thankful for!), which should give us enough time to plough through the turkey and out the other side. A Happy Anniversary to me, a Happy Thanksgiving to our American readers, and to all our British ones, a Happy…er, two-and-a-bit-weeks-past-Bonfire-Night. 🙂

There you go. That’s this week’s big piece of news, which might come as a surprise, or might not. I’d always viewed marriage as an outdated institution – you’re either committed to a person, or you’re not, and the presence of a ring isn’t going to make the slightest bit of difference. But try telling that to the immigration people here in the States, who are clearly an old-fashioned bunch.

No matter how long I live with my one true love, I’d always be at the mercy of my temporary work residency – were I to be fired from my position as webmaster of trashcity.com, I would theoretically have to leave the country immediately. Though since said employer is also my one true love (for immigration purposes, concepts like “joint partners” aren’t any good either), I like to think I have a certain amount of job security.

It will also allow Chris to become a McLennan, divesting herself of another remnant of her previous marriage, a nightmare she is otherwise reminded of every time she signs a cheque. Changing your name any other way is, I’m told, a somewhat troublesome process, but announce you’re getting married and it all kinda happens by default. Think the kids are going to hang on to their names – well, they are used to them – which might lead to some interesting times going through immigration. Yes, these are my kids. No, they don’t have the same name as me. Nor their biological mother.

As I write this, Chris is looking into booking venues for the wedding and receptions, with her customary fervour. It’s probably going to be back in Britain, but she’s used to long-range planning, having previously co-ordinated parties, including a surprise one for me, with the aid of much furtive maneouvering and a copy of the London Yellow Pages. Plotting a wedding from 5000 miles away should be a piece of cake – albeit a large cake, with two little figures on the top of it.

Part of me begrudges the money. Many venues appear to work on the principle that bickering over the odd thousand for your daughter’s wedding would be churlish, but we are actually paying for the damn thing ourselves. Hell, you could buy a really big plasma screen – or even two – for some of the prices we have heard: we just want to feed and water a few guests, not buy them cars and start them all up in business. I would be happy with a few sausage rolls and a six-pack of Irn-Bru – as long as we got the his and hers pair of plasma screens, of course.

So I come to the end of my first year in America: selling beads for a living, engaged to be married, and perfectly content to be both. How life does change…

The one thing the above lines teach us, is that Rudyard Kipling knew jack about sports fandom. Because, having sat through both in the past week, I have become painfully aware of the difference. Wednesday and Thursday night saw the Diamondbacks lose World Series games in heartbreaking fashion, not once but twice, in virtually the same way. Comments I made previously, specifically, “How people like our 22-year old Korean pitcher, Kim, will cope, I dread to think,” seemed like the work of Nostradamus. For in both games, he (and by extension, we) needed just one more out to defeat the Yankees; instead, a home run yanked the fluffy shag-pile carpet of victory from under our feet, replacing it with the hard and chilly lino which is defeat.

The second one in particular was heart-breaking. Just ask Chris, who felt like a baseball widow that evening as I struggled to contend with feelings of unfairness, loss and disappointment which… Well, Bill Shankly once said, “Some people believe football is a matter of life and death…I can assure you it is much, much more important than that,” and the same goes for baseball. Uncomfortable though it is to say it, I felt more upset than I was over the World Trade Center attack.

Yet just when all seems lost… Last night, we crushed the Yankees 15-2 – merely setting a new record for World Series hits, and handing the foe their worst loss in 294 post-season games – and all is once again right with the world. It’s three apiece, and we head tonight towards the deciding seventh, with everything on the line. I just hope I have enough adrenalin to cope.

Why does fandom – and sports fandom in particular, since few other kinds can match the tremendous roller-coaster of emotions – exert such a terrible toll, making you care less about the deaths of 5000 people, than a white ball going over a fence? It’s a sense of direct connectness, perhaps; every day since March, the guys on the team have been a part of my life. I know Luis Gonzales has triplets. I know Matt Williams likes Rush. I know Craig Counsell’s nickname is “Rudy”. These are things I don’t know about our next-door neighbours.

Sports is the ultimate unscripted soap-opera. Perhaps Kipling had a point; in any season (especially one with 179 games in total), there will be ups and downs, wins and losses, injuries, triumphs, mistakes and everything else you can imagine. It’s a true microcosm of life, and we live it through the players. Their success becomes ours; their failures become ours too. At one point, I found myself wondering if moving from the office to the living-room to watch the final moments had caused the defeat somehow, in an inexplicable butterfly-in-the-Amazon way.

They’ve done studies into this (your tax money at work in a useful cause, for once), and one suggestion is that it recreates the emotions from back when humanity lived in tribes. “Our sports heroes are our warriors,” said psychology professor Robert Cialdini of Arizona State. And studies have shown that testosterone levels rise after a victory and fall after a defeat by over 25% – Chris will testify to this one, since I think my line on Thursday night was, “I just want to be held…” 🙂

Just a few short hours to go; for the moment, anything is possible. In my best dream, I see Kim back on the mound, successfully getting the final out this time, and being carried off on the shoulders of his team-mates as the stadium erupts. Where else is such redemption possible? But whatever happens, it’s going to take me a while to get to sleep tonight.

[And verily, in the bottom of the 9th innings, Arizona were losing 1-2, and they did swing mightily and scored two runs. And there was much joy in Phoenix, and much gnashing of teeth and weeping and wailing in New York. Kim never did get to pitch though…]

or All Your Baseballs are Belong to Us…
or Why is a Brit watching anyway?

Phoenix is a city than runs by car; no-one walks anywhere. But last night, even allowing for it being Sunday, the roads were incredibly quiet: the local baseball team, the Arizona Diamondbacks were playing game 2 of the World Series, and the whole town, it seemed, was glued to the screen. Even I wouldn’t have been out except for parental duty, returning a visiting small child to its owner – with bad grace, and at a speed that would have been reckless, had not all Phoenix’s finest been in the donut shop watching the game too. It is painful to be dragged away from the screen, simply to stop the whining of someone who doesn’t appreciate the potentially once-in-a-lifetime nature of this event.

For my hometown team to be taking part was miraculous, as the Arizona Diamondbacks made it to the game’s ultimate showcase in just their fourth season. While I’d been supporting them since their inception (partly through proxy via Chris, partly through the Reuters feed at HSBC), it was my first World Series actually living here and there are cities which have gone DECADES without winning a World Series. No team from Chicago has made it this far in 42 years, while Boston last won the World Series in 1918. Boy, they must be pissed.

Particularly so, since history is part of the sport’s essence. It has far more than any other popular sport in America, with the first organised league forming in 1858. This may not seem particularly impressive, but is pretty good considering that basketball wasn’t even invented until more than thirty years later, and the first Superbowl took place as long ago as, er, 1967. Compared to this, baseball holds a unique place in the American psyche.

And in mine too. Chris and I attended about a dozen games this year, in addition to countless more on TV, the radio or the Internet. Their home, Bank One Ballpark, is a fabulous new stadium with a retractable roof, air-conditioning and a swimming pool in which spectators (albeit rich, corporate ones, mostly) can frolic during the game. It’s all very civilised – you can even get Newcastle Brown Ale on draft (albeit at a rich, corporate price) – despite the intensely irritating mascot, D.Baxter. The logic of a team named the Diamondbacks having a bobcat as a mascot escapes me entirely, and his smugly furry grin and childish antics are sufficient to get the most stoic animal-rights advocate reaching for a rifle.

To any statistically-minded individual (waves pencil in air), the game is a paradise, with RBIs, ERAs, slugging percentages and more decimal points than an accountant’s convention. But you can just sit there and absorb it – baseball is the sort of game that creeps up on you, until you suddenly realise you’re wondering whether the pitcher will lay down a sacrifice bunt, or if the manager will pull him for a pinch-hitter capable of going the other way against a hanging splitter, up and in. I appreciate that sentence probably made no sense to 95% of readers, and will try to restrain myself.

It also possesses a timeless nature, with games being open-ended, continuing until someone wins – however long this takes. And it can take a while; even the average game is around the three-hour mark, but earlier this season, we played eighteen innings – twice as long as a regular game – which took just shy of six hours. We won 1-0, and that wasn’t even the longest game played in the major leagues this year. Any sport capable of playing such utter havoc with TV schedules can only be loved.

In line with this languid approach is a regular season which lasts for a mere 162 games, followed by playoffs leading to the World Series, a best of seven matchup scheduled over nine days. Non-Americans tend to scoff at the term “World Series” given the only teams ever taking part come from the USA and Canada, but these days, the game is seriously international, with the two likely Rookies of the Year coming from Japan and the Dominican Republic. As mentioned, the Diamondbacks made it to this final showdown, after fewer years in existence than any team ever, but in American sport, less important than longevity is an owner prepared to plough lots of money into the club.

The D’backs have that – their owner also has the local NBA basketball franchise – but it was still something of a surprise, given most of the team are the wrong side of 30 (or in pitcher Mike Morgan’s case, 42) and seen as past their prime. We were given little hope, especially as our opponents are the New York Yankees, the Manchester United of baseball. Like the Reds, the Yankees are extremely rich, very successful, and hated by everyone outside their own city, and indeed a good chunk of those inside. [Just as United has City, so the Yankees have the New York Mets] Their history is peppered with name familiar even to non-Americans, like Babe Ruth and Joe DiMaggio. The Yankees had won 26 World Series in all, including the past three with little trouble, winning 12 games and losing only one in that time. Just this once, they also had more outside sympathy than usual, being a symbol of national pride after the events of 9/11.

No-one gave the Diamondbacks much of a chance before play started on Saturday. As mentioned, history plays a big part in baseball, and the Diamondbacks don’t have any to speak of. Most of the population in Phoenix is from elsewhere, and bring their loyalties with them – when teams like the Chicago Cubs came to town, it was hard to be sure who was the home side. Die-hards were largely limited to people like myself, who moved here after the franchise started, and we failed to sell out some earlier playoff games against St.Louis and Atlanta, which is like having tickets left over for an FA Cup semi-final.

But here we are, on Monday morning, and the Diamondbacks are two games up, having won 9-0 and 4-1. What the hell happened? Two words: Schilling and Johnson. They are the star pitchers for the D’backs – in cricketing terms, it’s a bit like when Lillee and Thomson played for Australia, with both at the top of their best seasons ever. Their styles are different: Curt Schilling uses pinpoint accuracy and movement to deceive the batter, while the very scary Randy Johnson – 6’10” tall – blazes it past them at 98 mph. Rounders, this ain’t.

Normally, even good batters only manage to hit the ball three times out of ten, one way or another, but in those first two games the Yankees batters – reigning world champions, remember – managed barely one out of ten. The bad news is, the effort involved is so extreme that most pitchers need four days of rest to recover before they can be used again, and the rest of the D’backs staff are nowhere near as effective. In addition, the next three games take place in New York. In the Bronx. In Yankee Stadium. Where the lovely fans have a reputation akin to Chelsea supporters with a hangover, and are renowned for slinging batteries at opposing players. How people like our 22-year old Korean pitcher, Kim, will cope, I dread to think.

But just at the moment, Arizona is the centre of the baseball universe, and with a 2-0 lead, there’s no better place for this recent convert to baseball to be. All is truly right with the world…