Seven small wonders

THE seven deadly sins, what are they again? Pretentiousness, illogicality, transparency, genre running away with genre, gratuitous violence, stereotypical serial killers and Brad Pitt?

By the end of the first week in January, David Fincher's Seven was proclaimed to be the "Best Movie of 1996" Ten out of Five! shrieked the critics. Must see! read the expensive, full page newspaper ads. If you must see one film make it Seven! chirped the cleverclogs copy writers. Seven is magnificent!

The reviews were deadly. Best film of the year.

What is going on here?

Okay, it's all very chi chi to talk about tongue in cheek noir. We've read all that post modern surrealistic da da about Pulp Fiction, another movie to leave you foaming at the mouth without so much as a whiff of cocaine. What is so disturbing, however, is how remorselessly all this is being sold as entertainment.

Is evil so far removed from most people's lives that they find it fascinating on the big screen? Why is it entertaining to peer, through blackest noir, at fictional depravity, when all you have to do is turn on the News? Or surf through channels of trash TV. Or walk through city streets. Or worry about the choices confronting dour children.

To go to most of the popular movies at the moment is to experience nausea as your stomach churns and your heart is pressed through a meat grinder, while people all around you are laughing and cheering.

It's bizarre. And please, don't give me any guff about having a post modern moment. Don't talk to me about concept.

What is entertaining about films, purporting to be thrillers, which outdo one another in their literalness? We're not talking special effects anymore and we're certainly not talking about subtlety. There it all is in blurred, heavy handed technicolour ... bloated, long dead bodies, buckets of vomit and blood; bodies sliced and swung open for autopsies; mutilation, flailings - soon to be available at a video store near you.

Explanations, please. One man admired Seven for its unrelieved bleakness. Sign of hope for Hollywood," he said. Now that was a good, interesting, post cinema spoof line, until he added that he really liked the film because "It stopped me from thinking about my problems for a couple of hours." He will find more consolation in Heat and Casino which between them promise "never seen before" scenes of rape, murder and criminal violence.

Another colleague said he found Seven "perfectly evil". Wasn't it fascinating, he purred, how the (real) deadly sins - pride, covetousness, gluttony, lust, anger, sloth, envy were regarded as virtues nowadays?

One thankfully unpretentious movie buff said he thought it was a laugh he liked when the corpse . . . whoops, better not spoil it for you.

And the movie buff helped me off my high horse. Calm down, I said to myself. Suppose people do find this entertaining. Fine. But that still doesn't explain why they couldn't see through this particular film's infuriating illogicality.

Seven takes noir to a new level of darkness, to a colour not yet named on the Dulux colour chart. This wasn't merely black, it was damn near invisible.

It rained and rained down on this cruel and evil urban landscape. (Just like it rained on Bladerunner eight years ago - a much better film.) Then, oddly enough, at the end of the movie they take a quick drive to the desert. That's right. An arid, treeless desert, 10 minutes beyond this extraordinary rain belt. A sunny, dusty denouement right cover the rainbelt. Am I being too picky?

AS for the storyline. Hah! Hands up anyone who didn't know that the one woman in the film was a victim from the very moment she appeared on the screen! (Oh dear, am I ruining it for you?) And that moment when Brad Pitt shouts his name and, I think, his address, at the photographer. .You wouldn't have to be Cracker to suss that one.

Best of all, there was that box. Now I can't spoil it for you and tell you what was in that small, perfectly square delivery box. But there were roughly three possibilities. Was it a hat? Nope. A cake? No ...

So, we've sat through all this gut wrenching psychopathic gore for what?

I'll spare you songs of moral righteousness; I'll leave arguments as to what is genre and what isn't to the pundits. But, hey, the punter could do without the hype which so readily glorifies the ghastly, and gives tacit support to Hollywood's insistence that there be nothing left to the imagination.