2005-01-17

Walking home after work in the early hours of a Sunday morning, I observe the archaeological detritus of a typical weekend: empty Styrofoam containers from the local chippy; a trail of Fosters cans leading to an abandoned shopping trolley; the ubiquitous, poetically discarded single shoe (To the girl who lost one stiletto-heeled shoe on Victoria Road: How did you walk off without noticing that? Did you think you�d suddenly developed a limp?). Yesterday morning, I came across a puddle of vomit, as you do (my former flatmate Andy calls them �recycled Kebabs�); this one was horrifyingly fascinating because it looked for all the world as though someone had ingested and then regurgitated, along with their takeaway meal, an entire napkin. Either that or they�d urped up their intact stomach lining � neither a very attractive possibility. It was like something from the set of Aliens. Such is midnight in Portsmouth.

And speaking of stomach-churning horrors, I rented The Butterfly Effect a few days ago. Now, I have as much desire to see Ashton Kutcher on the silver screen as I have to see Regis Philbin in Playgirl, but it was the only DVD left in the all-night Kwiki Mart that I hadn�t seen. I dearly wish that were still the case.

This film had all the makings of an easy, forgettable summer blockbuster (facile time-travel plot! Passably attractive starlets! Eric Stoltz molesting children!), but it was carried off with enough panache to take it from the merely bland to the downright laughable. The only thing distracting my attention from the gaping holes in the plot was the sight of Ashton Kutcher being manifestly outperformed by the ten-year-old hired to play the child version of himself, by a small terrier, and in one memorable scene, by a mailbox. And I still can�t figure out whether the film was intended to be funny, although the scene at the end of an unborn fetus committing suicide was a good bit of a giggle by anyone�s standards.

Of course I only mention this celluloid suckhole in order to bring up an abstruse literary reference: A Sound of Thunder by Ray Bradbury, in which a man goes back to the prehistoric era, accidentally crushes an insect, and returns to his own time to find the world changed beyond recognition, has been the inspiration for a whole series of mediocre and unimaginative movies (and one really funny Simpsons episode). The Butterfly Effect is no exception. I think I should do the world a favour and invent a time machine myself so that I can travel back sixty years and kill Ray Bradbury before he wrote that story. I expect to return to the present day to find that the hours and money that would have been pissed away creating plagiaristic cinematic twaddle will have instead been spent implementing worldwide famine relief and inventing flying cars. And hopefully, sterilizing Ashton Kutcher.