Confused Views: Beat me up, Scotty! 

It's hard to know what to make of the new Star Trek movie. Or rather, it's hard to know what to make of the audience of the new Star Trek movie. When I say it wasn't long ago that nearly everyone thought Star Trek was for specky, nerdy divs whose social failings meant they had to stay out of the sun watching a poorly acted soap opera set in space, I mean literally about three weeks ago. Apparently, all it took to change the minds of practically everyone was one slickly put together trailer suggesting that idiots might not be too thick or socially adept for it after all. 

So now we're faced with having to wade through rivers of blood with gold teeth floating in them, like a makeshift driftwood, just to get to the popcorn counter as football hooligans kick each other's heads in over perceived slights against Spock or suggestions that the new Scotty isn't a patch on the old one. They chant during the film and try to start Mexican waves. 

The indie hipster crowd have been sucked in too, but they're as confused by it as we are. Their uniform of artificially aged band t-shirts, ill-fitting jeans and designer black framed glasses means they're almost impossible to tell from the Trekkie elite, in their genuinely aged band t-shirts, ill-fitting jeans and black framed glasses. Most of them spend the entire film trying to work out if they're only watching to be ironic or not. 

It's precisely these crowds that have meant I've been willing to see anything but Star Trek recently. Knowing that its natural audience was currently rioting in the theatre showing Trek, I found myself watching Fighting the other weekend. It's a film about a well-meaning street hustler (is there any other kind?) who is approached by a well-meaning street fight organiser (is there any other kind?) who believes that the street hustler has what it takes to be a star in fight club light after seeing him beat up two teenaged muggers. 

Fighting is exactly like one of those MTV dance movies where someone poor learns the importance of passion, a multi-cultural community and a solid week's worth of practice (which, no matter what you're practicing, will make you the best). The only difference here is that they've swapped the dance show-down for a badly filmed scrap. Otherwise, all of the stereotypes, nonsense sub-Dawson's Creek drama and complete detachment from reality are present and accounted for. 

I worked out the key to enjoying Fighting fairly early on, which is lucky because it's an awful film. It becomes infinitely more enjoyable if you imagine that you're watching a film called ‘Fucking'. Every time a character says ‘fight', or a derivative of, you have to imagine that they're saying ‘fuck'. It suddenly makes all of the homo-eroticism seem like a style choice. It also goes some way towards explaining the fight scenes, edited specifically to disguise what is going on in order to get a low age rating (ahh, the uncompromising  integrity of the artist), which serves to make them look suspiciously intimate. 

There are several other games you can play. There's ‘count the awful hip-hop songs' (13,526 before I lost count and the will to live). Perhaps the most fun is guessing what happened to Terrence Howard's head that could possibly explain his voice affectation. You can spend the whole film waiting for Howard to deliver an emotional speech about an injury he sustained in a bare knuckle boxing match (a speech that never comes), or you can just come up with your own explanation. In my version of the film, Robert Downey Jr jumped up and down on his head in a real suit of iron for about ten minutes. Then he held him down so that Jon Favreau could fart in his face and tell him that he wasn't welcome on the set of Iron Man 2. It was brilliant. 

Better on release at the moment is Coraline, the 3D stop-motion animation from Nightmare Before Christmas director, Henry Selick. It expertly builds a dark atmosphere (in fact, it does a considerably better job than most modern horror films do) and looks terrific. See it in 3D while you still have the chance.  

Coraline serves as a good reminder that 3D technology can be put to good use. It would be easy to only think of 3D as the additional dimension in the Miley Ray Cyrus (the result of a one night stand between Billy Ray Cyrus and Medusa) concert film, where a permanently smiling teen leans out of the screen to sing into your face about how it totally rocks to respect adults and how people who litter come from broken homes. When used appropriately, though, 3D can be far more than a cheap gimmick. I only hope that it's still popular when they get going on the Videodrome remake, because that would be amazing.