On the evidence presented in The Amazing Spider-Man, the latest re-boot of the franchise, to which as usual the pond came late, American acting in feature films targeted at the youth demographic has now reached a kind of frenetic quality equivalent to the gestural exaggerations to be found in silent films.
Andrew Garfield, in the title role, delivers such an amazing variety of twitches, beats, sly looks, and desperate wild-eyed, beseeching, tortured visual pleas for love and attention that anyone in his company would swear he was smacked out, wired tight, and on at least his third amphetamine tablet before he began the show. Compared to him, the ostensible villain, played by Rhys Ifans seems positively sedate, at least until the CGIs kicked in.
Amazingly this modern equivalent of Rudolph Valentino scores four stars on Imdb and raked in close to $700 million.
Yet all it is is a lizard picture. A bloody big apocalyptic lizard picture, with a lizard about to take over New York and then the world. As lizards and Pinky and the Brain do ...
So what's this got to do with the ways of the commentariat? Well for the last couple of weeks, generally grumpy Paul Sheehan has been in splendid form, with vindictive sprays that have provoked furious responses, generating over a thousand provoked readers in one memorable defence of Tony Abbott, alleged to have suffered a Labor party stoning.
Sheehan was agitated at the negative language directed Abbott's way. So how does he open Rich vitriol shrouds budget extravagance?
I preferred Robotic Julia. Now we have Furious Julia. Is there no middle course for the Prime Minister?
This is roughly equivalent of scribbling I preferred mad scientist Paul Sheehan. Now we have angry furious lizard Paul Sheehan. Is there no middle course for the outrageous Fairfax hack?
Yep, it's just another variant on when did you stop abusing your furious robotic wife. A routine outing for an apocalyptic, furious, angry lizard always ready to put in the boot:
Furious Julia has become obsessed with the Leader of the Opposition, a level of personal animus that has reached the point of becoming the defining issue of federal politics. It may provide a voyeuristic soap opera for the political class and the Canberra press gallery but it is unhealthy politics and it is toxic policy.
Does it ever seep in to the reptilian brain that furious angry lizard Paul Sheehan has become obsessed with Julia, a level of personal animus that now saturates his scribbles, and while it might provide a voyeuristic soap opera for his readers, it remains a defining reason why the pond wouldn't pay for a Fairfax publication with a barge pole (come to think of it, paying for lizard films also seems a tad redundant).
It makes for unhealthy reading and zero in the way of insights into policy.
Sheehan has now reached the screeching hysteria and animosity of a Piers "Akker Dakker" Ackerman, or that parrot Alan Jones, and you have to think it's unhealthy.
These days he simply compiles lists of what he perceives as outrages. Indonesia was an outrage, and so are boat people, and Peter Slipper and Nicola Roxon and the NBN and Fair Work Australia, and then amazingly, like a dog returning to much loved vomit, he even drags the Home Insulation Program out of its grave, dusts it off, and gives it yet another run.
Is there anything he can't turn his petty, fervent mind to? Nope:
The Department of Climate is spending $20.5 million on a fit-out of its new headquarters building in Canberra, including a stainless steel executive wine cabinet and Nespresso machines in all eight staff kitchens.
Shocking, outrageous, and comical.
It was the pond's great good pleasure once to sit down in the Nine board room and enjoy a fully catered meal, lovingly cooked and served via a lovely linen table setting, thanks to a most well appointed fit-out (and don't ask about the wine. It was fine and plentiful).
That was in the days of Kerry Packer, who was allegedly and supposedly a tight bastard, so why is it that you never hear someone like Sheehan banging on about waste and decadence in the private sector (as for the old BHP boardroom with its splendid sweeping views of Melbourne ...)
Why? Well because the man clearly loves a junket and a piss-up, and is inclined to decadence, as anyone who read his epic recounting of his junket in My plane, my way will recall:
A white Boeing 757, the words "The Captain's Choice Tour" emblazoned on the side, all business class, with a chef and seven attentive, good-looking cabin crew who have been with us for the entire journey. Our escorts, the six people who do all the gritty work of getting us through foreign airports with baggage intact, transport waiting and hotel rooms ready. We even have our own doctor.
Luxury, security and continuity in the midst of obscurity.
Indeed. And it gets more nauseatingly indulgent from there. And this was all in the name of work, or an advertorial for the travel mob, who sprang for it in the name of publicity, or so the disclaimer at the bottom Paul Sheehan travelled courtesy of The Captain's Choice Tour would suggest.
Does Sheehan have a single, reflexive self-aware, or even an ironic, bone in his body?
Put it another way. Does a lizard have any other desires than to take over New York and control the world ...
Those poor buggers in the Department of Climate don't have a clue about how to live it up.
Naturally Sheehan is ready for a final apocalyptic denunciation:
Today, the government will release a revised set of budget estimates. They will show, of course, a deterioration since May. The Treasurer will attribute this largely to a shortfall in revenue caused by the decline in commodity prices. It will have nothing to do with waste, incompetence and excessive spending. It will also be Abbott's fault, for talking down the economy with his ''reckless negativity''.
Actually the pond blames it on Sheehan, for taking a junket when the economy was in such dire straits and he could have been down coal mine saving world.
Not to mention his talking down of the economy with an ongoing vitriolic relentless and quite pointless negativity.
It was with a start and a shock that the pond on the weekend read Tony Walker - no pinko pervert commie radical socialist he - taking a moderate, even-handed look at an issue which had been vexing the commentariat, especially those hand-wringing in The Australian, all week, in UN triumph leaves Abbott to rue rhetoric (outside the paywall).
It's always a shock to the pond when it steps outside the closet, away from the braying of the likes of Sheehan:
Before engaging in his own version of tabloid diplomacy, Abbott might also have borne in mind that it may well come to pass before too long that he is the leader of a country that is the world’s 12th-largest economy (we recently passed Spain); a member of the G20, a participant in the East Asia Summit, a member of the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation forum, a leader of the Commonwealth and now, from January, one of 15 nations on the Security Council, five of them permanent.
In other words, he might find himself representing Australia in all sorts of high-level forums where he will be talking to fellow leaders, including from African nations.
We recently overtook hapless Spain? Australian mining companies are contemplating upward of $50 billion in investments in African mines? We spent some $24 million over four years promoting our national interests? And it's not a scandalous waste, up there with pink batts?
What this all tells you is the Coalition has been all over the place on the issue of Australia’s Security Council bid, having persuaded itself initially such a bid was a vainglorious manoeuvre by former prime minister Kevin Rudd.
It may well have been a self-serving exercise by Rudd, but that doesn’t mean it’s a bad idea. Not all the former prime minister’s initiatives are without merit.
Abbott was against the idea before he was equivocal and finally apocalyptic when he warned on the eve of the vote that, despite all the expenditure and dislocation, it would be “absolutely disastrous” if we didn’t win this ballot’.
Losing the ballot – like missing out on the World Cup soccer – might have been a disappointment, but an “absolute disaster’’?
I don't think so.
An absolute disaster? Talking of abject apocalyptic rhetoric as we were. Of course in the lizard world of Sheehan, everything is an absolute disaster, either robotic or furious, and no half measures allowed.
That's why you won't find anything approaching intelligence or balance in the vitriolic braying of Sheehan. Or the awareness that other Liberals have that occasionally recognises that the relentless negativity sometimes poses a problem:
Former foreign minister Alexander Downer, now a UN employee as special envoy for Cyprus, makes a valid point that the very process of gaining a seat has been beneficial because it has obliged our diplomats to reach out to places like Africa.
These views were reflected in a measured statement from the Opposition spokeswoman for foreign affairs, Julie Bishop, in which she welcomed the Security Council vote with qualifications.
It took Bishop some six hours after the vote to produce a formal response, which might suggest difficulties in getting Coalition views aligned. This is a response that would have taken some crafting.
The problem of course when you look at the world through the eyes of a simplistic child, a world where you are only allowed two choices - robotic or furious - you're actually entering the world of a mindless Hollywood actioner full of apocalyptic intent and silly sentimental endings, in which the beloved Tony Abbott sweeps to power and all ends well ...
It's completely silly, full of tics and neuroses of an Andrew Garfield kind, but it really is more than vaguely indecent to pass it off as broadsheet commentary.
The sooner the Sydney Morning Herald becomes a tabloid, the sooner it will become a fitting home for its lizard colony ...
(Below: so here's the thing. Fairfax doesn't even have the imagination of a tabloid. Speaking of robots, why not run with this Derryn Hinch type graphic, here, where the robot meme is given a full run, but which also conjures up the full lego-infantilism shock jockery lizard tabloidism of Sheehan's insults:
Instead Fairfax came up with this as the accompanying insulting graphic for Sheehan. Tragic, michaelmucci.com, truly tragic. You were allowed only "robot" or "furious" and you came up with an invisible face, red hair and a nose? Pathetic. No Hollywood job for you).
Not sure why they don't just replace Sheehan's column with a link to Menzies House
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