In which the pond says farewell to travel and film blog, and the citizenry of the south ...

 

The pond realises it should be using its precious holyday seasonal time to celebrate the splendid example set the country by the likes of Iron Pyrites' standard Dom, and dog-nauseating TikTok hypocrite SloMo ...

But this is a travel blog now, at least until the New Year, and so the pond has been scouring rustic regional Victoria for splendid sightings. 

Alas and alack, where the pond has landed only offers examples of the weirdly optimistic ...

... as if the postal service was still a thing ... 

Or even sadder, rusting dreams by the side of abandoned rail lines ...

The pond did have a moment when it thought of beefy boofhead Angus, what with being confronted by the sight of hysterical, wild-eyed cows running about in fear and loathing, trapped beneath a wind farm ...

The pond managed to take a snap of the bewildered, agitated bovine in a deep panic, and wondered if the beefy Angus might turn up to save them ...

CU if you will, maestro, to catch the nostrils dilated by fear and panic ...

Oh the suffering, oh the bovineanity ... and then some crazed local informed the pond that the beefy boofhead was on board for a sea-based wind farm in Gippsland, and the pond finally understood that hypocrisy and stupidity should never be allowed to stand in the way of getting re-elected ...

The pond supposes it should toss in a few snaps showing where a beach once was ... sssh, don't mention climate change ....

And as this is as close as the pond can get to slide night these days ...

What else? 

Well it's the season for rellies to bung on truly awful movies, which the pond refuses to watch, but as they watch terrible movies all year, there's not much point blaming the season. 

Still, speaking of movies the pond refuses to watch, Anthony Lane in The New Yorker provided a good explanation of why the pond wouldn't spit on a Marvel movie if the superhero happened to be on fire ...

…the tally of miscreants is highest, however, in “Spider-Man: No Way Home,” which trawls the back catalogue of the franchise and comes up with the many-tentacled Doc Ock (Alfred Molina), Green Goblin (Willem Dafoe), Electro (Jamie Foxx), Sandman (Thomas Haden Church), and the Lizard (Rhys Ifans), whom I’m afraid I had forgotten entirely. Most of these fine actors look a mite embarrassed to be dragged back into this high-concept, low-rent palaver, and there’s a telling moment in which Dafoe, despite being punched repeatedly in the head, preserves that wonderful fanged grin of his, as if to show us how little he is dented or fazed by such indignity.

There are two reasons for the presence of these multiple offenders. The first is that they have been accidentally summoned by Dr. Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch), who is casting a wizardish spell as a favor for Peter Parker (Tom Holland). Peter wants the past rearranged for his benefit, and why? Because, thanks to being unveiled as Spider-Man, he has—wait for it—failed to get into M.I.T. That’s right: universal chaos is unleashed for the sake of college admissions. Nothing in the movie, which is directed by Jon Watts, suggests that we are to treat this narrative development as a joke.

The second reason is cannier and more cynical. The film, which is aimed exclusively at its existing fan base and would be grimly incomprehensible to anyone from outside the fold, is rigged to produce occasional spikes of gratification in the audience. Every returning super-baddie, however meaningless his motive, is greeted with a thrill of recognition; I felt as if the armrests in the movie theatre should be fitted with a row of buttons, labelled “OMG,” “No shit,” “!!!,” and so on, and that we should be hitting these in response to every thrill. The collective result of the hits could then be patched through to Marvel, and the next sequel would be tweaked accordingly.

The spiking peaks in the latter stages of the film, and, if you haven’t yet had the pleasure of watching it, you might want to stop reading now. Traversing a portal of fire, of the sort through which moth-eaten circus tigers used to leap, two other golden oldies join the fray: to wit, two former Spider-Men—Tobey Maguire, who was Peter Parker in 2002, 2004, and 2007, and Andrew Garfield, who was “The Amazing Spider-Man” in 2012 and 2014. (Does that make the other guys officially unamazing, and should they be pissed about it?) For a while, all three Peters team up like witches, in their matching scarlet outfits, the assumption being that we will faint at the existential awesomeness of their cahoots. Please. No offense to the performers, especially Maguire, who has an air of the wistfully lost, like a middle-aged Peter Pan, but all this is pure marketing bullshit: reboots dressed up as revelation.

And why stop here? Since the portal’s open for business, why not use it to introduce other characters once played by Maguire? How about Paul, the child of a wretched marriage, in “The Ice Storm” (1997)? Or the jockey in “Seabiscuit” (2003), together with his trusty nag? As for Garfield, one of his most enjoyable roles was that of the televangelist Jim Bakker, earlier this year, in “The Eyes of Tammy Faye.” I’d love to see Jim march proudly into “Spider-Man: No Way Home,” clutching his Bible, and ask Green Goblin and Dr. Strange for their generous donations, to sponsor the work of the Lord.

Most alarming of all is the prospect that movie studios besides Marvel might be inspired by the portal gimmick to turn their own franchises into regeneration engines for the retired. Until now, new actors shouldering old roles have contented themselves with queasy in-jokes: “This never happened to the other fellow,” George Lazenby says in the opening scene of “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service” (1969), as a nod to the departure of Sean Connery. But imagine if the other fellows were able to muscle in at will, with or without digital assistance. Imagine, for example, if the dour and unsatisfying finale of “No Time to Die,” the recent James Bond adventure, had been rounded off not by the explosive dismissal of Daniel Craig but by the placid arrival of Roger Moore, wearing a gentleman’s smirk and a snowy tuxedo, and by the excitable voice of Q, saying, “I think he’s attempting reëntry, sir!”

This mania for repetition is nothing new. One person who foresaw it was Samuel Johnson, who was scrupulously wise even about matters of which he could never have dreamed:

"The regard of the public is not to be kept but by tribute, and the remembrance of past service will quickly languish unless successive performances frequently revive it. Yet in every new attempt there is new hazard, and there are few who do not, at some unlucky time, injure their own characters by attempting to enlarge them"...

What else? Well the pond has completely cancelled the reptiles - not once has the pond clicked on the lizard Oz during the holydays - and was overjoyed to see elsewhere that a similar sort of cancel culture was still all the go ...

...in the summer of 2020, shortly after the murder of George Floyd, Kelly Latimore, a white artist who grew up surrounded by images of a white Jesus, decided to make a course correction. He’d paint the Virgin Mary and Jesus with gold halos encircling their heads — and both would be Black. Also, his image of Jesus would resemble Floyd, a Black man who had been killed by a white police officer in Minneapolis.

The painting, titled “Mama,” attracted little notice in February after a copy was installed at the law school of the Catholic University of America in Washington. But in November, The Daily Signal, a conservative website, published an article about the work and about the university’s recently published report on diversity and inclusion, and students created a petition calling for its removal. That month, the painting was stolen.The university replaced it in November with a smaller copy — the school’s policy was “not to cancel speakers or prevent speech by members of the community,” the university’s president, John H. Garvey, said in a statement after the theft — but now that copy, too, has been stolen. And the student government has passed a resolution calling for further displays of the work on campus to be banned, citing religious objections.

And so on, and it was cancelled, and then the cancellation was fudged, but still the cancellation turned into cancelled fudge, though the painting didn't arouse any passion in the pond at all ...

Meanwhile, the emperor for life in the Middle Kingdom had his minions attempt to ban memories of past events at assorted Hong Kong universities, but still the images lurk on the full to overflowing inter tubes...

And it turned out that Project Veritas was keen to cancel the truth, as only a veritable exponent of Veritas could do without a shred of irony ...

But the one the pond especially liked came courtesy of Fox News, still waging assorted wars ...

That's got to be worth a poem ...

"Everyone in Leander liked reading a lot/ but some evangelicals in Leader did not," Tyler begins. "These kooks hated reading, the whole reading season./ Please don't ask why, no one quite knows the reason./ It could be perhaps critical thinking causes fright./ It could be their heads aren't screwed on just right./ But whatever the reason, their brains or their fright,/ they can't follow policy in plain black and white."

"These bigots don't get to choose for us, that's clear," Tyler's poem continues. "Then how, I am wondering, did we even get here./ They growl at our meetings, all hawing and humming,/ ‘We must stop this indoctrination from coming!’/ They've come for the books and the bonds and what for?/ Their kids don't even attend Leander schools anymore./ Bring back our books, maintain decorum, good grief./ Wouldn't it be nice to have a meeting in peace?"

Naturally the bigots and kooks, close-bosomed cousins to loons, came out for a growl, but here the pond must stop its travel/film blog to go on the move, eventually to land back in Iron Pyrites' standard Dom's record-breaking state, leaving only a few cartoons as a reminder of its time amongst Comrade Dan's citizenry (yes, the pond has some socks to return, or at least pass on to someone who will find them useful) ...