It doesn't work

Thursday 22 October 2009 12:43 AM

I'm a film dork, if there's such a thing. (And if there isn't, there will be when you've met me.) When I'm with a bunch of people who are talking movies, I try to grunt intelligently but my answer to every question is "No, I didn't actually." After giving that answer six times, the room knows there's a cinematic philistine in its midst. (I do occasionally see it on DVD when the world's moved on, but no one's asking by then.)

So it was truly out of character that, with a nearly empty evening beckoning, I spent last night in a nearly empty cinema. On the screen was the latest Woody Allen directed flick Whatever Works. It was nearly empty too. I picked it because it was in a timeslot that worked and because I don't mind some of Woody Allen's one-liners.

Whatever it was it didn't quite work for me, but I'm glad I saw it to remind me of the senseless futility of the world viewed through the prism of nihilistic agnosticism. I knew Allen was a bit of a nihilist, penning classic lines like "Life is divided into the horrible and the miserable." But I'd forgotten just how truly empty and purposeless that world is. From a quick google about Woody Allen, a spiritual drifter from an orthodox Jewish background, he strikes me as a man running from God - and making hard running of it too.

To watch this film is to take a crash course in the brand of ancient gnosticism which, predicated on the ultimate meaninglessness of pretty much everything, advocates the worship of today's erotic pleasure ahead of yesterday's covenant.

Will someone please pass me a Bex ...