Critics, Steven Seagal, and Me

After Lewis, my squaw and I sliced up some apples and sat down to watch a movie. Unwilling to wait out the fifteen minutes it takes the Sony DVD player to load (it's too flash to work fast; the crappy one in my bedroom starts immediately, and plays movies from any region on Planet Earth), we decided to stick with tonight's exciting TV schedule.

We had choices, and settled for Proof, John Madden's 2005 movie, starring Gwynnie, AnTHony Hopkins and Jake Gyllenhall. The Radio Times awarded Proof two stars, and their film critic slated the film, accusing it of unremitting drabness, amongst other things. My squaw said, "Ignore whatever dick wrote that review, it's really good." And she was right. I really liked it.

Meanwhile, as Proof played on BBC2, on Channel Five, Steven Seagal was karate chopping his way through a Jamaican drug gang in a movie called Marked For Death, the IMDb synopsis of which includes the following line:

On the next day, after reuniting with his sister Melissa and Melissa's daughter Tracy, John gets into a shootout against a Jamaican drug kingpin known as Screwface

The Radio Times decided to award Marked For Death THREE stars. That, for those of you who (unlike Gwynnie Paltrow) are NOT mathematics geniuses, is ONE STAR MORE than they awarded Proof.

I don't know how to put this any other way, so I won't. This is just insane. And I don't say this as a total movie snob. I've smoked my way through many a Steven Seagal moviefest, at the end of which I'm usually in hysterics. Fire Down Below, Today, You Die and (it doesn't get any better than this) Half Past Dead, are some all-time movie treasures, beloved of my friends Wednesday and Will.

Nevertheless, Proof was good. Not "good". But actually not bad. It defo isn't worse than Marked for Death.

Yet more evidence that all critics should be taken out and karate chopped by Steven Seagal.

By the way, for those of you interested in movie marginalia, Jake Gyllenhall is the SPITTING IMAGE of Brittany Murphy. You read it here first (I hope).