Did an excited child on Red Bull make this Hollywood history?
SHe’s a classy dame, that celine Dion. The chanteuse famous for her hit theme from Titanic was on Paul O’Grady’s Hollywood (channel 4) to talk about the movies that get us sobbing in the cinema.
celine’s face didn’t appear to move. she seemed to be a mannequin in a mask, whispering words like a ventriloquist without a twitch of her lips. But as she described Titanic’s emotional impact, water squirted from her eyes.
Was a hidden puppeteer working her tear ducts? celine let the heartache glisten in her gaze for a moment, then raised a mechanical hand to dab at her mascara.
such sensitivity. such artistry. such horsefeathers.
she wasn’t the only celeb among the impressive collection of bigname actors to have a little sob, at the mere thought of sad films.
U.s. actress sherilyn Fenn got all choked at the memory of Titanic, too. Bernard cribbins went wobbly lipped over the ending of The railway children.
But o’grady refused to join in. He was hurling popcorn and jeering at the screen, like a bored schoolboy in the cheap seats.
Titanic didn’t impress him. ‘This film’s as far-fetched as a bucket of s*** from china!’ he mocked, with a blast from the bleeper to ensure the show retained its pre-watershed, Pg certificate.
you can’t blame him for being unmoved. We saw a ten-second clip of Leonardo Dicaprio kissing Kate Winslet’s hand, then glimpsed the two of them in that classic pose on the prow, before seeing another five- second excerpt, this time of Leo turning into a mini iceberg in the freezing atlantic.
no one could get genuinely weepy about that. The same applied to the flashes of e.T. and Bambi, not to mention the very brief encounter with Brief encounter.
The whole programme appeared to have been edited by an eight- year- old stoked full of e-numbers and red Bull.
none of the all- star interviews was longer than a couple of sentences. every thought was cut short, every scene was truncated.
Bits of Marley & Me, The champ, Beaches and Philadelphia were over before they had barely begun.
Maybe it’s because an entire generation raised on youTube is unable to concentrate for longer than the time it takes a baby panda to sneeze, but this was not a coherent show, more of a blur.
online video clips are not the only threat to humanity, according to science writer Jamie Bartlett on Secrets Of Silicon Valley (BBc2).
He set out to warn that the free thinkers of the internet age could plunge civilisation into a futuristic nightmare where machines render all of us redundant. It starts with phone apps like airbnb and Uber, designed with the innocent intention of making it easier to book a selfcatering holiday or call a cab.
It ends with the collapse of society and an economy where bullets are the only currency.
What Bartlett couldn’t grasp was that his interviewees, while they might have created internet start-ups now worth billions, were all imbeciles. a talent for writing computer code is no guarantee of true intelligence.
one ‘visionary entrepreneur’ was babbling like a lunatic on a soapbox at speakers’ corner, about a financial system where poverty was eliminated with hefty cash handouts for all.
and a former Facebook boss was building a hideout in the rockies that bristled with weapons, ready for a zombie apocalypse. you could almost hear the hum of paranoia in his head.
These people won’t change the world. you wouldn’t trust them to change their underpants.