Sometimes, you find yourself watching a film, let’s say, The Postman, for example, and something strikes you as so ridiculous that a thought begins to form in your mind: “this is a joke. It is not meant to be taken seriously. The writer(s) are taking the piss. They are in on the joke. In The Postman, it occurs about the time we are introduced to a character named Ford Lincoln Mercury (played by Larenz Tate).
Recently, I heard a theory that the The Postman is not just bad, it is intentionally bad. That it was a prank played on Kevin Costner. The man who wrote it, Brian Helgeland, is a Hollywood fixture. He’s one of those cats who will get paid $250,000 to spend a couple of weeks doctoring a script that’s already been written. He won a Razzie for The Postman. (In fact, The Postman swept the Golden Raspberry Awards that year, with other "wins" for worst picture, worst score, and worst director AND worst actor for Costner.) But the same year, he won an Oscar for best adapted screenplay for L.A. Confidential, which is an awesome movie with an awesome script. He wrote and directed the underrated A Knight's Tale. Obviously, Brian Helgeland is very good at writing screenplays. Thus, it simply doesn’t make sense that he would write something as bad as The Postman unless he had done it on purpose.
The Postman is Costner at his most bloated and bombastic. The irredeemably unjustified Best Picture Oscar and Best Director he won for Dances With Wolves led him to embark on the “turgid & ponderous pseudo-epic” phase of his career. Do you realize that he cast himself as the savior of mankind in Waterworld? Let me repeat that just in case you missed it: the savior of mankind. What sort of a man does that?
As CSI: Miami has entered its sixth season, it seems that the fine technicians of the Miami-Dade Police Department are more and more finding themselves in situations so absurd that the bounds of credulity are stretching near to the breaking point. To wit: on a recent episode, the body of a young woman was found in a cabana poolside at a posh South Beach hotel. Her body was covered in goo. The CSIs subsequently deduced that she was covered in goo because she had been swallowed, and thence regurgitated, by a giant python. That’s right. This is the point at which I said (aloud) to the television, “Come on. This can’t be for real. They don’t actually expect us to take this seriously. Do they?” But it gets better. The snake was in the hotel because he was actually a drug mule. Okay, sure. Why not? A crooked herpetologist who has a customs inspection exemption, for reptiles of course, was smuggling drugs from South America. Inside the snakes. When this particular snake was being exchanged at the hotel, he got out, swallowed that chick, and then the vials of narcotics inside the snake burst and the python died of a massive drug overdose. The snake O.D.ed. Of course. Then he threw up the girl. Seriously, they actually expect us to believe this? Come on.
I must say, Horatio had a great one-liner at the beginning of the episode. When Horatio’s Texan sidekick informed him, in his own laconic Texan way, that the young woman was “Tanya Thurman, 23, from Chicago. Her friends say she came down here to drink some mojitos and catch some sun,” Horatio responds, right before putting his sunglasses back on, “Well it looks like [pause for dramatic effect] something caught her.”
