CEMETERY JUNCTION

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Starring Ricky Gervais
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XYDeHIszUqA

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Don’t mess with science. Science did everything first, science knows why you cry, and science is going to stop the inevitable black-hole-end-of-all-things with a Pan-Dimensional Hadron Collider and a Bucket of Paper Clips. Science’s big discovery this weekend is the long-debated half-life of talent: its ten years. Ten years from being a trailblazing cement-balled idea-fountain to facing a dull grey slide into rehashing the past-glories of the eighty-six million generations before you and dying, cold and alone, buried in a pit of money. Paul McCartney. John Lydon. Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant. The Office is brilliant: Cemetery Junction is the stuff they used to laugh at whilst thinking up David Brent in Wetherspoons, huffing ingenuity and running on Rustlers and cheap lager. But that was ten years ago. You can see what they’re doing; it’s a youth movie, made by grown ups. It’s an escape fantasy delivered in a style that was haemoragingly boring and out of date even in the film’s heavy handed 70s setting. It makes you want to set fire to your premier seat, just to watch the Minstrels popping about as you burn. The actors aren’t at fault here; this is all Gervais and Merchant’s mess, a cliché decathlon with 6th form dialogue and characters devised on the back of miniature cereal packets. Pity the first-timers caught up in it, even the one whose acting style consists of staring at a wall for eight years, causing the hands of your watch to move backwards as boredom becomes your new stepdad. Pity Ralph Fiennes even more, forced to do his best with a villain so pantomime he might as well wear a cape and sit at the end of a pier downing Lambrini. This probably isn’t the end for the former GENUINELY FUNNY MEN but it does represent a big old spit in the eye for any integrity they used to carry around as the result of writing one of the best sitcoms ever. Occasional flashes of the old dialogue slither through, but overall it’s worth waiting and praying for the other offerings from The Big British School of Comedy this year: Pop-Cultural Cardinal Edgar Wright’s Proto-Seminal ‘A RENZOKUKEN TO THE FACE OF THE ENTIRE FILM INDUSTRY, THE MOVIE’(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xgOLmjhxVVU) and Chris ‘Christ’s Fat Cock’ Morris’ ‘Jihadi Dad’s Army, Four Lions (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yGk2TojOd-4) Both will be ninety eight times better than this. And death by Black Hole.