Then a thought struck me. A wonderful, magical thought. A wonderful, magical, blunderful, concriddliagial thought. A quite strumdiddlious thought. Why don't I turn on the television and see what the Gods of the Box have chosen for me to view? So that's what I did. I turnedth oneth theeth televisioneth andeth Ieth watchedeth.
And wow, the choice I had over those five channels. I could have watched anything. Literally anything. I could have watched the newsreaders pout as they told me about some losers who got blown up in some sandy landy. I could have watched Jimmy Carr reattaching his eyebrows. I could have even watched a documentary on beavers having sex with geese. But no. I said "NO" to all of these options. I even turned down that squeaky cunt Justin Lee Collins. Instead, I chose to watch three hours of dirty people running around wearing delivering mail, growing beards, and killing horses.
Yes, that seminal classic of cinematic poetry The Postman was on last night. And I watched every minute. I didn't want to. But I couldn't tear my eyes away. It's like that TV advert for Road Safety when they show you the slo-mo of that boy getting hit by the car. "If you had been going at 30, the car would have stopped... here." Then it hits the boy and he bounces off the car with a tasty crunching sound. Now, nobody wants to watch that advert too closely, especially when the pelvis shatters and his teeth fly out and blind that duck. But you always do, just because the beauty of a young boy getting hit by a car in black and white can't be denied. Although, to be honest, most of those road safety ads have lost their shock value with me now. Having seen them all day in day out for the past year, I can predict the collision to the second. "He's gonna hit the motorcycle nnnnnnnnnnnnnnn....ow." CRASH. What can I say? I have a gift.
But that's besides the point. Ce n'est pas le point. C'est une politique vouée à l'échec. Mon point is that I was unable to stop watching this film because of its sheer awfulness. From the opening moments, when an unrequested lion wanders onto screen and starts kicking a tin can around, to the closing slow motionless of a statue of a man on a horse taking a letter from a cute blonde boy, surrounded by old ladies nodding their heads appreciatively, this film is a textbook case of cinematic tedium. Kind of like Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. Or Waterworld. Or The Bodyguard. Or Dances with Wolves. Or Kevin Costner.
I'm not sure that I could be able to properly describe the plot to this film without doing it a grave disservice, so instead I typed "The Postman" into IMDB and copied the synopsis:
The life of the fisherman Mario changes dramatically when the famous Chilean writer Pablo Neruda settles on his little Italian island. The two become friends and Neruda helps the shy and clumsy Mario to win the heart of Beatrice, the beautiful waitress at the village's inn, by showing him the beauty and power of poetry.
That's interesting, I don't remember the film I watched being anything like that at all. Perhaps the version I saw was a remake. And a pretty shite remake at that. They dropped the entire 'poetry' storyline, and instead concentrated more on the Chilean writer angle. Except instead of a Chilean writer, they used a Shakespeare quotin', gun totin' Kevin C. And instead of an Italian island, they used a post apocalyptic America where some kind of war has destroyed all technology and forced everybody to wear fingerless gloves (because everyone has forgotten to sew and so is forced to wear clothes made out of ripped rags and brown leather). And instead of a fisherman they used a huge land army owned by some evil dude with a beard who quotes Shakespeare and daintily paints self portraits and marches around talking about how he used to sell copy machines. And instead of Beatrice, they decided to push for the "Kevin Costner finds a bag of mail and decides, for no reason whatsoever, to deliver it, and in doing so manages to totally reform the entire United States without even trying" angle. Which is good, I like that. It's clever. I can also see the interesting parallels between "the beauty and power of poetry" and "a guy randomly getting eaten by a lion". Interesting.
Of course, I've just totally overcomplicated the plot of this film to an insulting level, because really it boils down to two KEY narrative concepts: Kevin Costner growing a beard, and people being mean to horses. That's it.
I do English Literature, and these two ideas would be known as 'Motifs'. Let me enumerate my consolidation of the answers. The film starts with a stubbly Kevin Costner letting his horse drink possibly poisoned water. It then continues to him having a sword-fight with said horse. Yes, I know. It then proceedes to a fully bearded Kevin C hearing that his horse has been murdered. Yep. After a bit, a newly shaven Kevin gets a new horse, which, I think, dies in a gunfight later on, along with some other horses (at which point he is stubbly again). He then picks up another horse and becomes fully bearded, at which point he goes to live in a cabin in the woods with a lady. He lies in bed for a bit, and the lady shoots and cooks his horse in a stew. After a bit, he picks up another horse from somewhere, along with some more friends, all of whom are riding horses. And he shaves off the beard. Clean shaven, he and his friends ride about on their horses, until some of them (and their horses) are shot to bits. In retalitation, he forms an ambush and shoots some of his foes, who are riding horses, many of whom die. Finally, stubbly again, he and his enemy play chicken with their horses and crash them into each other, possibly giving said equines nasty bumps. There, I pretty much told you the entire film.
He grows two huge beards and twice he shaves. Each time he does so, somebody comments on it. "Oh, you've shaved. It looks good."
Roughly fifty horses die during the course of the film. Interestingly, all horse death is at vital points of the story (usually at the beginning and ends of acts), which hints to me that horse-death in THE POSTMAAAAAAAAAAAN is somehow linked to the core narrative structure of the entire piece. Which would be a surprise, because it seems that fuck all else attention was paid to making it narratively cohesive. Example. I was watching it quite happily. I checked my watch, it had been going for fifty minutes. "Hmm" I think to myself, "We must be nearly entering the middle act now, surely." Then it hit me. WE WERE FIFTY MINUTES IN AND SO FAR THERE HADN'T YET BEEN EVEN THE SLIGHTEST HINT OF ANY POSTMAN-RELATED ACTIVITIES. HE HADN'T EVEN SEEN ANY LETTERS. DICKHEAD. Even in Lost In Translation, the official Slowest Movie Ever Made, we meet the two main chracters in the first twenty minutes.
It was like when I was watching Titanic for the first time. I was thinking "Yep, she's naked, he's doodling her, they're in love, it'll all work out after they get rid of the fiancé, this shouldn't go on for more than an hour longer HOLY CRAP THEY HAVEN'T EVEN HIT THE FRIGGIN ICEBURG YET. SHITE. Just in case you were wondering, this film is about five hours long. Most of those five hours are shots of Kevin Costner looking pensive, Kevin Costner looking thoughtful, Kevin Costner looking contemplative, Kevin Costner with wind flowing through his hair, Kevin Costner with wind flowing through his beard, and horses dying. Now I know that I'm emphasising the horse death quite strongly here, but seriously, a LOT of the film was horses perishing. So much so that I think the poster doesn't do it justice:
Here's the theatrical poster. Now I know that it has a beard and some horses in it, along with Kevin Costner's apparently broken neck, but, you know, it just doesn't show the audience just how much horse holocaust there IS in this masterpiece. I mean, what if there are any bearded horse-death fetishists out there who would go to see the film if only they knew about it (don't laugh, I'm sure that there are such things out there on the web)? The filmmakers would be missing out on a HUGE demographic. So using hours of hard work and some serious Photoshop know-how/effort, I made a better poster, which totally captures the entire ethos of this film:
Overall, this film was a let-down. I was expecting an hour and a half of italian fishermen learning poetry and Jack Nicholson using butter in inappropriate ways. There was NONE OF THAT. NONE AT ALL. BASTARDS. And what's more, they cold heartedly lied to the audience, by implying that women find men who look like Kevin Costner attractive and thus want to sleep with them. That is not true. Not true at alllllllll.
Comedy Mohammed No. 8:
The HUOTW (Horse Union Of The World) does not approve of The Postman, and would like it banned. It'll never happen, because we have FREEDOM OF SPEECH, you metal-shoe-wearing pansies.
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