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Not for terrestrials

Deborah Ross

Wednesday, 30th July 2008

The X-Files: I Want to Believe
15, Nationwide

There are all sorts of things going on in this film to do with God, science and that which we don’t understand, but none of it is even vaguely coherent. At 104 minutes, it may even be 104 minutes too long. It wants us to believe. I didn’t; you won’t. Is the truth ‘out there’? No, because you just heard it now.

There’s a rather wonderful new book out by a man named Travis Elborough, which sounds a bit like one of those dead Dorset villages where every second house is a holiday rental. Mr Elborough’s previous book was a great thundering roar of nostalgia for the Routemaster bus, and The Long-Player Goodbye (Sceptre, £14.99) is a great thundering roar of nostalgia for the LP record, from its origins in the 1940s, through its long heyday in the 1970s and 1980s, to its current rather enfeebled state as a weekly CD giveaway glued to the Mail on Sunday.

Mr Elborough feels, as many of us do, that the 40-minute album is a thing of beauty and its current status as an endangered species is a disgrace. I suspect it has never quite recovered from the arrival of the compact disc. Suddenly, perfectly good 40-minute albums were being bulked out to 50, 60 even 70 minutes, and I defy you to think of a single such record that wouldn’t be better if it were 20 minutes shorter. And as for the reissues of things you had already with extra tracks you will listen to once and never play again, well, more fool us for buying them. I write this knowing — not merely suspecting, but knowing — that in the next week I shall buy the bumper new CD reissue of Nick Lowe’s Jesus of Cool with a single painless click on Amazon. Voilà! Yet more money I haven’t got down the drain!

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Andreas

August 5th, 2008 2:26pm

Why send some feinschmecker zombie to review a "sci-fi" movie when she obviously has decided beforehand?

Articles, even movie reviews, should be written for the readers not the critics.

laurie macdonell-sanchez

August 6th, 2008 4:16pm

I HAVE TO BELIEVE that this movie was an embarrassing & implausible patchwork of a plot punctuated by moments of gratuitous grisliness & relentlessly stone-faced acting. In true Hollywood tradition, the Catholic Church acted as scapegoat with the meany-baddie being the "normal" hospital-administrator priest & the anti-hero being the semi-stigmatic but wholly stigmatized gay priest (actually not a garden variety pedophile based on his "history" as spat out by Scully). As for plopping Russians into the plot, I'm still trying to figure out to which segment of the viewing masses the screenwriters/ producers thought they were pandering. However, many of the former denizens of the Soviet Union who've made it in droves to Western shores haven't endeared themselves by turning their new-found "opportunity" into white slavery rings to supply strip clubs & brothels; hacking/ID theft; commercial fraud & vulgar shakedowns; plus a thriving world market in human organs. And yes, those grungy teeth were unfair. Soviet dentistry USED to mean steel teeth, front & back, for the unwashed masses, IF they were lucky. However, the highly mobile new "Russian" gazillionaires have been sporting pricey veneers for a couple of decades now.

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