Don’t be a maverick – go out and watch the movie

You can hardly get out of bed without being assailed by publicity for the new Tom cruise movie. A sequel to the ‘cult classic, top gun’ and one reviewer wrote gushingly that ‘Tom still has it’. What the ‘it’ is was not defined but I assume it means his ability to act rather than say his adherence to the cult of the church of Scientology and their bizarre beliefs. Anyway, after another blast of puff about the film I made it my business to establish if his female co star of twenty years ago still has ‘it’. The smart money said she didn’t and so it proved. Nothing remarkable about that in spite of all the promises that Hollywood is addressing its sexism issues. Now, there was a time not long ago when you watched a movie and enjoyed the bit of escapism, went home and forgot all about it and you assumed everybody else did the same. You would be wrong. The evidence of our eyes, research and current events tell us that a sizeable proportion of the audience think Tom is actually out there giving it large to the ruskies and assorted bad guys. More think that even if he isn’t well then he should be. You can imagine the disconnect so when this alternate reality crashes into real life. Instead of john Wayne or Dirty Harry or Rambo or Putin’s mate, Seagal wiping out the forces of evil what we see on the news is eight cops putting sixty bullets into an unarmed blackman who is posing no threat at a traffic stop. No wonder people are confused and in denial. The sanitisation of war, death and destruction by the gun lobby, Hollywood and the war mongers is no accident. We don’t want to frighten soccer mom and the kids with reality. We don’t want talk about racism, black history, mass shooting or womens rights. So when the parents of the uvalde children were told they would need to provide dna samples and photos in order to identify their children a lot of people were astonished. This is not Hollywood folks. Some commentators bluntly stated that until pictures of the dead bodies were posted on the evening news nothing would change. Don’t hold your breath. Anyway, don’t be a ‘maverick’. Go out and see the movie. It’s going to be a classic.