Words Dept.: entry

Can there be anything more depressing than the new British film Three and Out? I haven’t seen it, of course, because it’s shit. How do I know it’s shit if I haven’t seen it, you ask. Well, just look at the poster (I reply) – in fact, just look at the font used on the poster – and you can see instantly that it’s shit.

Aside from the font, and the poster’s use of exclamation marks in inappropriate places in order to denote a false wackiness, there are other clues to the film’s status at the front of the poo queue. Mackenzie Crook, in an unflattering woolly hat, takes the lead role, which is hilarious in its own right (I mean, look at him for Christ’s sake). It’s got that bloke who plays the annoying fat bastard bank clerk in the Nationwide TV adverts in it. Kerry Katona also makes an appearance. This is the territory we’re in.

I can’t imagine Spielberg was banging down the door.

Then there’s the storyline, which involves a Tube driver who kills two people after they jump under his train. He finds out that if three die in such circumstances within a month he gets pensioned off with a massive pay-off. So he goes on the hunt for a suicide case to help him out. Hmm, a rich vein of comic territory there, no doubt about it. No wonder Aslef, the train drivers’ union, wasn’t very keen. (They hadn’t seen it either but had, like me, noticed the font.)

Peter Bradshaw in the Guardian gave it one star and speculated that a bizarre shift in setting to the Lake District halfway through could have been a condition of funding. Seriously. Mark Kermode on Five Live yesterday was similarly baffled and described the film as “just awful”. He repeated the phrase about seven times, appearing to exaggerate the word “just” rather than “awful”, for some reason.

Neither mentioned the font. However, Kermode got into a discussion with Simon Mayo about the word “Lacanian”. Mayo didn’t know what it meant, neither did I and neither did Mayo’s newsreader, who got embroiled in the debate. Turns out it relates to the psychiatrist Jacques Lacan and formed the basis of an allegedly hilarious joke in Basic Instinct 2. Which caused me to wonder how many people in the world fulfill both of the following criteria:

(a) Paid to watch Basic Instinct 2 at the cinema

(b) Are familiar with the work of Jacques Lacan

There really can’t be that many, can there?