The Revelation of St. Christopher of TooKee...

If you are a resident of the UK and Ireland you will no doubt be aware of the Daily Mail, now available in Ireland..kinda. For non-UK and Ireland readers, if you can image Fox News as a film of putrid bile thinly spread over newsprint you get the gist. Now the Daily Mail is an easy target, like a BNP graphic design* shaped fish in a barrel of boke. I don't want to slag it off per se, it's clever in what in does. What it does however, is waffle on until you almost fall asleep and then sticks the boot in with a sexist, homophobic, or racist phrase that gives you a feeling of peering into a parallel dimension, thinking, 'wait? did I just read that'. It's become a veritable sport among comedians to make fun of it. The best is the Daily Mail list of Things that give you Cancer.

But I digress, fundamentally, their film critic Christopher Tookey does not like films

Update: see comment below, he does like films:

Check out Tookey's Tops

verus

Tookey's Turkeys

"I have awarded marks of 6/10 or more to 2910 films so far, out of a total of 8,550 movies I have reviewed"

Now, lots of critics from Alexander Walker to Mark Kermode to Charlie Brooker , all don't like some films or tv shows, that's their job, to critically assess things in the context of their culture, but fundamentally they love the medium they write about, and arguably Brooker has actually made more TV shows, and extremely good ones, despite what this mook has to say, than most film critics have made films.

Similar to the fact that most comedians rag on the Mail, and rightly so, for easy laughs, there was a almost urban legend that Kick Ass was going to cause a Daily Mail fuss when released. This is almost nostalgia for our generation brought up on Video Nasties and seeing it's pale mirroring in the 'Crash debate', the anticipation of another tussle of censorship and moral outrage like wot we know and love, of course nothing of the sort happened. As Kermode pointed out, the BBFC certificate had a sense of the humor and irony involved...

Unlike Mr. Tookey,

Don't be fooled by the hype: This crime against cinema is twisted, cynical, and revels in the abuse of childhood

with one of the most hilarious film ratings in the world

Verdict: Evil

Rating:

?

how can a film be "evil", the majority of those killed are bad guys and drug dealers, by vigilantes no less, surely that's a demographic the daily mail can get behind when it suits them? Evil is such a metaphysical concept, it's a word created by people who don't want to comprehend the horrific capacities of humanity. Kick Ass, in contrast, is an amazing smart funny movie. It would be churlish not to admit that I only went near the mail site because I knew it would slate Kick Ass but the amount of one star reviews yer man dishes out is unbelievable, Nanny McPhee is the only recent film that has has a positive review, god help us all surviving in this world where fictional characters some how want (need!?) to destroy our very souls. Quantum of Solace get's two stars, Law-Abiding Citizen get's three?

Clash of the Titans: Back to Argos, the whole lot of you

Verdict: A horrible myth-take

Rating:

Steer clear, unless your a teenage girl

Verdict: Forgettable and regrettable

Rating:

RACE TO WITCH MOUNTAIN and DRAGONBALL EVOLUTION: These two should be burned at the stake

Obviously he love's Gran Torino...

* I have a theory that right-wing Christians and political Web sites see graphic designers as a heathen band of homosexuals, atheists, and general reprobates so they deliberately make all there Web sites look like shit.

Don't believe me?

Jesus, Dinosaurs and More (gee I hope the 'more' is reasoned evidence based on physical reality)