The gripe in Hollywood is that the critics and Oscar judges are past it. Too old; too elitist; too solemn. Praise and prizes go to The Hours (which is exactly what the film feels like). Meanwhile, Spiderman (the kids' choice) gets no respect and will be lucky to pick up a bauble for special effects.
A current must-see among younger movie-goers is Final Destination II. Like its predecessor, it's a fantasia on death. In Final Destination I, a bunch of schoolkids are bumped from Flight 180, which subsequently crashes. They have cheated the grim reaper. But he doesn't like being cheated. You can guess the rest. Gouge, skewer, throttle, splat.
Life has one entrance and a million exits. Which has our name on it? Teen movies are fascinated by the subject. Much-visited websites cater to the same youthful appetite. If you want grisly, try www.deathnews.com or the Bizarre Death Archive on www.bdragon.com - but not, I suggest, before lunch.
A topic of heated debate on the connoisseur sites is whether Friedrich Riesfeldt actually existed or is merely the stuff of urban legend. He, you may remember, was the Paderborn zookeeper who, on April 23 1998, while giving his constipated elephant, Stefan, an enema, was buried alive (and quickly dead) under an avalanche of pachyderm poop. Imagine Gerhard Schroder giving the funeral oration: "Friends, Germans, countrymen: I come not to bury Friedrich, but to dig the poor bastard out." Spoilsports, alas, point out that there is no zoo in Paderborn.
Death (real death, that is) is for us what sex was for the Victorians: the great unmentionable. Only recently was it publicised that some 200 occupants of the World Trade Centre chose to hurl themselves from the top storeys, rather than await incineration. The pavements below were red with blood and body parts. Those 15-second plunges of courageous (and conscious) men and women were airbrushed out of all American television coverage. Why? Because death (close up, real and detailed) was unendurable. Too painful.
In all the outpouring of grief in the past 10 days, no one (publicly) dared voice a pervasive curiosity about how, exactly, those seven astronauts arrived, tragically, at their final destination. Dismembered, burned, disintegrated? It crossed my mind. And yours? Certainly, those ghoulish souvenir hunters scouring the Texas woods and fields. This was the first time in human history that anyone had exited travelling 12,000mph at 200,000ft.
One of the split-new weapons to be tried out by the US military on the battlefield next month (or whenever) is the high-power microwave. How HPM works is still classified. But luckless Iraqi conscripts will find out. As far as I know, no human being has been killed in battle this way before. But a Google search on "cats + microwave" throws up some really nasty hints. Don't worry: the newscasts will spare us.
In the crevices of newspapers there are invariably items whose only justification is astonishingly unusual death. Last Wednesday, this paper reported that a 92-year-old lady in Hastings had been killed by a hit-and-run (literally) jogger. Another first. On the same day, the Los Angeles Times recorded that a 74-year-old man undergoing dialysis was killed by a 67-year-old whose car ploughed through the front wall of the medical centre. He, too, was turning up (rather too promptly) for his dialysis. Death's a funny thing.
The best poem about death? John Betjeman's The Cottage Hospital. The best novel? JG Ballard's Crash. The best self-help manual? Derek Humphry's Final Exit. A goodish movie? Final Destination I (the sequel's gross). Or, if the subject's too macabre, try The Hours and spend 114 minutes wondering whether Nicole will wear her false nose to the ceremony.
