The GOAT Who Doesn't Like Dirt

He's the most breathtakingly artistic tennis player to be seen in the last 20 years. He's flamboyant yet consistent, inhumanly skillful yet robotic. He's The One. The only potential GOAT (Greatest Of All Time) since Sampras. Roger Federer plays perfect tennis on his good days, and magnificent tennis on his average ones. And yet, lately, some have had the audacity to call Rafael Nadal 'The One' too. Even if only The Claycourt One. 77 consecutive victories on clay is no joke. Admittedly, Federer's 48 consecutive victories on grass is hardly kindergarten stuff either. Yet, Roger Federer has just seen the rug pulled from under his feet, by a a couple of dirtballers called Guillermo Canas and Filippo Volandri, and Nadal, his exasperatingly exceptional nemesis of the last two years. The All-Surface Grand Slam dream has never seemed more distant. Federer's 4-tournament title drought is cause for worry too, but a very minor one compared to the ever-troublesome Grand Slam challenge. This is GOAT stuff we're talking about - Federer needs that Roland Garros trophy.

What is it about claycourt tennis anyway? Why is it that a surface which produces tiring, artless slug-fests is considered so important to test a player's ability? No tennis follower ever lapses into lyrical nostalgia about the great claycourt specialists. Who remembers Guillermo Vilas, Mats Wilander or Thomas Muster? Well okay, maybe a few do remember these all-time greats, but certainly not in the same vein or numbers as people reminisce about Bjorn Borg, Rod Laver, Pete Sampras, or even Goran Ivanisevic. Pete Sampras never won the French. Heck, he never even reached the final. Sure, Borg did win both Wimbledon and the French five years in a row, but his legend lies more in his astonishing ability to switch between the two surfaces, year after year, than any particular dexterity at 'grinding it out' on clay. I guess what I'm trying to say is that the grass and hardcourt greats, rather, the non-claycourt specialists, have always been considered the more legendary and irresistibly endearing champions, as opposed to the claycourt greats, who've more often than not been consigned to the dreary areas of records and streaks.

Why the big fuss, then, about Federer being unable to stand up to the unshakable clay demon that is Nadal? Maybe it's because a No. 1 player is not supposed to lose as consistently to a single player as Federer loses to Nadal. Maybe it's because the sheer length of the claycourt season is too large to ignore. Or maybe, it's because Federer is, simply, the best player of all time, and so him not being able to win the French can turn out to be a damning indictment of the reasoning behind using different surfaces in tennis. Sigh! If only there weren't all these logical explanations! Then we could all just happily ignore the filthy red surface and rejoice in the jaw-dropping genius of the Swiss maestro.

But we are humans, and blessed as we are with the powers of logic and reasoning, we should necessarily agree that Federer has to win at Roland Garros. The bad news is that he's in worse form than he's been at any time in the past 3 years. And oh, he's just split with his coach Tony Roche, and will travel without a coach to Paris. Most worryingly for him, however, Nadal is playing almost perfect claycourt tennis, and it's pretty much a given that Federer will have to defeat Nadal to win the tournament that Nadal has won almost effortlessly for the last 2 years. Impossible? Well, it does seem pretty bleak right now. But doing the impossible shouldn't be that difficult for the GOAT (I know, I'm using the term far too often, but I've taken a strange liking to it). This is Roger Federer we're talking about. The man who can make the Roddicks, Hewitts, Blakes and even Agassis of this world look like mesmerized bystanders. Surely he can turn it around in time? Surely Nadal has to suffer an injury sooner or later?

A Slow-Paced, Boring, Melodramatic Must-See

An alien symbiotic creature that clings to a piece of clothing, a man with a curious ability to conjure and resize his clothes entirely from sand but who wilts when exposed to water and a fully grown superhero weeping like a two-year-old when his girlfriend dumps him. 'Spiderman' was never about being realistic anyway. And with Spiderman 3, the improbability stakes go up just that bit higher. But who's complaining, when the stunning action scenes, breathtaking cinematography and lightning pace keep the audience obscenely entertained, right? The trouble is, Spiderman 3, for all its action-packed thrills and feeble attempts at philosophy, just cannot keep you glued to your seats - it is, quite simply, boring. And for a series as record-breaking and amusingly awe-inspiring as Spiderman, that's not good news at all.

The movie attempts to deconstruct the psychology of superheroes (now isn't that a Herculean task!) and underline the most basic doctrine of all - being bad is fun. The old guard of Tobey McGuire, Kirsten Dunst, James Franco and Rosemary Harris reprise their roles as the central Spiderman characters in this mildly dark and very slow-paced affair. The movie starts off with Peter Parker (McGuire) and Mary Jane (Dunst) firmly ensconced in a compromising yet carefree romance, who spend their time together entangled in gigantic spider webs. Parker is still without a permanent job, but this time, MJ joins him on the list of the unemployed after being kicked out of a ridiculously dull stage performance the like of which I'm pretty sure will not find a single a viewer in the real world. The relationship begins showing signs of strain, what with Spiderman being such a hero and all and poor Miss MJ being reduced to working as a singing waitress. Things take a turn for the worse for the cranky couple with the appearance of the shockingly unimportant Gwen Stacy (Bryce Dallas Howard, utterly wasted) and her snotty boyfriend Eddie Brock (Topher Grace). For some reason, Spiderman thinks it a good idea to share a passionate kiss with Gwen in the presence of a shell-shocked MJ, which makes one wonder whether Spiderman is inherently evil after all, Venom or no Venom.

Meanwhile, Flint Marko (Thomas Haden Church), a predictably wronged convict on the run from the police, gets transformed into the invincible Sand Man under highly mysterious, not to mention amusing, circumstances. The script's excuse is that a 'particle physics' laboratory carries out highly dangerous, 'demolecularizing' experiments in frightfully unguarded pits, under the open skies, with not a hint of a worry about any thing or being falling into the pit accidentally and getting its molecules ripped apart. So Flint Marko, now Sand Man, comes to be a pretty invulnerable monster who is furious at the world for some reason, but who also has a human side to him, compassionately trying to rob every bank in sight to gather funds for treating his daughter's incurable illness (no idea what the illness is). All this while, the alien 'Venom' stealthily sizes up the emotionally ploughed Parker, waiting for the right moment to cling inseparably to the noble superhero and turn him into an arrogant, aggressive demon. And wait, there's another crucial subplot - Harry Osborn is finally ready to take up his due post as the new Green Goblin or the Hob Goblin (the name fans of the comic will assure you is the correct one) and avenge his father's death. A bout of amnesia for this one considerably eases things for poor Spidey, who has his hands quite full with not one but five different adversaries (MJ can be counted as an adversary too - she barely looks at him with anything other than pitying disdain during the movie). A case of too many villains? Fans of Spiderman the comic will wholeheartedly agree.

The film has plenty of moments to savour - the action scenes are brilliant as usual, and the fight sequence between Peter and Harry, (not the one between Spidey and Goblin) is fantastic, with the underlying simmering tension and deep-seated affection between the two spilling over quite dramatically. The episode where Spidey willingly gives up his sickeningly saccharine self in favor of the evil yet cool alter ego guided by Venom's venomous ways has been handled with wonderful deftness. You can actually feel Parker's enjoyment at being allowed to be bad, and McGuire, it has to be said, does a thoroughly efficient job in these parts. The character development is really shoddy though - there doesn't really seem to be any point to the Sand Man character, and Venom is quite unceremoniously dumped to the sidelines by all the romance and irritating sequences concerning the murder of Parker's uncle (turns out he was killed by Sand Man after all). Gwen Stacy is laughably insignificant - it seems the makers intended to give her a full-blown role at the beginning but forgot all about her somewhere in the middle. Nothing else can explain why they chose an actress as brilliant as Howard for the part, or why she accepted it.

The dialogues are predictably trite, but that's completely forgivable in a Spiderman flick. The acting is fairly average, though one wishes McGuire would tighten up his act in the emotional scenes - all he had to do was look at Dunst, who undoubtedly is the best performer in the movie, even if her character is horribly annoying. James Franco and Topher Grace do adequate jobs, and Rosemary Harris, thankfully, has very little to do in this one, because there's only so much of Aunt May reminiscing about her poor old husband and their lame times together that one can tolerate.

The romance is overbearing, the action too little, the pace too slow and the storyline too hackneyed and melodramatic. And yet, Spiderman 3 deserves to be watched at least once - the 'evil is fun' theme is far too irresistible, and the movie's box office returns are far too humongous to be ignored. There are many movies that are deserving contenders to qualify as the definitive movie of our generation, but none as strong as the Spiderman series. This is Hollywood at its costliest, loudest and most extravagant - let yourself be overawed by the hype, it's fun. Even if it is boring.

Erm, Time Travel is a Ridiculous Idea, Hollywood

Hollywood filmmakers really do know how to get on your nerves. They may use a lot of fancy special effects, get the most photogenic actors to prance around like saintly superheroes and dress up all of their movies with the snazziest of technology and production values, but at heart they're only really out to surprise, confuse and thoroughly irritate their unsuspecting audience. In the midst of all this, if the audience are lightly entertained for even a second, then it's a monumental victory for the average Hollywood moviemaker, and is taken as his cue to start work on a string of similarly logic-defying scripts, or better still, to make a sequel. Okay, that may sound a little insane, but at least it can explain the stream of movies based on time travel constantly coming out of Hollywood studios, and with all top drawer actors, no less. I just finished watching Deja Vu, a movie based on time travel, which stars Denzel Washington, of all people, as the main lead. And to be very honest, after two hours and six minutes of fairly entertaining, fast-paced thrills, I was only left wondering who on earth could have written such an outrageously ludicrous script, and why in God's good name Washington ever agreed to be a part of it.

The thing with time travel is that it is inherently such a ridiculous idea that when Hollywood scriptwriters take the concept and try to construct intricate plots replete with loads of sci-fi hogwash around it, they end up thrusting the most insanely unbelievable tripe at their audience. I know that sci-fi is supposed to be unbelievable, but most sci-fi movies do have a central logical theme to their plots that at least makes some sense with a degree of imaginative leeway on the part of us watchers. But time travel! It makes no sense whichever way you look at it.

Now I don't claim to have watched all of Hollywood's time travel movies, but I have watched a fair few - The Terminator movies, The Time Machine, Kate and Leopold, Deja Vu, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban and The Butterfly Effect, the last of which was a surprisingly high quality product for a genre of such fatuousness. The Terminator series concentrated more on the robot/cyborg element, with time travel being just an auxiliary part of the plot, so I guess we can forgive the utterly crazy premise of humans and evil robots sending ultra-stylish marshals to the past to protect and destroy, respectively, the future leader of the human race. Kate and Leopold is a romantic comedy, and frankly speaking, is actually more believable than the slew of mindless, coincidence-abounding fairytales that are the norm for the genre, even with the 'crack in time' theory and Hugh Jackman playing the inventor of the elevator who somehow finds himself in the apartment of the remarkably unflustered Meg Ryan, who incidentally exists 120 years in the future. The Butterfly Effect, a completely fanciful venture that is mainly preoccupied with human emotions and fate, is darkly depressing yet unexpectedly stirring, and would certainly have had a very large cult following had Ashton Kutcher been a little decent at acting. It manges to get away because of the underlying supernatural theme, but only just.

It is when the filmmakers try to bring science into the equation that the plots fail spectacularly. In Deja Vu, for instance, Denzel Washington uses modified satellites to travel to the past and prevent a terrorist attack that he knows has killed hundreds of people. The trouble is, he also has to reverse the death of a beautiful young woman who conveniently yet bizarrely is crucial to the attack. And this, as you may very well have guessed, sparks off a series of confounding and fantastically ludicrous events that only the director can fully explain (though I'm not sure even he can). Apparently, the story moves through four different and discrete timelines, with Mr. Washington existing in two different forms in any given timeline, and each of these two forms is wholly oblivious to the existence of the other. At one point, we are even told that there is a 'dead' Washington who somehow managed to take along his mobile phone through the time machine even though he was strictly advised not to carry any extra baggage when making the leap, and an 'alive' Washington who notices, to highly amusing effect, that a victim of the attack (in other words, the dead Washington) receives calls at exactly the same time that he himself does. So in the la-la land of Deja Vu, mobile phones can travel through time too. If you think all of this is stunningly laughable, you should check out the 'theories' about the film at www.imdb.com. They'll leave you in very pleasant splits, I assure you.

I know this may sound a little biased, with me being such a big Harry Potter fan and all, but I honestly believe that J K Rowling's version of time travel is far saner than most other theories. In Potterworld, 'reality' cannot be changed no matter how much anyone may fiddle with 'time turners'. There can only ever be one timeline, and even if somebody does go back or forward in time, his or her actions will somehow be aligned with the existing reality as we know it, so that there can never be alternate universes or bringing of the dead back to life, thus eliminating at least two of the most worryingly unbelievable phenomena of time travel. In short, 'destiny' cannot be changed in Potterverse: Time is only a function of Fate, and no amount of time travel can bring any sort of disharmony to this fundamental truth. In spite of this rosy, intellectual-sounding explanation, however, the fact remains that the time travel part of the Harry Potter books and movies is still the most misunderstood and hotly debated Potter concept. Which just goes to show how terrifically inconceivable and needlessly confusing a concept time travel is: people are willing to accept flying on broomsticks and storing parts of one's soul in many different inanimate objects, but they refuse to accept time travel, even in as perfectly imaginary a work as Harry Potter. Something for Hollywood to think about?