Flip through the latest issue of Gulf Weekly.
Since cinematic nausea seems to be a staple of the art form now Joe Queenan makes a plea for better onscreen hygiene
Several years ago, I noticed that most contemporary American movies contain a scene where a character vomits.
This I found repellent. Every couple of years I would write about this abhorrent trend, in the hope that someone might realise that on-screen vomiting had become a cliche.
But this never happened. Cinematic nausea seems to be a staple of the art form now, and has also been picked up by British productions such as Trainspotting. It's enough to make your stomach turn.
My son and daughter, 23 and 21 respectively, having grown up in a culture of woeful onscreen hygiene, insist that I am delusional.
Their attitude is: there isn't nearly as much puking in films as you think. Cary Grant probably puked in the director's cut of North by Northwest, but it got cut out of the final print. My wife, who only watches superb foreign films, insists that Catherine Deneuve, Isabelle Huppert and Emmanuelle Beart have never appeared in a film besmirched by the spectre of upchuck.
Last week, to prove them all wrong, I rented five movies, selected entirely at random, whose only common trait was that they looked as if they might be entertaining.
The first was Ocean's Thirteen, which contains not one, but two scenes featuring a hotel inspector heaving his guts out. The second was Shrek the Third, which contains a scene where a baby spews all over the protagonist. Days of Glory, winner of a French Cesar award, contains a puking scene.
Equally spew-worthy was The Ghost, the 12,356th Asian horror film about a dead girl seeking revenge on her schoolmates because they were not very nice to her.
Technically speaking, The Ghost does not involve vomit per se; instead, two different characters spit up what appears to be the entire contents of the South China sea while waiting for the generic dead little girl to part her black hair and transfix them with her evil eye, as if anyone didn't see that coming. The fifth film was The Good German, which, though not very good, is noticeably devoid of puke.
So there you have it. They're puking in award-winning Franco-Algerian films. They're puking in mainstream animated films. They're puking in Korean movies and they're puking in indie features about rock stars.
It's starting to look like this vomiting thing is getting completely out of hand.
But maybe it's just me.
