Review of John Stuart Mill and the Temple of Doom
Vervet Vandiver Vanlandingham-Vanderveer
Lecturer, School of Linguistic Appreciation and Dialectal Dialectics
University of Even More Northern British Columbia, Atlin
This weekend I went to see the new high-spectacle action-adventure
film, John Stuart Mill and the Temple of Doom. While the special
effects were noteworthy, I was most impressed by the reflorescence,
if not recrudescence, of Hollywood linguistics. Intended as a
high-brow response to the recent Sherlock Holmes movies, this film
begins with the hero recovering from his once-famed nervous
breakdown by defeating Tennyson in a poetry slam during the Great
Exhibition; while the rest of the audience thrilled to the CGI
recreation of the Crystal Palace, I was enthralled by the fast-paced
exchanges of Cockney and Geordie in iambic pentameter—truly a treat
for our culturally denuded age! The climax of the film should, if
justice is to be served, enter popular culture with the hero’s
unforgettable taunt, “I warrant you’ll die unsatisfied, pig!” as he
defeats Thomas Carlyle (played by up-and-coming Birmingham actor
Vince Pence-Schantz) in a sword fight on the ramparts of his home at
Pitsligo Castle.
If this film succeeds at the box office, the producer and director
have promised to film a prequel of sorts, Oliver Wendell Holmes and the
Jest-So Storyteller, and if the film under review is any indication,
that projected film should do for antebellum New England what this
film does for Victorian England. I thus urge all my readers to go
to see this film early and often. After the disastrous missteps of
The Passion of the Christ, which included such howlers as medieval
Aramaic spoken where koine Greek would have been used, and
Apocalypto, in which the dialectal situation of the pre-Columbian
Mayan world was simply butchered, it was a joy to behold the
American film industry return to form for the finest treatment of
English dialects since George Cukor’s Gaslight.
