This is it, this is the one - The Last Supper, the best movie ever made, sorry to all you out there who’ve claimed that movies such as Titanic, Mallrats and Schindlers List are the best they’re not this is, why? because I said so thats why!! But seriously though it is my own opinion though and although some of you out there disagree with me hopefully by the time you’ve finished reading this I’ll have you all rushing out to get yourself a copy! It was 4 years ago that my love affair with this movie began, it all started so innocently with Sky advertising that it would get its British TV Premiere on one of their movie-specific channels at 10pm on a Thursday night and it announced Cameron Diaz as the main star of the movie - that was in no force on this earth that was going to stop me watching this, I didn’t care that I was at college early the next day, there was a Cameron Diaz movie on TV, I didn’t care that I’d got home late from college on that night there was a Cameron Diaz movie on TV, I didn’t well I just didn’t care for anything but that movie OK? It’s Cameron Diaz!! I was 17 at the time and she was my boyhood crush of the time, so I sat down settled in and prepared to drool all over the TV, the opening credits rolled, fine then all of a sudden Ron Eldard appeared on my screen playing the character Pete! Aaaaaahhhhh!!! where’s Cameron I started to scream, I know whats wrong with this movie not enough of Cameron Diaz on screen, but luckily my better thoughts reminded me that 88 minutes of Cameron Diaz is not so commercially viable and that I’d better stick with it so I did, and damn am I glad that I did!
But back to the storyline, after I’d calmed down about Pete being the first character on screen I noticed that he’d been given a lift home by Zack, a trucker who happened to see him broken down and Pete and his housemates have decided to invite him for Supper due to an unknown guest backing out, this is where we get our chance to meet the 5 main cast members - theres Jude played by the luciously divine Cameron Diaz, Pete played by Ron Eldard, Marc played by Jonathan Penner, Paulie played by Annabeth Gish and Luke played by Courtney B.Vance, they’re all left-wing post-grad students who are currently studying for their masters degrees and sharing the house together, anyway a conversation is struck up between Zack and the students, he finds out that they are students who class themselves as liberals and starts on a tirade about how liberals are basically wasters who don’t actually do anything but protest and how he fought in a war for people like them, obviously this starts a heated argument between them all in which calm as you like Zack says the sentence ’Hitler had the right idea’ (Now theres a guy in Grimsby who walks around town saying this all the time at the top of his voice and it wouldn’t be the first time I’ve had a go back and left him walking away humbly, but thats going a bit off the beaten track so lets get back to the review shall we?) anyway he continues by pointing out that Marc’s a jew and begins an argument over which side he’d fight for if America ever decided to Wipe out all the jews, before you know it this argument has gotten very heated and Zack is holding a knife to Marc’s throat, to cut a long paragraph a bit shorter, this all ends with Marc stabbing Zack in the back when he tries to attack Pete, still not much out of Cameron but however it seems we may have a good storyline coming here so lets continue, are we all sitting comfortably? Of course you can’t leave a dead body in your house and the students then have to decide what they’re going to do, when Luke comes up with the idea that Zack had sort of got it right, thats all they ever did was protest, and they never changed a thing so why don’t they just finish their supper, bury Zack in the back-yard and go on a mission to try and change some peoples points of view and if they don’t change these peoples minds then they poison them and said person would then join Zack in the back-yard. Of course this brings up a lot of argument amongst the students, but theres a movie to be made here so, of course they all agree that this is the right thing to do, when they decide to do this it brings up the one question that is always interesting to find out somebodys answer on - ’You’ve found some sort of time-travel device.
It’s 1909 you’re in an Austrian bar and a young man calling himself Adolf offers to buy you a Schnapps, now as the conversation goes along it becomes plainly obvious that this is Adolf Hitler, but as he stands before you, he’s just a plain ordinary person, hes never done anything wrong, do you kill him? do you try to poison his Schnapps or do you try and change his future by talking to him?’ anyway once again I’m going off on that tangent so we’d better get back on track, after the students have decided to go ahead with Luke’s plan all that is left is to decide who they are going to approach and how they are going to do it - this is where the movie gets its title from, what better a way to get somebody into that kind of situation than invite them for supper, have 2 bottles of wine ready one of them poisoned with arsenic, one of them clean, at the end of each meal we propose a toast, if the chosen person still has the same point of view they get the blue bottle (the poisoned one) if we’ve managed to convince them that they are wrong then they get the green bottle (the clean one) this is where the movie begins to come into its own, it shows each of the students reactions to their killing spree and how it affects each one of them personally. They start off their plan with a local reverend who believes that all homosexuals go straight to hell, and to be fair no matter how much the students try to convince him that he’s wrong, there is no way the reverend is going to change his mind, so it isn’t long before Zack has a neighbour so to speak, I’m not going to let you in on the other murders because there isn’t that much that can be said, we have an anti-environmentalist, an illiterate librarian, A dominant male (woman-hater) and many others but as they go on they find that their killings are attracting attention from the local police but on top of that their reasons are getting more petty by the minute, thats it no more storylines are coming from my keyboard, I’d ruin the movie, so we should get onto the outer aspects you know soundtrack and stuff!
After watching it the first time I was a little disappointed to be honest, there wasn’t enough of Cameron Diaz on screen for a start and to be honest I was a little bit tired from college that day so the subtleties of the storyline mostly passed me by, but then one Saturday night it was repeated and it got a second viewing, knowing not to expect that much of Cameron, I focused more on the storyline and the actual movie itself rather than one of its lead characters, well this time I was blown away, maybe because It was the second time I’d seen it, but I could see into the meanings of some parts of the movie a lot more and it definitely was a lot better viewing than the first time I’d seen it, over the years now I’ve seen this film dozens of times and it still ranks as my all-time favourite, sure the inclusion of Cameron helps, but there is so much more to this movie than I can give it credit for it.