On the first day of this month of August I announced a blogging pause here, and I meant it, and it is in place. The rules of this pause are not that I don't post anything, merely that I don't have to.

I announced the same rule on my Culture Blog and since then, nothing. There will be cultural things there, this August, but for the time being … But here, I still find I have a lot of things to say.

Tonight for example, I'm watching a truly excellent education-based movie. It's 187, starring the truly excellent Samuel L. Jackson. It is as good as that grotesque Michelle Pfeiffer thing was absurd.

And here is what the Radio Times has to say about it:

Samuel L. Jackson's typically intense performance is the sole merit of this over-directed, uninvolving school drama, which shows the nasty flip side of the Michelle Pfeiffer vehicle Dangerous Minds. Jackson plays a viciously assaulted New York teacher who transfers to a school in Los Angeles to rebuild his life. It's all shot in a jumpy MTV pop video style by Waterworld's Kevin Reynolds. JC

Now I don't know who JC is, but I suspect him of holding many of the opinions that caused the civilisational catastrophe described so gruesomely by this movie. He's right about that Michelle Pfeiffer movie, but, faced with this one, he feels got at. And he feels got at because he is being got at. The message of this movie is that you, JC, and all the idiots who think as you think, have re-established barbarism. And rather than deal with that message, JC retreats and blames the handwriting of the message. That's a guess, and maybe an unfair one. Maybe JC is wholly in favour of civilisation, and just thinks that this movie is uncivilised. But I doubt this. This is a movie in which the central character says things like: "You are responsible for your actions." And I suspect that JC feels uncomfortable about ideas of that sort.

I've just got to the bit where one of the Senior Barbarians has had his finger cut off. Did Samuel S. Jackson do this? I'm guessing yes. My education proceeds. Just because it's the vacation doesn't mean I stop learning.

By the way, "187" is the police radio code for murder. Or something like that.

SLJ did cut off the finger, and then kill someone. He dies, as does the finger loser, in a somewhat over the top rerun of the Russian Roulette scene in The Deer Hunter.

Final word of 187: "A teacher wrote this movie."