Plane speaking

I confessed a few weeks ago that I'd referred to JG Ballard's Crash in my Radiohead book, without actually having read it and, like a sinner scrabbling for redemption, I'm studiously going through all the references and noting the ones I haven't actually read, watched or heard. In Chapter 25, I discuss the technological developments that have destroyed the notion of The Rock Album as a discrete set of songs in a non-negotiable order. I compare these changes with the experiments in reader interactivity carried out by the experimentalist writers BS Johnson and Georges Perec, and link these, via a footnote, to the web-based discussions that caused changes to the script of the 2006 film Snakes on a Plane. And, being a complete ponce, the one I hadn't actually experienced in all its glory was the schlocky movie. So today I endeavoured to rectify this. But I only lasted 20 minutes. Bear in mind that I'd managed to plough through Perec's Life: A User's Manual (the 99 chapters of which you can read in any order, guided by a 59-page index, a chronology, a checklist of stories, a floorplan of the building in which the action takes place and a profound interest in jigsaws) and Johnson's The Unfortunates (the 27 chapters of which can be read in any order you bloody well like, although Johnson politely suggests you read the first and last in their conventional places), so a lowest-common-denominator thriller about reptiles running amok on a flight from Hawaii to Los Angeles ought to be straightforward, yeah? Sadly, not. But what stopped me wasn't the wafer-thin characterisation, the cliche-strewm script or even the remedial acting. It was the fact that the hero, the alpha-male FBI agent played by cooler-than-dry-ice Samuel L Jackson was named.... Neville. Now, apologies to any Nevilles out there but c'mon, it's not the sort of name that seeps a cocktail of sang-froid and testosterone from every pore, is it? It's a dealbreaker as far as the audience goes, like finding out that Satan has elected to name his son... Adrian...