Is the world crazy or am I?

Is it me or are we resigned to the fact that this time next year the man running our country will be a toff in Blair’s clothing. I am of course talking of the fact that The Sun has changed its allegiance to The Conservative party, ending it’s 12 year association with the incumbent Labour party. Now it is no surprise that the Sun has lot of clout in this country, as it is the paper with the biggest readership , and is a strong arm of Murdoch’s News Corp Empire. The paper even announced, after John Major surprisingly won the 1992 general election, that: “ It was the Sun Wot Won it ,” in its usual blunt instrumental way, so even it is in some way self aware of its influence. Sure, it’s true that people decide the outcome of an election and not the media, as Labour are spluttering frantically , but having the media on your side certainly helps. Then again is what we are seeing a case of The Sun backing on the horse with better odds, or an attempting to influence the voters? Now t...

Now I am quite a fan of action films. Sure they are purile and mindless things to watch, but god they are entertaining. Maybe it’s being a man or something, but a movie with lots of explosions; stupid puns and men who can’t act for shit, but can still forge an acting career thanks to the former two things, despite being as wooden as a petrified pine tree, but then who cares as that kind of adds to the entertainment. Anyway, I digress. The reason I’m suddenly gushing about my love of action theatre, is because the culmination of every action movie generic convention seems to be amalgamating into a massive, perpetually exploding, testosterone filled lump of pure muscle, which will be called The Expendables , and is out next year. This film has the action casts of action casts, including: Sly Stallone, Bruce Willis, Jason Statham, Jet Li, Dolph Lundgren and Mickey Rourke… oh and ARNOLD SCHWARZNEGGAR. Seriously, this film will be Actiongeddon, and may raise the bar of the ludicrous actio...

Another short thought on daytime TV today from me. I have been watching the BBC’s daytime soap Doctors for a while now. Now, it’s tough making a daytime soap, as its restricted on content and racy material even more-so than it’s evening soap counterparts, and the writing and acting talent isn’t really in the market for daytime output. But that notwithstanding, Doctors is pretty poor by anyone’s standards. To sum up the premise, it is based on the day-to-day trials and tribulations of a group of GP’s running a health centre in the West Midlands, ranging from normal surgery where pensioners basically come in so that they have someone to talk at for five minutes about their cough, to hostage situations (I kid you not on the latter). As you can already tell the format flip-flops between two extremes of mundane and quirky, to all out drama, which is a bit off putting. After all one day the doctors might be dealing with a mother who is panicking, in an unnecessarily excessive way, about ...

This week marked the release of Muse’s 5th studio album The Resistance. Now I had a lot of reservations about this album, which was surprising with Muse being my favourite band. However, the singles that had been played from the Resistance, in the run-up to the album’s release, had caused me some concern that the band had passed their prime (as I discussed lengthily here ) and had begun to embrace a more conventional and rather bland sound. Well, was I in for the surprise of my life when I sat down to my first listening of the full album, as it swept away any belief from my mind of its mediocrity. That’s right! I really like this album. Sure, Uprising the first single and track, is a bit of a jarring entry to the album, but it doesn’t matter as what follows is sheer brilliance. The album in general is a bit eclectic as we, the listeners, are treated to a real blend of rock classics complete with Muse’s normal space-aged tweaks, along with some jazzy piano songs, classical symphonies, a...

I went to see The Final Destination this week, with the interest of seeing if Death had really “Saved the best till last” as the trailer triumphantly tried to jam down my throat. Instead what I saw was the flagging remains of a premise that has been done to death (puns ahoy!). I think the only things that I can safely say are different about this film compared to the other three films in the series are the change of scenery, a fresh batch of forgettable teens and the addition of the ‘The.’ So we begin as ever with the usual group of carefree and unrealistically attractive teens hanging out somewhere (this time it’s at a racing circuit). Suddenly one predicts that all were about to be brutally slaughtered in an unlikely chain reaction disaster; averts death only for each survivor to be picked off in even more ridiculous circumstances (seemingly by death himself), and in the original order of the initial premonition. Of course all this exposition in the film is totally wasted on some...

Why is it that a lot of people on TV or in the media – be they actors, documenters, contestants or interviewee – have to trawl out the old cliché of their experiences being a ‘personal journey’. Sure this simple phrase conjures up the romantic idea that someone has gone through some kind of spiritual or life changing experience, and that is fine when it’s used appropriately. But to just keep slapping it into sentences at will, as some people do, just becomes nauseating, and makes you want to just have a pretentious-twat shock-button on your TV remote to deal out swift justice. The reason I’ve become riled, is thanks the use of this cliché by Ricky Groves - a prospective Strictly Come Dancing contestant and ex-Eastenders dullwit - in a pre-series interview . So then are we to assume that Strictly Come Dancing is a spiritual and life changing experience? I think this takes a lot of credence away from the idea of the ‘personal journey’ as, after all, taking this phrase to it’s logical co...