1. Aliens have taken over their minds. The brain numbing dribble they sprout is designed to lower our collective intelligence thus making the inevitable interstellar invasion easier for our prospective conquerors.

2. Sports commentators are usually ex-sportspeople. Sportspeople are usually bad at school. People who are bad at school are usually stupid. Enough said.

3. Years of sitting next to high frequency electronic transmitters have fried their brains. Let’s hope it’s made them sterile as well.

4. Sports commentators pin their identity on the sport they describe. Their useless badinage arises in a desperate attempt to make the game and thereby themselves more interesting than they actually are.

5. They get paid by the word.

6. Locker room gases have seeped up into the commentary box, mixed with the commentators’ hot air, producing the equivalent of an embollism in their brains.

7. A little known fact: The worst commentators are paid the most money. This is because advertisers realise listeners will want to hear their commercials to purge themselves of the drivel they’ve just endured.

8. If sport is ritualised war then commentators must be terrorists. Just as the true terrorists (those who cause terror) are not the ones who kill or die, but the ones who report it.

9. The law probability demands that if enough commentary is made some of it will be worth listening to. Sports commetators unrelenting defiance of this law marks the last great paradox for science.

10. Sports commentators are trapped in a Freudian Oral Phase of childhood. Their loquaciousness, the phallic shaped microphones, their pathetic and transparent need for approval, etc, point to deep and troubling psychoses.

The Human Factor is a fictional story about real spies. They don’t drive sports cars, they’re not irresistible lovers, they don’t wield deadly wristwatches and they don’t crash tackle maniacal millionaires over the edges of cliffs only to miraculously climb back up via fortuitously placed tree roots. They sit behind desks, read reports, love their wives and look forward to retirement. And yet, this novel is as gripping as anything from the pen of Matthew Reilly or Ian Fleming, with more intellectual stimulation than either of them, with all due respect, could ever hope to achieve. Read the rest of this entry »

Ever since a bloke named Moses came down a hill carrying a stone with the words “Thou shalt not kill” engraved upon it (among other, more nit-picking directives), we have been obsessed with the concept of murder. It permeates every form of art and entertainment that European-based cultures have indulged in, from painting, to music, to literature, to film, to boardgames. Let’s face it: we love it. It’s so much fun! Which means that films like Jonathan Lynn’s Clue are probably going to be enjoyable for most of us regardless of whether or not they’re really very good films. Read the rest of this entry »

Christopher Paolini’s novel is a hugely popular fantasy with young and old readers alike. Surely there must be more to it than what has made it to the screen in this big budget Hollywood interpretation?

Read the rest of this entry »

Oxford Art Factory
Friday August 29, 2008

As the curtain swept back from the stage, we were greeted by a carefully crafted view of white on white. The band had obviously been busy pegging sheets to the scaffolds as the punters continued to stream into the OAF’s Live Art Space (Mercy Arms obviously attract a dedicated crowd; I’ve never seen the main bar so deserted while a decent crowd fills the other room). It takes guts to get up on stage in white tights, but this band showed they’re just serious enough about their aesthetic to do it. Good on them, but at times throughout this gig I was struck by the possibility that these boys might take themselves just a little bit too seriously? Read the rest of this entry »

And this is where things are going to start getting difficult for the Harry Potter films. After the appalling Chris Columbus’ painfully mediocre interpretations of the first two books, this film series suddenly hit its straps - first with Alfonso Cuaron’s brilliant Prisoner of Azkaban, and then with Mike Newell’s surprisingly fine effort for the Goblet of Fire. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix was always going to be a difficult book to turn into a film, with its extreme length and preoccupation with Harry’s incessant brooding and angst (hey, fifteen is a difficult age, OK?). Although new director David Yates struggles to craft a coherent plot out of it, there are certainly some things to admire in this one. That won’t stop hordes of Harry Potter readers clamouring for his head because of his rape and pillage of the storyline but, hey, you can’t have everything! Read the rest of this entry »

To quote Amsterdam in Scorsese’s Gangs of New York, it’s warm under the wing of a dragon. This largely factual account of a young Scottish doctor recruited by one of the world’s most infamous warlords as his personal physician is a well made and enormously entertaining drama, centred around a phenomonal performance by Forest Whitaker as Idi Amin. Read the rest of this entry »