Ross Jones-Morris 2015-10-06T12:24:06-04:00 Ross Jones-Morris Copyright 2008,, Inc. HuffingtonPost Blogger Feed for Ross Jones-Morris Good old fashioned elbow grease. On Tuesday Facebook Showed Your Private Messages To All Of Your Friends,2012:/theblog//3.1915218 2012-09-26T04:37:55-04:00 2012-11-25T05:12:01-05:00 Ross Jones-Morris
Bottom line: I was not happy.

You know how Google and Facebook and 'the internet' are hoarding all of our lovely personal data and giving it to terrorists and stuff? Yeah? Well If I gave you a penny for every time a f*ck was given by me about that old debate you'd be going hungry I'm afraid. But now? Now all of my precious private conversations had been leaked? Well I was livid. How could you do this to me Facebook? After all I've done for you. I've given you my whereabouts at any given time, my social life, my time, my addition to an easily targeted and marketable demographic. What do you give me? This!? I was ready to end things between us. It's not me it's you. Fin.

But alas we'd all got our knickers in a twist about nothing. Facebook hadn't really leaked our private messages. Apparently it was just a rumour based around some confusion with the timeline and how it displayed our public interactions. Then this had been reported, people had seen the headline (sorry about that) and a great big vicious circle was now eating into Facebook's share price. Great for us though, disaster averted, life back to normal, why isn't Dave online so I can bitch about Suzy again?

Not matter what our Facebook profile may say there is no 'us'. Especially online. We have not one identity but several. On Twitter we may be an aspiring 'writer' with a slightly crotchety, belligerent
outlook on life. On Youtube a politically driven loudmouth prone to squabbling with fundamentalist Christians. Not convinced? Use a website anonymously and see how you change. Watch how on 4chan 'nice' people can do horrible things once they become their anonymous selves. It's all a matter of accountability.

On Facebook the more sensible amongst us project ourselves as best we can. Using choice snippets of comedy here or there to make ourselves look spontaneously witty or sharing only our most kitsch or socially astute of interests to make ourselves look interesting. Such a groomed and socially conscious manifestation of our personality can lead to a sort of social schizophrenia. This apparent dichotomy of good and bad 'us' is exposed not for everyone but for Facebook - to see. What I mean to say is that in private chat, depending on who we are talking to, we let it all hang out. This is because we are of course not airing our dirty laundry out for all to see, just for our best mate, or boyfriend or girlfriend. So that's fine then. Well not really because Facebook is there as well, it's pressing it's innocuous little ear up against the door and it's got the room wired.

The online privacy debate has never had much sex appeal for the youth market but now, in one fell swoop it's been made (albeit theoretically) relevant. Sure, let people know where you live, what you do, where you are, but DO NOT let them see what you said in the confines of private chat. Forget your personal details, in Facebook's highly considerable data banks is stored not only you, social you, public you, but private you. Your secrets, your lies, your shame and quite frankly, your bitching.

Now I realise that not everyone reading this will be a 'bitch' but I'm willing to bet that the majority (if they're honest with themselves - come on, be honest) are. This is of course not some
terrible thing. Sometimes you just need to let off some steam about someone. With that emission out of the way you get on with your life. Maybe you are having a 'private' chat with a significant other or someone you'd like to be your significant other or even worse, someone you'd like to be your significant other. And d'you know what? No one ever needs to know. No one needs to know but Facebook does.

Do you know who else knows that Facebook does? Hackers. Now I'm going to try and not be naïve here. 'Hackers' aren't just going to 'hack' their way into Facebook's surely impressively secure and dense network, but it's a possibility. Forget terrorism. Want to bring western society to it's knees? Publish it's private conversations.

There may not be an Orwellian thought police watching and recording your innermost thoughts, but Facebook have them on file. Want to be the next prime minster? Well watch out because chances are you're not only living your social life in public, but you're airing your dirty laundry on record as well.

The whole 'personal information' argument has had little sway amongst a generation that has grown up in the information spotlight. But infringe their right to privately bitch, sext, or conspire and pretty soon you'll find the youth of today going pretty public.]]>
The Pseudo Scientist Who Cried Wolf,2012:/theblog//3.1644925 2012-07-02T21:30:12-04:00 2012-09-01T05:12:12-04:00 Ross Jones-Morris an article in which Lucy Wallis takes a perfectly reasonable look at the reasons certain centenarians (and a related expert) give for living past the age of 100. A diverting read but tomorrow I'll change nothing about my life. This utter defiance of almost any incidental health related article has become a regular occurrence for me. By this point my life is like a story of "The Pseudo-Scientist Who Cried Wolf" but with me as a poor bewildered villager staring down the barrel of mortality knowing that one day something will get me. Even so I somehow doubt that it'll be the lack of oranges in my diet.

As an impassioned soldier in the age old fight against death I'm on the front lines every day, staring cars, knives, cliffs, dodgy alleyways, the highly inconvenient blood clot I currently have in my arm and Facebook (apparently) in the face and saying "No! Not today!". You see it's something we all have a vested interest in and it's patently clear that personal survival in the majority of cases is a tremendously popular thing. I mean, in a choice between £200 million or continued existence I think on balance I (as I confidently predict you will too) am going to plump for the latter.

This fear is thus a huge part of the human experience and one which low-brow tat (and indeed high brow tat) isn't afraid to exploit with outrageously repetitive effect. On a scale of 1 to "YOU ARE GOING TO DIE AN AGONISING DEATH THIS AFTERNOON UNLESS YOU READ THIS" the headline "YOU ARE GOING TO DIE" is a pretty effective one. Just look at the Daily Mail. Sun, sea, sex and survival sell and without the latter you won't be getting much of the former.

A cursory Google search of "Daily Mail chances of cancer" (although I of course didn't include the capital letters in my search -do you take me as the sort of person that types into Chrome?) reveals everything you need to know firstly about newspapers and secondly about your health. Within only the first three pages of my search I was treated to a wide and terrifying array of potential death traps.

Only 11 hours ago the Daily Mail told us that "drinking coffee lowers the risk of common skin cancer" but there are oh so many more things and you (as a stupid feeble minded hypochondriac) could and of course should be doing. Why aren't you currently 'going on a brisk walk'? Walking for 90 minutes a day? Breast feeding your child? Losing weight ? Eating less? On statins? Eating a high fibre diet? Getting circumcised (that's right getting circumcised)? Chewing through Aspirin like they were Smarties or eating Oranges like they were juicy, pithy, unmanageably large popcorn? Well I'm not sure why not and if not start immediately. Do you want cancer? Do you?!

For those of you that don't - so that's all of you then (now that's a demographic to target) - here's some things you should stop (remember I've retrieved these straight from the tip of the iceberg - there's a hell of a lot more). Without delay you should cease having IVF treatment, having seven cups of tea a day, taking The Pill, using sunbeds, inhaling diesel exhaust engine fumes, eating in accordance with the Atkins diet, having CT scans, delaying motherhood, snoring, taking health supplements, being a tall woman, using Facebook, drinking fruit juice, eating a meat or salt heavy diet, having a father that smoked before you were born, having the 'painful womb condition endometriosis' (stop having it immediately you fool), getting breast implants and eating a high fibre diet - yes it helps prevent cancer too but who's counting . Well these guys are so if you want to interrupt your pursuit of a successful and fulfilling life then go there.

So now that you've stopped doing everything get ready for that birthday card from the Queen! 100 here you come. Well apparently not. If you've somehow managed to dodge a heart attack, any sort of unfortunate fatal accident, having CT scans on sunbeds, eating meat whilst snoring and/or being a tall Facebook using woman then there are still many, many things that could kill you. When I say 'kill you' remember here I mean actually kill you. Like really dead. What are these things? Let's go to the experts shall we.

Well the consensus seems to be that you need live an active lifestyle, have the right genetics , live in the right environment and be chuffing lucky. At least that's the conclusion of Professor Tim Spector of Kings College London who also says that, "the science is slightly baffled by this, we still don't really understand what makes a centenarian because all of them are unique". Oh really Tim? Next you'll be saying that spending your days looking at The Daily Mail website masturbating to pictures of Pippa Middleton is a waste of time.

I think that the 100 year old somewhat remarkable Peggy Hovell has got it sussed. Never one to let age get in the way, she recently planned (but was not allowed to) take part in a charity parachute jump and says "I just love driving, I like driving fast." Her no doubt remarkable willpower, adventurousness and drive could be a possible reason for her advanced years suggests Professor Spector who says "if you have the will to do things then you have an optimistic view that you are not going to get hurt, you'll do something unexpected. If you are a bit of a pessimist and you say 'well if I do that I'm bound to break a leg and end up in hospital,' you just stay in bed all day." I guess that means that if you spend your time reading health scare articles then you are going to die earlier. What a delicious irony.

The nameless protagonist of Fight Club once put it excellently as we watched him lying on a sofa ruminating over inconsequential rubbish on TV that "this is your life and it's ending one second at a time". Many peoplelive modest, quiet lives averse to any risk or unnecessary deviation from their Darwinian path. They bat a good long innings, living life in the style of Geoffrey Boycott at the crease, staving off anything remotely dangerous with a finely honed defensive guard, surprised or tricked by nothing. They may well be happy to do this but are you? Once we're dead and gone, the method with which we lived our life or the age we achieved become no more consequential to us than they were to us before we were born. Wouldn't it be nice to know with your last breath that with the one shot you had you made the most of it? That you didn't squander it in an attempt to stave off an inevitability. Of course you don't want to die early but similarly you don't want to die with any regrets. Unnecessary indulgence is a great and glorious part of our lives and it's what makes life worth living so striking a happy balance between existence and pleasure is the name of the game.

In their own irritatingly small way I think these health related articles and the massive viewing figures they achieve are symptomatic of a larger problem. Our society's obsession with death. There are many amongst us who will go to great lengths for an entirely minimal (and only possibly possible) increase in our lifespan. If I were a woman would I rush into bearing children to 'decrease my risk of cancer'? No I don't think I would. Will I stop using Facebook or mobile phones or have my children circumcised all in the vain hope of increasing my and their lifespan by a completely vague and imperceptible amount? No I won't.

The message I think should be this. Stop worrying and get on with it. Unless of course 'get on with it' to you means stabbing yourself in the heart or testing the limits of your skull under an industrial strength vice, that much is inadvisable. You might live to one hundred and similarly you might get cancer. Some smokers get lung cancer, some don't. Even though they have a much decreased chance of getting it some non-smokers get lung cancer as well. Clearly you shouldn't be smoking or binge drinking or using sunbeds all the time or huffing diesel fumes like they were snuff and you were an 18th century gentleman of fashion and repute, but don't tell me that smokers will die 30 years younger than non-smokers. I just have to look at my currently existent 85 year old chain smoking grandfather recently bereaved of his clean-living wife to know that much. Any world in which the majority of the members of the The Rolling Stones are still alive after decades of drug use isn't one that cares about marginal tea induced increases in your chances of cancer. I'm not advising you smoke here, I'm just saying that luck, chance, chance and luck have an awfully large sway in the corporeal equation.

Who cares if The Daily Mail thinks that drinking too much tea or neglecting to give a blood sacrifice at an altar of "The People's Princess" every morning without fail is going to kill you? I definitely don't. One night getting drunk with your mates isn't going to kill you and you won't still be feeling that cheeky McDonald's you had this evening in 20 years time, so stop worrying, stop indulging the Daily Mail's readership figures and do something productive with your time. It's running out.]]>
Big Brother Bullying: What Exactly is Everyone Complaining About?,2012:/theblog//3.1637389 2012-06-29T10:18:27-04:00 2012-08-29T05:12:05-04:00 Ross Jones-Morris The Four-Step Conor McIntyre Guide to Charming a Lady:

Step 1: If one ever finds oneself in a situation in which a male acquaintance verbally abuses a woman for failing to eat a cake made of tinned ham covered in hot sauce, stand back and don't intervene.
N.B. Some people say chivalry is dead but if someone can't complete an eating challenge with any form of decorum or success then what am I supposed to do? Sympathise? Please, it's a dog eat dog world out there and if a dog can't win the "Confusing Cuisine" task then the bitch is going to get put down.

Step 2: Once her self-esteem has been sufficiently shouted out of her find a feminine hygiene product and/or piece of feminine hygiene 'equipment' and wave it about. Depending upon whether or not your chosen item is phallic in shape, perhaps suggest that she insert it into an orifice (the use of the word 'minge' is optional but advised). Not only will she be impressed by your knowledge of the female anatomy but by this point her self-esteem should have bottomed out.

Step 3: Now she'll be putty in your hands (if not the poor cow is probably confused - give her a hug or threaten to punch her or something).

Step 4: Rest assured that if you don't successfully charm her then at least your bullying will make great TV.

"Where does Big Brother find these people?" It's a perennial question of the 21st century I'm sure you'll agree, yet it's one that I've never understood. Just visit any city centre at 3am on a Friday and I'm sure you'd be treated to some less than progressive opinions, colourful language and if you're lucky a punch in the kidneys. Yes, modern Britain does have its fair share of morons. One of these particular morons is Big Brother 2012's Conor McIntyre, a man that makes Richard Keys and Andy Gray look like a pair of silver tongued feminists.

In fact, his actions on Monday night have elicited around 1,000 complaints from angry viewers who took against his Malcolm Tucker style approach to people politics. But what exactly were these people complaining about? Why were they complaining about it? And who are they and where do they buy their anoraks?

If I were a writer for the The Sun I'd just chastise everyone involved on all sides and be done with it (including making an anorak joke which unfortunately I'm not above). I'd label Conor McIntyre "a foul-mouthed lager lout and suspected immigrant" and all of the viewers who complained "scurrilous, possibly Polish, mouth-breathing, liberalist sympathisers." I'm not going to write that here (because I am not xenophobic, a right-wing nutcase or obnoxious - well, maybe a bit obnoxious but two out of three isn't bad). What I will write however is that Conor McIntyre is indeed an arse and that pretty much everyone who complained needs to consider what it is that Ofcom is really there for.

Yes that's right, I'm a bit of a cultural libertarian. Feel free to complain about what I say but don't you dare complain about my right to say it blah blah blah, one of those types - ish (I'm not going to be supporting the BNP's right to wage a hate campaign against Britain's ethnic minorities anytime soon in the name of free speech if that's what you're thinking).

There are many however who don't share my somewhat louche disposition. Turns out there are plenty of people out there of a Mary Whitehouse persuasion who's sensibilities are somewhat sensitive. So much so that a somewhat insignificant event simply by being televised can lead to them hitting the phones faster than you can say "stop and think about whether or not you are directing your grievances at the relevant authorities" - or something to that effect.

Such a culture amongst certain people is ably illustrated by the media shit-storm in a teacup that followed Jade Goody's mockery of Shilpa Shetty way back in 2007. Never ones to miss an opportunity to build a big cash mountain out of a meaningless molehill the newspapers as well as the professional Ofcom complainers had a field day. Pretty much everyone turned on Jade Goody and things got awfully unpleasant. It all went to show that if you sling shit at someone in front of a camera then people, and then the media, will sling shit back at you. Before you know it everyone ends up covered in shit and everyone is too disgusted with everyone else to do anything constructive about the situation. In the aftermath we get to see footage of morons in India (yes they have them in other countries too) burning pneumatic effigies of Goody and hailing her the devil. After that we get to see Goody's grovelling apology for her actions and most grotesquely of all we get to see Channel 4 executives rolling around in a pile of shit covered money and coming out the other side smelling of roses.

Yes, Channel 4 was placed under certain sanctions by Ofcom as a result but the misconduct of the network was buried by the media under the revelation that certain ignorant people are sometimes racist to other people. I heavily doubt that many of the calls Ofcom received where focused upon Channel 4's editorial responsibilities and I think the same could probably be said of this week's complaints. They may make a lot of noise but in reality make no real difference. Channel 4 would have been investigated without the complaints and all the incident served to do was make a victim of Shilpa Shetty and make Jade Goody some sort of EDL martyr.

You see Ofcom is there to regulate the broadcasters and their editorial judgement, not the Big Brother housemates. As a man of (admittedly self-diagnosed) sane mind and moral I do indeed object to any bullying that occurs in the house but that alone does not a valid complaint make.

Throughout the history of high profile Ofcom cases it becomes clear that many people complain when they are angered or annoyed by something, often something that is somewhat specific to them or a group they belong to. Ofcom may be tasked with "protecting the public from what might be considered harmful or offensive material" but it doesn't count if you are offended because of your bigotry. Such people evidently see Ofcom as some sort of counselling service, a hotline where they can air out their grievances to a member of staff that is paid to listen.

Topics people have felt motivated to call Ofcom about include:
  • This Morning doing a report on gay wedding (117 complaints).

  • The Bill featuring a gay kiss (170 complaints).

  • Spitting image showing an image of God (341 complaints).

  • Brass Eye satirising paedophilia (992 complaints).

  • The mere idea that of film that shows Christ having sex being shown (The Last Temptation of Christ with 1554 complaints, many before broadcast).

Why stop there? Why not complain about anything that takes your fancy:
  • Why not complain that you became distressed by England being knocked out of Euro 2012.

  • That you didn't like the bit in Total Recall where we find out that the mutant taxi driver has been secretly working for Cohagen all along.

  • That Walter let a heroin addicted woman die of by choking on her own vomit in Breaking Bad.

  • That Breaking Bad showed someone dying by choking on their own vomit after taking heroin.

  • That you think vomit is a bit "icky".

  • That Channel 4 dare show the film Crash in which people find sexual pleasure in car crashes.

  • That as a homophobe you didn't like the bits in Queer as Folk where guys have sex with each other (that actually received 163 complaints).

  • That you didn't like Brokeback Mountain because now you can't think about the previously "dreamy" Jake Gyllenhaal without thinking of Heath Ledger having sex with him.

  • That you thought the Shawshank Redemption should have ended with Red getting on the bus for God sake it was a film about hope and the bit on the beach at the end ruined that and that Andy was sanding down a boat was just too cliché and trite for words and that Frank Darabont should have stuck to his guns and not filmed the "audience pleasing" addendum. Was it a dream sequence? Please tell me it was a dream sequence.

I disgress.

Ofcom are charged with many things (some of which lie outside of the 'censorship' arena) but not only can they not fine individuals but the people that comprise the content they regulate are out of their jurisdiction altogether too. That a program or the people in it upset us is not the point. We may be upset by bullying in Waterloo Road and upset by bullying in the Big Brother house but it only violates Ofcom's rules once it becomes editorially unjustifiable (i.e. exploitative to participants or harmful or offensive). Ofcom's remit when it comes to editorial content is to regulate the broadcasters - Channel 4 and Channel 5 for Big Brother, the BBC when a middle aged man and less than middle aged man call an elderly man and talk about engaging in sexual intercourse with his less than middle aged daughter.

By all means complain about the editorial judgement of broadcasters, maybe even do a Whitehouse who for all her sins at least attempted to start a public discourse about censorship rather than just calling in and adding her heft to a somewhat meaningless statistic. If you don't like bullying then well done, you are somewhat lovely, but don't call Ofcom about it. On the other hand if you object to Channel 5 cultivating and broadcasting bullying and abuse in order to turn a profit then go crazy. Give Ofcom a call and express your distaste at Channel 5's editorial decision-making. If the BBC starts a campaign supporting the Conservatives, if Newsnight airs a VT of Jeremy Paxman pulling down his trousers and decapitating a donkey, then by all means complain. In each case feel free to bemoan the BBC's lack of political neutrality or the Newsnight producer's questionable decision to show unjustifiable animal murder by a trouserless lunatic on prime-time TV. Just whatever you do don't moan that 'it made you upset' and leave it at that. Ofcom isn't there to police how content affects your personal sensibilities per se, it is there to uphold freedom of speech and to police the actions of broadcasters in relation to the public's sensibilities as a whole.

When Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross phoned Andrew Sachs and it was broadcast after the fact the BBC received a fine of £150,000 and Brand and Ross were sacked. But of course they were sacked by the BBC, not Ofcom. Ofcom don't have that power. So next time you see something on TV that you find offensive and instinctively start to reach for the phone, think about why you are doing it. I may be completely off base here and many who do complain may indeed do this and may in fact be complaining on the correct grounds. Even so this is an appeal that the rest should bear in mind that Ofcom is there for a certain reason and that reason only.

If Big Brother features an horrendous argument featuring one or two bewildered idiots then don't phone up and complain that it's not what you want to see, complain that Channel 5 are acting irresponsibly by accruing money through exploiting people and their distress. The same could possibly be said of talent shows like Britain's Got Talent or The X Factor. Maybe then, by formalising the reasons for our distaste instead of making a lot of noise, we, and the regulatory bodies that govern our viewing experience, can actually start to truly instigate some change.]]>
Euro 2012: Where Have All The Hooligans Gone?,2012:/theblog//3.1626334 2012-06-27T19:00:00-04:00 2012-08-27T05:12:06-04:00 Ross Jones-Morris really mean something? A pint, a few penalties and some pugilism. Oh, and if you were lucky a bottling, or stabbing or strangling and a few arrests and hospitalisations and while you're at it why not throw some racism in there as well. I mean why not?

Well there's plenty of reasons why not, not that Lexi Alexander's supremely stupid film Green Street would have had it that way. In 2004 football hooliganism was dying a death. Since then films like Green Street, The Football Factory, The Firm, Cass and Awaydays have sought to recapture the now rather by-gone era of football hooliganism with varying levels of condemnation and (in Green Street's brains to the wall case of idiocy) nostalgia.

You see the England team are now safely home after crashing out of the Euros on penalties, again, but the oddest thing of all is that there's been little violence, no substantial cases of racism and no notable arrests to speak of. Just whatever happened to the all of the idiocy, the stupidity and most of all, the hooliganism? Where have the hooligans gone? Are they hiding? Are they currently engaged in some sort of high level technological experimentation preparing sophisticated mech-suits for an apocalyptic showdown at the 2023 FA Cup final? Most worrying for fans of fatuousness everywhere, have they somehow educated themselves, leaving the life behind them forever?

On the domestic scene hooliganism has been in decline ever since its peak in the 1980's. The notorious 'firms' that proliferated in the 70s and 80s rose at a time when football was becoming an increasingly metro-sexual pursuit (if the players were anything to go by). Gone were the heady days of Ron "Chopper" Harris and his glorious display of shin kicking in the 1970 FA Cup Final, now everyone was fashionable and well presented. The man with a moustache that nobbled a thousand knees, Graeme Souness, was still "keeping it hetero" on the pitch but the majority of players were now rocking mullets, perfectly preened perms and shorts so tight one could reasonably (if not accurately) accuse pretty much everyone of "plum smuggling" or on colder days "blueberry bootlegging". These were dark times for the übermensch amongst the stands so one can only assume that they overcompensated by forming into gangs and kicking seven shades of stupid out of each other. Well, of course that's not strictly true. There was probably a whole surfeit of underlying social problems as well. The 70s and 80s it seems was just the right time and place to go down the football and stick your fist in a face.

Reaching its peak in the riots following a Luton versus Millwall match in 1985, Ted Croker, head of the FA at the time, was summoned to see Margaret Thatcher and pretty soon the police were sticking their oar in. After the Hillsborough disaster in 1989 stadiums became all-seated affairs and, further hampering the hooligans cause, widespread CCTV coverage meant that if you were planning on sticking a broken bottle in the head of an opposing fan within range of the stadium you'd likely be seen and dealt with accordingly.

Nowadays arrests at domestic football matches are falling year on year and hooliganism continues its thankful descent into obscurity. Nevertheless as Home Office statistics show football fans aren't altogether afraid of a bit of a fracas. The fans of east end clubs continue to feed the stereotype of the loutish cockney thug but as the statistics show it's still only a terrifically small percentage of fans that seek to ruin it for everybody. Out of 13,406,990 attendances in the 2010-2011 season of the Premier League there were only 1,191 arrests, the majority of which were for public and not violent disorder (although one can only assume that a bit of a cockney knees up is what they were building up to before they were rudely interrupted by the law).

Policing seems to be the key here. You can't reasonably think that Britain has stopped producing morons now can you? Amongst the more recent (although thankfully declining) trends of 'monkey-chanting' and British violence abroad before, during and after European matches one can easily discern that the fighting and hate was just taken elsewhere, be it to the stands or to foreign countries. But football violence isn't a purely English phenomenon. Poland is now the football hooliganism capital of Europe. Organised into gangs that train, co-ordinate and plan their fights with a military precision, the terraces have become a breeding ground for cultivating violent supporters of the Polish far-right. But even now they tend to take their fights to the forest or the underground. Fans still want to punch the team colours off of their opponents backs (and possibly punch a few new ones in), but now they just do it hidden from view, like a skinhead version of Fight Club. Rule 1 of Football Club: You do not talk about Football Club.

So however they've done it, this summer the Polish authorities - as have the British in the domestic arena - have done a solid job with removing hooliganism from our matches, if not entirely (one only has to look at the violence in Warsaw ahead of Poland versus Russia to see that). Nevertheless it's now thankfully rare to open a newspaper and read of a football related murder, something that even my 21 year-old self can remember doing not too long ago.

The English hooligan has been neutered by the police to the point that he can seemingly no longer get it up on match day. Whether that be through force of disincentive or direct police intervention the hunters have become the hunted when entering through the turnstiles.

Perhaps now more than ever then we can watch England or our chosen club lose in peace, safe in the knowledge that our enjoyment won't be hampered by anything other than the appalling lack of prowess shown by our players. Hooliganism may not be dead, but it is leaving the stadiums, and as small victories go I think that's a pretty big one.

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Britain's Got Talent - Here's to Weeks of Socially Acceptable Abuse,2012:/theblog//3.1377578 2012-03-24T21:18:24-04:00 2012-05-24T05:12:01-04:00 Ross Jones-Morris
Just when you thought that Simon Cowell couldn't be any more hypocritical, any more more false and apparently any more botoxed he's back. Last night heralded his return to Britain's Got Talent. But more importantly we got to see Susan Boyle's spiritual successor; Jonathan Antoine. That, and a whole load of hypocrisy.

That's right, it's talent show manna from the heavens. It's someone entirely uncommercial overcoming the odds and presumably heading headlong into a commercial career. It's that golden formula that allows shows like Britain's Got Talent and the 'experts' that comprise the judging panel to turn to a gawping public with their eyebrow raised to tell them that this is why they are here, this is what the show is about. It's about finding unlikely talent they say, it's always the ones you don't expect they say (the physically unattractive), the ones marginalised by mainstream culture (Britain's Got Talent), the ones mocked by the public (the viewers). You know the ones, the ones that by merely walking onto the stage prompt Simon Cowell to say "just when you thought it couldn't get any worse" to gal-pal Carmen Electra.

Is it just me or do you think that Cowell knows in advance who's good and who's bad, who's got what it takes and who's about to have 15 minutes of hideous infamy? Essentially however when it finally comes down to the talent do you think he already knows what's conventionally clean cut and what's freak-chic? Is that why he ups the odds by abusing the weird and talented (say it in hushed tones) before rather than after their performance?

Last night we were introduced to an immensely talented and almost cripplingly shy young man called Jonathan Antoine and his similarly talented stage-crutch of sorts Charlotte Jaconelli. Now Jonathan is a 17-year-old that to all intents and purposes has obviously had a very unhappy struggle with his weight throughout the years. Yet this unfortunate story is nothing to Simon Cowell who sees fat and sees a lack of self-awareness and thus another 'failed' performance (read - funny filler). Yes, by the mere act of an all too self-aware Jonathan bravely walking onto the stage in front of a crowd that boos whenever Germany is mentioned and millions at home who will mock him and appreciate him in equal measure, Simon sees fit to say to untalented fellow judge Carmen Electra, "just when you thought it couldn't get any worse." It's only a small thing but it typifies a hell of a lot.

But don't fret, it's okay because he was good and everyone stood up and they showed a VT about bullying due to Jonathan's appearance, just after Cowell said that thing, what was it? Oh yes "just when you thought it couldn't get any worse." That one. But it's all fine because he was talented. It's fine to abuse the untalented, you know, because of course they've got so much going for them. The talented ones on the other hand need all of the encouragement they can get, because they have prospects and a convenient means to a happy and fulfilling life ahead of them and Cowell can't make any money if one of them gets all depressed or finally crosses that oh so narrow of lines between fashionably unlikely and just plain unlikeable.

Just think of a playground situation and try to imagine Simon Cowell stepping in to defend someone like Jonathan. You can't, can you? Unless of course Jonathan is accompanied by a rare natural talent (which he most certainly displayed) and the potential for a plethora of heartfelt interview opportunities and a marketing campaign based around overcoming the odds that Cowell himself seemingly constitutes. That and a substantial cut of all future earnings.

Just spare a moments thought for the ones who aren't talented though. The cripplingly shy, the amiably outgoing, the just plain bonkers and the socially awkward who think to give it a go for whatever reason. We may celebrate people like Jonathan and Susan Boyle overcoming 'borgeois stereotypes' and Britain's Got Talent for successfully unearthing a monumental and unlikely performer, but rest assured the next minute we'll be laughing at an untalented version of Jonathan. A person who has been through the same as him but is instead unceremoniously abused before millions. The difference between the abused and the partially abused then lauded? One of them has a natural talent and probably much more self awareness. Of course Jonathan deserves everything he gets out of this (something I genuinely believe) and the other Jonathan obviously deserves to be laughed at because...well because bad performances are funny. They should be more self-aware we say. The people who screen them for talent (or lack thereof) before sticking them on the stage probably also say that when they're ticking off their idiot quota for the day, right before they go home and can't sleep. Not because of their consciousness of course but because the puppy they just stabbed is whining in the corner.

But as is everyone over at Britain's Got Talent, the screeners are just doing their day job. Everyone involved is doing their day job. I'd do their day job. Give me pretty much any job right now and I'd take it because you see not all of us have an immense natural talent like Jonathan, or... erm... David Walliams (who I think made a decent sketch show once and swims quite a bit), or Alesha Dixon (who was a minor member of Mystique lest you forgot - you did, didn't you?), or Amanda Holden (who sang in the West End once or something and married that guy who presented Family Fortunes) or Simon Cowell (with his ruthless business instincts and gravity defying haricut and not so gravity defying chest). You know, talented people. Like Jonathan. Oh, and Susan Boyle.

If Britain's Got Talent is a modern day freak show then Susan Boyle is the queen of the freaks. The prize oddity. Her entire career (which I don't begrudge her in the slightest) is predicated upon her social-awkwardness and 'homely' (as every paper would now have you believe) appearance. Simon Cowell champions her around the globe as representative of why the show is on TV. And he's kind of right. It's there to showcase the weird (the eccentric, the conceited, the delusionally hopeful and occasionally the borderline mentally ill) and the wonderful (the commercial-types and dog acts). If they meet in the middle then all's the better. She gets a makeover and the press swoon about how womanly and lovely she looks now. Oh, and comedians make jokes constantly about how unattractive she is, because let's face it, if a so-so 20-something had come on stage and sang like that would Ant and Dec wouldn't have gone "you see and you all thought she was going to be crap" (or something to that effect), looking down on you from their thrones made of the tears of the unfortunate and the sheer cash pile that comes from being a chirpy pair of Saturday night mainstream apologists.

They are probably really nice guys in real life but don't tell me they thought she'd be good when they saw her, that they didn't judge her like we all did. Like I did.


Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant once wisely wrote that TV talent shows "wheel out the bewildered to be sniggered at by multi-millionaires". Well Jonathan certainly wasn't bewildered and Simon Cowell didn't directly mock him, but isn't that the point? If Britain's Got Talent has taught us anything over the past six years it's that you don't have to be clean cut and commercial to succeed, but if you aren't don't expect Simon Cowell to give you any courtesy. Even then if you are as immensely talented as Jonathan is Cowell will still talk behind your back, to Carmen Electra, and to millions, to make millions.

But it's all fine isn't it? He's just being 'honest' about what he thinks. It's what you need on shows like this, 'honesty'. Cowell made it because of his 'honesty', his refreshing life-affirming 'honesty', the type of 'honesty' you don't get from people with 'tact', a 'conscience' and 'basic human decency'.

If people who merrily sing to themselves in the shower get fed up of their humdrum existence and get a little way-laid by the lights then of course they need to be told how wrong they were to ever dream of anything more than they have. It's not like they're being exploited. It was their choice to go on TV. No one made them go up there and make fools of themselves. The poorly educated, untalented, unfortunate, unhappy, bewildered bastards.]]>
The UK Box-Office - The Devil Inside Hits and Runs Off With the Top Spot,2012:/theblog//3.1370152 2012-03-21T12:37:04-04:00 2012-05-21T05:12:01-04:00 Ross Jones-Morris


The Winner - The Devil Inside


It's an evident success for what is sadly an ever-increasing practice. Through some masterful PR work the real story here is how a film released over two months after the US release (accompanied by a less than awesome 7% on Rotten Tomatoes) has magically managed to get £1,988,461 from a startlingly efficient use of 377 sites.

The key is surely the strong genre overtones targeted firmly at the public's apparent post-Paranormal Activity thirst for low budget found footage shocks. Rest assured the film will not be troubling the upper echelons of the chart come next week though with a steep fall off in revenue even over such a short time period as the weekend past. Even so, no matter how it got there or whether it deserves it, The Devil Inside is a great piece of hit and run money making and it's hard not to root for a film that has managed to de-throne a release that cost 250 times more than it's meagre self.

Speaking of which:

The Loser - John Carter

Opinion may be somewhat divided and verging on the underwhelmed but subjective issues aside it's the cold hard cash (or lack thereof) that will constitute John Carter's legacy. Along with Mars Needs Moms it looks set to be one of the biggest box-office bombs of recent years.

Suffering from bad word of mouth and a wave of bad publicity mostly related to its humungous $250 million+ budget the press are jumping all over Andrew Stanton's business nightmare as it sinks inexorably into cult obscurity. However, the use of such language may lead one to believe that it's made absolutely nothing. On the contrary, John Carter cleared the $100 million mark on it's opening weekend and still managed to push well toward 7 figures in its second week in the UK with £965,946 from 452 sites.

It's not really failed to pack them in then it's just failed to pack everyone in. With such a decadently huge budget you really need to be the next Avatar or Inception. Essentially you need repeat viewings, good reviews and above all a hell of a lot of hype. Where Disney's reported $100 marketing budget was thrown away is anyone's guess.


The Overlooked - In Darkness/Once Upon a Time in Anatolia

It's always a shame when a great piece of arthouse cinema gets overlooked but that seems to be what has happened with Agnieszka Holland's Oscar nominated In Darkness. It's per screen average from an ambitious 47 sites doesn't make for great reading with overall takings struggling at £90,558. Given hope by Britain's not inconsiderable Polish cinema-going public the film has fallen short of expectations both because of Polish competition in the form of Kac Wawa (taking £41,274 from 42 sites) and some good old fashioned bad arthouse turnout.

Once Upon a Time in Anatolia has also been generating some great press but predictably didn't trouble the charts with its small opening of 14 sites. Nevertheless a total of £35,117 is decent screen for screen offering a glimmer of hope that if they show good films a discerning audience will come.

The Veterans - The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel/The Woman in Black/The Muppets

Even though it's been a struggle for John Carter and many films this year there are a couple of success stories scattered about. This week the top 10 holds 3 of this year's exclusive £10 million+ club (the only other member of which seems to be War Horse but it's early days yet) and with the exception of The Muppets they are all very British affairs. We've got the old guard giving it their all in The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, Hammer finding success again with The Woman in Black and back in January a very British cast and story with the Spielberg helmed War Horse. After the success of The King's Speech last year it does increasingly seem that the early months belong to the Brits and jolly proud of that we should be too.

Also Ran - 21 Jump Street/We Bought a Zoo/Contraband


On the other hand the true A-Listers haven't really performed this week. First up and fifth on the chart we have Matt Damon and Scarlett Johansson in Cameron Crowe's rose-tinted We Bought a Zoo which has garnered a decent £850,651 from 428 sites. It may have an absolutely terrible title and a high level cast that one would expect larger returns from but the film seems to have performed as lukewarmas it was reviewed so all in all a fair result.

Another high level underperformer is Marky Mark Wahlberg who may have had higher hopes for Contraband which sits precariously under the zoo with a highly tepid opening of £683,654 from 412 sites. That sort of per-screen for an opening really doesn't bode well for next week, especially with the chart wrecking ball that is currently readying itself for impact:

Next Time:

The film adaptation of the mega-selling book series The Hunger Games is out and will demolish any semblance of balance in the top 10. It's going to be a top-heavy week as the film will of course be raking it in at an apocalyptic rate of knots.


The US import Act of Valour arrives after an effective US marketing campaign that saw it take $64 million on a budget of $12 million. It is to all intents and purposes a film with all of the subtlety one would expect from a sledgehammer to the retinas. On the plus side for your beleaguered eyes it does look startlingly well shot, on the downside it's all American and flag-wavy. It's gone down a storm in The States but it's surely going to struggle over here in good ol' blighty.

Alternatively our representative in this trans-Atlantic testostathon is Dexter Fletcher's directing debut Wild Bill which stars Charlie Creed-Miles and has been getting some decent press (albeit mostly constituted by the lads mag 4 star default for films in which the cast predominantly speaks in cock-er-ny accents).

UK Top 10 Films:

Contraband, £683,654 from 412 sites (New Entry)

Other New Releases:

In Darkness, £90,558 from 47 sites
Kac Wawa, £41,274 from 42 sites
Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, £35,117 from 14 sites
The Other Side of Sleep, £1,375 from 3 sites
Booked Out, £223 from 1 site

Top Film This Time Last Year: Rango]]>
Life on the Content Farm - It's a Blog Eat Blog World Out There,2012:/theblog//3.1339371 2012-03-12T12:51:50-04:00 2012-05-12T05:12:01-04:00 Ross Jones-Morris Image and video hosting by TinyPic

It's hard living in co-dependent hell with The Human Centipede. As a film blogger for too long now have I wittered on day after day, never sure of where my next Centipede shaped nugget of information would come from. What titbit Tom Six would throw our way so that I could write about it, and rage at it and inadvertently promote it all in the name of hits, re-tweets and comment related pats on the back. For too long has Tom Six tempted the internet with his claims at depravity. For too long have we been masochistically underwhelmed. For far too long have I shared his message with the masses, flogging it to within an inch of its life, publicising it to within an inch of journalistic integrity, inch by inch sowing the seeds of its success. Life on the content farm can be hard sometimes. Pity me.

You see I'm trapped between morbid curiosity and a hard place. A hard, barren place where the meretricious blogger heroically promotes the underdog, trying to bring lesser known gems to the masses, promoting the medium they love in the form that they love. My stable is far from there. I want a job as a writer and as any embittered cynic knows if you want to get somewhere you've got to get your hands dirty. As a film writer I must work on the farm churning the freshly dug earth of The Human Centipede and its ilk with relish, leering at their shortcomings, shocked at their shameless self-promotion, the way they chase viewers by exploiting their own voice. But as Nietzsche didn't say, "when you stare into the abyss, you can't help but write about it". And it's my job to stare into the abyss. And as an aspiring writer, I write about it.

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The most viewed, liked, shared and objectively successful pieces I have ever written have been about The Human Centipede. I clamoured to review the first two in order to wrest the morbid voyeurism of the internet toward my writing, my byline bold and underlined hoping for a brief glimmer of attention, a moment of self-aggrandisement that would feed my ego enough to keep my tenuously pro-bono engine running. I spent minute after minute of my ever decreasing life looking for any cursory nod of recognition that my holier-than-thou critique had damned Tom Six perfectly, mocking his contemptuous attitude to his audience, his attention grabbing vulgarity and his unapologetic narcissism. All in all I tore apart his manipulative pandering to the easily influenced in the name of fame and money. But as he subsists and even flourishes by that sword it is I who survive and will someday maybe even die by it.

If you equip your rose-tinted horn-rims journalism used to be great. Film journalism used to be about breaking the next big thing, unearthing a rough diamond and attempting to cut it so that it fitted into a nice mainstream shaped hole so that we could trick the unwashed masses into watching it and 'enlightening' themselves. #theidiots. But now we give #theidiots what they want. We give them smut and trash and exploitation and rail against it with all of the venom we can muster to get views. I find myself tweeting about trash to get re-tweets about trash by other movie bloggers who in turn re-tweet about the trash and write about the trash so that #theidiots can read about the trash. We are consumed by trash. I guarantee you'll find more negative opinion pieces out there than positive ones. But even so it's unlikely you'll find the positive ones, being as they are aspirational, lovely, film-centric and a celebration of a medium that we movie bloggers purportedly love. However admirable they are the fact is unavoidable. They aren't memes and never will meme. Praise is not meme worthy. The point is ladies and gentlemen, that meme, for lack of a better word, is good. Meme works.

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Memes are what drive the blogosphere, the bastardised word blogosphere itself a horrible by-product of the clarity and immediacy of communication required by today's culturally progressive bloggers. Memes are founded primarily in parody and proliferate on the edges of the mainstream. The blogosphere is built on these negative building blocks and so often it is our job as writers to scramble to put ourselves on the top side of that sphere. A perfectly pitched headline, a perfectly timed blog post, a perfectly linked trailer just as it's released in the hope of stealing the attention of #theidiots and their easily turned heads. This is our bread and butter.

Feel free to occasionally go out on a limb, maybe go a bit crazy and get a bit creative with your writing, but no one will be looking unless you're ticking boxes. So you tick boxes and you sell your soul and your reward? The fervoured enthusiasm of #theidiots, manipulated in your favour and channelled towards your perfectly pitched opinion, to the opinions you have to deadlines and if you are lucky enough, for money. Online journalism is not about writing or wit. It's about buzzwords and Google Analytics and mainstream cynicism and Memes. And Google Analytics.

Memes are cynical. It's fun to be cynical, it's funny to be cynical, it's fashionable to be cynical and I for one am not averse to opining all day long on the shortcomings of my artistic medium of choice in order to satisfy my craving for success, recognition and Lars Von Trier's head on a stick. But you can't just start parading round a freshly satirised cultural victim and expect the baying mobs to just cheer. You've got to finesse it.

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In the beginning was the word, and the word was Brooker. Surely the master of the cynical send up, Charlie Brooker - a man whose entire career is based on a world weary obnoxiousness that pervades almost everything he writes - is funny, he's witty, he's inventive, but above all he is intelligent. He knows that hate is everything but also that it's not nearly enough. You need some credibility if you're getting paid. So he'll stick an allusion to Graham Greene here, heap praise on Doctor Who there and deliver one of the most moving obituaries I have ever seen with his Screenwipe tribute to Oliver Postgate, all in order to string the intellectuals along, dragging #theidiots in their wake. Many of us stand trapped in a pen on Brooker's content farm eagerly consuming his brilliant hate, watching him "not so much go for the jugular as decapitate his targets altogether" - Jim Shelley, Daily Mirror. We sit there docile, watching the docile public of a dystopian future in his excellent 50 Million Merits with its X Factor hook for #theidiots and its satire for the cultural gentry. We sit and lap it up because it's perfect. It hits all of the bases; intellect, #theidiots and most important of all; cynical hate.

Charlie Chaplin once beautifully put it that we "should like to help everyone if possible; Jew, Gentile, black man, white. We all want to help one another. Human beings are like that. We want to live by each other's happiness, not by each other's misery. We don't want to hate and despise one another." Well that's all well and good but once we get online (and even worse become anonymous) all of that goes out of the window. The content farm is a cruel place. It's blog eat blog out there.

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Much like in 50 Million Merits our culture is cannibalising itself. We chew up and spit out the latest memes and run with the best. It's evolution and it's intellectually indiscriminate. There's no finesse, no deserving or undeserving, it's survival and when the fittest come in the form of Lady Gaga and Justin Bieber it's clear that something has gone horribly wrong. Sometimes Vanilla Ice and in film people like Cuba Gooding Jr. pop up from time to time, vestigial reminders of memes past but now it's the time of the Transformer, the Jack Sparrow and the Centipede. You get hate and you survive, you get nothing and you don't. Me and the mouth-to-anus franchise have had a long, horrible journey together and eventually we will go down in flames, consumed by self-reference, infantile mouth-to-anus references and the boredom of an increasingly desensitised public.

Until then we're living hit to mouth. Someday the film industry and our poor mouths will be all the worse for it. Maybe it's time everyone stopped being negative and tried a little tenderness toward the things they love in this life. Maybe it's time every journalist out there rose up against negativity driven meme culture and as Howard Beale would have once shouted if he was part of the /b/ generation; "God damn it! Culture has value! So I want you to sit down now. I want all of you to get into your chairs. I want you to sit down right now and go to WordPress. Open it, and write, 'I'M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I'M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!" Maybe it's time bloggers promoted the deserving, the transcendent, films like The Artist.

If only because then I can steal their audience and get another 100 followers on Twitter by writing about #theidiots who walked out of it a few months back.]]>
The UK Box-Office - The Grey Pound Wins the Weekend,2012:/theblog//3.1326335 2012-03-07T09:11:46-05:00 2012-05-07T05:12:02-04:00 Ross Jones-Morris This Means War. Throughout this article that may become tediously clear. The film is rubbish and in a box-office that this week has been buoyed to a long overdue comparative high I regret that a large chuck of that success is constituted by the aforementioned pile of arse that is This Means War.

In other less self-indulgently negative news The Woman in Black has nipped out of the top spot down to second. Bested by the power of the grey pound it has been beaten by last week's runner-up The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel.

The new releases on the other hand fared badly. Apart form This Means War. That fared all too well.

The Winner - The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel/McG

Last week I predicted that if they built it the oldies would come and come they did as this week The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel has managed to do what very few have managed. It has jumped in surprisingly spritely fashion from second to first in the box office netting a gross of £2,342,095, proving if proof were ever needed that OAPs are a force to be reckoned with.

On a rumoured budget of around £8 million the film is currently looking down the barrel of a possible £15 million+ gross. However, with many touting a £20 million+ showing which I highly doubt The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel could prove to be a nice word of mouth earner for Fox who would have surely seen it as a very steady understated release (as indeed the tepid ad campaign would lead us to believe).

Nevertheless it's knocked The Woman in Black off of the top spot but I'm sure no one there is complaining. Currently outperforming the likes of Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol and destroying pretty much everything in its path currently four weeks after release it's doing bloody well for itself.

The Loser - Wanderlust/The Audience

Judd Apatow hasn't been cleaning up like he once was recently. Gone are the days when a plot revolving mainly around nerds, copious amounts of weed and Seth Rogen would garner you a million dollar pat on the back and the keys to the big boy room. Nope. The Apatow Mafia have struggled of late. With the reflected cultural glory of McLovin's fake ID fading into background static all that is left is a few well-worn tropes. That and Kristen Wiig who is absolutely excellent.

The latest Apatow production Wanderlust has hit the box-office this week with all of the voracity of Rogen after an ill-advisedly large bong-hit (you know the one, the one where he inhales for too long and splutters like a big hairy lion with bad comic timing, in every film he has ever done or ever will do). It's weekend earnings of £490,592 from a hearty 371 sites is just not good enough, especially when placed next to recent Aniston vehicles (The Bounty Hunter taking £2,055,021 and Horrible Bosses £2,077,239). I guess the gravy train's slowing down running as it is on old ideas, past glories and marijuana.

Oh, and if you hadn't already guessed the biggest earning new entry this week is This Means War garnering a decent gross from 451 sites. The audience this week has been ill-served by their judgement and as a result of that they've lost at the cinema game (the one where you have to pay to enter and if you pick a McG film you lose). No entertainment or prizes for them then and if it was ideas or intelligence they were looking for they've gone home empty handed. The fools. Speaking of which:

The Rubbish - This Means War

It's the film I'm currently obsessed with. Why? Because it looks rubbish, it's reviews are rubbish, it's director is rubbish and it stars Tom Hardy and Tom Hardy is rubbish (oh God it does actually hurt to joke about it, Tom Hardy is of course amazing). So why oh why oh why has everyone gone to see it? I know £1,821,698 is hardly earth shattering but it just doesn't deserve that sort of box office and it makes me sad. McG never aspires to anything higher than music video visuals with some snappy talking and yet his movies make millions and millions of money. All that money could go to deserving people who deserve it. Why not give it to deserving people who deserve it? Why?

I wouldn't be surprised if this was a career-long experiment concerning the lack of discernment shown by the modern cinema-goer. What everyone is doing I don't know but when he does finally publish his results I'm sure he'll have found a positive correlation between 'vacuous gloss' and 'money'.

The Film That Never Dies - The Artist

Hanging in there and refusing to let go The Artist has cleaned up the big awards at the Oscars but not exactly set the box-office alight with the fire of a million The King's Speech's (£45 million at the UK box-office in case you were wondering). After two months it has only just broken the £8 million mark and with every man and his cute silent dog acting like they've seen it this seems awfully paradoxical.

Even so it's no mean feat sticking it out for almost nine weeks on the trot (dropping out of the top 10 for only a week three weeks back). Unlike certain films this time round (have I mentioned that This Means War grossed as much money in a weekend as it would take to feed 57256 starving children for a year?) The Artist deserves everything it can get but even so I can't help but feel that this might be an all too silent goodbye to the film that stubbornly refuses to leave until it reaches an eight figure gross. Sadly I doubt it will make it.

Next Time...

Well with the box-office on a temporary high beating it's comparative takings in 2011 for the first time this year it seems cause to celebrate. It's a shame then that Disney's John Carter is going to bomb. When I say bomb of course I'm sure it'll take a lot of money, but $250 million? Of course there's America to consider and a whole swathe of countries just aching to stick the next big thing on their screens. But it's not the next big thing and was never going to be.

Whilst it's great that a new cinematic franchise in the making is getting such enthusiastic funding I'm betting there won't be a sequel. But then again I'm often wrong about many many things so take this entire contentious paragraph with a pinch of salt.

Next week we've also got the spot the anachronism game that is The Raven, a film based on a fictionalised account of Edgar Allen Poe's life starring a now elusive John Cusack that I'm sure will fare badly. We've got Robert Pattinson starring in something. It needs no more description than that to figure out who's going and how much money they will be paying for the privilege. Ok then, it's called Bel Ami, not that anyone (including the fans) cares. Other than that the Brit's are out to play with Sean Bean in Cleanskin and Adam Deacon in Payback Season which will find a moderate sized audience at best. It's not looking great.

P.s. McG does sound like a nice guy in interviews. I guess I should lay off him a bit in future...

UK Top 10 Films:

The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, £2,342,095 from 509 sites. Total: £7,014,101
The Woman in Black, £1,888,232 from 461 sites. Total: £17,629,443
This Means War, £1,821,698 from 451 sites (New Entry)
Safe House, £1,316,965 from 428 sites. Total: £4,716,050
The Muppets, £1,239,822 from 514 sites. Total: £14,434,872
Project X, £561,655 from 332 sites (New Entry)
Wanderlust, £490,592 from 371 sites (New Entry)
The Artist, £469,369 from 320 sites. Total: £8,496,472
Journey 2 the Mysterious Island, £387,435 from 374 sites. Total: £6,231,644
The Vow, £264,643 from 266 sites. Total: £5,221,026

Other New Releases:

London, Paris, New York, 23 sites, £32,640
Hunky Dory, 59 sites, £31,930
Carancho, 9 sites, £18,394
Michael, 14 sites, £13,389
Khodorkovsky, 7 sites £8,747
Paan Singh Tomar, 8 sites, £7,450
Blank City, 2 sites, £2,455
If Not Us, Who?, 2 sites, £1,761

Top Film This Time Last Year: Rango

Source: DCM]]>
Jack and Jill - It's Actually as Bad as Everyone Says,2012:/theblog//3.1262465 2012-02-08T09:55:01-05:00 2012-04-09T05:12:01-04:00 Ross Jones-Morris Jack and Jill to be a terribly scathing affair and there's no doubt it deserves as much. But there's more to it than that. It's not just a film about Adam Sandler in a woman suit and Al Pacino slumming it like successful career choices have gone out of fashion. No. It's a film about missed opportunities, lost potential, no potential, past potential, wasted potential and of course poo jokes and fart jokes. And lots of pooing and farting. Sometimes together, sometimes not. It's creative like that.

However whilst I would love to give the 97 minutes of wasted celluloid a good raking over with a few rounds from a shotgun, a can of petrol and some horribly puerile similes and metaphors (god there's so much potential here for a good old rant) - which I will - it's hard to do so when I'm so utterly bewildered. When cinema can be such a powerful force. When you have so much money and industry power at your disposal. When you obviously have at least a modicum of acting talent. Why not do something great with your time. Why make commercial refuse? Why make this?

There is no God.

The film as everyone by now is horribly aware is a prosthetics and tiaras affair (à la Big Momma's House and the second half of Eddie Murphy's career) in which Adam Sandler plays both of the titular roles. He firstly stars as a grumpy career oriented ad exec living a comfortable life in Los Angeles with his prim and proper wife (played by Katie Holmes). His second role in this tour de force is that of Jill, Jack's loud, stupid twin sister who is much less successful and much less tactful. Then Al Pacino arrives and fancies her and everything takes a turn for the surreal.

Short of the unfunny rubbish, the rubbish unfunny stuff and that gently amusing joke about Pacino only ever receiving one Oscar (which is in the trailer incidentally so why not save yourself the time and the money) the film has so much more to offer in the way of disappointment. It's not really even worth reviewing properly. it's just terrible. Need you know more? I'm guessing you won't be rushing out to watch it anytime soon.

I mean, what was going through the heads of everyone involved? Sandler has proven himself to be utterly terrible at picking roles and passable at delivering them time after time. However let's not forget that he hasn't always been so bad. In 2002 he starred in Paul Thomas Anderson's Punch Drunk Love and was quite simply awesome. Ever since then with the possible exception of Reign Over Me he's taken a career trajectory of diminishing critical returns. He received $7 million to star in Punch Drunk Love yet he routinely receives $20 million+ salaries to produce commercial silage devoid of any artistic merit whatsoever. He's shown he can act and he's shown that he has a huge amount of creative control and executive power when it comes to making films, so why oh why oh why is he so utterly lazy?

I mean just look at Jack and Jill on paper. A $80 million budget with which Sandler will dress as a woman and 'klutz around'. Oh and Johnny Depp will have a cameo and Al Pacino will ruin his career. Sold. It just boggles my mind that these talented people squander their myriad opportunities to create something great on rubbish like this.

This time around Sandler is his usual passable self as Jack but as Jill he really starts to grate about two seconds after appearing on screen sporting a hairpiece and prosthetic bum combination that pretty much constitutes the artistic zenith of his performance. I can't quite decide what's less tasteful, her vaguely racist remarks to her adopted Indian nephew or the fact that she has unresolved incestuous feelings for her brother which she creepily airs at certain points in order to apparently elicit laughter. Stumbling all over the screen like a BNP sympathising, loose bowelled Norman Wisdom, she falls over here, offends an ethnic minority there and farts thither and hither. Did I mention there's farting?

It's not even funny in a bad way. It's hard to put a film in the so bad it's good category when all it does is make you sad. Adam Sandler has managed to make watching the self-immolation of Hollywood movie stars a boring and tedious act. Gone are the days when you could sit back and laugh watching Lindsay Lohan pole dancing her way into an early retirement. Gone are the days when watching Guy Ritchie's 'early noughties phase' was a questionable viewing pleasure. Now we have Sandler - a man eternally alight with a million miscalculations - up in flames on a seemingly bi-monthly basis. However earning $20 million dollars to humiliate yourself before millions does have a certain ring to it.

One also has to wonder how much Pacino was getting paid to debase himself in the name of self-satire. That he does this through playing someone with an artistic integrity that Jack spends most of the film wearing down only makes his presence even more excruciating. It's less Being Al Pacino and more Being an Idiot. And I thought Robert De Niro was going through a late career malaise...]]>
Are the Oscars Becoming Irrelevant?,2012:/theblog//3.1246793 2012-02-02T19:00:00-05:00 2012-04-03T05:12:01-04:00 Ross Jones-Morris
The Oscars are the high watermark of film recognition. The red carpet trampling, lovvie love-a-thon that is the motion picture awards season starts in earnest with the Golden Globes in early January and extravagantly culminates every year in late February with the Academy Awards in which apparently "everyone is just thrilled to be nominated!" but in actuality hopes are realised, dreams are shattered and the presenters are almost constantly underwhelming. When it comes to the big night though it can all seem like a bit of game. A cynical, industry-driven game in which awards are doled out by the sensibility load and Martin Scorsese can win an Oscar through sheer bloody minded persistence (and a superlative body of work of course).

The awards themselves essentially boil down to the artistic whims of a group of voters who are predominantly older, whiter and male-er than your typical movie audience, and your typical movie audience they most definitely aren't. The 6000 members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences are a venerable bunch of industry professionals who once inducted are placed into their various pigeonholes of expertise. Actors, directors, cinematographers and writers all have their place to name a but a few with the experts in each category having more sway when it comes to the tricky business of voting. In the first round directors nominate the work of directors, writers of writers and so on with each member providing a list of their top five choices. These feed the candidates for the second round of voting to the Academy as a whole who then all submit their top fives in most categories. The exception is of course the be-all and end-all award of Best Picture which everyone votes for.

Oscar voters are people sustained and venerated by their own artistic endeavours and as such they won't be voting for any hack-produced hokum any time soon. Added to this we don't get many surprises either. We get them plumping for the worthy over the cinematic (think the choice of The Help over Tinker Tailor), the traditional over the innovative (War Horse over Drive), the heroic underdog over the perverted sex-addict (Brad Pitt's average display in Moneyball over Michael Fassbender's powerhouse performance in Shame).

Way back when in 1989 we got the starkest manifestation of this we could ever wish for with the triumph of the comfortably middle class over the radical and intelligent with Driving Miss Daisy winning best picture over Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing - a film that set the tone of black-centric cinema for a decade to come and wasn't even nominated. A case like that more clearly than anything shows how the mass appeal of the facile and one-dimensional can almost always triumph over the confrontational and original. This may seem like I am throwing The Help and Driving Miss Daisy together into some sort of race rights for dummies cadre and it kind of seems like I am. But Driving Miss Daisy cleaned up at the Oscars so of course it's brilliant. Of course it is! Anyone who says otherwise is stupid, or a Hollywood Foreign Press member. So both.

Speaking of which when you compare the Oscars to the Golden Globes our gold plated, statuesque friend comes out smelling of roses. The Golden Globes are the sort of unashamed silly affair that keeps re-hiring a presenter to hilariously lampoon their inadequacies in some sort of devil's pact for viewers. It's like someone building a house on a cliff using stone from the cliff face. At some point the Golden Globes, I mean house, ahem, will collapse and all of the viewers will leave and Ricky Gervais will have to find somewhere else to live out the creative death of his career.

What the Golden Globes do have over their more respected counterparts however is timing. If something wins at the Globes it's often a good indicator for things to come. By the time the Oscars swing round films like The Artist will have won so many awards that they'll we struggling for something to say other than "OMG OMG OMG OMG the Oscars are the best it's been my dream blah blah blah" that we've heard all before. There's none of the surprise that there should be for indie flicks like The Artist when they win a huge award as their expectations are already so high come February that a Best Picture victory will seem more like a relief than anything.

So why will I be staying up into the wee hours of the morning waiting to get my Oscar fix for yet another year? Well it's because they are just so bloody important and despite everything that I've said up until this point they still hold the requisite amount of artistic integrity.

More often than not the Oscars get it vaguely right and if they don't it's not usually that bad (apart from the Academy's complete disregard for Senna this year which is ridiculous beyond parody). Yes, last year The Social Network should have walked off with Best Picture never to be refuted but that on the night it went to The King's Speech wasn't terrible. The Social Network would've been (and had been) a success irrespective of awards attention but The King's Speech, high on the Oscar buzz it was getting - and Colin Firth's repeated walk-ons at every awards show imaginable - carried the film through its January and February release period to a humongous (and thoroughly deserved) box-office. That an artfully-inclined arthouse flick about a king with a speech impediment made $400 million worldwide is testament to the power of Oscar buzz. Without the Oscars such deserving films would get much less mainstream attention and I think cinema would be poorer for it.

Recently this also proved true for Slumdog Millionaire, The Hurt Locker, 127 Hours, Juno, Little Miss Sunshine, Brokeback Mountain and the masterful Sideways to name but a few. Oscar buzz is the real force behind the Oscars. What happens on the night happens and will be raked over in movie posters for eons to come but the real relevance of the Academy Awards is in the bridge they build between the artistic medium of film and the mainstream engine of the film industry.

If you love films and hate to see the wrong things getting top recognition come awards night then yes it may seem like the Oscars are losing their relevance, but as an industry force they are nevertheless a force for good. Even if we do have to put up with the occasional give me a bloody Oscar already! film like I Am Sam (featuring the now famous Sean Penn going 'full retard' performance) or Seven Pounds (in which Will Smith begs for an Oscar so hard that I'm surprised he didn't actually grab his nearest box jellyfish and jump into a bathtub for attention come nominations), ultimately they bring (albeit a small selection of) lesser known gems to the masses.

So come 26 February 2012 I'll be sitting down to watch four hours worth of film industry back patting, self indulgent montage and lots and lots of hysterical speeches. But I don't think I'd have it any other way. Oh and Billy Crystal's back. Which is nice.]]>
People Demand Refunds For The Artist Because Of Lack Of Dialogue,2012:/theblog//3.1217567 2012-01-20T09:28:54-05:00 2012-03-21T05:12:01-04:00 Ross Jones-Morris
What I'm essentially trying to convey here is my amazement at the story printed in the Daily Telegraph on Tuesday about people demanding refunds for The Artist. Why? Because there was no dialogue or colour and the picture was a bit smaller than usual and no one gets decapitated by a big muscular man as he carts around a woman dressed only in a pair of breasts. I'm ever so slightly appalled.

The story harks back to last October when outraged morons went into Paddy Considine's terrific and challenging Tyrannosaur expecting something akin to Jurassic Park just without the Hawking-esque intelligence of the velociraptors. Outraged that instead of human catastrophe at the hands of a big lumbering carnivore they got a dog being murdered by an unemployed widower with a drinking problem, they marched to the box-office with all of the righteous outrage of Saddam Hussein at a war crimes tribunal. These people are so dense that I'm surprised that the cinema didn't start to orbit around their ignorance singularity, ironically making their self-imposed predicament inescapable.

I wouldn't take issue with these reports if the people just asked for a refund politely and in most cases I guess they do. However I was actually in the foyer of my local independent when one certain complainer was kicking off about Tyrannosaur and amongst the accusations of false advertising and fraud I suddenly realised that the modern cinema experience can be fraught with idiocy.

Film also report on examples where a theatre in Connecticut had to post signs encouraging their customers to read up on the content of The Tree of Life before purchasing their non-refundable tickets. However the one that takes the all the biscuits is the woman who filed a lawsuit against FilmDistrict because she'd expected Drive to be more like The Fast and the Furious.

Seriously, what possesses people to demand a refund or even a court settlement in these situations? The Drive trailer showed nothing that wasn't in the film. It's not like Considine mis-sold his film by interspersing the downbeat trailer with clips from Dino Crisis. Neither did Michel Hazanavicius who's completely dialogue-free trailer most definitely didn't feature an Orson Welles monologue or some sort of shouty interlude. I mean if you go into something blind and don't like the results how have you been wronged in any way?

If I went around taking titles literally every time I went to the cinema I'd go down to the Phoenix Picturehouse near me expecting (as the OED would erroneously lead me to believe if I amalgamated the definitions of picture and house together like an idiot) "a building containing a painting, drawing, photograph, or other visual representation on a surface that is fit for human habitation, typically and historically one that is the ordinary place of residence of a family" and yet find a building showing films. They should have called it the Phoenix Film Building but even then I might rock up expecting to find a mythical bird there and be so disappointed when there isn't that I go home and lick twice as many windows as usual. And then I'd eat a Mars Bar and get furious when I didn't bite into red rock.

Hazanavicius had a sense of humour when the subject of The Artist's walkouts was broached, saying, "I have been told about it and I think it's hilarious, actually...If I could give any advice to people it would be that they should ask for their money back whenever they see a film they don't expect. If it's not written on the poster 'this is a bad movie' and they think it's a bad movie, ask for a refund!"

Of the more film-literate public, Hazanavicius said that people in general "really enjoy the [silent movie] format and they've discovered that it is a new way to tell a story." That's precisely what it is. A new way to tell a story. Film is about telling stories and evoking emotion and thought. At no point anywhere under any definition of its remit does it say that films should not be silent. Musical accompaniment or no musical accompaniment it's just a widely accepted filmmaking method. Deprive your audience of a picture and film loses its purpose, deprive them of dialogue and it opens up their mind to a pure form of visual story telling.

It's not always a bad thing to be unpleasantly surprised when one goes into a cinema. Why not go with it sometimes, you never know where it might take you...

Unless it's a Michael Bay film, in which case leave and sue everyone.]]>
MPAA Criticises the SOPA Blackout Protests - Here's Why It Was Wrong to Do So,2012:/theblog//3.1214166 2012-01-18T15:29:00-05:00 2012-03-19T05:12:01-04:00 Ross Jones-Morris
They essentially removed their sites from circulation for a day citing that this could be a regular occurrence under the new proposals. The laws being fought here are the planned Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the contrived 'Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act' which provides the ecstatically convenient moniker PROTECT IP, also referred to as PIPA. So there's a bit of fun amongst all of the legislation after all. That's nice.

But whilst PIPA has been roundly opposed by internet big boys like Google and Wikipedia, it's the SOPA bill and its ramifications that have been grabbing the headlines. Both acts are designed to stop the sharing of copyrighted content on American computers and servers. The enforcement mechanisms that the bills allow include power over search engine indexing and the incoming traffic from foreign alleged copyright infringers.

Whilst there's a lot of obvious piracy online that I think any industry could definitely do without (sites like The Pirate Bay are often cited as such) the bills are so invasive and general that their ramifications could be disastrous for swathes of worthy sites throughout the world, let alone the US.

The bill for one could be interpreted as a heavy burden for sites that routinely use copyrighted material within the bounds of fair use policy. Sites like Wikipedia and even HeyUGuys that use copyrighted material under fair use as a matter of course in writing about and promoting ideas and in our case films will be severely affected by the acts.

Whilst The Huffington Post UK and many other non-US sites may feel the effects of the bill much less it is in no way just America's problem. SOPA's supporters cite the bill's targeting of "foreign rogue websites" as an advantage of the proposed legislation but the definitions and wording of what constitutes such a site is woolly and ambiguous. The sheer room for manoeuvre within the bills as they stand could lead to perfectly innocent enterprises being blocked or diverted from US IP addresses. Such tools would not only lead to widespread censorship but could even compromise the internet's addressing system.

The bill would also require sites to routinely scour their articles, links or even comment sections for copyright violations that must be pre-emptively removed before action is taken. This is a huge burden for large sites that contain a lot of reader reaction or for small sites that do not have the time or legal nous to search for and identify potential copyright infringement. The frequently lauded ideal of free speech would be severely undermined as sites would most likely close the comment and forum sections of their site or at the very least start to heavily censor reader produced content.

For film centric sites for example the bills could cause a direct problem. The sharing of film trailers, film footage, screencaps and other promotional material of ambiguous distributional arrangement could give sites like this massive issues. While such 'promotional material' is used throughout the internet on sites that thrive from analysing, reviewing and opining on all things entertainment (often under the copyright constraints that such a brief entails) the incidental use of potentially copyrighted images will cause unnecessary problems for sites that all in all promote the genre within which they work.

For example if I accidentally use a screencap from a film that I assume to be a promotional still, the copyright holder could report the site, with repeat infringement notices probably resulting in the website I write for being delisted from search engines and advertising network and payment providers being forced to sever business relationships. If the site was hosted in the US an infringement notice could have the site instantaneously taken down until the offending material is removed on the strength of this mistake.

Whether the copyright holder chooses to report alleged infringement may be down to the nature of our content. If we give a negative review a company may be much more inclined to act than if we give a glowing report of their product. The bills therefore could lead to an all-pervasive paranoia about the source of every piece of incidental property and to the site's content.

One ardent and powerful supporter of SOPA is the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) which often seeks to persecute film piracy with all of the angry shouting that it can muster.

The chairman and CEO of the MPAA Senator Chris Dodd yesterday issued a statement condemning the SOPA 'blackout day' protests that have been popping up all over the internet.




Whilst Piracy is a definite problem in the film industry his comments (as do the bills themselves) misunderstand what meaningful piracy is. If one downloads a film without paying for it then in most cases the property holders are deprived of their due fee. This is a crime and should be recognised as such. However if the authorities get all anally retentive about the use of promotional material and the coverage of films on websites that do the industry more good than harm then the MPAA's comments seem to harm the film industry, not enhance it.

This goes for the websites that cover it too. Whilst I and many others may frequently vent our disdain for certain aspects of our chosen passion our ultimate interest and motivation in the industry comes from a place of love. And without getting all mushy about it it's the sharing of ideas and the creative energy that comes with ambiguously defined fair-usage policies that keeps us in the game.

When I see a horribly earnest fan made trailer for Twilight for example made by a hopelessly besotted teenager in their room I may scoff and laugh about it, I might even send it to some of my friends to laugh at but either way it is obvious that the person has engaged in a creative pursuit that ultimately edifies and celebrates the magic of film. Yes, they have infringed copyright by distributing the material but the trailer would not harm Twilight's revenue stream. No one is going to watch what is essentially a promotional trailer and not see the film off of the back of it just because it involves some of the films copyrighted footage. The fair use of copyrighted footage rarely bares any resemblance to industrial concerns and often it seems like creativity's gain is in no way the industry's loss.

But it is an industry after all so maybe such considerations are not taken by the studios. Fair enough. But whichever way you look at it the last thing they want is websites getting taken down and bankrupted by needless legal wrangles when everyone involved is just pursuing and promoting their passion, and film itself. I'd like the MPAA to take heed of this. At the moment it seems to be blinkered by the industry monster of piracy when in fact the SOPA not only seeks to stifle the distribution of pirated films, but actually looks to undermine the very creativity upon which the film industry is based.]]>
Immortals: A Fatally Flawed Foray Into Greek Mythology,2011:/theblog//3.1091728 2011-11-13T23:19:34-05:00 2012-01-13T05:12:01-05:00 Ross Jones-Morris Immortals is going to be another 300 clone. Another film full of men who spend more time shaving their chests than their faces and go around decapitating people with impunity, and actually, up to a point, they'd be right.

The film's lacklustre screenplay by Charles and Vlas Parlapanides is cliché-ridden and just about as bland as they come. The story such as there is involves a vengeful warrior king called Hyperion (Mickey Rourke) who seeks the Epirus Bow, a weapon with the power to unleash a group of trapped ex-immortals called Titans who can kill the immortal Gods of Greece and let him assume the throne at the head of all humanity. Unluckily for Hyperion an outcast peasant (being secretly trained by Zeus of all people) called Theseus (Henry Cavill) wants to stop him.

Cavill's tour de abs performance at the centre of the film pays little heed to character development or nuance and instead relies upon his physique and can-do shouty attitude to get things done. It does up to a point but in a film without any "This is Sparta!" moments and the least laughs since Bernard Manning got a guest spot on BBC 1Xtra campy loudness just isn't enough. In the other performance stakes Mickey Rourke as Hyperion is nigh on incomprehensible, I really could have done with less growling and a little more enunciation and Freida Pinto as an oracle called Phaedra phones it in - although she could actually be trying her absolute best, I'm not really sure.

However, it's not all bad. Whilst his first feature The Cell was showy nonsense his follow up - namely The Fall - showed a director with a great talent for photography. Tarsem Singh's painterly eye is yet again on show here with moments of great artistry and fleeting and often brutal beauty. Throughout The Fall any holes in Tarsem's plot or dramatic efforts were usually effectively filled by his breathtaking visuals and vistas. Anyone in any doubt of the director's ability for spectacle should see the astoundingly good music video to Massive Attack's 'Paradise Circus' that utilises the highlights from the film to great effect.

In a way I think that such a recommendation says it all. When actually watching The Fall Tarsem's limp writing and poor delivery meant that much of the imagery died on the screen. However, when given the right context (in this case being a music video) his carefully worked shots take on a rare beauty. With Immortals, the visual wizardry of the climactic and well-staged fight scenes doesn't make up for the rest of what is a supremely bland film. It's no surprise that Tarsem started life as an extremely talented music video director and on the strength of this effort it looks like he should have stuck to what he does best.]]>
The Censors Will Watch Rape All Day Long, but for God's Sake Don't Show Them Your Penis,2011:/theblog//3.1066115 2011-11-12T12:52:56-05:00 2012-01-12T05:12:01-05:00 Ross Jones-Morris
Now you may think that I'm overstating the presence of genitals here, but for the MPAA they are a not inconsiderable sign of depraved horrendousness. Whilst The Hangover, The Life of Brian, and Forgetting Sarah Marshall have easily passed through the ratings system by showing us the comical side of man's silliest of endowments, when it comes to sexualising genitalia the MPAA often loses its sense of humour a little.

In the case of McQueen's Shame the sexually explicit film has been awarded an NC-17 rating by the MPAA (the American censors) due to its extensive and one must assume sexualised depiction of its lead actor's penis. In real terms this equates to the British '18' rating but whilst over here such a classification raises no controversy whatsoever, the American equivalent is box-office poison.

Like a lingering disease cured only by cuts to the most nefarious bits of your running time, the NC-17 has long been the leper of US distribution. Many American cinema chains both refuse to promote and flat out refuse to show NC-17 rated films due to the institutionalised stigma that comes with them. Choked from screenings and public goodwill they often fall by the wayside and it is extremely rare for a film to not appeal against what is often considered a label of shame. With Shame, however, Fox Searchlight seeks to change all that by embracing the NC-17 as "a badge of honour, not a scarlet letter." Their dogged promotion of the film and it's likely candidacy for awards consideration come New Year may just be what is needed to break the taboo of the most divisive of classifications once and for all.

Though it may sound fair enough to award Shame what is functionally an '18' rating, all the board requires of them to receive the generally acceptable R certificate is to cut out Fassbender's explicit bits. But when a film treats its subject matter as maturely as Shame seems to and with an uncompromising artistry that is hard not to respect, why should the directors unflinching portrayal of sex have to get in the way of societally acceptable distribution in America? Genitals given the right context aren't generally considered to be morally offensive or "liable to deprave or corrupt" so why is their sexualised depiction treated in the same leagues as sexual violence? Any matter of fact on-screen delivery of consentual sex is always going to be less disturbing than a rape scene or a graphic and realistically delivered murder, right? Anyway, anyone who is likely to be depraved or corrupted by the sight of a penis is probably as mad as a box of Von Trier's to begin with.

One may see the problem here as being with the inherent stigma attached to the NC-17 by cinema chains and the public at large but the MPAA has a lot to answer for. When disturbing and sexually explicit films like Requiem for a Dream (even with its required cuts), Blue Valentine (after extensive appeals) and Last House on the Left (delivered with no shortage of rape, torture and murder) receive 'R' ratings it's hard to see why a film like Shame should be unfairly maligned just because it's lead actor literally couldn't keep it in his pants. He's playing a sex addict, what did they expect?]]>
Moving onto European Standard Time will not plunge Scotland in to a nuclear winter. It also won't do much else.,2011:/theblog//3.1065077 2011-10-30T10:18:34-04:00 2011-12-30T05:12:01-05:00 Ross Jones-Morris
With all of the sardonic candour that only an opposition politician could muster SNP MP Angus MacNeil public denounces David Cameron's support for moving the clocks forward by an hour in order to align with Central European Time. And many, many people agree with him.

The announcement that the government has backed a bid for the UK to move its clocks forward for a three year trial period has been met with dissenting voices, especially from the devolved powers. So with these doubts ringing in Parliament's ears Cameron has backed the plan with Business Secretary Edward Davey stating that, "as the prime minister has made clear, we would need consensus from the devolved administrations if any change were to take place".

So what's all the fuss about you may ask. Well the pro-time change lobby would inform you of the practical benefits that such a change will bring. Lower road deaths and reduced carbon dioxide emissions in the lighter evenings (although nothing said of the darker mornings) and of course the catch all of 'improved health'. It will also reasonably allow for more time when many of us are in bed to be spent in extra daylight in the evenings being just generally more active (I am also aware that I write this as I cower from the glaring sunshine shining into my dimly lit office).

Now I am obviously not fully informed of the benefits or drawbacks, and neither is anybody seemingly. The current consensus amongst those in the know seems to be discordant at best. The main opposition can be found in the form of the Scots parliament with the SNP denouncing the changes as dangerous and sometimes (as Angus MacNeil oh-so-subtly insinuated) anti-Scottish.

This may just seem like they are jumping on a bandwagon that helps smooth the path to independence but there is some evidence to back up their opposition. When a similar trial was carried out from 1968 to 1971, Northern Scotland saw a net increase in the number of people seriously killed or injured on their roads. Though this may be quite a small and relatively sparsely populated part of the United Kingdom it seems politically unfeasible to go ahead with the proposed changes without unanimous enforcement. The majority of the UK it seems would hardly notice the change, with the novel prospect of watching Newsnight in daylight and eating breakfasts in the dark being more odd than anything more threatening, but the consequences at the northern extremes of our country really should be taken into account.

The response of many has been, so what? It's not like Scotland is going to be plunged (a somewhat ominous word used all too often in the coverage of this story) into some sort of nuclear winter, foraging around for fried mars bars and haggis amongst the panic induced glassings that would surely claim all but the most savage. Scotland isn't some sort of arctic leper colony, at the whim of a tyrannical English parliament intent on their unpleasant and sunlight deficient demise. Let's remember that (as the government has said) Scotland will get it's say and that those Scots are not too different from the English. Why can't we all just get along?

Anyway, let's just hope that they say no because firstly I am currently grievously underwhelmed by the proposed changes, but most importantly I do like a nice dark evening sitting in front of the TV ignoring the overblown party politics of the SNP.]]>