The Machinist’s bleached steely grey cinematography succeeds in preventing the audience from placing the film in time and Bale’s epic weight loss is something of a feat. Yet, while remaining watchable, it fails miserably as thriller. The riddle really is as obvious as it seems from the start.
An effort wasting 3 out of 10.
Director: Brad Anderson……Starring: Christian Bale……Jennifer Jason Leigh
Hotel Rwanda……Maria Full of Grace (Maria llena eres de gracia)

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Much amused to come across this alternative report of the Conservative Way Forward event at which Howard Flight admitted the Tory pledge to spend £35bn less than Labour in a couple of years, should read ‘at least £35bn less’, via Mathew Turner. In this alternative world, the gaff that got Flight sacked was heard as refusal, ‘to agree to more radical tax plans or even consider them’. Oh dear. As Mathew suggests, a career in real world journalism does not beckon for poor Andrew Iain Dodge.

Yet it’s an easy mistake to make if you’re a libertarian Conservative in libertarian Conservative company: you believe in a smaller state in principle and that any pledge to cut spending is a very good thing. But such people have failed to recognise their own minority position within the Conservative Party, the majority of whom are traditional social conservatives: some might even favour a theocratic junta. Tory house paper the Telegraph has warned Michael Howard of the dangers of opportunism in the past, but an opportunist he is. He’s happiest jumping on hate fuelled bandwagons.

The blue rinses may have been happy to let libertarians run the economy under Thatcher (looking down on them as mere technocrats) but those days are over. Traditional, pragmatic Tory fudge is all Michael Howard has to offer.

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Way back in October, I had a bit of a whinge (how unlike me) about City Life’s makeover, how the focus group I’d been in had been ignored and how the editor attacked a reader on the letters page (anybody would think he was writing a blog, not a magazine). Yet I have to admit that while the letters page – which is for readers, not hacks, to let off steam – continues to absent itself for weeks on end, recent issues have seen a marked improvement. It’s like the new regime has found its confidence and the magazine is maturing rather than dumbing down.

And the improvement isn’t something I can put my finger on: a good thing. There has been no obvious reversal of editorial policy. That ignored focus group saw signs that that City Life aimed to become a mono-cultural Heat for Manchester, unable to represent the full cultural experience. It had mourned the death of the old Archisnap column, which I read, but never rated that highly, and more importantly the Citizen, which represented a smidgen of politics. Now Archisnap’s Phil Griffin has been brought back for the odd column and there’s a bit of a news section near the front, but that alone isn’t what’s turned things around. Pagination’s grown, the design is cleaner. The magazine still (rightly) celebrates a young Manchester lifestyle, but it hasn’t lived up to fear that it would forget that the only useful listings magazine is a comprehensive one. City Life hasn’t dumbed down after all and should still build circulation at the margins populated by allegedly high-brow cultural pursuits… it can still do literature.

So. I was wrong. (Although the website is very poor and orphaning a gossip column thing amongst the listings is rather odd.)
City Life’s lobotomy
Britney Spears Do Somethin’: I was wrong#2……REACH & animal testing: I was wrong#4

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It’s not death that frightens me, but the act of dying and Terri Schiavo, who may be allowed to die this Easter after suffering brain damage in 1990, shows how horrific the dying process can be. While it’s inevitable that the case focuses on Terri the individual and, right now, her arguable ability to say ‘ahhhhh’ or ‘waaaaaaa’ if asked, that’s not the main thing at all. It’s barbaric to keep somebody alive artificially and without the ability to lead their life. It means forcing them to exist somewhere between a very real purgatory – trapped inside a broken body and fated to stare for all eternity at hospital walls – and being dead already. Yet the only option left is itself barbaric.

To be ‘allowed to die’ is normally presented as a dignified fading away, but actually means being left to starve over a period of weeks. The victim may be capable feeling excruciating pangs of hunger, after all food and water are our most basic needs. It has the potential to be a very cruel death indeed.

A true death with dignity would surely involve an element of mercy. Drawing a distinction between the removal of a feeding tube and the administration of a morphine overdose shows philosophy and religion at their most pointless. I’m sure that I’d want the second best option of starvation, but should the time come, I’d much prefer a swift and genuinely dignified end.
Pope on Life support… forever?

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It’s hard not to choke on Hotel Rwanda, it’s such a harrowing film. Everything that Schindler’s List isn’t, it tells its true story through strong believable characters, heart stopping tension and, without asking or wagging a finger, leaves the audience guilty that nothing was done.
An outstanding 10 out of 10.
Director: Terry George… Starring: Don Cheadle… Sophie Okonedo… Nick Nolte… Joaquin Phoenix
The Woodsman……The Machinist

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Stephen Newton’s diary of sorts… was a year old last Friday and the very next day was named the most popular blog in the North West in the inaugural BritBlog chart and fourth most popular British Blog. Which was nice. But I have to admit that as of today I’m down to eight overall and there are some bigger people than me who haven’t signed up.

Anyway. The first week of BritBlog chart fame has been a little slow – just one post – because I’m on holiday. Although that hasn’t stopped me responding to an interview request from the Big Issue with the news that bloggers will never be particularly influential in the UK and that blogging is a fad that’s peaked.

This diary of sorts has not evolved in the way I expected at all. It began as a place to dump personal reviews of films I’d seen, books I’d read et cetera so I wouldn’t forget all that I’d seen, read and heard (hence the tagline), but was also prompted by a desire to record the protests in Barcelona that took place after the Madrid bombing. Yet a diary of sorts it remains, with a mix of the trivial, the political and the odd review. Balance is important; no newspaper is exclusively politics or celebrity gossip, so the diary cannot be that way either. The world’s simply not like that.

And for me the blog has yet to mature. I’m not a stage where I feel I can look back on the archive and say to myself, ‘ah, so that’s what I was thinking at the time’. The last year still seems fresh. But I do have something planned to mark my blogging anniversary on 1 April (that’s right All Fools Day), so watch this space.

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US researchers have taken the worst of British music – like Black Lace’s Agadoo – and some of the best – like the Rolling Stones’ Satisfaction – to help discover what it is that makes a tune catchy. Brain activity was much the same when volunteers heard a full tune as when they heard it with bits blanked out and, moreover, volunteers often heard the full tune even when bits were being blanked out as they mentally – and involuntarily – filled those blanks.

Which brings me on to Reebok and their major poster campaign featuring the likes of 50 cent (in his case against a background of police style fingerprints) and the tagline, ‘I am what I am’. I can’t read that without thinking of Gloria Gaynor (even though Greyhound had a UK hit with it first).

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Keen to persuade us that twenty-something women do politics, Cosmopolitan editor Sam Baker’s used the Observer to say ‘We care about politics and our vote matters’, listing a few top line issues for women. And you have to give her top marks for effort: this month ‘The high heel vote: See grown men beg!’, interviews with all three main party leaders, is a minor front page flash alongside the usual ‘Inside his dirty mind’, ‘Shop like a genius’, ‘Find your E-spot’, all of which is fair enough.

She’s left unimpressed by the men in suits, but that won’t bother them because she tells us that 80 per cent of twenty-something women say they may not vote. Not a statistic whose significance she understands: ‘if you were an MP seeking re-election…you’d jump at the opportunity to get these votes’. Not really. Because the task is Herculean: first persuade them to vote and then that that vote should be for you. Succeed in the first and not the second and you’re worse off than you started. And remember a floating voting is worth two new recruits as conversation cuts your opponent’s tally by one as well as adding to your own.

Recent history also cautions against trying to win over reluctant voters. John Kerry won over the few young voters who turned out last year after making a huge effort that included a series of big name concerts. He really should have concentrated his efforts elsewhere.

Yet people who vote do get prizes. Pensioners vote are getting £200 off their council tax and free bus passes, paid in part by taxing the twenty-something women. And there’s an inevitability about that because elections concentrate minds on issues that shift votes… creating a vicious circle whereby issues the women care about slip down the politicians’ agenda and so further reduce the chance of them voting.

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It’s proving to be an historic St. Patrick’s Day for Ireland, whose big wigs are obviously stateside where the real celebrations are: nobody would dye an Irish river green like they do in Chicago. And a good thing for Ireland that is too: the PM gets the ear of the US president at least once a year.

Traditionally, it winds-up certain Brits who choke on Sinn Fein’s presence, unable to understand how so many Americans can regard the IRA as freedom fighters. Ignorance plays a major role in that, of course, combined with America’s traditional anti-colonialism (a position that’s increasingly difficult for them to maintain, but that’s off-topic). This year, there’s some cheer on this front with Gerry Adams snubbed by Bush and cold shouldered by Ted Kennedy.

Yet Americans aren’t the only ones who don’t get it. Not many Brits understand the dilemma the Republican Movement finds itself in. Take three types of IRA member. Foot soldiers; hard men, who drink in dodgy Belfast pubs, get into fights and occasionally kill people. Robert McCartney was no one off, after all. They currently operate above the law, effectively policing their communities and enjoy status and power they could never attain in any other environment. A world apart are the highly effective guys who’ve skilfully managed multi-million pound fundraising operations for many years, have the capacity to launder that money and have built international networks for trafficking arms. Some people have become wealthy on the back of these operations and that’s difficult to give up. Holding it together are politicos, who give the IRA political respectability and an ideology.

And the IRA’s raison d’être – key to everything – is that Britain is an occupier and the Police Service of Northern Ireland is, like the RUC before it, an occupying force. Republicans are unable to call upon the police, so they must police themselves. And they do by, amongst other things, shooting petty criminals. It’s by this logic that the IRA offered to shoot McCartney’s killers as for them it was the most honourable course of action. McCartney’s murder has pushed this argument well beyond sustainability and provoked an inevitable crisis for the movement.

The Republicans’ handling of the McCartney murder is a symptom of a much deeper intellectual and practical crisis. The politicos may want to embrace a commitment to a united Ireland through totally democratic means, but they have to persuade the rest to surrender the power, perks, status and privileges that only war can offer.

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Back in June, I wrote ‘Britney sinks to new low’ and may have implied that she couldn’t sink any lower. I was wrong.

With Do Somethin’, she proves that there truly are no depths to which she will not sink. Check out the video, where she fakes a kind of wild child sexuality that tries too desperately to make us want to put her in her place (nudge, nudge), but only succeeds in making us laugh. Britney seems to get younger as she ages, link a pop star version of King Arthur’s Merlin, who in some legends lived backward through time. So Britney’s grown up into the younger sister who’s witnessed an older sibling’s rebellion and tries to mimic it without knowing what any of this is all about.

Yet despite all that, it’s hard not to pity Britney, as she does appear to be so very, very lost.
Integrity of Top of the Pops: I was wrong#1……City Life’s lobotomy reversed: I was wrong#3……Britney sinks to new low……The meaning of Britney’s Onyx Hotel

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