Rampant Anomie

When it comes to judging how far we've come down the road from the class-bound, hierarchical Britain of yore to the golden New Labour meritocracy we've been promised, forget think-tanks and colum-inches; just take a long hard look at BBC2's Masterchef, having first turned the sound down - unless you want the last thing you ever hear without tinnitus to be, "cooking does not get tougha dan dis (you slaaaag)".
I frequently find my public sector hackles rising at what that strange show's victims, nay, contestants, nay, kitchen porters of tomorrow, are made to do. I'm not talking about getting to grips with cooking food - if that's not too vulgar a term - to a very high standard; serving bleeding and bleating meat to avoid the risk of its being a tad dry; and giving their meagre morsels of salivatory delight names that would make a beat-poet scratch his noggin - anyone for mezzanine of korfballed pike in a bitumen of drizzled sarin?
Instead, I'm talking about the constant, buttock-clenching, lip-biting degredation and kowtowing forced on these saps by the presenters' swaggering, inquisitorial style. Many programmes are padded out with pointless soundbites - take Dragons' Den and its pointless narrator's need to repeat the bleeding obvious for the hard of thinking (the blogger just said that Dragons' Den's expert analyst repeats the bleeding obvious to give cherished viewers extra insight) - but this is worse.
Knowing how to cook is just not enough for these sadists. Blue-chip interview questions, usually flung at the little chefs while they're busy chastising scallops, have to be fielded, and fielded out of the park, even if their flatulence of sulky yak liver and distressed onion jus is the closest thing to organic ambrosia these gourmands have ever supped. Unless the little chefs are prepared to say they are the best and destined to win, which is, given the level of competition, at best hubris and at worst a desperate, frightened lie, they're plainly lacking the ambition they'd need to hack it in a professional kitchen. If they can't persuade mein hosts that they'd skewer and lightly braise their own immediate family for Raymond Blanc's amusement and force-feed their flesh to an expectant Westminster lunch service, they are the professional equivalent of a sputum garnish on a coulis of frisky calf a la Max Boyce.
I'll concede that there's a bit more to it than that. Force-feeding the little chefs expectation and then stewing them in an emotional pressure cooker makes the tearful disappointment most of them will face all the sweeter for the audience; but that's another debate.
In short, it is not enough for them to be good at what they do unless they can regurgitate stylised chaff when asked questions whose only real purpose is to justify the interviewers' existence and put them in their place. On Masterchef and in many workplaces, this approach legitimises a thoroughly modern model of cap-in-hand, forelock-tugging begging and pleading for your job. It is degredation for entertainment, a test of conformity as well as competence. Where, I ask you, is Amnesty in all this?
Perhaps it struck a chord because I've had a few interviews in the public sector, all of which only tested my ability and willingness to say the right thing on the day and thereby conform to the interviewer's agenda. I don't claim that this is telltale of a conformist and intellectually craven culture which values saying the right thing more than doing it; I'll leave that for Flaming Cross. I'm just suggesting that being loudly and farcically 'on message' matters far too much in our supposedly restless, democratic culture.
After all, do I care about a Tanvic mechanic's willingness to embrace automotive corporacy and facilitate an enhanced customer expectation matrix, or is it enough that my new brake pads and discs work when I leave the M1 at 90mph in the expectation that I'll enter the Little Chef (the dining experience, not a failed contestant) on my feet rather than in the hurtling shell of my unresponsive car?
I almost included The Apprentice in this piece, but realised I didn't mind its contestants being degraded.

I recently had cause to visit the Home Office. I did so for reasons I'm not at liberty to discuss, my questionable understanding of some complex issues usefully masked by several layers of secrecy which may, for all I know, exist mainly to feed a smug sense of corporate exclusivity.
Having dragged myself in from the provinces using one of Mr Branson's 'Pendulino' trains - by far the most comfortable alternative to the motorcycle 'wall of death' - and enjoyed the welcoming embrace of London life that only the Underground can deliver - intimacy with reeking strangers, tooth-rattling inertia, the parched and ionised breath of Hades, the prospect of your sweating neighbour toting a bag crammed with semtex or sarin - I pitch up at the heart, or perhaps a less vital but still well-intentioned and noteworthy organ, of government.
A thickly chlorinated water feature, lustrous films of water wrapping themselves around obsidian blocks, guards the doorway to an airy structure of burnished steel and glass that is clean, frosted or infused with colour. This isn't the creaking, beleaguered facade of law and order I've seen in provincial magistrates' courts and market-town punch-ups. This high-concept vision of strength and openness wouldn't look out of place in an investment banker's loft-space being discussed over absinthe and quail nipples, assuming said banker has tasted those tasty, green shoots of recovery rather than drowning in his own mortgage and wishing he worked in the public sector.
Inside, sharp-suited automata, their mouths glued into adequately polite half-smiles, check my bona fides, scan me for knives and RPG's, issue me with temporary ID, which would probably explode if I left the building without handing it back, and wave me towards a set of man-size test-tubes. I show a machine the ID, enter the unique and secure code shouted my way by one of the automata, and the test tube whisks itself open to admit me. I step inside, to embrace what turns out to be a disappointing future. I'm not transported to the Soho basement HQ of UNCLE, to the transporter room of the USS Enterprise or to the Batcave. Instead, I stand on a target, am sniffed for explosives - or celery, for all I know - and ushered into a bright and open atrium, a basement floor of tropical plants, demi-lattes, panninis and Yogo classes opening on to five floors of hushed office space, water coolers and signage in soothing colours directing the visitor to a bewildering variety of acronyms and - protect and survive - the bomb shelter.
I have my meeting - the contents of which I cannot disclose, but rest assured a small corner of Guantanamo will be preserved for abuse'rs' of apostroph'es - and find my provincial wits somewhat taxed by a charming apparatchik of the new order, bright enough to go far enough, his path unimpeded by cynicism, his high-minded readiness to serve making my withering world-view feel more than a little juvenile, his ten years of bureaucratic insight trumping my two months of long lunches and skimpy research.
A chorus of whooping and laughter floods in from the street below, ignoring the tetchy clacking of keyboards and the hushing whisper of the air conditioning. Zimbabwean emigres are staging a demonstration on the street below in support of imprisoned pro-democracy activists. They grin at anyone who comes to a window, brandish their banners politely, wave and tease the security automata, before moving on without a glimpse of the old bill, perhaps having realised that the Home Office has little influence on Mugabe's penal policy, or having already discovered that the same can be said of the FCO, the UN or any other acronym you'd care to mention.
I return to Euston, join the expectant mass at the departure board, become part of a frenzied hive-mind when my platform is announced, have a one hour fever-dream of tilting crazily northward at huge speeds while chubby men with floppy fringes shout at their phones about slim margins and enhanced resilience, then find myself back in the provinces and compelled to type a meandering and pointless blog about my unusual day rather than concentrating on my civil service project management exams.
If you think this is dull, you should see the textbook I'm avoiding.

This is without a doubt the worst trigger-happy action film that I've ever seen. That isn't to say it doesn't have moments of purely technical inventiveness and spectacle. It's just that the whole sorry caper is infected with such a groundless sense of its own wit and sassiness that I couldn't let the gross insult to my intelligence pass unanswered.
It does have star draw in the persons of Clive Owen and Paul Giamatti, and God love 'em for delivering the terrible, scatalogical drivel that passes for a script without wincing, guffawing or sobbing at what they'd been reduced to.
It might seem that I'm taking a bit of popcorn cinema too seriously. Yet I'd take a sub-par Seagal or Van Damme movie over this because it would deliver its thrills without making the audience endure knuckle-bitingly awful gobbets of fortune-cookie wisdom in a desperate bid to be street-hip and deep. The script isn't so much your dad dancing at a wedding; more like your dad donning a hoodie and trying to bust a street-dance improv outside the offie with his own Level 42 megamix in the sound system.
Shoot 'Em Up desperately wants to keep company with the likes of Kill Bill and Sin City but the script alone puts it in a very lowly league of its own. If you want better gun-toting spectacle and edgy writing that doesn't get in the way, return to John Wu and his Pacific Rim confreres.

The basic premise is interesting and the director's track record promising, which together led me to ignore the negative criticism and waste a rental credit on this fat, diseased turkey. I may not be fully qualified to review this movie as I hated it so much I skipped the last half hour.
You'll be aware that the hero (Annakin Skywalker or whatever he calls himself these days), a lovestruck high school geek, finds himself able to teleport. As any teenage boy might, if he lives in an Oakley commercial, he uses this gift to get wealthy, get laid and get some surf. We are treated to images of Annakin picniccing on the Sphinx's head and clinging to Big Ben to try and persuade us that he is a charismatic, globe-skipping avatar of mind-bending power.
In a vain bid to turn this fantastic good fortune into a plot, Samuel L Jackson paints his hair white, produces an NSA ID card and chases Annakin around the world with an electric cane (really), interrupting Annakin's laying and surfing. Matters are further complicated by Annakin's pretty and pointless love interest and Jamie Bell's very confused accent, still in the air somewhere between Darlington and Burbank, but still leaving us in no doubt that dancing isn't just for poofs, divvent yer kna.
Each and every principal is bereft of charisma; perhaps Annakin, who mistakes pouting, sulking and glaring for acting, so lacks charisma that he drains everyone else's. Maybe they were all just mortified by the screenplay, which must have been written by a chimpanzee; not even a talented one, probably one of those 'scab' chimpanzees who worked through the screenwriter's strike. In short, give this a miss. If you want a taste of the sassy, well written, roaming action this director can deliver, revisit 'Go' or 'The Bourne Identify'.

The makers of this tosh seriously overrated themselves.
They must have thought their lazy and ludicrous plot made their movie as visonary and leftfield as The Matrix, despite lacking any zeitgeist or inner reality, or indeed any sign that it wasn't penned by an eight-year old who spends his waking hours drinking Red Bull and playing Grand Theft Auto.
Perhaps the makers thought parachuting in Angelina Jolie gave it the sexy sassiness of Mr & Mrs Smith; instead, the deathly professionalism needed by the distinguished cast to fulfill their contracts and issue their awful lines with straight faces leaves them no energy for anything more than constipated grumpiness.
Instead of lending this crock the earthy, urban lyricism of Pulp Fiction, the potty-mouthed, witless script sounds like it was penned by Vicky Pollard.
As for its much-vaunted special effects, if your idea of visual flair is endless shots of bullets tunnelling through cerebral matter, then this movie will excite you immensely. Even then, perverts of your ilk will get better value for money from the over-18 content on You Tube.
Worst of all, I rented this turkey and persuaded others to watch it, so there go my voting rights for the next few movie nights.
This crude, lazy effort at a high-kicking, comic-book actioner has only one distinguishing feature; it's somewhat less awful than Shoot 'Em Up and Jumper. Don't waste your time and money on this when you could just watch The Matrix, Kill Bill or Pulp Fiction again, or anything from Hong Kong.