In late 2011, when Black Mirror arrived on our screens, it gave us a chilling, disturbing reflection of ourselves, using technological progress as a MacGuffin to explore our own deeply buried qualities. Charlie Brooker, the series creator, was all too happy to expose us as the wretches we are and leave us quivering and self-loathing in the foetal position wondering where it all went so wrong. The first series was a breath of fresh air in the same way that finally opening the window to escape the recirculated air conditioning to gulp the breeze from a nearby sewage treatment plant is a breath of fresh air. The first episode, The National Anthem, was really an expanded game of thrilling sleepover game, ...

As a child of the 80s, John McClane has been a constant figure in my life. He may be out of sight, but we know he's there, saving people and kicking ass. Like Jesus. We first met John McClane as a young hotshot cop, trapped out of his depth in a building full of evil wizards, led by Severus Snape himself. He was scrappy and panicked, but eventually – and against the odds – he defeated those wizards with nothing but street smarts and one-liners. And we loved him for it. We caught up with McClane three years later in Die Harder, in which a slightly older, wiser McClane had to overcome an airport full of terrorists so brutal that the T-1000 was a mere underling. ...

You know his name, you know his number but now you finally get to know more about the classic British spy hero than ever before. James Bond looks pretty fucking fabulous for a character who is clearly about 90 years old, fifty years after defeating Dr. No. Though he is an international man of mystery, Skyfall keeps Bond on our stormy isles for a great chunk of this tale, as a terrorist threat points its sights at MI6 itself. It's difficult to review this film as, for the first time in any Bond I can remember, most of the narrative is chock-full of spoilers. This is an odd things for a Bond film - normally the films are a self-contained narrative, ...

To give you an idea of what kind of film The Expendables 2 is, let me tell you a true story from my cinema viewing. About a third of the way into the film, for reasons I still don't understand, my phone started playing Rage Against the Machine at full volume. And I didn't realise. And this was during the five minutes of the film where no one was getting punched or blown up. I'm about to turn 29, which means I grew up in the golden age of action movies: the 80s/90s straddle. I was nurtured by Schwarzenegger, breast-fed by Willis and ... Stallone was also there. The film Commando was the ultimate movie of that generation; it packed mindless destruction, creative deathsplosions ...

I have a joke for you: The Dalai Lama walks up to a hot dog stand and says: “Make me one with everything”. Pretty funny, right? OK, here's another one: The Dalai Lama walks into a pizza place and says: “Make me one with everything”. Haha! Oh my sides! Man, OK - one more: The Dalai Lama walks into a sandwich shop and says: “Make me one with everything”. Man alive, I'm cranking them out like Tim Vine on amphetamines! Once you've wiped the tears from your eyes, let's return to the matter at hand: Ted. What you may have noticed, if you've a mind as sharp as the late Oscar Wilde’s, is that those jokes were all completely identical, save for their context. And this is essentially ...

Jon Richardson went into this documentary jokingly calling himself 'a little bit OCD' and ended up meeting genuine sufferers of the debilitating affliction that ended up scaring the shit out of him. Sure, now he only lines up the condiments in order and has to walk in a symmetrical pattern across paving stones, but what if he ends up trapped in his own home in a perpetual cycles of endless frenetic germ-busting? Cracking the lid on Obsessive Compulsive Disorder was part of Channel 4's "Batshit Mental" season, or whatever appalling title they decided to give to their latest  effort to explore  those of us who are a little bit 'different'. To be honest, despite being a batshit mental myself, I didn't ...

Banananananas

Disappointingly, this programme isn’t about throwing Gordon Ramsay into prison to see how long he can last among the gangsters and psychopaths. As much as he may swagger and curse, Ramsay doesn’t have a pinch of the bravery of Louis Theroux.  Perhaps even more disappointingly, this programme isn’t Gordon’s equivalent of Jamie’s Dream School, where Ramsay attempts to set up his own prison run by celebrities. I would have personally paid the £2 billion annual tax fee to see David Starkey bestowing his famous ethnic wisdom upon a feisty black offender. Anyway, Gordon Behind Bars is Gordon’s attempt to set up a working kitchen within a prison, run by the prisoners and sold to the public in order to make the prisoners put in some hard ...

(Spoilers lie ahead. Beware ye all who enter here) When Ridley Scott made Alien in 1979, he effectively rewrote the form book for space sci-fi thrillers forever. Audiences packed cinemas, completely blind to the journey they were about to be taken on - a mysterious signal, creepy eggs, a weird-ass giant skeleton and the infamous Alien that would creep through the shadows of their own ship, killing them one-by-one. Everything was clouded in mystery and suspense: what the hell was going on? What happened to John Hurt? Why is Ash such a creepy dude? So the real story of Prometheus is what Ridley Scott would bring us over thirty years after his first foray into the Alien universe. I say this is the real story ...

 This week in Channel 4's seemingly endless quest to slap a stupid, childish title onto an otherwise interesting exploration and documentation of the fringes and taboos of society, we get to see the world of obese women and the men who love them. The BBW (Big Beautiful Women, if you want to pretend you don't already know) fetish scene is big in America and growing in the UK; large women everywhere are finding big business in being bouncy belles. The backbone of this documentary is Reenaye Starr, a veteran BBW model who runs her own business; hosting and shooting a range of BBW ladies for her network of websites. Reenaye is a belly model, which she demonstrates by standing and letting ...

Look at the person to your right. Now look at the person to your left. Chances are, one of those people is wearing a butt plug right now. Okay, that's not actually true, but the sex toy industry is throwing one huge erect up yours to the recession and is doing better than ever. Hey, if we can't afford to go out on the town then it's cheaper in the long run to dress up in rubber and fuck each other with vibrating dongs, right? One company swept up in the sweaty, heaving boom of erotic wares is Bath-based internet store, Lovehoney. The company, like my own sexual history, started in a bedroom but was quickly forced to larger premises after crippling demand from enthusiastic ...

Winner of twelve awards, only one of which wasn't a Razzie™, Jack and Jill sets the bar dizzyingly high for the terrible movie genre. Adam Sandler wrote this slice of pigeon cloaca without a shred of a plot and then cast himself as the two lead roles, meaning that he believed he could carry the whole film on his talent alone. It turns out he was wrong. Hideously, unequivocally, transvestitorially, egomaniacally, Rob-Schneiderly wrong. The story of Jack and Jill is that Adam Sandler plays both the part of Jack and his twin sister Jill. Everything else - time, space, common sense, character consistency, acting, the laws of physics - bends and breaks to accommodate Sandler's hilarious dual-character indulgence. But, because I'm kind, I'm going attempt to walk you guys through this ...

Hey, Ricky Gervais has made a new TV show! Yeah, me too.   But I watched it anyway, so let's crack on. Derek is a strange little show, describing itself as a “comedy/drama” while sort of being neither. I spent the whole show feeling slightly uncomfortable and it's almost as if Gervais noticed my discomfort and tried to distract me with pratfalls and feelings. This was not immersive television; I spent the whole time fully aware that I was watching Gervais play a, erm, challenged individual with the same awkward embarrassment I tend to feel when a drunken family member makes racist jokes at the dinner table. I say “challenged” because Gervais himself has rejected the label “mentally disabled” for the Derek character, instead describing him as oddly ...

So, Tulisa has a sex tape. Or rather, a blow job tape. Or rather, Tulisa’s face and a penis belonging to some dude called MC Ultra share space and time for a while. However you see it, it’s not a particularly successful endeavour and you can see why she chose to put her mouth to labour as a… what is she, a singer? I’ve only seen her on The X Factor and if I thought I needed to watch that through my fingers, I was not at all prepared for this. We get the classic POV shot from MC Ultra, who unfortunately doesn’t seem to have name himself such as compensation for masculine deficiencies. It all starts with Tulisa smacking the ...

Once you get over the weirdness of middle-aged internet innocents delving into web slang without a safety net, The Anti-Social Network is an interesting and quite disturbing insight into the horrors of the bowels of cyberspace. Personally, I tend to abide by the ancient proverb, “Only read the top half of the internet” as it's abundantly clear that letting every Tom, Dick and Sally mind-vomit all over the comments section of web is one of the true monstrosities of our age. Step forward, Richard Bacon. He wants to explore “trolling”, which, for the purposes of this programme, has been narrowly defined as “being an abusive shit online” (with the more general definition being “internet tomfoolery”). Bacon has his own personal troll who, across ...

The Mail Online, in its ever-popular Femail section decided to delve arse-first into the question that’s on everyone’s lips: Can a woman be too clever to be a stay-at-home mum? Well, can she? Can she? It’s a strange question from the outset; I mean, can a person ever be too clever to do anything? The cleverer you are, the more empowered you are, right? Is there particular task that becomes unmanageable beyond a certain threshold of intelligence? Reading the Mail Online without haemorrhaging, perhaps. But I digress. The actual premise of the article is to establish the place of a woman who has somehow managed to fight the distractions of oversized handbags, celebrity breakups, fashion faux-pas and home-county reality TV for long enough to attain ...

Following my viewing of this film I was surprised to discover that Itty Bitty Titty Committee was written, directed and produced by women - and feminist women at that. I was surprised because this film only serves to set up feminism as an annoying, ignorant, confused, immature, thoroughly unlikeable position. So intense is this portrayal of feminist women in the film that I was fully expecting our protagonist - eighteen year old Anna, who was drawn into the group of femmes in a moment of loneliness and vulnerability - to escape their evil clutches by the conclusion of the story. The set-up so closely mirrors the tropes of young people snared up in immoral underground, drug-abusing criminal gangs that the revelation that the feminists were ...

Watching the Peep Show team attempt to make a fully-fledged movie is a lot like watching one of your best friends attempt to act in a play (someone my friends had to do for me, once). You really don't want them to be a letdown and be forever tainted with the stink of failure, like I did when I accidentally skipped four pages of the script up on the University of Reading stage, thus depriving the audience  of a scene where a dream woman saunters across the stage in negligee to seduce our protagonist. You think anyone has forgiven me for that, even now? You think I don't lie in bed every night shaking and weeping, wondering what life might have been like had ...

The Change-Up begins with scatological humour, ends on a cock joke and all the female nudity in between is computer generated. It's like this movie hates me, personally. And women. And men. And the movie-going public. I think Jason Bateman and Ryan Reynolds are pretty decent comedy actors, so goodness knows how they managed to take a look at this script and say, 'Yes sir, this is the movie for me!'. The only explanation I can imagine is that the script was soaked with chloroform and pushed over their faces. Let me explain how you're supposed to do a body-swap movie. You get two people who love each other (in one of loves many forms) but who also can't stand each other due ...