There are so many reasons why this film should not have been made.  The Rule of Three suggests that a fourth will not work.  The fact that the Last Crusade was released in the year I was born suggests that the world has moved on.  And no film of any description with such comprehensivly poor dialogue should not make it beyond crumpled yellow paper.

Given the circumstances, nobody was expecting the film to work.  But it did.  It couldn’t be bad, because it wasn’t trying to be good.  This is not an action film - it is an Indiana Jones film.  Just as one watches the latest James Bond because it is a James Bond film, this film must be approached in context.  It tries so hard to be an Indiana Jones film that it is almost self-parodying.  And it’s no bad thing.

There is a stupid plot (this one far worse than the ludicrous Nazi seizure of the Ark of the Covenant), and pointlessly long and directionless action sequences.  The score rises and falls in such textbook movie fashion that you know exactly when to expect the next thing that is meant to take you by surprise.  The Russian accents are about as believable as Lowestoft-born Tim Westwood’s ghetto lingo.  If you want a good action movie, stay at home.  This is an Indiana Jones film: watch it with that in mind, and you will love it.

I wouldn’t want to spoil the vacuous plot line (and admittedly it is far too flimsy to be put into words).  I will, however, touch on two (of many) moments which made me laugh out loud.  The first is during Jones’ first dramatic escape from the clutches of death.  A sequence already saturated with cliches climaxes as the archaeologist swings limply from a chain, mildly landing on a Star Trek-looking desk.  Suddenly, from nowhere, a big red clock suddenly lights up, counting down from 30 seconds.  The unashamed cheapness of it was amazingly funny.  Minutes later, Jones finds himself in an atomic bomb testing site, and - who could imagine - a siren sounds.  He leaps into a lead-lined refrigerator just as the blast whips through a model town, and the fridge is tossed through the air like Dr. Who’s Tardis.  Jones spills out of the makeshift nuclear bunker and looks over his shoulder to see a mushroom cloud.

Every plot and sub-plot leaves the viewer in bewilderment.  But the film is extremely well made, and has an air of fun about it.  It is a good couple of hours, meant to be enjoyed not analysed.  So I shall not begin to try.  Instead, I suggest that you go to watch the film with an eye open for tongue-in-cheek moments, and then enjoy them.

I love BBC4. It is unashamedly high-brow, featuring gameshows about grammar and news that is closer to an academic journal than your average broadsheet. The recent series on Sacred Music has made the label “high-brow” look cheap. I have enjoyed it thoroughly.

Charting the history of Church music from the Plainsong of the 12th Century to the mastery of Bach, Sacred Music has brought a niche subject to a mass audience. The series does not speak down to viewers, but rather leads one along on a story they (certainly I) know very little about. It is unashamedly intellectual, but remains neither pompous or irrelevant.

Throughout the four-part series, which began on Good Friday and ended today, the choral group The Sixteen has been providing examples of the vastly varied kinds of music produced over the centuries. Telling the story through the music is a risky game, but it works wonderfully: the singers are exceptionally talented, and Harry Christophers is remarkable in his enthusiasm for the pieces he performs. Each episode seems to tell a particular story, with the music slowly rising throughout the programme to the end. From the four-voice pieces that featured in the first episode to the powerful organ music of the last, it is obvious just how important this music has been for the world.

But the programme is not merely about music - telling the story of the development of Church music must include the story of the development of the Church, which explains it. From Gregorian monks to Luther’s 95 Theses, Church politics has led to a dramatic change in Church music - indeed, in Palestrina’s era Church music was the main matter for debate in Church politics. By telling the story though the music that made it, Sacred Music has provided an important gatewayfor people who know nothing about the music they may be only faintly familiar with. It is a pity that so few people will have watched the series, although it is encouraging that the Radio Times has featured the programme each week as a “choice”. I hope BBC 4 commissioners continue to make this kind of original, thought-provoking and intellectual programming.

If there is one concern about the series, it was the sometimes iffy camerawork. Anyone watching a programme about 12th Century Church music on BBC 4 on a Friday evening is likely to be able to concentrate for more than three seconds without a change of angle, and would rather focus on a manuscript with a steady camera, not one deliberately shook as if attempting to keep a sugar-high toddler entertained on a Saturday afternoon. This said, the overall quality of the programming was excellent, and certainly the best TV I have seen for a very long time.

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For more information, visit the Sacred Music website.

I don’t watch films very often.  When I do, they are rarely old.  Or foreign.  Or silent.  The Guardian has today offered me the opportunity to delve into uncharted waters with the offer of a free DVD of The Battleship Potemkin.  This film was commissioned by Lenin in the 1920s to tell the story of the failed revolution in 1905, the most notable event of which was the mutiny on the flagship warship Potemkin.  The film is held in very high regard by critics and film lovers: the cinematic techniques used have been used lovingly by film makers ever since its initial distribution.  I am neither a critic nor a film lover, so I want to see whether the Eisenstein’s classic is as captivating as has been suggested.

The first thing I notice is that it is very difficult to watch a silent movie and type at the same time.  Films such as this are really made to be watched, and the effects of the cinematography are lost in a partial viewing.  The film moves swiftly so your full attention is required; it is a saving grace, therefore, that attention is not begrudgingly given..

On the battleship, the sailors are unhappy with conditions.  The meat is maggot-infested and the soup is rancid.  They refuse to eat it.  One man, while washing the dishes, reads an inscription on a plate: “give us this day our daily bread”.  The scene is set.

It takes little time to tell whose side you should be on.  The malicious captain, twiddling his moustache menacingly, makes an example of a group of the sailors and condemns them to death by mass-firing squad.  An Orthodox priest appears, a dark cloud set behind him, and brings his large crucifix down into his hand like a hammer to a nail.  The authority of the naval hierarchy and the church, it seems, has led to barbarism.  Down with religion!  The imagery is subtle, but hard to miss.  The firing officers refuse to shoot, of course, and the ship is under collective control just as soon as the oppressive authorities are disposed of.

Some nuances of the Soviet worldview are more difficult to pinpoint.  The man who kick-started the rebellion is made a martyr of, and a stream of men risk their lives to pluck him from the rigging.  The revolutionary suffered, was martyred, but has been immortalised in the narrative.  It would, perhaps, be unreasonable to allude to Jesus, but the Soviet love-affair with leading revolutionaries has stretched to almost religious proportions.  Soviet history does not have a bad word to say about Lenin.  News reaches the mainland, and mourning follows for the dead sailor - not, note, for the dead officers.  As the caption declares, “Eternal glory to those who died for the revolution”.

Soon the city of Odessa is united in its desire for the end of tsarism.  “The land is ours.  The future is ours.”  Fleets of sailing boats are shown taking supplies to the revolutionary Battleship, hurling bundles of food from man to man across a raft of boats.  The comradeship and co-operation could hardly be emphasised more.  These men enjoy helping the needy sailors, and they enjoy helping them together.  One man is shown to miss a package thrown towards him, but another steps in to catch it instead.  The subtlety of the political indoctrination is remarkable.

The film’s most famous sequence takes place on the steps of Odessa.  The crowd gathered to cheer the mutinying sailors are fired upon indiscriminately by tsarist regime.  This is no mere crowd dispersal; the regimented soldiers callously and systematically fire, reload, and fire again.  Then comes the pram sequence, copied by numerous film makers since, neatly shows the brutality of the massacre at Odessa.  Although some shots were fired at Odessa, no people died on the Odessa steps.  The dramatic backdrop of the stairs marks Eiesenstein’s exaggeration of events, and exemplifies the film’s ability to stir emotion with the most subtle of techniques.

As far as Soviet propaganda goes, The Battleship Potemkin makes its point remarkably well.  A narrative is skewed to meet the needs of a dictator two decades on, but is done so with real beauty.  The film never gained a mass audience in Russia, but its impact was quickly felt abroad.  One Joseph Goebbels wrote of it as ”a marvellous film without equal in the cinema … anyone who had no firm political conviction could become a Bolshevik after seeing the film”.  Its place in cinematic elite was secured in 1958 when it was voted the best film ever made at the World’s Fair in Belgium: quite an achievement for a Soviet propaganda film considering the stigma of the USSR during that era.

This film is remarkably well made.  It tells a narrative that is embellished at best, but so casually weaves references to Soviet thinking throughout that one is soon rooting for their comrades on the Potemkin.  This film is a masterpiece because it perfectly, effortlessly achieves what it set out to do: inject Leninism into the story of the mutiny on the Potemkin twenty years previously.  Try to contrast that with Hollywood’s finest - films made to make profit at the box office - and it is easy to see why this is such an enduring classic.  It has been suggested that Eisenstein single-handedly justifies the existence of Film Studies with this picture, and I couldn’t agree more.  The Battleship Potemkin is captivating not just for the sake of entertainment, but as a genuine work of art.

Channel 4 are doing something amazing at the moment. “Celebrity” Big Brother has been bumped to E4, so the January schedules were looking a little thin until some bright spark suggested making some programmes about food and showing them in the same slot every night for a week fortnight. This week was all about how chickens are treated. Next week focuses on health, quality and the like.

Hugh’s Chicken Run

I spent three hours this week watching Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s programme on chicken. The premise of “Hugh’s Chicken Run” was simple: he would rear two crops of meat chickens in the same shed, split down the middle. One group of chickens was reared within EU standards of meat chicken production, and the other was free range. The difference between the two groups was remarkable. The programme also charted a community project in Axminster where local residents reared some birds on an old allotment, and a campaign to rid Axminster of intensively farmed birds. The mini-series also charted Hugh’s efforts to get supermarkets to agree to speak about bird welfare on camera, and a lot of talk of how “the industry” was trying to make life difficult for him.

I have a huge amount of respect for this kind of programming. It’s fine for us to complain at atrocious animal welfare, but something else to get off our backsides to do something about it. Fearnley-Whittingstall reared two groups of chickens, and the comparison between them was very obvious for all to see. His argument was simple: paying £1 more per chicken is not unreasonable for anyone on any sized budget.

But the mini-series had its failings. Most obviously, it was too long. The premise could have been more effectively condensed to a single show, either an hour or 90 minutes in length. Endless trailing of “still to come” and tiring repeats of clips that were shown in the adverts anyway began to grate. I can understand that after four weeks of killing ill birds every morning would unsettle anyone, and Whittingstall crying made for an emotional piece of television, but I must have seen that scene a dozen times.

My other chief objection is one of personal taste. I found the presenting style too soppy and self-involved. Clearly Whittingstall felt that the chicken industry was crusading against him, that the supermarkets were refusing to engage with him, and that the consumers didn’t feel as passionately as he did about the whole thing. It was evidently an emotionally draining few months for him (the factory chickens being culled just 39 days after hatching), but the programme lost something in the overplaying of emotion. Anyone would be upset at killing off birds because they could not walk because of the conditions you chose to put them in, but by the tenth time I heard “the industry will be all over me” I wanted to tell Mr Fearnley-Whittingstall to get a grip.

Jamie’s Fowl Dinners

Jamie Oliver never ceases to impress. He comes across as a genuine, decent, nice guy. He made the change from celebrity chef to political campaigner overnight, and appears to have found his most natural place on TV. His programme on school dinners shocked the public and changed the law. Parents had no idea what their children were eating in school dinners: having trusted educational authorities to provide nutritious food, they were amazed at the 35 pence-per-person slop their kids were being served. I can still remember the army of dinner-ladies he took on a camp to teach how to cook with fresh produce: these people wanted to cook proper food but were held back.

“Jamie’s Fowl Dinners” is clearly trying to do the same thing for the chicken industry. We consume millions of eggs a day, yet most of us simply do not care where they come from. Supermarkets are competing to force the price of eggs and chickens down, so conditions degenerate. If only people knew what nasty conditions these birds are kept in, surely conditions would change?

The set-up of “Jamie’s Fowl Dinners” was different to any kind of cookery show TV has seen. An audience watched a mixture of short films about a bird’s life, with key moments played out in live action. They then watched Oliver prepare chicken and egg meals, and ate his cuisine. Needless to say, most renounced their love-affair with the cheep chicken (forgive the pun).

Jamie Oliver succeeded in a way Fearnley-Whittingstall could not: he appeared to divorce himself from the reality of what he was doing, totally lacking emotion at any stage of the process. He passionlessly produced his slaughterman’s licence and slit a chicken’s mouth. Don’t misunderstand me: his words were heartfelt and his voice emphatic, but the whole programme had a different tone to Whittingstall’s. Whittingstall seemed to want to be a persecuted campaigner; Oliver seemed to want to persuade people of his point of view.

The programme was educational. Seeing the actual “egg products” that are listed on processed food boxes was more stomach-turning than the chicken-killing. Watching hour-old chicks being sorted between female egg-layers and male duds was concerning: watching the males gassed with CO2 was upsetting. “This happens with all chicks, battery farm or free range”, we were reminded.

Jamie Oliver’s programme had a clear purpose, a clear argument to put forward. I suspect it will be criticised in many corners for being one-sided and partial. This is unjust. The programme had a clear editorial bias: so clear that it is difficult to see how one could be unknowingly influenced by it. Many of his guests remained adamant that they would continue to eat fast-food and cut-price fresh chicken. Many viewers will conduct their weekly shops this weekend and will stock up on cheap bird parts. But many will have been surprised by what they saw, and will change their shopping habits.

This programme sought to change people’s shopping habits. But the methods employed were those of education, not half-truth; fact, not deception. The supermarkets would rather you don’t think about where your food comes from. Really, they are to blame for all this. If I were a supermarket, I would not stock battery-farm eggs or anything sub-free range. Prices would rise, and the market would see some of my custom disappear. Sometimes ethics come above profit.

Jamie Oliver and I take the same view of chicken. We both cook it, we both eat it. But we both think the birds should be treated well during life, and should be killed humanely. The cut-price chicken industry ignores these two crucial aspects of food production, and it is a huge failing. Ask a supermarket why they stock cut-price chicken and they will point out that the public buys it. The farmers get only 3 pence per factory chicken retailing at £3. If the public is to be held responsible for the food it eats, the supermarkets have a right to show the consumer how it is grown. This programme did that. If the consumer continues to buy rubbish chicken, so be it. If they are educated, at least they can take the active decision not to care.

I had seen adverts for St Trinian’s on the Underground before Christmas, and was slightly confused about who the target audience was.  By all accounts, St Trinian’sis a “tweenage” girl’s dream: it features a large cast of girls that any impressionable young lady might aspire to.  Yet the publicity was clearly aimed at pervy men (girls in school uniform with too much make-up and suspenders…).  Perhaps the hope was that dodgy men would take their daughters to see the film.

It wasn’t far into the film before I began to see that my suspicions were not unfounded.  There was a decidedly adult feel about the movie, which called into question the 12A rating.  Part of the group I watched the film with was an 11-year-old girl: I am sure that many of the jokes went over her head.

The storyline was far-fetched, but you can’t expect much else from a rather camp film about tearaway teenagers.  St Trinian’s school is a dumping ground for “ungovernable” girls, under the very liberal (almost anarchic) Camilla Fritton, ably played by Rupert Everett in drag.  As with any school, the girls are immediately typecast into social groups (The Posh Totty group, The Geeks, The Emos, etc).  This is not a film for realistic social commentary, but comedy was often extracted from the social groupings in fairly intelligent ways.

The chief figure of authority in the school is the Head Girl Kelly, played by Gemma Arterton.  She appears to mastermind a complex system of moneymaking, with the girls mass-producing a brand of potent vodka and then trying to flog it to dense wheeler-dealer Flash Harry (the perfectly-cast Russel Brand).  The girls are trying to diversify their industry, introducing Flash to their latest product (tampons) with comic effect.

The main plot-line follows the school’s financial uncertainty.  The school is served a notice of bankruptcy, and the girls take it upon themselves to make £500,000 to sake the school by stealing a painting from the National Gallery.  In a plot-line clearly devised just to get Stephen Fry starring, the girls have to get to the finals of “Schools Challenge”, a quiz-show somewhere between University Challenge and QI.

The sub-plot was far more interesting for someone of a few years older and of the opposite gender to the target audience.  Newly-appointed Minister for Education wishes to reform the education system, starting with the very worst school: St Trinian’s.  Colin Firth brings his typical je ne sais quoi to the film, along with as many Pride and Prejudice gags as you can get your hands on.  Ms Fritton’s dog (naturally called Mr Darcy) likes to hump the minister’s leg, leading to an entertaining gift for the attending press pack.  In another scene, he is caught with his trousers down in front of the “Posh Totty” clique; cue a slapstick sequence of being thrown from a window into a swimming pool, then a trademark “Wet Shirt” scene.  It is a testament to the BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice (and, indeed, to Firth’s performance in it) that the chief male protagonist has been unable to see the back of it.

So, there was something in St Trinian’s for everyone.  There was a silly plot-line involving save-the-day schoolkids for the girls to enjoy, enough adult jokes to entertain the middle-aged, and more female flesh than should be allowed (including a daring scene including a shower, stolen clothes and a number of “hidden” cameras).

If you want an Oscar-winning piece of art, don’t see St Trinian’s.  But if you want a bit of camp fun with a plot more holey than Mother Theresa, a Gatling gun joke rate, and a wide spectrum of entertainment, then it’s well worth a fiver.  It’s a very well-made film, and very entertaining.  It’s no masterpiece, but it doesn’t pretend to be.

Musically 2007 has been rather a disappointment in terms of musical releases: the number of underwhelming second albums emitted was vast (chief among them Bloc Party’s A Weekend In The City, which followed the potent debut of Silent Alarm like a come-down follows a crack high) and as for new music, well, it seems that an army of mindless clones has come to dominate British music, with a pack of identiket twats wielding guitars peddling pure populism and releasing music devoid of any creativity or spirit. Their music sounds so similar it all sort of blurs into one gloopish gulf of heartless riffs and shoddy beats, some creative void that might snag itself in your head but will ultimately just make you despise the unmemorable idiots that created it the more you consider it, or rather it would if you could tell them apart from those others ones who are exactly the same, except their drummer wears a hat.

It is lot like the glut of synth-wielding bands we experienced two years ago except for more larger, more popular and much, much worse. So for my Christmas wish I long for the death of this syndicate at some point in early 2008, preferably in a suitably gory and decisive fashion and to be replaced with far more moments akin to the most sublime point of 2007: the release of Radiohead’s new album.

It seems that the internet is finally blossoming into everything that it was promised it would be. The unorthodox release of In Rainbows is only one manifestation of this revolution, which has influenced every genre to an unprecedented extent. It rises beyond the greatest difficulties for distribution, the most inescapable problems for a band: what limit is mere geography in a world harnessed by wires of light? What relevance has province, country, even continent when you can listen to music from Cuba or Quebec as quickly as Coventry or Cornwall? Truly, there are no limits to this progress beyond those which people set themselves. The internet browser can be aimed anywhere that exists, an ability that enables it to overpower all media that preceded it with ease. What were previously monopolies now have only as much power as we allow them.

For instance the rant I began with to build momentum was based only upon the pap that the mainstream radio stations insist on playing. But why should I bother with this when I can watch instrumental Reggae Metal on YouTube or listen to the Bikini Kill reminiscent wails of all-girl Taqwacore from Canada? No reason at all, and it is the realisation of this that ultimately frees every music lover to pursue their own passions rather than taking what is on offer from the mainstream sources, which all too often is pre-fabricated, demographically-considered, meticulously-packaged, primly-plucked and carefully-presented nonsense or else just a bunch of dumb cunts who were set loose with memes (see: “The View are on fire”) and hefty marketing budgets by a bunch of industry twats after “Authenticity”.

There is no call to dismiss everything that you will find played on stations such as Radio 1 (Zane Lowe remains a man around a year ahead of the game and in pop-terms tracks such as Heartbroken really are pieces of blissful, bass-heavy brilliance) but the fact remains that it is simply impossible for any radio station or all of them to cater for everybody’s musical tastes. The internet may still not be entirely capable of managing this but more than any other tool in history it comes close. May 2008 see the expansion of its brilliance.

Oh yeah, and I hope that the Foals album is as good as their singles. If it is it will not only make up for the dearth of 2007 excellence but also all human atrocities and climate change.

R.E. Vamp’s 2007 highlights:

Radiohead - In Rainbows
Queens of the Stone Age - Era Vulgaris
Serj Tankian - Elect The Dead
Klaxons - Myths of the Near Future
Arcade Fire - Neon Bible
Laura Marling - My Manic and I
Patrick Wolf - The Magic Position
Yeah Yeah Yeahs - Is Is
Soulja Boy - Crank That
T2 & Jodie - Heartbroken