In the wonderful world of criticism there are lots of horribly lazy phrases people fall back on. For people who care a weeny bit more about what they’re writing, such phrases cause everything from wincing to full body spasms. And these phrases have a king.

When trying to convey to the reader whether they may like the product one is reviewing, the very easiest way to put this across is to explain, “If you like [similar product] or [another similar product], then you’ll love [product being reviewed].” There’s a parody by which this most awful and lazy of devices is known. It is:

“If you like this sort of thing, you’ll like this sort of thing.”

Not only is there the inherent redundancy, but it’s also the most massively unhelpful sentence to read if you a) haven’t heard of the compared products, or b) don’t like them for specific reasons that may not apply to the current subject. It should never, ever be written. Ever. By no one. If you see it, write the author’s name down in a list of people you’ll roll your eyes at, or car over.

And if you’re looking for this at its absolute worst – to a point where it creates convulsions in all right-minded people – you want to make your way to the Odeon website.

Let’s have a look at some of the film descriptions for the currently showing films at the Odeon in Bath.

Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs:

If you liked ‘Bolt’ and ‘Finding Nemo’, you’ll love ‘Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs’.

Let’s see. There’s Disney’s Bolt, a film about a dog who believes he has super powers, but spends the movie learning that he does not. And there’s Finding Nemo, Pixar’s remarkable comedy drama about a fish separated from his father after the tragic death of his mother and hundreds of siblings. The idea of putting the two films in the same category is peculiar enough, let alone implying that liking either of them will cause you to escalate your feelings in response to the third, and most poor, Ice Age film. Two CGI children’s films were plucked out of the air, with Bolt thrown in to avoid including two Pixar choices. Perhaps, “If you liked Ice Age and Ice Age 2, you’ll love Ice Age 3″ might have been slightly more relevant.

Beverly Hills Chihuahua

If you liked ‘Babe and ‘Good Boy’, you’ll love ‘Beverly Hills Chihuahua’.

Possibly the title alone is enough to tip you off that Beverly Hills Chihuahua isn’t reviewing all that well. The New York Post wrote, “The film is Beverly Hills Chihuahua. The audience is the fire hydrant.” So there’s a good chance that if you “love” this film, your taste in the films you “like” is going to be suspect. But what choices! Good Boy, which I’d never heard of before, is the straight-to-video tale of a dog from space visiting Earth. Babe is the vastly successful story based on Dick King-Smith’s The Sheep Pig, that saw a generation of children refuse to eat bacon for about two weeks. One’s about a dog, the other’s got, um, talking animals in it? They’re bound to lead to your enjoying the tale of a rich, spoilt LA Chihuahua lost in grubby poor people’s Mexico.

Brüno

An easy one, right? Sacha Baron-Cohen’s third film. His third film taking an old character and seeing how much trouble he can get himself in with it in America. Ali G, Borat, Brüno. It’s a simple formula.

If you liked ‘Borat’ and ‘Yes Man’, you’ll love ‘Brüno’.

Um, half way there. Yes Man is last year’s poorly received Jim Carey movie vaguely based on the idea from Danny Wallace’s book where he said yes to every offer for a year. Which has precisely what to do with Baron-Cohen pretending to be gay to aggravate rednecks, or pratting about at fashion shows?

It then gets too boring to carry on. Fans of gangster movies will love The Departed. Those who enjoy comedy films will love a comedy film. Those who like special effects will love special effects films. But then there’s one shining example of this horror hidden in the site. Not to be released at the God-forsaken Bath Odeon (lest they not be able to run Harry Potter on all seven hundred screens at once), the extremely excellent-looking Moon is due to be released this Friday. Old-school hard-scifi, with rarely more than one character present, focusing on isolation and minimalism, it brings to mind obvious comparisons such as Solaris and 2001. But not to the Odeon’s mind. Where most critics have referred to the quietness, delicate pacing and reminiscence of classic 60s and 70s science fiction. The Odeon, they say,

If you liked ‘Transformers’ and ‘Star Trek’, you’ll love ‘Moon’.

Because they’re both in space too! Apart from Transformers. Oh, they’re all about robots! Except that Moon and Star Trek feature computers. They’re both… They have… WHAT?

It’s been a while.

I’m currently in LA, in a peculiar hotel on the edge of Korea Town, a little overly filled with Korean BBQ. My life may not be well paid, but I’m certainly one lucky guy with the peculiar things I get to do. Now Valve has finally revealed the existence of Left 4 Dead 2 I can say that I’ve been in Seattle for the weekend. Life is sometimes odd, that I sometimes can’t say where I am on the planet because cunning RPS/Gamer readers will put two and two together and get a number dangerously close to four. Valve weren’t even stating they were going to E3, let alone that they’d be revealing a brand new game. I was like an international spy.

It meant there was a spare weekend in Seattle, which was filled tremendously. I ate splendid food like six-egg omelettes at Beth’s Cafe and pulled pork sandwiches from an awesome sandwich shop, visited all the right touristy places like the Space Needle and a Duck Tour, as well as the Jim Henson exhibit, and saw Up at the cinema and Anthony Bourdain and Mario Batali live on stage.

Arriving in LA would have been glum, were it not for meeting up with a chum and going for Korean food, then being given an impromptu “nickel tour” of the city in her car. Another really nice evening.

It’s been a great time, with splendid people.

Tomorrow I have to start doing some proper work as E3 begins. (Well, beyond the 2000 word exclusive preview I already wrote, and so on). I’ve not been before, and it’s a daunting schedule. It’ll be interesting, at least.

And that’s all the weather.

Earlier this month, and somehow without a fraction of the noise of the to-ing and fro-ing in California, Vermont and Iowa completed votes that now allow same sex marriage. This enormous victory for realising the rights of loving couples to be recognised as such has, shockingly enough, upset some people. Because it’s now the case that every single person in Vermont and Iowa is now forced, BY LAW, to be in a single sex marriage. That might be wrong. It’s pretty hard to tell when you watch the remarkable advert from an organisation called NOM (National Organisation For Marriage).

You’d be forgiven for being confused by the name into thinking they were for marriage, but what their catchy acronym fails to encapsulate is their rather fevered specificity over the matter. Marriage is for men and women only they say because, well, common sense says so. What they mean is, their interpretation of their religious values says so. In fact, there’s a more sinister reason for the obfuscation: were they to be clear about their reasoning, it would put an even larger irony-shaped dent in their claimed position of defending “freedom of speech”. Here’s the ad:

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Imagine you had a time machine. Where would you go? Well, forward a year until Russell T Davies finally has nothing more to do with Doctor Who, and his insipid incompetent writing is gone. There aren’t griefs good enough to express the disgust at how hideous the Easter ’special’ was. If someone took the cheapest, laziest Disney live action adventures of the 1980s and distilled them down into one concentrated drop of piss, it would look like a homeopathic solution compared to that stinking insult to humanity.

I come to this with no great passion for Doctor Who. I care little about its history – it was mostly dreadful, if fun – but when it’s good, it can be pretty special. David Tennant’s appeared in a number of such special episodes, and they’ve invariably been written by Steven Moffat, (who thank goodness takes over next year). At his worst, Davies has made Doctor Who tedious, and occasionally pathetic, but he’d previously managed nothing as monstrously dreadful as Planet of the Dead.

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Oh good, it’s International Institutionalised Lying Day.

I loathe this ridiculous day. A day on which you can’t trust anything you read, hear or are told. What a brilliant plan it is – trusted sources of information becoming deliberately unreliable. So anything you hear on the radio, watch on TV, or read today on the BBC News site, Wikipedia front page, or whichever newspaper you pick up, is to be treated with suspicion.

The largest problem being, all these sources of news information cannot dedicate their output to half-arsed jokes. The world continues exploding, shooting at itself, and throwing all its money out a window. The inclusion of deliberate lies amongst the carnage is a knob joke at a funeral.

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I find myself in the completely new position of reading reviews of a videogame from the other side of the wall. Broken Sword: Shadow Of The Templars The Director’s Cut, a new version of Charles Cecil’s most famous adventure game, is now out on DS and Wii, with a chunk of brand new content, a smattering of new puzzles, and a new diary and hint system. I think it’s rather good. This thought is encouraged by my having written bits for it.

I’ve always loved the Broken Sword games, playing the first two multiple times in my teenage years, and reviewing the third – a game I adored – for PC Gamer. Broken Sword IV I also reviewed… But that aside, it’s a great gaming series, and certainly the best British adventure series there’s been. George, a American lawyer, and Nico, a French photo-journalist, pair up in escapades linked to Templar myths, modern day conspiracies, and the only decent will-they-won’t-they running story in gaming history.

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There’s a question that affects all our viewing lives, and yet no one gives it the attention it desperately deserves. Why is the BBC so absolutely incapable of picking new hosts for its TV and radio programmes? Since 2002, when Angus Deayton’s penchant for privately hired ladyfriends saw him fired from Have I Got News For You, the network has become riddled with this Guest Host Syndrome, rendering them incapable of making a single decision.

The most recent example comes with the announcement that the Beeb won’t let elderly, painfully infirm I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue die with any of the dignity it might have left. Instead it’s to be wired up to wheezing pumps and machines, forcing its feeble organs to keep huffing and puffing through painstakingly scripted gags, into some unspecified future. It’s presenter, Humphrey Littleton, sadly died last year, but this is apparently not recognised as a graceful opportunity to move on. So who is to replace the enormously loved Humph? Naturally, a rotating roster of guest hosts.

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You know when you read that bedtime story to your kids, your niece or nephew, or maybe that last time you were babysitting? You were violating the copyright agreement of the book, you disgusting criminal. Please hand yourself in immediately to the nearest police station, and you’d better be very, very sorry. As Amazon US has recently learned, reading books out loud without the publisher’s permission is the most heinous of crimes, tantamount to going to the author’s house and shitting in his goldfish bowl.

Of course all sorts of hundreds of years old industries are running around in increasingly frantic circles, alternately pulling at their hair and letting out terrified sobs, as various electronic tools start to render them irrelevant. The music industry is suing every grandmother, child and pet kitten it can find, trying to frighten everyone out of the evil act of sharing. The film industry repeatedly assures us that watching a pirated DVD is directly funding child molesting terrorists. And now the Author’s Guild is claiming that Amazon’s latest gadget, the Kindle 2, is driving writers to bankruptcy by its ability to read the books aloud in a little computer voice.

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While I realise screaming at outright lies and dangerous stupidity on the front page of the Daily Mail is much like screaming that you don’t like lava into a volcano, there are days when you’ve no choice. Today’s headline, “Social websites harm children’s brains: Chilling warning to parents from top neuroscientist” is beyond ridiculous.

Following on from the embarrassing fiasco of publishing the completely unfounded and nonsensical claims printed last week, where they claimed that Facebook et al would give you cancer, now social networking is damaging our brains. And on what evidence is this based?

None.

This is what is most extraordinary. There’s not even a spurious study, a misunderstood academic paper, or even a suspected case. All there is are the thoughts, whimsy and suspicions of one Susan Greenfield. Greenfield obsesses on this subject, but boasts she does not have the data to demonstrate it.

Her claims “will make disturbing reading for the millions whose social lives depend on logging on to their favourite websites each day” say the Daily Mail. Well, let’s take a look at this damning evidence that merits a front page, and a deliberate attempt to frighten parents.

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It is with serendipitous timing that I was recently having a discussion with friends about whether online communication has any effect on face-to-face interaction. It seems to be a received wisdom that people who spend time online are therefore spending less time in the physical company of other humans. But this is something that has never sat right with me. Because it seems to me that if anything has changed in the last fifteen years, it’s been a massive increase in the amount of communication we all conduct. And while this is only a guess, based on my experience and knowledge, it seems to me that communication leads to interacting with people.

This came to a head today with the Daily Mail’s phenomenally silly headline, “How using Facebook could raise your risk of cancer“. Of course, the Daily Mail suggests that anything and everything might send our cells mutating willy nilly, possibly dragging down the value of our houses along the way. Hopefully Facebook will be suing Dacre and the Mail into a black hole over this astonishingly stupid reporting. Especially since the article the piece was based on never mentions Facebook, let alone Facebook-like sites specifically. However, the article does make the claim that online communication decreases offline communication, and this, he suggests, in turn leads to a lower quality of life and an increased risk of morbidity. It’s quite a trip from using Facebook to cancer. And it’s a trip that the Aric Sigman’s paper doesn’t manage to cite.

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