How I hate the box office

This weekend saw Transformers 4: Age of Extinction and Mrs Brown's Boys D'Movie top the US and UK box office charts respectively. Now, I haven't seen either film, so shall refrain from labeling those who have made them such idiots until after I have done so, but for contrast, here are the peak chart positions for some of my favourite films of the last year or so. Pass this on to anyone who's spent their money to see these films and see if they feel proud of their selves.

Remember. Mrs Brown's Boys is the UK's number one movie this week. Number one. ONE.

How to save the games industry in 60 seconds flat

Lately, I've been, perhaps, somewhat disenfranchised with video games. I always assumed it was due to my growing interest in film and inability to hold too many interests at once, but there seemed to be very little for me in gaming. The video games media are hounds, the developers fronted by heartless suits and the community overflowing with the ravished and the dumb. All unfair generalisations, but I suppose I just found cinema more welcoming, and as I began to see that, I began to wonder why I continued to follow games as I had before. The list of games I actively wanted to play shrunk to a handful of first-party Nintendo titles. All of these were perhaps a factor, but I do wonder whether the true reasoning is infinitely simpler and infinitely sadder: I like to view video games as an art. While Super Mario 64 or Ocarina of Time may not necessarily be thought-provokers, they are intricately designed to within an inch of its life. You wouldn't discount van Gough's Sunflowers as art because they're not there to question the human condition: Instead, they celebrate what there is in this world. In the case of video games, they celebrate what there isn't.

The Search for Another Frances Ha

I all but sacrificed my late teenage years in favour of sitting alone in a plush chair accompanied only by a projector and a few dozen other people, whom I largely chose to ignore. I made a point of seeing near-enough every film that saw UK cinema release. On a regular basis, I would wonder why. Upon opening Facebook, a means of viewing the loudmouthed and the insecure's personal highlights reels, I would see people performing the kind of actions those on the screen I was slavishly watching were doing (Namely: Having friends). The majority of films released are, almost by definition, average, and a further 60-odd percent of the remaining films are rubbish. Last year, I sat through four movies where Bruce Willis contemplates his retirement whilst holding a machine gun. I sat through the Moshi Monsters Movie, for crying out loud. They say time is money, and if that's the case I feel it would only be just if I were reimbursed on a similar pay scheme to that Willis demands for movies nowadays.

However, once in a while a film comes along that makes all the glazed-eyed bald-headed snooze-a-thons in the world worthwhile. More precisely, once. Frances Ha was my favourite film of last year, and one that reinvigorated my love of both cinema and of the world. It's a film filled with such frame-to-frame effervescence that I feared the projector may combust and leave into an optimistic doughnut in the place of ashes. Greta Gerwig puts in the performance of a lifetime, and by which I don't just mean the best performance she'll ever put in, I mean the best performance I've seen in my lifetime. It's perfect, encapsulating cinema that swept me up over it's 87 minutes into a ball from which it has yet to release me. I've seen it seven times now, and after five of these viewings I've thought to myself "This is hands-down my favourite film". Very few films have ever garnished this level of affection from me. Certainly none of the standard-issue action flicks and hackneyed romcoms have hit me that hard.

What should win the BAFTAs

The nominees, ranked in order-

Best Picture
12 Years a Slave
Gravity
Philomena
Captain Phillips
American Hustle

A plug for a thing

   'This is my favourite radio show ever'
 - Jason Statham

 'This show literally changed my life for the better'
 - Mahatma Gandhi

'Sliced bread had better buck up it's ideas'
 - U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry

Listen in as TIME magazine Man of the Year 2026, James Bosson, and 2017, Robbie Owen, attempt to be passively entertaining on the radio.

*Not fit for human consumption.

D:One, 10 am 'till 12, every Friday
http://www.doneradio.com/

The Welsh regional dispute told via. the opening paragraph of classic books

"The Great Moffet"
by F. Scott Fitzgerald-Jones

In my younger and more vulnerable years, my father gave me a piece of advice which I have been turning over in my mind ever since. "Whenever anybody else is being criticized," he told me, "Just remember that all the people in the world know less about rugby than you."

He didn’t say any more, but we’ve always been unusually communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that. In consequence, I always knew what was best for Welsh Rugby and acted on my instincts, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the worlds' leading expert on central contracting. The abnormal organisation is quick to fumble and attempt to mimic this quality when it appears in a normal person.

The Grand Owen Awards 2013 - The Results!

Hello and welcome to the 2013 Grand Owen Awards! It's been an eventful year- literally some things have happened, and during which time, a large number of films have come out. The registered Owen voters comprise of a panel of the utmost experts Britain has to offer, and by which I mean one bloke whose opinion very few people care about. Which is funny, because more people watched last years' ceremony, in which Danish drama A Royal Affair scooped the big prize, than the Oscars, BAFTAs and Golden Globes put together. So, for the hundreds and thousands around the world, it is worth noting that all results are done purely on UK release dates, meaning that films such as Lincoln and Zero Dark Thirty, which were up for the last 'Awards season' are eligible, whilst the likes of 12 Years a Slave and Her are not. This is very much reflected in the nominations.

This year, Edgar Wright's surprisingly deeply thematic sci-fi comedy The World's End scooped the most nominations, a record seven. The sheer delight that is Noah Baumbach's Frances Ha follows behind with a stand-out five nominations. There are no 'technical awards' here, and gone are the Razzie clones (Bruce Willis and his performances in A Good Day To Die Hard, GI Joe 2 and RED 2 can be relieved), replaced instead by another acting award- The best performance in a bad film. It's the sign of a great actor when you can shine in a pile of rubbish, perhaps more impressive than the performances put in by most stars up for the 'bigger' awards. This, after all, is a celebration of cinema in all it's glory, and it's about time we got that celebration under way...