<p>Here in New Zealand there was one local celebrity chef in the early years of television, name of Graham Kerr (1962-66), who later found fame in the States as The Galloping Gourmet — after being unceremoniously dumped from the NZBC for being too fancy. He was replaced by a self-proclaimed cook, who carried on solo for many more years. One half hour a week seemed like plenty to devote to brightening up our home menus a little — We weren’t mistaken in placing our priorities solidly elsewhere. I’m sure Alison Holst’s, the humble cook’s, heart was in the right place, without ever once attempting to turn the testicles of the Yellow Finned Thailand Octopus into a delicacy the wealthiest among us can’t do without. In the end, eating is something we lucky ones do every day, simply to keep us alive. Anything more is a bonus. And the more superfluous lengths we go to in cookery the more rapacious we humans become — way out on our own as the only species intent on destroying our own and others’ environments, and at an accelerating rate despite all the p.c. hype about conservation. One yearns for someone to finally stand up and shout at the top of their lungs: “IT’S ONLY FOOD — IT GOES IN ONE END AND COMES OUT THE OTHER! IT’S SHIT IN INTERMEDIATE FORM!

<p>Yes, it’s nice if it tastes good, all the better if it’s nutritious and sustains us another day, but who the hell inflated searing animal flesh, garnishing it with aromatic additives to disguise its flavor, and arranging other bits and pieces around a plate into a high art? The program I avoided this evening, starring Gordon Ramsay, has plenty of supporting literature to explain its essence. He is travelling around by train to every corner of India to find out its real cuisine. Among the highlights, he is presented with a snake whose heart is still beating to eat. Now you know why I didn’t watch — However it turns out, it’s beyond disgusting to use such a thing as an attraction, no matter how authentic or otherwise it is as a cultural artefact. Don’t get me started on the God-given-rights-in-perpetuity of Japanese and Icelanders to eat whales to their little hearts’ content…

<p>Gordon prides himself on going to the ends of the earth to find authentic dishes. I once witnessed him risking life and limb climbing down a remote cliff face in the Mediterranean to collect the eggs of a rare bird — Yum, yum — irresistible — into the pot is what they’re best for, eh? In the TV Guide article accompanying his latest series he claims that, unlike other chefs he has got famous on the back of his work, not the other way round. Come now, Gordon — You seriously believe you’re watched because you can cook something a little better than others, when we can’t taste it, even smell it from where we’re sitting? Please, just cut the celebrity self-delusion.

Ah, what to do, what to do? — when a movie is so stupid and insulting that you cannot sit through more than a few minutes of it. Yet, the movie is so popular you’re yearning to see something, anything, that warrants it. After agonizing a few more seconds than I wanted to I changed channel — If only all decisions were so simple. The scene that was the deal breaker had these assassins trying to bump him off at the top of a spiral stairwell, at least two. This was some time ago and my memory has luckily erased the details, so for all I know he plugs the first assassin’s gun with his pinky so that the barrel blows up in the bad guy’s face: one assassin dispatched. The other is a little harder, and in the struggle they both go down the stairwell, about eight storeys up — No worries. Matt has plenty of time — probably about two seconds in real life — and just arranges his opponent beneath him (another tricky maneuver), and pummels him senseless on the way down so that he has a nice dead weight of a cushion to fall on on. Then he gets up and walks away without even bothering to dust himself off. The old Warner Brothers cartoons did the cartoon violence a lot better. Wile E Coyote always survived, but at least had the sense of realism to look a little crumpled. Even Arnie, in one movie where he wasn’t playing The Terminator — but seemed like he was — paused a little before yanking a chunk of timber out of his thigh and then strolled on to defeat his nemeses.

According to the IMDb site, the user vote for this film is 7.8 out of a possible 10 — higher than a lot of real classics. But then maybe this is a real classic by today’s standards???? Problem is, the standards are set by by computer-degenerated dweebs who are interchangeable with online participative game designers, not the crew of artists that once created movies.

<p>This was just the first movie in a series of four (so far) — the fourth due out in 2012. The others have names like Born Inferiority — a prequel about how Matt struggled through a puny childhood, to be zapped by lightning one day and be transformed into the superhero we see now. Seems like even superheroes suffer wear and tear because Matt is standing down for the one coming up. Or maybe he expects to be taken seriously in a different kind of movie. Good luck to him. I’ll always see him as the game little fighter who is picked up by fishermen, bullet-riddled and suffering amnesia, and still is able to sense all the forces of evil pitched against him in time and develop muscles and enough psychic powers to defeat them all without breaking a sweat. Arnie had nothing on him.

Who knows what the creator of the series, one Andy Breckman, thinks of this. He must have worked out the balance of the characters to the nth degree if he’s gone through what most good tv writers do. Then just have it subject to arbitrary change when the producers, presumably rolling in more millions of profit each year, tell an actor “Take it or leave it.”

Yes, Traylor Howard is blonde and cute. (I admit to a prejudice against the ugly modern trend of females named with two unfeminine surnames.) I’ve seen her in a few teen movies from the early ’90s and she did well enough. But there is no way her character Natalie has “replaced” Sharona — who lent just the right spice to the mix. Ted Levine seems to me a very accomplished comic actor (and otherwise) and Jason Gray-Stanford does well too as the often hapless detective lieutenant. Tony Shaloub is expert in what he does on screen — but part of what he does is executive producer, and he doesn’t seem to be quite as good at this. It obviously creates an unhealthy power imbalance among the cast.

But whether this one event triggered more unfortunate trends I can’t say for sure. The comedy had gotten less clever, more slapstick. The tone is more crassly sentimental, to the point of getting us to feel sorry for geeky Teen Monk in numerous flashbacks. As if anyone’s interested — Yet, he might get his own series one day in a lucrative spinoff, as these things tend to happen. Straining for plots, Monk is put in less and less likely situations until credulity is strained beyond breaking. Knowing just a little about mental health, I’ve known from the start that someone who suffers from anxiety as constantly and intensely as Monk does could never bring himself to focus on a case for more than a few seconds at a time. No way could he function coherently as a detective over a whole case, never mind a genius who solves every case. But for the sake of involvement (which every good drama needs) I was willing to suspend disbelief.

Yet, the producers throw away this one main premise of the character when it suits them. After the umpteenth rerun episode I just started to watch — and felt too insulted to continue — Monk, on the run from the police, had just come out of the ocean to be greeted by his friend Leland Stottelmeyer (Ted Levine). The captain says something like, “That must have been hard since you can’t swim.” And Monk replies, “I was highly motivated.” These injokes are fine if the series wants to descend to the pat, unchallenging level of Murder She Wrote or Love Boat, but don’t expect me to hang around.

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Benedict Arnold, once a battle hero of the new United Colonies, switched sides and betrayed his fellow colonists for personal glory — believing he wasn’t credited enough for his efforts: vain to the ultimate. Boehner’s actions can no way be associated with glory, willing to sacrifice against all democratic precedent the common welfare of his own countrymen and women, and untold ‘foreigners’ (maybe a bonus he didn’t count on) largely for the sake of the wealthiest 1/10,000th of the electorate and the so-called Tea Party movement. Many of this ilk like Bachmann, Palin and Perry maybe think the original Tea Party was at the Vanderbilts’, Rockefellers’ or J. P. Morgans’ one afternoon in their golden age of the Robber Barons. Their ‘God’ is definitely a punishing one who not only lets the poor fend for themselves but is all for siphoning off the little money they have to humble them and build their characters even further.

Little Johnny claimed afterwards to be pretty happy because he got 98% of what he wanted. But I imagine it’s a pretty dry, cheerless, childish, selfish kind of happiness that satisfies him: seeing so many of his countrymen and women suffering just to make him happy. I can’t imagine, for instance, him ever having the largeness of heart to tell a joke against himself, like the time-honoured classic I have adapted just for him, it seems so apt:

“Little Johnny Boehner went to the cupboard to fetch poor Rover a bone. When he bent over, Rover took over, and gave Johnny a bone of his own.”

It’s curious how Republicans these days are so obsessed with sex but seem to find such little joy in it — more like a means of punishment, or something to be hidden away… Is that why he calls himself “Baner” by the way? So people won’t insert him into that and other rhymes?

No less than Obama called Boehner a man of “good will” after all the carping from the other side. What’s going through the President’s mind has left the US’s best political pundits guessing, so I won’t attempt it. Just seems like Obama could have found a nicer playmate to pal up with when the future of the world is at stake.

I’ve recently discovered that Obama thinks he’s modeling himself on Abrham Lincoln, by listening to all sides equally, then letting the most powerful, ruthless faction win. Couldn’t be further from the truth… On a post on the Alternet website I saw Obama’s behavior described as “Appeasement” and I can’t do better than that. He reminds me of that champion of Appeasement in 1938, British prime minister Neville Chamberlain, waving a piece of paper containing a blackmailed agreement signed by his enemy — as if in triumph. Let’s hope none of the enemies of America are as monstrous as the accommodating “Herr Hitler”.

What sticks in my craw most is two worthwhile actors like Robert Downey Jr and Jude Law lending their talents to what is supposedly meant to be a Sherlock Holmes movie. Arthur Conan Doyle is not considered among the greatest of all writers — but he was among the greatest mystery/detective writers and went to a great deal of trouble to create a character who is still the most memorable of all sleuths — Sherlock Holmes. Try looking for him in this latest film, which will corrupt the character for an entire generation of film-watchers wanting to know who Sherlock Holmes is.

Maybe to this and recent generations it doesn’t matter — just like the dumbed-down cardboard-cutout portrayals over the past 20 years of the original 1966-69 Star Trek characters. The original writers were thinking people who came from theatre and the Golden Age of Television in the Fifties and early Sixties. They knew what it was to conceive and create characters and genuine Science Fiction concepts.

The line between Science Fiction and soap opera fantasy is the difference between Leonard Nimoy as Mr Spock and whoever it is playing a cutesie nonhuman called “Data” in that more recent series and the banal lines Data is called on to utter and the faces he pulls.

Movies of yesteryear have it all over modern films in that for biopics the subject was always someone long dead and so the acting depicting the central figure had a good shot as coming across as believable as that real-life person. If a still-extant prominent figure was significant in the story but not central the writer would include a key but very short scene in long shot or acute-angled close-up of the back of his head accompanied by what he hoped was a reasonable facsimile of the person’s voice.

In the Eighties a series of biopics of rock’n'rollers were hailed for the portrayals from Gary Busey as Buddy Holly, Lou Diamond Phillips as Richie Valens… but Kurt Russell as Elvis? All due credit to Kurt’s chutzpah for taking on this project, but why would an audience want to see a well-known actor pretending to be Elvis? A pretence was all it could be because “The King” had only died in 1977 and there were dozens of his movies in circulation featuring (too much of) the real thing.

Great credit must go to the convincing performances of the actors more recently portraying Johnny Cash, Ray Charles, Idi Amin… But in Frost vs Nixon, Frank Langella as President Richard Nixon comes across more like he is trying to play Mr Ed: “I am not a crook, Wilbur.” And, The King’s Speech — Colin Firth as George VI?! Maybe if James Fox or his brother Edward had been available or of half-suitable age, they could have at least portrayed the King’s special sanguine stolidity… Having seen just clips of Firth in the role, at no time was he able to suggest even a hint of an impression of George VI — still a well-known persona to history buffs — in looks or in his distinctly reserved manner. How is this an award-winning performance?

Probably, Firth (and Langella) gave an actorly performance par excellence — uninhibited, energetic — of the kind you might see on the West End stage, resembling the pupil in Pygmalion and so impressing many members of the Academy.

I can see why the English Premier League is called the toughest in the world. Any number of brilliant players from overseas are forced to play the English way — faster, more physical, and less skilfull, typically pushing the ball and running in hope. Or lofting the ball far upfield, often to no one in particular as a (low) percentage shot. Of the ones who choose to tone down their skills for the English game, many still never adapt and end up labeled failures — until they are sold back to any one of approximately 200 countries where The Beautiful Game is played.

Of those who stay on and “tough it out”, injuries lasting three to five months through the prime of a nine-month season are becoming more and more the norm. Of course, English players too are more prone to injuries in the modern game. There’s only so much punishment week in, week out, that flesh and bone can stand. Even a moderately successful Premier League side will play the required 38 league games, plus a run of up to half a dozen FA Cup games, the same number of Carling Cup games, and maybe up to ten or a dozen games in European competition.

Under these conditions it is no surprise that, for example, Tottenham Hotspur, that rarely faces European competition, has no less than 22 full international players in its squad of 33, quality players from an array of countries — most of whom will spend months on the bench, loaned out to other teams, or injured, without the fans getting to see them. A sighting of these top-quality international players — Spurs fans can name them from Mexico, Russia, Croatia and Brazil — in a Tottenham jersey is about as rare as a 14-year-old virgin.

So having watched the opening games of Manchester United, Chelsea, Liverpool and Arsenal on the first day, from whom great things are expected this season, there was no beauty on display, rarely even any excitement. It was 31 minutes, as told by the commentators before Chelsea’s $100 million superstar (Torres of Spain) lodged his team’s first serious shot at goal. Manchester Utd’s game, that was at least energetic and worthwhile to watch (thanks mainly to their opponents West Bromwich Albion), though I didn’t manage all of it, was won by a fluke goal that ricocheted in off a defender. This most famous football team in the world has many ways of being favored — and will probably win again this year, just because it’s expected. How powerful in the everyday ways of the world is the devious power of suggestion… Thanks be to the gods of football that when they came up against Barcelona a few months ago to play The Beautiful Game it was outside of England and with a non-British referee. Manchester Utd had no answer, just as the England team never does in the World Cup, all things being equal.

A day later I have watched Manchester City’s opening game, to confirm that this ‘ennui’ is a trend in English football. Sure enough, this most expensive team in Europe — from whom such great things are dreamt — in a home game took an hour to score against Swansea City, in their first first match ever in the Premier League. Highlight of the game — the magnificent performance and cat-like reactions of the young Swansea City goalie!!!

Who could ever have guessed, or wished, that the three bodybuilders Stallone, Arnie and Madonna would go on decade after decade at the top of the tree in sound bites and column-inches of coverage? — which, let’s face it, defines superstardom these days. Today’s vacuous mentality only requires these celebrities to exist to be celebrated, regardless of what they produce. The same of sell-out compromised ‘artists’ Rod Stewart, Eric Clapton, Mick Jagger, who continue as celebrities while people as musically committed and talented as, say The Doors, The Byrds, Steve Marriott, rose and collapsed as stars in three years? Well over ninety percent of stars of the Twentieth Century were under-appreciated or had their careers curtailed

In the Golden Age of Hollywood only a handful of (invariably male) actors sustained superstar status for anything approaching thirty years: Gary Cooper, Clark Gable, John Wayne, Spencer Tracy, Henry Fonda, James Stewart. In casting a film, no producer or director ever mistook a Gable movie for a Cooper movie, or vice versa. All of them brought highly individual characteristics to a role, and were often able to raise ordinary scripts to something watchable. Today’s stars are all interchangeable, except when a film calls for a particular physique, then it can be faked anyway with computer graphics. But for a few, they tend to sink or float with the material, i.e. How many pyrotechnic effects can the budget afford to divert attention from them?

Actors who ooze a mind-numbing sameness of one-dimensional acting in role after role just go on and on: Tom Cruise, Tom Hanks, Mel Gibson, George Clooney, Bruce Willis, Brad Pitt, Matt Damon, Samuel L Jackson, Angelina Jolie, Jack Black… In previous times actors had to capture the public’s imagination in their first two or three films or they were OUT — and without aid of special effects and other eye-catching gimmicks.

Rap music is another phenomenon that has carried on for more than a quarter century seemingly without changing, improving, developing into something that requires talent. It’s the ideal do-it-yourself ‘music’ for anyone who can fake a Bronx accent — and I’m speaking from New Zealand, where a Bronx accent comes about as naturally as did a Liverpool accent in the Beatle era.

After numerous box-office failures, repeatedly rumored to face forced retirement, Arnie, Stallone, Eddie Murphy, John Travolta have been given chance after chance to reestablish themselves until something clicks and they’re foisted back on us. The only movie stars I can think of that have fallen from the top echelon (outside of death or retirement) in the past 30 years are Burt Reynolds and Kevin Costner. The occasional tv star like Tom Selleck, Ted Danson, Shelley Long and that red-headed guy in CSI-Miami fails to make it in movies, but not very often. Generally, the rule is whoever is hyped by the promoters makes it.

Older female stars, as much as they gripe about the lack of roles for them, are much better off than their sisters of yesteryear. The Bette Davises and Joan Crawfords were automatically on the downhill past 40, no matter how good they were. Now 55, even 60, need not be a barrier. They might not be able to command $200 million budgets like wookies and hobbits can, but what producer with $30 million on his hands for an important subject would pass up Susan Sarandon, Geena Davis, Jamie Lee Curtis, Jessica Lange, Glenn Close, Emma Thompson, Cher, Judi Dench, Meryl Streep, Ellen Barkin, Whoopi Goldberg, Oprah Winfrey, Maggie Smith or Queen Liz in the lead?