Valkyrie Porn

Following a spate of right-wing panelists on BBC programmes, Newsnight Review restored some dignity for the BBC by inviting a more reasonble set of panelists: Natalie Haynes, Frank Skinner, and Tony "Parsehole" Parsons.

Instead of having right-wingers on the panel, they instead appeared as review items:

Tom Cruise plays Claus von Stauffenberg in Valkyrie,the last conspirator against Adolf Hitler. Needless to say, the film does not fulfil any criteria associated with a good film. Notwithstanding a few decent attempts, American attempts of portraying World War Two have been hackeneyed, repetetive, and cliched. This one looks like it ranks up there with the worst cinemagraphic depictions of the history of World War Two. Whilst The Reader looks contrived - not least because English-speaking actors put on a German accent - this looks truly awful. Yet again, an American production of a World War Two themed film fails.

A further item to be filed under the category 'painful' is Charlotte Roche's Wetlands . While Chiclit Porn should be a thing of the past, it persists at rearing its ugly, vacuous head on a very regular basis. Whilst it persists at selling itself as feminist (what it means is liberationist), it really ought to dawn on the proponents of this junk that it is little more than a voluntary reactionism.

What does sound good, however, is this week's Book of the Week on Radio 4, namely Vesna Maric's Bluebird - a book about the experiences of a Bosnian girl and refugee in Britain in the mid-1990s. It appears to be quite promising, because the author recognises and problematises the issue of 'east and west' based on personal observations. It sounds certainly more insightful than reading about sexual fantasies and popping arse-related boils in Charlotte Roche's book.