The bag was shit!!!!! A flimsy, fabricy, oversized thing with stupid flappy handles and, um… I’m kind of running out of suitable bagjectives here but suffuse to say I hated it, ok? I hated the bag.

Presumably, the lack of bagudget was due to the fact that the UK Film Council, which historically has been a major financial backer of the festival, was abolished last year as part of the austerity measures brought in by the Conservative-led government…. SHIT!!!! Finally, the effects of the global economic crisis are hitting home!! They say it’s always the most vulnerable in society who bear the brunt of a recession and once again it’s the Media Freeloaders who are being made to suffer. All I’m saying is, watch out Cameron – you can only push us so far, yeah. If you thought Occupy Wall Street or the Student Fees Protests were bad, just wait until you see the carnage that can be unleashed by my pallid army of disgruntled film critics… The Daily Mail’s Christopher Tookey is itching for an opportunity to go and smash the fuck out of his local Foot Locker. Give him a reason! Just give him a reason!!!

Fortunately – trbagedies aside – the actual films on show this year were as excellent as ever and I’m sure we’ll be seeing many of them in the Oscar line-ups next February. Here are some of my highlights:

*

The Ides of March

Convention has it that George Clooney will be involved in at least 30% of the entire LFF program and this year was no exception. As well as appearing in Alexander Payne’s The Descendants, he also co-wrote, directed and starred in The Ides of March – a glossy political thriller about dirty tricks on the presidential campaign trail.

The film has a few flaws in the storyline but these are more than made up for by the presence in the cast of Ryan Gosling who is scientifically proven to make EVERYTHING AMAZING. Also anything that can help fill the West Wing shaped hole in my life is mightily welcome and the sound of earnest public servants  wanging on about Super Tuesday and the Iowa Caucus brought fond memories of Josh, Toby and Donna Moss flooding back.

The Artist

If you’ve ever seen the episode of Family Guy where Peter, Cleveland, Quagmire and Joe go to a Barry Manilow concert, then you’ll have some idea of the ecstatic critical response this love letter to the silent era of cinema has been getting. “It’s a lot like falling in love. You can’t really express what it is you feel, but you feel it so powerfully, you can’t ever imagine not feeling it,” gushed one idiot.

Shot in black and white with no dialogue, this film is both lovingly crafted and perfectly performed and will revive happy memories of the golden era of Hollywood. If you’re a hundred.

W.E.

Directed by Madonna….. lol.

Sarah Palin – You Betcha

One of the slightly annoying things about Sarah Palin’s announcement last month that she wasn’t running for president is we’re now going to have to put up with her for even longer. Had she run and suffered a humiliating defeat, she would pretty much be consigned to obscurity – how much do you hear from Bob Dole or Michael Dukakis nowadays? As it is, she’s going to inevitably dribble on for years and years to come, spouting her personal brand of dipshittery every night on TV for money. The other annoying thing is it kind of buggers up the release of Nick Bloomfield’s new documentary about her campaign. Still worth watching though.

We have a Pope

In Nanni Moretti’s wry and mischievous comedy, Michel Piccoli plays the newly elected Pope who immediately suffers a crippling crisis of confidence and falls into a deep depression. As the official announcement has yet to be made, the conclave of cardinals who elected him remain shut up in the Vatican going slowly stir-crazy until the situation can be resolved. In their desperation, they turn to a skeptical psychotherapist played by Nanni himself. It makes for a very funny skewering of institutional religion and also features possibly the greatest game of Archbishop Volleyball ever committed to film.

Surprise Film

Every year the festival organizes a special screening of a hotly anticipated new release whose identity is kept a closely guarded secret right up until the moment the house lights go down. Historically, I’ve never been good at predicting these – it was neither Marley and Me last year, nor Alvin and Chipmunks: The Squeakquel the year before. So this time I’m playing it safe and going obvious… Human Centipede 2 – Blatantly.

Anonymous

Back when I was at school doing my English Literature GSCE (A* in case you wondering… kaboom!!) one of the ‘disruptive students’ in our class came in one day and announced he’d been using something called ‘The Internet’ (back then we were mainly just rocking Ceefax) and had discovered that William Shakespeare was a fraud and someone else had written all the plays and sonnets that were attributed to him. And so, for that reason, he hadn’t done his homework.

This is the subject of Roland Emmerich’s rollicking new historical conspiracy thriller starring Rhys Ifans which purports to tell the truth about Shakespeare and his work. It’s worth pointing out that the ‘Oxfordian Theory’ is given precisely zero credence by any respected Shakespearian scholar who regard it as being roughly on a par with 9/11 Conspiracy Theories and the Fake Moon Landings. But, you know, whatever Trevor. When Harold Bloom, Frank Kermode or Michel de Montaigne have done something anywhere near as culturally significant as The Day After Tomorrow or 2012, then maybe people will give a fuck what they think.

The film is fantastic and you should definitely definitely try to see it. That said, it’s not exactly the most cheerful of stories. It begins with Joseph kicking his beloved pet dog to death and gets progressively bleaker from there on in. After the screening, I basically had to watch back-to-back Disney films for the next 18 hours to avoid a catatonic breakdown.

It’s interesting how these types of films often seem to come from Britain. Is there something in our national DNA that means we enjoy wallowing in harrowing tales of poverty and despair? OR maybe we’re drawn to Misery-Porn because it secretly makes us feel better about ourselves by comparison…. “Yeah sure, my life is pretty terrible, but at least I don’t spend my evenings pretending to be asleep while my abusive husband urinates on me.”

Or maybe it’s because of the weather.

Anyway, to celebrate the release of Tyrannosaur – and while I wait for this massive barbiturates overdose to take effect – let’s look at some other memorable moments of movie misery…

 *

The Road

In my whole life, I never thought I’d find the garishly colourful carpets in the foyer of an Odeon such a warm and comforting sight. Then I went to see The Road, John Hillcoat’s harrowing, haunting and (h)brilliant adaptation of the celebrated Cormac McCarthy novel, and endured 111 minutes of its relentlessly bleak, hopeless landscapes bleached of any colour save the occasional splattering of dark red blood.

Viggo Mortensen stars as ‘The Man’, a survivor of an unspecified cataclysm that has wiped out most of humanity. Together with his son (Kodi Smit-McPhee), he journeys through ruined forests and derelict cities, pushing their scant possessions in a rusty supermarket trolley like shoppers in a massive, apocalyptically desolate Sainsbury’s (or normal Morrisons).

The most depressing and terrifying thing about the film is its damning indictment of a human civilisation that has largely descended into cannibalism and murder in its desperate cling to survival. In one horrifying scene, Viggo and son stumble upon a seemingly welcoming middle-class townhouse that, it turns out, is home to a family of cannibals with a basement full of live human ready-meals hung up on meat hooks.

Makes you wonder really, what kind of people will end up like that? Are they the ones who are evil already? Is it just the people who write angry comments on the Sabotage Times website or work in investment banking who’ll seamlessly transition into cannibalistic child-rapists? Or, given an ecological disaster of sufficient magnitude, could that happen to any of us? I guess in about 15 years or so we’ll find out..

Dead Man’s Shoes

Paddy Considine himself stars in this gritty revenge tragedy directed by Shane Meadows. In the a way, the film is like an inversion of the classic Hollywood teen slasher convention and could alternatively be known as “I know what you did last summer… you bullied my developmentally disabled brother so badly he did something unspeakable so now I’m going to hunt you down and butcher you.”

And it’s also set in Derbyshire and it rains a lot. Bleak.

Antichrist

Depending on who you believe, Lars Von Trier’s 2009 film is a poignant psychological masterpiece, a torture-porn abomination, or a critic-baiting satirical piss-take. Anyone owning a set of genitalia (male or female) will want to approach this with extreme caution.

Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsburg star as a couple in mourning after the death of their infant son, who retreat to an isolated wood-cabin to work through the psychological impact of their loss. Needless to say, it doesn’t go all that well..

The film has quite a lot of massively explicit sex in it, which is obviously a plus, but the unremittingly bleak atmosphere and sickeningly graphic acts of violence mean it would take a tenacious masturbator indeed to try and tug himself off to this.

In fact, that would’ve been quite a cool Special Feature for the Blu-Ray release… you could have a little man in the corner of the screen (like when they do signing for the Deaf) attempting a realtime wankalong to the film. He’d never make it.

Anything with Ray Winstone

Before he became the jowly affable “Bet in play, naaaaah” geezer we know and love today, Ray Winstone was a reliable guarantor of some seriously bleak shit.

Things that may happen in a Ray Winstone movie:

• Intergenerational incest (The War Zone)
• Prison rape leading to a lonely suicide (Scum)
• A heavily pregnant wife being beaten so badly she loses the baby (Nil by Mouth)

On the other hand, he does play a jovial beaver in the Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe so, swings and roundabouts…

Requiem for a Dream

Pretty much the most effective anti-drugs advert ever produced, Darren Aronofsky’s 2000 cult tale of four New Yorkers succumbing to their various devastating addictions also takes the prize for the most depressing film in history (IMHO).

I’m not quite sure which bit I found the most disturbing… Jared Leto injecting heroin into the gruesomely infected wound on his soon-to-be amputated arm? His amphetamine-addled mother being carted odd for electromagnetic shock therapy screaming “I just wanted to be on television”? Or maybe it was the sleazy New Yoik pimp chanting “Ass ta Ass” as Jennifer Connolly tearfully performs in a sex show? Very grim.

***

And that’s it. Sorry to put a bit of a downer on things. Don’t worry about it too much though old friend – they’re only films. Everything’s will be ok really. Why not cheer yourself up with a nice long relaxing bath?

A bit like this one…

The new battery arrived the next day and, even though I was still pretty aggrieved about it, the packaging was so sleek and charmingly designed that I nonetheless felt that frisson of excitement you get at having bought a new Apple Thing.

I guess this rectangular lump of pointless black plastic can therefore serve as the ultimate memorial to the company built by the late Steve Jobs. If you can create an enchanting customer experience with an annoying and expensive item that people massively resent having to buy in the first place then, truly, you are a master of design.

I wonder what his coffin will look like.

In cinemas this weekend is Crazy, Stupid, Love. A fun new sort-of-but-not-quite romcom starring Steve Carell. He plays Cal Weaver, a straight-laced 40-something, whose cozy life suddenly falls apart when his wife (Julianne Moore) informs him that she’s cheated on him and wants a separation. After 23 years of marriage, Cal finds himself dumped back on the dating market with no idea what to do. Enter Jacob (Ryan Gosling) a super-smooth, impossibly good-looking Pick Up Artist who takes Cal under his wing and teaches him the dark arts of seduction.

The world of Pick Up (made famous by Neil Strauss’s 2005 book The Game) is an area I’ve always had a sort of gloomy fascination with. We knew a guy at college who got involved with it and was transformed overnight from a slightly nerdy but likable World of Warcraft enthusiast to a bona fide Sex Volcano! I still occasionally see him around Covent Garden, marching fearlessly up to startled-looking girls in HMV and demanding they sleep with him immediately.

I was therefore massively excited to be invited to a special Crazy, Stupid, Love promo event attended by Matthew Hussey – an actual dating expert who promised to reveal the secrets of seduction that would transform me from this into this.

So firstly, Hussey is a bit different to some of the creepier characters in the ‘seduction community’. He runs dating classes for women as well as men and helps people with a whole range of confidence issues from mastering public speaking to how to be a better CEO. He’s slightly wary of some of the methods used in Pick Up, which often revolve around thinking up ways to psychologically manipulate girls into finding you attractive, which essentially treats women like unruly toddlers who can be tricked into eating their greens… ‘The right knowledge in the wrong hands can have a dangerous result,’ says Hussey, ‘I’m not against it if it’s helping people, giving guys who need a break advice on how to have more significance in girl’s eyes. But the danger is when they’re not respectful, then it can create an us-versus-them scenario which isn’t healthy.’

To emphasize his non-creepy credentials, Hussey tells us a routine girls can use if they want to initiate a conversation with a guy for themselves; ‘ask a guy for a favour’ he suggests – ‘you could ask him to hold your coat for you while you carry drinks over to your table. When you’ll return you can thank him for his help and, if he’s interested, he’ll carry on the conversation. Not only is it a good way of coming in under the radar and not having to put yourself on the line too much, it also plays to his natural desire to feel powerful. Men like it when women ask for their help. It’s like at school; whenever a teacher wanted help moving tables or whatever, she’d always ask for a “big strong boy” to help her and everyone would put their hands up. Guys don’t really grow out of that.’

That’s fucking genius, I reckon. The most terrifying part about dating, for me, is the bit where you have to walk up to a complete stranger and start a conversation without it seeming like you’re a) a mentalist or b) wanting to talk about Jesus. So does he have any similar tips that would work for guys? ‘Yep sure. Just climb up onto the bar, pull your trousers and pants down around your ankles and tearfully waggle your penis around bawling “I’m horny, horny horny horny” at the top of your voice. Works every time…’ (Ok fine, he didn’t really say that. I’m just reluctant to give away all this genius material away – get your own Love Guru!)

“Yeah the favour thing doesn’t quite have the same effect for guys, you need to be able to prove you have confidence and status. Try just paying her a simple compliment in a genuine, almost matter-of-fact manner: “I just wanted to say I think you really great in that dress” kind of thing. But say it in a strong way, don’t be needy. And don’t linger around too much afterwards.”

Another good way in is to make an assumption about her – “you must be a lawyer right?” Then whether you’re right or wrong you can still spark a conversation – either about how much of a Derren Brown style genius you are, or about why you were wrong. When I’m doing a class with some guys, once they become more confident, I might get them to try something a bit more playful and risqué: I’ll have them go over to a girl and ask very politely “Would it be OK if I tried chatting you up?” If she say yes, they then follow-up with “OK, well you start and I’ll jump in in a bit..” As long as you’re congruent – relaxed and not weird about it – it’ll be fine’.

In one of the subplots of Crazy, Stupid, Love Cal’s 13-year-old son Robbie is obsessed with his 17-year-old older babysitter and constantly bombards her with messages declaring his undying love. She’s unimpressed with this approach initially but it eventually pays off at the end of the film when she rewards him with a photo of herself naked. (I mean, technically, giving a naked photo of yourself to a 13-year-old child is probably illegal and she should really have been placed on the Sex Offenders Register, but it’s quite a sweet moment in the film so we’ll let her off..) I ask Matthew if that relentless, heart-on-your-sleeve approach is something that could work for me? Not that I have a babysitter or anything… (she’s more of an Au Pair)

‘It’s not ideal. Possibly if you’re funny with it and make out that you don’t really give a fuck it could work. But unlikely I’d say. People respond better when they think they can’t have something. Find a way to subtly imply that a relationship is impossible: “I think you’re lovely, it’s such a shame we can’t be together”. They’ll instinctively start to think “why not?” This also works well if you secretly fancy one of your friends and want to take things to the next level. “Wow, you look hot in that jacket! I’m not supposed to be seeing you like that.” By drawing attention to the idea that you’re “not supposed” to be together in that way, you may encourage her to question whether that really has to be the case.’

So there you have it. Dynamite stuff! Well I’m off down Tiger Tiger to try out my new moves. Feel free to come and ask me for a favour.

Find out more about Matthew Hussey at matthewhussey.com. Crazy, Stupid, Love is in cinemas now.

Jesse Eisenberg plays Nick, a 20-something pizza delivery driver (“your pizza in 30 minutes or less”) who gets kidnapped by bumbling goons Danny McBride and Nick Swardson. They strap a bomb to him and force him to hold up a bank for $100,000.

As with The Change Up, no one here is taking the plot all that seriously, it’s mainly just an opportunity to do a few jokes and slap some phat tunes on the soundtrack (the end credits roll to the sound of ODB’s ‘Got your money’, featuring possibly the greatest ever lyric in Hip Hop; “I don’t have no problem with you fucking me, but I have a little problem with you not fucking me..”)

There’s some really funny stuff here, especially from rising star Aziz Ansari who plays Nick’s best friend guilt-tripped into helping him rob the bank. Eisenberg is also pretty great, back to doing comedies after his tour de force in The Social Network last year. Early on, his character actually references that film with a nice little in-joke how much he hates Facebook – although this was entirely spoiled for me by the gales of dick film critic laughter it provoked throughout the cinema (this is where you laugh, turn around to see how much the people around you are laughing, and then make yourself laugh even louder to show that you really get the reference).

Also Danny McBride (Eastbound & Down) is his usual foul-mouthed self and does a good line in sweary metaphors – I definitely want to use the phrase “I’m the one fucking this bitch, you’re just holding the camera” in a project management-based context very soon.

YEAH? IS THAT YOUR KIND OF THING?? IS THAT WHAT YOU’RE INTO? FLYING BABY POO?? GOING INTO PEOPLE’S MOUTHS???

YOU SICKEN ME.

What follows is 100 minutes of the most extreme, gross-out, crassly juvenile nonsense I’ve see for a very long time. It’s a film without much to say and with precious little artistic merit. It is, however, quite funny.

Bateman and his old college buddy (Ryan Reynolds) are both jealous of each other’s lives. One’s a highflying corporate lawyer on the verge of making partner, but with no time to spend with his wife and kids. The other is a lay about, trustafarian douchebag who spends his time smoking weed and having freaky sex with superfit honeyz, but deep down is lonely and unfulfilled. One night, as they’re pissing into a magic fountain(!) they make a wish that they could swap bodies and, low and behold, they do. Blah blah blah… whatever whatever whatever… chaos will obviously ensue and then everyone will end up learning important life lessons.

However, the writers Jon Locus and Scott Moore who also wrote The Hangover (the original good one, not the second shit one) have clearly decided not to bother too much doing an actual proper ‘film’ with fleshed out characters and plot developments and stuff, and instead have just written lots and lots of really funny jokes. You may disagree, but I’d argue that this is all that really matters in comedy. It won’t be to everyone’s taste – indeed I’ve yet to find a single person with anything good to say about it – but if you’re into bad taste, raucous comedies (and shitting babies, and copious dick jokes, and sex with heavily pregnant women) I’d recommend giving it a chance.

You’ll probably want to get drunk first though…

Let the Right One In director, Thomas Alfredson, recreates perfectly the secretive corridors of power in 1970’s London – a damp and dreary world were everyone looks a bit like my dad. Gary Oldman takes on the iconic role of George Smiley, an intelligence analyst at MI6 or ‘The Circus’ as it’s euphemistically referred to. Following a disastrous operation in Hungary, he and his boss (John Hurt) are drummed out of the service into ignominious retirement. However, when a former field agent (Tom Hardy) reappears with information about a Soviet mole at the heart of the Circus, Smiley is drawn back into the spy game, tasked with finding out which of his former colleagues is betraying their country.

The performances from the extraordinary ensemble cast are, obviously, amazing. So much so that the Best Actor nominations at next year’s Oscars could conceivably be monopolized by this one film alone. I was particularly impressed by Toby Jones as Percy Alleline, the crafty and ambitious new head of The Circus whose effete ‘Posh Scottish’ accent I haven’t been able to get out of my head ever since. He never seems to get the credit he deserves, Toby Jones (maybe it’s because people get him confused with Toby Young) but having seen him play Truman Capote, Karl Rove and – to a lesser extent – Dobby, the fucking annoying elf in the Harry Potter films, I’d argue he’s one of the most vocally talented British actors around.

John Hurt is also great, with that lovely old wrinkly face of his (when I’m a trillionaire, I’m going to have it pickled in a jar on my mantelpiece..) but best of all is Gary Oldman. His grey, bureaucratic spy is the opposite of the conventional Hollywood vision of a flash, James Bond-style secret agent. Needless to say, he doesn’t wear a Rolex with its own electromagnetic force field, or have skis that double as rocket launchers. He doesn’t even do any shit, sexually suggestive wordplay. Instead he mainly stands inscrutably still, sporting an ill-fitting suit and pallid grey raincoat – the uniform of choice for someone whose job it is to be instantly forgettable.  Not that anyone’s likely to forget him anytime soon.

The film was met with universal critical acclaim. It took the Palme D’Or in Cannes and became the first film since Ben-Hur to do a ‘clean sweep’ at the Oscars winning the Best Picture, Director and Acting awards. But its impact didn’t stop there… The films record-breaking takings at the Box Office helped rally the faltering global economy, turning what analysts feared would be an L-shaped recession into a sort-of-square-root-button-on-a-scientific-calculator-shaped recession. Inspired by the film’s uplifting and positive themes, anti-government protestors came out onto the streets of Egypt to demand a more open society creating a chain of events that led to crumbling of repressive dictatorships all across the Middle East. In fact, more or less every major news story in 2011 – from the Murdoch hacking scandal to the death of Bin Laden, Wikileaks to the Royal Wedding; could be directly and exclusively linked to the impact of this one world-changing romcom.

Our message to Hollywood was clear; “YES WE KNOW IT ONLY CAME OUT SIX MONTHS AGO, BUT WHAT WE’D REALLY LIKE YOU TO DO IS MAKE THE EXACT SAME FUCKING FILM ALL OVER AGAIN WITH A SLIGHTLY DIFFERENT CAST PLEASE!!!”

So they did.

It also makes life a lot easier for Hollywood screenwriters. All you need to do to get a movie made nowadays is simply write down two nouns on a piece of paper and hand it in to Harvey Weinstein. He will then check them off against his Excel spreadsheet and, provided they haven’t already been covered, will give you $300m to make the movie. Seriously, I don’t know why more people aren’t doing this – I’m flying out next week to pitch Astronauts versus Nazis and Peadophiles v Wombles.

Unlike Super 8 - which kind of sat on the fence on this issue – C&A is strongly anti-alien. The extra-terrestrials in this film are gruesome insect-like creatures with little slimy Jeremy Beadle arms who’ve come to this planet to rape our natural resources and probe our women. After Avatar - where they briefly flirted with a more empathetic, tree-hugging, namby-pamby, Prius-driving, Nancy Pelosi type of alien – it’s good to see Hollywood is very much ‘back on message’ making it abundantly clear that aliens, unequivocally, are cunts.

There’s something comforting, I think, about this black-and-white, good-versus-evil view of the universe. In these topsy-turvy modern times of ours – when we don’t even know if we can trust our investment bankers, tabloid journalists and inner-city feral youths anymore – it’s nice to see a film that harks back to a simpler time when you had straight-shooting frontiersmen on one side and intergalactic space-bastards on the other.

In the first camp is Daniel Craig who plays a rugged outlaw named Jake Lonergan. He wakes up in the desert one day, alone and with total memory loss, having been kidnapped by aliens. Before releasing him, the aliens have attached a futuristic-looking bracelet to his wrist and given him bizarre, unnaturally blue eyes. Seriously, they’re like the bluest eyes you will ever see – there’s simply no way that a normal human being could have eyes that ridiculously blue in real life… (What? Really? OK, apparently those are just Daniel Craig’s normal eyes. Weird). When the aliens return to wreak more havoc, Jake must team up with his erstwhile enemy Woodrow Dolarhyde (a name that is incredibly fun to say out loud in your best highfalutin Wild Wild West accent) played by Harrison Ford.

Ford is really good in this, I think, especially in the first half an hour where he is playing against type as a cantankerous and surprisingly brutal villain. It’s almost disappointing when his character undergoes the inevitable“d’aww he’s alright really” transformation in the final act. Daniel Craig is also pretty convincing in his role as a laconic gunslinger with shades of Clint Eastwood about him (although I find it impossible to watch Daniel Craig anymore without thinking of this). A lot of people will probably not like this film that much (my friend Eric was literally seething with rage when we came out of the cinema) but I think, for what it is, it’s kinda fun. It’s slickly directed by Jon Favreau (Iron Man) with some properly bombastic action sequences and, for a 12a, is a lot more violent than I was expecting.

Also, if nothing else, at least it won’t have been responsible for inflicting this on the world…

I essentially failed to take my own advice and saw The Inbetweeners at the Tottenham Court Road Odeon – pretty much the epicentre of nightmares. I realise this is going to sound quite bad, but I’ve kind of become so accustomed to going to press screenings that I now find it really intimidating when I’m obliged to sit amongst *retch* ordinary members of the public. Once you’ve experienced the comforting embrace of a roomful of smirking Telegraph journalists it’s very hard to go back. It was a bit like what I imagine Bernie Madoff’s first day in Gen Pop was like…

Also, I made things worse for myself by booking this seat…

…which I thought was in the front row but actually turned out to be right at the back (I mean, in retrospect that is very obvious – I didn’t realise it was actually possible for a human being to make mistakes that idiotic in real life..) This meant that I found myself sitting in the back row right in the middle of a gang of angry teenagers (some of them had ‘baseball hats’). They were pretty unimpressed with me at first but warmed up a bit once I’d offered round the box of strawberries I bought from Waitrose on the way in.

In the end, I don’t think I could actually have asked for a better audience to see it with. The film is really funny and silly and it’s loads better watching it with people who actually like The Inbetweeners and are up for laughing and having a good time, as opposed to a bunch of patronising media knobs who spend the entire film scribbling little twaticisms down in their moleskine notebooks.

So the film is pretty great, I think. Like Bird said, it’s got a lot of heart and there are some really nice character moments – particularly between Simon and Jay. He was kind of right to say that there are fewer gross-out moments in it – certainly compared to, say, Hetty Wainthropp Investigates – but don’t worry, there’s still plenty of material for clunge-fans to get their teeth into (eeuw). My personal favourite is the matching ‘Pussay Patrol’ T-shirts the gang get printed up for their holiday which feature an image of Sylvester the Cat from Looney Toons sporting a gargantuan and fully-erect penis! If these aren’t available to buy from Top-Man by the end of the month it will be an absolute tragedy.

Aside from this, there are some lower-key moments that were really good. There’s a great joke about the Anatolia Massacre that I found really funny, though I’m not sure it went over particularly big with the gang at The Odeon. I also very much liked how Bird’s character is seen reading The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobson at one point – I’d bet actual money that that was a prop he brought along himself..

If I had to criticise, I guess I’d say it maybe doesn’t feel quite as cinematic as I hoped it would. It’s definitely more than just a long episode storywise, but could have been a bit more ambitious in terms of its production values – particularly in sound and editing. I guess that’s mainly the result of having a budget of just £3.5m (i.e. what Transformers 3 spent on croissants..) But seeing as it’s apparently made £2.5m of that back on the first day alone, you’d think they could’ve got a way with putting a little bit more on the credit card?

If I had to guess, I’d say this is probably the last we’ll see of The Inbetweeners (which means there will now almost certainly be a Christmas Special) but, if this is the end, they’ve definitely gone out on a high.