Best Movies of the Decade (Top 25)

Here I have attempted to distill a list of my favourite 25 movies released this decade. They aren't necessarily the movies I think will be the most influential in the years to come, nor are they necessarily the most critically acclaimed. What they do represent is quite simply movies I would definitely want to watch again, movies that I found hugely enjoyable or thought provoking. Movies that somehow lingered with me, and will continue to linger still:

1. The Lord of the Ring trilogy
   
2. Pan's Labyrinth
3. The Lives of Others
4. City of God
5. Dogville
6. Y Tu Mama Tambien
7. Kill Bill (Vol. 1 and 2)
8. There Will Be Blood
9. The Dark Knight
10. Wall-E
11. Before Sunset
12. Atonement
    
13. Milk
14. Brokeback Mountain
15. The Dreamers
16. Michael Clayton
17. Sin City
    
18. Sideways
    
19. Good Night and Good Luck
    
20. Avatar
21. Downfall
22. Memento
    
23. The Incredibles
24. Spirited Away
25. The Pianist
    

Near Misses: Star Trek, Amelie, Gosford Park, The Wind that Shakes the Barley, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, Minority Report, The Constant Gardener, The Queen, Borat, Finding Nemo, Million Dollar Baby, Once, Closer, Lost in Translation, The Wrestler, Spring Summer Autumn Winter Spring, Revolutionary Road, Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, Casino Royale, No Country for Old Men, Man on Wire, Bowling for Colombine, Match Point,

Acclaimed Films I Haven't Seen: The Royal Tenenbaums, Four Months Three Years and Two Days, Hurt Locker, United 93, Mulholland Dr., Knocked Up, A History of Violence, Mystic River

Computer Gaming Madness

Much of the first week of the holidays has been taken up by two computer games that I recently purchased. The first, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 is an excellent first person shooter, and a sequel to the previous Modern Warfare game. The second, Dragon Age Origins is a classic fantasy role playing game.

Before Modern Warfare 2 was released, I decided to play through the original Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, at a slightly higher difficulty level for a greater challenge. It underlined yet again how the Call of Duty franchise had really raised the bar for first person shooters. You take on the role of both Soap MacTavish, a new recruit to the elite Special Air Service (SAS), and as Sgt. Jackson of the US Marine Corp. In the Call of Duty games you truly get a strong sense of what it feels like to be 'under fire'. The system of not having a health meter, but having the screen darken as you taken repeated hits (thus limiting your ability to fight back) makes you instinctively try and duck for cover, or for those foolish enough not to, die. This innovation is carried over to Modern Warfare 2, as is the lack of your ability to save the game at any desired point, meaning that you have to survive till specific checkpoints or replay that section.

Call of Duty 2 extends the sheer turmoil and exhilaration of combat that was present in the original, and adds multiple new and fascinating settings and perspectives. In this game you are another young recruit this time mentored by Soap who is now a captain in the SAS. It would be hard to top the original which included the detonation of a nuclear device, a stage where you are a sniper in a ghillie suit stalking through an abandoned city near the former Chernobyl nuclear reactor, and you even get to take the perspective of an aerial bomber providing air support to ground troops. Call of Duty 2 does manage to top this though- you get to try your hand at driving a snow mobile, you have to negotiate a cliff face with ice axes, and in one exhilarating sequence you are a gunner on an armoured vehicle racing through the streets of a Middle Eastern city while taking fire from all directions. The settings are diverse and novel - from a slum in Rio, to an oil derrick used to host SAM sites, to a prison near Vladivostock, even to several levels in suburban America. There is also a stage which is bound to attract enormous controversy where you play an American soldier that infiltrates a Russian terrorist cell, and which involves you taking the role of terrorists shooting up an entire airport full of innocent civilians.

There are several drawbacks to the game despite the intense combat experience, the excellent gameplay, the creative settings, and the generally effective AI. First of all, it is expensive. At $75 it is a good $20 more expensive than a normal computer game. I would have less of an issue with it, given its quality, were it not for the fact that it was also disappointingly short. I finished the game in around 10 hours on the advanced difficulty setting. An average gamer could complete it in 6-7 hours on normal difficulty. After you complete the main campaign there is an additional section that you can tackle called "Special Ops" which takes specific elements from the game (evading capture in a forest, snowmobile races, breaching and clearing rooms, surviving a wave of enemy attacks) and you earn between one and three stars by completing these set tasks at higher difficulty levels. That can't disguise the fact that the single player campaign is a bit skimpy.

Another surprising drawback was that the Call of Duty 2 plot ended up far less coherent and structured than the original's which basically involved you hunting down the Russian ultra nationalist Imran Zakhaev. The storyline got downright messy towards the end of Modern Warfare 2, and the motivation behind a crucial plot twist was never really sufficiently explained beyond some bombastic and overly cliched voice-over dialogue between missions. As someone who hardly utilizes the multiplayer component of these games paying such a hefty price for a short campaign was definitely poor value for money. But Call of Duty does provide fantastic thrills and a powerful gaming experience.

Far, far more time was spent playing Dragon Age: Origins. The developers behind the excellent Mass Effect has created a more traditional fantasy role playing game this time around, creating an enormous world to explore complete with its own back story, mythology, political dynamics and much else besides. Incredibly enough, the game even provides multiple back stories to start with, depending on the background and race of your character, with five separate 'origin' quests as a result, all culminating with your recruitment into the Grey Wardens, a group of reknown fighters committed to battling the evil threat of the Dark Spawn. The game is immensely complex, and it is easy to be completely lost in the rich tapestry of this fully realized world. From recruiting and interacting with a multitude of non-playing characters to multiple dialogue options, alternate paths and endings, the game is huge in every sense of the word.

It is also fairly difficult unless you've played through a number of role playing games, particularly the combat elements. For much of the game you will be involved in combat with three other members of your party, and it is essential to have a balance between warrior type melee combatants and ranged characters such as rogues mastering the bow and arrow skill or mages. What I disliked was the necessity to micromanage combat - you had to set out clear instructions in the tactics screen and even then you still had to pause combat repeatedly to control individual characters. The tactics menu also had drawbacks. For example I found it hard to program a mage to cast an area effect spell on a group of enemies far away - or at least to do so effectively. Often, the only way was to pause the game and take control of the character yourself.

The advantage of combat switching was that even if your main character is of a particular class - such as a mage - you can taste combat in all the various roles by playing as an accompanying character for the duration of any particular combat. In the end, I left the game at the easy difficulty setting, minimizing the amount of micro-managing I had to do, and also because I wanted to explore dialogue and character options to a greater degree. I would have preferred a more fluid combat system needing less pausing and tactical development, though.

On the whole, Dragon Age was a hugely addictive and immensely entertaining game. I spent the better part of 25 hours of direct gameplay and I still failed to finish all the various side quests and sub plots, let alone read through the immense codex outlining the history, mythology, and back story that you accumulate as you proceed in your quest. It is a superb buy but only if you are willing to jeopardize your social life for a number of weekends, not to mention risk having your significant other severely annoyed at you for neglecting them! I can't wait for the inevitable sequel that surely must follow, and indeed, for Mass Effect 2, slated for release in April 2010.

My Film Highlights of 2009

The year is not quite done, but I've decided to do a short run through of the best (and worst) movies I've seen in 2009.

Best Movie seen in the Cinema: To date, I have seen 40 movies in the cinema this year. If I go a December movie binge I might just bring the total to around one a week. There were many quite wonderful films - the brutal rawness of The Wrestler, the emotionally heart wrenching (some would say manipulative) yet also quietly funny Departures, the wonderfully adapted 1960s take on suburban unhappiness that is Revolutionary Road, the delightful Up! and the thought provoking and just generally provocative Waltz with Bashir, and the list goes on.

Two movies stood out for me, though. For sheer pure enjoyment, nothing quite beat J.J Abrams Star Trek. It managed to both pay homage to and reinvent and revitalize an old franchise, but more importantly it was just a tremendous blend of wonderfully good humour and great action. Sean Penn rightfully won the Best Actor Oscar for a chameleon like portrayal of Harvey Milk - Milk, in my opinion deserved the Best Picture Award as well. I was supposed to choose between them, but I honestly can't, so I'll fudge and pick both.

Best Movie Seen (Other Media): This was truly impossible to decide. How could I possibly choose, when I saw A Man For All Seasons, The Lion in Winter, The Third Man and The Hustler on DVD? All of them are classic films that are deservedly great. How to choose between Paul Schofield's tremendous portrayal of Thomas More as a man of conscience (A Man for All Seasons) or Paul Newman's immensely charismatic yet complex pool shark (The Hustler), not to mention a classic film Noir in The Third Man complete with a Orson Welles cameo. That's to discount Bernado Bertolluci's tremendously influential Last Tango in Paris with an unforgettable performance by Brando which I also saw for the first time this year. All brilliant movies which I would definitely watch again.

Worst Movie Seen (Any Media): Hollywood continues to churn out fairly bad, testosterone fueled action movies which ensures that Michael Bay will always have a job. While the first Transformers movie was fairly successful (mainly by not taking itself too seriously), the second one was bloated, overcooked and excessively long that took itself far too seriously. It was also not helped but some fairly bad acting (Sam's dad going "I don't wanna lose you" in such a terribly fake way in the middle of a war zone being the icing on the cake). New Moon was turgid and often excruciating. I found it impossible to overlook the often terrible lines such as "all you have to do is breath" [to make me happy], or "Bella, you're everything to me" (okay, I'll be honest and admit those aren't the exact lines, but rough paraphrases, but you get the idea!).

Occasionally I also feel the odd compulsion to watch a bad, generally brainless action movie without any plot. Thus, the abysmal Elecktra and the rather dull Fantastic Four. Oh, and I also did pay to watch Street Fighter: Legend of Chun Li in the cinemas, but that had Kristin Kreuk in it, and a local Singapore actor!


Addendum: Avatar did indeed turn out to be a spectacular movie which made my Top 25 list of the decade (as did Milk) while Star Trek missed out in that regard. So I guess Avatar and Milk are my best of 2009.

Coloured (Paper) Memories

I was attending a Knowledge and Inquiry workshop organized by the Ministry and one of the sessions involved a hands on activity where we had to try and show a proof of Pythagoras' theorem using coloured paper.

Beyond the fact that the proof was really interesting, what struck me was that coloured paper was fundamentally the same from my school days. Even more impressively, the price tag showed that it cost only 60 cents for one packet of coloured paper, compared to 50 cents when I was in primary school. The price tag also showed that it had been purchased from one of those random neighbourhood stationary shops that are slowly disappearing.

All in all, a bit of a nostalgia trip as I hadn't seen coloured paper for years. It also struck me as fairly impressive that the price had remained relatively the same even after two decades. Other stationary items (fullscap paper, pens) are now far more costly, let alone food, cars and much else beside.

I remember a budding young entrepreneur type in my primary school who used to pay five cents to fellow classmates to make ninja stars which he would then sell for ten cents to other students. Even taking into account the cost of the coloured paper, he would turn a small profit. Ninja stars made of the prized gold and silver sheets cost more of course. It was also an early introduction to colour matching since a ninja star was made from two pieces of coloured paper folded together. There were many random combinations to be had - I particularly enjoyed black/pink and green/red ones.

Given my lack of ability in folding/wrapping/creating anything, I was often the student who bought the ninja stars for ten cents, rather than ending up part of the stable of individuals earning some small change making them. To put things into context, 10 cents was not inconsiderable in those days when your daily pocket money often amounted to a dollar. A glass of soya bean milk would cost that, from the old grumpy uncle (ten cents, ten cents, all also ten cents, big one twenty cents) who also sold Walls ice cream from a large cooler which he regularly slammed (never closed or shut, always slammed). A plate of small chicken rice cost only 30 cents.

For old times sake, I tried my hand at making a ninja star (while also attempting to prove Pythagoras right of course). I took a pink sheet and a black one and tried to combine them, but of course it came out all wrong. A person who apparently took weeks to learn how to tie my shoelaces (when I was little), who gets presents to family members wrapped by other family members to whom that present is not meant for (sis wraps dad, dad wraps mom, mom wraps sis), and who often struggles to tie a half windsor knot, that was always going to prove a challenge.

More Quizzing Mayhem

I was asked to stand in for Peter again this week as quizmaster, and the choice of "black-eyed Pete's" [a riff off Black Eyed Peas] as a team name was a not too subtle allusion as to why. I was short of inspiration for that week's quiz so it took a fairly long time to set. In the end, I set rounds on Remembering '89 (in honour of the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall); A Test of Character (teams had to name the film after I listed out some characters from it); and The Natural World (Animals, Plants, Physical Geography).

It was a full house - nine teams in total - and it made for a fairly good night. There was a bunch of first timers that definitely caught the eye no less because one of the members was a television personality who was a presenter on ESPN Sport Center. Attractive young ladies are a rarity at Old Brown Shoe quiz nights, so it was refreshing to see two of them that night, teammates of said television personality.

It turned out to be a fantastic quiz, perfectly pitched. By the end of the night, as many as 5 or 6 teams had a shot at winning it, and the top 5 were separated by a mere four points. The team with the attractive young ladies won, but sadly they had to forfeit their winnings for violating the long standing rule that each team could only have a maximum of six members. I still gave them a bottle of wine though, along with the third placed team. To give some idea of the balanced scoring, none of the nine teams scored a perfect 10 in any of the rounds; almost all teams scored at least a five in every round except for a team, self-styled as the "wooden spoons", which predictably struggled.

All in all, it was a very fascinating night, made even lovelier when I ended up speaking to Colette afterwards and was introduced to one of the girls - Emilie - who proved to be slightly tipsy. She proceeded to show her immense flexibility by placing both feet at either ends of the table top, and her considerable singing prowess by belting out some tunes from Annie. No doubt the alcohol had something to do with it, but I suspect she is generally random and slightly crazy, which is quite wonderful. A great pity then that I didn't get her number, one can only hopes she comes down to quiz again.

A Book A Day for 365 Days

Of all the new year resolutions that I have made, one of the few that I have successfully kept is a pledge made back in 2000 to try and read at least one book a week for the entire year. I've since gone from that initial target of 52 books to setting myself a more ambitious one of 100 books for the year (just under 2 a week). All this pales in comparison though to the goal that Nina Sankovitch set herself - she wanted to finish a book a day for one entire year, and write a reflection on each and every one of them. She started on October 29, 2008 and she's almost done - having read through Christmas, New Year's and Easter. She started her one year of reading as a means of helping her come to terms with her sister's death and of course to appreciate more about herself and the world. Her reviews and thoughts on reading are real gems, which I encourage everyone to read.

I can't help but be moved and impressed by Nina's journey, and perhaps, one day I will find the courage and the time to do something similar. The depth and breadth of her reading was very impressive - she would not read anything she had already read before; she would read an individual author's work only once, and she would read widely - essays, short stories, science fiction and fantasy, crime, literary novels, the occasional classic. Of course, the fact that she had only a day to complete it meant that each book was usually limited to under 300 pages (with novellas for busy days).

It was flattering to see a number of books I've already read that she encountered for the first time during her one year journey. These included The Watchmen (she found it far too violent and didn't enjoy it), Ex Libris by Anne Fadiman (we both loved it but as book lovers that was only to be expected), Ali Smith's The First Person and Other Stories (she found Smith's style irritating and distracting, I found it intriguing and fun), The 39 Steps (we both thought it farcical and not very exciting), and many others such as Ender's Game, Paul Auster's Man in the Dark, Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach (she found the ending too staged, I thought he had earned it), Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates, The White Tiger, Never Let Me Go and Stardust by Neil Gaiman (we both wanted more of faerie).

Anyhow here's a salute to Nina once again, and I'll go back to her list and I'll sure be glad to find some interesting new reads that might help me fulfil my goal of reading 100 books next year.

Courting Controversy

I was asked by Pete to be the quizmaster this week as he had a load of marking to catch up on. I naturally agreed - I do love being the quizmaster and I pride myself on setting a fair quiz. For me, there have to be at least a couple of teams with a shout of winning the quiz for it to count as successful.

The last time I set the quiz there were complaints that it was slightly too intellectual with a round on first lines from novels, and one on famous last words (from both real and fictional people), so this time I decided to dumb it down considerably. So, I besides a more typical round on the 1920s, I dumbed things down considerably with a round on celebrity baby names. As if more proof were needed of the horrendous names that people give celebrities. I also set a random and interesting round on tricksters and scams, which was a bit of fun.

All in all it was a fairly well received quiz bar one moment. I asked a question about the recent Manchester derby football match, where there was a huge bone of contention over the amount of added time played, mainly because Michael Owen rifled in the winner with the clock showing 95:25. I of course, asked what minute in extra time the goal was scored and there was significant semantic controversy as to whether that constituted the 95th or 96th minute of added time. Obviously less than 6 minutes of added time had elapsed, but it was still IN the 96th minute itself. Confused? Well some of the teams were outraged. The problem was 2 teams had put 95th and three teams had put 96th, so in the end I accepted both answers.

Other than that, I was rather pleased that my usual team missed out on a question on the 'Lost Generation' (in the 1920s round) despite having 2 literature teachers in their ranks. And I was pleased, in keeping with my own ethos about exciting quizzes that the top three teams were only separated by 2 points at the end of the night.

Defending the Caveman

Defending the Caveman came relatively hyped up. After a sold out first run last year, the SRT brought it back for another run due to 'popular demand'. It is easy to see why so many people loved it, dealing as it does with gender stereotypes and the battle of the sexes it was impossible not to resonate. It was definitely popular with the audience, as there were laughs throughout, though the true measure of its success could probably be measured in the number of knowing glances between couples that were exchanged throughout the show.

However, to sum it all up it was not theater. Not to be too pedantic about it, but the 'play' was effectively a one man scripted stand up comic routine masquerading as a play, much to the detriment of both its attempts to be theater and more damagingly, to its attempts at comedy. Apart from a few props (TV set, a couple of wall mounted paintings, chair, pillow) which the best stand up routines now incorporate anyhow, and some largely irrelevant lighting effects, there wasn't anything terribly theatrical about it. Not that it largely mattered if the play (or should I say routine) succeeded on its own terms. I had some serious doubts in that regard, however.

I'm quite a big fan of improvised comedy, particularly the British variety. I admit to not having had the chance to see much improv live, but I have a couple of friends who are diehard fans, and we occasionally get together to watch the latest DVDs of QI (with the indelible Stephen Fry), as well as other one night only performances. Of course the very point of improv is that it is not scripted, and the performer is able to feed off the audience. Of course the best improv performers prepare and reherse quite thoroughly, but there is an element of spontaneity which characterizes the best routines. That of course was very much missing in Defending the Caveman, stolidly scripted as it was.

Daniel Jenkins does a fine enough job, nicely building up an easy rapport with the audience, without which the entire production would have fallen quite flat. He strutted and exaggerated and milked the laughs, and was more than competent especially when role-playing the inevitable disagreements and entanglements that formed the complex web of male-female relations that was at the heart of the show.

Ultimately, though, I just didn't find the jokes all that creative or original, and in fact not even all that funny. There were the usual cliches trotted out about men being hunters and women gatherers and how that accounts for our differences. So women always gather information about each other, while men of course when interacting are satisfied with a couple of grunts following which they watch footie on the telly. Of course that is why men can't multitask either (they're evolved to concentrate on one thing for a long time) while women are quite the opposite. The jokes went on in a similar vein and soon started to wear thin.

The problem is, you soon got the sense that you've heard all of this before, probably when meeting up with you guy or girl pals for a bitch about the opposite sex (ah one thing that men and women have in common!). When the play went on to espouse such nuggets as poking fun of the fact that men absolutely refuse to ask for directions (which was mocked far more succintly and charmingly in Pixar's Cars among other places), I quietly felt the inclination to want to leave the theater, head straight to my local pub and start moaning to my mates. Of course, that could just be down to the fact that I wasn't one of the lucky six people to get a free Tiger beer (in what was probably the only original act in the entire play). More likely, it is due to the urgings of my inner caveman that I felt hard pressed to resist.

England and 'Destiny'

Much has been made on England's brilliant progress in their recent World Cup qualifying campaign and their eight consecutive wins. The praise and enthusiasm has reached a new high following their 5-1 victory over Croatia, a win that sealed their place in next year's World Cup. Coach Fabio Capello has now officially gone on record in saying that anything less than making the finals next year in South Africa will be a disappointment. The British press has typically gone all agog, with the Times stating that there was a 'sense of destiny' about England. However, as any England fan will know, England never fails to provide a sense of drama and heartbreak. If anyone can break this streak it is the iron-willed, disciplined and methodical Italian manager they now have, but I'm not altogether ruling it out.

The first thing that inevitably seems to happen, of course, is injuries. It seems inevitable that England enters a World Cup with their best player facing some kind of major injury crisis. Captain Fantastic Bryan Robson had a hamstring injury and struggled for full fitness for much of Italy '90 - that was well before the sudden metatursal jink that affected both David Beckham in 2002 and then Wayne Rooney in 2006. Capello himself noted that one key factor in England's success will be their physical conditioning during the World Cup itself. He'll have one full week to make sure they're in shape before the competition starts, but there is not much he can do if they're crocked.

In a related point, for all of Capello's tactical nous, England's squad still remains thin in several areas. The Goalkeeping problem is unlikely to go away, Paul Robinson has World Cup experience, but was in a slump; David James remains error prone; Rob Green whom Capello seems now to prefer is hardly deemed world class. England also lack an out and out striker. Wayne Rooney is wonderful gifted but he's not a true goal poacher (and his best talents lie elsewhere, anyhow), for all the physical presence that Emile Heskey has provided, he has a poor goalscoring record, and missed two one on ones against Croatia. France in 1998 proved decisively that you don't need a proven goalscorer to win the World Cup - they had Stephane Guivarch and Cristophe Dugarry leading the line when they won, but it does make life easier. An injury to Rooney would still be fairly fatal to England, and there might be a lack of goals should opponents find a way to effectively stifle England's midfield.

Lastly, there is the dreaded notion of penalties. Of the horrors of Italia '90, the '96 Euro Championships (both to Germany), the '98 World Cup, and of course the last World Cup finals against Portugal. On some occasions there was a clear lack of self-belief and some bizarre decisions - what was David Batty doing taking a penalty in 1998? As much as I admire Gareth Southgate's courage in 1996 he made it sound like a complete spur of the moment decision to step up and take the sudden death penalty. Shouldn't such things be planned? They will be under Capello. England players certainly don't lack self-belief and it is not that they can't take them. Gerrard, Lampard and Barry (at Villa) regularly took spot kicks for their clubs and now Rooney seems to have taken over the job at Man Utd. Yet Gerrard and Lampard both missed in 2006. One final interesting point - given his trauma in the 2008 Champion's League final playing for Chelsea, will England captain John Terry step up to the plate again if England are faced with a shootout?

It's fun being an England fan. You learn to live with drama and a little bit of heartbreak. It would be nice for a change if they actually do go on and win the tournament, and they get lucky in the lottery of freak injuries and penalty shootouts, but it would be just a little less exciting. Destiny, maybe, but I'm not ruling anything out just yet.

Counterknowledge

Random crackpot conspiracy theories have been around for ages. We all have our favourites such as insisting that JFK was assassinated by more than the lone gunman but instead fatally shot by a mysterious shooter on the grassy knoll (either way, there is no disputing that he ended up quite dead) . Indeed, if one were to be completely spurious about it, I wouldn't be surprised to find that more Americans believe in the existence of UFOs than the theory of evolution.

Damian Thompson takes direct aim at some of the more nonsensical recent crackpot theories in his book on Counterknowledge subtitled "how we have surrendered ourselves to conspiracy theories, quack medicine, bogus science and fake history". These might make rather easy targets, but Thompson argues that their influence has grown rather perniciously. Indeed, counterknowledge which he defines as "misinformation packaged to look like fact" has gone from being at the fringe of society to having spread to the mainstream. UFOs are a classic example of this, but the list now encompasses such unfounded scares and unabashed rubbish as a 9/11 being an American-Israeli conspiracy, MMR immunization causing autism, quack nutritionism, alternative treatments in general, particularly for HIV/AIDS, creationism, and such meta-historical nonsense as Jesus fathering a child, China 'discovering' America and the holocaust never occuring.

As he notes, one of the paradoxes of our age is that while "our techniques for evaluating evidence are subtler than before..... counterknowledge is corrupting intellectual standards". It must be said that he does skirt around the more intellectually interesting question of why this might be the case. Mention is made, obviously, of the internet, and the information revolution which has increased the "privatization of knowledge" and has made everyone an expert. He also delves into Sociology arguing that modernity leads to the "dismantling of authority structures" and our dedication to what Anthony Giddens calls the "reflexive project of the self". Still, more interesting analysis on this paradox of more easily available knowledge leading to the growth of so-called counterknowledge would have been welcome.

Where Thompson does succeed well is gleefully deflating some of these crackpot theories. He does this with gleeful abandon and not inconsiderable wit. He delights in showing the intellectual bankruptness of such quack cures as homeopathy, craniosacral therapy and other so called 'alternative' medicines. More scarily, he shows how some of those remedies are now marketed officially in high street stores such as Boots, or worse how homeopathy is available as a treatment from the NHS and as a degree course at the University of Westminster. Nutritionism, or rather those who abuse the label also comes under fire from him, and his cynicism is amply justified when we consider that (Dr.) Gillian McKeith actually earned her Phd from a non-accredited American University on the basis of a correspondence course. Worse still is the case of Patrick Holford, a 'nutritionist' whose degree in psychology better explains his blatant attempts to market quack products like a 'crystal' which will protect one from allegedly harmful electromagnetic radiation emanating from mobile phone towers.

Ours has been labelled the information age with good reason: advances in technology has allowed us almost instant access to unlimited information. But as Damian Thompson has pointed out, this has also led to the pernicious spread of misinformation. We might shrug off mass mails about HIV infected needles being left on train seats in order to infect people (the virus can't survive any length of time openly exposed), but it is more scary for society at large when this extends to autism scares over MMR jabs, cancer scares over cellphone antennaes and the belief that China discovered America in 1421 (and Europe in 1431 too apparently).