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You can rest assured that Salmon Fishing in the Yemen isn’t completely about salmon fishing in the Yemen. In part, it’s a pretty okay romantic comedy starring Ewan McGregor, Emily Blunt and a criminally underused Kristin Scott Thomas, and it combines fuddy-duddy Britishness with something that resembles a tight-knit storyline. It also features fish.

Doctor Alfred Jones (McGregor) is a fishing expert employed by the UK Government’s fisheries department in grey, dour London. He has a grey, dour life with a grey, dour wife and a grey, dour lifestyle made up of day-in, day-out monotony - and he’s also completely whipped by his wife, who jets off to all sorts of places without even bothering to let him know in advance. The film opens with Jones receiving a ludicrous email from the representative of a wealthy Yemen sheikh, Harriet Chetwode-Talbot (Blunt), asking about the feasability of introducing salmon fishing to the sheikh’s homeland and Jones, as the dour, grey type, has no interest in just how silly the idea is. Until he meets Ms. Chetwode-Talbot.

Whilst the two exchange doe eyes over lunches and make the acquaintance of the Sheikh himself (Amr Waked), there’s something of a B-story involving Kristin Scott Thomas’ government Press Officer. As it happens, the Middle East is generally a pretty hostile place if you’re a UK soldier and the Prime Minister’s office is looking for a story that doesn’t involve something dead-shaped - and hey, a loopy story about shipping ten thousand fish to the middle of the desert ought to do the trick. But her interaction with McGregor and Blunt is minimal, and yet her lines and temper make up some of the film’s funniest moments - that she is underused is something of a missed opportunity.

As a whole, the film works. McGregor and Blunt do a fine job of keeping the proceedings running along at a decent rate of knots, but there’s very little romance to this romantic comedy owing to the disappearance of Blunt’s soldier boyfriend in - of course - Afghanistan. That she holds out for him is cute and gives the film an air of realism, but it also creates an impression that the titular fish are really important - and as later scenes will allude, they’re really not. A quick CGI shot at the end of a miraculous fish doing an adorable little leap out of the water is about your lot when it comes to anything with gills, and the real focus is naturally on the back and forths of the dowdy office fisherman and his primp and proper love interest.

Whilst the gentle fawning over the lady on McGregor’s part is sweet, the film has moments where it chugs along rather than glides as a well-oiled machine, and the two parts - the love story and the public relations panic - don’t really gel together all that well. When they meet in the middle at the conclusion, the two barely interact either, and I was left scratching my head at why the B-story even existed, as it was of such little significance and influence that the film may as well have done away with the scenes as a whole and chopped half an hour off of the runtime.

It could have been better written, but there’s gentle humour to be found in between the cute hints of courting and the occasional shot of a gawp-mouthed fish. I also expect that the Yemen will find itself the subject of a tourist influx in the aftermath, becoming a prime hotspot for those wealthy enough to travel there, and that the jarring terrorist side-story is at odds with the film’s light-hearted tone. But none of that really matters when Ewan McGregor is making doe eyes at Emily Blunt and she makes the slightest of suggestions that she is making them back.

Read more film reviews, including Marvel Avengers Assemble and Gone.

Note: The following is a short story concocted after absent-mindedly sketching the picture above inside iPad app “Paper”. It’s a bit different from the usual content on here, but if it gets any kind of decent reception I’ll probably consider more creative pieces like this in the future. Without further ado, here goes nothing.

The heat of the summer’s evening was balmy, neither uncomfortably warm nor bearing towards the unwelcome grasp of the cold. The breeze across the fields was light, making the trees whisper in their own gentle language, passing messages across the air to those who cared to listen. That the grass still grew and the trees still swayed was a blessing, a reminder that something in the world still worked, still existed as it did before.

To Caleb, it was normality. It was all he knew and all he would know, for Jacob would tell him nothing of the world before or of how it came to be that it was as it was, now. The rush of the wind, the parting embrace of the warm setting sun and the cold, unwelcoming nights were the equilibrium, and their existence was, through his eyes, nothing more than an everyday occurrence, for all the days they had been walking.

Caleb was too young to have known of the world before, his faintest childhood memories a blur of grey, flashes of white and splashes of red from which his eyes were shielded by the careful hands of his older brother. That he couldn’t remember was, to Jacob, of utmost importance. Caleb’s mind was too new to have to bear the horrors of the war that had come before. The war was over, and had been over, for countless days or weeks - he’d stopped counting the sunsets long ago - and that it was over was the only truly important thing in Jacob’s mind. Caleb would ask him questions of people and of where they had come from, but with each passing day began to understand that Jacob would tell him nothing.

As the sun kissed the top of the sky and began to descend, they did what they had always done, what Caleb had always known and what Jacob refused to change: they walked. They traipsed through fields and down paths, never encountering a living soul. They fed off of the land diligently, delicately pulling at plants and peeling at skin to feast on the delicacies of the fauna. They never rushed, never took for granted, saying their graces. Jacob had taught Caleb that they must always be thankful for what they could find, and this he understood without needing to ask - days and days would separate each find, and their stomachs had given up growling between the stops, as if accepting to the pains hunger was no longer an option.

The cool warmth of the evening had put something of a spring in Jacob’s step, to Caleb’s delight. His brother’s dour demeanour was ubiquitous, and to see a crack in this stone-heartedness brought great delight to his face. He might not know where he was going, or what had gone before, but that the world had given Caleb a chance to be happy with the only person he really knew elicited a kind of relief, a gratitude that there was somebody there who could be a pillar of reassurance. And with that happiness came a gentle hunger, a desire for insight - a meek curiosity for where he and his brother were headed for next.

“Where are we going?” he asked, taking Jacob by surprise - the two stopped in their tracks amongst the summer breeze. It was the first time Caleb had asked of their ultimate destination rather than of what had come before, and this optimism on his younger brother’s part warmed Jacob a little. He had, up until this point, had only the demons of the past for company, walking side by side through the wind, rain and gentle warmth of the spring.

The truth was, Jacob did not know where he was taking his little brother. His only guidance was the direction pointing away from the horrors and the grey and red of the war gone before, away from society, away from civilisation, away from the people who had destroyed all he had known. What he may have once called familiar had been distorted, and for the sake of his brother he had left it behind - there had been nobody else left to scoop Caleb up from the rubble and the mess of mangled limbs in the aftermath of the flash of white. All that mattered was ensuring his brother knew nothing of the horrors they had left behind.

He held this thought, and gripped Caleb’s tiny hand tightly as they looked towards the setting sun; the wispy clouds a pale brown against the golden hue of the darkening sky, the grass around them sweeping their dusty trousers clean of the muck of travel. The sun disappeared from view, painting the sky a bold, deep shade of blue.

“We’re going home, Caleb,” he said. “We’re going home.”

Tonight’s blog is one about mobile games, or to be more particular about it, one very notable title which stands apart from the rest. I could’ve spent tonight writing about Grand Theft Auto III and how its conversion to mobile is a sublime work to art. I could’ve even spent six hundred words waxing lyrical about Jetpack Joyride and its amazing Retina display update being a brilliant showcase for the new iPad’s razor-sharp screeACTION POTATO.

But no. Mobile Pie’s Will Luton has tonight been singing the praises of ACTION POTATO, a high-intensity adrenalin rush of an action game about potatoes, available for both iOS and Android. I beckon you to follow me into this post and enjoy the treasures withiACTION POTATO.

ACTION POTATO involves just two things: action and potatoes. The action in particular involves controlling three happy little pots who exist purely to catch potatoes with which to make potato stew. And the potatoes? Well, they’re just potatoes - but what potatoes they arACTION POTATO.

The pots of ACTION POTATO are controlled by tapping the pots, one at a time, in order to catch the potatoes. With a tap, they leap into the air and attempt to catch the potatoes. There’s no multitouch support “so that you can play simply with one finger,” guaranteeing that even the world’s biggest idiot can play it and experience the fun for themselACTION POTATO.

The closer the pot is to the potatoes approaching from the right corner of the screen, the more points the player earns - or, as the game documentation puts it eloquently, “more right pot earns more score”. Catching multiple potatoes in a row builds up a combo meter but missing any, or catching rotten potatoes turned blue with growth, shatters the combo meter. Catching blue potatoes also ruins the pot until it’s restored with a heart pick-up, and losing all three pots means game oveACTION POTATO.

And that’s all there is to it. ACTION POTATO’s action is simple, yet intense, and filled with potatoes. Never have pots and potatoes come together in such glorious harmony, nor have they provided such exciting gameplay. And, the game is free, and available on both Android and iOS - meaning that a Windows Phone port can only be around the cornACTION POTATO.

This game is so good I downloaded it twice on both my iPad and my Android phone. I uninstalled it so I could reinstall it, and then uninstalled it again so I could reinstall it again. It was almost as fun as playing ACTION POTATO for real. But then again, nothing could really compare to the intense action, or potatoes, of the amazing title that is ACTION POTATACTION POTATO.

ACTION POTATO is available for free on Apple devices through the App Store and Mac App Store, or for Android devices at the Google Play MarketplACTION POTATO.

I spent the early part of this afternoon watching another one of my favourite films, after completing a particularly strenuous piece of work. That film is Rango, the 2011 Gore Verbinski-directed animation featuring a thespian chameleon, who is voiced by Johnny Depp. Wikipedia lists it as a “family film”, and Nickelodeon had a major hand in its production. And yet plenty of reviews from both critics and users dismiss the film’s apparent universal appeal: one critic noted that “[watching it] with a big suburban preview audience was instructive. Not much laughter. Moans and sobs of pre-teen fright.” And he’d be right - despite carrying a PG rating, Rango is far from what I would call a family film, and yet its status as one of cinema’s greatest lost treasures is absolute.

These days, there’s a general sentiment that an “immature” rating being attached to a film means the movie itself has to be immature in nature. There’s even a general lean, anime aside, towards animation generally being for kids on the big screen. But Rango, for all of its lack of blood and guts, is a relentlessly mature film with references to a ton of films probably not watched by anybody born after 1995.

It’s part serious Western, part Looney Tunes escapade and entirely wonderful, but it lacks what you would call a “family” element. When the titular lizard wanders into the teeny-tiny animal frontier town of Dirt, it’s like walking into something  out of a Sergio Leone flick - the fuzzy rabbits and crusty-skinned frogs are black with dirt and soot, and spit tobacco whilst swigging red-hot cactus juice and dealing rogue aces in games of poker. The population of the town may well be assembled out of everything cute and not-so-cuddly, but they embody everything about the dark and gritty genre of the Spaghetti Western.

The amazing thing about Rango is that it chews up the expectations of the viewer extremely often, but the Western iconography is instantly recognisable. Duels, inbred weasels - literally, weasels - and banjos creep up alongside the regular town hicks and the finicky, plotting politicians planning drastic changes to the otherwise simple lives of the impoverished townsfolk. Kids probably didn’t get it, and they didn’t understand why their parents were chuckling at bats swooping down on a caravan convoy to the instrumental backing of Ride of the Valkyries, straight out of Apocalypse Now. The plot’s straight out of Roman Polanski’s Chinatown and the character of Rango has elements of Raoul Duke about him, and yet the addition of animals is inspired - but haunting if you’re under ten.

Whilst it’s a PG, Rango is excessively dark. There’s credible threats of violence and the language used to dish them out is, to say the least, disturbing. Flies have their eyes pop out; everybody carries a gun and the humour is, mostly, subtle and referential rather than laugh-out-loud slapstick. Main villain Rattlesnake Jake, a gatling-gun toting serpent voiced by Bill Nighy, is scarier and more menacing than any sub-par Disney villain. The film is not a kids’ film, despite carrying the PG rating, and thus my roundabout point comes to a head.

Despite the faux-kiddy charms and the PG rating, Rango is a film more mature and intelligent beyond its years than many films which carry a stronger rating. That a film can be graded suitable for an age bracket based on its audiovisual content is just one sign of the film’s age bracket, and plenty of old great films have, by and large, escaped censorship or regulation. Rango follows that trend by being a film that goes above and beyond its age rating - it’s an animated film for grownups, real grownups who are past viewing swearing and ultraviolence as “mature” and are looking for something more.

So much could have gone wrong. Like do many of music’s greatest supergroups, The Avengers - I refuse to use Avengers Assemble, the UK’s namby-pamby alternative title - shouldn’t have worked. The build-up in the post-credit scenes of previous films was too drawn out, the hype too much; and yet Joss Whedon has written and directed an electric and devastatingly awesome movie which successfully avoids the pitfalls that the simultaneous assembly of so many Marvel franchises could have fallen victim to.

The regular gang are all here: Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.), Thor (Chris Hemsworth), Captain America (Chris Evans) and the Incredible Hulk (Mark Ruffalo, thoughtfully voiced in monster form by Lou Ferrigno), fresh from their own movies and braced for action. Sort of. Earth is under threat from Thor’s rogue brother (Tom Hiddleston), who essentially uses a neat backdoor conjured up by a mystical object to invade Earth and plan a huge invasion. That he turns up in the underground lair of SHIELD - think the FBI, but with more superheroes - is a gift, and sets off a major recruitment drive for the organisation’s head, all-round badass Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson).

The problem, and it’s one that’s refreshing to see, is that the team who will become the Avengers don’t exactly play well together. There’s a lot of fighting early on between the group’s members, notably between Iron Man, Thor and Cap in a desolate night-time forest as they come to fists over whose responsibility the bad guy is, and it’s as hilarious at times as it is exciting. That the Hulk’s tender, exceedingly more human alter ego Bruce Banner is kept under wraps for a while is one of the film’s greatest assets, and his eventual unleashing is spectacular.

Despite being established in their own films, the homework of watching them isn’t necessarily required. A couple of made-up proper nouns are tossed about - Tesseract, Chitauri - but the basic gists of what each of these things are, and how everything works, aren’t hard to grasp. The already-established characters, it is worth noting, are kept somewhat distant from Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) - her outfits jarring with the non-sexuality of the rest of the cast - and Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner); the two are given their own slightly thin scenes in which to gently fawn over one another without very much actually happening, and their establishment is swift and somewhat two-dimensional.

The establishment of the Avengers unit itself is, it must be said, a little on the slow side, but the pacing is redeemed when the action picks up and a whole bunch of warring alien bandits are unleashed on an unsuspecting New York City. The catastrophic destruction of the city will, without a doubt, blow several minds, and set fanboys’ mouths foaming with frantic delight. There’s an excellent, CG-fuelled pan across a city block showing the six heroes kicking their own unique type of ass in a few split-second sweeps, and it had my inner kidult punching towards, and directly through, the ceiling thirty feet above my head. But there is a sense that, outside of this shot, the heroes were really sparring off of one-another for screentime, and it’s the Nordic-inspired Thor who ends up having the most interest invested in him, owing to his relationship with the film’s villain, whom Hiddleston plays with a brilliant edge verging on camp. But any potential family drama is averted through ostentatious use of explosions and fisticuffs, to detract from any risk of our heroes softening up at the wrong moment.

The script is sharp, the timing of the surprisingly frequent comedy perfection, and the conclusion and mid-credits scene (stick around for a couple of minutes) sure to set tongues waggling. But whilst The Avengers works, there’s something two-dimensional about some of the characters, as if Whedon crammed just that little bit too much in, causing a couple of loose cracks. And there’s still that issue with the pacing of the first hour or so - and this is a long film. Yet for all of the little shortcomings, the fact that a film of this long a build-up and of its galactic level of hype has formed something other than a car crash of the most horrendous level is to be commended, and that Whedon by and large kept a lid on the whole thing without it imploding in on itself is surely a feat as heroic as anything the film’s characters have to offer.

I went to see The Avengers in 3D and, save for some squinting during some nightime scenes, it did the job of adding some entertaining value, but only because the post-converted 3D jarred so badly with the genuinely 3D CGI - as ironic as that statement may be. The combination of “real” 3D with cardboard-cutout live action lifted the on-screen action up to a level of more believable falsity, like a Ray Harryhausen special effect, perhaps actually increasing my enjoyment of the film because of how plainly obvious and yet spectacular the false images became.

Alongside semi-regular film reviews, I’ve drawn up a list of games which I picked up a long while ago and never played or finished - it is my gaming pile of shame. To celebrate finishing each Pile of Shame game, I’ll be writing them up as a post like this, and you can all chip in and tell me how late I am to the party. This week, it’s the turn of Epic Games’ (Gears of War) and People Can Fly’s OTT shooter Bulletstorm.

To say that Bulletstorm is brash, bold and laddish is an understatement. It’s a lager-swilling, loud-mouthed, burping, farting pig of a game, kicking you in the nads for daring to question it and knocking you on the head for good measure. It’s set in a sci-fi universe where militarisation is ripe across the galaxy and Grayson Hunt, the player’s character, is a hard-ass black-ops soldier who embraces the loutish attitude with all of his being.

Hunt and his ragtag team of soldiers form a unit called Dead Echo, sent on assassination missions on behalf of their Tea Party commanding officer to kill dangerous criminals. They only twig that they might be doing something wrong when tapping into the emails of a recently-exploded target and discover that he’s not so much a hardened criminal as he is an innocent civilian recording their exploits of widespread homicide. When a rather explosive attempt at wreaking revenge on their CO goes wrong, Hunt and surviving half-cyborg comrade Ishi find themselves stranded on an alien planet with just each other, and some particularly meaty assault rifles, for company.

The mutated population of this alien planet makes up the game’s cannon fodder, and the great news is that there’s a lot of them, and plenty of ways to deal with them. Bulletstorm’s unique kick is its system of “Skillshots”, which reward creative skills and splatters with points which can be used to upgrade and buy new weapons. Hunt can kick people away - usually into sharp objects - or use a hand-worn electric ‘leash’ to reel them in, and then blow them to kingdom come. The combination of gunplay and these extra actions are designed to be used in tandem with one another to produce something a little more refreshing than just shooting people in a hyper-real war environment a la Call of Duty.

Skillshots become a test of instinct and observation, and it’s the surprise of finding them that makes the game so fun. Huge drops guarantee a “Vertigo” bonus, sharp cacti become useful impalement posts and explosive barrels can be used to send several targets flying into the air, at which point they slow down so fatal shots can be lined up and executed by the player. There are some skillshots which are just crude, and hilariously so: the “Rear Entry” shot rewards precise shooting directed at somebody’s backside, and a “Mercy” shot involves a swift bullet to the nads followed by a shot to the head in order to spare the target any more pain. It’s immature, and unapologetically so, which is part of the game’s appeal.

That the game’s script is equally childish should come as no surprise, and Bulletstorm’s scriptwriters deserve some kind of award for their creativity when it comes to the use of swearwords. “Dicktits”, “ugly buttfuckers” and “Son of a dick” are some of the game’s best highlights, and they’re too funny in their ridiculousness to even stand a chance of being offensive. That said, the Polish developers of the game from People Can Fly were surprised at how the game’s potty-mouth was received by some when it released: they just found the excessive swearing funny, as they rightly should have.

While there’s no competitive multiplayer on offer, Bulletstorm offers up a pretty healthy single-player campaign and a co-operative mode called “Echoes”, but these days the online servers are pretty much abandoned. That said, the game can be found very cheaply in a lot of places, and there’s an Amazon link at the bottom of this post if you’re interested in buying it. All-in-all, I’d say that Bulletstorm is worth an investment if you haven’t played it and need a quick, cheap fix - it’s more colourful, more fun, and more entertaining than Call of Duty or Battlefield, and is only let down by the fact that, these days, it is essentially limited to its single-player campaign. That this campaign is very, very good means the limited nature of the title shouldn’t put you off from giving it a shot. Dicktits.

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Reading today about Google’s plans to finally launch Drive, a cloud-based file storage service, encouraged some ironic blue-sky thinking. Microsoft’s got SkyDrive, Apple devices get iCloud and there’s the ever-ubiquitous Dropbox, which has more than 50 million users across the world and has recently been invested in by Bono and The Edge, the two most annoying men in rock and roll. Discussions on Twitter point to Google Drive integrating with the huge number of cloud-based services the Silicon Valley giant already gives to users for free, which begs the question - why bother?

The variety of services Google already provides is staggering to the point of being overwhelming. Users can collaborate live on Word documents and spreadsheets using Google Docs and, if still on Google+, can even have their phone automatically upload all of their photos to the service for safe-keeping. Google Music, when/if it’s launched in the UK, will allow users to stash 20,000 tracks in the cloud for streaming on mobile phones. And then there’s Picasa Web Albums, Gmail, Google Calendar…the list goes on. Google’s cloud services are a menagerie of tools with great purposes in mind when they act independently. Trying to integrate them all into this other cloud service is a headache waiting to happen.

And even if the service does launch successfully with decent integration, how many people will make the leap? Spotify Premium allows for any and all music tracks on the service to be stored offline on phones and music players, rather than just those that the user owns, and Dropbox is compatible with every single device under the sun and now offers automatic phone and digital camera backup - and these can all be shared with a link requiring no registration.

When it comes to using Google services, my actual use of them varies. Gmail is an obvious candidate for regular use because it’s genuinely useful - the same goes for Google Docs and Google Calendar. But for cloud file access and backup without batting an eyelid, I use Dropbox. The desktop integration means that sharing files on a regular basis is drag-and-drop simple, and I can take a photo on my phone and have it sitting on my hard drive moments later. 

I do also use iCloud, simply because it’s there and it’s very well-integrated with both my laptop and my iPad. It’s a comfort to know that photos and other things are saved, more than anything, and being able to write something in the pure and focused iA Writer and see it appear on my laptop for formatting is hugely convenient. But cloud apps on my phone, like Google Docs and the like, generally go unused, and two-step verification to keep my Google account secure makes every log-in on a new computer a pain. 

In short, Google Drive’s problem is penetrating the barrier of usability and necessity. With so many distinct ”cloud-plus” services (collaborative emails and shared calendars) already available, what use is an extra storage space when there are companies doing it better? For ease-of-use and practicality, Google has their work cut out when Drive launches, and I won’t find myself using it too often when there’s so many other services out there doing it better or with a better sense of purpose.

Gone is one of those rare films in which everything that can go wrong does. Jill Conway (Amanda Seyfried) is a woman convinced that she was abducted and left to die in a hole a year previously, but the police and her sister Molly (Emily Wickersham) are sceptical, owing to her time spent in a mental institution. Then Molly disappears, and Jill’s appeals for help fall on deaf ears - so she turns private eye and essentially falls at every hurdle in her attempt to track down the kidnapper.

But the storyline of Gone is not the biggest issue at hand. It’s tedious, generic, as grey as the landscapes of Portland it depicts, and a better third act is sandwiched between the wanting quality of everything that came before and a poorly thought-out ending. The title is, I’d hope, a reference to the audience after the first ten minutes.

The meat of the tale involves Jill’s pursuit of her nameless, faceless killer after the police send her on her way, save for the new kid (Wes Bentley) who offers to help her out. He’s played out as a shifty type, like he might be suspicious, but like many things in the film he is misrepresented and poorly constructed, and it turns out he doesn’t really add anything to the film save for a few minutes of vacant stares. Much of the film is like this, but Jill’s private detective work is painfully ill-conceived.

From a run-down locksmith store to a hardware vendor and beyond, all whilst evading the law after pulling a gun in public, Seyfried plays Jill as a wide-eyed moron who wildly flails about and squeals like an irritated child. There’s nothing to like, nothing to root for, and the connections she makes are constructed with the laziest of links. There’s too many convenient things for her to pick up on - a discarded receipt, a shop assistant who knows that little bit too much about a random stranger - and the red herrings bore rather than surprise, as you can bet your bottom dollar that somebody will show up with an all-too-handy hint showing where to go next.

When the action turns from a hunt into a direct pursuit, there’s actually a little masterstroke of tension to be found. The latter scenes take Jill down a darkened forest path with just the headlights of a 4x4 and the voice of a potential abductor on speakerphone for company, and there’s slight relief when things reach a conclusion. But the sequence and the ending that follows are both so mind-numbingly bad, and badly scripted, that any plaudits which came before evaporate into the ether, replaced by frustration at director Heitor Dhalia for messing up so much.

Gone joins the ranks of films such as The Devil Inside in that it was not screened for critics. That distributor Summit Entertainment saw fit to blank reviewers speaks volumes about their confidence in the film and in Dhalia. I keep my fingers crossed in the hope that he isn’t given any work for a while.

Read more film reviews, including The Cabin In The Woods and Battleship.

Hey, did you hear? There’s been some civil unrest in the kingdom of Bahrain for, ooh, about a year and a bit now. People aren’t really very happy with the King of Bahrain, but the problem is that each time they speak up, they end up battered, bloodied, or just shot. It’s not the best life to be living.

But you know what that country needs? Expensive cars and extremely rich people watching them!

The 2012 Bahrain Grand Prix has been and gone after much umming and ahhing over whether or not the race would go ahead. Last year, the race was canned due to fears of drivers and crew coming to harm at the hands of either protesters or those brought in to contain them, and even then was only cancelled following an initial postponement period of four months. This year, money seems to have won outright in favour of making a crucial and wise statement.

A protester has died and Force India mechanics have found themselves in harm’s way - and yet the race has gone ahead regardless. What gives? It’s all to do with dosh - Bahrain’s economy is one of the fastest-growing in the world and a mass unemployment rate (4% of the population) and the recent dissent would suggest that this great wealth is probably in the hands of few rather than many. And these people would probably enjoy spending a vast portion of their weekend, and their wealth, at an exotic motor race.

Essentially, in allowing the Bahrain Grand Prix to go ahead, governing body FIA has condoned the torture and censorship of the Bahrain regime, so that Bernie Ecclestone can pocket a few extra pennies from some rich Arabs. Widespread condemnation from both world figures and some sponsors has been ignored, and the government of Bahrain has seen fit to claim that the country is “UNIF1ED”, using the F1 event as ammo for support of the regime. Which I’m pretty sure isn’t allowed. Or shouldn’t be.

Not really sure what else to write here, save for more generic disagreement with the weekend’s events. But as a whole, my opinion of F1 and its governing body has dropped a level or two. Suppose I should get back to reviewing films.