Trashy Old Shorts

Matt? Didn't he actually used to write opinion pieces around here?

Well yes. But there's only so many times one can make the same argument, so until I either have another interesting idea (which is rare, what with my brain constantly being invaded by thoughts of armadillos) or riled enough about something else enough to want to write some withering deconstruction of it I guess I'm stuck doing reviews, and you're stuck reading them. Besides, when I have something I want to review I find the review half-writes itself and then sits in my head like a big, gloating toad, firing off all my synapses and preventing me from working or sleeping until I can expunge it somehow. And writing it down turns out to be an excellent method of expungement. Is that actually a word? Does anyone care? Ah well, at least we've got something a bit different for you this week - some trash culture reviews.

None of this stuff is new. In fact most of it is quite old so you might well have come across it already. But I've got to ditch the toads somehow, so since there's quite a few of them and they're old (did I mention they were old?) I thought I'd so some quickfire one-paragraph reviews. We've got two books, two films and two XBox (no, not 360: these are old, remember? But both are available for PC) games to get through so let's get on with it. Then we can all go back to drinking beer and smoking crack.