The Drake brothers probably can’t believe their luck. The Hangover cost $35m to make and has taken $400m and the box office and counting. Among its stars that aren’t stars is semi-obscure stand-up comedian Zach Galifianakis, who the writer/director siblings of Visioneers cast as their leading man. Visioneers couldn’t be more different from The Hangover, though. Because it’s shit.

This somnambulant nightmare of a movie stands to benefit Galifianakis more than anyone else – not least the people who watch it – for the sole reason that it gives him a chance to show off his serious acting chops, which should be enough to prop up half of a ‘tears of a clown’ style article when his friend and peer Patton Oswalt debuts as a dramatic leading man in Big Fan later this year, which is the directorial debut of the writer of that and The Wrestler and looks much better than Visioneers, for the following reasons:

This isn’t anything new. The look, tone and overriding point of Visioneers – it’s pious enough to have one – has already been done to death. Modern life is rubbish, advertising is bad but it works, the president is a corporate pawn, people are enslaved by their day jobs, values that are not our own are being pushed onto us, which we adopt out of a sense of blind conformity and – guess what?! – it makes us unhappy. These are points all made by better actors speaking better dialogue in better stories with better plots in the following films: A Clockwork Orange, Office Space, Network, American Beauty, The Wizard Of Oz, Videodrome and, fuck it, even I Heart Huckabees, which isn’t any good. Visioneers recalls all and sometimes borrows from some of these films at one point or another, but never swerves from its tired, plodding pacing, as if any kind of momentum or spark would constitute betraying its own lofty but deathly boring and pretentious ideals.

It’s not anything different. It is possible to be derivative and break some new ground. Parody and satire rotate on that axis, whereas Visioneers can’t even rip off better films and try to blind anyone who watches it with its earnestness, because the characters it features are all underwritten: Galifianakis’s character, George, is the embodiment of impotent rage, flanked by a wife who does nothing but act as a sop to his discontent. You wouldn’t get a more chauvinistically written female character outside a Judd Atapow movie; her moment of clarity is a lumpen, unmoving outpouring 75 minutes into the movie, 73 minutes after anyone with two brain cells to rub together has figured out the target of its dreary satire. Elsewhere we get the corporate shill hanging from the top of his monolithic company like a Christmas tree fairy; a fraudulent TV demagogue; a vapid personal trainer; a hippie brother staging a revolution in their back garden that’s really just a load of hippies doing an afternoon of athletics and a son we don’t see. Oh, and a love interest who turns out to be beautiful when we and our protagonist finally see her face.

It’s a comedy that’s not funny. Billed as a ‘black comedy’, the humour doesn’t go beyond affording the audience a few opportunities to look down their noses at popular culture, should they be intellect-free aspiring intellectuals. George’s middle name is Washington and his recurring escapist fantasy is about embodying the General and leading a battle against… oh Christ, need I go on? He hates his wife and wants to fuck off with someone he’s fallen in love with over the phone, basically, and we’re meant to root for him on the off-chance that we might empathize with him.

Finally, there’s no pay off. Visioneers wraps itself up with the trite, closed ending of a Hollywood romcom. After George’s wife gets her ghost in the machine out, it’s as if the writers simply ran out of ideas. There’s an implausible payoff about the secret behind the success of George’s company that’s nothing more than a lazy accusation that big organizations are the Bad Guys and that these things don’t grow out of human qualities like ambition, George saves himself and gets the girl. Arrogance isn’t the preserve of the rich and powerful and there’s never a doubt in the viewers’ mind how this film will end.  Instead of freeing himself from the ties the bind him, George shackles himself to doing what he wants, all the time. The people who do that end up successful and alone, not happy and in love.

The Ultimate Fighter is the UFC’s answer to reality TV and, given how the UFC is martial arts’ answer to cockfighting, you can imagine the grace and sensitivity with which they’ve risen to the occasion.

For its ninth season, TUF pitched a team of UK fighters against counterparts from the US. The program was broadcast on both sides of the Atlantic, but the producers lacked the cultural sensitivity to bother taking out the subtitles under the British fighters when it arrived over here, buried on Virgin1, with each episode playing several days after it had been broadcast in America. Also, if you’re watching Virgin1 at 11pm on a Sunday night there’s a good chance you can’t read, so it was doubly offensive.

Not as offensive as Team America, though. Making fun of Americans is easy, lazy, racist, and ignorant, but that’s no reason not to do it when they really deserve it.  The American team excelled at chanting USA! USA! and, well, not much else, it turned out. Holed up in a Big Brother-style house with their opponents, when they weren’t praying, crying, talking obsessively about themselves or blandly about nothing in particular, the cracks soon started to emerge and the in-fighting promptly began. The resident black sheep was Jason Pierce, who took issue with his teammates’ occasional beer-drinking and revelry as well as their inability to be pious, humorless pricks like him. I mean, just look at him:

By the quarterfinal stage, this band of foster brothers were lining up to kick each others’ asses, rather than those of their enemies from across the sea. Which is just as well, really, as the best fighters on (shudder) Team UK mopped the floor with them every time they were asked to do so. Pierce withdrew due to a mystery injury, asked to be re-instated in time to fight, had his request denied. Skip forward a few more cut scenes of 30 grown men sitting around dressed like retarded gangbangers and he’s feeding his teammates’ British opponents notes on how the Americans plan to fight. Brilliantly, he denied this to camera, despite being filmed cutting his bros’ balls off earlier that day. The levels of idiocy and anti-climax were then jacked up as Team USA leader, UFC ‘legend’ (it says here) Dan Henderson, failed to react or stamp any kind of authority on the situation. Instead, he continued to walk and talk like Robocop on a diazepam bender, as he had done for the whole series.

Team UK, in contrast, seemed like a riot. Ignoring the terrible name and half-arsed attempt at getting their own chant going, this was a bunch of guys from a variety of cultural and class backgrounds, from regions of the country that are a world away from each other, who simply turned up and got on with it, having a good time and making some new friends in the process. All the things that Team USA should’ve done, if they’d bothered to learn their own ideology and, well, the tournament rulebook. The only arsehole in the UK pack was their leader, TUF 3 winner and now established UFC fighter Michael Bisping, and he was more of a good-natured maniac, truth be told.

Brilliantly, all the best aspects of British culture unfurled themselves before Team USA’s nonplussed eyes. They had accents that didn’t sound like a Hugh Grant or a Guy Ritchie film, they ran riot around their side of the house partying on their nights off, and for their final meal they dressed up nicely with a range of shirts that seem to span Moss Bross to Burtons, sat down for a meal together and had Bisping give them a 30-second speech at the end of it about how proud of them all he was, delivered with the mumbling grace of a emotionally-repressed tough guy. A real man, in other words. Then one of them threw a teammate into the swimming pool and got dragged in and then coated in flour for his troubles.

To be fair, not all the Americans were wankers. Californian army kid Frank Lester was allowed the only credible breakdown on their team, when he subbed for arch-bottler Pierce, won his second chance bout and then fell at the last hurdle for qualifying to fight in the finale. Seeing a twenty-five year-old man with a kid to support learn that he is not quite good enough to do something for a living that he’s worked harder for than most people will ever work for anything was stirring stuff and, mercifully, the producers didn’t milk it. Lester’s admission in the final episode to one of Team UK that the only reason he didn’t like him at first was because his teammate lost to him was typical of his likable, candid honesty, too, and handily emphasized the problem with most of the arrogant tossers with whom he shared a camp. Likewise, Alaskan rube Richie Whitson stayed on good terms with eventual Lightweight champion Ross Pearson, even after Pearson had accidentally spread Whitson’s nose across his face with a late blow in their bout.

The only American to make the pay-per-view finale was DaMarques Johnson who, when he wasn’t wearing his baseball cap at a ridiculous angle and talking about what a badass he was and how the strength of his faith inspired him, got a squirt of water up his nose from Bisping’s water bottle for being such a prize dickhead. When Bisping went to apologise 30 seconds later, Johnson was too busy brooding in the car park and rushing to find a camera to tell that he’d kick Bisping’s ass, given half the chance. He also had a king-sized bug up his arse about the other Welterweight finalist, James Wilks, presumably because Wilks had the temerity to be well-spoken, polite and really quite good. Johnson earned his spot in the final with some impressive bouts but was promptly found out at the PPV and ended up tapping out in the first round, with implicit recommendation that he not let the octagon’s door hit him on the arse on the way out.

Next up is TUF 10 which, for the sake of diversity will feature only heavyweight fighters. It will definitely lack the peculiarities of 9 that gave it great moments of unintentional comedy and cod sociology, so we’ll just have to go back to enjoying watching half-naked men beating the crap out of each other, which is where we came in…

Well, here it is, folks: the worst film ever made by anyone, ever. Sure, there have been blockbusters in the past that had nonsensical plots (Pirates of the Caribbean 3, the last Star Wars prequel), suffocating amounts of cultural imperialism (Independence Day) and terrible acting (take your pick), but the way in which Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen brings it all together is spectacular. Sadly not compelling, because that would imply that the film is worth watching, but it’s bad enough to offend anyone with a brain in their head and shortchange the rest of the cinema-going public, who want bright lights and lots of smashy-smashy.

From what I remember – dizzy, confused and still feeling slightly violated, 24 hours after the fact – the whole thing pivots around the Autobots and humans stopping the Decepticons activating a machine buried on Earth to harvest the sun. We learn that six ancient Transformers built the machine but swore not to use it on planets that had any life on them. All well and good, except the opening scene shows the Transformers duking out with some spear-carrying types on earth, which makes the fact that they installed the machine on earth a) pointless and b) contrary, seeing as they seemed happy enough to smash the shit out of our ancestors.

The Fallen is basically Hasbro’s imagining of a cross between Emperor Palpatine and Don Corleone; the one surviving ancient Transformer who decided to harvest the Sun anyway and promptly got bitchslapped into outer space by his peers. To be honest he never should’ve been involved in the original sun-harvesting process: I’ve found that people with glowing red eyes and a rasping, demonic voice rarely work well as part of a team.

Maybe that glaring plothole upon which the whole film is based means I missed something. All I really know was by the time Shia LaBeouf showed up I wanted to see some fucking robots, not spend every scene he’s in wondering if he’s the next Harrison Ford or the next Mark Hamill, because of the IQ-reducing, solipsistic dialogue he’s forced to hack up throughout. “It will work because I say it will work,” is about as inspired as it gets, when he has a moment of clarity during the never-ending final showdown an Egyptian desert.

Likewise, I don’t know if Megan Fox is a good actress or not, as the decision to dress her in hot pants and slap her lips with a retina-scorching layer of gloss meant I couldn’t do more than sit and gawp at how beautiful she is, which was probably the point. All the ingredients needed to make a movie of this type are present: actors, cameras, CGI, editing software and presumably, somewhere, a script, but as Michael Bay gallantly jettisoned any notion of telling a coherent story, the end result is something that looks like a movie but carries itself like a portmanteau of different types of shit.

This is all because the robots are the only thing we’re encouraged to care about, so here’s what wrong with them: Optimus Prime blows away his first Decepticon of the movie after calling him a punk ass bitch, or something similar, which I can’t see Orson Welles signing up for, even at his lowest ebb. Given how the modern incarnation of the character still speaks like Brian Blessed using Stephen Hawkins’ vocoder, it’s a bit like hearing your parents recite their favourite Snoop Dogg lyrics. A couple of mildly entertaining Autobot ‘twins’ soon turn into this century’s answer to the crows from Dumbo – I was surprised their ‘upgrade’ 10 minutes in didn’t involve them turning into vans that delivered fried chicken and watermelon, or at very least a convoy carrying Soul Plane DVDs. In the interest of race relations, they don’t kill them off like they did the Autobot with the black person’s voice in the first film. Also, Tyrese Gibson bros down with Optimus Prime in one scene, while we all sit through the tedium of the stuffed shirt/fall guy bashing through a “Let me get this clear…” speech, reeling off all the plot points we need to remember from the first movie to comprehend what the hell’s going on in this one. The old adage of Hollywood films saying something once, then again, then showing someone doing it if it’s important gets condensed down here into 90-second bursts. I can only assume from this that you need to suffer from severe short term memory loss and chronic stupidity to appreciate this film as intended.

Not that it’s worth mentioning, but the initial fucking about of a storyline involving LeBeouf’s character going to college plays like American Pie spliced with Terminator 3 and appears pasted in like the missing reel from another movie. The poor woman who plays his mother has clearly been instructed to overact even more than last time, so we get her losing her mind after half a hash brownie and a pointless dig at France when his parents pop up there at one point – don’t ask – which I’m not complaining about, being British, but it’s yet another example of all the tedious shit they left in because no-one can be bothered to edit big summer movies down to 90 minutes anymore.

The brief appearance of some Jordanians provides the final twist of casual racism/cultural imperialism, as they get announced as backup only to be blown to smithereens within about five seconds of making it onscreen. No white people or characters integral to the franchise die, obviously, which is good news for that one British soldier from the last film, who appears to have had his US-UK army exchange program placement extended, and Megatron, who dips in and out of the film like his agent took one look at the script and wisely advised his client not to get too involved.

I went to a late showing on a Monday night where people laughed in the wrong places, groaned when the soundtrack was briefly quiet enough to hear anything else and even those audience members of simple pleasures were noticeably fidgety and bored during anything other than the fight scenes, which were oddly spaced out and therefore unedifying, compared to the first film.

Revenge of the Fallen has nothing to say, and even if it did, no one involved with making the film would be capable of articulating it.

RUTHLESS PLAYER OF THE YEAR: STEPHEN IRELAND

He didn’t win anything or even play for anyone good, but there are plenty of reasons to crown Stephen Ireland Ruthless Player Of The Year 2009. First off, he was the best player on a Manchester City side that was somehow more shoddily and expensively assembled than last season’s, two years into their acquisition by a Sheik with too much time and money on his hands. Ireland, fittingly, cost the club nothing and has been there since he was a trainee.

Secondly, this was the first season Ireland consistently grabbed headlines for being a midfield dynamo and not lying about the death of both grandmothers, one after the other, to avoid international duty for reasons probably unknown to even himself. He’s a mad bastard prone to driving around in a pimped out 4×4 with neon pink rims and a matching My Little Pony dangling from the rear view mirror, when he’s not showing his skilful shirker of a team-mate Robinho what it means to turn up and play every week.

Thirdly, he’s due an award but hasn’t had one. He lost out on the PFA Young Player Of The Year Award to Aston Villa’s Ashley Young, who had a great season but didn’t really do anything better than Ireland other than be English and not have a terrible tattoo of a pair of wings covering his entire back.

Finally, just like Ruthless Reviews 3.0, Ireland has shown that rebirths are possible, even when the man behind it is as brilliant as he is, well, let’s be polite and say ‘flawed’. So for that, Stephen, we salute you.

THE HOUSE OF COMMONS AWARD FOR ARROGANCE: DIDIER DROGBA

Drogba’s outburst after his team, Chelsea, were robbed of at least two penalties and promptly dumped out of Europe by a last minute goal from Barcelona has been documented everywhere, with everyone seemingly missing the point as to why it was offensive.

In a nutshell, football fans hate Chelsea. They hated them for being racist thugs with dirty players before their shady Russian owner showed up and bought two league titles; they hated them afterwards for doing it. The sense of bewildering entitlement that their players carry around with them has, inevitably, become their undoing as managers rarely last more than a season.

When Drogba lost the plot and started swearing into a TV camera that he went and found about how fucking disgraceful their elimination was, he handily glossed over the fact that half his team had, as usual, been screaming in the face of the bollock-free referee during the game in a manner that would’ve resulted in a flurry of red cards, had the official decided to grow a pair. Also, given the 120 minutes of tedious anti-football Chelsea had consigned themselves to in an effort to beat the best passing side in the world, everyone watching should have been allowed to scream in the faces of Drogba and his fellow excuses for footballers that night.

The most surprising thing about it was that a player who’s pissed and moaned about his big money move that granted him fame, fortune, and medals every season since joining Chelsea from French nobodies Marseille actually looked like he gave a shit after the final whistle for once.

THE DEPENDS AWARD FOR SHITTING THE BED: LIVERPOOL

It was bound to happen, really. Liverpool, previously the most successful English team of all time, haven’t won a league title for two decades. In Rafael Benitez, they’ve got a manager skilled in picking his way through and punching above his weight in European club competition, but when Liverpool bossed the first half of the season all right-minded football fans watched through their fingers.

With only two match-winners in their whole squad, Fernando Torres and Steven Gerrard, they struggle to be taken seriously as a major footballing force at the best of times these days, having to settle for a mild sense of injustice following them around when a team with donkeys like Djimi Traore and Igor Biscan can win Europe’s highest club competition, as they did when they smashed and grabbed the Champions League in 2005.

Topping the table and never having slipped below third place halfway through the season at Christmas, they kicked off 2009 by drawing nil-nil with freshly promoted Stoke, who tend to play human Battleship rather than any recognizable form of football when they’re out on the pitch. It was the latest of a string of easy matches they should’ve won, which allowed Manchester United to finally nip past them and stay there for the remainder of the season.

Just as it was all about to go gloriously tits-up, Benitez appeared at a news conference with his now-famous dossier of evidence, showing how, in his mind, Man United had an unfair advantage in the league when they weren’t faking the moon landing, assassinating JFK and inventing Swine Flu. Looking on as a still-talented manager completed his transformation into another clichéd, paranoid Scouser – presumably by osmosis – it was all a bit like watching this guy talk about wrestling:

THE JS MILL AWARD FOR SERVICES TO THE COMMON GOOD: NEWCASTLE UNITED

Unlike Liverpool fans, Newcastle supporters know that their team has been a joke for years. To illustrate this point, I shall quote a perfect explanation of a team who’ve won nothing for over 50 years but persist in calling themselves a ‘big club’ from one of their supporters, who posts in the hallowed Ruthless Kickball Forum.

Otaku Joe says:

My team, Newcastle Utd, is the team to support for the following reasons:

1. Never ever boring as something is always going on at the club.
2. That something is seen by everyone else as a major crisis.
3. Our last chairman [Freddie Shepherd] had a thing for big titted-blonde Spanish lesbians and he told the whole world about it [in a sting by one of the British tabloids]. Howz that for chutzpah?!
4. Last chairman [Shepherd, again] was a thieving cunt who paid for his brothel trips with my fucking season ticket money.
5. We have a new manager on average every six months.
6. Masochistic? We are definitely the club for you. See our recent games versus any of the top four scum [Liverpool, Man Utd, Arsenal and Chelsea].
7. We are the northernmost English Premier League club [not anymore, keep reading] therefore we have a “them and the rest are just wankers” mentality.
8. You can never, ever be accused of being a glory-hunter.
9. The women who support the club have the sexual voracity of Rottweilers – or so I’ve been told.
10. We are managed by a foul-mouthed cunt [Joe Kinnear] from his hospital bed [sadly not anymore, as he's sacked/better now].
11. Fact: We have the best football strip on the planet.
12. Fact: We are a band of brothers descended from Norse rapists.
13. Due to the nature of the club you will always be on the verge of being a very pissed drunkard.
14. If you are a manic depressive -welcome home.
15. Any homosexual tendencies? We always take it up the arse, so you’ll fit right it.
16. The media hate us as they think it’s too far to come up north to watch the game.
17. The media are always talking about us.
18. Now owned by a chairman [Mike Ashley] who just lost 2 billion on the bingo.
19. You can sing “If you see a glory-hunter, clap your hands!” with gusto.
20. No matter how bad you think it can get, you’re always wrong. It gets worse.

If that sounds like a soap opera it’s, well, you get the idea…

In a new era of irresponsible spending and terrible business decisions, Newcastle led the pack in the top flight this season. A club stocked with overpaid rejects from across the globe was dragged down by a self-made man who clearly got lucky making his riches, only for it to run out in drastic fashion.

With the likeable characters and flashy, attacking football of Kevin Keegan’s (first) reign as manager in the ’90s long gone, Newcastle United stopped being everyone’s second favourite club and turned into the oikish, obnoxious problem child of the Premier League a while ago. Unsurprisingly, hiring their recently retired all-time top goalscorer, management novice and all round arrogant prick Alan Shearer, didn’t cut it and this year, every neutral football fan got one of their permanent wishes granted: to see an established top flight club get relegated. As for a ‘fire sale’ of Newcastle’s best players, it’ll probably end up resembling a jumble being flogged out of a car boot.

THE ZACK DE LA ROCHA AWARD FOR SPEAKING YOUR MIND: CARLOS TEVEZ

Carlos Tevez looks like a werewolf, runs around like he needs his shots and just might be a world class second striker. After a dodgy deal initially sent him to play for mid-table wideboys West Ham, Tevez looked to have finally got a fair shot with his move to Manchester United on loan two years ago. Problem was, they already had Wayne Rooney; a player in the same mould who is slightly younger, slightly better and a lot more English.

Having finally gotten sick of being shunted out the team by chances like Anderson and inconsistent performers like Dimitar Berbatov, towards the end of this season Tevez finally had enough. He kept quiet, stayed professional, ignored his bleating, parasitic agent and made every effort to keep working hard and sign a permanent deal at the club for the start of next season.

Man Utd responded with typical big team arrogance: no sustained starts on the pitch and dicking around and postponing new contract talks off it, in a transparent bid to run down his transfer price, something the player has no control over.

So now he’s politely told them to fuck off and is going to sign for their crosstown rivals, the newly mega-rich Manchester City. City are a shit team with an imbalanced squad and have egregious owners who won’t let the manager do his job. Still, they’ll pay Tevez £140k a week after tax and hopefully he’ll land somewhere they appreciate him as much as the blue side of Manchester will do when the shit eventually hits the fan.

THE T4 AWARD FOR AN INFERIOR SEQUEL: JOSE MOURINHO

This wouldn’t be a football article written by an English football fan if it didn’t handily ignore every other major league in the world game, so here’s a concessionary closer: Jose Mourinho transformed Chelsea into a team that pissed the league title, working for another bored billionaire owner whose ignorance and interference ultimately made his life a living hell, not least when he sided with overrated, egocentric cunts like John Terry and forced Mourinho out two years ago. This season he resurfaced in Italy and the world held its breath.

What did we get? Inter strolled to another domestic title in a race that looked like Usain Bolt vs. 17 extra-chubby renaissance pin-ups and got dumped out of the Champions League by a Manchester United team who had rings run round them by Barcelona in the final.

Sure, he managed to piss off politicians, league officials and rival managers by still being a petulant, outspoken little shit, but it just wasn’t the same. If you’re reduced to buying playmakers from third-quarter Premier league table specialists like Portsmouth as one of your closest former charges passes up the opportunity to join your revolution – Sulley Muntari and Frank Lampard, respectively – then you know you’re a big fish in a muddy puddle.

Hopefully, when he gets bored, he’ll be back.

When Michael Owen was 17, he made his first team debut for Liverpool in the Premier League. Small, boyish and wearing a kit that looked two sizes too big for him, he proceeded to tear Wimbledon or Crystal Palace or whoever it was a new one with his blistering pace and tireless work rate. I don’t think he scored and I’m too lazy to check, but the point was this: he’d arrived.

Fast forward 12 years and he cuts a forlorn figure leading the line for Newcastle, who are on the brink of relegation and long past the point of oblivion, in footballing terms. If ever there was a club in need of a coup d’état, it’s them. The usual clichés about a rich club that find themselves at the wrong end of the league table are all true – terrible signings, bloated wage bill, idiot owners and makeshift management – but Owen’s presence there adds insult to injury. His own injuries, mainly, as that times a couple of moments of poor judgement look to have terminally fucked his career.

The trouble started when Rafa Benitez took over an ailing Liverpool side who’d run their course under previous manager Gerrard Houllier, picking up a number of cups but no league titles, the prize Liverpool fans most covet since their inability to win won in the past two decades. Their record of 18 titles will be equalled this year by their fiercest rivals and biggest club in the league, Manchester United, after a particularly suicidal league campaign this season.

Owen decided that Liverpool didn’t have the stuff to move forward, so Benitez – ever a pragmatist – quickly shipped him off to Real Madrid for £8m. He was more than double that, but his contract was running down and when it was up, he could go for nothing. Real Madrid got a bargain – or at least they would, had they actually needed him. Once it became apparent they didn’t, he got few chances to shine in an alien league and the partisan press on his back. Branded a ‘junk’ signing, rumours persisted that the knee operation he had during his last days at Liverpool strengthened his durability at the cost of some of his trademark pace. He was still in his prime, though, it’s just the environment in Madrid became unworkable for him.

Meanwhile, back in England, Benitez somehow dragged a Liverpool team full of losers and bumpkins like Djimi Traore and Igor Biscan to the Champions League final. Granted, it’s anything but a league of Champions since they let the two four teams of every major league in Europe and safe-proofed the big guns with a table format instead of the do-or-die tradition, home and away leg approach of the old European Cup competition, but their unlikely victory against Chelsea in the semi-final – Owen gave studio analysis from English TV and spent the wrap-up looking like he was going to be sick with shock at what he’d inadvertently done – and even more unlikely victory against Milan in the final crowned Liverpool champions of Europe. To make things worse, he would be barracked by fans who respected rather than loved him when he made a humiliating return to Anfield for Newcastle two years later.

Owen’s return to the Premier League was inevitable but didn’t come cheap. Liverpool weren’t going to spend £16m on a player they’d sold for half that, Arsenal, Chelsea and Man Utd just plain didn’t need him and so it was left for Newcastle to weigh in with their deep pockets and delusions of grandeur.

Playing in front of a shit midfield in a team that constantly leaks goals through its awful defence, the times Owen has been fit and played for Newcastle over the past three seasons have been one long gulp from a poison chalice. Just like when David Beckham foolishly stranded himself in the USA, England games are now Owen’s only salvation, but England’s ruthless new coach Fabio Capello doesn’t pick players on their reputations, unlike his two predecessors. Before his international fall from grace and the arrival of the indomitable Wayne Rooney, people were talking about Owen breaking Bobby Charlton’s top goal scoring record. He’s still only nine short, at the age of 29.

He’ll undoubtedly leave Newcastle at the end of the season on a free transfer, but both his stature and his wage slip will suffer a blow in the process. Still, unlike Robbie Fowler, a fellow Liverpool icon who fell on footballing hard times after he left the club, Owen’s hunger for the game cannot be questioned, he still carries himself without a shred of ego and he has everything he once did an attacking arsenal that made him world class when he was 18 and scored THIS GOAL, apart from his biggest asset: his speed.

Still, the situation is not unsalvageable. If he stays in England he’ll end up at another bloated mid-table club like Spurs or Manchester City, but with regular games and no injuries he may just redeem himself. It’s a shame he’ll never win another trophy, though.

Growing up hurts. A lot. Memoirs from TV writers sound just as painful, but thankfully Paul Feig’s Kick Me – Adventures in Adolescence pays tribute to the maxim that brevity is the soul of wit. If keeping to the point weren’t enough, he also includes enough pratfalls, empathetic flashbacks and good old schadenfreude to make sure things stays interesting.

A collection of anecdotes that span from his first days at school to his high school graduation, Feig’s remembrances are qualified and partly lifted up by the fact he was the creator of Freaks and Geeks, which is the only US TV series aimed at teens to have a soul in the past 20 years. With its ensemble cast, Freaks… was routinely gut-twistingly brilliant, timeless (it was set in 1980 but made in 1999) and oddly moving in places, too. In Kick Me, Feig’s too busy sending himself up to cram all that in: laughs are delivered in place of thoughts on the strains put on a family unit, as he’s keen to paint himself as a mollycoddled wuss. He’s nothing of the sort, of course, otherwise neither Freaks and Geeks or Kick Me would exist.

There’s no room for sentimentality here, just a brilliant rendering of a young man’s folly through adult eyes. The book starts with a story of how his parents are called upon to make an elf costume for him, for the school’s Christmas play. With best intentions, they cobble together something from the stock at his father’s army surplus store. As a result, he’s “the only combat-ready elf” in the production and the first of several fist-chewing denouements unfolds. That he manages to work in run-ins with cross-dressing, playing across stumbled upon genuine Nazi regalia and recounts his first gym class of junior high in two harrowing instalments, it’s enough to wish you weren’t there but that you probably were, or at least somewhere equivalent. We’re left in no doubt that the suspicion we all have about people who are popular in school being some form of unacknowledged pure evil is abundantly true.

Girl trouble, needless to say, also makes an appearance. The fact that this book’s sequel is subtitled How I Became a 24-year-old Virgin tells you where its going, but not before he’s blown his first kiss, managed a disastrous first date with a girl who somehow stops being pretty the moment she dolls herself up and accidentally pursued a prom date to whom he’s not sexually attracted, with the feeling being mutual.

Feig’s wit and perspective is notable in a broader context for the fact that the one series he had total control over was, as elitist as it might be to say it, too smart for TV audiences. The ones who tune in en masse to maintain ad revenue with their viewing figures and make shows viable in the US, anyway. His Freaks… collaborator, Judd Apatow, continued with a natural successor, college-based Undeclared, that too was unceremoniously shitcanned. It wasn’t as good, but is now the obvious missing link between the smart, intelligent and funny storytelling and the formula that Apatow found to eventually work: broader, crasser comedies like Superbad, The 40-year-old Virgin and Knocked Up. Feig directed some episodes of Undeclared and has hardly disappeared since, working on a variety of programs. What his sole TV creation and first book both lack is the pragmatism of someone like Apatow recruiting Seth Rogan’s youth and ideas and turning both into commercial hits. Also, it’s true that Kick Me is a less accomplished novel than the similar The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid by Bill Bryson. In fairness, though, it doesn’t set the same literary goals. Instead it sets out to do one thing: make the reader laugh. In that respect, it’s faultless.

As TV gets dumber, so does its audience. In recent times, some media commentators have cited 1976 movie Network as not only a great film but sheer clairvoyance. Its central thrust – taking a rogue newsman’s on-air breakdown and turning his outcries into a concessionary viewpoint that re-enforces their stupefying values by becoming part of the same machine – is a handy stick with which to beat anyone who knows speaks out against the mediated status quo, if you’re a cynic.

Eleven years later, James L Brooks produced and directed something just as good with Broadcast News. Rather than a straight satire, it revolves around a love triangle: a lonely, depressive and gifted producer Jane Craig (played by Holly Hunter), charismatic but ignorant news anchor Tom Gruinick (William Hurt), and ambitious but awkward reporter Aaron Altman (Albert Brooks, pictured). When the best that 2009 can come up with is double-lobotomised crap like The Ugly Truth, it’s a masterclass in how to write work-based stories with a broader scope.

Altman’s unrequited love for his best friend, Craig, compounds his misery at being unrivalled at writing compelling reports, backed up with his encyclopaedic knowledge of global affairs, yet totally unsuited to any work in front of camera. Gruinick, meanwhile, steals Craig’s affections practically against her will: he’s a white knight who’s an empty suit of armour. Undereducated, promoted beyond his comfort zone as a sports news presenter but willing to learn, her ambivalence towards him exacerbates her already fragile mental state.

Gruinick’s rise to prominence is proportional to the network’s slide towards shallow, superficial reporting in the eyes of the other two. Brooks – now most famous as major player with The Simpsons – brings the best out of a strong script by giving the three leads what feels like equal screentime. It’s no irony that their jobs don’t afford them the same democracy to fight their respective personal battles. They’re all flawed and in it together. Craig’s harsh hard-headedness and loyalty to her friend makes her incapable or unwilling to understand the economic pressures on the station bosses, Altman’s unattainable dream of progressing to the role of anchor doesn’t rob him of his professionalism, so he continues to help Gruinick’s rise to the top out of sheer duty towards doing his job to the best of his considerable ability. Gruinick meanwhile, is so open and honest about his shortcomings that he never truly becomes the bogeyman seeking to replace education with entertainment. He does manage one perceived betrayal of Craig towards the end of the film, that sparks the dissolution of the group, but his endeavour is still strangely sincere. His values revolve around having the common touch and, as his work is rewarded and praised by his bosses and co-workers, his confidence grows as a result of what skills he’s learned from the other two. He’s not Lucifer and a cameo from Jack Nicholson as the network’s lead anchor, who carries himself with a polite forcefulness that commands respect, foreshadows what he may become.

With a denouement that’s something season five of The Wire could be proud of, the only thing that lets down Broadcast News is a final flash forward. The characters have all moved on, predictably in different directions, destroying any mystique about the paths they go down. Still, it avoids them descending into cliché and shows that there’s plenty of room for intellectual and populist presentation of the news, if you want it, which people do, which it while it still exists. So, perhaps what Broadcast News shows best of all is the cost of doing business.

If you want to hear a story told two different ways, read the book and watch the movie. When Let The Right One In was made into a bleak, neatly told vampire movie set in a run-down suburb of 1980s Stockholm last year, it cleaned up on the festival circuit and had its DVD screener bolt across the torrentsphere. Ironically, the latter probably robbed it of part of the box office it deserves in the wake of the feeble-minded allegories offered by summer blockbuster Twilight.

So, if you want to watch the movie, it’s now easy enough to find. The book is equally accessible to agoraphobics, provided they have a fully-functioning Amazon account, and comes similarly recommended.

The book treads the same themes and plot points as the film and even has an identical denouement, but the story is handed back to the voice that first imagined it: former stand-up and street magician John Ajvide Lindqvist. He’s also a Morrissey enthusiast (the title is derived from a Smiths lyric) who doesn’t shy away from topics like homosexuality, child abuse and the loneliness of growing up. Whether he’s condoning or condemning all of the above is a debate best left for people who like shouting at a wall: both on screen and in print, his text is allowed breathe its own life, which is slightly ironic given his predilection for the undead.

Lindqvist’s novel is pacier than its adaptation but also longer than the film version. In the movie, some characters have their stories clipped before reaching an identical fate, while others disappear entirely. Knowing how it ends initially makes these culled details seem like extraneous information when you read about them for the first time, which is a credit to the world Lindqvist has created, its strong cast of characters and the story he tells.

Luckily he’s Swedish, so the film didn’t have to clear an assault course of nervy, delusional mavens worrying about its visceral and at times unnerving subject matter to get made, but the most notable omission from the film is still an attempted rape of a child by the tale’s one paedophile character. This event and the ditched subplot it’s from briefly transports the book into zombie territory: perhaps Lindqvist didn’t realise that the world he’d created was unreal and disconcerting enough. If anything, the film benefits from its absence, becoming less a genre piece and more a meditative study of the warring agendas and contingent goals of its characters.

The film itself is so artfully, minimally shot that it both works on a budget but also emphasise the stoicism of everyone involved. If anything, that quality is reinforced by the book: here, the characters’ thoughts are described to us through internal monologue as it’s written in the third person. However, like the film, they let their actions speak louder than their words. It’s an existentialist dream, portrayed as a nightmare.

Watching the film before reading the book is a good idea. If you become infatuated by what you see on screen and want to spend more time there beyond a second viewing, the book is an invitation to be guided round by the author rather than the director, see some new sights and have what you already know described to you by a different voice, one that feels empathy for every character on the page. The back story missing from the film is kept to a minimum, serving as a case in point: it’s not essential, so you’re only ever told enough to feel compelled, but also slightly disorientated by it. In either format, Let The Right One In works as a slow-acting poison, delivered like a killer vampiric lovebite on anyone who takes the time to fully soak it up.

RUTHLESS PLAYER OF THE YEAR:

JOEY BARTON

Sometimes an individual distinguishes himself in such a unique way that all previous methods of appraisal are rendered obsolete. Meet Joey Barton: too good to play for perennial underachievers Manchester City, not really good enough to play for anyone else, which handily explains his move to peerless underachievers Newcastle United this summer.

Not leaving under a cloud so much as prickteasing a natural disaster in his wake, Barton’s off-field antics this year alone include: slagging off the predictable yet galling way in which the parade of prima donnas who now pass for the English national team sold book deals on the back of their impotent World Cup campaign (“I played shit, here’s my book,” was how he critiqued their collective efforts); baring his arse to Everton – his boyhood club – fans who goaded him after his brother was convicted of murder and, finally, hospitalising his teammate Ousmane Dabo during a training session, leaving Dabo temporarily unable to see out of one eye and consulting his lawyers.

This mix of supreme arrogance, savage violence and deft critical skills sees him embody everything this site stands for, so he is awarded the Ruthless Player of the Year. God knows he’s not going to win anything next season.

THE AWARD FOR SPORT PSYCHOLOGY & AMATEUR PROCTOLOGY:

MARK VAN BOMMEL

A dirty, moaning, diving bastard of the highest order, it’s almost a shame that Dutch midfielder Mark van Bommel hasn’t been able conjure up footballing highs to counteract those character flaws for some time now. Having traded the most loved team in Spain (Barcelona) for the most hated team in Germany (Bayern Munich), he explained the Kraut giants’ inability to manage their standard cakewalk to the league title this season – they finished fourth and were anonymous in European competition – thusly: “We need more arseholes,” he complained, miserably unaware that he was talking out of his own.

THE DICK CHENEY AWARD FOR SERVING THE COMMON GOOD:

STEVE McCLAREN

Regarded as a stinking No. 2 at last year’s World Cup, Steve McClaren’s ascension to England boss was the footballing equivalent of watching a game of musical chairs go badly wrong, with the last man standing somehow awarded the main prize. Tactically inept with delusions of grandeur, he’d be a fitting addition to the Bush administration, were he currently not busy assembling a multimillion-pound first XI from the richest league in the world to draw 0-0 with a minibus full of Eastern European milkmen six times a year. The way he watched the guy directly in front of him take a bullet and escape any real censure was the stuff vice presidents’ duck hunts are made of, too.

THE AWARD FOR SERVICES TO NATIONAL STEREOTYPES:

LIONEL MESSI

Leo Messi might look like any other skinny South American 19-year-old with a piss-poor haircut. In fact, he’s the greatest left-winger in the game right now – a point he was happy to prove when he skipped past the bulk of Getafe’s floundering defence to score for Barcelona from a run that started inside his own half. People quickly rushed to compare him with Maradona (again), to the point where he felt obligated to punch the ball into the back of the net and get away with it a few months later, thus recreating both the best and worst goals ever scored by the Argentinean legend in a single game – against England in the 1986 World Cup. If, like me, you’re English, this second goal was just as greatly appreciated as the first, as it proved conclusively that, for all their tenacity and flair, Argentineans are all cheating bastards who shouldn’t be allowed near the game that we invented, damn it. Insert you own jingoistic cheap shot about the Falkland Islands here.

THE GUNNERY SERGEANT HARTMAN AWARD FOR MOTIVATIONAL SPEAKING:

ROY KEANE

As one chin-stroking Guardian columnist said of Roy Keane’s rushed appointment as Sunderland manager, “Keane made himself a great player, but was born to be a great manager.” That’s exactly the kind of romanticised, hagiographic guff Keane has railed against with a vengeance for years.

Still, its prophecy bore truth, as he took a squad of players who were languishing at the bottom of England’s second tier and turned them into league champions in just over half a season, with minimal changes to their personnel. The fact that Keane comes with a reputation for kicking his opponents’ legs in half, telling his national manager to “stick it up his bollocks” (no, us neither, but you’d still shit your pants if he said it to you) and winning everything under the sun as club captain for Manchester United has probably instilled enough fear of failure into his players to claim a few Premiership scalps next season, following their promotion. Just look at that stare, for Chrissakes.

THE ‘BUILD YOUR OWN LAZARUS COMPLEX’ AWARD:

DAVID BECKHAM

In an industry governed by hyperbole, it takes terrible tattoos, a new hairstyle every 8 days and a trophy wife who now looks like a 33-year-old toffee apple to make it to the top. David Beckham proved all this, then felt the sharp end of a tabloid newspaper turned into a dunce’s hat by being singled out for his shit performance at the World Cup (there were 11 of them from England, at least), being dropped from the national squad and by his white elephant of a club, Real Madrid.

That was August, anyway. Since the New Year, Beckham has been riding the horse that kicked him like it was his kids’ nanny: an injury-ravaged Madrid recalled him to their first XI and saw him play, well, well, which was enough for England’s latest shyster boss to recall him to the national team. Two games, three assists and a new, really shit tattoo later, he’s a national treasure again. Agreeing to sign for LA Galaxy during his fallow period was an almighty fuck-up, but he’s now seemingly done enough to ensure that he’ll be basking in the kudos of playing on the world stage, in between Americans’ trying to figure out who the hell he is, for a few years yet.