The hard cell

Let's get this out of the way first. The Shawshank Redemption is a stone cold classic. Even though it barely made back its production budget when released in cinemas, it didn't take too long to become a universally loved favourite. But even classics can be prone to cliché, and Shawshank is no exception.

There's the wrongly convicted man, psychopathic guards, strip-search induction, weepy new fish, a corrupt warden, maggoty food and a kindly old-timer. It's like a lag's greatest hits compilation. Plus, of course, there's all the touching scenes of male bonding, as well as plenty more scenes of male touching. If you believe the movies, there are two guarantees when it comes to prison life - manicure kits covered in cake frosting, and more aggressive man-on-man action than one of Michael Barrymore's pool parties.

So far, so predictable. Surely there's another side to life in the lock-up, besides the rapey inmates and socks full of snooker balls? For an alternative view of prison life, try picking up the DVD boxsets of Prison Break. Admittedly, its over-reliance on 'deus ex machina' plotting made it about as believable as Ryan Giggs' marriage vows, but even so, there were moments of surprising authenticity in amongst the tattooed blueprints and hot prison doctors.

Sensing that the man-on-the-run plotting of season two was in danger of losing the show's core concept, the writers decided to send their heavily-inked hero back to the clink in his third outing. Only this time, he was going to be slopping out in Panama. Rather than dealing with corrupt staff, genius engineer Michael Scofield found himself at the mercy of the inmates who had taken over the prison during a recent riot. In Sona, the only armed guards were the ones who patrolled the perimeter, with everything else falling under the jurisdiction of Lechero, a Panamanian drug kingpin. Sounds ridiculous, but it turns out, the writing team was bang on the money.

According to a new report in the New York Times, in Latin America at least, penal reform means leaving the lunatics to run the asylum. San Antonio prison on Margarita Island in Venezuela might be surrounded with sharpshooters in watchtowers, but inside it's more like Club 18-30, just with fewer tattoos.

Outdoor pools, conjugal visits, Playboy murals and even a cockfighting arena - it's no wonder the island's many holiday makers are sure to include a day-trip to San Antonio as part of their itinerary. The one-way security checks are a big bonus: walk in empty-handed, and waltz out a few hours later laden with enough crack to keep Whitney Houston hitting the high-notes for a fortnight.

Under the benevolent leadership of Teófilo Rodríguez, inmates and their guests enjoy barbecues and whisky by the pool, plus cable TV and air-conditioning in their cells. Kids are welcome too, and there's an onsite photographer who can Photoshop you and your family into a variety of backgrounds. OK, so most of the prisoners are armed, either with AK-47s and M-16s, or BlackBerries for scheduling those all-important drug deals, kidnappings and murders. But at least you don't have to put up with a Thomas Cook rep trying to sell you eight hours on a catamaran, with a complimentary pork chop at lunchtime.

Forget about rehabilitation and reform, this is just a package holiday where the package happens to be wrapped in clingfilm and muled through the security checkpoint. And even if you do have to dodge the occasional grenade attack whilst visiting the infirmary, it still beats the shit out of Magaluf.

The food's so bright, you gotta wear shades

Anyone who's ever read Eric Schlosser's extraordinary 'Fast Food Nation' is more than aware of the tricks that manufacturers will pull to get us to eat their nutritionally void products. Workers are exploited, safety laws are flouted, and child-focused marketing campaigns are managed with military precision. Food has become a scary business.

When the book was first released back in 2001, it was the exploits of the meat-packing industry that garnered all the headlines. But just as scary, if not quite so feces-focused, was the expose about the practices of the chemical companies responsible for colourings and flavourings. You might like to think that you have a cultured, sophisticated palate, but actually it's easier to fool than a sheep with learning difficulties.

Just recently, the American FDA ruled that artificial food colorants pose no real threat to consumers, despite concerns that they may be linked to hyperactivity in children. But not everyone's convinced by the ruling, maintaining that we might be better off with a diet that doesn't include a regular intake of FD&C Yellow Number 6.

Unfortunately, it's not as simple as just switching to more natural colouring solutions. In an attempt to understand the role that these chemicals play in the way we select and consume our food, test subjects at Cornell University were asked to try a variety of colourless samples of popular snacks.

Although the ingredients were exactly the same, the taste tests confirmed that people found the products bland and lacking in 'fun'. According to the study, eating a bag of Cheetos is a decidedly underwhelming experience if it doesn't leave you with the yellowed fingers of a life-long chain smoker.

It seems that our brains connect the colour of the foods we consume with our perceptions of their flavour. And since most comestibles are as grey as a wet weekend in Bradford, it's hardly surprising that the big food companies prefer their products to come with an instantly recognisable Pantone reference.

Talking to the New York Times, food chemist and spokesperson for the Institute of Food Technologists, Kantha Shelke explained “Color is such a crucial part of the eating experience that banning dyes would take much of the pleasure out of life. Would we really want to ban everything when only a small percentage of us are sensitive?” Hear that sound? That's the kerching of corporate logic.

Since the addition of yellow colouring to vanilla pudding can convince consumers that it tastes of banana or lemon, she's right when she says that "Color can actually override the other parts of the eating experience." The problem is, another crucial part of the 'eating experience' is flavour. Shelke's view seems to be: "When life gives you lemons, drop yellow colouring into water and call it lemonade."

Some manufacturers are bucking the trend, and turning to natural colourings instead. But as the NYT warns, "They are generally not as bright, cheap or stable as artificial colorings, which can remain vibrant for years. Natural colorings often fade within days." Weirdly, I'm OK with that - after all, we're talking about food, not furniture. It's supposed to have an expiration date, so I'd like to think that I'm going to eat it long before I need to worry that it's losing its lustrous hue.

I guess that, for some foods, appearance matters more than flavour. Take Coco Pops, for example, which used to promise that they were "so chocolatey, they even turn the milk brown". Interestingly, Kellogg's have just announced plans to replace their long-standing box mascot Coco the monkey with Irish bad seeds Jedward. At first the pairing seemed a little incongruous. Then again, since the cereal looks like a bowl full of little shits, maybe this is a match made in heaven.

Hairdos and don'ts

Move over, Margaret Drabble. Take a hike, Iris Murdoch. There's a new authoress on the block, and she means business. Promising plenty of subtext, allegories aplenty, and a razor-edged insight into the human condition, Nicole 'Snooki' Polizzi's debut novel 'A Shore Thing' is certain to live up to its name when it comes to selecting this year's winner of the Orange Prize for Fiction.

She may only be 4'9", but Snooki's already a towering colossus in the world of reality TV, having shot to fame as the tangerine terror of MTV's hideously compelling 'Jersey Shore'. Making The Hills look like Downton Abbey, Jersey Shore follows the misadventures of a bunch of mahogany-hued Italian Americans sharing a beach house. 

Despite a contribution to popular culture that amounts to little more than a beehive hairdo and being punched in the face in a nightclub, Snooki is the breakout star of Jersey Shore, singled out by the New York Times as the one to watch. It doesn't seem to matter that she looks like a "turnip turned on its tip", her attention-seeking behaviour has made her an easy audience favourite.

Whilst her fellow cast members pursue their own business ventures, largely based around tackily bedazzled clothing lines, Snooki has more literary ambitions, which is why she's turned her well-manicured hand to writing. With a plot that "mimics her escapades" on Jersey Shore, the book follows the adventures of two cousins, Gia and Bella, who head to the beach in search of "hot guidos, pool clubs, fried Oreos, and lots of tequila." It's like Hotel Du Lac with a six pack.

Ahead of the book's launch today, the New York Post published exclusive excerpts, and it seems that we have a new Anthony Burgess on our hands. His celebrated novel A Clockwork Orange painted an evocative picture of dystopian future, using an invented language called Nadsat that blended rhyming slang with Slavic words.

Showing a similar visionary confidence, Snooki writes boldly about "badonks", "shimmies" and "juiceheads". Here's hoping the book comes with a glossary of terms so that we can decipher sentences such as "Yum. Johnny Hulk tasted like fresh gorilla." Melvyn Bragg is going to love it.

What less certain, is whether or not Snooki's loyal fanbase will lap it up. They may have made her one of America's most popular TV stars, but they're unlikely to even know what a bookstore is. Their heroine readily admits that she's only ever read two books in her life, and one of them was 'Twilight'. Let's just hope that Snooki's first adventure in publishing doesn't land on its badonk.

Shut up and sing?

Ever since the golden age of disco, female singers have been intermittently churning out gay-friendly anthems to encourage and support their sparkliest fans. The songs themselves haven't always been explicitly pro-gay, but they tend to have a message that can be easily applied to the trials and tribulations of post-closet life.

These days, however, the divas are getting much more active when it comes to voicing their support for the gay community, beyond the occasional PA in a clothing-optional nightspot. Katy Perry, Lady Gaga and Ke$ha have all become outspoken advocates of homosexuality, consigning Gloria Gaynor and Diana Ross to the bargain bin of homo-activism.

Despite still being months away from an official release, Gaga's 'Born This Way' is already being talked up by no less than Elton John as the ultimate gay rights anthem. So far, all anyone's heard is a short acappella snippet that Gaga performed whilst accepting her MTV Music Video Award. But that was enough to inspire a bunch of DJs to turn the sample into a stomping anthem that's been doing the rounds in every club from Christopher Street to the Castro.

Katy Perry's new single Firework is also being talked up as the official soundtrack of the 'It Gets Better' movement. Having pledged her support for the anti-bullying YouTube campaign, Katy managed to tear herself away from her epic nuptials long enough to tweet that "Everyone has the spark to be a firework.”

The video for the song features two boys snogging each other's faces off as a series of spectacular pyrotechnics burst from Katy's dynamic décolletage. This is starting to become something of a trend for the new Mrs Brand, since the film clip for her previous single 'California Girls' featured cans of whipped cream exploding from her bikini top. At this rate, by the time her third album is released, she'll have lactated the entire periodic table.

But the real surprise is Ke$ha - a girl with less depth than her own calendar. She's managed to cobble together a timely answer to the outbreak of suicides in the form of a new song called 'We R Who We R'. Presumably she was in such a rush to record it that she didn't have time to sort out the punctuation.
It turns out that when she's not brushing her teeth with bourbon and clambering out a skip, Ke$ha spends her time thinking about people “who haven’t felt accepted because of their sexuality.” 

Her new song is a rallying cry (autotuned, natch) for "people [to be] themselves unapologetically". Although it sounds like a rehashed megamix of all her other singles, Ke$ha believes that she's struck solid glitter this time - "I never could have imagined how much impact my music could have on people. I realized that through pop music, I have the opportunity to stand up for something I believe in.” Even if standing is something that she has trouble doing unaided. 

No doubt the critics will carp that it's all a cynical exercise in selling records and aligning themselves with all the right social issues. And at the end of the day, what difference can a bunch of pampered pop-stars really make? A lot, according to activist and sex columnist Dan Savage. He told the New York Times: “These songs are countering a hateful message that a peer, family member, politician or a bully might be saying. I get frustrated with gay politicos who discount or undermine the importance of pop stars. They’re a huge part of this fight.”

OK, it might be cause for concern that vapid pop tarts like Katy Perry and Ke$ha are the only hope for the world's disaffected gay teens. But given the amount of support they can expect to receive from this niche audience once they find the nerve to throw open the closet door, it's the least they can do.

Feathering his nest

In amongst all the multi-million dollar blockbusters lining up to fill your local multiplex is an all-action thriller made on a rather more modest budget. And yet, whilst the other movies jostle for attention in another crowded summer schedule, this little film has already notched up quite a cult following, not to mention some unbelievable reviews.

Originally intended for the Sundance Film Festival, James Nguyen's opus was rejected by the festival's selection committee, so the industrious auteur decided to screen the film independently. The film fans who stumbled upon 'Birdemic: Shock and Terror' couldn't quite believe their luck.

Inspired by Hitchcock's apocalyptic adaptation of Daphne de Maurier's The Birds, Birdemic portrays a horrifying attack on a small town by a platoon of eagles and vultures, leaving the townspeople with no choice but to fight back.

Movie studios have always been happy to quote film critics out of context, turning non-committal reviews into glowing recommendations, simply by virtue of the bits they leave out. So Nguyen should have no trouble creating some truly spectacular posters featuring quotes like "it's like nothing you've ever experienced. Words completely failed me by the film's end." Now who wouldn't want to see a movie with the power to make that kind of an impression?

Unfortunately, the quote continues "I was sure of only one thing - I had just had the funniest, most awesomely bad experience of my entire life." Maybe not quite what Nguyen had intended.

Not that you'd know from his reaction. Speaking to the New York Times about the surprise success of his avian shocker, he said “A few people... were laughing at my movie. But I think the majority who were there really laughed with it. That’s the risk that I take in making a movie, to be judged, to be reviewed — the good, the bad and the ugly."

I'm not sure if there's anything inherently 'good' about Nguyen's film, but bad and ugly seem quite plentiful. The actors could take lessons from porn stars on convincing line readings, and the CGI eagles wouldn't look out of place menacing Horace as he goes skiing. The birds don't so much attack people, as hover threateningly in front of them, before inexplicably exploding.

According to the Times article, Nguyen spent $10,000 and seven months (weekends mostly) bringing his singular vision to the screen. And although audiences are hyperventilating at his staggeringly inept handiwork, Nguyen may have the last laugh. His dream was to make a film that would find an audience, and he's certainly achieved that.

Considered by many to be the worst director of all-time, Ed Wood died penniless and forgotten, several years before his films were rediscovered and celebrated on the midnight movie circuit. With many people marking him out as Wood's logical successor, Nguyen is fortunate enough to be around to actually enjoy his fame and notoriety.

He's found a medium that allows him to express himself. And the great thing is, his work is engaging people and eliciting an emotional response. Ultimately, isn't that what all artists crave?

What's up, Governor?

It's a sad fact that politicians and scandal go together like Tom Cruise and damaged sofa cushions. Judging by the state of affairs (pun possibly intended) in New York, those associations aren't likely to end any time soon.

New York governor David Paterson is currently the target of a smear campaign involving "a variety of unproven accusations involving [his] personal conduct." In fact, the rumors are so unproven, they haven't even been articulated yet.

Apparently, character assassination has become so easy that these days you don't need a shooter or a smoking gun. In fact, you don't even need to take aim. Just plant the rumor that there may be a threat and let the internet take care of the rest.

All it took for Paterson's troubles to begin was a handful of bloggers speculating that the New York Times was working on a story that would force him to resign. As Doug Muzzio, politics professor at New York City's Baruch College, said in an interview: "I've never seen the rumor of a story becoming the story as this one has."

But the damage has been done, and now Paterson's political opponents are ready to strike. Leading the charge is former Nixon, Reagan and Bush advisor Roger Stone, who has lined up a most surprising alternative candidate.

Former 'Manhattan Madam' Kristin Davis (no, not that one) has put herself forward as a Libertarian candidate, and believes she has a chance of being elected since she 'has nothing to hide'. Having originally found notoriety by helping to unseat Paterson's prostitute-patronising predecessor Eliot Spitzer, Davis plans to run on a reform agenda.

A report in the New York Daily News claims that Davis "laid out her credentials...on the lower East Side" - a trick I'm sure many a man has paid to see. But if you're thinking that Stone is using her as part of a cynical publicity campaign, you couldn't be more wrong: "Kristin knows lots of Penthouse Pets. We'll get four, make them notary publics and have them, suitably attired, collecting signatures at Grand Central Station during rush hour." You stay classy New York.

On the upside (she's probably done that too), it makes a change to see a whore wanting to enter the world of politics, rather than the other way round.