Jack’s world measures eleven feet by eleven feet. He shares Room with TV and Bath and Meltedy Spoon and Rocker and, of course, with Ma. Oh, there’s Dora, too, who lives in TV and goes exploring with him. But she isn’t real. Then there’s Old Nick, who comes in some nights to make Bed creak with Ma. He has to hide in Wardrobe those nights, because Old Nick can never see him. Jack’s not sure if Old Nick’s real or not. Maybe…he becomes real when he comes into Room?

This is the world of Room, the new sure-fire bestseller that crept onto the Booker longlist before it was even published, and has already been installed by the bookies as joint favourite to win. Describing the world of a child born into captivity from that five year-old boy’s perspective, it catches a kind of zeitgeist that emerged after the Josef Fritzl case. Just in case you had any doubts about the sign of destiny hanging over this book, it comes complete with glowing recommendations from some of the best-selling authors of the modern era.

What do they say? Well, here’s the view of Audrey Niffenegger, who wrote the Tesco 3-for-2 paperbacks staple The Time Traveller’s Wife: “Room is a book to read in one sitting.” This is precisely my problem with it. You should not be able to digest a potentially Booker-winning novel in a single day. The book recently voted “Booker of Bookers,” Midnight’s Children, took me two weeks. Even last year’s overrated winner Wolf Hall took six days.

Am I dismissing Room just because of an inborn snobbery about thrillers? Absolutely. The purpose of the literary novel is to challenge its readers, to make them swallow difficult truths, to make them think really, really hard. Whereas when you read Room your heart pounds, you cry a little bit if you’re a girl, and when you finish you look at the world around you and think “well thank God I’m free.” And then you forget all about it.

Room is not stupid. Emma Donoghue has put a huge amount of imaginative effort and sympathy into writing it, and it is hardly ever as mawkish as it ought to be. There are several scenes where she uses Jack’s five year-old eyes brilliantly. The satire on the media is clever, especially when Oprah interviews his mother, and in another scene when a group of sofallectuals are discussing Jack’s case:

“There’s a woman, too. ‘But surely, at a symbolic level, Jack’s the child sacrifice,’ she says, ‘cemented into the foundations to placate the spirits.’

“Huh?

“Grandma comes in and switches the TV right off, scowling. ‘Those guys spent too much time at college.'”

But in spite of all this, Room is intellectually shallow. It’s very much like Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime, but with captivity in place of Aspergers Syndrome. I would go so far as to say that it would not be on the Booker longlist at all were it not for our ghoulish fascination with the Fritzl case. If Room beats Peter Carey’s Parrot and Olivier, something is profoundly wrong with the way the nation reads books.

About forty minutes into ‘The Expendables’, Sylvester Stallone’s thoroughly stupid tribute to the heyday of 80s action heroes, the film makes an unexpected and surprisingly scathing attempt to review itself. Jason Statham and Sylvester Stallone stand in the shadows of a doorway, taking photographs of the generic South American country that the infuriatingly over-familiar plot requires them to infiltrate. Statham breathes heavily, turns to his sweaty 64 year old companion, and asks, ‘What’s wrong with this picture?’ Then, in a moment of uncharacteristic intelligence and candour, Stallone confesses, ‘Everything.’ This seems a rather unforgiving assessment of his own film, and perhaps overstates its meat-headed awfulness. Still, as pithy self-reviews go, it’s not entirely inaccurate.

The plot – so groaningly over-familiar that it threatens to collapse under the weight of its own clichés – follows a titular group of mercenaries, led by Stallone, who are offered the job of putting an end to the rule of a cruel dictator in the fictional South American country of Vilena. Not that the name of the country matters; it could have been called Genericnationia or Kerplunkistan and you wouldn’t notice the difference. Still, the evil general must be stopped, and so the team accept the job. Statham and Stallone scout out the country and meet the general’s beautiful, disloyal daughter, Sandra, whose introduction genuinely involves a soft-focus shot, slow motion and some romantic music. The army soon start attacking our heroes, who manage to escape, but in doing so they leave Sandra to her fate. Stallone can’t bear this (he’s fallen in love with her since they met half an hour ago) and so the team return to finish what they started.

At its heart, this film seems to be a mastubatory and self-indulgent exercise in nostalgia, harking back to the good ol’ days where action films lacked any hints of depth or moral ambiguity. The production notes confirm this, boasting that the film aims to resurrect a time in movies ‘when men were men, combat was mano a mano and the story was believable.’ Well, two out of three ain’t bad. It’s certainly true that men are indeed men in ‘The Expendables’, and there’s plenty of ‘mano a mano’ action to go around. It’s like watching several raw slices of thick, vein-covered steaks punching each other and mumbling frequently indecipherable dialogue. Yet the occasional (and presumably unintentional) result of this abundance of testosterone is the rise of unmistakable undertones of homoeroticism. Men shoot each other, men stab each other, men punch each other, men tattoo each other, men even recite poetry to one another. It’s ‘Team America’ meets ‘My Beautiful Laundrette’. And the dialogue doesn’t exactly help matters – lines such as, ‘You two aren’t going to start sucking each other’s dicks are you?’ make the innuendo of ‘Carry On Matron’ look positively Shakespearean.

In interviews, Stallone has boasted how the script went through over 100 drafts. This is worth dwelling on for just a moment. It took 100 drafts to come up with something this headache-inducingly stupid, with characters so one-dimensional that no amount of 3D retro-fitting could possibly save them. Crucially, Stallone seems aware of the stupidity of what he’s doing – there are sporadic bursts of self-awareness, most notably when the anonymous army his team are about to fight and, predictably, slaughter are made literally faceless by the application of face-paint – yet this only compounds one’s frustrations. The action simply isn’t good enough for the film to be thrilling or exciting (much of the blame for this lies with the sub-Bourne ultra fast editing), while the levels of self-aware humour and irony in the script are so basic and predictable that it falls a long, long way short of satire. As a result, ‘The Expendables’ falls between two stools, just slightly too self-aware to be a big dumb action flick, but far too moronic to become an intelligently ironic tribute. Couple this with several staggeringly bizarre moments – the highlight of these being the film’s ending, with Jason Statham reciting ‘poetry’ – and some frankly repellent and simplistic political standpoints, and the result is a great, incoherent, mumbling mess of a movie. It’s not quite true to say that ‘Everything’ is wrong with this picture, but Stallone tries his best to make sure it comes pretty damn close.

Generally speaking, a press conference will stereotypically be populated by hardened hacks, cynical about their work and the celebrities they have been sent to interview, desperate to catch out the interviewee on anything which might qualify as a scoop. When faced with Sylvester ‘Sly’ Stallone, Jason Statham and Dolph Lundgren (best known as the evil Russian opponent in ‘Rocky IV’), however, a room full of journalists will suddenly turn rather polite, even enthusiastic. This may have something to do with the actors’ physically imposing statures – they tower over the room at a collective 18 feet – yet it isn’t just fear that wins over the hacks. Instead, the surprising truth is these beefy action stars are polite, funny, intelligent and (in Lundgren’s case) even a little shy.

Such politeness is not necessarily expected by all, particularly as we have already been subjected to ‘The Expendables’, the film they are here to promote. It’s a loud, brash, and extremely stupid film, so bursting with testosterone and manliness that you leave the cinema intent on starting a fight with a passer-by or shooting an endangered animal. This is primarily due to its stellar action cast: alongside Stallone (who co-wrote and directed the film), Statham and Lundgren, The Expendables stars Jet Li, Steve Austin, Randy Couture, Terry Crews (from those incredible Old Spice adverts) Bruce Willis and even Arnold Schwarzenegger. Stallone is the first to admit that he struck gold with the ensemble: ‘I could never have afforded Bruce and Arnold [25 years ago] – I mean, that would have been the whole budget of the movie… Jason – well, he’s a lot of money but well worth it. I mean seriously, £100 a week! It’s unbelievable!’ He laughs, and, whether because they’re charmed or terrified, the room full of journalists laugh along with him. ‘But things have changed now. I mean, prices are dropping rapidly. You are lucky to get work, so people who were getting ten million are down to two, and they’re going, ‘Thank you.’ But this was all favours; it was done really low budget, some of these guys almost worked for nothing… I certainly couldn’t have gotten Arnold and Bruce back then. Not a chance – ever. Just too expensive and too busy.’

However, as well-connected and liked as Stallone is, he wasn’t able to get everyone he wanted. ‘At one time I wanted Ben Kingsley as the bad guy and Forest Whitaker… And then we called Jean-Claude Van Damme and Steven Seagal, but they had different ideas about their careers. I did the best I could!’ Stallone laughs again, and it’s just as infectious. Regardless of the film’s final quality, there is a sense that Van Damme and Seagal missed a trick by turning him down. Few action movies have been so hyped, due in large part to the formidable cast, even without the muscles from Brussels and the pony-tailed Buddhist. This has led to a high level of anticipation amongst action aficionados, and Stallone is certainly aware of the enormous expectations. ‘It’s a lot of pressure, because sometimes you come in with a film and you’ve got a major turkey and it’s not even Thanksgiving. It’s bad. But this time, this is the other end where there’s great expectancy, and I didn’t expect this when we started making this. So you want it to live up to expectations.’

In some ways, it’s surprising a film like this even got made. Stallone seems a little frustrated when he reveals how the film industry is no longer willing to take chances. ‘Nowadays, there’s no more, ‘I’ve got a gut feeling. I’m going to take a gut chance, and I know everyone will say no but I’m going to try it anyway.’ Well, that’s gone, it’s now all very scientific and now every actor is going to be weighed up to see what they bring from different territories. It’s like a math project.’ Then again, the pitch for The Expendables is a fairly straightforward and, it must be said, intriguing one – in describing it, Stallone, Statham and Lundgren all repeatedly come back to one phrase: ‘old school’. The cast saw it as a chance to return to the simpler action films of the 1980s, complete with physical stunts, big explosions and no subtlety in sight. For Statham – at 37 years old the relative youngster onset – such straightforward simplicity was a relief: ‘The good thing about when movies get made when Sly’s there, in control, is that he shoots a lot of the stunts in the camera. A lot of action directors of today tend to rely on the movie as a visual, and it becomes very boring because it’s a lot of CG and people don’t really care too much about it. So when you’re doing an action movie that requires real men doing real action, it’s an opportunity to do that, and that’s all we’re looking for. We can’t wait to get stuck in and do that kind of stuff.’

Stallone is keen to point out Statham’s commitment to such realistic action, and recalls how, ‘Jason does an action beat and he’s very physical – you’ll see it in the [DVD] documentary, his hands were in ice and he keeps leaping onto baked ground over and over, and he keeps wanting to do it, but I said, ‘Stop, stop, stop.’ Then the next fella who has to do it, his stunt guy, says, ‘Thanks a lot.’ It keeps building, and that’s why you have such a physical, physical, testosterone filled movie, because men are just naturally competitive and they want to keep upping the ante… You had to be tough on this show.’ But there must have been stunts that even the action-hardened cast refused to do? Statham pauses, before proclaiming, ‘I won’t wear a flowery shirt, no.’ Is there anything Dolph Lundgren is scared of doing? The 6ft 5inch Swede thinks for a moment, then, in his first comment of the afternoon, mutters, ‘Saying too much at a press conference.’

On reflection, such reticence isn’t particularly surprising from a star known for brawn rather than brains, yet Stallone reminds us that Lundgren is a PhD graduate in Chemical Engineering and a Fulbright Scholar, while the star of Rambo and Rocky isn’t too dense himself. Although he laughs off any suggestions of complexity in his art – advising one questioner to ‘go with Christopher Nolan, pal; I’m just guessing my way through this!’ – when discussing films in general, he seems surprisingly eloquent, effortlessly pulling apart studio politics and casually referencing the philosophy of Joseph Campbell. With this intelligence in mind, it is of particular concern whether Stallone is able to justify the huge swathes of violence in his film. He doesn’t seem surprised by the question. ‘I believe that the violence is very justifiable… The one thing in my films is to only kill people who really need to be killed, or [have] killers killing killers… Let me put it this way: the ones who deserve it get it – and get it good – and the ones that go after women get it really good, you know what I mean? People say, ‘Well isn’t that overkill?’ and I say, ‘Well, I’m not going to have a man having his way with a woman and wrecking her life, and then just shoot him with a bullet. It’s too civilised. He’s going to feel real pain.’ And I think the audience has this cathartic feeling… So I don’t feel guilty about it at all.’ He stops for a moment, then laughs, ‘But if you want me to, I will.’

It’s with little comments and quips such as this that Stallone manages to endear himself to interviewers, even those – myself included – who found his film far more banal and stupid than the mind behind it. Disappointingly, he later reflects how he no longer feels the need to pursue dramatic or complex roles: ‘I have kind of done my mind movies, and probably I think people are not really that interested in seeing me do that any more. I think I am past my prime in doing drama… Maybe it becomes a kind of pathetic cry out to be recognised as a serious dramaturge… I did my little moment, and am very proud of my drama, in ‘Rocky Balboa’, which is about as deep as I can go.’ Despite this self-deprecation, he appears to be much more than just another meat-headed action star, and seems capable of far greater things than just running away from explosions in slow motion. It would be a great shame if, at 64 years old, Sylvester Stallone really is content to expend his considerable talents on ‘The Expendables’.

After teasing us all with a series of promising single releases, Californian trio Best Coast have put out their debut album, ‘Crazy For You’. Fronted by cat lover and ’60’s enthusiast Bethany Cosentino, and backed up by her former childhood babysitter Bobb Bruno and drummer Ali Koehler, Best Coast give off a surf-rock, lo-fi buzz and emanate laid-back cool.

Inspired by the girl groups of the late-1950s and ’60s, Cosentino writes lustful, wanton music ‘about weed, my cat and being lazy a lot.’ The first track and most recent single, ‘Boyfriend’, moans on with a rather charming immaturity about an unattainable crush, while ‘Goodbye’ is louder and angrier, berating her lover for his long, neglectful absences. ‘Summer Mood’ is a woozy, grouchy grumble which calls up wasted warm days spent indoors and bored; ‘Our Deal’ is a cry-on-your-best-mate’s-shoulder number with a catchy, beachy vocal hook at the end.

The album’s paranoid flitting between bright-eyed puppy-love and sulky, grudging apologies leaves the listener both captivated and at a loss for what to expect. This is never more apparent than in tracks eight and nine, ‘When The Sun Don’t Shine’ and ‘Bratty B’. The former has Cosentino prostrate, clutching desperately at her lover’s ankles, forever reaffirming her love; the latter is a regretful, brooding lament after a break-up, descending into sullen repetitions of ‘I miss you’ while Bruno jabs out a steady, sombre melody.

The longest track on the LP (a whopping three minutes two seconds) is surely the most artful. ‘Honey’ carefully layers clever harmonies over a muted Bruno and opportunistic drumming from Koehler; the result is a dark, sexy clamour. But yet again, the mood swings drastically to caffeinated hyperactivity, as ‘Happy’ thumps away with rather annoying tachycardia. Two-thirds of ‘Each And Every Day’ is similarly aggravating, taunting the listener with pointless, puerile mockery, but a break in all the leg-pulling brings calm and a cute sing-along verse bubbles forth. The bonus track, ‘When I’m With You’, saves the album from a weak end with a return to the duskier sound of ‘Honey’ combined with classic surf-rock riffs.

‘Crazy For You’ is a very accomplished record, although at times the sudden shifts in mood threaten to derail the train. Despite these slight frustrations, it is all the same very listenable; Cosentino’s voice is enchanting, the lyrics simple but memorable, the lo-fi sound amiably old-fashioned. Ultimately, Best Coast resonate with a teenage and immature noise, and threaten to do big things once they’ve grown up a bit.