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Saturday – Corpus Ball Medieval Trance – Ollie Ford

Friday – Here comes the rain – Will Granger

Thursday – Hustings at St.Edward’s School- Jeremy Wynne

Wednesday – Summer by the Isis – Sonali Campion

Tuesday – Slavic books at dusk – Ollie Ford

Monday – Experiments at the science fair – Jeremy Wynne

Sunday – PCBC Pimms Party – Ollie Ford

Here in Oxford we’re often content with escapism, so, understandably, nervousness usually greets any Oxford story more romantic and more wonderful than our (sometimes depressing) everyday existence. In this way the ‘Incomparable Max’ has become the forgotten author Max Beerbohm.

A member of the Oscar Wilde set, he left Oxford an essayist, parodist and caricaturist. In 1911 he wrote his one, perfect, novel: Zuleika Dobson.

In true Edwardian satirical style, Zuleika, the eponymous femme fatale, manages to infiltrate the all-male Judas College (based on Beerbohm’s alma mater, Merton College) and proceeds to entice every male undergraduate in the college with her irresistible charms. This sets in motion a chain of events which leads to, amongst other happenings, thunderstorms, drownings, and mass suicide.

Beerbohm is, after all, incomparable, so I must share a favourite passage. Following a scene in which every male undergraduate, gripped by the tragic romance between Zuleika and the Duke of Dorset, has followed the Duke and drowned themselves in the Isis, the narrator returns to Zuleika:

“And Zuleika? She had done a wise thing, and was where it was best that she should be. Her face lay upturned on the water’s surface, and round it were the masses of her dark hair, half floating, half submerged. Her eyes were closed, and her lips were parted. Not Ophelia in the brook could have seemed more at peace….What to her now the loves that she had inspired and played on? The lives lost for her? Little thought had she now of them. Aloof she lay….The air was heavy with scent of violets. These are the flowers of mourning; but their scent here and now signified nothing; for Eau de Violettes was the bath-essence that Zuleika always had.”

The shock that Zuleika might too have followed the Duke, but more shockingly that she might not be utterly amoral, is swiftly assuaged in the knowledge that she is merely taking a bath. Perfect.

Last year grime took over the UK: its indelible melodies and whimsical rapping were all over mainstream media. Rude Kid is one of the most renowned and ambitious producers on the scene, although he is hesitant to limit himself to grime. ‘I mix a lot of different sounds: dubstep, funky…I don’t know what I’d call it’. His tracks share an incredible sense of rhythm, with beats which scurry around the bassline, and a fearless use of samples from violins to maracas. Every instrumental features the words ‘are you ready?’. ‘It’s like my trademark – if I didn’t put that in, people wouldn’t know it was by me’.

The tracks are experimental in the best sense: ‘I try to make something that no-one’s made, to be different, because when you’re different people pay attention to you.’ Sometimes a distorted guitar chord replaces a bassline, other times the beat is built from a series of bleeps which sound like a checkout having an orgasm. Clearly, Rude Kid is fascinated by music: ‘I’ll listen to classical, just to hear how the strings are put together’.

He creates songs without a plan. ‘I just sit down and if I like the sound of the instrument, I will use that instrument and work around that. I’m on my own, in my room, and I try to do it to the best of my ability. I name the tunes by what’s around me – if I’ve got aftershave sitting on my desk, that’s the first thing I’ll look at when the beat’s done and I’ll just call it aftershave.’ But he claims that the name ‘Romford Ladies’ wasn’t inspired by the presence of several of Romford’s finest in his bedroom, but by the girls he’d see spilling out of clubs playing the familiar garage track samples.

He broke onto the scene with a track called U.F.O. ‘I used to get ignored a lot, but you have to keep your head down and work hard. I set myself a target, to get played on Logan Sama’s show. I made U.F.O. and that started getting played on Rinse FM. After Logan, people knew my name, and started asking for tunes’. That was three years ago. Now his tracks are on MTV adverts.,and even the latest version of DJ Hero.

With the heavy rotation his songs get on Rinse and at raves, you’d think he’d get sick of hearing them. “You know, I’ve heard them so many times on repeat. But, you know, as long as people like it, and play it, I’m happy.’

If the lacklustre trailer for Tina Fey and Steve Carell’s new film Date Night fails to convince you to fork out money for a cinema ticket, the impressive cast list may well do the trick. Fey and Carell have clearly called in some favours for this project. That’s surely the only explanation as to why James Franco, Mila Kunis and Mark Wahlberg all chose to partake in such an unambitious production.

In the film, Fey and Carell play Phil and Claire Foster, an ordinary couple from New Jersey with a pleasant but unfulfilling daily routine. As a couple the amusing duo are likeable and believable but the film, disappointingly, is not. We see the Fosters heading out to the new ‘it’ restaurant in Manhattan called Claw. When they arrive at the restaurant without a booking and take the reservation of a couple known as The Tripplehorns they get a great deal more than they bargained for. We soon discover that the Tripplehorns are involved in some pretty sticky business. Thus the rest of the film sees the Fosters (mistaken for the Tripplehorns) desperately trying to avoid all kinds of danger. General hilarity ensues.

To be fair there are actually a selection of laugh out loud moments. These moments tend, however, to be when Fey and Carell are sticking less rigidly to Josh Klausner’s uninspired script. For example when the Fosters return to Claw disguised as ‘trendy’ and ‘alternative’ New Yorkers (with unexplained Siberian accents), they produce a brilliant piece of comedy that had the cinema erupting in laughter. In addition the outtakes at the end display the strong chemistry that exists between the film’s two protagonists. It’s just a pity Fey and Carell weren’t granted more freedom and control over this picture.

My main issue with the film is that I just didn’t buy the story. Why do the Fosters behave so stupidly throughout? When asked to step into a dark New York alleyway by two burly men, they comply. And when offered a way out of the mix up by the NYPD, they decide ‘It’s much too late for police now. Let’s solve this thing ourselves!’ Fey and Carell are a safe bet for the main parts and they should be the key to success for a comedy like this. Instead Date Night ends up using cheap methods for easy laughs.

In 2007, the London International Documentary Festival (LIDF) started as a one day event. Now in its fourth year, the festival has grown rapidly into a 16 day event spread across the capital. Playing host to not only films from all over the world – including a retrospective of the inimitable Don Boyd – but also presenting photography and multimedia events, the LIDF looks set to be one of the most diverse and exciting film festivals of the year.

Cherwell spoke to Patrick Hazard, LIDF organiser, about this year’s festival.

How do you go about selecting the films for the festival?
It’s an enormous job. The number of submissions that we get is extremley high…this year we got many more direct submissions from directors and distribution companies who would like to choose London over another festival.

Since the 2007, how has the festival changed?
Not much is different really, I think the ethos of the festival has remained the same which is this idea of ‘Conversations in Film’; we want to try to eke out the issues and subject matter of the film by working very hard on the debates and discussions that we hold around the screenings. We try to link the films to notions of social change, critical debate and try to satisfy the documentary audience…we wanted to get a little bit away from the notion of just a director’s Q&A and more towards an ideas event.

There’s a multimedia event on at the Hub, can you explain more about that?
We’re calling it ‘The Invisible City’ and its focusing upon the King Cross where there’s been a big regeneration programme and people have been recording those changes in various ways with photography,radio and film.
So we’re looking at the area specifically, but we’re looking more generally at the way we look to describe urban life…we’re bringing together film, photography and radio which is the other distinguishing feature about the festival this year in that we’re looking at ‘documentary’ in the wider sense of the word now and seeing how documentary narratives are being produced in all these different types of media.

Do you organise any events beyond the sixteen days of the festival?
Yes, I think it’s quite important that the festival is a highlight of the year for us because we do work all year around.
We do a monthly Docspot screening at the Barbican… and we do work in Pakistan, so we’re quite heavily engaged in other activities.

Are there any films this year that you’re particularly looking forward to?
A big one is by Abel Ferrara which is already sold out. We’ve got a French film about music in China, it’s very experimental…There films which are quite inspiring stories about people who have taken things into their own hands.