A former Oxford University don has broken a world long-distance running record after completing 10 marathons in 10 days. Sir Christopher Ball, Warden of Keble College from 1980 to 1988, has now entered the Guinness World Records after completing 262 miles in 10 days, even though he only took up running five years ago. The 72 year old from Jericho achieved the record when taking part in a ‘Ten in Ten’ challenge in the Lake District to raise money for a children’s charity.

Becky Ely

OUSU is organizing a ‘Green Week’ in line with World Environment Day on 5 June. The day itself will be marked by ‘Climate Change Oxford: What you can do now?’, a day of sessions in the Town Hall addressing practical action that can be taken to tackle climate change. The keynote speaker will be the President of the Royal Society, Lord May. OUSU Environment officer Niel Bowerman, said, “Oxford is a hub of green innovation, so I’m looking forward to what the people behind the advances have to say.”
Jack Browning

Australian philosopher Professor Peter Singer has argued that citizens of rich nations should donate more of their money to the world’s poorest people rather than waste money on “frivolous consumption”. Speaking at the annual Uehiro Lectures on Practical Ethics at Oxford University on Tuesday, Professor Singer said, “I am delighted to have the opportunity to speak at Oxford. I shall argue that we are wrong to do so little for the world’s poorest people.”

Joy Wong

Seventy is the new 50, a report by HSBC and the Oxford Institute of Ageing has claimed. The 60-79 age group was found to be worth £59 billion, showing older people to be huge contributors to the economy. Prosperous over-sixties are increasingly pricing first-time buyers out of the property market. Contemporary trends, such as high divorce rates and more women without children, also mean that future pensioners will be unable to rely on family support.
Matt Hackett

University officials have admitted to monitoring and editing Vice-Chancellor John Hood’s profile on Wikipedia in an attempt to protect his reputation.

Officers working for the University Press Office confirmed that they had made changes over the course of six months, claiming it was part of their job remit to alter “misleading” statements on internet websites.

Parts of the profile were also edited by Brendan Dellandrea, son of University Pro-Vice-Chancellor Jon Dellandrea.
A spokesperson for the University Press Office confirmed that they had altered the page in order to prevent false information from appearing online. “Yes, we have made edits. These were deletions of misleading statements, not additions or editing,” she said.

On December 8 2006, one Press Officer deleted a paragraph that detailed academic staff’s cricitisms of John Hood. One month later another Press Officer left a comment complaining that proposals for University governance reform were being directly associated with Hood himself. “Discussion of governance proposals should form a separate entry,” she wrote.

Her objection was criticised by one Oxford academic active on Wikipedia. Jonathan Jones, a physics fellow at Brasenose, replied, “That’s spin and you know it as well as I do. It’s a bit like suggesting that the Iraq War shouldn’t be mentioned in the article on Tony Blair.”

One Press Officer justified removing a number of statements that did not conform to ‘neutral point of view standards’. In one instance, she dismissed an informal letter of confidence in Hood with only 50 signatories out of 3,000 as “irrelevant”, claiming it was not clear “whether or not every member of Congregation was asked to sign the letter”.

Jones said in a discussion on the site that editing did not always produce better entries. “It would indeed be nice to have some pro-Hood views, but his supporters seem to have confined themselves to deleting large chunks rather than adding anything,” he said.

Nicholas Bamforth, a fellow in Law at Queen’s College, attacked the Press Office’s actions as irresponsible. “I am astonished that people at Wellington Square are being paid to try to censor accurate comment by other members of the University,” he said. “Their clumsiness would be amusing if their behaviour wasn’t so dangerous. What planet do these people think they’re on?”

Funding for the Press Office has increased by almost 50 per cent since 2002 and one senior academic questioned the allocation of the University’s financial resources.

“The Press Office ought to be, first and foremost, a resource for the whole of the University and not for John Hood alone. Changing the image of Oxford is a good reason for Press Office spending to increase but I think there is a question of usage,” he said.

One University member of staff, who wished to remain anonymous, said that Brendan Dellandrea’s actions were suspicious and raised questions of conflicts of interest. “There seems to be something really quite deep and possibly dirty going on to control what people can and can’t find out using the web,” he said. “We have even found certain pages from Auckland disappearing in the past.”

In Wikipedia’s ‘Talk’ section, where editors discuss proposed changes with a moderator, the user ‘BDF1’ responded to a question asking whether he was the Pro-Vice-Chancellor’s son, saying, “I lose points for originality with my username, don’t I? Yes, I am [Brendan Dellandrea], I hope that won’t cause too much trouble.”

Dellandrea supported the Press Office’s changes, saying in the discussion on John Hood’s entry, “Your points are well made and I personally welcome your contributions. Don’t be afraid to step in there and make some heavy edits, and don’t be afraid to make mistakes.”

The University Press Office issued a statement, which read, “Part of any Press Officer’s job is to correct misleading or false information in the media, including new media like Wikipedia, relating to their institution. In a newspaper this is done by discussion with the editor or a published letter, but Wikipedia works entirely differently.”

A motion to create an OUSU mascot, a “big bouncing blue blob of bureaucracy” called ‘Ousy’, unexpectedly passed at OUSU Council last Friday, despite repeated objections from representatives.

£300 of OUSU’s publicity budget is to be spent on creating a suit after the proposal from Oxide Radio DJs Max Seddon and James MacAdam was amended to force Seddon to be inside the suit as a part-time executive officer.
Seddon, a first year Magdalen student, described Ousy in his satirical manifesto as “a big bouncing blue blob of bureaucracy who lives in a beautiful 1970s style building surrounded by happy homeless people. He’s a loving fellow and is sure that OUSU Council fully reflects the opinion of the majority of students. His favourite things are student union services, hugging and anal sex.”

Wadham SU President Ben Jasper warned that students will not necessarily accept the decision as light-hearted. “Half of our central student union’s publicity budget will be dedicated to putting a pompous Etonian twit in a big blue suit for a few days in Michaelmas,” he said.

“It’s not going to help let students who face being thrown out of their college contact the Student Advice Team. It will prevent OUSU from advertising the most important welfare services it offers. Other JCR Presidents should be hanging their heads in shame. It occurred in a hysteria of ‘I don’t care, my replacement’s been elected’ and they acted with utter stupidity.”

Jamie Frew, OUSU Vice-President for Welfare, said that the mascot was intended to perpetuate the Student Union’s negative public image. “There are people both inside OUSU and beyond who have been very offended by what has happened. I had expected the motion to be quickly dismissed: I was really surprised to discover that people were prepared to vote for the sanitised version he presented.”

Another OUSU sabbatical officer, Andrea Miller, agreed with Frew that the mascot would not be beneficial for the Student Union. “I am very upset that OUSU Council would pass a motion that endorsed the statement that ‘students would be more prepared to listen to someone in a fuzzy blue suit talk about and provide student services than members of the OUSU executive.’

President Alan Strickland refused to side with his fellow sabbatical officers, suggesting that the mascot would be welcome in the future. “I’m touched that Max is thinking of us. I think a mascot would be a fun publicity tool for events like elections and clubs nights where we want to grab students attention and get them involved.

“Personally I think of OUSU as more of a lion than a dinosaur: fast, powerful, and ruthlessly effective. Max’s idea to use animals to get our message across is inspired. Communication is a mammoth issue which has sometimes been a bit of a dog’s dinner for OUSU because of our mouse-like funding.”
Becky Ely

A MERTON student was hospitalised after being attacked by a Blues sportsman at last week’s Summer Eights regatta.

Ben Holroyd, a fourth year medical student at Merton, was treated for concussion at the John Radcliffe Hospital on Saturday after he was head butted in the face and punched in the jaw at Merton boat house. The attacker alleged that Holroyd had been threatening towards his girlfriend.

Holroyd said that he had not provoked the attack and that the accusations made against him were untrue. “He told me we needed to talk and then dragged me towards the darkened corridor next to the changing rooms. He told me that I had been threatening a girl who he had recently started dating” he said.

“He assured me that if I didn’t 'shut up', he would 'knock me out and throw me into the river'. The next thing I knew, he had head butted me square in the forehead.  He threw a right hook at my jaw and I lost consciousness,” Holroyd added.

First aid officers were immediately called and accompanied Holroyd in a speedboat to the Head of the River pub, where he boarded an ambulance and was taken to the John Radcliffe Hospital for treatment. The following day the incident was reported to the police, and Holroyd is currently considering the possibility of taking legal action against the attacker. “The whole thing was completely unprovoked and mad, so I’d like something done about it. I may well press charges,” he said.

Merton barman David Hedges witnessed the attack, saying he asked the aggressor to leave the College's premises following the incident. “As bar manager, I chucked him out of the boat house and he went quite quietly.”

Richard Stock, Oxford University Rowing Club’s Sabbatical Officer and one of Eights Week's  main organisers, condemned the assault and said that incidents of violence were not typical of the regatta. “Obviously we don’t want this kind of thing to happen, but it was a pretty isolated event.”

Holroyd’s attacker was unavailable for comment.

Who are the heroes of Oxford film? Surely Jeremy Irons’ trademark narcissism in Brideshead Revisited must come to mind; perhaps John Thaw’s snobbish coolness as Chief Inspector Morse; without doubt, the speech by Michael Soares in True Blue – may it endure as the greatest (the only?) rhetorical display by a Catholic priest out to subvert the authority of a rowing club council. Above all, those “dreaming spires” that the film industry so loves have probably brought more attention to this town than any individual. Filming in Oxford, you say, has been done. Often it has been good – and at times brilliant – but, nevertheless, it represents an inevitable entry into the tedious realm of stereotype. However, despite this popular perception of film-making in Oxford, there are a number of students who aim to break the bonds of trite cinematic mediocrity.
The largest student film society in Oxford is the Oxford University Film Foundation (OUFF), which has been in existence for a quarter of a century and claims on its website to “aim to support all aspects of film appreciation and creation right across the university.” The society’s film cuppers, held in Hilary term of each year, represents the major event of the film-making calendar: six shortlisted films were shown before a panel of judges in the Pheonix Picture House this May, and the winner was given a distribution deal.
Entries in the past couple of years have represented a variety of approaches: the comic-pretensiousness of Terracotta, a film which explores the seven deadly sins through the medium of a ceramic plant pot; Ophelia’s origami animals in stop-frame; the downright demented This is an Art Attack, a spoof of the children’s television programme in which presenter Neil Buchanan was portrayed sniffing glue and attempting to recreate God’s image.
The winner two years ago was the inspired 1920s style surrealist work “Cauchemar de l’homme en Noir et Blanc.” Since then, co-director Matt Green has gone on to produce another surrealist work, The Tragedy of Albert, to be screened in London cinemas, with (all hail product placement) two thousand pounds of funding from that great arts-supporting capitalist enterprise: KFC.

This year’s competition was won by I Just Keep Thinking of Humphrey Bogart, a ten-minute film written and directed by Alec Garton-Ash. The film is a strange probe into the world of artistic imagination in which a young man gradually realizes that his life has become a film noir fantasy, and the plot climaxes with the manic onrush of a horde of Bogartesque figures. The colour is effectively replaced with black-and-white halfway through, paradoxically moving still images are successfully interspersed, and the main character’s battle with his shadow is convincing.
Garton-Ash says the idea of producing a film about Oxford did not appeal to him as much of the material produced by students, on stage or on camera, tends to be unimaginative and/or conservative. This is not for lack of resources; he borrowed equipment from St. Peter’s College Film Society, and put Facebook to good use in spreading the word that he required a large group of Humprhey Bogart impersonators.

Above all, Garton Ash stresses how easy it is to produce a film: you can just take a digital camera, get some friends together, and you’ve got one. This might not produce a masterpiece, but it does not require a massive amount of effort (or, necessarily, participants) to produce valuable work. Putting on a play requires a lot of know-how, preparation, and people; as a result, the number of those willing to put on a play who also know what they are doing is limited, and it is inevitable that a thespian clique emerges. But making a film, with university film societies providing support, is something that is fundamentally straightforward and democratic. Christchurch filmster Craig Webster also made an entry for film cuppers this year. Casting friends and, again, borrowing equipment, he shot it in a single weekend.

Indeed, there are some students who have exploited the democratization of media to bypass film societies and produce their own work entirely independently. Leading the avant-garde of Oxford documentaires is Alex Scrivener, whose filming of Abkhazia (a Russo-friendly breakaway republic in Western-looking Georgia) was shown on the partly-Murdoch-owned Georgian television channel Imedi. Georgians were expelled from Abkhazia as a consequence of the Russian-asssisted ethnic-Abkhazian uprising in the early 1990s and so Scrivener, who is himself half-Georgian, hid his national identity and posed as a “stupid English tourist” interested in going on holiday in a war zone. Because Abkhazia’s independence is not recognized by any nation (not even, officially at least, Russia), officials at the foreign ministry were only too happy to spend their time with Scrivener. He says: “So I just took a camera and started filming stuff – them, battle sites, stuff like that.” When he had left, he sent the tape to Imedi; because no Georgians had filmed Abkhazia for over a decade, the station was very enthusiastic and the film was shown on what Scrivener jokingly describes as “the Georgian Trevor MacDonald.”

As Scrivener’s experience shows, it is more than possible for an Oxford student to produce not only film with interest, but also with impact. However, the days of a generation ago, when the auditoriums would burst at the seams with students for whom the cinematic experience could be the highlight of the week, are now dead as dead can be: even Magdalen film society scarcely manages double figures in its average audience. You cannot help but feel that unless there is an even wider expansion of interest and involvement in the cinematic community, film-making in Oxford will fail to develop successfully. Nevertheless, there is a small but talented group of film-makers who are not to be written off.

Tom Corcoran

If you were to walk into Flyboys halfway through, you wouldn’t have missed much. The movie creaks slowly into motion as it explores characters’ backstories and sets up the scenario. Based on a true story, Flyboys follows a group of young Americans in 1916 who engage with the French airforce in the Lafayette Escadrille before the States had officially joined the effort.
At first the characterization seems shallow; on the one hand we are presented with the French commanders, mockingly portrayed as bumbling and fatherly—a very poor match for the Americans’ well-drilled servicemen. On the other, we have the collection of new recruits, each arriving in France with his own trite history. They begin training, learn to fly, and accordingly start making tasteless jokes about combat. The dynamic of the group is immature—more American Pie than Apocalypse Now. A film’s score is usually unintrusive, but here it is ever-present, a constant reminder of the emotions the film-makers want us to feel about characters who have, as yet, done nothing to justify our sympathy.

That all changes, however, as soon as they enter air combat. Suddenly we—and they—come to realize how vulnerable these men are in their fragile aeroplanes, flying very low and very slow by modern standards. They fly over No Man’s Land and shells explode in mid-air around them; this is scary stuff. Unfortunately, the dialogue remains stilted-as a result, there’s still some time to go before we can be fully sympathetic with these characters.
In the midst of the shootouts, a love story develops between our hero (played by a very heroic-looking James Franco) and a French woman (Jennifer Decker). The linguistic difficulties begin to grate fairly quickly, but she is looking after her late brother’s children who, like all the finest French movie-children, are good for chorusing ‘Bonjour’, and ‘Au revoir!’ The romance, however, does succeed in offering a respite from the gruesomeness of the aerial dogfights and beginning the process of emotionally involving the audience.

This process continues as the story develops and members of the squadron are gradually killed off. Each of the deaths is handled gracefully as appropriate to the character concerned and resists cheap sentimentality. Finally, the score fades appropriately into the background, and we’re left with a believable and sympathetic set of characters.

The film is visually stunning, with many extensive aerial shots over ‘France’ and ‘Germany’ – all, in fact, filmed over south-east England. The effects required to realize the squadron’s flights and aerial combat are entirely believable and there is a degree of real humour (not just the tasteless stuff) provided by the expressions of the squadron’s captain (Jean Reno).

The ending feels slightly abrupt, but not because the film is short; it is a sign of how good the film does eventually become that you don’t realize two-plus hours have passed when the credits roll. There is a realistic lack of resolution to the separate story-lines as the film effectively ends in the air. However, that is surely a realistic reflection of these men’s experience of the end of the war: one minute they’re fighting; the next they’re not.
The film suffers intially from an overbearing score and poor early characterization, but once we’re able to engage with the characters, it becomes and remains an exciting and moving piece.

Richard Flynn

The Blossoming of Maximo Oliveros centres on an effeminate young boy (Maximo), living in the slums of Manila in the Philippines with his father Paco, a small-time crook, and two brothers named ‘Boy’ and ‘Bogs’. The opening sequences of the film, which show the young lip-glossed, colourfully dressed Maximo mincing through the backstreets of Manila are slightly difficult to digest but I was, ultimately, pleasantly surprised to find a sophisticated and provocative film.

When he is harassed by teenage thugs in a dark alley, Maximo is saved from a potentially horrific assault by the idealistic and somewhat naive policeman Victor (JR Valentin). At the tender age of twelve Maximo falls in love with Victor; but events take an unforeseeably sinister turn when Maximo’s brother Boy commits murder. Maximo alone knows of his brother’s crime and when Victor launches an investigation into the murder, Maximo is left torn between loyalty to his brother and adoration for Victor.

‘The Blossoming of Maximo Oliveros’ is at once a story of innocence and corruption.; Maximo finds himself drawn into the very adult world of police brutality, crime and even love while still remaining a stranger to it. Maximo is essentially a fantasist- when the troubles of real life overwhelm him he loses himself in pirate screenings of romantic sagas and takes part in ‘beauty contests’ with his (equally effeminate) friends. So, his attraction to Victor is in reality based on childlike fascination and a yearning for security rather than actual sexual desire. Similarly, Maximo’s role as the ‘girl’ of the house, cooking is a form of make believe; Maximo playing at being an adult. Nathan Lopez’s performance as Maximo is both mature and nuanced; he captures the confusion and torment of being suspended between childhood and adolescence perfectly.

For Director Auraeus Solito, who grew up in Manila and describes himself as “a gay boy,” ‘The Blossoming of Maximo Oliveros’ is a very personal story. Indeed, it is Solito’s familiarity with his subject (it was filmed in his old neighbourhood with many of his neighbours as the supporting cast) that results in such an engaging and convincing film. The social context of the film is handled skilfully. The web of poverty and corruption that eventually enfolds the family becomes the invisible villain of the piece. At the same time, the narrative is injected with a sense of hope by the bonds between Maximo, Paco, Bogs and Boy. Here, we discover an intimate snapshot of a close family brutalised by circumstance and struggling to survive amidst devastating poverty.

With a budget of only $19,000 and Filmed digitally ‘The Blossoming of Maximo Oliveros’ is infused with a raw creativity. The experimental cinematography allows the colour and vibrancy of Manila to emerge alongside the darker undertones of the film. While ‘The Blossoming of Maximo Oliveros’ will not appeal to all tastes, I found it simultaneously playful, moving and ultimately bittersweet. Definitely one to watch if you’re looking for something unique.
1 June
ICA, Key Cities
Mary Clare Waireri