‘Gloriously ostentatious’ (Total Film)
****

‘A sparkling return to form’ (Heat)
****

‘Arse juice’ (The Done Thing)

That said, it’s a bit rich of Peter Bradshaw to peddle the ‘seen it all before’ line in The Guardian. For it seems that whenever the esteemed critic truly detests a film, he employs exactly the same stylistic technique to ridicule it.

During a light-hearted argument about free-range chickens, a friend calls you a pompous ginger twat.

His girlfriend immediately leaps to your defence, insisting that you are not ginger.

Which, when you think about it more carefully, isn’t much of a defence at all.

Inspired by an excellent response to a comment posted here, ‘Stick It Up Your Crace’ involves transforming the surnames of public figures into expletives. Points are awarded at your discretion, though special credit should be given for Cognomenisms. In other words, if John Crace really is an arsehole, you get a massive bonus.

Kinky Friedman, the doyen of Gonzo private detective fiction, has the right idea when he describes the act of defecation as ‘taking a Nixon’.

The fact that you are in ‘top’ celebrity nightspot Mahiki of an evening should not detract from a fundamental truth: you are Dirk fucking Diggler, a regular disco daddy, ripping up the floor like some shit-hot carpet-fitter of dance.

It doesn’t matter that the champagne costs £100 a bottle. It doesn’t matter that the staff treat you with a contempt normally reserved for incestuous Austrian paedophiles. It doesn’t even matter that you puke up an entire steak and kidney pie in their toilet.

No, none of these things matter because you are seriously fly and the chicks are digging it.

Digging it, that is, until you have the following conversation:

CHICK: Are you the guy from Peep Show?

YOU: Er, no.

CHICK: Oh.

(Chick shuffles away, with all her friends.)

For those who can’t tell the difference between a woman who is pregnant and a woman who is overweight, there’s much to learn about the birthing process, from beginning through middle to end.

For instance, it turns out that a preconception class is a forum in which couples who want to have a baby discuss topics such as ovulation, diet, and the merits of the reverse cowboy as a doorway to insemination.

It is not, as might be imagined, a place where you discover how to make rash judgments about people you’ve never met.

If nothing else, trivial parlour games provide a useful diversion at parties where you congratulate a fellow guest on her pregnancy when she is not, in fact, pregnant.

If faeces are not your idea of fun, how about a game with a musical theme?

In order to play Ad Nauseam, you’ll need to trawl through your record collection to find songs which have been used in adverts. Once you have gathered a decent selection, play random snippets to the contestants (aka: your friends). It is their task to guess the artist, track title, product and brand. Award one point for each element the contestant correctly identifies, and a bonus point if they get all four.

This simple dinner-party word game requires you to name films which have a vague affiliation to pooh, rather than films which actually are pooh. Points are awarded for original titles (Jackie Brown, Cable Guy) and variations thereof (hence ‘Gangster Number Two’).

Parisians may be offensive, but at least they have a degree of charm, wit and sophistication, which is more than can be said of the film In Her Shoes.

This is without doubt one of the most inane follies ever committed to celluloid. Billed as a comedy drama, it is neither comedic nor dramatic. In fact, during the course of a mind-numbing 140 minutes, nothing of note happens whatsoever. The narrative plods along like an obese asthma-sufferer in a suit of armour, making his way across the Gobi desert at the height of a particularly oppressive drought. Clichés abound, the performances are anaemic, and the dialogue is as unremarkable as a road sign on the M62.

Then there is the unseemly, semi-pornographic obsession with Cameron Diaz’s body. One imagines that behind the camera, Curtis Hanson passed the time masturbating like a baboon, so frequent are the shots of his female lead prancing about in her undercrackers. Diaz has great pins, no doubt about it, but the man who brought us LA Confidential shouldn’t really be dwelling on them like a randy frat-boy, who enjoys hiding in cupboards to watch his roommate have sex.

All things considered, you would be hard-pushed to find an artistic endeavour in any medium with less to recommend it, including Tracy Emin’s lost masterpiece, ‘Shit In My Shoes’.

Verdict: Not The Done Thing

One of the few things I don’t miss is Paris, not least because its denizens take great pleasure in humiliating the English.

For example, when you order vin de maison in a Parisian restaurant, the waiter will almost certainly inform you that anyone uncultured enough to drink house wine should go to a ‘ferkeeng nightcloob’.

In such an event, take this advice on board, choose a heart-stoppingly expensive alternative, and sit in embarrassed silence until he returns – not with a normal-sized bottle but a fucking great Methuselah. Guffaw merrily at this hilarious gag, even though you want to brain the garlic-licking berk with a soup spoon and force-feed him his own cerebrum. By this stage, the other patrons in the restaurant should be looking at you with a mixture of pity and disgust, as though an albatross has crapped on your head.

Eventually, a proper bottle of wine will be delivered to the table. Pour yourself a large glass – you’ll need it to wash down the chef’s special.