You’d be forgiven for thinking it the height of silliness to try and tease out some deep cultural truth from the contemporary action movie—an art form in which Sly Stallone mentioning that some kind of vague bad political and/or drug stuff sometimes goes on south of the border passes for trenchant political commentary. But then you may not be a fan of the action movies of one Jason Statham and you may not have had his most recent punch-fest, The Mechanic—an otherwise well paced, competently shot affair, with no wince-inducing dialogue and with plenty of stoic Statham ass-kicking—marred by the fact that the only gay character in the movie [...]

At first gloss, there are maybe two things that Ben Roethlisberger and Ernesto Miranda have in common. Roethlisberger is very rich, very famous, a two-time Super Bowl champion and was regarded, until a series of recent sexual assault charges fouled up what had become a very lucrative persona, as a prize example of the dull virtue of Ohio high school football – a big, unflappable, rocket-for-an-arm, all-beef archetype who could pull off remedial self-effacement in interviews and deliver a few lines in a television commercial. Roethlisberger is the fourth highest-paid player in the NFL, and he also looks like a boiled ham that has somehow acquired the ability to [...]

Rapey-haired Ben Roethlisberger is not being prosecuted on sexual assault charges but he has been kicked to the curb by the manufacturers of Big Ben Beef Jerky.