Latest News

13 / 05 / 2012
Fantasy F1: The results from the fifth F1 race at Barcelona are in! Check the results, see how your team did or enter a new team. Next race is Monaco in two weeks on 27th May - cutoff for team edits is midnight GMT on Friday 25th.

30 / 04 / 2012
Fantasy Rally: Results from Rally Argentina are in! Check the results, see how your team did or enter a new team. The next rally is in Greece and starts on 25th May. Cutoff for edits is midnight GMT on Thursday 24th May.

23 / 04 / 2012
Fantasy Rally: Jari-Matti Latvala has been injured, so he is being replaced by Dani Sordo for Rally Argentina. If you have Latvala on your team, you'll automatically score for Sordo instead. Cutoff for edits for this weekend's rally is midnight GMT on Thursday 26th April.

22 / 04 / 2012
Fantasy F1: The results from the fourth F1 race at Bahrain are in! Check the results, see how your team did or enter a new team. Next race is Barcelona in three weeks on 13th May - cutoff for team edits is midnight GMT on Friday 11th.

15 / 04 / 2012
Fantasy F1: Now we have a few races under our belt, the weightings have been changed to reflect the early season performances - see the the league page to see what changed.

15 / 04 / 2012
Fantasy F1: The results from the third F1 race at China are in! Check the results, see how your team did or enter a new team. Next race is (probably) Bahrain next weekend on 22nd April - cutoff for team edits is midnight GMT on Friday 20th.

02 / 04 / 2012
Fantasy Rally: The results have been updated to reflect Mikko Hirvonen's exclusion from Rally Portugal.

01 / 04 / 2012
Fantasy Rally: Results from Rally Portugal are in! Check the results, see how your team did or enter a new team. The next rally is in Argentina and starts on 27th April. Cutoff for edits is midnight GMT on Thursday 26th April.

28 / 03 / 2012
Fantasy Rally: Last call to pick a WRC Academy driver! Teams will be locked from midnight GMT on Thursday night - if you haven't picked one by then, you'll get Christopher Duplessis by default.

25 / 03 / 2012
Fantasy F1: The results from the second F1 race at Malaysia are in! Check the results, see how your team did or enter a new team. Next race is China in 3 weeks on 15th April - cutoff for team edits is midnight GMT on Friday 13th.

18 / 03 / 2012
Fantasy F1: The results from the first F1 race at Australia are in! Check the results, see how your team did or enter a new team. Next race is Malaysia this coming weekend - cutoff for team edits is midnight GMT Friday.

15 / 03 / 2012
Fantasy F1: LAST DAY! Teams entered after midnight GMT tonight won't count for Melbourne - this is your last chance!

13 / 03 / 2012
Fantasy Rally: Results from Rally Mexico are in! Check the results, see how your team did or enter a new team. The next rally is in Portugal and starts on 29th March. Remember to pick your Academy driver before then! Anyone who doesn't pick an Academy driver will by default get the first guy on the list - Christopher Duplessis.

05 / 03 / 2012
Fantasy F1: It's here! The 2012 Fantasy F1 championship is open for entries! Read the rules or dive straight in and Pick your team. You can change your mind as often as you like until midnight GMT on Thursday 15th March when teams will be frozen for the first race.

23 / 02 / 2012
Fantasy Rally: The Mexico entry list has arrived and is available on the rally page.

14 / 02 / 2012
Fantasy Rally: Due to Mini's recent hoo-ha, if you have Mini as your WRC team, you will score for the Mini Portugal team instead (currently Araujo/Nobre) from Mexico onwards.

13 / 02 / 2012
Fantasy Rally: Teams are open for editing again, though the entry list for Mexico isn't yet available.

12 / 02 / 2012
Fantasy Rally: Results from Rally Sweden are in! Check the results, see how your team did or enter a new team. The next rally is in Mexico and starts on 8th March. Teams will reopen for editing on Monday.

23 / 01 / 2012
Fantasy Rally: Teams are now open for editing again. Ogier and Mikkelsen are entered into Sweden in S2000 cars, but they're not eligible for the SWRC championship. You can choose them as WRC drivers for Sweden if you want.

22 / 01 / 2012
Fantasy Rally: Results from the Monte are in! Check the results, see how your team did or enter a new team. The second rally is in Sweden and starts on 9th Feb. Teams will be frozen at midnight GMT on the night of Thursday 9th Feb.

18 / 01 / 2012
Fantasy Rally: Rally teams are now frozen for the Monte. You can still pick a team and it will start scoring from Sweden on 9th Feb.

11 / 01 / 2012
Fantasy Rally: The 2012 Fantasy Rally season is now open for entries! Read the rules or dive straight in and pick a team. You can change your team as often as you like so you may as well create one now in case you forget later. Cutoff for the first race in Monte Carlo is midnight GMT on the night of TUESDAY 17th January.

27 / 11 / 2011
Fantasy F1: The results from the final F1 race at Brazil are in and the championship has been decided! Check the results or see how your team did. First race of 2012 is Australia on 18th March. Entries for the new season will open a week or two before that date.

14 / 11 / 2011
Fantasy Rally: Shock rally drama! Martin Semerad was excluded from the PWRC, so our results change too, which gives us a new champion! Check the results or see how your team did.

13 / 11 / 2011
Fantasy Rally: The results from Rally GB are in and the season is over! Check the results or see how your team did. The 2012 season will be open for entries in early 2012 in time for Monte Carlo on 17th January.

World Trade Center

Cast: Nicolas Cage, Michael Peña, Maria Bello, Maggie Gyllenhaal. Directed by Oliver Stone. Story: Rescue workers get trapped in the debris of the collapsed World Trade Center. Running Time: 2hrs 9 minutes. UK Certificate 12A.

World Trade Center is Oliver Stone's take on the September 11th Manhattan incident and, surprisingly, it's almost entirely apolitical.

Oliver Stone usually makes movies with a heavy and deliberate statement, like JFK and Natural Born Killers. With World Trade Center, he's surprised everyone by going with the true human story of a band of police rescuemen who become trapped in a lift shaft when the World Trade Center collapses on top of them. Very similar to Ladder 49, it's as far a departure from his previous work as when David Icke professed to be the son of God, rather than the goalkeeper for Coventry City that everyone else thought he was. It's pretty effective, to a certain extent, but it can't quite capture the heart in the same way that, say, Schindler's List does.

We're dropped into the action fairly swiftly - we see no more than the shadow of the first plane, and we only see the collapse of the towers from the inside, with the odd bit of TV footage thrown in. The tower scenes are all manufactured - the concourse was made in its entirety as a set - and the accompanying special effects are adequate but don't hold up to careful scrutiny, though this may be partly psychological in that we know we've already seen all the footage there is 100 times, so anything new must be an effect. We also know what happens in the end, as the two main guys are real people involved in the incident, so there's a Titanic style inevitability to the plot.

Nicolas Cage spends most of his time under rubble, which really helps as he's much better without free rein. Apparently he spent considerable effort to accurately speak with a New York accent - which I didn't see any evidence of whatsoever. Ah well. Michael Peña, so good in Crash, puts in a similarly impressive performance as Cage's rubble-mate, adding much needed drama to the enclosed scenes. The claustrophobia only really kicks in when the rescue crew arrives, however, as until that point it's not really clear quite how little space they were trapped in. In fact, there isn't nearly enough emotion of any kind generated in the viewer - our heart-strings are plucked by the families desperate for information, and the ending is rousing - well, apart from the marine inappropriately suggesting, "we'll need a lot of good men to avenge this." All told, it's just not that good. Acceptable, but no more.

World Trade Center isn't as good as United 93, but if you know someone who was there, or have some other involvement in the incident, you're likely to find it far more touching than I did. A worthy attempt, but it's no better than average.

I enjoyed this film: 3/5

I think the average moviegoer will enjoy it: 3/5

Testosterone Satisfaction Rating: 1/5 - some non-gung ho heroics.

To enjoy this film you should be: involved in some way with the real events.