I’ve no idea why Toy Story 3 doesn’t open until 23 July here in the UK, more than a month after the likes of China, Russia and Kazakhstan, but I was lucky enough to see it at the weekend in the fantastic Regal E-Walk movie “theater” in Times Square, New York, complete with medium Coke and popcorn that require two hands each to carry, and – ahem – 3D glasses. Yep, Toy Story 3 is presented in “Real 3D”. But fear not! The movie is a triumph, and, remarkably, Pixar actually seem to have cracked the 3D conundrum. Toy Story 3 may be the world’s first genuinely good 3D movie.

Having (sensibly) waited ten years to follow-up Toy Story 2, the creators now have a neat premise – Andy is 17 and off to college, and the toys, unplayed with for years, are bagged up for the attic. Unhappy with this prospect, they instead conspire to be donated to a kiddies’ daycare centre, which they imagine to be an idyll of happy, playful children. In fact, the daycare centre turns out to be something of a nightmare, and the toys plan an escape to return to their owner.

All of the key characters return, and there are also plenty of new ones, including Lotso the less-than-cuddly bear (Ned Beatty), Curb’s Jeff Garlin as Buttercup the Unicorn, and a hilarious turn from Michael Keaton as a camp-as-Christmas Ken doll.

The end titles (worth staying for) credit around 20 people with the story, and the collaborative process seems to have paid off. It’s sharp, lean and funny, even to a cynical bugger like me.

At 103 minutes, Toy Story 3 flies by and – in a rare occurrence for for a summer blockbuster – actually leaves the audience wanting more. If it’s not quite as good as 1 or 2, that’s only because the first two movies were so fantastic. Chapter 3 is preceded by a typically great Pixar short – Night & Day – so make sure you’re in your seat early.

I’ve previously blogged that 3D is an unwelcome distraction, but in Toy Story 3 that never becomes the case. It’s used subtly and effectively – there is no pointing and poking at the screen, no throwing things at the audience. Instead it’s a subtle effect that simply adds a little depth to the image.

Unlike in screenings of Avatar, not once did I notice anyone removing their 3D glasses in order to assess the 3D effect. The movie is never less than immersive, and I, for one, forgot I was wearing the glasses. (Also, the glasses serve as a useful disguise if you happen to get something in your eye during the moving finale…)

Mark Kermode has videoblogged on the subject, wondering whether watching Toy Story 3 would be every bit as involving in 2D. My opinion is that it would still be a fantastic and immersive movie, but I have to admit that in this case the 3D does seem to add something.

Of course, this is animation, and totally different from live action movies. I still cringe at the thought of 3D becoming the standard for every major film release. But, in the case of Toy Story 3, Pixar has proved that, used cleverly and in the context of a great film, 3D can actually be a positive thing in movies. I, for one, never expected that.

Film Toy Story 3

We ain’t no hooligans,
This ain’t a football song,
Three lions on our Mars,
I know we can’t go wrong.

And there, in 30 seconds of televisual madness, John Barnes manages to both hit a new career low and defile the greatest football record ever made.

Quite an achievement for a man whose playing career ended with lumbering embarrassment at Newcastle and relegation at Charlton, and whose managerial career with Celtic (‘Super Caley go ballistic’ etc) and Tranmere must surely rank as one of the least successful of all time.

Barnes never exactly pulled up any trees playing for his country either, and some might say his original rap on World in Motion was the best thing he ever did for England. It would be hard to argue with that opinion.

Because World In Motion by New Order, some say EnglandNewOrder, is indisputably the best football record ever made. You can keep your Three Lions, and your Back Home, and your All I Want For Christmas Is A Dukla Prague Away Kit.

It is the best football record ever made because: a) It is really very good; and b) It helped change the face of English football – and some might say football in general – forever.

Cast your mind back to the end of the 89/90 football season. English football was virtually unrecognisable to the bells and whistles phenomenon it is today. Liverpool won the Barclays First Division, but they didn’t get into Europe. English clubs had been banned from European competition for five years, and Liverpool for six. The shadow of hooliganism still hung over the game.

It was only a year on from Hillsborough, and the memories of that disaster remained fresh in the mind. Racism was prevalent on the terraces, and football was hardly an attractive place to take the family.

And on the pitch things were fairly uninspiring. The PFA and football writers’ players of the year were David Platt and that man John Barnes, and there was very little foreign talent around.

Not that you would get much of a chance to watch it. Armchair fans were restricted to the occasional Big Match and lamentable highlights shows on ITV.

Overall, English football was in a pretty miserable state. There was absolutely no reason to think that the national team would have any success at the World Cup that summer in Italy. There was very little optimism.

And then came World In Motion. New Order, fresh from the success of the Ibiza-infused Technique, teamed up with Keith Allen, Dad of Lily, to record the track. Also roped in were Barnes and various team-mates including Paul Gascoigne and Peter Beardsley, both of whom, legend has it, recorded versions of the rap that never made it onto the final track. Throw in some Kenneth Wolstenholme samples, and the end result was something quite special.

The genius of World In Motion is that, as the rap admits, it ain’t a football song. Yes, there is talk of creating space and beating your man, but really it’s bigger than that. ‘Love’s got the world in motion,’ the chorus proclaims. Love, not football. It’s only at the end, as it swells to a climax, that the song throws in, ‘We’re playing for England, En-ger-land!’, and by then you’ve been drawn in and can hardly help singing along.

World In Motion helped create belief in a national team that arrived at Italia 90 with little to no chance. Peter Hook has said that the song ‘enhanced patriotism’, and that’s true. These were the days before every other car flew a cross of St George, and just about the most commitment anyone gave to showing their support for England was to collect World Cup coins or Panini stickers.

It’s obviously an exaggeration to say that World In Motion propelled England into the semi finals, but it certainly helped. It encouraged us to go out and buy England shirts, have a couple of beers, throw our arms around our mates and holler, ‘En-ger-land’. It encouraged us to love the game again.

What happened next is securely stored in the memory of any football fan. Sir Bobby’s genius, Lineker’s goals, Waddle’s penalty, Gazza’s tears. And that was that. English football was never the same again.

Within a couple of years we had the Premier League and wall-to-wall TV coverage. We had an influx of new talent, sponsors and money. There were new stadiums and kits and haircuts and multi-coloured boots. Not all of the changes were positive, of course, but overall the game became a bigger and better thing.

And World In Motion was the starting point. Had it not created a surge of pride and goodwill that propelled the England team into the semi finals of Italia 90 who knows where our national game would have ended up? We might still be watching the bloody Big Match. And that would be no good at all.

So now it’s 20 years on, and it’s World Cup 2010, and England have no chance of winning the thing. Or do they? If they hold and give and do it at the right time, anything is surely possible.

New Order – World In Motion (Spotify)

Football, Music England, New Order, World Cup, World In Motion

Spoiler alert – if you haven’t already watched the finale of Lost you probably shouldn’t read the following…

No, I didn’t get up at 5AM to watch the Lost finale, clever piece of marketing though that scheduling was by Sky. If I had hauled myself out of my pit at that unlikely hour I’d have been mighty annoyed when, after the ‘previously on Lost’ preamble, up popped a ‘TEMPORARY FAULT’ card. A few moments of sound sync problems followed. Early risers must have been choking on their Bran Flakes.

Instead I watched it on Sky+ in the evening. It still felt like a proper TV event – the end of an era and all that. Because, whether or not you enjoyed it, Lost was an important TV show, a network offering that threw away the rulebook, playing free and loose with genres, narrative structures, and pretty much all the conventions that are used in making stuff that appears on that box in the corner of your room.

Lost wasn’t afraid to kill off lead characters, introduce a myriad of new ones, switch and ditch plot strands, play with polar bears, ghosts, time travel and mysticism, use flashbacks, flashforwards and, erm, flashsidewayses… they even made an entire episode in Korean for God’s sake. An entire hour of primetime US network television in the Korean language with English subtitles. Astonishing.

Not that it has all been great. I briefly gave up on watching Lost regularly somewhere around the middle of season three when it got bogged down in its own nonsense, but, like Jack and co, I ended up being drawn back to the island.

It has been pretty daft, and relentlessly introduced new twists and turns, often without properly exploring the plot strand that were already underway. Most frustratingly, entire storylines were regularly dismissed by subsequent twists, rendering entire strings of episodes that the viewer had spent hours sitting through completely pointless.

But, despite that, Lost produced more than enough excellent episodes and memorable moments to have made it worthwhile. Off the top of my head I’m remembering Charlie’s death scene, the first appearance of the Others, the introduction of Desmond in the hatch to the strains of Mama Cass, the reveal that Jack and Kate would escape the island, Ben allowing his daughter to be murdered…

As for the finale itself, personally I could have done without season six’s sideways flashes in which the now-deceased characters are in a sort of purgatory trying to ‘let go’ and head into the light. My attention always wavered when the show headed off into spiritual territory.

And, let’s face it, the whole thing with the light and the plug was pretty dumb. This was a device that had only been introduced a few episodes earlier, so it didn’t feel like the mysteries of the island that had built up over the previous six years were properly addressed.

As for the claim that the creators knew from the beginning how the show would pan out, I am simply not having it. The show headed down far too many blind alleys along the way for that to have been the case.

That said, the final scenes on the island, where Jack sacrificed himself to save the island and his friends were pretty good. The final shot of his closing eye, echoing the opening shot from the pilot, was fitting and memorable.

There were loads of questions left unanswered of course. Did Desmond make it off the island? Why didn’t the likes of Michael, Walt and Ecko appear in the ‘purgatory’? And what about all of the non-speaking Oceanic 815 passengers who died on the island?

But while we didn’t get all the answers, we did get a resolution, and one that is left open to debate – perfect for blog writers with too much time on their hands. So goodbye Jack, Locke, Kate, Sawyer and co. It was interesting, occasionally annoying, but ultimately a lot of fun.

Previously by me: The mystery of flight 574: In 2007, a Boeing 737 carrying 102 people vanished off the coast of Sulawesi, Indonesia. No distress signal was received and no wreckage could be found. Read more about the ‘real Lost’ here.

Television Lost