Percy Jackson & The Lightning Thief

The Lad wanted me to take him to see this sub-Harry Potter film today.

There were two government sponsored adverts before the film - one inviting members to become social workers and the other paid for via Cancer Research UK, inviting women to take part in the Race For Life.

During the film itself, the most blatant product placement was when the hero had to battle Medusa, and he remembered the trick about only looking at her in a mirror, so he whipped a 160GB iPod out of his backpack and used the back of that.

Apart from that, the film was all right, I suppose. The hero's posse was wonderfully PC - there was him, his Afro-American satyr sidekick (who pretended to be disabled), a slighly older girl who was pretty handy with a sword, and his Mum, who had had the hero out of wedlock (but had remarried in the interim and was divorced again by the end of the film). Steve Coogan as Hades was wonderfully out of place as ever. The Lad enjoyed it at least.

The highlight was actually in the supermarket on the way home, where we overheard a rather imperious shopper asking a shelf-stacker "Excuse me, where do I find jam and all that rubbish?" which is the sort of thing that I get into trouble for saying.