Catch me when, my crumpled angel

Did you hear the news this week, oh boy....

Gun crime and London shootings

Blair pledges action on gun crime as toll rises

"I have trouble acting normal ‘round here,"- the Counting Crows song (Across a Wire, Live in NYC '97)

Dito Montiel has written and directed from his published memoirs of growing up in Astoria, Queens during the mid-80s.A Guide to Recognising Your Saints. "We live here, you die here," shouts the local graffiti.

Art or Asbo: Banksy is a big enough man to fend for himself (half way down page!)


The film flashbacks between Robert Downey, Jr. and Shia LaBeouf as different ages of Montiel. "Everyday there's something different,” says his dad Monty (Chazz Palminteri) who will never understand why his son wants to leave the place he knows and grew up in. The only enlightenment comes from Scottish outsider Mike (Martin Compston, Red Road), and Dito taking his advice ends up a writer living in Los Angeles finally coming home to see his ill father. "I dreamt of farms," said Dito in an interview about his youth. Foreign realms too for the urban youth cast of Kim Chapiron's Sheitan (Satan) who go clubbing and end up adventuring to an isolated farmhouse for Christmas only to wind up in their own horror movie. "You think your shit doesn't stink," says one, staking out his emotional turf. Like the kids in Saints they also take their aggression out on small retailers. The dialogue of Saints smacks of the local deli, and in Sheitan of raw garlic. Dito works for a gay dog walker who warns "the owner checks his ass to see if he's crapped!"

Sheitan is a stunning debut – camera angles, editing, rap music, the works. What begins with street cred La Haine turns into cross-genre comedy/horror (Vincent Cassell of La Haine heavily twisted). It doesn't quite bring that ending off, though, more clever than astute. Saints is raw too, just a tad tame in comparison, which isn't really fair I know. Dito said of actor Channing Tatum’s character "He brought a guy who breaks your neck and then tries to put it together because he didn't mean to do that." And that's true of the rest of the film. Just sometimes you feel you've visited this territory before. Maybe it's that Dito knows his turf too well or maybe his film wiles not enough.

Lawyer falls to Death at Tate Modern

Eric Steel's doco about suicide on San Francisco's Golden Gate The Bridge opened last week in London to respectful reviews. All except Andrew Pulver from The Guardian. "This could be the most morally loathsome film ever made. [Eric Steel] failed to be honest [his] methods are thoroughly despicable." I wonder what he'd make of Norwegian Jens Lien's The Bothersome Man (Den brysomme mannen)last year's London Film Fest) or Goran Dukic's Wristcutters October's Raindance Fest) both awaiting a UK release? I've known several people who've committed suicide. I didn't watch or take their last phone call, but I strongly felt this doco gave the 24 2004 Golden Gate victims incredible dignity. Steel is another first time director who's given us something quite impressive. The idea derived from The New Yorker's Tad Friend article Jumpers and it remains a subject that's icily taboo. When a regional American newspaper ran a picture of 'the falling man', a jumper from the burning 9/11 Twin Towers, there was outrage. Nobody wanted to believe or moreover own up to the fact that this is how someone chose to die. Steel has compared his film to Bruegel's painting "Landscape With the Fall of Icarus. "In the corner of the painting, a pair of legs disappears into the water with a splash so small it is hardly noticed by the other people in the picture, much less by someone in the museum." I remember too an early Dali painting where the angel in the landscape is so small it's like the ppp (absolute pianissimo- the quietest sound you can) marking in a Gustav Mahler score. "One camera would be fixed, at wide angle to record the bridge and the water beneath it, as if it were a postcard. The operator simply had to change tapes every hour and press record. The other camera was fitted with an extreme telephoto lens – strong enough to see individual people as they walked across the bridge." Steel did always try to warn the police of an impending leap. While the dod lacks the detail of Friend's essay, it's the old problem of translating the literary to the screen. And Steel opted for the simplist, boldest and most visually arresting option possible. For that he should be applauded.

In The Bothersome Man (pipped at the post by Reprise as Norway's Oscar entry, although it did win the top prize at last year's 14th Hampton’s International Film Festival), Andreas (Trond Fausa Aurvaag), an office worker throws himself under a subway train (as does one of Dito Montial's friends) only to wake up in a city with a perfect home, perfect job and a perfect girlfriend into all things designer. Probably why he committed suicide in the first place. Only nothing has any taste or touch. Suicide is impossible in his new environment as we see to great comic result. Wristcutters is the flipside: Zia (Patrick Fugit) slashes his wrists speeding him to a desert nowheresville populated with everyone wearing their suicide scars literally on the wrist, head or whatever. In the United States there are almost twice as many suicides each year than homicides. The beautiful hitchhiker Mikal (Shannyn Sossaman) is the normal odd-girl out (passport mix-up).

"I thought if I watched enough people, I would be able to spot the outward manifestations of their interior demons," said Eric Steel. Scots Jock Mooney has a show in Gimpel Fils's emerging artists' space downstairs Funland Was No More. In the corner cornice a painted cloud is pricked by a tiny pair of struggling female legs while diagonally below Pooh Bear licks blood not honey from his pot. Monney had no need to paint the title. "The vulgar excesses of disposable contemporary culture are replicated in Mooney's work...highlighting the horror of our Ikea society," goes the press release. Mooney builds hundreds of tiny figures to populate a trestle table Inventory and a black painted floorboard Drying Rack erupts bulbousing tiny creatures. Quite disconcerting, impressive and not an easy act to pull off.

The buildings of French architect, interior designer and artist Thierry W. Despont would probably never be visited by any of the characters mentioned so far: the restored Frick family mansion in Pittsburgh, Dorchester Bar London, Los Angeles' J. Paul Getty Museum interior, and houses of Calvin Klein, Oscar de la Renta and Bill Gates. Except perhaps the Statue of Liberty in New York for which he was associate architect for the 1986 centennial restoration. In 1916, Gutzon Borglum, Mount Rushmore's sculptor, was commissioned to cut out most of the copper and install six hundred pieces of yellow cathedral glass into Liberty's torch. It certainly glowed, but it's never been waterproof since. An irony perhaps lost on most of her citizens.

London's Marlborough Gallery has an exhibition of his warrior-like masks constructed of kitchen chopping boards and other bibs and bobs. There are his Planets paintings too. For once, the gallery walls have been painted a grey/black creating quite a different space. Nothing wrong with the masks but you somehow wish he'd stopped at the walls perhaps creating a critique of the milieu in which he normally works. He speaks of the masks being neither good nor evil and as if of another world. To have done that purely through the gallery's fabric would really have been something.

Another Frenchman Michel Gondry, writer/director of Science of Sleep never seems to have succumbed to the American success of his music videos, commercials and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, longing more for the land of early French animator Melies. Stephane (Gael Garcia Bernal) has a touch of Donnie Darko with his ‘Disastrology’ drawings of earthquakes and plane crashes. His dreamlife is the only illumination in his humdrum job making headers for calendars. In his mind he has created ‘Stephane TV’ an imaginary studio of cardboard cameras reflecting on his life. Then he falls for his neighbour Stephanie (Charlotte Gainsbourg) trying to disguise the proximity. Stephane is the type of boyfriend needed by the girls in Eric Zonca’s Dreamlife of Angels (another suicide pic). “I pushed [Stephane’s crudeness] a little further,” says Gondry, “because I was afraid people would not understand why a girl like Charlotte would not be attracted to a guy like Gael. One of the reasons is he’s a little insane. I think insanity is unattractive. Being down-to-earth is a more attractive quality for woman.” Some have found Science too whimsical hankering after Eternal Sunshine’s screenwriter Charlie Kaufman. But there isn’t much in the cinema world these days that’s like Gondry, unashamed French romantic rather than David Lynch that he is. And if we were encouraged and medicated to fly more there’d be a lot less people jumping off bridges.