[Addition]

Jools Holland's birthday Later with.. BBC TV prog with great music and video from wonderfully inventive Canadian singer/writer Feist touring Oz later this month and London's Royal Albert Hall in May, New Yorker Cat Power (who performs like her name and acts in the upcoming My Blueberry Nights as Jude Law's Russian ex-girlfriend) plus the greats of Radiohead, Dionne Warwick and Mary J. Blige.

And hopefully they'll repeat Summerhill about the radical Brit school. whose pupils and teachers took the government to the High Court in London and won.

Cat Power's Sea of Love is also part of the way-cool soundtrack of Juno that also includes Antsy Pants' Vampire, and Adam Green and The Moldy Peaches. If you don’t enjoy this film then it probably really is time to take some form of medication. Juno (trailer)(will teenagers start text messaging in Greek myth?) is an indie that is very Hollywood. But a movie promoting teenage pregnancy awareness is no bad thing. It recouped its $7.5 million budget in only 20 days. I kept thinking would it still work without Ellen Page’s irresistible performance and Jason Reitman’s (Thank You for Not Smoking) finely tuned direction? The story may be predictable but the rhythms and dialogue of Diablo Cody's her MySpace blog script are in a time signature far sassier than regular Hollywood.
Cody also wrote of her 'alternative' experiences Candy Girl: A Year in The Life of an Unlikely Stripper
One could be cynical and say it’s too full of Republican political ‘right to life’ values with none of the contrary argument. Tony Kaye's doco Lake of Fire
(seen in London’s Raindance ’06 Fest, still hasn’t had another UK airing). Then there was the very brave US distribution of Mike Leigh's Vera Drake(Fine Line, a quintessential movie for them) many years ago. And, of course, more recently the Romanian film 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days (4 luni, 3 saptamâni si 2 zile).

Juno, though, is quite unashamedly leafy middle-classdom where everyone is reasonably nice to each other; 16 year-old Juno doesn’t even get taunted as she walks through school heavily pregnant, and parents are kind and supportive human beings. And truth be told, that’s what much of America aspires to rather than the excesses of rampant capitalism and corporate greed. And surely that can be no bad thing either! And aren’t these ‘middle-class’ individuals entitled to a voice as much as the ‘oppressed’? There are hints of family dysfunction in both Juno’s clan and the prospective adopting duo but these are more delicate wind instrument scoring woven into what is essentially a cheeky Mozart symphony of love. Little Miss Sunshine is more like a boisterous Bernstein ‘Candide’ overture in comparison.

Ellen Page goes from geeky unknown to star of this year's most talked-about film (Independent on Sunday)

It’s hard not to like Cloverfield, too. I actually enjoyed the technical expertise of its Godzilla takes Manhattan antics more than The Blair Witch Project (but I know I’ll be in the minority there). My gripe is that there’s some very important small print that gets obscured in the publicity frenzy. Unlike Blair Witch, this was no low-budget camcorder pic but one with a budget of close to $30 million. Seen in perspective that’s several Junos or one and a half Dancer in the Dark’s (also shot on digital). Cloverfield was shot using an expensive high-end high-definition digi camera but with the illusion that its all shot on hand held camcorder, complete with auto-focus indecision. Knowing that rather takes the spin out of Cloverfield and you long for the unseen menace of early Spielberg. Dom Rotheroe’s (so far undistributed) gem of last year’s Raindance Fest Exhibit A is far scarier for my money, with its ‘normal’ dysfunctional characters and monstrous ending. It’s probably just co-incidence but did Cloverfield borrow Exhibit A’s (my blog review)device of exposing flashes of narrative on the videotape that had been recorded over? It would have been far more daring to shoot Cloverfield directly in the wake of 9/11 and opinions such as those of Susan Sontag. But as we know, that would have been indigestible for most people. (Remember how some distributors were asked to remove the Twin Towers from their films). The Korean movie The Host(Gwoemul) does a better job, I think, of portraying collective fear.

Overlord (Allied code-name for the 1944 D-Day liberation of Europe) is a re-issue of Stuart Cooper’s 1975 B/W Brit pic made under the auspices of the Imperial War Museum and the MOD (Ministry of Defence). Metrodome UK DVD (with director's commentary out March 4). Also available on Criterion DVD (in the States), its meditation on preparing young Tom (Brian Stirner) for the invasion is strangely and effectively anti-war. The actual bombardment footage seems newly born in this film due to John Alcott’s stunning cinematography (DP for Stanley Kubrick amongst others). And Brian Stirner went on to be an un-sung hero of new Brit theatre directing. Most recently he helmed an evocative stage reading of a play written by actor Erland Josephson (as part of Tarkovsky celebratory events in London).

Previews of Morgan Neville's The Cool School-The Story of the Ferus Art Gallery this weekend at the Tate Modern (part of the Revolver Arthouse Films' output distribution deal (new label) for U.K. and Ireland). This is the surprisingly hitherto untold story of the LA art scene. We usually get only the New York perspective. Ed Ruscha's paintings (BBC Front Row interview)are at the Gagosian Gallery but I haven't seen them yet.

And a new David Attenborough series on reptiles Life in Cold Blood starts BBC One (Mon 4 Feb). Far more interesting than watching politicians change colour.

[Addition] Attenborough interview (I've never heard him utter one boring word) in tonight's (Thurs 7 Feb BBC's Front Row)

And ITV London news have a good piece (look at the emission crap on the handkerchief) on the Mayor's Green Emission Zone for London this week. (search for the title, but it isn't always easy to find spots on that site, sorry)