The last glass

Driving further into the forests of political incorrectness amid the hum of Monty Python’s ‘lumberjack song’, we chance upon the sunlit winter glade of contract killer comedy. Even the posters for the recent Clive Owen vehicle Shoot‘Em Up managed to find an unappreciative audience. Yet In Bruges is one of the best Brit films in a long time with playwright director/writer Martin McDonagh making his feature-length debut (Six Shooter won the 2006 Academy Award for Best Live-Action Short). It’s pre-Christmas season and Ray (Colin Farrell) and Ken (Brendan Gleeson) are hitmen ordered by their boss (reptilian Ralph Fiennes) to lay low in Belgium’s beautiful but winter-dull tourist spot Bruges. Ken takes to the Gothic city like a wolf to Red Riding Hood but Ray’s accidental child killing during a contract on a priest forever haunts him. The child’s death mawkishly recurs a lot in the film but doesn’t quite ring true in this context. A shame because 80% of the movie is utterly fantastic, seasoned with the kind of bawdy contemporary dialogue Shakespeare would have loved and a camera style that appropriately never seems to make up its mind. We need more Mike Leigh moments in this film but we also need more Martin McDonaghs in British cinema.

You Kill Me(DVD) is another tour de force criminale for Sir Ben Kingsley an American alcoholic (Frank) C-list hitman in the backwaters (Buffalo). “Sometimes I couldn’t go drinkin’ ‘cause I had to kill somebody. And sometimes I’d miss killing someone ‘cause I was out drinking.” It’s a very clever script from Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely (dating from 1997 before the genre became all the rage) who alongside director John Dahl (of the sleeper turned video success The Last Seduction) give an audio commentary. The writers relate how they attended an AA meeting one day and began wondering what was the most shocking and outrageous ‘anonymous’ confession one could make. Hence Frank our hitman was born. What really anchors the film is the perceptive bond between Frank and Laurel (Téa Leoni – “all present-day Katherine Hepburn” enthuses Kingsley) a deceased’s spouse he meets in his mortuary day job. For aspirant lower budget filmmakers, there’s an inspiring extra on the computer effects used in the movie – CGI snow, gun fire for the finale, and the Golden Gate Bridge. American indie filmmaking at its very best. Much less involving is Revolver DVD’s Borstal Boy based on the life of Irish rebel and playwright Brendan Behan. Nothing bad about the film and if it prompts one to seek out the original autobiography that’s no bad thing.

Percepolis (YouTube) is the much admired back and white French animation of Marjane Satrapi (co-directed with Vincent Paronnaud) from her graphic novel memoir of childhood Tehran. This version is unsubtitled but keeps the voices of Chiara Mastroianni and Catherine Deneuve (mother and daughter in real life too). Using her own name, Marjane’s story spans from the pre-Revolutionary 1970’s and her Leftist parents, then the overthrow of the American backed Shah, Left-wing disillusion at the new Fundamentalists and the execution of Marjane’s beloved Communist Uncle Anoosh that sparks more rebellion in the child. Now in her late teens she’s packed off to Vienna for enlightenment only to find that the golden windows of the West aren’t much different to those she left and she returns to Tehran. For a 12A movie it packs quite a political punch for kids and always humorously. Marjane is a little like Lisa Simpson with her childhood hero Bruce Lee, penchant for bootleg Iron Maiden CD’s from dodgy street vendors and bopping to the theme of her teen hero Rocky. I kept wondering if Mike Leigh was to make an animation would it be something akin to Percepolis or more like Belleville Rendez-Vous (2003), the French animation of thwarted American dreams? One sort of expects animation to be somewhat magical reimagining the thoughts that those simple lines on a page evoke. I haven’t seen the graphic original so maybe the film succeeds for those who have. It’s certainly radically different to anything you’re ever likely to see in a multiplex for quite some time - backed by Spielberg’s producer Kathleen Kennedy: long may it reign.

Persepolis (Times article)
Palestine film festival
Nightwaves (Thurs 24 April) Rana Mitter interviews Raja Shehadeh, the winner of this year's most prestigious prize for political writing -The Orwell Prize. Which work of the past year has best achieved George Orwell's aim to "make political writing into an art"?
Palestinian Walks: Notes on a Vanishing Landscape by Raja Shehadeh is published by Profile.
Mourchidat - Morocco's female Muslim clerics
The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of VS Naipaul
BBC Radio 3's Nightwaves fascinating whole programme on Salman Rushdie (too late to listen again, wish they’d leave them all online like The Film Programme, but admittedly the latter is only once a week not nightly).

London played host again to the eclecticism of Heiner Goebbels: Stifters Dinge (Stifter's Things) BBC Music Matters spot.

And try Marc-André Hamelin in a state of jazz
The amazing pianist/composer Friedrich Gulda
New Portishead album their first release in 10 years
The composer Thomas Adès and the video artist Tal Rosner have produced a spectacular retelling of the creation story
Private Passions with singer and songwriter PJ Harvey.
A revealing audience with Marianne Faithfull
Nigel Kennedy 's new album
Bryan Ferry: 'I don't want to be controversial'
And BBC's Music Matters Luigi Nono's opera Prometeo receives its UK premiere, and an interview with violinist Nigel Kennedy on the release of his recording of Beethoven's Violin Concerto.

And if you're tired of attending lectures sitting in uncomfortable chairs next to uncomfortable people TED.COM is a brilliant new site owned by The Sapling Foundation, a private nonprofit foundation:
Try Tod Machover & Dan Ellsey: Releasing the music in your head or photographer Alison Jackson (Hamiltons currently have a show)

But to end on the race for reality:
Grand Theft Auto receives acclaim
Grand Theft Auto IV embodies the future of entertainment
The first Grand Theft Auto, video of Dundee office back in 1996
And the live action film adaptation of the 1960s Japanese animated series
written and directed by The Wachowski Brothers Speed Racer is out in cinemas May 9. Or if you're a different kind of racing fanatic:
'Recipe book' holds the clue to Phar Lap's death