Celebrating the release of The Avengers: The Complete 50th Anniversary Collection (Optimum DVD) the Vintage Festival at Southbank Centre this weekend will be showing all of the episodes featuring Diana Rigg back to back in a specially 60s themed Gallery space at the BFI Southbank, curated by Vintage film creator Stephen Woolley. There's even a Diana Rigg Look-a-like Contest: "please present yourself in costume between 3pm and 5pm on any of the above days, and your photo and details will be taken and kept for the judging on Sunday evening at 5pm. You will then be notified by email if you have one The Avengers complete box-sets."

Another Brit classic out this week on DVD/Blu-ray is Whisky Galore! (1948) packed with 103min of extras as well as a highly informative audio commentary. If you're not a fan of looted shipwrecked whisky movies (even after seeing this one anew!) and even producer Michael Balcon wasn't, this release allows a quite fascinating insight into the film, the Scottish island of Barra, and historical context. And an essential addition to the library of anyone interested in British cinema. Though trained in documentaries (and with Roberto Rossellini) it was Alexander Mackendrick's first film and unusually for Ealing Studios shot on location. The head of Universal in the States was impressed enough at the time to give it a 'sleeper' release under the title Tight Little Island - due to the ban on drinks titles. On the disc there's a 1990 Channel Four doco interviewing those still alive to tell the movie's tale and the modern day salvage operation. And the audio commentary goes into much comparison of the characters' detail and that of 'Englishness' vs Scottishness of the time and the "elasticity of morality". Writer Philip Kemp (Lethal Innocence: Cinema of Alexander Mackendrick) is quoted as comparing The Wicker Man as almost a remake of Whisky Galore! - Captain Waggett (Basil Radford) of the English Home Guard being the outsider 'scapegoat'. Other comments note that Waggett epitomised the petty bureaucracy of the ration book under the then Labour government. In fact there's quite a contemporaneous tone to the whole show, n'est pas?

I: what a much maligned word. The very essence of our existence and perpetual problems. (Phrases that any real writer would be sacked for using;) And without making the poor girl at the end of Life in a Day (who I've mentioned before) into a receptacle 'starlet' for the unbearable unbelievability of life, today for me (or rather yesterday by the time i post this from my dinosaur cave) was one of those days in flipside! (Hey: don't knock primordial til you've tried it - or indeed the use of parentheses). IIIII - get home (after spotting the only 8 people [velvet ilk] who converged on an alleyway after reading the 'let's have a London revolution' ad in Time Out (don't laugh - a couple of Hampstead New Labourites actually DID put an open house party ad in TO late 90s pre-Blair - and NO ONE spotted the decade to come??...) I avoided getting whacked over the head by the 'velvets' placating them with tales of Werner Herzog's revolutionary penguin who was really FOR REAL [in Encounters at the End of the World] after seeing we assume his/her boyfriend, yeah - what's not to like in cross-flipping gay penguins - the Emperor penguin wash up on a New Zealand beach the other week [in a menage a trois with Michael Barrymore I guess:)

Arrive home. The digital TV installers of tomorrow morning have left a card sayin' my digital connection won't take place til a week from hence. Who the hell do they think they are! We just take days off willy nilly to amuse ourselves like some bored housewife hoping (la vein helas) that the tradesperson will turn out to be Mr/Mrs/Ms G spot!!!! oh please - as many a critic in the 90's used to sigh, begging me to ghost write their reviews back in the 90's.

So: life in a day: 'cause u see I never wanted to get out of bed this morning but waking up early to the British summer of grey sky and drizzle- yeah: Tom Hanks loves the British weather too - so much so in fact he's signed up for my script about a Brit weather man who got fired for taking his TV gig too seriously and accurately (not to mention his tie and cardigan), then inherits a lighthouse, gets tortured by jealous left-wing yuppies who were gesumped from buying the lighthouse up the coast, and said weatherman takes revenge on Westminster - and 'cause he's the only guy with any revolutionary balls, the Brit public say 'what the heck' we'll get behind 'him' as our leader. Kate 'Duchess of whatever' whips her lot into line claiming (quite rightly) that she's the only one who knows how to catch the bus to Westminster and give even the semblance of cake, bread and circuses. (Harry's wearing a red nose at this point completely nonplussed). And NO Tom- there's not a part for Julia in this one (much as we still love her - mean Village Voice motherfffers...). What's not to like about Julia Roberts' smile?

Oh, life in a day: so: I did get to the 10.30am screening of Universal's Beginners and found The Standard's Derek Malcolm unusually full of joie de vivre rather than gloom after being on the jury of the Golden Apricot film festival in Armenia. You see - you just couldn't make up real life nomenclature! Nigel Andrews (film critic of the Financial Times) popped his head into the conversation just as we were taking about old age 'dropping dead' avoidance. And there across a crowded room was Metro's (the free morning commuter paper owned by The Standard) Larushka Ivan-Zadeh besporting her wonderful pregnancy - though the critics see so many horror movies it's hard not to hallucinate some inter-stellar thingamajit morphing out of her witty weekly wordswomb. Metrodome's The Violent Kind (written and directed by The Butcher Brothers...(I told you you'd never believe the really real) screened that afternoon with much of said 'transfiguration': hey if it works for a penguin.... Cheesy film- but yo: a mate was DP (that's camera guy for the lay folk) who always does a great job - e.g. the gorgeous sepia Medicine for the Melancholy that didn't even get laid in the UK after it's tiny London Film Fest appearance years ago. I know that feeling.

But then Dexter (director of Wild Bill screening next door) just couldn't resist my poker ability and rather than lose the thrippence he'd made in his career, promised me a part in his next film -that's after Robert Sheehan who as any actor worth his salt would, filled in the missing line from the Murdoch parliamentary grilling when Mr. M snr. looked totally perplexed at being asked why and who'd asked him through the back door of Downing Street....do I really need to spell out rear***). It got even more legal when Mr M snr. remembered that PM Brown also had offered him rear entry. ME - I haven't watched TV in years - so captivated by the new high tech of Plato's screening Cave I forsook Warner's Horrible Bosses and became mesmerised by the Murdoch father/son questioning by parliamentary reps. Now THAT whole argument is one to be saved for a later consideration. Suffice to say that THEY (in the broadest public sense) wanted a scapegoat and who better than the man himself THE mogul Mr M. But it sorta backed fired because though my front row (oft assuming) colleague came to the rather blunt conclusion that he was "arrogant", Mr Murdoch Snr. was rather endearing -in a way that one longed ex PM Tony Blair to be given his 'Medusa' delivery but just never could given the loud 'hissing'. Whether Mr M knew or not about the phone hacking we may or may never know as the police enquiry finds its rolling stone.

And there was something quite moving (rather than evasive) about the way a father wanted his son (James) to do proud the family name (oh shut up Elisabeth - here's a copy of Louis Althuseer to read;))- just as in Beginners where the son (Ewan McGregor) of Christopher Plummer's gay character tried to reconcile and piece together the complete inhibitions of his father's gay sexuality while he (the son) endearingly fumbles somewhat 'mumblecorishly' through his newfound relationship with the adorable kooky girl (Mélanie Laurent). (No implication here of Murdoch sexual similitude I stress;)) Though, Mr M Snr - people would pay good money to see you attempt an All That Jazz routine in a garishly coloured cravat alongside James Jnr being the 'straight' man;) They would! Piss off Simon Cowell that's MY idea, love....

And then, and then! LIFE IN A DAY gezooks! (I might have just got sloshed on vodka in bed if I hadn't arisen this morning): just as the Murdoch questioning was closing from the very impressive and attractive Conservative MP Lousie Mensch (again - I'm not making up these names,) Pow, Wham. Splat from left of TV screen, live feed cut! What just happened? Someone in the public gallery behind tried to whack Mr M!!! You're kidding! His wife Wendi instinctively with Jackie Chan DNA skills looked as if she whacked back the assailant. This is staged right? We're in The Truman Show - come on, we have to be! The Yahoo tweeter behind me says the assailant's name is Jonnie Marbles - now he's pulling my whatsie too! And he tried to whack with a plate of shaving cream?! No. no I really am hallucinating. I never really got up this morning, right - I've really been in an alcoholic stupor. No wait, I did get up. AHHHHH TRUTH where art thou?

Funny thing is, if this were Sky sports we'd have slo-mo action replay almost immediately with all the human points of contact graphically laid out so that even a kid of 5 would think he's the next best astro-pysicist understanding trajectory of shaving foam from the paucity of a human limb. But this was BBC News 24 so we had to wait 10 minutes for even a simple standard replay. Credit where credit is due Sky TV. Incredibile! My first live TV in years and I get this. There is a God after all...Mr Malick (well, Fox Searchlight did stump up the money on that experimental studio film The Tree of Life- again, credit where it's due). One MP closed the Murdoch proceedings by jovially noting that "your wife has a very good left hook," - but typical of politicians eternally confused as to which side of the chamber they inhabit, Mrs Wendi Deng actually used a 'right hook'.

Missed most of Rebekkah Brooks answers as I unexpectedly stayed on at the screening room to watch David Weissman and Bill Weber's doco We Were Here about the history of AIDS in San Francisco (not released in the UK until Nov 25). You'd think it'd been done before but, I don't remember so....And do caring people even remember that initially the gay and lesbian camps were very far from being synonymous, in fact quite the opposite. It's incredibly emotive and personally recollective but that in fact gives the film a pinpoint focus rather than something rather more diffuse. One of the most moving moments (that wouldn't be out of place in The Sun or even The News of The World) is when one man describes how some who'd lost loved ones couldn't even afford to buy flowers. And amidst all the day's bluster, political maneuvering, coaching and guile, a real world was emerging. I had really woken up this morning. All of us lie to some extent sometimes. To save someone, rather than to harm them. But when does an illegal act become welcomed in the public interest rather than becoming a hinderance? If everyone is now in the public eye, or in Mr. M Snr's words demanding the need for "transparency", what does the law mean? Aren't we all complicit in this 3-ring circus of life? As Mr. M Snr noted in his answers, the city with least political corruption in the world is Singapore because they pay their democratically elected politicians an unbribable wage.

The trouble with Britain is that some of the most important (arguably unskilled) jobs such as security guards and CCTV monitors have such derisory salaries no human in their right mind would turn down a tempting offer from the dark side. (Seeing a new print of Brit B/W classic The Lavender Hill Mob was such a treat this week. It really does look different on that big screen...) People don't think that their son or loved one might be killed walking along that collapsing ill-constructed bridge that they could really not be bothered properly attending to. Whereas in America they can't get away from that democratic thought. And ironically Mr M Snr who controls Fox News in the States today admitted that Britain was far more transparent in regards to freedom of the press than America.

A day full of fascinating insights and contradictions into our life on earth. The whole crux of capitalism and the free world is creating desire. Desire for something just out of our grasp and yet only just enough so that we think we can trick it into our orbit. Like the old comedian's slight of foot sketch of seemingly almost grabbing the ball or whatnot and yet kicking it at the same time. It's both a reality and yet an illusion. Over the years, Mr Murdoch has given the world what it thinks it desires in many markets but most particularly in Britain. So much so that this country's democratically elected political elite thinks that is exactly what it too desires in their collusion with the Murdoch press. But it's a movable yet stationary feast just like the greedy buccaneers in countless movie adventures who melt into stone after believing in the illusory table of bountiful sustenance. While Britain foolishly sold off ALL its viable assets to foreign lands over the decades, a plucky young Ozzie Mr Rupert Murdoch spotted an ailing paper that over the century had caused even a true socialist such as George Orwell to sink into his armchair with gleeful slaver and savor. The News of the World fed The Sun and vice versa. Murdoch moved onto greater conquests. Britain, alas did not.

And would the world be a better place if democratic newspapers and democracies treated their readers and constituents as if they were their own son and daughter? No direct Murdoch family reference intended (I really do stress), but Cordelia in Shakespeare's King Lear just wouldn't bullshit her father like his other siblings. For that act she was banished. And ultimately the wise (or foolish depending on one's viewpoint) old Lear who thought he'd done his best in life? He ended his life carrying his daughter's carcass in his arms. No, no, no, no! The fault lies not in the stars but in ourselves. Murdoch is being made out in many quarters to be in search of his childhood 'Rosebud' (Citizen Kane). The man can be no saint but is there any proof that he is actually really a sinner? And may I posit the very unfashionable view that just maybe, and very perversely, the man is actually giving readers their Rosebud rather than searching for his own.

When Murdoch referred to making proud his own newspaper man father in his closing remarks today, I was genuinely moved. No! Please don't lynch me for saying that. Moved in a way that made me hate former PM Tony Blair's spin even more - (unfair perhaps I know but...) though there's certainly skill involved in that. Most people one meets (both sides of the Atlantic) try to find an excuse for not doing something. That someone, something or other let them down in life. And I thought of my own father (also an Australian) who passed away earlier this year. He was no saint either. And often I hated his guts to be honest and in many ways still do. But am I dead? No. Did I become a drug addict? No. Did I become a failure? No. In a very perverse way do I still love him? Yes, undeniably. Very much so. And why? Because although he was as straight-laced as anyone else of his generation, my father entertained the possibility of life's impossible. And as unfashionable a view as it might be I believe Murdoch has offered people that same choice. The fact that they have ignored or been to ignorant to question that choice is not a blame to be dumped on his doorstep.

Who is guilty and of what in the phone hacking scandal is for the government/police investigation to possibly uncover. And it is far from insignificant. But why are most people incapable of interrogating an equally significant and far bigger question about their lives? If everyone's a celebrity then no one is! Murdoch's tabloids ruthlessly (and arguably cruelly as well as illegally) made money out of holding a mirror up to nature: we live in a democracy so any celebrification has to be both normal (down the pub like us) and abnormal (how do we ever get to afford that fashion look). The result is a bit akin to the film Back to the Future where matter cannot possibly occupy simultaneous temporal spaces else it logically destroys itself. Thus is the story of many in Murdoch's tabloids. Thus is the dilemma of our society.

The Big Picture (not a bad transliteration of the film's French title L'homme qui voulait vivre sa vie) shows a man who thinks he knows what he wants to the extent of killing another and taking that identity whilst erasing his own by a faked death. The irony is that he is ultimately reborn by surrendering, or rather unwittingly creating yet another 'identity' for a total stranger. Many people never resurface from those waves. But he did. Maybe he had a 'Rosebud' or maybe not. But he stopped clinging to a past in which there was no hope in finding him a future. German director Alexander Kluge's films are all to do with that. Brit indie Treacle Jnr about the sadness of London streets also explores that catharsis. As doco director Molly Dineen has often pointed out in interviews the British don't have amnesia about the past it's that they so often just don't want to remember. But remembering isn't clinging. And it most certainly isn't about worshipping anything let alone in a refection. At least not unless one wants any chance of survival. Of waking up to another life in a day rather than forever trying to avoid it.

Does anyone remember the Commonwealth Institute towards Hammersmith on Kensington High Street and looming at the back of Holland Park? Does anyone remember the Commonwealth? Since the building closed its doors in 2002 it has been the home only mould and the ghosts of Melbury Road. As part of the InTRANSIT festival (4th year), dancers and musicians lead on audience through its spaces culminating in a dance performance (choreographer Dane Hurst) in the old auditorium to Harrison Birtwistle's Orpheus Elegies (only until Sunday). What newcomers to the building (and to such site-specific performance) is of course hard to tell. But for those of us who lived through a former decade of arts funding cuts, who survived another world only to be thrust into an equally dubious one currently, the experience at last night's preview was very strange and haunting. And it made one think of just how important are actual buildings in relation to the virtual world most people now inhabit.

As much as many would like everything in our daily lives to be controlled 'online' the Common Sounds: touching the void performances (presented by Fruit for the Apocalypse) are a reminder of our inner being. Of how we control ourselves in relation to others - many of the building's passage ways are very dimly lit and while safety precautions are adhered to, the show also seems to be asking us to be aware and take control of our own bodies; that political correctness and control in whatever form does not necessarily makes us happy. That we must find the light in the prevailing darkness. In the windmills of those of us who still have a mind to call our own.
Refreshing change from the hypocrisy of Westminster politics that's for sure...and the Metropolitan Rotton Apple Corps...

The Zoo of the new...

Did you read of the pregnant woman having to walk the rail tracks escaping her trapped train only to be confronted by police officers to whom she had to justify her actions (along with other passengers)? And more allegations of The News of the World phone hacking. "Deplorable" said Mr. Murdoch, News International's proprietor. Too little too late? If other organisations are anything to go by, there may be a trickle down effect but often very little trickles up! (There is, of course, a lot of benefit of the doubt itself in that statement.) But when in the bigger picture will it all stop and when will it all get better?
BBC Radio 4 Profile of investigative reporter Nick Davies

This year's Cannes fest winner The Tree of Life was finally distributed by Fox Searchlight (a News Corporation stablemate). It's director Terrence Malick has been dubbed a maverick and one of the few directors in the world whose films are awaited with hushed awe among the critical fraternity. Having mentioned 'the law' in paragraph 1, most films this week indeed orbit that subject. Malick's film opens with a supertitle from the Book of Job "Where were you when I laid the foundations of the Earth?" - his female protagonist wife (Jessica Chastain) extolling the virtues of 'grace': "the only way to be happy is to love...do good to them...wonder, hope". Moreover, Malick seems to be embrassing the philosophy of Simone Weil (Gravity and Grace): the qualities of grace being such that they are immune to the laws of gravity. And while many will feel that Malick's use of space and cosmos imagery (a little akin to Kubrick's in 2001: A Space Odyssey - effects maestro Douglas Trumbull in fact worked on both films) is unnecessary and pretentious, the director's vision is indeed just that and one that he follows with utter surety. It brings to mind the clip in the YouTube Life in a Day in which a husband is reciting Walt Whitman poetry to his wife who juggles two babies yet only berates him for laziness and inconsequence.

And it's certainly arguable whether Malick ever succeeds in promulgating his vision of humanity to a 'broader church'. But in Malick's defence his story of a church going 50s Texas family (the stern father-Brad Pitt), juxtaposed to the eldest son (Sean Penn) now matured into the modern day metropolis as an architect, is all to do with gravity and where 'grace' might lie. The film jump cuts, lists, swerves, hovers while never quite touching anything long enough to fall. It's a film full of tender and cruel moments like our own memories that we simultaneously cherish and trash in frustration upon reflection. It's a film at one and the same time deeply religious and yet deeply critical of religion's hypocrisy. Much as what lead Simone Weil into her unique Christian philosophy. Above all it's a film about the duality of love and survival; of how we must simultaneously trust each quality whilst never succumbing to the gravitational pull of the other.

Yuya Ishii's Sawako Decides (trailer)is one of the few wonderful Japanese films that has managed to secure distribution outside its homeland (Dear Doctor from last year's London Film Festival remains unbefriended). Like many Japanese films it's all to do with family and how one copes with the contradictions of independence and attachment. Sawako (Hikari Mitsushima) ran off from her family's freshwater clam farm in the countryside, a boy towing her to Tokyo. She returns rather reluctantly 5 years hence with another - his daughter not hers in tow (her 5th boy and 5 jobs later) to see her dying father. The tree of this film is a very disgruntled one cursing the roots it placed in government promises of prosperity and confidence. 'Thoughtful, funny, uplifting' would be the poster tag for this film. But thankfully it's far more than just that trinity of salesmanship.

"I can't understand people who say that childhood is the happiest time of one's life." says the orphaned 8 year-old Ana (Ana Torrent), as an adult (Geraldine Chaplin). Carlos Saura's Raise Ravens (Cría Cuervos) (1976) has another adult desperately trying to make sense of what was. For Ana, remembering or re-assembling her childhood past (the last days of Franco's Spanish regime) is somewhat sado-masochistic. By filling the void of memory or rather lack of understanding Ana kids herself that she has made her life whole again. A sugar rush that forever dwindles into despair.

And if one had the choose of taking their enlightened teenager (indeed some are still allowed to thrive;) to see either Disney's Prom or Greg Araki's Kaboom? Disney can do 'edge' within it's happy realm but it's usually confined to animated characters. Any chance of another Enchanted anytime soon? A shame Prom's cheerleader couldn't end up with the cute geek who turned out to be gay (but not quite) but who had a friend who everyone thought was, you know, but wasn't (almost). Innuendo is possible in a G rating. The closest we get in Prom is the poking of a pencil. Still, great acting all round.

Araki wanted his film to "exist on its own terms and vibrate at its own anomalous frequency". His tale of American college freshmen (and women) is intimate, quirky and cool until in the final quarter angsty paranoid gloom prevails and he discovers his estranged Dad has become Mr. Doomsday. But maybe the young Smith (Thomas Dekker) is also attempting to fill that void of memory. Some great lines abound in Araki's script, though: "Dude, it's a vagina, not a bowl of spaghetti." Oh sweet mystery of youth I've found you...

Actor David Schwimmer (on the board of directors for the Rape Foundation in Santa Monica, California) explores the issues of teenage 'grooming' and sexual encounter with older men in Trust (Lionsgate is UK distributor). The 14 year old Annie (a totally believable Liana Liberato) strikes up an internet/text relationship with the much older Charlie (Chris Henry Coffey) and you can guess the rest. If it weren't for Liberato's deeply nuanced, affecting performance Schwimmer's film would probably not have the impact it does. And you do begin wondering about this when the director neatly sews everything up in a moralising end credit coda. It's politically ney morally incorrect for us to feel any empathy for Charlie but that's how Annie feels. What's interesting about the film is that for the mostpart Annie doesn't feel like a victim of Charlie more one of society's mores. The adults, meanwhile, attempt to impress upon you (and her) that such empathy is misplaced.

It's a script needing several more re-writes if one wants a film that lives up to what one senses are Schwimmer's more chiaroscuro intentions. We get it: Annie's Dad (Clive Owen) works for an ad company that of course markets sexily to teenagers etc etc. He becomes somewhat of an incensed vigilante even committing GBH at a netball game on someone who vaguely resembles a pedophile in a photo he's seen. He's, of course, instantly forgiven. Not bloody likely in America. Out for dinner and drinks his ad buddy innocently banters chat-up with the quite normal flirtatious 19 year old waitress and then sprouts sexual innuendo to his mate. We get it. What we don't get is what we experience from Liberato's performance as Annie.

Her trust in Dad snaps as she learns that her older brother's been told of the incident as they discuss his new girlfriend while enjoying an extended family dinner: she socks her disgust at that hypocrisy to the assembled. Scenes like this show Annie's strength rather than vulnerability. So why does Mr. Schwimmer feel the need to tow a moral line rather than trusting his material and performers - the latter are all so tremendous. Annie is done a disservice by a film that allows her to remain a victim. Would the investigating police really prejudice their case by showing Annie photos of other girls, prefaced by the info that their rape cases match the DNA of Charlie? Perhaps so. But the film results more in promulgating a law to help and condemn adult morality rather than offer any consolation to girls like Annie. Why does age of consent differ in different countries? Are girls of those ages any more/less vulnerable? Any more/less able to judge for themselves. Of course not. It isn't what this film is about but THIS seems to be the film Schwimmer really wanted to make. His direction of Liberato is just too full of care and compassion of a young human being to say otherwise. While the world chokes on the hypocrisy of agism, the law is like democracy: it's far from perfect but it's all we have to combat the darkness of its alternative.

The stylised comic-book-esque Super is another case in point. Should Frank 'the Crimson Bolt' (Rainn Wilson) and Libby 'Boltie' (Ellen Page) really be allowed to clean-up crime on our screens? Seemingly no subtlety to be found here only a helluva lot of fun from writer/director James Gunn. But he found a way to entertain whilst acknowledging the widespread moral rectitude debate in America - Gunn was influenced by reading William James' 1902 book The Varieties of Religious Experience. Ellen Page, as always, bounces around and out of that screen like a dog never ceasing to search for its ball.

The Devil's Rock mixes Nazi occult with the vampiric devil in a New Zealand three-hander (basically) set in the Channel Islands. It sounds dire but is surprisingly well done with few tricky camera moves or effects relying almost solely on the actors' ability to convince. You even get used to the Nazi sporting a Kiwi accent. What's not to like...

"Ignorance is never dead, it's even making progress" director Bertrand Tavernier said of his latest film The Princess of Montpensier (based on Madame de La Fayette's novel). This director's greatest skill has always been to get into the heart of his characters whether they be the police, a jazz musician, a school teacher or in this case the Princess Marie (Melanie Thierry) in 1562 France trying to assert her independence of heart and mind in a world dominated by male political power struggle. It's a film whose invisible orbit is of "realities we cannot see" and make sense of. Marie is uneducated and yet uncalculating. Ultimately, did she get the life she desired or has she fallen victim of it the film seems to ask? Some may prefer the period contemporaneous immediacy of Catherine Breillat's Bluebeard. Tavernier goes for precise detail such as the scrutinising of Marie's hymen blood on wedding night showing us that the moral and political absurdities of our modern world aren't very far at all from those of 1562.
Lots of Tavernier titles with commentaries from him e.g. L.626, L'Horloger de Saint Paul (The Watchmaker of St. Paul)


Bridesmaids needs no introduction after its enormous success all sides of the globe. So is it as good as...? Well, yes, pretty much, given that it's the sort of film outre comedienne Sarah Silverman outgrew in her mind years ago and one she could take her mum to without causing much offence (assuming her mum is a universal one;) And all the gags are funny because real life is the basis for their wicked wit. Even Brit's own Chris O'Dowd (from TV sitcom The IT Crowd) fits in perfectly - gentle nature, accent and all - as of all things a cop who falls for Annie (Kristen Wiig) after pulling over her car. And it's produced by Judd Apatow of Knocked Up fame etc.

Only one line rings slightly awkwardly when at the very end Annie jokes to the sky marshall she caused havoc with on a flight (all's now well and he's even invited to the party), "I put a gun in your carry-on". Now if Silverman delivered that line it would be funny. Here in Bridesmaids it seems to need an addition like 'joking' as ballast. And if there's a criticism of the film it would be that we should laugh through our tears for Annie rather than just with her. Not the fault of Wiig who always suggests that in her performance (and she's far less trouble, well not quite, and irritation than the sister in Mike Leigh's Another Year.) And what is nice about the film is that it never makes fun of one character or lifestyle ( e.g. Helen's perfectly manicured rich life and actions) over another. A touch of Hannah and Her Sisters wouldn't go astray, though.

Treasures of Heaven: Saints, relics and Devotion in Medieval Europe sounds dull. But in fact it would be even more interesting than it already is if the British Museum's show told us who, exactly, were these Catholic saints whose intriguing reliquaries to this day have devotees in their thousands. A 3 minute video reminding us of contemporary icons (as diverse as eg Princess Diana, Elvis Presley, Lenin) isn't a crowd pleasing afterthought in the last alcove either. Rather, its germane to the whole idea of the exhibition. Fragments of the dead that allow some of us to continue the struggle for our gift of life.
BBC Radio 3's Discovering Music explores the contemporaneity of Ockeghem's C15 Requiem Mass.
This week's The Choir is also worth a listen.
And of course the annual BBC Proms springs into action next Saturday.

BBC4's Troubadours: The Rise of the Singer Songwriter (also out on Universal DVD) is Morgan Neville's doco on the famed Los Angeles club of the title. "By 1970 the heart of 60s rock was going down...losing it's energy and needed time to take its breath...and this was when this singer/songwriter movement was at its most powerful" according to Robert Hilburn of the LA Times. Much of the doco centres on Carole King and James Taylor who returned to celebrate the club's 50th anniversary in 2007 and the 2010 reunion tour.
King: there was "a hunger for the intimacy, the personal thing that we did".
Jackson Browne: "the authenticity of somebody telling their own story was what people were interested in". Doug Weston's Troubadour club was also the start of Elton John's career amongst many, many others. Steve Martin: "It wasn't so much, 'I want to be an artist', it was that 'I want to make it' ...here's how you make it, 'to be an artist'." Neville's doco wisely focusses on how the music of the club germinated rather than the personal trials and tribulations (drugs and otherwise) of his interviewees though James Taylor is as candid as one could get in a chat filmed with Carole King. And though the subject of this musical era has been covered by others (e.g. the BBC series Hotel California that follows tonight's airing of Troubadours), as with all Neville's docos, the director always finds the personal stories that make the relatively unknown history spring to new life rather than melancholy.

In celebration of the re-release of The Lavender Hill Mob (1951) there will be specially arranged bike tours of historic cinematic sites (July 29-31).
For scooter enthusiasts there's always Tom Hanks pootling round LA in Larry Crowne - an idealised life perhaps but so is the one politicians wish us to live. Tom Hanks should know he gets to have dinner with them all;) Still, on its own terms, the film's not all that bad, come on. And why you may ask is Optimum releasing a film with so little 'edge' (Universal in the States): it's produced with its French owner Studio Canal.

A Separation sounds fairly plodding but one shouldn't be deterred by the storyline. In fact it's the very intricacies of the film's plot that make it more akin to a subtle low key police thriller than the social realism that also it is obviously. Equally, the fact that the film is set in Iran and is Muslim in nature in no way limits the film's resonance to a capital city like Berlin, Paris or London. It deservedly scooped this year's awards in Berlin with its writer/director Asghar Farhadi paying tribute to his imprisoned colleague director Jafar Panahi. Farhadi's film seems to ask what does the law mean to us as normal human beings? We may transgress it but not necessarily ourselves and vice versa. When does a white lie become rather more black and so on? Sony Classics picked up the film for US distribution and its easy to see why.

Marcel van Eeden's new show at Sprüth Magers Lee asks us to consider our relationship to historical narrative. Initially you wonder why that in 2011 the artist is presenting what looks like narrative fictions exclusively in pencil. Surely this is 80s/90s work before the internet truly went berserk in deconstructing our world order. You read the press release and are still a little mystified. You go back to the walls yet they seem odd - the placement of the drawings, the colour of the walls. This isn't even just a constructed fictional set of narratives. If one were to move a drawing you feel that it would leave a trace on the wall. When the artist himself explained, the sense of the show was indeed as simple and complex as one wondered. Every historical narrative is of course a construct. Only a fraction of the truth (if that) is ever present in the representation of any narrative e.g. if the government didn't tell us that then what else didn't/aren't they telling us? In theory the internet should be making us conform to such narratives less and yet the opposite seems to be happening. Plus ça change...

Last fortnight's film Potiche rather appositely opened this year's Transylvannia International Film Festival. For another week at the Romanian Cultural Institute is the exhibition In the Light of Utopia showcasing experimental art of the late 1960s from a group of Timisoara-based artists. The catalogue's opening paragraph: "The artists' individual searches sometimes lead them to the most dissimulated, labyrinthine spaces of a line of thought, which shunts the surrounding reality aside. The searches take them to the secret locations, jealously kept away from the outsiders' looks, wear the most daring concepts arise, bearing the mark of idealism. This line of thought, fed by inner phantasms, gives rise to chimeras or utopias, eclectic sets of dreams or goals, replacing the surrounding world. Chacun sa Chimère, Baudelaire used to write, pointing to the diversity of these phantasms, which can take a variety of arbitrary shapes measured against individual standards."

Liliana Mercioiu Popa's Elliptical Construction was made in response to Romania's 2001 election - simple grey boxes containing word actions, "nothing coherent and constructive...it doesn't matter what one says only how one wins their audience." It's an art work certainly equal to any in major museums and one's not quite sure whether it's allowable to kick or move the boxes around. Great piece for kids too. When Sean Penn looks up at those skyscrapers in The Tree of Life it reminds us (and probably him) of what it was to grow tall thence taller. We thought the world was unknowable it was so big and when we return to such a place we wonder at how on earth the world could possibly have tricked us. And how indeed it continues to do so.

...this dark ceiling without a star