Life nowadays is a funny something

At the end of the day, we all live in different realities. Right? And if we haven't actually experienced something for ourselves, we will all inevitably have a different sense of the truth. No? The question keeps asking itself, why do we go to an art gallery, a film, a book reading? Is there really any human difference between those experiences and that of attending a sports event? Isn't it ultimately a search for belonging, for meaning in our lives? Prince Charles visited some of the sites decimated by the riots a fortnight ago and concluded that youths joined gangs for a sense of belonging. Often it's worthwhile to state the obvious. Tony Blair hit the front page of last week's Observer with his opinion piece on the riots concluding that these were isolated citizens in the minority of our good society and all that we needed to do was get back to his policies (promulgated as PM) of helping dysfunctional families.

But did Mr Blair see the real world either? The argument is a book in itself, of course. But Britain has always been a divided society. It tried (arguably succeeded) in leading the world in being a tolerant society. But for decades the money started running out to support the infrastructure for such noble ideals. New Labour created a new middle-class but ironically its result has been to out-price any new-coming house-buyers from any major town or city and create another set of under-classes. No-one could have foreseen last decade's multitude of financial debacles nor the Iraq War. Could New Labour have worked in an ideal world?

The roots of Britain's discontent lie far deeper than just dysfunctional families. Not all is lost of course and never will be (therein lies Blair's optimism and vindication) as many of America's inner-city interventions have proven. This year's Oscar winning In a Better World by Danish director Susanne Bier explores our notions of tolerance and forbearance. It's a confrontational yet life-affirming film, arguably a discourse rather than a vision for the world. The irony is that she may never have got it made (through Danish outfit Zentropa) if it weren't for the dystopian visions of Lars von Trier (his latest Melancholia opens end-Sept) who scorched an international reputation for that company. And who openly made fun of Bier (apologetically) at his Cannes press conference this year. He mentioned the Nazis and was banned from the festival. The Chapman brothers (at both White Cube spaces) eerily create an installation of life-size Nazis (like magnets that both repulse and attract) garnering them mostly praise (it really does need to be experienced). Go figure.

Von Trier's groundbreaking films are unlikely to ever win an Academy Award® (not that there aren't some very fine Academy Award® winning films). But films that win such awards will always tend to embrace the ground of life rather than break the turf. The concert film of Glee is a case in point. The stereotypes of this hit TV series are life-affirming to the minorities it champions. Who could possibly criticise that achievement? Just as the guy who blinked twice on YouTube and followed up with his confessionals went on to be one of the most widely viewed in the world. It's a sense of belonging.

But belonging can also be hewn out of dystopia as Athina Rachel Tsangari shows in her film Attenberg: “I don’t use psychology,” she has said. “I prefer biology or zoology. These are my tools." Marina's (Ariane Labed) father Spyros is dying of cancer and she forms a bond with Bella (Evangelia Randou). Together they watch Sir David Attenborough animal docs, dance, kiss and generally avoid any other human contact. As with last year's perversely provocative Greek film Dogtooth (same cinematographer Thimios Bakatakis) it is a meditation on the barriers between our inner selves and society. Are we any happier joining in the social mores of our race?

Another Dane, Lone Scherfig has helmed the film of David Nicholls's book One Day. College in Edinburgh almost unites Emma (Anne Hathaway) and Dexter (Jim Sturges) but life (we witness their same July 15 from 1988 to 2011) thence teases them apart. Scherfig's skill (cf An Education) is in getting up close and personal to find a character's truth. Her latest film is no exception. And many times we roll with this mirror to our nature. However, a novel allows us space to dream while a conventional film does not. Therein lies the film's failures not so much in the material.

If you've queued for hours one dreary, grey London summer morning in the vain hope of getting a ticket to see the bare-breasted torso of Jude Law in Anna Christie (the rest of the show's attributes are apparently first-rate too), try The Museum of Broken Relationships open til Sept 4: a sad, fascinating show touring from Zagreb, initiated by the Tristan Bates theatre, and spread over two Covent Garden spaces plus a few window nooks in surrounding shops. Objects with their attached 'broken stories' have been donated to the Museum by their owners and suspended in time like the volcanic aspic of Pompeii. Inspired or depressed you're certain never to walk alone with your scars after seeing this show.

Spaniard Pedro Almodóvar has spend much of his time living in another reality namely Madrid. His films find the truth of life in its melodrama, often multiple dramas within the same movie. The Skin I Live In has Dr. Robert Ledgard (Antonio Banderas who only seems to become more human the longer he works;) obsessed with his plastic surgery techniques. It's a far slower, more meditative, even more voyeuristic film than we're used to from Almodóvar. He creates skin that is both a metaphor for identity and a membrane for our tolerance of existence. He even seems to be toying with his viewer giving them both the entertainment they crave but also suggesting that our own inner life is far more disturbing and incisive than anything Almodóvar himself could conjure on the screen. Normally edgy 'politically aware' distributors Metrodome have savvily nabbed what could only be called Ming Dynasty soft-porn, 3D Sex & Zen-Extreme Ecstasy. Now's your chance if you've never seen a 3D nipple (and there are plenty to choose from here). Might even be a route into introducing teenage students into the semiotics of Umberto Eco and simulacra;) Or even the fine art of Chinese ceramics.

Sergei Paradjanov played with identity in The Colour Of Pomegranates, 1969 (a world 'classic' just out on DVD) outraging the censors by casting the same actress as both iconic C18th poet Sayat Nova and his seductress Anna-two halves of the same soul. He was imprisoned by the authorities who feared that he'd become a figurehead for young intellectual Ukranian nationalists. The film was commissioned for the 250th anniversary of Sayat Nova's birth - he wrote in 3 languages, viewed as a symbol of the brotherhood of the trans-Caucasus and promoted by central government as a path to united socialism. The original release was a travesty of the director's vision - and only by watching Levon Grigoryan's (Paradjanov's assistant) 2006 doco DVD extra can we gauge the full vision of the director's "poetic subtext of the everyday object". This Second Sight release is brimming with other extras such as Daniel Bird's specially commissioned doco The World is a Window and an audio commentary by one of the actors who was cast because of his authentic beard - though some phrases are a little hard to understand through his thick accent.
Legend Of the Suram Fortress DVD

A review at the time by Willy Haas of F.W. Murnau’s 1921 silent Schloß Vogelöd (Castle Vogelöd:The Revelation of a Secret) notes: "Murnau’s artistic tendency is to moderate strong gestures into others more noble and subtle. This makes him more successful than any other director in conveying intimate dialogue, the completely silent exchanges of the heart, as in the scene of the confession, where the emotion is expressed through the extraordinary tension of the bodies." The film is even more remarkable given that it was shot in only 16 days. A 30min DVD featurette shows how Murnau used sets to illuminate the character's emotions e.g. false perspective, inspired by the art of Käthe Kollwitz. Also from Eureka DVD is a very strange, rather slow Romanian tale Strigoi giving a sort of Ken Loach twist to the vampiric genre. And if you didn't know that Howard J. Ford & Jonathan Ford had over 100 commercials to their credit you'd be awestruck by the sheer technical brilliance of their zombies in Africa pic The Dead - a hit at London’s Frightfest. You don't have to give this film the 'sympathy' vote just 'cause you've heard all their trials and tribulations e.g. losing their leading man to malaria. What is lacking, though, is anything particularly new or inventive for the zombie genre. That said, you're never bored and the fact that you expect more to happen than it actually does is tantamount to the Ford brothers skill in the use of suspenseful cinema. There may indeed be a message trying to escape here but there isn't that extra twist to allow it to do so. Still, you'll happily buy a ticket for the Fords next adventure given this quality product.

Another award winning ad director turning to feature films is Ben Wheatley (whose debut last year Down Terrace divided critics). On the strength of that and his latest Kill List Wheatley's one of the few Brit directors alongside the likes of Shane Meadows who's idiosyncratic enough to deserve having their name above the title. There's a documentary edginess to the camerawork and to the way Wheatley allows us unto the lives of his characters. The 'hit man family' plot descriptions don't sound like much on paper. But when executed they're really quite spine-tingling and excitingly enigmatic. It's been a while since a Brit director had us on the edge of our seats (in Blair Witch vein) and if you prefer your violence suggested off-screen (like the Tarantino Reservoir Dogs ear slicing) then Wheatley's brand of entertainment is probably not up your street.

After In Bruges we all eagerly awaited Martin McDonagh's brother writer-director John Michael feature. The Guard's tone isn't quite as sure-footed and nimble as the former - think Tarantino on Valium in West Ireland after too many pints of Guinness. But it's still miles ahead of anyone else in the Isles attempting this sort of politically incorrect jibe, with every performance just a knock-out.

And you couldn't get further away from such shenanigans than Pedro Costa's Colossal Youth (2006, out on Eureka DVD) filmed in Lisbon's new high-rise public housing ghettos. But there you might be wrong, at least most certainly in terms of Costa's cinematic sensibility. Craig Keller's doco extra is a fascinating shambolic 2hours where Costa reminds us that 3sec of a John Ford western is equal to 3hours of some less illuminating contemporaries. "Art is not about anything else but reality...the things we see...not doing philosophy...space, form, I see certain lights...I'm not dealing with other things than this" "3 seconds in John Ford is 3,000 years. I defy any young video artist to tell his story in [one of those time frames] but he has to work very hard...it's Proust, it's Kafka, it lasts for centuries to tell just one second."

Costa has used as actors non-professional local inhabitants of Fontainhas, Lisbon to get as "faraway from the mechanisms of cinema" wanting his films to be " as rich as a Griffith or a Stroheim film (beautiful in another sense)...I never thought I could do that with a video camera [Costa began his career using traditional 35mm]...I thought it was a poor electronic way of doing some things, but..."
Criterion's Region 1 DVD release certainly beats Eureka's when it comes to the extras and its 4-disc box set


At the Royal Academy Eyewitness: Hungarian Photography in the 20th Century puts many of the world's most famous photographers into their historical Hungarian context - André Kertész, László Moholy Nagy, Brassaï. And like Pedro Costa you start thinking about what is life and what is art and is/should there be any difference in the execution or the result? Costa's film's could be termed 'art-house' yet they aren't professing to be art. Nor are Lars von Trier's films - he remarked once about the pointlessness of showing a close-up of a fly crawling up the wall if all one is doing was creating an atmosphere for a film. Neither he nor Costa could be termed 'realist' - perhaps more akin to 'magical realism' though both may consider each other polar opposites. Moholy-Nagy's photos aren't angular just to be different and 'poetic' they are his way of showing us the reality. Munkácsi (who moved on to fashion photography) described his task as seeing "within a 1,000th of a second the things that indifferent people blindly pass by - this is the theory of photo reportage. And the things we see within this 1,000th of a second we should then photograph within the next 1,000 of a second - this is the practical side of photo reportage."
Compare this to the V&A's new show Signs of a Struggle.

Artist Ryan Gander's work has always seemed to get us asking what is it that we desire and how do we go about that journey. You arrive to Locked Room Scenario and an empty Hoxton warehouse with almost all the doors padlocked. There are signs of activity that you barely see or hear. If you're ultra-used to be inquisitive/skeptical/voyeuristic then this experience may prove somewhat disappointing. But as we know, though that is everyone's natural tendency most of us go to great lengths to keep such thoughts submissive. Gander suggests you should un-lock these inner feelings, take them home and nurture rather than suppress them. Another ArtAngel commission is 1395 Days without Red two almost identical films by artists Šejla Kamerić and Anri Sala (in collaboration with Ari Benjamin Meyers) using citizens of Sarajevo to reenact the days they were under sniper attack (1992-1996) whilst crossing street corners. Each film uses the same material but is angled somewhat differently. Spanish actress Mirabel Verdú hums the notes of Tchaikovsky's 6th Symphony rehearsed by the Sarajevo Symphony Orchestra elsewhere in the city. Even if you've never lived through an experience such as Sarajevo, it's easy to identify with the very private act of trying to stay alive whilst focusing your mind on both the reality and the possibility of a different world.

Mike Figgis Royal Opera House weekend Just Tell the Truth
Vision Sound Music Festival Southbank Centre

mais il faut savoir

London's burning and other regional cities followed suit. The impression, at least, our newspapers gave the world. Yet London's West End is perfectly normal, no more, no less than ever before-the same twittering bullshit, petit alliances, pretense of normality, total lack of privacy and absence of anything less than banal. This week's film releases seem as if history was already writ. You could feel tensions in the city's tentacles at least 5 years ago. But to have spoken its name would be to own up to a terrible truth of democracy. Once again, the Metropolitan police have shot dead a suspect. Not a regular occurrence but you only need one match with which to start a fire. The Brazilians were more level-headed after the Met Police shot dead one of their own (Mr. Menezes). But few ever wish to confront such a naked flame.
Angry Police We made decisions while politicians were on holiday
The Interrupters is released this week.

Did Amy Winehouse die from a broken heart and did anyone ever really keep an eye on that porcelain breath? Or were the seismic jolts from the police, from the press, from the nay-sayers just too much to bear in the end. Her fans were her solace. I joked to someone a few weeks before, that with her money she could've/should've moved to Malibu for a bit and bought that classic recording studio going for a song instead of splurging on her Camden pile. Like that other singer who'd recovered in Nashville. Probably that just wouldn't have been Amy. She now rests is peace and the world's non-conformists and dreamers will have an inextinguishable flame.
Nick Godwyn wrote a wonderfully honest tribute in the Saturday Review of The Times (July 30)

One Rio de Janeiro police officer Captain Nascimento (Wagner Moura) confronts the naked flame in Elite Squad: The Enemy Within (a sequel set 13 years after the 2007 original). The territory of this film may seem all too familiar - corrupt politicians in league with corrupt cops - fictional with "similarities to real events" (Brazilian audiences of 10 million in its first 9 weeks of release). But writer/director José Padilha gives faces and lives to these people, and though its an action film certainly on par with Hollywood, you leave the cinema wondering (if you hadn't already) just what your own government's "loathsome interests" hasn't been telling its people. Interestingly the film isn't attacking policing as such; rather the abuse of power. Moreover, Nascimento tries to impress upon his own teenage son how important it is to be ready to fight in order to be able to enjoy peace.

More abuse of power in Lee (Once Were Warriors) Tamahori's The Devil's Double - the story of Uday Hussein (one of Saddam's sons) and his body double Latif (Brit actor Dominic Cooper believably impressive as both). The director freely admits he was aiming at making a gangster pic with all the garishness of Scarface and "the obscene bad taste of wealth". The Tamahori choice to verge on savage satire works well though some may wish for more socio-political depth of field.

A wonderful surprise on Eureka DVD is Imamura Shôhei 's wide-screen B/W (beautifully restored print) Pigs and Battleships (Buta to gunkan, 1961) centering on a small Japanese fishing port transformed by the presence of a US naval base. Small-time yakuza (lead female Haruko [Yoshimura Jitsuko] contemptuously
calls them chinpira, meaning ‘punks’ or ‘would-be yakuza’) control the tiny town including pig breading. Haruko's boyfriend is the endearingly awkward Kinta - the yakuza's scapegoat. This gangster comedy (with an exciting painfully bitter-sweet finale) is certainly the equal in all respects of Hollywood product at the time (even a little reminiscent of Minnnelli's Some Came Running, 1958) ending. Imamura' "didn’t find the atmosphere of Shochiku [film studio] at all inspiring (least of all his stint as Ozu’s lowest assistant director) and needed little encouragement to jump ship to [the more commercial] Nikkatsu" notes Tony Raynes in the DVD booklet. Imamura's first feature Stolen Desire (Nusumareta yokujô, 1958) ,also on the DVD, exhibits the director's same comedic touch on a group of struggling travelling actors.

Another thoroughly enjoyable 'evening in' from Eureka (no sycophancy needed only justly deserved) is Jean Epstein's silent 1923 Cœur fidèle (Faithful Heart): "You might say it’s the least bad of my films," the director is quoted, "And, in fact, by dint of this desired, studied, concentrated banality, I made a rather strange film which possesses nothing of the melodrama beyond its surface appearance." If you knew nothing of Epstein or his film theories you'd watch this film and go WOW! that's not at all like a boring silent movie;) such is Epstein's modern movie-making skills. Epstein himself again (quoted from Eureka's DVD booklet):
"If you must say about a film that it has beautiful sets, I think it would be better not to speak about it at all; the film is bad. The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari [Das Kabinett des Doktor Caligari, Robert Wiene, 1920] is the best example of the misuse of sets in cinema. Caligari represents a serious cinematographic malady: the hypertrophy of a subordinate feature accorded to what is an “accident” at the expense of the essential...shoddy expressionism ready-made for thirty francs.”
Henri Langlois' following text first appeared in Cahiers du cinéma, no. 24, June 1953:
"For everyone else, Cœur fidèle was a point of departure; for Epstein, it was only a point of arrival. He was through with the discoveries of our first avant-garde; he was eager to test himself on a simpler story, on a slower type of movement." Rapid editing technique had been almost perfected by Abel Gance in his La Roue (The Wheel, 1923) who at the Palais du Festival in Cannes 1953 paid tribute to Epstein the "extraordinary and unrecognised thinker and philosopher...and, like a true sorceror, he went so far as to penetrate the mysteries of the fringes of interference between images of the automaton strangling the inventor."

"In The Senses Epstein explains that because stories do not exist in life, they have no place in cinema. The cinema is true; a story is false. [He] believed that narrative served only to strangle the drama and emotion in cinema, the proper place for narrative was the theatre and the novel, and it was within these forms that such devices should be dominant." Epstein believed in a film theory of photogénie. "I would describe as photogenic any aspect of things, beings or souls whose moral character is enhanced by filmic reproduction. And any aspect not enhanced by filmic reproduction is not photogenic, plays no part in the art of cinema...[ the camera grants] a semblance of life to the objects it defines.”"
As I first noted, you'd don't need to read the DVD booklet first to immediately appreciate all those qualities in Cœur fidèle. They just leap out at you from the screen e.g depth of field, the very unstagy acting, even the damp, depressing walls (wonderfully visible in the restored print) seem more like the work of a contemporary film art director not one from 1923. Quite simply, I was blown away by this DVD. And it's such a sad comment on our existence that Epstein's talents went so unrecognised during his lifetime.

A more familiar name is Alain Resnais whose Last Year at Marienbad (UK DVD), recently re-released, divided critics into either the still fascinated or still totally bored i.e. ponderous. In fact most of his oeuvre is of much the same divide. There was the failed, fascinating comic book musical I Want to Go Home (1989), the singular Stavisky with a rare Stephen Sondheim score, or his Providence (1977) with an amazing cast that included John Gielgud. And so many, many more films.

Just out on DVD are two early classics Night and Fog (Nuit et brouillard) (1955), and Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959). The latter, his 1st feature (with a Marguerite Duras script) is considered part of the ground-breaking 'modernist vein' in cinema and it would be intriguing to know what Epstein would have thought of this (he died in 1953) given the film's refusal to follow traditional narrative in its quest for "inconsolable memory". Night and Fog also divides opinion: a half hour film about the holocaust! It's distancing effect is almost Brechtian - the film gives you crucial facts but they barely scratch the surface, it elicits a gut-wrenching emotional response yet never allows such an indulgence. This is no Shoah (1985) nor was ever meant to be. Yet there are three lines of narration that leap out grabbing the viewer (and indeed is that one and the same as the listener?): “Is it in vain that we try to remember?”. "We pretend it only happened once." "At least they tried." (in reference to the Nazi's recycling of their victims' bodies and belongings) Resnais seems not so much to be making a documentary about the past but a film about the present and the future. How can one remember something that you've never experienced? Or indeed relate in any meaningful way except for platitudinous grief. Is the film not asking how can we possibly respect history (or even the future) if there's little chance of really understanding it from the remains of what we are proffered?
Hiroshima Mon Amour (Criterion DVD)
Night and Fog (Criterion DVD)

Chris Marker was an assistant on Night and Fog and has gone on to be one of the most discussed figures in avant-garde cinema and photography. “The Sorbonne [University] should be razed and Chris Marker put in its place,” wrote fellow French writer Henri Michaux. Optimum DVD releases his three important films: the 28min narration of still photos La jetée (1962), Level Five (1996) and Sans Soleil(1983): "I've been round the world several times and now only banality still interests me...small fragments of war enshrined in everyday life...the fragility of those moments suspended in time...memories whose only function of being to leave behind nothing but memories." His faux narrator travels to the locations of Hitchcok's Vertigo: "From this fake tower—the only thing that Hitchcock had added—he imagined Scotty as time's fool of love, finding it impossible to live with memory without falsifying it." So much has been written about Marker that it seems almost superfluous to the films themselves. If Godard is Brecht then for all its Marxist leanings, Marker is the melancholic romancer of Mouladji's song Un jour tu verras (One day you will see) that plays out the final credits of Level Five. Marker is all to do with projected futures that are predicated on a projected past, predicated on a projected present, projected on a forgotten future.

Sander Lee even wrote an essay for Senses of Cinema, Platonic Themes in Chris Marker’s La Jetée - "Like Plato’s philosopher, the protagonist in La Jetée cares more for his internal vision of the truth than for the objects and shadows coveted by most other people." In Sans Soleil the ill-fated Guinea-Bissau Carnation Revolution of 1974 is constantly referred to like an old refrain that holds hope for the future but with a bitter memory of past's reality: "And beneath each of these faces a memory. And in place of what we were told had been forged into a collective memory, a thousand memories of men who parade their personal laceration in the great wound of history." If you visit Chris Marker, you visit a world that is tragic, spontaneous, exhilarating, the nadir of human existence. But also by its very nature pragmatically romantic - or should that be the other way round right side up?

Brit director Duncan Jones follows his successful Moon with Source Code (just out on DVD) an absorbing and intriguing thriller predicated on the ideas of quantum physics - and it's much more fun not knowing too much about the film before watching it. Suffice to say the Jake Gyllenhaal's wounded Afghan war Black Hawk chopper pilot is manipulated by scientists to enter parallel time frames hoping that Chicago will be saved from annihilation. Even more absorbing because it's exactly where real life science is heading in understanding the curvature of time following in the footsteps of Einstein. And a film that'll stay rattling about in your head. Some good DVD extras too - 20min of a prof explaining all the film's science, cast interviews and an audio commentary from Mr. Jake, Duncan Jones and the screenwriter. The latter extra is interesting principally for showing just how a healthy collaborative process can lead to a film much more than the sum of a team's parts. Ego is blown out the window here (well, almost from Mr. Jake but then he's a lead actor so sorta excused;)

"There are some things in life that you just can't change [or words to that effect]"muses Freida Pinto in Rise of the Planet of the Apes. Director Rupert Wyatt certainly proved that his debut The Escapist (also with Brian Cox) wasn't just a flash in the pan - everything in his latest is exciting yet restrained, informative yet never dull. (Weta Digital's [Avatar, Lord of the Rings] special effects are awesome, but it's a shame Patrick Doyle's music score isn't as fearsomely inventive as Jerry Goldsmith's original) The film's premise is one that initially makes one cringe. Not a remake of the original Planet of the Apes but almost a pre-quel/sequel. A drugs corp Gen-Sys is testing a virus on chimps that has proved restores brain tissue i.e. Alzheimer's cure=big bucks=corporate kudos. However, their chimp goes berserk and gets shot. No wonder, there's a hidden baby at stake. Back to Will Rodman's (James Franco) suburbia, and in a cardboard box arrives the baby chimp Caesar (later enacted by Andy Serkis). What transpires owes a lot to the true story of the baby chimp Nim - which James Marsh has doco assembled and is also released this week as Project Nim .

Rise of the Planet of the Apes is film studio entertainment but it's also quite a lot more than that reminding the general public of questions and implications surrounding the animal testing of drugs let alone the moral debate. And it reminds one of the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park who didn't take long to work out that the electric fence was no longer operational. What is man actually controlling? Is he really in charge of his own destiny? Does man even know what he wants to be when he's grown up? If you've read the book or heard the story of Project Nim this doco will still captivate every human demographic, simply because Nim is so 'human'. And again, it begs debate on human freedom and incarceration, of how we want all people to be equal but could/will never be by their very nature. Much like his Man on Wire Marsh sculpts his documentary with music and artistically shot interviewees so the whole thing resembles 'a performance'. It is none the less for that and arguably none the better. But the reality of Nim is just so human it will break your heart (that's if you still have one).
And just in case you're not convinced of how powerful chimps can be: Chimp attack woman reveals her new face

Also arriving in a cardboard box (this time into a Manhattan pad) is one of the teeny blue creatures (originally a Belgian comic book) of The Smurfs. Akin to Enchanted, they're chased by an evil wizard out of their happy mythical village and stumble into a vortex that dumps everyone into Central Park. Now: though the special effects may not be quite as inventive as one might wish for, Rob Engle's 3D effects (Phil Méheux as cinematographer) is thankfully perfect (just as well as Sony are the frontrunners in promoting the stuff!) i.e. 3D doesn't have to be dark and the gradation of light and shade here is as good as standard 35mm cameras. While the mix of animation (the Smurfs) and live action isn't cringe-worthy either. What's more: an adaptation that could be so, so naff is actually bristling with wit and charm. It'd be hard for tiny tots and adults not to exit the cinema grinning from ear to ear. As for your teenagers, well, just hope that when you get back they're not burning down the family home or frying your computer hard-drive. You never know they might actually find the digital antiquity of Chris Marker's Level Five rather fascinating if you leave it playing. As for the politics...

Or they may just poke cathartic fun at you if the teenagers are taken along to Salt of Life (Gianni e le Donne). Gianni (played by the director himself Gianni Di Gregorio) lives in middle-class Rome retirement with his rarely seen wife, caretaker, and loving teenage daughter (stringy boyfriend in toe) with wrinkly charming tippling mum playing bridge (or is it poker) with her friends in leafy seclusion, not that she ever stops beckoning poor Gianni for favours. Teenagers might enjoy Gianni's antics of chasing after a mistress - and it's always endearing never seedy (not that we know of anyway!). He's still able to do a yoga 'downward dog' - though may have a bit more trouble lifting his leg. He even inadvertently experiences an LSD trip walking the dog (canine one). Is this the life that 'rounds our little sleep' asks the film? Is there ever any more than this? The film doesn't judge, doesn't probe, doesn't prod. Lucky are the ones who can fall gently asleep without the pain of existence weighing them down even before the first earthy sod hits the casket.

HAL dreamt of a chimp hiding his sock beneath a lily-pad before he fell asleep forever and a day...Cocoloco..coco.co.c________