Jamie Bell is so great in this story about a grieving misfit who takes refuge in cross dressing, voyeurism and make-up to try and fill the hole left by his dead mother.

A kind of skewed love story set in Edinbugh, Hallam Foe is going to find its place up there with Donnie Darko as the film of choice for emotionally sensitive fey boys and goth girls. Don’t let this put you off though, if you’re not a fey boy or goth girl; there is cracking dialogue, authentic performances from all involved, and a genuinely moving storyline that deals unflichingly with the aftermaths of suicide.

It’s also very funny. And it’s this lightness of touch that takes you to very dark and deranged places. It’s Jamie’s film though as he turns in a physically and psychically wounded performance that makes you want to reach into the screen and give him a cuddle. There are also clear parallels/references to Hitchcock’s Vertigo and Rear Window here as well.

Wonderful.

This seems to be the film that divides the Godard oeuvre between pre and post-Maoist ideology. As such, it’s a mess. I found it hard to stomach the casual misogyny, the adolescent political posturing and the fact that it’s so boring to watch.

Why are the women in Godard’s films always so passive, without thoughts, feelings and opinions of their own? The film has a completely masculine structure, with the female characters orbiting around the desires and needs of the men. They are reduced down to body parts or emotional punchbags absorbing it all and never resisting.

Watching “Masculin Féminin” I found myself giving thanks to the same generation of feminists who came along and kicked the asses of these chauvinistic “revolutionaries” who, while busy out on the streets standing up for the “working man”, (sic) also expected their little women to be at home making dinner and warming up the bed for later.

“Masculin Féminin” abandons the playful exuberance of Godard’s earlier films and ushers in the formless, inauthentic, radical chic that typifies most of his latter output. For me, “Masculin Féminin” lacks any sense of critique: the Vietnam War is just an excuse to daub paint, American Imperialism becomes a catchphrase flashed up on the screen like an MTV blipvert, the question of the individual and the mass political act becomes two men leering at a woman in a launderette. Ghastly.

This is a disappointing film. It’s superficial and unlikeable both in its execution and in its characterisation. Yes, you can admire Godard’s technique and his cinematic literacy, but if the end result is something that is so uninteresting, you have to ask what the point of it all is.

I hadn’t played this for a while, and dug it out to listen to during one of the many rainstorms buffeting Britain at the moment. Along with “Night Ride Home”, “Turbulent Indigo” marked a welcome return to form for Joni after the hideous digital 80s Geffen years. As the rain drummed down, Joni railed against the world.

The centrepiece of the album is the awesome “Magdalene Laundries”, a description of the Church run workhouses for unmarried/”fallen” women peopled by the “bloodless brides of Christ” married to the Irish Catholic Church. The casual cruelties and indifferences of the place are captured in the lines “Peg O’Connell died today/She was a cheeky girl/A flirt/They just stuffed her in a hole!”.

The moods of injustice and simmering anger bubble up throughout the words on the whole album, which contrasts with the gentle lilting jazz inflected sounds of the songs themselves.

Other subjects covered include urban psychosis, the impermanence of love, the process of making art, domestic violence, the stratification of American society and the sense that we’re all going to hell in a handbasket.

The album ends with “The Sire of Sorrow (Job’s Sad Song)” which contains one of my favourite lyrics ever: “Let me speak, let me spit out my bitterness”.

This is another great set of songs to add to an already formidable catalogue.

OK so this isn’t as great as the book, but people let’s focus here: Annette Benning’s performance as Deirdre Burroughs is fantastic; all feminist anger, 70s therapy speak and foul mouthed psychosis. It’s Benning’s film. End of.

Secondly, Jill Clayburgh as the ravaged Agnes Finch caught in the destructive undertow of her husband’s activities, is moving, comedic and melancholy.

This means that all the other great roles in the film can shine and shimmer like really cheap glittery disco eyeshadow.

Made with a true obsessive’s eye for period detail – all that hideous 70s furniture, polyester clothing and the Finch household almost crawling alive with dirt and junk and chaos – along with a killer soundtrack, makes this amusing trip into the darkside of the 70s Me Generation and the way it screwed up their kids, an absolute must.

You gotta admire the boy Augusten, for getting through it all.

Although I love The Wire, I have to say that I found this series rather fragmented and less satisfying than the other two seasons. I think it’s because the central narrative draws together previously established themes (The Game, politics and corruption) rather than introducing newer ones. As a viewer I had to shift into the idea that things were developing rather than going off in a new direction.

However, having said that, this is still razor sharp drama with fantastic characterisation that never allows you to take one side over the other. This season has the added subversive suggestion that perhaps the only solution to the out of control drug trade is to legalise it; a bold position for any mainstream drama to take.

Can’t wait for Season Four!

This short novel tells the story of a marriage gone adrift through the eyes of its 17 year old narrator. It’s a story told through its gaps: things happen but you never see them happening, you just hear about the consequences of actions taken and the decisions made in good faith by the characters.

Written in a beautifully sparse, poetic style, the story is set in a small American town, around which a forest fire is burning. Inside the inferno a man, a woman and their son negotiate their relationships to each other and to life.

Things don’t turn out as you’d expect.

Wonderful.

Based on a true story about a young Chinese mother who gets into debt for $25,000 to be smuggled into the UK on the promise of earning big money for her child’s future, and ends up nearly drowning with 23 others, while working in a low paid pittance of a job.

Find out how the spring onions and turkey twizzlers in your supermarket are directly linked to people trafficking and economic slavery in the UK. Everyone (except the enslaved) is making a buck or two, so no-one gives a rats ass about what happens to those nameless people caught in the cogs of the machine.

Directed in Broomfield’s love it or hate it documentary style, minus his own bodily presence, and with many of the actors played by survivors of the Morecambe Bay tragedy, this is both great drama and informative viewing.

More info here:
http://www.myspace.com/ghoststhemovie

http://www.ghoststhemovie.co.uk/

Is there anything more tedious than watching the privileged bourgeoisie wailing and gnashing about how empty their lives are? Watch this film, if you must, for the striking framing and scenery rather than the pensive wavering of middle management ennui.

When I lived in London, I used to sneer at all those twenty/thirty somethings on the tube reading their Harry Potter books. “Look at them” I would think, “wanting to regress back to childhood reading books written for people half their age. Pathetic”. And then? And then I was given the first volume as a present and one thing led to another and now I’m a full-on regressed Potterphile.

As everyone says, this is the darkest book in the series, with some really unsettling scenes. Building on the tone of the previous volume (“Order of the Phoenix”) we really see how the main characters are changing with time. I love the fact that Harry and Co. have become stroppy teenagers on the hunt for kisses and reassurance. The books also seem to have become more political too: is it me or are there subtle satires of the media, politics and society contained in these pages?

Rowling continues to explore the nature of evil and the moral grey areas that make us who we are. “Half Blood Prince” like the previous volume is a thrilling read. The plot twists and turns with connections made between earlier seemingly isolated events and Harry’s future. There’s a shocking ending too.

So, I too will be joining those twenty/thirty somethings on 21st July when “Deathly Hallows” arrives, eager to know how the whole thing wraps up and whether Harry or Voldermort triumph.

Never again will I mock mass cultural events without investigating them first. I’d hate to miss out again on something so amazing as the Harry Potter series. Although, if push came to shove, I’m still a Philip Pullman man!

An enjoyably impressionistic journey into Iceland’s innovative and exciting music scene. All human life is there from zonk rockers Minus to ethereal scene stealers Mum via Bjork, Slowblow, Sigur Ros, poets, pagans and troublemakers. A kind of homage to the “Rock in Reyjkavic” documentary, the film makers manage to get access to the movers and shakers in the Icelandic musical milieu in order to explore why it is that a country founded on poetry produces such visionary, shamanistic artists.