Family Fortunes

These two movies couldn't be more different; or more precisely, the characters in them have completely different relationships with their creators. Almodovar can even reserve some love for his reptilian construction magnate, and the voyeuristic poseur son. However dark, fearlessly exposing and vibrantly vengeful the exchanges in Solondz' film, I was left with the sense that he really doesn't like any of his characters, and that simply asks the question: Why should we pay them any attention? Only Philip Seymour Hoffman can carry the weight of the self-pitying, phone-masturbator without descending into a stagey live-action cartoon. There's nothing as naked as the moment Penelope Cruz steels herself to walk back out of her hotel bathroom, made-up and ready to perform after exhausting sex with the magnate.

'Broken Embraces' is carried strongly enough by Almodovar's respect for his creations to carry the very simple blindness-creation dichotomy that his plot sets up; in contrast "Happiness" only blares misanthropy at every masturbation scene and accusation of molestation or mutilation.

A Little Local Difficulty

These two novels are set more than a century and many thousands of miles apart, though they both tell a story of relentless inevitability and painfully intense locality. They both have the desperate sexual weakness of men at their heart, and both are fuelled by the unravelling of flimsy narratives to account for that weakness.

McCarthy gives us a travelogue, covering what seems to be only a few square miles of blasted yet fecund and revoltingly natural terrain, across which a woman travels searching for the son her brother fathered and gave to an itinerant. Stunted relationships with remote and fearful communities wither after a few pages each, as she ploughs on.

David Peace has written a war-story of a novel set in the heart of a police investigation into a series of brutal and lurid sexual murders in the North of England, jubilee year. It hasn't quite the shocking effect of "1974", and the dreadfully sticky, greasy, bluntly functional familiar details of relations between the English genders are not quite so garishly lit; I'm sure all the fuel and flesh missing from the TV adaptation is here.

Wasted Lives

Nick Cave can still grind out masterful couplets, probably jotting a dozen down before breakfast most days. "How many of you been wasting your lives/ On booze and drugs/ husbands and wives?"

Grinderman, playing especially in the slightly peeling, unpleasantly branded'n'sponsored, pink trifle of an interior that is the Hammersmith Apollo, are a splendid object lesson in Keeping It Simple.

These are songs about the wailing, flailing, obstreporous, vindictive tides of men's desire, and they never outstay their welcome or lose their sense of the ridiculous. There's rudimentary but fearsomely effective drums and bass, Cave's slash'n'burn guitar hysterics, and the wonderfully decorative but absolutely essential violin, bouzouki and maraca abuse provided by Warren Ellis, whose presence is symbolic of only the centrality of posture, hair, sweat and stare.