Tourist Trap

Even harder, this one. Even though it's technically a documentary, it looks like a 90 minute MTV gangster rap video- endless posturing, threats, platitudes, empty promises set against a relentlessly bleak stage of the grinding poverty of a shanty town. There's no sense of hope or community at all here, which makes for a deadening, empty movie.

The interjections of political and news footage is oddly natural; the stagey, cliches of network news reporting from a comfily distant warzone, the evasive pronouncements of the corrupted politician sit completely naturally with the ethically bankrupted aid worker and slurred moralising of the heroes.

By the end of the film, it's possible to see the threads of manipulation and advantage-taking that hold each take together.

City Of Tiny Lights

This is a properly difficult one.

It kept bringing to mind "Bus 174", a billiant, cold-eyed documentary about a compulsive, truly nerve-jangling horror-stricken hostage scenario in a bus in Rio de Janeiro. The documentary film that comes with the DVD of City of God is similarly gripping, unarguably real. "You might say it's not a job, but it is" says one guy about his life in the favela.

"City of God" itself is too awash with flashbacks, cheeky captions, crowd-pleasing music, self-consciously knockabout comedy, stagey changes in film stock, and lengthy chase scenes to build up real menace or engagement with "Rocket", the likeable kid who wants to be a photographer.

There are a few moments when it comes alive: Little Ze stalks the nightclub, genuinely out of control, needing to take revenge on any figure he can pin his rage on. In some ways, the film is too small for anything but this 18-year-old's volcanic anger, and in trying to capture another personal story or deliver an impression of a community the film simply gets too diluted.

The Gentle Art Of Keeping It Simple

The always-inspiring Union Chapel on Upper Street in Islington was our venue for John Hopkins and King Creosote, playing a jointly recorded LP venture.

As is my wont recently, I pitched up for this entirely on the strength of a general liking-the-idea of it, and the enthusiastic recommendations of Chris and Sean, who'd actually taking the trouble of listening to the songs beforehand so that I didn't have to.

This was incredibly fragile music, with none of the robustness of verse-chorus-verse, or anything you'd call a beat. The vocal melodies were almost choral in their repetitiveness and undemonstrativeness. Even when KC's content is ostensibly emotional, there's very little emoting about it.

The electronics-enthusiast in me kept hearing the empty spaces where the Hopkins bounce of joyfully complex techno would normally be; the longer the songs went on, the more apparent it became that this would overload the show with unnecessary musical detail. Hopkins ended up playing more of his upright piano that he did the computer.

Halfway through the show, Chris told me that the ambient sound at the start of the first track was the field recording of dinner-table talk at someone's house: clattering, indistinct chatter, room air and the sound-scape around a house. This immediately placed everything in an almost painfully-intimate domestic frame, and the Talking-Heads-esque restraint in how much each person on stage did made for a genuinely magical gig.