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.

Be Quiet! We Can't Hear the Noise.

Our first visit to Cafe Oto, which is shamefully close by. It's an absolutely wonderful venue: Despite showcasing some of the most experimental, earsplitting music imaginable, the system is wonderfully understated, just filling the room with sound, letting your presence in the space be enough exposure to the noise. They also have an excellent alcohol policy: An amateurishly biro-ed sign propped on the bar announces "No sales during the performances".

This was absolutely essential during the solo cymbal with mixing/processing by Oceans of Silver and Blood. Long episodes of clanging, chiming silence, gradually shifting rise-and-fall of frequency reverberation. The cymbal player was out of sight behind his huge tam-tam, which added to the drama. "When's the next noise coming"?

ARAR had charmed us with home-made radio transmitters, simple jury-rigged wave-form machines and a sound propelled by the humane ebb and flow of bass frequency.

Good Dog, Good Dog

We were at the Oxford Playhouse last Friday, for 40 minutes of brilliantly delivered relationship analysis through Lassie, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, and fearless self-examination. Stacey Makishi and her real-life partner Vick act out, in every sense of the phrase, a stream-of-consciousness dream sequence fuelled by the vivid visual and cinematographic residue of the thrashing, repetitive, resigned end of a relationship.

There are several tours-de-force: Vick pours water from a jug while stood at the top of a metal stepladder, into Stacey's mouth while she lays flat on her back at the base of the ladder, trying to sing through the waterfall; they both sit opposite each-other at a white-covered table, a pillow, a knife, and a black glove each between them and dinner when they both leap onto the table and eat like dogs.

Excellent visceral stuff delivered with gusto and good grace.

Ever Seen A Butcher Smile?

As always, the music is beautifully placed and judged, which is the marker for a film that is likely to be the same. (Michael Chion: "Sound is the principle means by which consistency and coherence are maintained and stimulated in cinema"). There's no music track at all during the 'action', or dialogue in "Eyes Wide Open"; simply the brief interludes, barely a minute long, feature some brief sketches of piano or string, repetitive short sequences of notes, playing the part purely of a Nothing, a breathe-in, a punctation mark. This technique places huge demands on the dialogue and the silences within the dialogue; as if to say: there is nothing in this film apart from what the people are doing and saying, and the music only occurs to remind the viewer of this point, and adds an exactly-judged Nothing to highlight it.

On the face of it, it's a just another dark love triangle. The most powerful scenes are really those between the butcher and his wife; heartbreakingly, she is only too aware of what he is doing at the shop, but carries this and confronts him with all the kindness and tact she can. The scene where the rabbi defends the butcher from the mob, but only at the cost of his ability to reason and convince, purely invoking his authority, is a desperate one. The film is a wonderful exercise in keeping-it-simple; there are no long sequences of speech, even from the Rabbis.

Frankfurt to Wiesbaden

There's a deceptively light social comedy style about this that manages to almost entirely mask the horrifying naivete, self-deception, broken trust and shallow propriety that fuel the wonderfully slight plot. As Ian McEwan does these days, with a great deal more portentousness and pomp, the faintest shift of events has consequences of hinted-at remorseless carnage. The climactic, almost apocalyptic horse-ride into the forest has left me actually quite shaken. You can probably get this for 99p on Amazon.