By Monique Davis***In a word, Polish film Extras is decent. However, I have just been told by my editor that I am expected to write more than one word. Director Micha? Kwiecinski presents a beautifully shot film in which a group of Chinese filmmakers shoot a tragic film in Poland, under the impression that the Poles are the most miserable people. The title of the Chinese film, Sad Wind in the Reeds, is evocative, but the focus of Extras is the eponymous ‘background artists’ (ah, political correctness). The film is basically a tale of love rediscovered as the father of the Polish-Chinese translator’s child returns unexpectedly, hoping to find things as he left them when he abandoned her to go and see the world. However things, of course, are not that simple as Bozena (Kinga Preis) has married a rich dentist whom she does not love. The film-within-a-film really just serves as a trite plot device, mirroring the action of the frame story and allowing liberal usage of dramatic irony as the extras frequently comment on the main story to the chagrin of Bozena, who tries to stick to the party line of wifely duty despite her love for Romek (Bartosz Opania) the charming rapscallion. Other subplots involve a coming-together of two loveable losers and some older characters coming to terms with being cuckolded. While the film does fulfil its brief of dispelling the myth that the Polish are all miserable, the casual racism has the propensity to make the viewer feel very uncomfortable. Aside from being referred to as ‘Chinkies’, at one point Gralewski (Krzysztof Kiersznowski) pulls up the corners of his eyes and refers to them as ‘yellow’ with ‘slits’, things I have not seen or heard since the playground was my haunt of choice. Later, when the object of his affection, Narozna (Anna Romantowska), comments on his wife running of with a chorister, bites back with ‘at least he was white’, in reference to her dead husbands ‘jungle fever’. These unnecessary throwaway comments really detracted from what was otherwise a charming film.To sum up, Extras is a fantastically atmospheric film. Every shot is delicately composed and the music really adds to the slight sense of unreality. In spite of the overuse of some dramatic conventions, the slightly annoying stock characters, and the Americanised subtitles, the film really has an undeniable charm. However, it is the jarring racism that hits the film hardest in the star rating.

By Isabel Sutton**Number three in Michael Moore’s repertoire of bomb-shell big-screen documentaries has arrived and it’s as predictable as can be.  The target this time is the scandal of the American health service – a subject which has been on Moore’s hit list since 1999, and explains the film’s disconcerting title Sicko.  Just like Fahrenheit 9/11 and Bowling for Columbine, Sicko is coming out at exactly the right time: mounting concerns over a privately-run health service have finally come to a head.  Profit-making insurance companies, who maltreat their patients, are going to come under severe pressure as soon as a Democrat reaches the White House.  Dissatisfaction is growing amongst ordinary Americans: Moore received over 25,000 e-mails from people with nightmare health care tales to tell, prior to the making of the film.  Once again Moore has seized the perfect moment.  His documentary Sicko will feed off current complaint and stir his audiences’ rage: no wonder drug companies sent round ‘Moore alerts’ when the documentary went into production.Now Sicko has hit cinemas and nothing seems to have changed in Moore’s provocative style of delivery.  He’s as fat and simplistic as ever.  I’m not saying I disagree with Moore at foundation: he’s absolutely right that the US health service needs some serious attention.  What narks me is the way Moore denudes his subjects of all credibility by the cras methods he uses to expose them.  This will be immediately obvious to any British audience when they see Moore’s presentation of the NHS.  First we hear Tony Benn speak with great persuasiveness about the excellent principles of our system.  Less convincingly, we are then shown an interview with a London GP who speaks with glowing enthusiasm about the free-for-all Paradise world that is the NHS.  He even represents the fiasco over recent GP salary changes as an ideal, socialised version of the American system, whereby the service is public but doctors are given the incentive to improve patient care.  No word at all on the uproar that has ensued since its introduction.  Moore gazes with astonished eyes peering out from beneath his baseball cap as the GP speaks: surely this man can’t be earning a decent wage?  To answer this question, we’re off to the doctor’s house where dinner guests have just arrived and are drinking glasses of wine.  Moore’s point is apparently proven: the NHS is a ‘free’ system which has everyone, including the GPs, living in physical health and material comfort all the time.  By this point my fellow film critics were chuckling in wry amusement.Why does Moore have to smooth over every obstacle – every opposing thought – when his argument can already stand up on its own feet?  The distortions are visible for all to see.  Well, perhaps I’m missing part of the point: Moore isn’t in the business of traditional documentaries.  He’s a stunt man with a point to prove, and he finishes the film doing what he does best.  No one can deny that it’s quite a feet to take his  starring patients – three volunteer workers at the scene of 9/11 who disgracefully have still gone untreated – all the way to Cuba for a proper check-up, all absolutely free.  I had to take my hat off to him.

By Kate Barrett Raymond Blanc has hit the spot with his relaxed and friendly Brasserie on Walton street, Jericho. Of an evening, the average student wouldn’t consider such a reputable name to be in their league. ‘Fine as long as the parents are covering the bill’ is what I thought before trying the place. But I was nicely surprised by how student friendly the restaurant was; there’s no dress code or certainly no snobbery. The management wants students to realise that they are offering excellent quality food at fair prices, and of this I was successfully convinced.On offer, particularly for students, is a set menu of two courses and a glass of wine for lunch (£11.50) and dinner (£15). Peanuts! Yet, Brasserie Blanc is run by a respected and well known chef. For this price, you’re probably thinking the portions are of the designer, nouvelle cuisine type. Quite the opposite. The portions are sizeable and would leave most people happily full.As for the food itself: the menu is varied, with something for everyone; they even have a children’s menu. As starters, they offer the expected French specialities including mussels and ‘escargot’, along with soups, salads and a particularly good battered goat’s cheese with tomato relish – a bold dish with an amazing array of strong flavours. Choices of main course stretch to include a carvery; the steaks on offer are exceptional with extremely high quality meat cooked to melt in your mouth. You can tell that time has been taken putting these dishes together, especially in terms of sourcing high quality ingredients and balancing the flavours of the dish.There are no short cuts taken with any aspect of your restaurant experience here. Tying in with the quality of the food is the staff’s attentiveness. They are there when you need them but are sensitive about interfering with your food or company by being too persistent. All this with a backdrop of a relaxed, chatty atmosphere, and if you’re lucky enough, a window table to watch the residents of Jericho go by – essential if your company happens to be boring the pants off you!I would definitely recommend dining at this quality restaurant. Perhaps lunch with friends, a dinner date, à la carte menu with the parents or a celebration; it will be suitable all occasions, and well worth a visit.

By Chantal Hadley****Even from the opening credit sequence I was struck by the similarity between Philippe Sarde’s mournful violin music and Philip Glass’s violin concerto used in The Hours. Both films deal with one’s mortality, specifically with AIDS, and with the impact of AIDS on friends and family. Les Témoins manages to evoke the tremulous time in the mid-eighties when AIDS was beginning to be seen as an epidemic in the Western World. This film, as Sarah (played by Emmanuelle Béart) says, is a “testimony” to those times and to the individual suffering of youth confronted with death.Les Témoins tells the story of Manu, living in Paris with his sister. Befriended by a respected doctor, Adrien, Manu is introduced to Mehdi (a police officer) and his wife, Sarah (a writer). Manu is attracted to Mehdi, and they begin an affair which will change their lives and the lives of those around them.Téchiné himself defines Les Témoins as a “historical film… not a documentary”, and it is. The film touches upon a variety of pretty serious issues:  mixed-race couples, same-sex couples, prostitution, STIs, post-natal depression and euthanasia. It’s not a fluffy film, but nor is it hard work. As a drama with a romantic backdrop it is more in the slightly uncomfortable vein of Deux Jours à Paris or L’Appartement than of Paris, Je T’Aime.As Téchiné says, he wanted to show the characters at “a certain moment of their lives… reveal aspects” of that moment, and then “leave the rest to the audience”. We are plunged into the characters’ lives at a moment just before a radical change, just as Manu and Mehdi literally plunge into the sea. That said, the changes are at times predictable, and their consequences somewhat cliché. In a manner reminiscent of Amélie, some of the major events are chopped up into tiny montages with fast music. This makes the film feel disjointed at times.
The best part of the film is the superb performance by Michel Blanc as the doctor who first falls in love with Manu, and supports him even after Manu becomes involved with Mehdi. Somehow, Blanc’s silent, melancholy glances just left of the lens have more emotion than the rest of the characters put together. I originally found it difficult to either have sympathy for or honestly like Manu. Johan Libéreau lacked chemistry with Depardieu, and I didn’t even realise Manu and Julie were related until she was introduced as his sister! On the other hand, Bouajila and Béart both put in solid performances, relating characters with internal demons and external pressures that prove hard to deal with. Téchiné says “perhaps loving Manu and bearing witness to his life makes the other protagonists stronger”, and even through moments where Manu seems unlikeable, grotesque or insensitive, by watching how others react, Téchiné succeeds in making all of us witnesses as well.

By Dave Challiner 
***Greatest hits compilations are often geared to provide the listener with an opportunity to look back and consider the trajectory of a band’s career. Scottish Fiction, the aptly named retrospective for hyper-literate Glaswegians Idlewild, certainly aims to do so. Sadly, it does so for the worse, rather than the better, only serving to highlight the creative paucity of more recent material in comparison with past glories. In an ironic sense, it also confirms the REM comparisons that have popped up so often over the course of their career. Both bands have emerged from tearaway beginnings and then ploughed fertile middle-period furrows before succumbing, sadly, to the law of diminishing returns.
Right from the off, the disparity in quality is clear. Sandwiched between the majestic ‘You Held the World in Your Arms’ and Gertrude Stein-referencing ‘Roseability’, recent single ‘No Emotion’ conforms to its title. This remains the pattern throughout the album with later, phoned-in work slipped in at frequent intervals to make it more palatable. Frankly, that a third of this album is made up of these tracks smacks of self-mythologising or record company interference.
This is a shame, as at least half of this album is made up of brilliant, raucous indie. Huge choruses leap out from every corner: the in-the-round hook of ‘When I Argue I See Shapes’; the weepy balladry of ‘American English’; the classic ‘Little Discourage’. Idlewild have always had a way with hooks. And way back when, as cocksure upstarts on the make, they sure knew it. Each one is delivered with the panache that comes from absolute self-belief, a quality sadly lacking in the more ephemeral Warnings/Promises and Make another World.
It isn’t clear who exactly this album is aimed at: older fans will already own the better tracks, and newer ones would be far better served by a collection based on quality, not scope. Its construction does, however, give us an accurate account of a career; alas, it is all the worse for it.

By Tobyn MaxwellBob Harris is a man lost in a culture completely alien to him. He is immediately likeable: a charismatic film star suffering a midlife crisis thousands of miles from home. Sofia Coppola’s film is filled with numerous funny, touching moments between Bob (Bill Murray) and Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson), yet it is a scene barely three minutes long that sticks in the memory as the true crowning moment of this wonderful film. Bob Harris has travelled to Tokyo to make an advert for a high-class whiskey, the director of which speaks close to no English. The premise is simple: create comedy from the linguistic confusion between Harris, the director and their translator. It is an extremely simple scene. There are no fancy camera tricks, nor any music. In fact, if we stop and look at how the scene might read off the screenplay, there is not really any particularly funny dialogue. The majority of the scene is in Japanese but it is hilarious to watch, and this nearly all comes from the reaction shots of Murray. The scene starts with Murray enduring a barrage of Japanese from the zealous young director. The instructions, apparently, are simply to turn and look at the camera. Bemused at the simplicity of the instruction, he asks for clarification, provoking another flood of Japanese, this time between both the interpreter and director. Turn from the left and do it with intensity! Unfortunately, on paper, this does not sound terribly funny. But then, this is not Tarantino: it is Murray. He sits there, mystified, trying to prise out some more information; but the more he wants the less he gets. With a widening of the eyes here, a frown there and a stare of desperation everywhere, he has you in fits. Watching his face is akin to watching a Chaplin or Keaton film; he could do this scene without speaking and it would be just as good. As the director becomes ever more irate with Murray’s apparent time-wasting, the translator becomes increasingly useless and with a look of abject weakness Murray accepts the instructions to be ‘like an old friend and look at the camera’. It seems right to pause at this moment and point out that there is more than just Murray in this scene. Every action from Murray is a reaction to the two nameless Japanese characters that enhance the comedy with their increasingly lengthy Japanese discussions, and ever shorter English translations. By the time he receives his final instruction he has a look of weariness that belies the minutes he has spent on this advert, as he closes his eyes, nods and sighs. This action sums up a great theme of the story, that Murray’s character is weary of life. He is too old to be flying around the globe to appear on Japanese billboards, but there is nothing at home that provides any solace either. It is a reminder that this film is not a comedy; the culture clash seen here is used throughout the film in order to increase the sense of loneliness felt between Bob and Charlotte. Yet with this scene you can forget all that. It is a moment of comedy at its simple best and, for me, turns a great film into a classic.

By James Lowe 
****Ed Harcourt occupies the classically precarious position of being a good singer-songwriter. Such ability isn’t always particularly useful, commercial, or cool. So you can play a wistful piano, sing with cracked chords and strum under a tree in the pale autumn dawn? Then you can be a singer-songwriter. They come and go like internships for students: you feel you should give them a go but you don’t really want to spend all your time there.Harcourt alerted the world to his fragile presence with 2001’s Mercury-nominated LP Here Be Monsters, and has released five critically acclaimed albums since then. Being a best of, there isn’t a ‘bad’ song on here. They are all strong, from the bizarre, melancholic exuberance of ‘Born in the ‘70s’ to the Ryan Adams bar-room lilt of ‘This One’s For You’. Lyrical adventures abound, and the instrumentation kicks back from mid-tempo indie rock on ‘Watching the Sun Come Up’ to whispery strings on a rowing boat at midnight on ‘Something In My Eye.’ There’s enough variety and instrumental exoticism to merit further ear time and the general vibe of this album is that Harcourt is talented in an age that doesn’t understand or recognise such talent. Dinner party material? Possibly. But I’d rather listen to Harcourt with his romantic notion of life as overpowering and wildly affecting than, say, Norah Jones’s life as commercial lucky-dip.Harcourt’s voice, a combination of Tom Waits talking in a stage whisper to Nick Drake as Ryan Adams makes himself heard over the piano, is comfortable with mumble-into-the-microphone melancholy, shout-out-loud hoarseness or watch-that-vibrato timidity. Which is no bad thing, but the breath of these elders hangs heavy on the air, meaning that Harcourt is a good singer-songwriter, yes, but that can only get you so far nowadays.

 By Daniel RobertsWhen I was about thirteen I went through a ‘60s phase. I grew my hair and wore a woollen cardigan; I greedily devoured accounts of Jimmy Page riding his motorbike through hotel lobbies and listened to Dark Side of the Moon for hours in the glow of my lava-lamp. And how I wished I could have gone to that crowning event of the hippy era: Woodstock. Not for the acid trips, or the ‘free-love’, you understand, nor perhaps even for the music, but rather for the spirit, that essence of the age that brought so many people together to celebrate music and life. I couldn’t go to Woodstock of course, but there was one place where that spirit seemed to live on, a place of pilgrimage, a music festival with  so much more that devoted punters requested that their ashes be scattered on its site after their deaths. And so experiencing Glastonbury Festival became high on my list of ‘Things To Do Before I Die’.
I ditched the cardigan, but not the fascination, so this spring, just like several hundred-thousand other hopefuls, I awoke at a ridiculously early hour, commandeered two computers and a phone and I emerged as one of the lucky purchasers of a golden ticket to Glastonbury.
With such high expectations it was perhaps inevitable that the festival would be a bit of a disappointment, and so it proved to be. First of all there was the famous Glastonbury weather. Much as festival-goers love to claim that the mud and rain can’t dampen the fun I couldn’t help spending most of the weekend thinking about how much better it would all be if I wasn’t wet, and the loudest cheers of the festival were reserved not for The Who or the Arctic Monkeys but for the rare glimpses of sunshine that tantalised the crowds before giving way again to the deluge. Second, despite the festival’s reputation as a musical Mecca, the line-up this year was decidedly uninspiring. V stalwarts like James Morrison, The Fratellis and The Kooks rendered the Pyramid stage almost devoid of interest, and neither The Killers nor The Arctic Monkeys managed to justify their position on the bill: the former masked their plodding, hollow ‘anthems’ in pompous bombast while the latter were fishes out of water as headliners. Add to this the fact that all the best music was dispensed with over a few hours on the Friday (Bjork, Hot Chip, M.I.A. Trentemoller and Fat Boy Slim – how about that for a clash…), and one can’t help but think the festival could be helped by some more challenging and edgy bookings in the headline slots.
Despite this, there was still much to enjoy. The site was dotted with some fantastic pieces of art: clearly a lot of preparation had gone into the organisation, and the location was unbelievably large: there was always a new area to explore and a delightful surprise round every corner, and given the festival’s stature the joy and pride visible in the performances of many of the newer British bands made for some electrifying concerts.
But ultimately the Stonehenge installation constructed from portaloos by artist Banksy summed up Glasto’s predicament: at first Banksy’s guerrilla graffiti struck a chord with its fresh perspective and challenging themes, but now he sells paintings to Hollywood stars for tens of thousands of pounds. Similarly the popularity of what was formerly a genuinely meaningful and politically charged gathering has proved to be the festival’s downfall. With the masses came homogenisation and now there is just very little magic to be found in the ‘green fields’ at Glasto.
Don’t get me wrong, Glastonbury is anything but a bad festival, and it is by far the best of the major British offerings. The problem for Glastonbury is that in this age of increasing demand for the live music experience the options increase as well, and with some of the alternatives on offer abroad it’s hard not to see why soggy Glasto begins to look less appealing. Benicàssim offers glorious sunshine and a pristine Spanish beach.  Norway’s Hove Festival plays out against a backdrop of stunning mountains and fjords. And Eastern European festivals are becoming an increasingly popular budget option.
One such foreign alternative, and the one that completed my festival summer, is Denmark’s Roskilde. Located thirty miles from Copenhagen the festival arguably has an even richer history than its English counterpart. Founded in 1971 by a couple of high school students this non-profit event was modelled on the peace and love ethos of Woodstock and has a focus on recycling and the environment, plus an eclectic musical smorgasbord showcasing the best talent from Scandinavia and beyond. All in all it was, whisper it, better than Glastonbury.There’s the tantalising way the organisers add a few bands to the line-up every week from March or so, leaving you desperate to see if your favourite band will be one of the announced every Wednesday. There’s the wonderful refund system, under which beer bottles, cans and cups can be exchanged for money, meaning that not only can you buy yourself a meal by going around picking up a few cups, but the festival is noticeably cleaner and tidier into the bargain. There’s the fact that the Main Stage is called the Orange Stage not because it has anything to do with a phone company, but because it’s, well, orange. There’s the train service that goes right from the festival site to the town, or even to Copenhagen, for a pound or two a pop, there’s the swimming lake, the cinema, the naked run (which does exactly what it says on the tin, the prize being tickets to the next years bash). Not only does Roskilde have four days of fantastic music to Glastonbury’s three, but the main event is preceded by a five day ‘warm-up’: you pitch your tent, meet your neighbours, enjoy some smaller bands and generally have an unbelievably good time.
It’s the atmosphere at Roskilde that makes it truly memorable: the audience at the festival is significantly more multicultural and eclectic than its British equivalents. Glastonbury may have its hippy enclave, but in truth the crowds it attracts these days come from a relatively narrow demographic. Our campsite at Roskilde was populated by Swedes, I chatted to Australians in the queue to get in, an Italian called Paolo kept us awake with his broken but noisy English. We were also paid a visit by a dazed looking Norwegian clad in rainbow spandex and flying goggles who introduced himself as Ola and proudly showed all comers how he could almost do the splits, and I discussed the significant merits of The Whitest Boy Alive’s dream pop with a bloke from Leeds dressed as a banana.
The music was great as well: headliners Bjork, Muse, The Who, and Queens of the Stone Age provided familiar thrills, and the festival is the Scandinavian equivalent of Glasto for emerging talent; a host of up and coming Nordic acts gave their all, Datarock, Band Ane, Peter Bjorn And John, 120 Days, Jens Lekman and Mando Diao providing just a few of the more memorable shows.
‘Well’, I hear you say, ‘you clearly only enjoyed it more because of the awful weather at Glastonbury’. Not so. This Roskilde was subject to 95mm of rain, more than double the previous record (they even sell t-shirts emblazoned with the legend ‘Roskilde 2007: I Did All 8 Days’), but it just didn’t seem to matter.
I’d love to give Glasto another try some time, but next year, rather than frantically scrabbling for a golden ticket to Somerset; I will be making my way to a little slice of wet and beery heaven in an unremarkable corner of Denmark.

Conor Doak revisits the subversive films of Swedish director Lukas Moodyson Those who imagine Sweden as a delightful, ABBA-singing land of snow, socialism and smorgasbords will perhaps be surprised to learn that it is the home of one of European cinema’s most melancholic directors. Lukas Moodysson is a hard-hitting realist whose socially-engaged films have confronted a wide range of social issues, from teenage angst and alienation to the commodification of sexuality and the body.His work is well-known in Scandinavia, and he has won a handful of European prizes, but the British distaste for foreign language cinema means he is known here only among a small number of faithful devotees.Moodysson’s international break came in 1998 with Show Me Love, a heart-warming coming-out story of a lesbian teenager growing up in a conservative dead-end Swedish town. The two lead actresses, teenage Alexandra Dahlström and Rebechka Liljeberg, handle their roles with a sensitivity and maturity that belie their lack of experience. The film uses delicately drawn characters and brilliantly understated acting to produce some penetrating insights into teenage psychology. The combination of a low-budget set and simple camera techniques works to produce a sense of hyperrealism that has quickly become the trademark of Moodysson’s work. This hyperrealism obviously draws from the Dogme movement in neighbouring Denmark. Like the Dogme directors, Moodysson rejects cinematic gimmicks, special effects, and nail-biting action sequences. Those who enjoyed slow-burning character dramas such as Scherfig’s Italian for Beginners (2000) will love Moodysson. However, at least in these early films, Moodysson distances himself from the more experimental techniques of the movement: don’t expect shaky cameras or grainy video in his work.  Together (2000) is a delightfully wacky film that is part uplifting Romantic comedy, part engaging social critique. Elisabeth (Lisa Lindgren), a middle-class suburban wife and mother walks away from her husband and failing marriage. Lacking a place to live, she finds herself and her children staying with her brother Göran (Gustav Hammersten), who resides in a hippy commune. It’s the Sweden of the ‘70s, and much of the comedy derives from the tensions between the staid middle-class values of Elisabeth and the muesli-eating, Trotsky-reading, free-loving world in which she finds herself.  Although at times nostalgic about the ideas behind communal living, Moodysson is careful not to romanticise the sometimes harsh realities of the lifestyle. The film is particularly successful in exploring the difficulties that arise when trying to turn the idealistic philosophies of the hippy movement into lived realities: one character struggles to reconcile his ideological view of free love with his personal longing for his partner to remain monogamous. These juxtapositions are dealt with subtlety and sensitivity, and Moodysson refrains from any easy judgements about his subjects.His more recent films are more overtly critical of mainstream society. Lilya 4-ever (2002) is a harrowing look at the problem of people-trafficking. In some forgotten corner of Eastern Europe, the teenage Lilya (Oksana Akinshina) is abandoned by her parents and forced to live a harsh life on the streets. Despite striking up a close sisterly friendship with the streetwise-but-innocent urchin Volodya (Artyom Bogucharksy), Lilya is enticed to leave her country with the promise of a supposedly better life in the West.  On arrival in Sweden, Lilya discovers that she has been the victim of an international scam and is forced to work as a prostitute. The scenes of sexual violence, although not particularly explicit, are distressing and will remain with you for days after watching the film. This is a much tougher, more unrelenting film than his previous two features, and its hard-hitting, didactic message and quasi-documentary style places it more in the tradition of overtly political films – think Ken Loach –than the experimental Dogme movement.  Moodysson’s political and religious views now begin to emerge more clearly. In interviews, he claims that the anti-capitalist riots  of 2001 in Gothenburg strengthened his resolve to be a political film-maker. He is both a committed leftist and a practising Christian and both of these beliefs clearly inform Lilya 4-ever. The film suggests that there is more humanity and freedom among the street-children living in the abandoned factories than the leafy middle-class suburbs of Malmö.  One’s own experiences and political views will likely determine how convincing that seems. Most, however, will probably find the mystical conclusion – where Volodya is transfigured into a Christ figure complete with angel wings – too much to stomach. The problem is not the idea of a Christ figure itself so much as the incongruity of celestial angels suddenly appearing in a film otherwise characterised by stark and brutal realism.Moodysson remains political in his two most recent offerings, but he has veered heavily towards experimental techniques.  Undoubtedly, this has disappointed a large part of his traditional audience. Don’t watch Hole in my Heart (2004) with your Mum: it’s a gory, grotesque and plotless examination of the internet porn industry. You’ll be hard-pressed to find a copy of Container (2006) anywhere, a stream-of-consciousness narrative that covers Moodysson’s same themes of alienation, exploitation and social and sexual conformity. Both films have excited the art-house critics immensely, and it’s true that they have moments of brilliance, particularly in their some innovative use of montage and camera technique. However, I found they lacked some of the subtlety of Moodysson’s earlier work with their over-reliance on graphic shock value.It will be interesting to see whether Moodysson returns to a more mainstream style in Mammoth (currently in pre-production for 2009 release). Both his decision to shoot the movie in English, and to cast the popular Gael Garcia Bernal as the lead male, suggest a return to a more accessible format. If Mammoth is executed with the same skill and finesse as his earliest work, this film could open up the British and American market for Moodysson and make him into a household name. Watch this space.

By Robin Whelan Shoegaze is one of those terms which evolve intriguingly past their intended meaning. Originally coined to describe the less-than-gripping stage presence of a group of late ‘80s/early ‘90s indie bands like My Bloody Valentine, the Cocteau Twins and the Jesus and Mary Chain, it has now come to denote the sound of these performers rather than just their somnambulant performances. “Shoegaze” as a genre would be far better termed “stargaze”, lumping together as it does bands that produce epic soundscapes: music that twinkles and shimmers, clipped hooks, vocals buried deep in the mix.The mood is important above all else. In that regard, witness anything from My Bloody Valentine’s seminal Loveless. Voted best album of the 1990s by influential American indie site Pitchfork, Loveless is somewhat akin to a drunken stumble through a winter wonderland, or listening to radio static underwater. Each track is coated with a disorienting level of reverb and bandleader Kevin Shields uses his tremolo arm to dizzying, confusing, effect, This is music without shape or form.Few shoegaze bands were as “leftfield” as MBV (there again, how many have ever been?), although the Jesus and Mary Chain did approach their levels of oddness with some of their live feedback workouts. All the same, this was hardly a formula for mega-stardom. Insufficiently catchy to be indie-rock, lacking the chops for prog and just interesting enough to avoid that horrible coffee-table label, “chillout”, here they reside, doomed to a career of commercial failure and cult status.Still, that cult has bred latter-day success for many of the original ‘gazers: MBV leader Kevin Shields has collaborated with The Go! Team, and The Jesus and Mary Chain have recently reformed to no little acclaim (headlining the Coachella Festival accompanied by Scarlett Johansson). Rumours are that My Bloody Valentine themselves will reform soon and cash in.Now, bands like Secret Machines, M83 and Engineers have taken up the shoegaze mantle, while moving in different directions. Secret Machines marry shoegaze to Dark Side of the Moon-like prog and thumping drums; Engineers have the blurry feedback down pat, but harness it to create indie ballads; Anthony Gonzalez of M83, meanwhile, augments the beauty of shoegaze textures with bombastic synth workouts reminiscent of Vangelis. Thankfully, the nu-gazers tend to spend more time staring at the audience than at their tatty Converse.