Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery (1997): review: 9/10

As a British special agent, Austin Powers is unfrozen from the 60s to tackle Dr Evil, also unfrozen from that time. Dr Evil is trying to blackmail the UN.

Austin powers has a pretty assistant, for whom he feels a strong sexual attraction.

The film is a very funny, good natured on male sexuality, and British sixties films and culture, which it manages both to satirise and celebrate simultaneously.

54 (1998): review: 5.5/10

A pretty young man, of low social origins, from New Jersey, seeks self advancement as a bartender in Studio 54, a fashionable New York discoteque in the late seventies.

The film attempts to combine a themes of juvenile ambition, friendship, and love with a biography of one of the disco's founders, Steve Rubell, and a history of the rise and fall of that disco.

Structurally the film holds: sadly, however, the dialogue and the ideas in the film are hackneyed: none of the characters seem possessed of an interior life of any interest, and their ambitions are banal.

I suspect also that the director lacked a clear moral position on the events depicted- it being quite unclear whether or not he wishes to celebrate hedonism, superficiality, tax evasion, drugtaking and licentious sex.

Panic (2000): review: 7.5/10

A contract killer, married with a child and middle class, who works for his father, enters therapy: the therapist challenges his passive attitude to his domineering father. In the therapist's lobby, the killer also encounters an attractive young woman, with whom he becomes entranced.

This is an effective and elegantly balanced play whose humour is based on role inversions, and is well sustained throughout by all the cast.

Waltz With Bashir (2008): review: 8/10

An animated film focussing on an ex-serviceman of the Israeli Defence Force who is puzzed by his recurring dreams of dogs. Wishing to recall his experiences of the Lebanese Civil War he visits his comrades of the time and events leading to the Sabra and Shatila Massacre

The cartoon style is effective at conveying the sense of dream and memory recall, and the it is moving to see the protagonist study himself: the film explores mainly the memory of war, different attitudes to soldiering, to guilt, to trauma.

As a study of the massacre itself, and of specific historical events, however, it is insufficient: but to say that is perhaps to criticise it on the wrong terms.

The Company of Wolves (1984): review: 8.5/10

"...never trust a man whose eyebrows meet in the middle"

A rebellous adolescent girl locks herself in her room and sleeps. In her dreams, she is in a seventeeth century European village where her grandmother introduces her to wolves, their malign and seductive ways.

This is an amusing and diverting essay in nascent sexuality, seen through female eyes and full of momorable dialogue, but which might disappoint those used to more sophisticated special effects.

Angel Heart: (1987): review: 9.5/10

In the fifties, a private detective, more used to low level investigations, is hired by a mysterious client to pursue a debter, believed to reside in a mental hospital.

In the process of this investigation we are taken to the deep south, specifically Lousiana, to explore its religious subcultures.

The film succeeds in combining elements of Southern Gothic with film noir and is beautifully shot, with exquisite scenography and use of colour. The acting is rivetting: the story is told with just the right balance of melancholy, wit, sensuality and horror.

A trip to the mountains, part 3; solitude and painting

*

Chalets and a distant mountain, oil on card, 9.5 x 14 cm

Five Araucaria trees, oil on card, 14 x 9.6 cm  - available

Here is a final selection from my little trip to the interior of Santa Catarina, which I spent largely alone and painiting.

The first is very "picture postcard": beautiful places always carry the risk to landscape artists of bringing a certain kitschy obviousness to the work they do there. I cannot find a way round this: for me part of the pleasure of being a landscapist is the delight of being in a beautiful place: it gives me an excuse to go there (I believe fishermen and birdwatchers say the same thing). The only thing I can do is to try to offer a balance by also painting places which are without immediate beauty, such as industrial and suburban sites.

Landscape painting also lends a focus to solitude. And I confess I have the misanthropic tendencies common to painters and it hardly pains me to escape the herd*. Many people do not like being alone, it makes them anxious. But I think for this very reason, that it's important to be alone at times so as not to become enslaved to a social network.

I also feel, when I am alone in nature, that sense of rhapsody so forcefully conveyed in Knut Hamsun's glorious novels, especially Pan and Mysteries. Alongside rhapsody though, comes melancholy, and yearning: emotions relating somehow to an increased awareness of ones connextion with the life and death cycles of nature.

*I've never had the least sympathy with Christianity's generalised love of humanity: how can one when there there are simply too many people.