LONDON CITY NIGHTS

In 2010 DreamWorks Animation was primarily known for their onslaught of pop-culture referencing, celebrity-voiced kids films populated by cute animals that all make the same face. Compared to the lyricism and beauty of Pixar's output, Dreamworks Animation was looking increasingly cynical and commercially driven. Then How to Train Your Dragon came out. The marketing made it look like just another identikit CG kid's flick, but soon people began to sit up and take notice: this was an animated film with a soul; a story about enacting social change told with a Miyazaki-esque fixation on the joy of flight and mysteries of nature.

After a slow start the film quickly benefited from excellent word of mouth and now, after a few straight-to-DVD shorts, videogames and a TV series, the franchise returns to the big screen with How To Train Your Dragon 2. The big question: can DreamWorks Animation catch lightning in a bottle twice?

Set five years after the events of the original, we rejoin Hiccup and his dragon, Toothless to find them older, wiser and more focussed. The town of Berk, having gotten over its antagonistic relationship with dragons, now lives in a state of happy symbiosis with them. Hiccup is now the de facto hero of the town, and his father Stoick eagerly anticipates him taking the reins and becoming Chief.

Sample dialogue: "YEEEARRGGGGHHH!!!!"

Hiccup has other ideas. Driven by wanderlust he speeds through the clouds on top of Toothless, excitedly mapping out new islands and devising new gadgets. By chance he runs into a group of dragon trappers working for a warlord named Drago. Drago is a half feral nutjob with a penchant for terrifying screaming and skill for enslaving dragons. He's out to bring the world under his heel, and only Hiccup and the town of Berk have the knowledge of dragons to stop him in his tracks.

Bubbling under all this is a debate about the merits of persuading people to change their minds through peaceful rather than violent means. This thematically continues the last movie, Hiccup once again being an agent of change in a sea of people patiently explaining that "some things just can't be changed". But, whereas his position was validated by the union of dragon and Viking before, the waters are muddied by Drago, whose hellbent mania resists reasoned debate. Unfortunately the film never satisfyingly resolves the ethical problem it sets itself, somewhat half-heartedly concluding that maybe some people's minds really can't be changed.

Valka is awesome.

This colours the film with a tinge of pessimism. As the characters have aged so the world has become a bit more serious, replete with large scale battle sequences and imagery of torture and death. This ain't exactly Lars von Trier, but there's a growing sense of the burden of responsibilities and the shucking off of youthful idealism.

But where the film stumbles thematically, it more than picks up the slack visually and aurally. The cinematography is stunning, though what else do you expect with Roger Deakins on board? His technique in animation is to treat the virtual camera as if it were real, which gives the action weight and authenticity. The flight sequences are still as thrilling as they were in the original; the film making excellent use of 3D as it sends audiences spinning through the clouds and over oceans on Toothless' back. Capturing this exhilaration is the key to making these films work; our enjoyment is mirrored in Hiccup's face - we wholly understand his passions, love and fears.

Technologically things have been bumped along a bit too in the last five years. The 2010 film was no slouch, but improvements in facial animation are obvious. These characters, particularly our hero, act. I don't know if they use motion capture or not, but there's a realistic, almost naturalistic way to the way their tiny unconscious tics play across the character's faces.

I wish I had a pet dragon.

Most impressive animation-wise is Valka, a new character who's spent the last 15 years living with dragons. She moves as if dancing, both otherworldly and mysterious. All of my favourite moments in the film revolve around her character, and among a stable of broadly drawn comedic stereotypes she shines through as something genuinely fascinating. Being voiced by Cate Blanchett helps, but it's the way she moves around a room that gives you goosebumps - feral, wild and loving all at once.

Her scenes are buoyed up by John Powell's playfully epic Celtic score. My highlight is the music played when Valka and Hiccup fly together, the characters moving between a bustling flock of dragons. Their mutual happiness is infectious and for a moment all the drama drops away and we're left with the simple pleasures of two people discovering a mutual bond. The only minus point is the early inclusion of the rather out of place pop song Where No One Goes, whose processed vocals sit at odds with the folkish, medieval spirit of the rest of the score.

How to Train Your Dragon 2 is not as good as the original. There's the occasional overlong lull in momentum; the film doesn't quite have the confidence to be wholly sincere, peppering otherwise touching scenes with gags; the thematic stuff is a bit disappointing and the thrill of discovering a new world has begun to evaporate. But despite all that, this is still a very good movie, and though it doesn't hit the heights of How to Train Your Dragon, it's definitely a worthy followup.

★★★

How to Train Your Dragon 2 is released July 11th

Sunburnt, sleep-deprived and covered in mud I stumbled home from Glastonbury. I had a brain full of bad wiring and a body that was in the process of shutting down, organ by organ. This is the physical impact of living in a muddy field for five days, grabbing two or three hours sleep each night, eating the odd bit of junk food to keep fuel in the tank and dancing dancing dancing furiously from noon until 7am the next morning. Like some thousand-year-stare GI returning from the shit you glassily gaze out at the uncomprehending world, muttering "you weren't there man, you don't know".

Though there's 200,000 people in attendance most people experience Glastonbury through a TV set. Digitally flitting from stage to stage, you catch highlights here and there and marvel at the headliners from a comfy sofa. It's a decent way to watch live music on TV, but the music is merely the icing on top of the cake. Great icing though; my highlights were the body-thudding laser-chaos of Skrillex, the future rock performance art of St Vincent and, of course, Dolly Parton, whose performance took me to hitherto unknown heights of joy. But if you want to read gig reviews go check out The Guardian's coverage.

Glastonbury by night. Photo by Mikki Sandhu

This review is about the side of Glastonbury that's left out of most article; behind the A-list music glitz, behind the pyrotechnics bursting from the main stages; behind the huge crowds lies the real joy of the festival: exploration. Glastonbury is pretty much a fractal experience, the more you burrow into its deepest corners the more you find squirrelled away. Squeezed into every darkened nook and cranny are secrets that only the intrepid and attentive will ever discover, a ever-shifting kaleidoscope of woozy, half remembered interactions that now feel like dreams than something that actually happened to me.

Most of these take place in the darkened, fiery labyrinth of Shangri La, Block 9, the Unfairground and The Common. These are the intense, crammed late night hangouts, teeming with a crowd that has pupils like saucers and tense, rictus jaws. Walking around here is like being stuck in a tumble dryer full of the demented. You get jostled left and right, dazzled by lasers and building wide projections, freaked out by professionally trained weirdos. Eventually you're lost deep within this whirlpool, hoping desperately you don't actually lose your mind.

London Underground at Block 9. Photo by Peter Podworski.

My favourite of these areas was Block 9. Having arrived from the grimy city I was initially a bit non-plussed to see that they were constructing a grotty tower block in the middle of all this greenery. If I'd wanted to wander around damp council shitholes I could do that quite easily back home. But at night, with sickly green lighting illuminating everything, trashy transvestites dragging it up through shattered holes in the buildings and pounding dance music filling the air I was totally in my element.

A little birdy had tipped me off about some secret stuff going in the corner of this tower block; telling me to make my way underneath the tube train that'd smashed through the building and ask to jump the queue into the club within. I did and got hustled into a pen outside full of chatty people. What followed once I was inside was a blizzard of intense oddness; hell-nurses wanted to shove suppositories up my arse, lovelorn women living in trash that I got pregnant and being threatened that my cock was going to be cut off while having a close-up polaroid of a puckered anus shoved in my face.

And yes there was a lot of mud. Photo by Mikki Sandhu.

It was an experience designed to fuck with the chemically altered mind as much as possible. This was the Roundhouse Theatre's contribution to the festival, and it was so good I couldn't shut up about it all weekend. I made it a mission to drag as many friends as possible along, taking a sadistic pleasure in watching them pop confusedly through the double doors only to emerge with twisted brains and big silly smiles on their faces.

On a slightly less psychologically intense front was the excellent Back O' Beyond bar in The Common. Taking on a slightly slanted Day of the Dead theme, the bar was staffed by skeleton boys and girls. To the sounds of rickety retro-rock I lay down in a coffin and got turned into a skeleton man, then capered around the garden outside to You Know You Make Wanna (Shout) like a madman. This bar was off the beaten track, yet stuffed with teeny-weeny details within details. Within a Jesus knick-knack shrine at the back was a fence - I spotted a hinge in it and found a small shed with another man inside. He made us burst out onto the dancefloor to make a scene. We did.

Me being turned into a skeleton man.

Eventually the nights took on a freaky pattern. We'd find a series of tiny, packed out raves, each hotter, smaller and crazier than the last. Everytime we ventured somewhere we'd find faster and faster dance music; culminating in a 4am arrival at a tent playing music like this. It was full of freakshow circus performers and an audience who looked like someone had shoved an egg whisk in their brain and hit omelette. In my burnt-out, ruinous state I thought for a moment that I was actually going mad, figuring there was about a 50/50 chance I was imagining all this from within a padded cell.

There is nothing and nowhere on earth that matches Glastonbury. But for all the amazing experiences, fantastic music and beautiful scenery the real highlight was spending the weekend with amazing people. It's the tiny personal moments that are going to stay with me the longest; everyone holding hands and snaking through a packed crowd; linking arms with a friend and negotiating especially slippery mud; pretending to sleep in someone's lap to get away from a boring man at the Stone Circle; bumping into old friends I haven't seen in years and years; hiding from a torrential downpour next to a veggie burger van; waking up in a boiling, sweaty tent and grinning as I remember where I am; helping a stranger out who's stuck in a muddy pit; even something as simple as catching someone's eye and both smiling like idiots at how much of a great time we're having.

Sunset at Glastonbury. Photo by Mikki Sandhu.

Dolly Parton said "Wouldn't it be great if we could all just live like this?", a thought I guarantee has gone through the mind of everyone who's stared out contentedly at the sun slowly setting over a throng of ludicrously happy, mud-stained people. But we can't. We've got to head back to the boring old real world where there's music doesn't bubble up from everywhere around you and things don't randomly emit vast plumes of flame into the sky. After Glastonbury everything else feels desaturated and muted, the rest of the world a joyless, unfriendly place in comparison.

This was the best weekend I've ever had in my life. I've made new friends, discovered fresh music and raved harder than I've ever raved before. I only wish I could go back and do it all over again.

Maybe booking tickets to a gig the very day I arrive back from Glastonbury wasn't the best idea in the world. I'd partied my little heart out until 7am that morning before grubbily hopping on a coach to London and shuffling zombie-like back home. Perhaps, I thought, I should skip this gig. After all I haven't really slept in days, I've watched tons of live music and, to rub salt into the wound, it's just started raining. I was so done with rain at this point.

If it were any other band I'd have shrugged, climbed underneath a big blanket and enjoyed 12 hours of loglike slumber. But eels aren't just any other band. The very first album I ever bought was their debut Beautiful Freak back in 1996, and the subsequent releases Electro-Shock Blues and Daisies of the Galaxy meant an awful lot to teenage me. Their high water mark was the 2005 release of their magnum opus Blinking Lights and Other Revelations, and attending one of the best concerts of my life at Manchester's Bridgewater Hall to see it played live. Since then I had the uneasy feeling that eels had settled into an overfamiliar rut. They put out a run of middling albums (all of which I dutifully listened to once) populated by melancholy tracks punctuated with one wearily upbeat song to close out. It had all got a bit formulaic.

Even so, I've been an eels fan through thick and thin and even exhausted and fuzzy-headed I'm going to drag myself down to see them at the Royal Albert Hall. Supporting was Melanie De Biasio, an ethereal singer whose minimalist, haunting compositions completely filled the enormous auditorium. She was amazing. I instantly fell asleep. As I jerked back to consciousness I thought maybe this was a bad idea: if I slept through an eels concert I'd absolutely hate myself.

Photo by Sara Amroussi-Gilissen

These fears were instantly banished as E took to the stage. Reassurringly bearded and dressed in a simple grey suit, his husky voice enveloped me like a much-loved old coat. With his similarly suited band behind him surrounded by a jumble-sale of acoustic instruments everything seemed right in the world. After a short instrumental introduction he sat down at his piano and began a straight up heartbreaking cover of When You Wish Upon a Star. My malfunctioning brain, already perched on an emotional knife-edge, was sent into a total tizzy, my eyes welling up and a lump forming in my throat that remained for the rest of the gig.

There's a strange disconnect at the heart of eels. E is a famed purveyor of misery; a man who converts the loss, depression and bereavement in his life into (as he describes it) "sweet, soft, bummer rock" so beautiful it may as well whip out a scalpel and go straight for the my heart. Emotional highlights are a crushingly sad A Daisy Through Concrete that had me sniffling quietly into my drink and the disturbingly morbid Gentlemen's Choice: "The life that I've led / I'm better off dead / The world has no room for my kind". You just want to give him a big hug.

And, amazingly, we can. Despite his morose lyrics E is a remarkably chipper chap. In fact he's often full on hilarious, explaining that The Beatles and The Rolling Stones once played this stage on the same night, and bending down to kiss the floor where John Lennon once stood, before wiping his lips and remarking that that spot tasted more like Keith Richards. As he self-deprecatingly apologises for his songs being so depressing (introducing It's a Motherfucker as "a next-level bummer") it's almost as if we're going through therapy alongside him, the audience sensing that it's our participation and applause that's spurring him on. The emotional climax comes towards the end when E beams out at us and says he wants to give us all a big hug.

Photo by Sara Amroussi-Gilissen

He proceeds todo just that. Clambering off stage he makes his way around the vast room, hugging everyone on his way. Countless people with tears in their eyes embrace him with open arms. He must have hugged about a hundred people by the time he makes his way on stage ten minutes later, his suit and hair rumpled. He then explains that he's going to ditch the encore bullshit and get straight back to business.

After Blinking Lights and Last Stop: This Town, the band leave the stage and the audience rises to their feet and raises the roof with the most enthusiastic applause I've heard in a very long time. Boots are stamped on the floor, hoarse cheering drifts up the rafters and palms turn an angry shade of red as they're enthusiastically beaten together. A consensus quickly forms among the crowd that we're not going to stop until they return to the stage - which, after ten minutes of this din, they do. The tip-top of the second encore is an absolutely wonderful piano cover of Can't Help Falling in Love, E's warm, sad voice injecting a ridiculous amount of pathos into the song.

More crazy applause. Still the house lights don't come up. What can they possibly do to top this? Earlier in the night E had bemoaned that the last time he played here they wouldn't let him anywhere near the Royal Albert Hall's famous pipe organ - not without joining The Royal Society of Pipe Organists anyway. He vows that one day he'll get to play it... One day...

Photo by Sara Amroussi-Gilissen

Suddenly the lights dim and maniacal laughter rings through the room. A huge sheet drops to reveal E, dressed in round shades and a theatrical cape standing in front of the organ. With a silly, joyous grin on his face he sits down and blasts out a instrumental version of The Sound of Fear and Flyswatter on the gigantic instrument. Woooooooooooooow.

It's the perfect end to an absolutely perfect night. eels remain one of the warmest, musically proficient, sad, funny and straight up most entertaining live bands around. As we filed out in the London night, a bounce in our step, audience consensus was that we'd seen something really special. This was a performance to treasure.

As long time readers will know I have a soft spot for Czech cinema, particularly 1960s films produced as part of the Czechoslovak New Wave. In the midst of staid, dull and rigid cinema, these films burst with dynamism. Over the years I've gone on about them to such an extent that the Czech Centre in London took note and have asked if I'd promote some screenings coming up. These are ace films that more people should see, so I'm more than happy to oblige.

First up is a double bill of The Fireman's Ball and Buttoners:

The Firemen’s Ball (Hoří, má panenko)
Sunday 13 July, 6.30 pm
Miloš Forman, Czechoslovakia, 1967, 71min, sub-titles

"A ball which goes horribly wrong is the setting for Forman’s compassionate and beautifully controlled satire on organizational ineptitude and Czech provincial life where stealing is rampant and ugliness presented as beauty. UK premiere of the digital restoration."

Miloš Forman is the top dog in classic Czech cinema and The Fireman's Ball is one of his finest works. In 1968 it was banned "permanently and forever" by a Communist regime terrified at the advance of Soviet troops. If a film is deemed so dangerous it must be suppressed forever it's pretty much worth a watch. Yet The Fireman's Ball isn't some molotov-wielding piece of agitprop, it's a gentle satire on bureaucracy - exposing the ridiculousness of authority rather than trying to smash it down. It's a prime example in showing how authoritarian regimes fear derisory laughter more than they fear guns and bombs.

Buttoners (Knoflíkáři)
Sunday 13 July, 8.05 pm
Petr Zelenka,1998, 104min, subtitles
With: Eva Holubová, Rudolf Hrušinský, Jiří Kodet

"A black comedy about spitting on trains, bad weather, the atom bomb, shooting human sperm into space, infidelity and people who have killed other people. A kaleidoscope of eccentric characters creates a picture of a world in which everything is connected."

I've only seen Buttoners once a while back, and my memories of it are a little fuzzy, but I remember a darkly anarchic interlinked narrative shot through jet black humour, surreal logic, and a kind of weirdly comic stoicism. It's these things that make it a perfect example of what characteristics make up of Czech cinema.

And on the following Wednesday...

Markéta Lazarová
Wednesday 16 July, 7pm

František Vláčil, Czechoslovakia, 1967, 159 minutes, Czech with English subtitles

"A very special screening of the great Czech filmmaker František Vláčil’s acknowledged masterpiece. Presented for the first time in the UK from a stunning new 4k restoration of the film, created and supplied by the Czech National Film Archive. Voted the greatest Czech film ever made."

"The most convincing film about the Middle Ages made anywhere." says Sight and Sound, if that's true, then nuts to the Middle Ages! Seriously, Markéta Lazarová is the real deal; a shit-spattered, bloody, bonkers hellscape of misery and death. This film knocked me on my arse the first time I saw it: a black and white fever dream of mass slaughter, roving packs of wolves, religious ecstasy, people being transfigured into pure evil, crucifixion.. and it goes on! The film emits seamy malevolence from every frame, portraying the life of people in the Middle Ages as a cruel nightmare where kindness is meaningless and insane gods roam the land strangling the human spirit.

If you're in the mood for an existential vision of humanity at its most tortured this is very much the place to be on Wednesday the 16th.

Three great films, all worthy of a night out!

Tickets available from www.riversidestudios.co.uk.

(Incidentally this is not a paid post, I really do very much enjoy Czech cinema and London City Nights is happy to support the Czech Centre)

Kanye West might be the weirdest performer I've ever seen - and I've seen some pretty weird shit. I adore a bit of personality in music; I'm magnetically drawn to big personalities with a penchant for crazy shit, high fashion and, most of all, being totally unpredictable on stage. With all that in mind, Kanye West is an abundance of riches. The man is straight up bonkers in the same vein as Michael Jackson or Prince; having gotten so big that any crazy idea they fart out is indulged by a smiling team of yes-men.

Having seen pictures of the man meeting Jesus on stage, or perched up a laser-lit stage mountain I was a touch disappointed that his only UK shows this year were as the headline act in the Wireless Festival. But then Yeezus was the best album of 2013, so I dutifully bought my ticket and waited with baited breath. To summarise the rest of the acts I saw; that day, Iggy Azalea was dead fun, Angel Haze (who I was seeing for second time within a week) was off the hook ace; Giorgio Moroder appeared to have hit 'play' on a prerecorded 80s playlist and Pharrell Williams was great to dance around as the sun set.

Any other day they'd have been highlights ('cept Moroder), but not today. Today was all about the egomaniacs, geniuses and nutjobs - a category within which Kanye West slides perfectly into. Having wriggled my way to the front of the jampacked crowd, I was fully psyched. As the corporate advertising wrapped up, the screens on stage went blank, the crowd whooped and.... The Beatles began playing? After Come Together came Time by Pink Floyd - the very last band I'd have expected Kanye West to take the stage to.

Eventually the man of the hour arrived. Bathed in eye-stingingly bright red light, wearing a tattered looking quasi-camouflage jacket and a full head mask he strode to the middle of the stage, grabbed the mic and launched straight into the rabid glam-rock stomp of Black Skinhead. The crowd, quite understandably, went mental. A mosh pit instantly formed nearby and right away I got a full faceful of someone's CKOne scented back as hundreds of people sway dangerously around in a sweaty soup of sweat, weed smoke and rolling eyeballs. It's all too much for one poor girl. She goes all Mia Wallace: collapsing, juddering and foaming before being dragged backwards by her freaked out friends. I hope she's okay.

Through a tangle of pogostick bodies and arms waving like riverside reeds I occasionally get a glimpse of the man himself. He looks amazing and absurd; his mask like chainmail armour, the fabric gently oscillating as he furiously rat-a-tats lyrics into the cool Finsbury night. It's a testament to Kanye's stage presence that even with his face completely obscured he's still an impossibly charismatic stage presence; entirely at ease being the dead centre of the world.

The mask is difficult thing to ignore; but in a perverse twist damn near everything on stage is set up to prevent us ever properly seeing Kanye's face. Throughout the entire set he's constantly lit from behind, rendering him a bouncing silhouette in front of his gigantic video screen. Earlier in the day the video screens to stage left and right were crammed full of Wireless branding and closeups of the grinning crowd. During Kanye they're mostly blank, occasionally lighting up to reveal his bemasked figure with the colours inverted - a black-clad, superhero/villain BDSM preacher with a neon electric blue sea behind him. The cumulative effect is that he looks oddly computer generated: his outline jaggedly pixelated and his body language sharp and statue-like.

His control over what the audience sees of him is so complete that at one point he stops mid-song, (having angrily noticed that Wireless have switched to a non-inverted, stageside view) and gives precise directions to the cameramen on stage what he wants to see on the monitors. To go to these extremes means that Kanye must have a reason for all this obfuscation - but what the hell is it? What kind of man stands in front of thousands and won't let them see his face?

We get a clue during a trademark rambling rant. After 10 minutes or so of excoriating an apparently racist Nike for not allowing him to design shoes for them (I.. think?) he launches into a vocoded sing-songy caricature of a shoe executive advising him that he should stick to what he's supposed to do and save face. Kanye responds (to himself); "That's why I got this fuckin' mask on, because I ain't worried about saving face. Fuck my face! ... Fuck whatever my face is supposed to mean and fuck whatever the name Kanye is supposed to mean! It's about my dreams!".

Well I'm glad he cleared that up. For me, the idea of the multimillionaire international superstar Kanye West whining that he's not allowed to do whatever he wants is so perverse it rockets right past offensive and lands comfortably a couple of miles into straight-up deluded territory. To make things clear; this is a man who is currently standing in front an audience of thousands lecturing us about how no-one listens to him. A man who is apparently soon to release a three hour spoken word album. Damn Kanye, if you don't think you can do whatever you want now have a go living our lives.

Kanye West is, without doubt, a dickhead of the highest order. So it's fortunate that he's an interesting, enormously entertaining dickhead. His complete lack of modesty in proclaiming himself a genius at every opportunity ("At the end of the day I'm going down as a legend whether you like me or not. I am the new Jim Morrison. I am the new Kurt Cobain.") is both hilarious and accurate. Given a choice between the fake modesty of your Chris Martins and your Ed Sheerans I'll take the frothing, theatrical self-involvement of Kanye West any day of the week.

It's this invincible ultraconfidence that made this show so fascinating. He's never bashful or polite, speaking everything on his mind secure in the knowledge that he's right about everything. He closes with the epic Blood on the Leaves, an audacious mashup of Billie Holiday's Strange Fruit, a killer bombastic horn drop and Kanye equating him not being allowed to sit where he wants at a basketball game to apartheid. I don't even know where to begin unpacking all that. What I do know is that with the stage transforming into a stygian crimson nightmare, Kanye wildly yelling into the mic and the crowd going fucking bananas the place becomes a frantic psycho whirlpool of bass, sweat and happiness. The very ground quakes as countless trainers tramp the grass down.

When asked what his biggest regret was, Kanye once responded "That I will never be able to see myself perform live." Having now seen him I've got to admit he has a point.

Just a quick report from Curious Duke, my favourite local gallery. They're on a bit of a winning streak at the moment with their exhibitions, picking punkish young artists with street-honed sensibilities and a drive to reexamine the cityscape. For the last few months they've exhibited the work of individual artists, but now that the summer's here they've put forward a multitude of works. Here's some things that caught my eye:

First up was Mark Powell's Needle Craft, a bic biro drawing upon an antique document. I immediately found this wistful, relaxed picture of Amelia Earhart incredibly sad. The Earhart story of a woman successfully battling against gender boundaries and grasping the infinite freedom of the clear blue sky has a pleasing poetry to it. Counterbalancing this joy is the tragedy of her mysterious death while trying to fly around the world. Powell's piece marries much of this into one image, Earhart posing with practical, posed femininity and pausing to look at a plane soaring through the clouds.

Needle Craft - Mark Powell (sorry for the reflections)

Interposed between the two Powell has inserted one of his trademark birds. Rendered in scientific, clinical detail its placement has an air of the hallucinogenic to it, as if this is the representation of the thoughts flickering through Earhart's mind at this particular moment. The bird feels like an omen of her eventual demise and perhaps an indication of the aviatrix forever reincarnated in the the skies. Exacerbating this sad air is the aged, ragged edges of the magazine, what was once forward looking and futuristic is now slowly being forgotten and destroyed.

Miley Smash Hits - DS

Now, in one unlikely stride we move from Amelia Earhart to Miley Cyrus. DS's Miley Smash Hits is perhaps one of the most brazenly cheesed up pictures I've ever seen on a gallery. This is the epitome of the ephemeral; a screengrab of Cyrus from the Wrecking Ball video with some crude photoshop filters applied over the top smashing up the Disney logo. In the corner stands Mickey Mouse, quite understandably glaring in annoyance. As a visual depiction of Cyrus's metamorphosis from squeaky clean teen queen to crotch rubbing, tongue lashing party bitch it's pretty effective... but why?! It's the kind of image that'd be right at home blaring out from a Camden Market T-Shirt shop; something devoid of class, subtly and taste - but I kind of love it. I respect the gumption of any artist that exhibits something that waggles a middle finger this hard in the face of bourgeois respectability and aesthetics.

But what most jumped off the walls at me here was Dan Rawling's Building the Den 01 & 02. These are antique wood saws that've been assaulted with a plasma cutter, forestry scenes being carved from the sheet metal of the saws. First and foremost they are beautiful, intricate objects; the worn sturdiness and weight of the saw contrasting perfectly against the detail of the design upon them. The minute gaps beetween the leaves of the branches are a sight to behold - organic chaos in flat metal. But there's also a playful humour in action here - a hall of mirrors effect in which the very thing the saw is meant to destroy is outlined in such beauty. It's ace.

This is but a small taster - there's a ton of interesting stuff down at Curious Duke. Much of it I've covered before in these pages - from the satirical microcosms of Roy's People to the stylish fashion dogs of Agnetha Sjögren to Tannaz Oroumchi's warped maps of London to Darragh Powell's apocalyptic, deathy bird populated cityscapes.

With the Whitecross Street Party scant weeks away the street has begun its annual blossoming into a nerve centre of the London art world. Curious Duke sits at the epicentre of this, and (60) Days of Summer works as a perfect smörgåsbord of what's in store for us over the next few months. Whet your appetite, check it out and tell 'em London City Nights sent you.

After the hilarious and deservedly successful Death Ship 666, I was seriously happy to see an invitation to Box Step Production's new show drop into my inbox. Watching a show you've first seen in a rough, embryonic state blossom into critical acclaim and sell out crowds is a lovely experience, and as a bonus I enjoyed that certain pride in being one of the first people to rave about it. But a year later, have Box Step Productions recaptured that lightning in a bottle that made their last production so fizzingly fun - or is this a case of 'difficult second album' syndrome?

Whereas Death Ship 666 took disaster movies (specifically Titanic) as inspiration, Once Upon a Nightmare settles upon fantasy. Boiled down to its bones this is a parody of The Wizard of Oz with frequent nods to the heavy hitters in fantasy lit. In place of Oz we have the Land of Somnia and rather than a chipper, optimistic Dorothy we have the scared, traumatised Sophie. The conceit of the show is that the big famous adventure has already happened: two young children, Andy and Sophie, were sucked through a portal to another world where (with the help of a magic buffalo and 'The Love Whale') they defeated the sinister Nightmare King, saving the Kingdom. And everybody lived happily ever after.

There's a neat Guillermo del Toro vibe to some of the designs.

But not for long! After saving the day the two young heroes were separated; Sophie zapped back home to our world, and Andy remaining in Somnia. Twenty years pass. We open to find Sophie trapped in a sadistic mental institute, incarcerated alongside an aged Wendy from Peter Pan and a traumatised, broken Harry Potter - a pleasingly Alan Moorish concept that probably could sustain its own play. Over the intervening time, Sophie's been drugged out and electrozapped in a bid to cure her of 'delusions' of travelling to a mystical land. The therapy has taken such a toll that even Sophie wanders whether she's imagined the whole thing.

Then, at her lowest ebb, she's sucked back to Somnia - and it's worse than ever. The citizens are unable to sleep for fear of falling under the Nightmare Queen Onyxis (widow of the King Sophie dispatched) and everyone is pretty desperate, not to mention being very hopped up on caffeine. Once more it falls to Sophie to save the day, but has she still got the goods?

It's a neat little symmetry that Box Step's second show is about someone trying to live up to previous success. What immediately impresses is just how much effort has gone into this production; technically everything is a big step up from Death Ship 666 - from the care that's gone into the backstory of Somnia, to the intricate costumes (Onyxis costume is particularly outstanding), the sound design, the on stage videos - even the programme is top class, bearing a snazzy illustration and map of Somnia at the back.

But though considerable amounts of sweat have obviously been poured into Once Upon a Nightmare, there is one glaring flaw - this ultimately a parody of Oz and, well, it's not particularly funny. I hesitate to say that as it sounds pretty damning, but it's all too accurate. To qualify that a bit, it's not that the jokes that are in the show aren't funny but simply that there's not that many jokes full stop - at times as much as five minutes of straight drama passing without a single attempt at humour. Whereas Death Ship 666 used the disaster parody as an excuse to jampack the show with as many gags as humanly possible, this show appears torn between making fun of fantasy and in taking the plight of Somnia entirely seriously.

Fortunately taking the story seriously is pretty easy - it's a testament to the skill of these performers that they succeed in drawing the audience in. By the time the final curtain fell I was unexpectedly invested in seeing Andy and Sophie's reunion, whether Amastris was going to triumph over her nemesis Fenrir, whether the Nightmare Queen would fall and whether Somnia would wake from its nightmare. The problem with that is when you're sincerely wrapped up in the fate of the characters it's increasingly difficult to laugh at them. The most extreme consequence of this is the demise of a squeaky squirrel puppet: funny on paper, but here, played sincerely, it becomes bizarrely moving.

Now that is a badass costume - Victoria Blunt as Onyxis

Perversely then, I guess the problem is that these actors are too good - conveying their various desires and fears all too believably. Particular kudos goes to Victoria Blunt as the increasingly sympathetic villain Onyxis - we can really feel the frustration as her smart, forward thinking plans are foiled by prophecy and meddling kids. Similarly great is Rachel Bird as a kind of Legolas-y wood elf type who mixes fierce physicality (and excellent stage fighting) with a mournful desperation. Those two stood out as particularly excellent, but everyone here can hold their head high as they exit the stage.

I half suspect that the reason the show is so earnest is that, in constructing the fantasy world and history of Somnia, the writers became genuinely attached to their mythology. The upshot of this is more drama than comedy; a straightforward dark fantasy adventure with a Terry Pratchett-esque willingness to poke fun at genre conventions. It's a show that would be a barnstorming success for a younger crowd - who I'd imagine would adore these slightly skewiff dungeons n dragons stylings.

As for me, I was seriously impressed at the production aspects - this is a great example of stagecraft on a budget - and at the obvious care in the writing and performances, all which create a compelling fantasy world fuelled by genuine emotional development. I just wish there were a few more gags is all.

Once Upon a Nightmare is at the Courtyard Theatre in London from July 1st - July 6th, and The Counting House Ballroom at the Edinburgh Festival in August 2014.

Begin Again is a lovely salad with a big lump of shit sitting proudly in the middle of it. Sure the shit is only touching a tiny bit of the salad, but you're sure as hell not going to be eating anything on that plate.

The film revolves around Dan (Mark Ruffalo) and Greta (Keira Knightley). Dan, channelling the rumpled, acerbic carelessness of a Groundhog Day era Bill Murray, is a fallen star record producer / A&R man. He rolls around New York drunk off his tits in a vintage black Jaguar with a strangely canine aura to him. This is a Mark Ruffalo you could imagine spotting behind the bars of the local dog pound, looking sorry for himself, whining and pawing at his cage. Naturally his personal life is a complete shambles, with a distant, troubled daughter and exasperated wife viewing him with outright contempt. After being sacked from his job and bopped in the face by an angry bouncer he hits rock bottom, contemplating jumping in front of a subway train and ending this miserable existence. But first another drink, so he stops in a bar where he finds...

Greta! Greta is a precision-tooled objet d'indie girl - from her casually tied back, shampoo ad glossy hair to her very on trend patterned summer dresses. She plays a beaten up acoustic guitar almost bent double over it, as if she's really, really into the music, man. She's a British girl in New York, having arrived as the girlfriend of Dave Kohl (Adam Levine) an indie superstar who is currently in the process of blowing up (unfortunately not literally). Their picture perfect relationship is shattered when Kohl starts banging a sexy A&R girl and Greta proceeds to mope around the city looking attractively wan and miserable, guitar in hand.

Greta plays a song in a bar that touches Dan, the two become friends and Dan's creative juices start flowing as he devises a new type of album - one entirely recorded on the actual streets of New York City! Soon the two are collecting various musicians, writing songs, recording and engaging in cute indie montages where they wander around smiling and listening to their music collections. As the album begins to come together, so do their fractured lives - the pair almost literally healed by the divine power of guitar led indie. Isn't music a wonderful thing?

It really is. But oh boy, not here. I'm going to bang on about how crappy the music in Begin Again is for quite a bit now, but if you want to skip that I can summarise what's wrong with this film with one simple point: the lead singer of Maroon 5 has a large role in the movie. Maroon 5. For FUCK'S sake. I mean... listen to this (not all of it obviously that would be insane):

(my blood boils over at precisely 02:45)

I'm really sorry I subjected you to that. But goddamn that's bad....

This is the lump of shit in the otherwise alright salad: the music in Begin Again really, really, really sucks. It's flaccid, over-produced, syrupy indie rock sung by oh-so-deep wankers in flannel shirts perched atop stools in depopulated prick-bars. This is music devoid of passion, imagination and feeling, made so much worse by the fact that these musicians consider themselves painfully authentic. As they incessantly drone on like delicate little flowers about their feelings, staring off into the middle distance with big doe eyes I wanted to jump into the movie screen, smash their bloody acoustic guitars over their heads and put on some Extreme Noise Terror or maybe a bit of hard acid techno.

I really hate this man.

As they go on to produce Greta's atrocious album they rope in a gaggle of musicians who proceed to fanny around on top of buildings in porkpie hats creating the kind of sludgy brainless acoustic whiffle that you'd generally expect to find as muzak in your local branch of Starbucks. Then, through furrowed, confused brows, we watch as everyone in the film salivates over how great this music is. "Greta, your album is amazing!" they breathlessly intone. "No! It's shit shitty shit shit!" I (inwardly) heckled back.

For a film about the wonder, power and beauty of music to subject us to the guy from Maroon 5 repeatedly bleating his tortured little heart out feels like a particularly perverse form of torture. It's especially cruel given that, aside from the music, everything else isn't all that bad. Both Knightley and Ruffalo bring something neat to the table, there's a charismatic cameo from CeeLo Green and an appearance by an fascinatingly bearded Mos Def. It's all framed and lit beautifully, with cinematographer Yaron Orbach finding a bewilderingly impressive number of ways to frame two people sitting next to each other listening to headphones. Even James Corden is likeable here!

But all that good stuff is for naught. If you make a film about music where the music sucks then you're leaving port in a ship with a gaping hole in the side. Water is rushing in, people are futilely diving overboard, alarms are blaring, red lights are flashing. Eventually the boat keels over and vanishes beneath the waves. There are no survivors.

★★

Begin Again is released July 11th

Digital Revolution is an unreasonably entertaining exhibition. Within the Curve Gallery at the Barbican centre they've crammed a crazy amount of eye-catching, imaginative and straight up fun technological trinkets. By the time you've come to the end of the exhibition you'll have had steam billowing from your eye-sockets, been transformed into a birdcreature and flown away and been sung at by the giant creepy Egyptian-styled head of will.i.am. But first a game of Pong.

At first it's like you've walked into a particularly busy branch of Virgin Megastore circa 1995. Bathed in futuristic blue light, monitors glow from steel racks and the air is filled with iconic synthesised videogame blips. Somewhere Sonic the Hedgehog has dropped his rings, Mario has gobbled a mushroom and the Russian folk song Korobeiniki(immortalised in gorgeous DMG-CPU-03 GameBoy synth) floats across the room. It's as if ten-year-old-me has died and gone to heaven. Projectors around the room show some of the greatest hits of 90s tech; the T-Rex from Jurassic Park, Lara Croft diving through flooded tombs - even beloved obscurities like Parappa the Rapper get their moment in the sun.

Someone enjoying Super Mario Bros.

It's peculiarly touching to see all these childhood favourites immortalised in a gallery - what was once regarded to be trivialities now behind plexiglass with a little description alongside explaining its heritage and cultural import. As we move through the exhibition we quickly realise that these 8, 16 and 32 bit classics represent the testy first dabbles of culture's toes in the digital sea - the early years when it began to realise the joy of shifting pixels.

The rest of the exhibition is devoted to the potential of technology to elevate mankind, appreciate the world in new ways and explore our rapidly growing technological legacy. It's this last aspect that this exhibition really opened my eyes to. By its very nature the internet is transitory - a website changes its design and (aside from archived screenshots) it vanishes forever. As long-forgotten servers die, so to do the dusty bytes hidden away on them. Experiencing these early webpages feels somehow important to understanding the modern internet. I was particularly impressed by Hi-ReS!'s website for Requiem for a Dream which uses Flash 4 magnificently in recreating the style of the film as a page. You can experience the archive of this here - a vintage yet still lovely slice of internet art.

Requiem for a Dream website - Hi-Res

The most impressive example of trawling through the lost internet is Richard Vijgen's The Deleted City. If you were online in the mid to late 90s you weren't anybody unless you had a GeoCities page crammed full of flaming skull gifs and "Under Construction" banners. As the internet evolved and social media began to grow, people quickly abandoned the site, first to MySpace and then Facebook, leaving behind an internet ghost town. In 2009 the death sentence was pronounced; the entire community was to be deleted. In a heroic effort, a team scoured the servers of data before deletion - amassing a 650 gigabyte file.

The Deleted City - Richard Vilgen

In The Deleted City you can explore this archive, navigating through the cyberboulevards and zooming in to see what you can find. I unearthed an enormous cache of bitty, low-res pictures of Sporty Spice and a bizarrely comprehensive history of the haircuts of The Backstreet Boys. Vilgen describes his work as a "digital Pompeii", and much as we stare at ancient Roman graffiti and try to put ourselves in their sandals, perhaps future generations will ponder Bonzi Buddy and try to deduce why we despised him so.

As we move further through, there's a whole raft of exhibits that allow you to see yourself reflected back in the cold panel of a TV screen with effects applied. This stuff, novel and entertaining back in 2003 with launch of Sony's EyeToy is looking a little bit creaky in 2014 - though at least what's on display is visually compelling. The technology powering most of these appears to be Microsoft's Kinect, which makes up for its shortcomings as a game controller by working beautifully as an art delivery device.

The Treachery of Sanctuary - Chris Milk

The undisputed highlight of this section (and maybe the whole exhibition) is Chris Milk's astonishing The Treachery of Sanctuary. In this the viewer stands in front of a series of white screens to see their silhouette. Above the screens a flock of birds spirals and loops around. In front of the first screen you see your body slowly dissolving into more birds. The second sees birds swooping down and snatching pieces of you away. The third, and most impressive, sees the subject raise their arms to find that they've been replaced by graceful feathers. As you move your arms you hear the sound of wind swooshing through them - flap your arms and you take off, flying through the air. Just watching it is fun, actually doing it is amazing.

This piece isn't breaking any new technological ground but it's a great example of an artist precisely understanding the limits of the devices they're using. This underlies much of what's on display here; it's less about marvelling at the gadgetry and more at the imagination of those using them. Perhaps the pinnacle of this comes with Dreamin' About the Future, a multimedia installation by will.i.am and Sean 'bare' Rodela.

Dreamin' About the Future - will.i.am and Sean 'bare' Rodela

Working on the principles of the 'hollow face illusion', will.i.am's polygonal face tracks you across the room. In an exhibition full of illusions that rely on mountains of mathematics and circuit boards, this one works a straightforward optical illusion; albeit one augmented with a great projection. The gigantic godlike head made me feel oddly like a worshipper of technology, staring up at some gigantic omniscient CGI god whose eyes follow me wherever I go; a subtle criticism of an increasingly interconnected, privacy free world?

I've covered but a smidge of the stuff here, but everyone should check this place out - especially if you're the curious sort who likes to fiddle with all kinds of interesting little tech toys. Other than the above be sure to check out the excellent Assemblance by Umbrellium on sublevel -2 where you can dance with light. This whole thing stinks of excellence - it's an almost embarrassingly good time.

Digital Revolution is at the Barbican Centre until 14 September 2014 - 11-8pm daily. Standard ticket £12.50.

Edinburgh Fringe preview season is one of my favourite parts of the year. There's nothing like watching increasingly frazzled young performers in a state of mild-to-strong freak out as August crawls ever closer. Last night was a visit to a double-bill preview, nestled within an ex-BBC building in Marylebone - currently known as Theatre Delicatessen. Seized spaces always send a pleasant little twinge of adventurous through me: the more dilapidated, stripped backrooms I get to see in my life the better. But enough of my yapping, the shows:

Guinea Pigs on Trial - Sh!t Theatre

Back in the early 2000s I was a poor student. Malnourished I tottered about in rags like a Dickensian waif, until one day a man in a white coat eyed my bony body and informed me I could get a good price for my little toe. £12,000 to get it excised from my body, and then to have the toe stump experimented on to test bold new stump-prettifying drugs. I was initially up for it, but then I chickened out, realising that if I got on the slippery slope of selling bits of me to the highest bidder chances are I'd end up a moderately well off torso.

As I happily wiggle the toe now I thank good sense that I didn't go through with it, but it's precisely these kinds of decisions that Sh!t Theatre's Becca and Louise are tackling in Guinea Pigs on Trial, a politico-science-comedy show about the processes of becoming a guinea pig for medical testing. This subject matter ranges from the horrifying to the farcical, Becca and Louise painting a picture of a sinister, secretive industry that trades in the flesh of the desperate.

This is all framed through a ramshackle lecture that uses The X-Files as a framing device, encompasses a debate on the merits of Sister Act versus its sequel Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit, public urination and a quick summary of reviews of a crappy local hotel. Sure, Guinea Pigs on Trial is ragged around the edges but we quickly realise this is camouflage for the pair's burning sense of injustice.

At the core is the indignation that pharmaceutical companies exploit those in need of money with scant regard for their worth as human beings - preferring to see their guinea pigs as mere proddable, probeable, bacteria-ridden fleshbags. With an admirable willingness to get their hands dirty, the two list off the trials they've applied for, from the innocuous ("Flu Camp", which actually sounds quite nice) to the scary (getting you hooked on smack in the name of science) to the 'holy shit that's a bad idea' (injecting your bladder with botox to see what happens). As they show us the rejection letters, listing faults like "underweight", "too much/little bacteria", "not sterilised", "not wrinkled enough" and so on, we begin to get a sense of the human body as commodity.

It's actually pretty creepy stuff: the X-Files framing device stops feeling like a quirky conceit very early on as we learn about the evasiveness of the big drug companies, behaviour which directly led to the disastrous 'Elephant Man' drug trial at Northwick Park in 2006.

This cuts to the quick of what Sh!t Theatre are trying to achieve - the charisma and comedy the sugary coating on a powerful political pill. This brand of activist comedy really floats my boat - reminding me of the pointed stunts of Mark Thomas. Here, as there, the laughs spring from some strange place between outrage and shock at the ambiguous flutterings behind the curtains of power. It was ace is what I'm saying.

Are You Lonesome Tonight? - Ellie Stamp

Ellie Stamp is interested in identity. Who is she? Who the hell do we think we are? Who do other people think we are? What does the cosmos have to say about us? Genetics? Geography? Appearance? By the time you've gotten to the end of this show you'll have been categorised, rearranged, interrogated, had your innermost psyche laid bare and, if you're really lucky, gotten to eat a toasted peanut butter sandwich.

The skeleton on which everything is overlaid is an exploration of Ellie's relationship to the dead King Elvis. What if, instead of ignominiously popping it on the bog, he'd made his way to England and begun a clandestine relationship with Ellie's mum. After all, Ellie, unlike her sister, has dark hair and if you squint the right way in the right light, why - she might even have Presley's distinctively insouciant brow and plump, smoochable lips. The root of this train of thought was Ellie receiving a book with the unwieldy yet descriptive title Are You Lonesome Tonight? The Untold Story of Elvis Presley's One True Love and the Child He Never Knew.

This moment is the seed of the show and everything that we experience branches from it. There's a particular focus on numerology, with everybody in the audience being asked to add up their dates of birth to get a number between 1 and 9, by which we're then sorted into groups. Supposedly we're then to realise our similar personalities and proclivities. For example 1s are born leaders, 4s are perceptive and 6s are warm and caring.

I think what Ellie's doing is dividing us, labelling us and telling us how we feel not differentiate ourselves from each other, but to underline our similarities. The numerological stuff is, let's face it, a bunch of bullshit. Somewhere inside everybody is a caring person, a perceptive person and a forceful person. The only way to get through life is to shuffle these personae like a pack of cards, deciding which face is best to pop on for any given situation.

The show that results from this train of thought is an extremely intimate archaeological excavation; a kind of auto-autopsy on why Ellie Stamp is who she is. There's a crafty loopiness to proceedings, with tangents spinning from tangents, confessions and moments of self discovery for us and her. There's an air of truth to damn near everything Ellie says - and what's more - there's the illusion that she's realising a lot of this for the first time on stage.

I'm making this all sound unappetisingly serious so I should point out that Are You Lonesome Tonight? is also very funny. Ellie has a bag full of jokes and a stony deadpan expression that had me cracking up throughout. That said, the confessional sincerity shot through everything forces us to take her seriously, and we eventually arrive at a genuinely moving palce. By the final moments, with the crowd singing along to Elvis as Ellie frantically monologues about who she is and who we think we are, she's achieved something weirdly compelling and (ironically) unclassifiable - a show lodged in the crevice between performance art, theatre and stand up comedy.

I hope this double bill does well in Edinburgh. There were a few rough edges last night, but this meant that the material felt fresh and dynamic. I only hope repeated performances won't dull the blade; if they can maintain this sharpness and energy they're onto a winner.

'Guinea Pigs on Trial' / 'Are You Lonesome Tonight' are at the Anatomy Lecture Theatre, Edinburgh for the entirety of the Fringe.

Tickets for Guinea Pigs on Trial here.

Tickets for Are You Lonesome Tonight? here.

My ideal night out can be summarised pretty easily; hanging out in an interesting place surrounded by interesting people doing interesting things. If there's some nudity tossed into the mix that's a welcome bonus. So HOLY SH!T STAMP! cozied up to my sensibilities in the loveliest possible way. This was the much desired triple threat of performance art, comedy and theatre, unafraid to be aggressive, confrontational but also warm and inclusive.

The old BBC London HQ in Marylebone turns out to be the ideal place for a night like this. The soundproofed studio rooms give artists the room they need to make all the racket they want inside while never having to worry about disturbing anyone performing in the main space. In these pods around the main room are installations varying from an exciting looking 'Make-Your-Own-War-Movie' (which looked fun but I never got to do), a tombola stocked with organiser Ellie Stamp's toys (I won a toy racquet) and interesting stuff flickering tantalisingly just behind closed doors that I didn't have time to experience.

The purpose of all this is to raise money for those making the trek up to Edinburgh. Later in the night they apologised that the money being raised wasn't going to starving children; but by all indications visiting the Edinburgh festival is equivalent of being held by your ankles and violently shaken until all the money has fallen out of your pockets (and your bank account). Anyway, with this much neat stuff around to enjoy they more than make it worth their while.

One of my instant favourites was Gaia Harvey Jackson's blindfolded paintings. You're led into a side room draped in cloth, the atmosphere like that of a fairground fortune teller. Inside is Jackson, as she asks you questions, you place her hand on your face and she roams around, exploring your contours and charting your features. As she does she gently questions you. I was in a chatty mood so I immediately started excitedly gabbing about an interesting woman I've met that I'd like to see more of. It's like a miniature form of therapy just to have someone really listening to what you've got to say - all the while she's scratching out ragged lines on a piece of canvas. I'm excited to see the result:

I like it.

Similarly neat was the stall set up by Heather Bandenburg and Louise Orwin. One of my big annoyances in life in general is when people try oh-so-hard to be nice and pleasant. It's the rough edges in life that make things interesting. So it's kind of refreshing that these two are absolutely horrible to me. They're running a misanthropic cake stall dedicated the memory of someone called Diane (I don't know who she is). With curled lip and insouciant glare they invite you to pick between a cake experiences and reaching into Diane's cardboard vagina-bucket to see what's inside. How can you possibly choose? I didn't, and did both over the course of the night. Sat upon Heather's bony knee I gulped down a cake as I stared into the picture of Diane's eyes. Then, hand plunged deep between cardboard labia I scrabbled around - pulling out a bag of rhubarb and custard sweets!

Heather Bandenburg and Louise Orwin

By now I had a toy racquet, portrait of myself, bag of sweets and a couple of beers in tow. Life was looking pretty rosy. And it was about to get rosier. After a great talk by Richard DeDemenici about his Redux project - sweding movies in the locations they were shot in, Ira Brand takes the stage. Up to now things have been pretty upbeat and comedic, but not now.

Within about twenty seconds the room becomes utterly silent. She sits at a desk, opens a laptop and starts reciting a monologue: it's simple stuff, but like a black hole she inexorably draws everyone's attention to her. With a gentle wobble in her voice and a slight sparkle of tears under her eyes she guides us through the emotions and technical experience of cancer.

Ira Brand

We quickly realise she's talking about a prostate cancer scare. I wonder for a moment if women have prostates (I was pretty sure they don't), but then she settles that train of thought by talking about having blood in her semen. A weird cocktail of emotions and thoughts begins to take mix. Brand is such a good actor that the subjective, emotional side of us cannot help but instinctively sympathise with her - the room was so rapt that everyone there was feeling her pain along with her.

Meanwhile the coldly logical side of us is trying to puzzle out what the hell is going on. Whose story is this? What point is being made by a translating a masculine cancer through a feminine prism. Neurons are flickering around the brain like an untuned TV as we try to put it all together, a state of mind that leaves us confused and vulnerable - amplifying Brand's performance even more. It's a hell of an intense monologue, diluted only by experiencing it as part of a crowd. If this were a one on one experience it'd have been like taking a bullet made of sadness right to the temple.

Things don't let up. Next is Sara Zaltash, who stands on a stage looking perfectly normal and happy. Slightly bashfully she explains that she's not allowed to burn incense in this room for fear of setting off the smoke detectors. Then in the blink of an eye she whips off her dress and she's completely naked. It's the quickest disrobing I've ever seen and the sudden nudity silences the room. But this is just stage one of her transformation. Out go the lights and on comes the UV - revealing that Zaltash's body is smeared with UV paint. Her lips glow toxic waste orange in the darkness, disembodied and monstrous.

The angry disembodied lips of Sara Zaltash.

She begins reciting song lyrics - snatches from across the pop spectrum, all punctuated by a snarled "DISCUSS!". In 15 minutes or so we travel through about a hundred songs from Dolly Parton to Kanye West, stopping everywhere along the way as Zaltash's voice becomes ever fiercer and slightly hoarse, and her yells of "DISCUSS!" become ever fiercer. This is visually stunning stuff; the performer becoming a kind of phantom as she performs - slicing away humanity until she's just a few floating body parts in the darkness. Dynamic, exciting and brave - my kind of performance art!

After this we got a truncated version of Sh!t Theatre's excellent Guinea Pigs on Trial and an even more pared down smidge of Ellie Stamp's also brill Are You Lonesome Tonight? - both of which I reviewed here. By the end of the night I had a cold curl of jealousy in my belly that I wasn't heading to Edinburgh. If it's like this it'd be a tiny bit of heaven.

In 2007 I walked out of Transformers. I was gobsmacked at how racist, sexist and exploitational the film was, and how readily everyone around me was hoovering it up. Nuts to this, I like proper cinema! I'm out of here! Michael Bay, I concluded, was the devil incarnate. From the sidelines I watched as Revenge of the Fallen and Dark of the Moon fuelled the series' critical reputation as the epitome of everything that's despicable and wrong with the Hollywood blockbuster.

Then I saw Pain & Gain, which I adored. Maybe I was wrong about Bay. Maybe all these years I've been missing the point. Maybe Michael Bay is actually kind of a genius? And so I find myself, for the first time since I self righteously marched from the cinema all those years ago, faced with Optimus Prime and chums. By 2014 either these films have changed or I've changed, because by god I had a good time.

First up, the plot, script and characters are irrelevant to enjoying Age of Extinction. Do your best to compartmentalise them far away during any viewing of the movie, as they're objectively pretty atrocious. Dialogue is a fountain of inane exposition and meaningless tough guy blather, the plot is an excuse to ferry the audience from one set piece to another and the human characters are as artificial as the CGI monstrosities that they clatter around with.

It's best you ignore them, as what Bay has constructed is a numbingly intense cinematic world crammed to the brim with fascinating, disturbing, dynamic imagery. The world of Transformers is a nightmare; an insanely violent, pornographic portrait of dehumanisation with an utter shamelessness about trying to sell you shit you don't need. Bay's hyper-kinetic style, famously described by him as "fucking the frame", is taken to extremes. At its most intense Age of Extinction engenders the same reaction as staring at a Hieronymous Bosch triptych: a thousand tiny atrocities all occurring simultaneously, the audience's eyes and ears under the same kind of assault the cityscapes of Chicago and Hong Kong suffer as they're rent like soggy paper by murderous children's toys.

Boiled down, the Transformers franchise as a whole is designed as one long advertisement for these toys; from the cartoon series through the comics and so on. Bay recognises this and to his credit he doesn't seem particularly happy about it. The result is extremely barbed moments like a neckbearded manchild brony caressing a My Little Pony doll that morphs straight into an M4 rifle. Subtlety isn't Bay's strong point to say the least.

The wider implications of Bay's annoyance with the toys is the portrayal of the titular Transformers as deeply unpleasant, borderline psychotic murder machines. Want to wallow in childish nostalgia? Then come along the Transformers and watch the your toys exposed as war-crazed nutters. Practically all of their lines are strangled threats to kill, maim or destroy.

The highpoint is a line from Optimus Prime where he says "I have sworn never to take a human life. But I am going to kill this guy". Ooh! Or maybe a moment where another good guy robot voiced by John Goodman is annoys a caged alien which proceeds to spit on him. He summarily executes it while calling it a bitch. None of this accidental - these are not heroes and they're not supposed to be.

It's a bit cliche to approach a blockbuster like this as a satire, but frankly its inescapable. There is simply no straight-faced way to approach the way Bay goes about putting these scenes together, particularly in the way he uses product placement. Advertisers would ideally like product placement to be relatively invisible; we should unconsciously note that a character happens to drink Coca Cola or drives a General Motors car and, without thinking, seek to emulate them.

This is not what happens here. If anything, Bay appears to be mocking the very products he's been instructed to hawk. A man wearing elegantly framed Gucci sunglasses only notices the alien mothership when he removes the sunglasses (like a reverse They Live!). Mark Wahlberg crashes a spaceship into a Bud Light van, also crushing a man's car. Wahlberg then cracks open a beer on the distraught man's wrecked car, cracks a cruel joke and threatens to murder him. Really makes you thirsty for a beer. Another high point is a moment where Stanley Tucci's Steve Jobsalike stops in the middle of a frantic chase sequence to drink a carton of Shuhua milk. The camera cuts away from him mid drink, and the action literally pauses while he finishes his drink!

The height of Bay's audacity is a stunning shot of two robots battling on top of a robot dinosaur that's crashing through an exploding bus with a huge Victoria's Secret logo on it, all rendered in Bay's trademark maximalist slow motion pornography. If I see another shot in cinema so impressive this year I'll be surprised. Speaking of pornography, Bay even satirises his own predeliction for T&A shots. Almost from the moment the female lead is introduced it's explained that she's underage and that ogling her is creepy - laying a straight up guilt trip on any pervs in the audience.

If we're going to watch commercially minded Hollywood action film, we may as well watch the most brazenly insane example of the form - a full fat, high sugar dose of consumerist satire shot directly into our eyeballs. People often describe these films as something you need to "turn your brain off" to enjoy. They are morons. Approach this film with your analytical hat firmly on, view it as a sociopathic demolition of everything the West values, a world populated with meathead morons and killer toys that ends up as a completely fucking nuts pornography of destruction that always always finds something more to defile or explode. You'll have a great time!

Bay's cinema is unpleasant, tasteless and aesthetically awful - but this just underlines his essential honesty - society is unpleasant, tasteless and aesthetically awful. Why gussy up our awful world with cinematic beauty and style when you can wallow in pools of acrid, burning trash with Michael Bay? Age of Extinction is truth at twenty four frames a second in glistening CGI high def 3D.

★★★★

Transformers: Age of Extinction is on general release.

Picking the whole damn human condition as the topic for your one woman show takes guts. Yve Blake is stepping into the ring with an 800lb gorilla of a subject as an opponent, sending us on an hour's trip from childhood to death with stops along the way at teenage angst, middle-aged depression and senility. How do you even begin to condense all this down? How can you possibly represent the full spectrum of human experience?

The genesis of the show was a digital confessional that Blake set up; an website where people are quizzed as to their past selves. Who did you think you were in the past? What did you want to be? What were you scared of? What would you say to your past self? Nattering on about yourself is a great boost for the ego, and soon she'd amassed responses from all over the world, people of all ages outlining experiences of life. The resulting data is a soup of happiness, fear, nostalgia, embarrassment and regret - and Blake has rolled up her sleeves and pummelled this into a smooth, streamlined hour of songs, visuals and gags.

First things first - Yve Blake is an astonishingly energetic performer. She moves with a loose-limbed gangliness, every motion she makes calculated for maximum effect. Another string to her bow is an enviable comedy rubberface, which gives the impression that we're watching a person who's stepped out of a cartoon. Even better, she knows precisely how command the performance space, her stage persona at both pleasant and slightly intimidating. It feels like every single person in the audience gets a full dose of her laserbeam stare as she drags us into her world, dismantling the barriers between us.

It's impossible to be presented with the questions Blake asks and not immediately formulate your own responses to them. There's no direct audience participation, but the core reason the show works is that you hear these stories and spot your own thoughts, fears and emotions buried within them. The upshot of that is that this is less a process of gaining new understanding and more a process of reinforcing what you already believe to be true.

It's a sick joke that the more we hear other people's unique insights into the world, the more we realise that people aren't unique at all. From childhood on up we quickly understand that while we (for example) might have thought we were the only person to believe they were literally an alien as a child, there's multitudes that thought the exact same thing. Even when we fiercely assert ourselves as individuals in adolescence we're just adopting another set of pre-worn second hand social signifiers. Then, when we reach middle-age with a couple of kids in tow everyone bleats about how kids are the most important thing ever, followed by the quick onset of depression, followed by our bodies falling apart before we finally lapsing into senile incoherence as our brains trickle out of our ears. Then we pop it.

As the show progressed these realisations gave me cold shivers. After all, the illusion of individuality is one of those things it's best not to think too much about unless you're after existential sleepless nights and being fed it full force through high energy comedy is a bit unsettling. What's worse is that Then never even tries to assign any kind of meaning to the emotions and experiences we're all but forced to experience here. Now, I don't expect Blake to present us with the Meaning of Life but I was quickly craving a bit of philosophic gristle to chew on.

The lack of depth means the show often teeters on the edge of Saccharine Precipice. For example, an early sequence where we hear cute stories about children is eerily reminiscent of Kids Say the Darndest Things. Similarly cloying is a section where parents explain the "new heights of emotion" they feel at the birth of their children. I can't deny that these are important aspects of being human, but the lack of any real examination or reflection is a symptom of a lack of curiosity. Rather than attempted to understand why, things just are.

There's nothing wrong with a bit of sentimentality and for most of the show Blake just about successfully wobbles down the tightrope, balancing it all with touches of wry humour. Unfortunately towards the end the show goes full-on mawkish - with a straight up painful song about caring for your dying mother as she succumbs to dementia and forgets who you are. As we watch increasingly blurred video footage of a child playing on a beach there may as well have been a big flashing neon sign: "CRY NOW" - the dramatic equivalent of running through the audience holding freshly cut onions.

Ladling it on this thick is a bit much; the overt emotional manipulation curdling some of the goodwill Blake had built up. I've got no beef with a show that wants to make an audience sad, but forcing us to imagine our mothers dying horribly in an effort to wring a couple of tears out of us is misery as pornography. If it was in aid of underlining something genuinely profound about the human condition there'd maybe be an argument - but this is about as meaningful as a Hallmark condolences card.

I don't want to sound like I'm too down on this show - it's an entertaining, imaginative and concise. Yve Blake is an instantly charismatic and obviously smart as hell artist - shows like this and people like her are why I like to write. Most people will enjoy the hell out of Then, but personally, though I appreciate the skill and effort that's gone into its creation, it's not quite my cup of tea.

It's a found footage E.T.

That last sentence could be the most precise description of a film I've ever given, I could stop the review right there and that's all you'd need to know. Well that and it's not as good as E.T. Earth to Echo treats Spielberg's classic as a holy text, slavishly following the plot beat for beat: a gang of scrappy BMX riding suburban kids discover a cute alien that they need to hide from a squad of sinister, van-driving government spooks. Then again, if you're going shamelessly rip off a film then E.T. is at least a good choice and the found footage format freshens things up a bit.

Our four child protagonists are Alex (Teo Halm), Munch (Reese Hartwig), Emma (Ella Wahlestedt) and Tuck (Astro) (no really that's the actor's name). The three boys are fast friends, but on the horizon looms disaster. A freeway is being built on top of their cozy suburban tangle, scattering their families to the four winds. They resolve to do something special together on the last night before they move on - and all are puzzled by the appearance of weird patterns and glyphs on their smartphones. Realising that it's a map they head out into the desert to find where it leads where they find Echo, a cute flying robot alien thing who just wants to phone home. The rest of the film shows the children fixing Echo, rebuilding his ship, summoning new reserves of bravery, learning about what true friendship is etc etc etc.

Unfortunately the bikes don't fly.

Trite stuff, but it's elevated by the excellent performances of the child actors. The core of the movie is the importance of friendship and the four young actors are entirely believable as best friends with each other. The found footage conceit means we get to see a neat divide in the character's personality - when they're aware they're being filmed they behave how they want to be perceived by the others, when they forget we see their 'real' worries and personalities. It's a clever little advantage of the form and gives us a surprising amount of insight into these characters.

Also adding to the pile of positives is the realistic depiction of children interacting with technology. There's a loose framing device that we're watching Tuck's YouTube channel, and the characters display an easy familiarity with technology. Large portions of the movie are spent fixated on smartphone displays, scenes take place over video-conferencing - while technology distances the children from their parents it brings them closer to each other. This all feeds into the character of Echo, essentially a sentient piece of gadgetry. Of course the children are the only ones that really understand him - they're the only ones entirely at ease in a digital world.

That said, Echo himself is a bit of a non-entity. Designwise he's a robotic baby owl and to be honest, the film would largely work if he was an actual baby owl that the children had to return to his nest. An entirely CG creation, he never quite convinces as real - and crucially we never quite believe the children are actually touching him - robbing us of the 'finger-to-finger' moment from E.T. that Earth to Echo shamelessly swipes for its poster. Worse, being entirely CG means that Echo's every appearance drains an obviously stretched budget - resulting in the putative star of the film spending most of the runtime safely tucked away in a backpack.

That said, buried in amongst the middling-to-average special effects there is one shot so stunning it looks as if it's airlifted in from a much higher budget film. Echo and the children are speeding away from their aggressors. A semi-truck bears down on them, and Echo disassembles and reassembles it. Somewhere there's a special effects guy or girl who's showing off a bit - the visual is so good it makes everything else in the film look a little dowdier in comparison.

The found footage genre is in danger of getting a bit stale, and it's arguable that Earth to Echo would work pretty well traditionally shot. I suspect in a few years this glut of characters running around with videocameras, screaming and not framing important things very well will be seen as a fad. Personally, I still enjoy it - it makes scenes that much more intense, dangers is unpredictable and the characters feel in genuine peril. Amping this up is exciting stuff - but perhaps too exciting.

In the screening I attended more than a few children had to be escorted from the cinema in tears during some of the tenser bits that faintly recall The Blair Witch Project (which I still find pants-wettingly terrifying). It's not that this is going to turn audience's hairs white, but even I found some of the quieter moments pretty tense - the found footage technique amplifying every scary moment.

The Sunday morning I awoke to see a 10am Earth to Echo I was unreasonably hungover. I had a splitting headache, a fuzzy mouth and aching limbs. As my alarm beeped away I tried desperately to think of a reason not to see the movie. Why should I drag my exhausted carcass across London to see a shameless E.T. ripoff? I'm just about glad I did - and the film is just about worth seeing. Echo as a character sucks and there's a tonne of questionable directorial decisions but the whole affair is saved by the performances and the occasional dab of nifty special effects.

Or you could watch E.T. on DVD. Your call.

★★★

Earth to Echo is on general release from 18 July.

Back once again on the Screen Robot Filmcast! Me chatting about Begin Again and taking on everyone in a spirited defence of Michael Bay.

Or, as it could also be titled: Alan Moore the Exhibition. The Great Bearded One aka The Sage of Northampton aka The Prophet of Glycon aka That Grumpy Old Bastard who Hates Movies looms over practically everything in this exhibition - from the distant past of vaudeville right through to the modern day in the blank, grinning face of V. V-masked protesters huddle all around the corners of the space, threatening, powerful and faintly scary. What more perfect symbol of the power of comics could there be?

With the memory of Occupy very much in mind, Art and Anarchy in the UK treats the comic book as a revolutionary medium, its egalitarian principles and disposable nature making it the ideal medium for gauging what's floating around in the British political, social and cultural soup. The scope of the exhibition takes in everything from 15th century illustrated Bibles, through to Victorian Penny Dreadfuls, Viz and the digital comics of the modern era.

Photo by GBPhotos

The figurehead of the exhibition is an excellent illustration by Jamie Hewlett of a hungover, teen superheroine sipping from a hip flask in a Kings Cross back alley. She looks tired, pissed off and grumpy - a perfect summation of not just the influence British writers have had on US comics but also of the increasingly weariness of the superhero concept. This is reflected within the exhibition itself, which consciously shies away from cape clad muscle men bashing each other through buildings. So it's pleasantly appropriate that the exhibition opens with a quote from Alejandro Jodorowsky: "Kill superheroes!!! Tell your own dreams."

Chances are I'm going to enjoy anything that opens with a Jodorowsky quote - and Comics Unmasked doesn't let me down. I'm relatively familiar with the history of British comicbooks and every corner I turn I'm surprised by the obscure gems they've dug up and popped on display. It's not every day you see Pat Mills'Hookjaw; an environmentally minded shark gore story sitting proudly alongside curios like Zenith's "MAD MENTAL CRAZY!"robot raver Acid Archie or the heartfelt anger of AARGH! - a one off collection protesting the homophobic Clause 28.

Suffrage Atelier (1913)

The crux of Comics Unmasked is explaining the emancipatory potential of comics. The most powerful exhibits are those created by subcultures, the oppressed and the socially shat upon. One of the most striking was the 1913 Suffragette illustration Suffrage Atelier alongside Bryan and Mary Talbot's 2014 Sally Heathcote: Suffragette. Though we just see a few panels of the modern book, the anger and determination on the faces of the women is captured so perfectly it'd take countless pages of text to replicate.

Sally Heathcote: Suffragette (BASH! I've really got to check this out :) )

Similarly fascinating is the display showcasing the underground comics of the British gay rights movement, particularly the charmingly straightforward It Don’t Come Easy by Eric Presland and Julian Howell. Here two men meet up after a party and quickly check that neither of them is a soldier, sailor, under 21 and that there's no "fuzz under the bed" before going to bed together. Alongside it is a short from AARGH! that juxtaposes snide comments from The Sun newspaper about 'queers' and 'poofters' alongside a man being victimised in a pub by demonic, bristle-headed thugs.

From AARGH!

AARGH!, like an extraordinarily large number of things, can be directly traced back to the hand of Alan Moore (he both contributed to it and published it). Literally every section bears his fingerprints in one way or another. There's a fascinating juxtaposition between the comic art of Victorian Police Gazettes that leeringly shows us queasily sexualised images of Jack the Ripper's victims, and Moore's From Hell (for my money his masterpiece). Even Ally Sloper (whose strip premiered in 1867) has a direct connection to Moore, last being seen in the pages of his The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.

Lost Girls

In the Let's Talk About Sex section we encounter pages from Moore and Melinda Gebbie's Lost Girls - their (often unjustly dismissed) expert examination into the latent sexuality that throbs under the skin of Britain's cultural heritage. Moore proudly and unbashedly describes this work as pornography and its the centrepiece of some fascinatingly British sex art. The clean lines and sensual debasement of Robin Ray's Torrid (1979) says more about the aesthetics and sensiblities of the late 70s / early 80s in one image than countless analytical essays ever could.

Cover to Torrid Issue 3 - Robin Ray

Grant Morrison, The Sex Pistols to Alan Moore's magisterial Beatles, also gets a decent look in. There's something faintly beguiling about seeing Morrison's influential countercultural manifesto The Invisibles displayed behind museum plexiglass - though the two page spread of fox hunters turning their attention to London's homeless is an excellent choice to illustrate the series. Aside from a brief overview of his genre-defining work in Batman and Superman, there's a much needed exhumation of his ultra-obscure 1990 The New Adventures of Hitler - this exhibition marking the first time I've ever seen it in the flesh.

Here an apparition of Morrissey appears in Hitler's wardrobe. This really needs a reprint.

Though Morrison gets a decent look in there's no denying that this is very much Alan Moore's exhibition; his work outnumbering every other creator on display by at least two to one. As a Moore fan I don't have the slightest problem with this - he's one of the most fascinating creative minds working in Britain today and it's refreshing to see an examination of his work that's not a perfunctory summary of V for Vendetta, From Hell and Watchmen (if I never again read that this was one of Time Magazines 100 all-time best novels I will die happy).

What the scope and quality of this exhibition impresses upon you is that Britain is an absolute world-class leader in comic books. Sod traditional exports like football, movies and pop music - Britain absolutely kills it in the field of comics. This exhibition is stuffed to the rafters with smart, politically minded and forceful pieces of graphic art that're the cultural equal of anything else going on in this country. From the sub-sub-subcultural underground comics read by an audience of hundreds to the blockbusting Hollywood adaptation of Mark Millar's Kick-Ass we're owning this shit top to bottom, back to front.

My only criticism is that some of the books on display are a little far away and behind glass, making them difficult to read. Aside from that it's a hell of an exhibition - one of the most intelligently curated I've seen this year. If you have any interest in British counterculture you owe it to yourself to check this out.

'Comics Unmasked: Art and Anarchy in the UK' is at the British Library until 19 August - standard ticket price £9.50.

As far as ridiculous movie premises go The Purge takes some beating. Set in a near-future US, the government has decreed that the best way to reduce crime is that for one night a year all crime (including murder) is legal. The thinking is that if the populace has a release valve for their repressed anger then the other 364 nights of the year will be relatively peaceful. Amazingly it sort of works - 'Purge Night' is in its sixth year as the film begins and, though it the majority barricade themselves inside their houses and pray for sunrise, it at least appears to generally accepted as a worthwhile endeavour.

This is a sequel to the 2013's The Purge, which used the night as an excuse to stage a relatively low-budget home invasion movie. The sequel sets its sights much higher, guiding us through the streets of Los Angeles as the citizens tear each other apart. With gangs of flamethrower wielding maniacs, van-based minigun nutters and ranting sniper rifle wielding egomaniacs prowling about it's a pretty crazy 12 hours.

Stuck in the middle of all the mayhem is a pretty standard gaggle of stock types. There's mother and daughter pair Eva and Cali, dragged out of their homes by a mysterious paramilitary army. Shane and Liz, whose car breaks down at the worst possible time and the mysterious 'Sergeant' - a thinly veiled ripoff of The Punisher. Thrown together by fate the group pick their way through the carnage, looking for a safe haven - or in The Punisher's case - bloody vengeance.

'yer cast

There's a pungent whiff of John Carpenter to all of this and DeMonaco relishes showing off seedy, urban environments populated with over-the-top, extravagantly costumed weirdoes. The premise allows for a cavalcade of violence throughout, mostly through gunshot wounds. This isn't some splatter flick though, and while you get your fair share of bloody squibs blasting holes in people, a surprisingly amount of the the violence is either threatened or left to our imagination - gotta get that R rating after all.

The central idea - that an awful lot of Americans are secretly frothing gun-crazy psychopaths with fear of punishment as the only thing stopping them heading off on a Grand Theft Autoesque rampage of death and destruction - is inherently satirical. The Purge: Anarchy is thus easily at its best when its directly engaging with politics. It doesn't feel enough to say the satire here is 'on the nose', more that it's screaming while beating the nose in with a baseball bat.

DeMonaco has refreshingly little time for nuance in his political commentary. Going straight for the jugular, he introduces the concept of being a 'Martyr'. Essentially if you're poor you can sell yourself to a wealthy family as a sacrificial lamb. They'll carve you up and send your relatives a hefty cheque for privilege. DeMonaco shoots this scene like a live action political cartoon - an elderly, dignified working class black man sitting Buddhalike surrounded by grinning, primped, psychotic WASPS.

Better is to come later in the film, when we enter an elite hunting club run by 1%ers with the 99% as their quarry. I have seen few more satisfying things than a load of hoity-toity snobs in suits getting their shit wrecked up bigtime by a very angry Punisher analogue. If nothing else DeMonaco has his finger on what the people want: when a horribly witchy Republican woman is held at gunpoint by our heroes the audience actually began murmuring "shoot the bitch!" at the screen. There's similar assent when we see a mutilated man strung up in front of a bank bearing a sign "This man stole our pensions." Eh, he probably deserved it.

The audience's palpable bloodlust makes you think that maybe DeMonaco is actually onto something with this Purge idea. After all we're all gathered to watch people getting blown away in increasingly creative ways - and it's undeniably pleasurable to watch a bunch of arrogant rich pricks getting theirs at the hands of our firmly proletariat heroes.

It's a shame then that these sequences are broken up by the rest of the film - which turns out to be a pretty by-the-numbers action thriller. The further we get away from political commentary the more we stray into territory that has the unmistakable stink of straight-to-DVD. None of the characters are particularly compelling, well written or well performed, though at least they manage to look believably terrified most of the time.

It's also a bit of a let down visually - the film is bathed in queasy piss-yellowish light that looks a shade too artificial for the grittiness of the material. DeMonaco obviously has it in him to compose a decent shot - there's a few moments that make you sit up and pay attention - but the majority of the direction is pretty bland - especially some of the later action sequences, which are so impersonal they could be lifted straight from any number of B movies.

The Purge: Anarchy is undoubtedly a B-movie; but when it's unapologetically acting out revolutionary wish-fulfilment it's at least a B-Movie with its heart in the right place. The rest of the time it's a faintly bland, largely identikit bit of fluff. This isn't a film to run out and see, but if you want a bit of schlock in your life you could do worse.

★★

Pantani: The Accidental Death of a Cyclist is on limited release from May 13th.

Try to imagine Brick Lane without a curryhouse in sight. It's a strange vision. Yet this is exactly what happened to Limehouse. The area used to be synonymous with its Chinese population, mythologised by Victorians as a hazy warren of opium dens populated by sinister Oriental stereotypes with a penchant for luring innocent English girls into a degraded life of sin. These stories were a load of racist rubbish, yet they magnetically drew curious visitors to them. Tourists would take special buses out to experience their first tastes of Chinese cooking and bask in exotic novelty.

The reality of Chinese Limehouse was broadly similar to any enclave of new immigrants: a self-supportive, tightly knit community that establishes themselves in a somewhat downmarket area and runs a limited range of businesses - in Limehouse's case generally laundries and restaurants. As the years ticked by and bombs fell, the buildings of Limehouse degraded and after the War it was decided that something needed to be done. The London County Council proposed to bulldoze the area, rehouse the remaining Chinese families and build modern flats. They were as good as their word - so thorough in their urban clearance that the only traces of the near-hundred year link with the Chinese community are a couple of street names and a tin dragon statue.

Most Londoners probably assume Chinatown is where it's always been, tucked in Disneyland isolation in the tourist-friendly West End. Yellow Earth's The Last Days of Limehouse aims to correct some of that, recreating the end of Chinese Limehouse and ruminating on what the memory of the place is worth.

Old Limehouse

Staged promenade style within the pleasantly dilapidated Limehouse Town Hall, this play that keeps the audience on their toes. Literally. The action takes places at different locales around the Hall, all within one room. At one end there's a recreation of a 1960s Chinese restaurants, in one corner a sitting room and a dinner table at the other end. Over the next 90 minutes this rather minimal set becomes host to a cast of characters that feel like ghosts haunting the space.

As the actors move around the room the crowd bustles after them, constantly moving and regrouping around the actors. As they move the crowd we part like the red sea, the unpredictable nature of the play meaning you never quite know where the next scene is going to pop up. One moment you're standing on tip-toes trying to peer through a forest of people to catch what's going on, the next you're up close and personal with the cast, able to see every bead of sweat upon their face. The overall effect is to make us into invisible yet involved eavesdroppers, reminding me of Punchdrunk's The Drowned Man.

The narrative is centred around the arrival of Eileen Cunningham (Amanda Maud). She was born in Limehouse where her father ran a restaurant, though left at the age of six when her family emigrated to New York. Returning as a woman of means she's dismayed to find that the Limehouse of 1958 barely resembles her memories. Determined to preserve the character of the area she launches an 'urban preservation' campaign, trying her best to rope in as many supporters as possible.

The problem is that most of the remaining British-Chinese residents understand all too well the reasons for the council's decision. They live in the decaying remnants of Victorian housing, without indoor toilets, heating and with open drains - maybe one tiny step away from a genuine slum. They accept that the area is their home but have their eyes on a rosier, modern future. The battle is thus between sentimentalism and practicality - and Mrs Cunningham isn't doing a particularly good job of arguing for the former.

How the Victorians liked to imagine Limehouse.

The play's clear vision and careful judgment shines through from the first scene. This isn't some misty-eyed nostalgia trip into the past, rather an examination of the evolution of urban communities. Central to the story are Johnny and Iris Wong (Matthew Leonhart & Gabby Wong), second generation immigrants and restaurant proprietors. As soon as we meet them we instantly understand them - quite simply, they're Londoners. They talk like Londoners, behave like Londoners and have London aspirations (namely to move somewhere north). Late in the play, Johnny crisply boils down his position on Limehouse to one simple statement "This place has served its purpose."

It's difficult to argue otherwise. The East End has been a safe haven for immigrants for most of its history, both the Huguenot weavers and the Jewish community having moved on to make way for new waves of Londoners. Some day the current Bangladeshi community will move on too. What The Last Days of Limehouse understands is that the end of Chinatown was just part of a natural urban process - fighting it will turn you into King Canute.

But Miss Cunningham, though she's trying to fight back the tide, has a decent point underneath all her half-baked schemes and insulting bluster. She argues that we should be able to see who came before us; the cities should be developed like a coral reef, with organisms building around what came before rather than wholesale demolition. As someone who gets a geeky historical thrill spotting some weathered piece of old London jutting up beside an anonymous, glassy skyscraper, it's hard for me to disagree.

By the closing scenes The Last Days of Limehouse has concluded that while bricks and mortar may be cleared away, the spirit of the place lingers in the memories and in the children of the inhabitants. As one touching scene near the end points out, the descendants of those that scratched a living in this cobbled streets might now gaze down at the site of their shops from within Canary Wharf - the embodiment of the immigration success story.

The Last Days of Limehouse is relevant not only to the Chinese London community wanting a glimpse of their roots but to anyone remotely interested in the way groups of people disperse and accumulate around the contours of cityscapes. It's an excellent play, well-performed, interestingly staged, funny, melancholy and touching all at once. Highly recommended!

'The Last Days of Limehouse' is at Limehouse Town Hall until 3rd August 2014. Tickets available here.

There are few things more tedious than having someone tell you their dreams. This is precisely the same tedium that Mood Indigo induces: “and then the alarm clock turned into a spider, and a little mouse man ran out of a pipe, and then an eel popped its head out of a tap and I had to chase it! Isn't that CRAZY?!” If your measure of good filmmaking is how much random bullshit you can cram into a movie, then director Michael Gondry's latest definitely delivers.

The largely irrelevant plot concerns the relationship of Colin (Romain Duris) and Chloe (Audrey Tatou). Early in the film they meet, fall in love and get married. Then Chloe gets infected by a water lily which grows in her lung. Treatment is expensive and soon Colin's finances are spent, forcing him to take up a job incubating proton guns (which involves him lying on a pile of dirt for 24 hours at a time). Pretty crazy, right? Well, not really - underneath the constant visual assault and self-consciously surreal plot developments it's actually a straightforward terminal illness weepie, but one so wrapped up in tawdry quirks that it's difficult to care.

I have a hell of a lot of time for Michel Gondry: one of the smartest, most inventive directors around. His successes, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and his brilliant music videos are awe-inspiring works of genius. I even have a soft spot for his failures: Green Hornet was a deserved flop, but even within that there's solid gold nuggets of sublime cinema. With all that in mind it's with a heavy heart that I have to report that Mood Indigo just isn't very good.

What a wacky car. What will they think of next?

From the opening shots you sense that this is the product of a director let off the leash. It's as if Gondry has gone through his notebooks and realized every unused idea he's ever had – throwing everything into making this the most Michel Gondry film ever. But, like guzzling down a big box of chocolates in one go, too much of a good thing makes you sick. Concepts that would have made for a great three or four minute music video are splattered hodgepodge throughout the movie – and worse, they don't mean anything other than being weird for the sake of being weird.

For example, what does an ice-rink attendee having the head of a pigeon mean? How much does it inform us as to the themes of the film to have a pair of shoes growl like dogs? Why are the side panels of that car made of perspex? All this imagery piles up on top of itself in a chaotic, tangled mess – the few genuinely powerful symbolic elements drowned underneath. Worse, the stop motion, hand-made nature of Gondry's many, many weird gee-gaws induces a kind of doomy queasiness, like being on a drug trip that's starting to go bad.

The upshot of this is the near total crushing of any humanity in the film. Duris and Tatou, so moving together in Cedric Klapisch's recent Chinese Puzzle, do their best to wring a drop of pathos from this material, but even actors of their calibre can't contend with a cinematic world designed to focus our attention anywhere else other than on the human elements. The end result is that when the credits roll you think “that's it?!”

Oh right, some kind of cloud thing. Fair enough.

The closest cinematic companion to Mood Indigo isn't Gondry's previous work, but that of Terry Gilliam. At Gilliam's best, the rush of ideas and imagery is exhilarating, at his worst it induces a numb fatigue in the viewer, like a boxer who's gone a few too many rounds and stopped caring about taking the blows. More specifically, this film reminded me of Gilliam's 2005 nadir Tideland, a nauseatingly unpleasant movie that also throws everything it can at the screen in an attempt to disguise that there's not much going on (also the only film I've ever seen that opens with the director half apologizing as he explains that you probably won't like what you're about to see).

I feel incredibly guilty criticising a film for being too imaginative. The vast majority of cinema is a sludgy grey morass of cliches and banal platitudes. Mood Indigo certainly isn't that – on the rare moments that it does work it becomes briefly magnificent. The slow slide into desaturation throughout the film beautifully conveys depression and guilt, as do the cobwebs and muck that slowly accumulate in our hero's apartment. But these tiny highlights are swamped by a flood of pointless visual bullshit that distracts and annoys much more than it does inform.

For all that I didn't enjoy watching Mood Indigo, it's a difficult film to genuinely dislike. Even if the end result doesn't work, the enthusiasm baked into every single frame very faintly rubs off on you. Then again, I might be singing a more pissed off song had I seen the original 131 minute cut of the film. After a critical beating by festival critics, the theatrical release has been pared down to a svelte 94 minutes. Frankly, even the truncated version feels overlong – by the final act I was bordering on exasperated, checking my watch to see how much more I had to endure.

I respect the creativity that's gone into Mood Indigo. I appreciate the effort it must have taken to make. I'm glad that films like this can exist. But it's there's no escaping that this is a failure as a movie.

★★

Mood Indigo is released August 1st.

"This is David. He's a journalist. He's going to write about us". A roomful of eyes turned to me as I sheepishly waved hello. The speaker was David William Parry, Heathen Priest of the Goddess Nerthus, poet, critic, dramaturge, academic - kind of a big cheese in the Pagan community. Ruddy-faced and tweed-clad he fixed me with an authoritative stare that unmistakably read "don't write anything nasty, or else".

I began to wonder just what the hell I'd signed up for. Underneath a sex shop on Goodge Street lies Русский мир, a book shop, restaurant and repository for all things Russian. Inside are a motley gathering of Britain's heathens, heretics and pagans; collectively gathered under the umbrella of 'Theo-Humanist Arts'. They describe themselves as "promoting the cause of radical religious Arts across the globe. We celebrate our shared humanity, while aiming to grasp spiritual truth".

Sounds reasonable enough. The centre of the night was poet Darren Storer, reading from his new book The Recusant Who Never Recanted, an epic collection of poetry that probes the author's beliefs and the hypocritical society that surrounds him. Storer is an incredibly interesting man; a self described powerful psychic prone to dramatic visions and who frequently lapses into trance states while writing, emerging to find pages of text he has no memory of writing. In appropriately reverent tones he explains that he could be channelling Edgar Allen Poe, or even The Great Beast himself, Aleister Crowley.

Storer's poetry seeks to make followers of those that experience it, joining him in an epic voyage through a world populated by those antagonistic to him, whose reactions range from incomprehension to aggression. He bats questions away from Christians who interrogate him as to whether he's a Satanist, "I have older friends" he archly replies. As he recites he leans on a cane, grimacing every few lines as he worked his way through a fat bushel of papers.

Darren Storer

At about 40 minutes long this is a one hell of a reading, often feeling as if he's guiding us down the rabbit hole. There's the odd overly forced rhyme and a blizzard of purple prose, but it all hangs together. As Storer spins out his poem it occurs to me that the very act of reading it might be some form of magickal incantation in and of itself. I glance over his wife's Sarah Tiger's paintings hung on the wall next to me - clawed hands reaching through sigils and spiralling pentagrams.

My life keeps intersecting with the occult in all sorts of weird ways. Last year, just after having been invited by the Warberg Institute to examine his personal papers I literally stumbled across the Crowleyian history book Sword of Wisdom by Ithell Colquhoun, which someone had, for some reason, left lying on a Notting Hill pavement. Just a couple of days ago I was enjoyably picking my way through the Comics Unmasked: Art and Anarchy in the UK exhibition in the British Library. I turn a corner and find the staring eyes and hairless pate of Crowley bearing down on me, hearing an audio recording of the man himself tinnily chanting down through the years.

Sarah Tiger and one of her paintings.

I don't buy into the mysterious forces that Crowley claimed to have grasped, but I do respect the man for leading one of the most interesting lives I've ever read about. I'm also fascinated with the history of Occult Britain, which I like to read as a mutant reflection of very British preoccupations for ceremony, tradition and class. But it's one thing to sit around writing about this. It's quite another to be sat in a small, hot room full of people that really sincerely believe.

Looking around I wonder who these people are, what they do and where they go at night. Chatting outside later I learn that they consider themselves a family - members are husbands and wives, godfathers to each other's children and so on. To be honest the word 'family' in this context makes Charlie Manson (that other famous beast of the 20th Century) spring unbidden to mind. I feel guilty making the association, especially as everyone here appears nice and polite enough. That said, I still felt a little bit like Edward Woodward in The Wicker Man.

Adding to my nerviness is knowing the unfortunate tendency of some strands of Paganism to trip over into far right views. Hanging out with Satanist Nazis is the last thing I want to do on a sunny Friday evening, so I find myself desperately hoping that I don't spot any old NF tattooes in this pleasantly diabolical crowd. Thankfully everything feels relatively apolitical - perhaps I've just read a bit too much about the vagaries of Norwegian Black Metal and their predilection for Norse mythology.

I love discovering what's going on in the hidden places of London, sniffing out interesting subcultures and meeting the kinds of people you only hear faint whispers of. In that regard I had a hell of an interesting time - though not knowing anything about theo-humanism or this particular brand of Paganism left me afloat in a deep, murky, unfamiliar sea. As I cycled home my head spun trying to think of some way to conclude my thoughts on the night. Then I stopped off at a supermarket to buy some dinner.

Oh shiiiiiiiit!

'How to Train Your Dragon 2' (2014) directed by Dean DeBlois

Glastonbury Festival 2014

eels at Royal Albert Hall, 30th June 2014

Czech Season at Riverside Studios (The Fireman's Ball, Buttoners & Markéta Lazarová)

Kanye West at Wireless Festival, 4th July 2014

(60) Days of Summer at Curious Duke Gallery

'Once Upon a Nightmare' at the Courtyard Theatre, 5th July 2014

'Begin Again' (2014) directed by John Carney

'Digital Revolution' at the Barbican Centre, 8th July 2014

'Guinea Pigs on Trial' / 'Are You Lonesome Tonight' at Theatre Delicatessen, 10th July 2014

HOLY SH!T STAMP! at Theatre Delicatessen, 11th July 2014

'Transformers: Age of Extinction' (2014) directed by Michael Bay

'Yve Blake & Co: Then' at the Soho Theatre, 13 July 2014

'Earth to Echo' (2014) directed by Dave Green

Screen Robot Filmcast Episode 11

'Comics Unmasked: Art and Anarchy in the UK' at the British Library

'The Purge: Anarchy' (2014) directed by James DeMonaco

'The Last Days of Limehouse' at Limehouse Town Hall, 17th July 2014

'Mood Indigo' (2014) directed by Michel Gondry

'Darren Storer Reading' at Русский мир, 18th July 2014