Michael Bonner

When these two Hyde Park shows were announced last December, we ran a piece in UNCUT celebrating the return to active service of Blur, where David Cavanagh quite reasonably asked the question: which Blur are coming back? After all, here was a band who had undergone many creative iterations during their recording lifetime; equally, so much had happened since the four of them last played together, in July 2000, it seemed appropriate to wonder what Blur would do with these shows. Could they really reconnect with the moptops who made the buoyant baggy pop of “There’s No Other Way”? Would they really revisit “Parklife”, a song intrinsically linked to an era and movement they’d subsequently gone to considerable lengths to distance themselves from? And what about the more abstract, edgier material from the later albums – what place would that have in Hyde Park?

“It’s hot as a witch's tit in this room,” says Club UNCUT headliner Jesca Hoop. “I’m going to have to retune my guitar real quick… cos it sounds like a witch's tit. So if you’ve ever wondered what a witch's tit sounds like, then this is it.” Today has been the hottest day of the year so far in the capital. Despite the welcoming evening cool outside, temperatures in the newly-refurbished Upstairs At The Garage in north London are unforgivingly high. But in some respects, you couldn’t have wished for a better line-up at Club UNCUT in heat like this.

“Somebody better get me a fucking elevator. I’m fucking 60!” Here’s Bruce Springsteen huffing and panting into his microphone, during “Out In The Street”. He's just pulled himself up from a prone position at the top of a set of steps that lead from the stage to the pit, and the audience beyond. Later, during “Born To Run”, he’ll actually end up on his back at the top of those stairs, calling to Miami Steve Van Zandt to help him up.

It’s actually quite a strange experience watching The September Issue, RJ Cutler’s documentary about Vogue. For one, there’s something fascinating about watching the mechanics of another magazine in operation. It would, of course, be self-indulgent of me to base an entire blog on magazine publishing – or, indeed, looking for parallels between the staff of Vogue and Uncut. But I suppose, to some degree, it’s inevitable. Still, I’ll try not to bore you too much with talk of RF1s or ed:ad ratios and concentrate, instead, on the personalities that make The September Issue absolutely fascinating viewing.

I have to admit, rather pathetically, that my cumulative knowledge of claymation is limited to the exploits of Morph on Tony Hart’s TV shows and, of course, Wallace And Gromit. Profoundly ill-equipped as I am, I nonetheless caught up with Mary And Max this afternoon. I will report now that this is some clear distance away from the cosy world of Aardman. Oh, yep.

As films go, it’s hard to ignore a movie where the top-line talent is Christopher Walken, William H Macy and Morgan Freeman – three actors, it hardly needs saying, who are pretty much UNCUT incarnate. It’s a shame, though, that this fortuitous convergence of talent isn’t given a better vehicle. That’s not say The Maiden Heist is a bad film – it certainly isn’t – but it perhaps lacks the oomph you’d think they’d merit.

It says much, perhaps, about the enduring appeal of James M Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice that it’s been adapted three times already for cinema and, astonishingly, even once as an opera. This year, you can add two more adaptations - Vasilis Douvlis' The Homecoming and Jerichow, from writer-director Christian Petzold.

I first met film maker Andrea Arnold at the Sundance festival in 2003, when she was premiering her short film, Wasp. An eventual Oscar winner, Wasp was a bleak but compelling slice of socio-realist cinema about a single mother trying to raise her kids on a claustrophobic London council estate. Arnold revisits, to some degree, the themes of Wasp for Fish Tank, her second full-length feature. Already highly praised in Cannes – it was one of only three British films in competition – it’s certainly the best film I’ve seen since arriving in Edinburgh.

It’s been five years since director Shane Meadows and his long-term on screen collaborator Paddy Considine last worked together. That was for Dead Man’s Shoes, a violent revenge drama that took Considine’s natural, wired intensity and amped it up to an uncomfortable degree. Considine tends to specialise – for Meadows, at least – in charismatic, explosive figures and while his run of movies together with Meadows has proved thrilling and memorable, you might have cause to wonder where they could take their collaborations next.

Quite where American indie cinema can go next, so thoroughly has it been co-opted by the mainstream, is a big question. Writer-director Lynn Shelton offers, at least, a moderately novel solution with Humpday. A bromedy about two friends who set out to make a gay porn movie, it feels at times like a mumblecore take on a Judd Adaptow movie. Although, of course, while Apatow’s films ultimately serve to reinforce the strengths of the masculine dynamic, Shelton seems to set out to dig around in the frailties of the male ego.