Name-checked by everyone from Thurston Moore to The Strokes, US indie rock icons Guided By Voices espouse an ethic so heroically DIY it borders on the professionally suicidal. Watch Me Jumpstart profiles their idiosyncratic career, via Banks Tarver's charming, lo-fi documentary, extensive live footage and an engaging selection of the band's videos to date.
Quirky variant on the Frankenstein riff. Klaus Kinski is a scientist working on a space station with his android assistant Max404 (Don Opper, who co-wrote). Max is going through android adolescence—he's restless, sulky, curious about sex. Then a trio of escaped convicts invade, and one of them's a girl. Funny and compelling, and worth catching for Opper's geeky performance alone.
Hard to tell what's the main feature and what are the extras in this excellent four-part, three-hour package from Canada's heroes of spooked alt.country. There's an hour-long documentary on the Junkies' 2001 world tour, a Quebec festival appearance, Margo and Michael Timmins playing an acoustic set and the same pair in lengthy conversation to make it a must for all Cowboy Junkies fans.
This late John Wayne movie has The Duke as a Chicago cop trailing his man to London, while a hitman seeks to fulfill a contract on Wayne's life. It's middling, fish-out-of-water fare, the kind of bawdy, roustabout stuff Wayne did far too often, but by way of compensation you get Richard Attenborough as Wayne's finicky Scotland Yard sidekick.
Mesmerising Japanese study of voyeurism and eroticism. Shot in black and white but colourfully performed by Asuka Kurosawa as a repressed wife who's blackmailed by a stranger into—wait for it—masturbating in public places. In lesser hands it'd be tat, but there's a Cronenberg-like claustrophobia to the seediness. Porn, then, but arty porn.
Daltrey and Townshend struggle for the high notes, the mic-throwing and the windmilling are stagey rather than spectacular, and the sound never really comes together as the hits roll on. But it's historic stuff—Entwistle's last show, and also the great Pixelon hoax, the Internet concert that never was.
First sequel to The Ipcress File, with Michael Caine as blockbuster spy author Len Deighton's bespectacled kitchen-sink Bond, Harry Palmer. Made in 1966, it doesn't have that first film's grubby chic, and the convoluted double-crossing gets almost impossible to follow, but there's much to enjoy, not least Berlin in all its drab Cold War glory, and Caine's sullen, funny, unblinking cool as he travels there to unravel the story surrounding a Soviet officer wishing to defect.
Volker Schlöndorff's hallucinatory adaptation of Günter Grass' novel is a slow build. Like Apocalypse Now, with whom it shared the 1979 Palme D'Or at Cannes, it's an allegorical war movie with a trippy central conceit—three-year-old Oskar (David Bennent), disgusted by petty-bourgeois post-war Poland, refuses to mature into adulthood and instead opts for a surreal journey into the dark heart of Nazism. While his Danzig neighbourhood is consumed by Hitler frenzy, Oskar is subjected to Nazi dwarves, decapitated donkeys and suicide by raw eel overdose.
John Peel relives The Undertones' brief but brilliant career with the five founding members, friends, helpers and some great old clips. Describing the problems of success, the rift with Feargal Sharkey and the final split, the band defend their reformation with a new singer.
Impressive British witchcraft yarn set in the 17th century. After a ploughman unearths a bizarre-looking skull, the local villagers all start growing fur and claws and conducting saucy rites out in the woods with teen temptress Linda Hayden. Murder and madness abound as the victims' body parts are used to bring an ancient demon back to life. A notch above Hammer.
