You might have noticed that blogging is slowly picking up again after a bit of a gap, partly inspired by dug helping me to get the site reorganised.

In the old days, I used to talk about films I'd seen. There have been an awful lot of awfully good movies recently. Earlier in the year, I saw The Diving Bell and the Butterfly free of charge, thanks to those nice Time Out people. I remember when the book came out and everyone was talking about it. I'm not sure what my image was but I never got round to reading it. What a mistake. The film is incredible and it inspired me to start reading French again, since it's a fairly short book and of course easier when you've just seen the film. I then read it in English so I've had three goes at it now.

In the past couple of weeks, I've been to see three films which were all great in different ways.

Wall-E gave me that special feeling of being in a noisy cinema full of giggling kids which falls completely silent when the film begins, and of course we're talking about an opening twenty minutes with practically no dialogue. The film then does lots of different things to you, lots of allusions for those in the know (I only partly follow them), and a winning mix of despair and hope, culminating in an unmissable, beautiful and positive end-title sequence.

Last week, I had a few hours to kill waiting for a train in Sheffield and crossed the road to the showcase cinema. It was toss-up between the Julian (Diving-Bell) Schnabel film of Lou Reed's Berlin and Mamma Mia You know which one I went for, right? I cried non-stop through the whole thing. As it finished, the woman behind me said 'That was a real feel good, wasn't it?' which I found myself both agreeing and disagreeing with.

But I think the winner of the absolute-must-see-movie-award has to be Man on Wire which we saw last night. Absolutely incredible, and working on your mind in so many different ways afterwards. You have no choice but to see it in the cinema before it disappears. How long till it appears on a double bill with Man on Fire I wonder? Has anybody made Man on Tire yet?

B-)