Just a brief summary of what I’ve seen and read this week.

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I strongly encourage you all to see the simply fantastic and innovative “Waltz with Bashir^” [Dir: Ari Folman, 2008] before it leaves the cinemas. I know the prospect of an Israeli animated documentary won’t appeal to all tastes, but give it a go. I loved it. The basic story is as follows:

In 1982 at the age of 19 the director Ari Folman served in the First Lebanon War as part of the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF). The trouble is that he has absolutely no memory of the war and specifically whether he was near the scene of a Palestinian massacre at the hands of the Lebanese Christians. At this realisation Folman begins to track down old friends and soldiers in an effort to re-jog his memory.

The interviewee’s recollections and dreams are rendered through the stark, high-contrast animation. This gives the film a suitably surreal and bizarre quality, but this is possibly the best way to describe war on a subconscious level rather then with ultra-realist live action. War here is show as it must be like; a sensory overload or fever-dream. This is possibly most hallucinatory and surreal war movie since “Apocalypse Now” [Dir: Francis Ford Coppola, 1979].

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This week I finished reading David Pearce’s “Tokyo Year Zero”. The basic plot is as follows. It’s a year since Hiroshima and panic is sweeping through the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department, with the threat of yet more purges from the Victors. While ethnic wars are breaking out across the city for control of the booming black market.

Against this backdrop, Detective Minami is drawn into the complex and horrific case of a serial killer who murders young girls, finding that his hidden past and this case are indelibly linked.

This book starts off well enough, it’s atmospheric and the mystery is gripping. But its overlong with too many subplots and secondary characters, and so you find yourself lost and quite confused midway through the book. This was really disappointing as I have been a fan of Pearce’s distinctive writing for some time, his style is somewhat like James Ellroy.

For anyone interested I suggest his earlier fictionalised account of Brian Clough’s controversial time as manager of Leeds United in “The Damned Utd”. This is less a novel about football and more of a character study of a broken and contradictory man. I’m not a football fan but I loved it.

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I also saw punk chronicler Julian Temple’s biopic documentary “Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten” [2007]. This is a fascinating portrait of the turbulent life of the man, but possibly it is a film that is more readily enjoyed by fans of The Clash. But at 2+ hours the film has too much baggage and paints a rather biased and romantic portrait of the man. Less interviews with celebrity fans like Johnny Depp and Bono and more with the people who actually knew Strummer might have corrected this problem.

The film is nowhere near as good as Temple’s earlier documentaries; “The Filth and the Fury” [1999] on the rapid rise and fall of the Sex Pistols or “Glastonbury” [2005].

^Which also features in my now obituary humorous ‘Top Ten’ Lists.