I watched this with my sister (17) and she said it was the most disturbing thing she’d ever seen. It’s an aspect of the movie that always escapes my memory of it. I think it’s beautiful – but it is very disturbing. As well as being an autobiographical feature length rock musical, it’s really deep down a horror movie, and a horror movie of the best kind at that: it’s about the human soul.

This is a movie that (bizarrely for its 90 minute duration) drags in places but soars for me because of its moments. I still haven’t really delved into the Pink Floyd albums other than this one, but this movie is a hell of an ad for them – the music is astounding by itself, the images Alan Parker and Gerald Scarf conjure up are just icing. Then, I always preferred icing.

It’s obvious imagery sometimes – the Union Jack flag collapses into a gravestone cross; airplanes turn into flying crosses; two moving flowers look stunningly like male/female genitalia mid-coitus – but that’s why I love the movie. It’s the extreme of extreme. Intercutting is used to hammer the point home more than any movie I’ve ever seen, eg. You see fans trampling fans and Parker cuts to soldiers at war trampling soldiers at war. This is not a subtle movie, and it doesn’t mean to be. The imagery might disturb you but I can honestly say I’ve never found a single frame of the movie to be less than beautiful, and I’ve watched it in many moods ranging from suicidal to high as a summertime kite. This is the kind of ugly that’s enticing. The law in this movie is a talking arsehole… need I say more?

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