I guess this can sort of double as a mini-review of Kylie Minogue’s new album, X, since I’m still not really up to writing about the music I’m listening to as much as I’d like to. I listened to the new album this past weekend and loved it – and not just for the reason I expected to love it, which is that Karen Poole, Shelly’s sister, ex-Alisha’s Attic, wrote a few songs on it.

From the first post credits shot here – of Kylie looking, well, normal for the first time, to me, in ages – this documentary really pulled me in. I used to be a massive fan of Kylie. She’s one of the celebrities I could count on the fingers of one hand who I’ve been so obsessed with when I was little that I literally covered walls with the tiniest magazine cuttings related to her. Those little shots here where she’s completely unhindered by the publicity, the make-up, the image of herself, they reminded me of that love I used to have for her. It’s in those moments that the subtitle “A Personal Portrait” strays far from the lie I thought the film makers could easily get away with considering the name. It reminded me very much of the Molly Dineen documentary about Geri Halliwell ... except – and here’s where the negative starts – I hate to say it, but outside of these fleeting glimpses it ultimately doesn’t get anywhere near as close as it clearly wants to.

The problem I have with “the new” Kylie, that is to say, pretty-much post-Eighties and Neighbours and Stock, Aitken, Waterman (actually, having written that I now realise how much that Kylie fits what I’m about to say too …) – and the problem I have with the album (though I wouldn’t call it a problem since, like I said, I love the album) – is that she’s almost literally become nothing more than a puppet for other people’s concerns.

There’s a moment here where we see her in concert doing Madonna’s “Vogue”; it closes with her as Marilyn Monroe singing “Diamonds are a Girl’s Best Friend”. Midway you see her giving Christmas presents to sick kids with “Santa Claus” and it appears to them (and the intercut black and white interview shows her pretty much agreeing) that she might as well be the fairy on the Christmas Tree so much does she continue the democratic, impersonal, careful performance – even when offstage. In one scene she’s unable to do anything onstage because the whole concert is being controlled by “two superhuman computers,” we hear, which have gone awry. She’s tellingly credited as “The Showgirl” in the end credits, as if the whole film had been some kind of a fiction. I was amazed while checking the credits of the film on the IMDb that the director, William Baker, is apparently a close friend of Kylie’s – so much does he seem … to me, at least … to be always indirectly commenting on ‘what’s wrong with this picture’, not just with Kylie but with the Whole Fame Thing. I guess he’s just the really good kind of friend that actually points things like that out.

Like I said, the album X is fantastic – but it’s got nothing to do with Kylie. It’s a songwriters’ and producers’ showcase, and the characters of Karen Poole, Guy Chambers, Cathy Dennis, etc, even the ghost of Serge Gainsbourg, come through 1000 times more than anything the mere image of Kylie on the cover has to offer. What the man behind the camera says at the start of “White Diamond” really turns out to be all too succinct – “They think Neighbours + Michael Hutchence + gold hot pants + cancer = Kylie, and you’re scared to let them any closer,” to which her response is a faux-cool, “Right! 10 points.” The scariest thing to me is that perhaps the real reason she’s scared is that there’s literally nothing beyond that crude equation.

There are glimpses here of a normal girl screaming to be herself, and those for me make it well worth the look – it’s the little things, head in hands over a meal for one, dancing down the hall to the stage, asking the cameraman if the thing on her head looks ridiculous, giggling over Photobooth on her MacBook (“Hours of entertainment”), her too-cute warm-up routine, messing around on the beach with 2 random younger fans – but in the end it’s an immensely sad portrait, even sadder than Geri was all alone in that big house.

I don’t know, I could be just reading too much of myself into her, which I guess is the appeal of such impersonality in celebrity, we all see something of ourselves in someone like Kylie. “So much to say, and I just don’t know how to say it,” she says at the point that moved me the most. The film has beautiful moments like that, no question. It’s the way it makes you realise how much personality is burned away to make these big faceless Vegas-style productions, these megastars. I kinda knew it already … but to see it happening before your eyes is almost too much. The weird part for me is when they bring in Bono of all people – and he makes Kylie’s performance look positively humble by his playing to the camera – and then they unite onstage to sing “Kids”, and all doubt collapses under you as you just can’t help warming to them both even despite having had the whole thing deconstructed before your face just seconds previously.

I guess, if nothing else, it’s some kind of masterclass in fame. The biggest question it asks is how much of yourself are you willing to sacrifice? And it’s a question that’s been asked plenty before – but to those of us who care, it really can’t be asked enough. There’s another moment where she sings about, “living the dream,” and she shouts, “this is one of my dreams,” all dolled up in a sparkling red dress to a cheering crowd, and again, it’s presented in such a questioning way that all you can think is: if there’s a reason to hold her up and congratulate her, it’s ‘cos she’s living that soul-destroying dream so nobody else has to.

As I’ve said before, when a film makes me babble this much it can’t possibly be bad. But this one’s too sad to come back to in a hurry, it fails to get close to its subject, and I find it slightly bizarre how little it touched on her fight against cancer.

I guess this is one of those movies most thinking people will be able to attempt a review of without even needing to watch. I think I personally decided halfway through Fahrenheit 9/11 – or at least some time after, ‘cos a lot of the criticisms were valid enough to force even the most ardent of his fans into a re-assessment of the whole thing – that basically, yes, we know, Michael Moore sometimes lies as much as the people he makes documentaries about. Yes, he stoops to their very same tactics like fear at times. But you know what? Who the hell cares? When the people he makes documentaries about usually are undeniably deserving of it? How exactly are you to argue with the Bush machine, the Charlton Hestons of this world, etc? And, by the way, isn’t it ironic that even the film makers here can’t resist doing the exact same thing at times (the fake business cards, for example)?

Really, all this movie tells us is what we already know – or at least, should know – that media literacy is among the most important and tragically overlooked things on the planet right now; and that maybe we should be careful about calling Michael Moore films, and it must be said other films like them, “documentaries”. It won’t change anyone’s opinion on his work, or on the people he “documents”.

It earns points for being frequently as well-made as even some of Moore’s work – and more still for at least trying to be more balanced than Moore … so balanced, in fact, that in the end they ultimately fail completely to make the guy look as bad as they clearly want him to, lol. By letting Moore and his colleagues speak for him so often, and by showing themselves so often in a particularly poor light (perhaps highlighted by the hug one of them has with the man, really shoddily explained by the narration), this really came over for me like the biggest failure to denounce a person that I’ve ever seen. Which, considering I like the guy, and I like even more the things he fights for, I guess was a nice surprise, however embarrassing for the film makers.

Like Going to Pieces, this is a wonderfully focussed documentary on the horror genre – in fact, if anything, it’s even more focussed, dedicating around 10 minutes each just to Romero’s Dead trilogy (well, the first two parts, and Tom Savini’s make-up work thereon), Wes Craven’s Last House on the Left, John Carpenter’s Halloween, Tobe Hooper’s Texas Chain Saw, and David Cronenberg’s Shivers. There’s some brilliant intercutting from the movies concerned to actual reality footage of the time, truly putting the movies in question in context.

Will you learn anything new if you’re already as much a fan of the genre and the time as I am? Probably not – but it’s still a good watch and as good an intro to the whole thing as you’ll get if you happen to be starting a film studies course of any kind. My favourite quote in the movie comes from Tobe Hooper, brutally honest about the whole phenomenon, who says, “We shot a whole bunch of footage. And then 20 years later, we find out what it meant.” When you look at Dawn of the Dead and realise it was made at a time when, really, the world wasn’t so bad afterall, it really makes you (well, me) wonder, where’s the classic horror movie of our time?

Again we enter the category of “it’s not even a movie so why am I reviewing it?” I kinda can’t believe I complained about the Ken Burns-ishness of In the Realms of the Unreal the other day when there’s a movie like this out there currently picking up Oscar buzz and getting an 8+ on the IMDb voting system. Sure, this thing carries a powerful message and one can just about get through it without falling asleep, but really it comes off in the end as a boring old guy wrapping up a global warming lecture in pretty packaging that at turns fails to resemble a Steve Jobs Keynote and Jon Stewart’s Daily Show, and the most ass-kissing audience I’ve ever heard, I swear there must’ve been cue-cards telling them when to laugh heartily etc. at his jokes.

I’m being overly hard on it, I know, but I get this way when the balance of opinion seems so weirdly out of whack. I like the tone Gore ends on, and the Melissa Etheridge song, and all the ideas that come up on screen during the end credits – I even noticed the movie carries a credit for “energy offset”, is this a first? It’s certainly a movie that puts its money where its mouth is, I guess. But it’s far from must-see material.

I’ll be sad to see this win the Best Documentary Oscar next year, but looking at the “competition” it’s really quite a sucky year. This really is the laziest documentary ever made. A movie needs to be so much more than this if it wants to change the world.

I say it so often but it’s always worth repeating – sometimes, you just watch a movie at exactly the right time, and this was one of those for me, hitting me on every emotional level. I wasn’t even sure if I’d count this documentary as a “real” movie and write anything about it, but for all the love, joy, energy, beauty and sorrow that is Geri Halliwell that it captures, I think perhaps it should at least have an IMDb page? (Seriously, I can’t find one – someone let me know if I’m being an idiot – it’s directed by Molly Dineen and no, it’s not VH1’s “Behind the Music”)

I just submitted an additions form for the title to the IMDb, we’ll see what happens. Update: Oh well – IMDb says it’s this but I’m pretty frickin’ sure it isn’t. I even sent this link along with the additions form, where, btw, omg, I just realised you can actually watch the whole movie online (didn’t have the latest flash last time I visited it, I’m guessing that’s why I didn’t see it). Update 2: The IMDb finally has acknowledged the movie’s existence lol

I’ve actually found myself wondering frequently over the past year what it is I love so much about Geri. I loved her last album and I felt downright hurt by her appearance in the abominable Fat Slags. But outside of watching Spiceworld: The Movie at the end of last year, I’ve barely even thought of her at all, aside from, as I said, why it was there was a time I used to love her so much. This documentary really captures that conflicted feeling – ‘cos for all the energy she is able to exude, it’s evident on almost every frame how lonely and sad and longing to be loved she is, how she’s able to ‘play’ confident and ‘play’ outgoing but she retreats so easily into herself at the drop of a hat. In short, I fell in love with her all over again and – I’m sure I’m not alone – by the end of the movie all I wanted to do was hug her (shut up, I’m being serious here – not to say she isn’t stunning to look at). That after-movie activity being unavailable to me, I might just stick some Spice Girls and Geri stuff on my iPod this weekend.

The last image is particularly haunting – shots of Geri sitting with a puppy on the stairs, or roller skating through the halls of her new, big, ridiculously spacious (considering she seems only to have a handful of friends and a small family) house are juxtaposed with shots of a Sindy doll dressed as Ginger Spice in a similar doll’s house … Geri herself points out that a dressing table she has in her bedroom is exactly like one she had in her doll’s house as a little girl. An earlier scene shows her in a big FAO Schwartz/ Hamley’s type toy store, where she explains her fascination for toys by the fact she never really had many. It’s like she’s recreating the dreams she had as a kid as if that’s what reality should be. It’s kinda creepy and odd, but also sad … but somewhere there seems to be hope too. Kinda leaves you not knowing what to think, I guess.

Beautifully shot, but what wildlife documentary isn’t these days? This is best seen on the big screen, IMAX if possible. But really it’s no better than the average David Attenborough show, and he does a much better job at narration than Morgan Freeman. It does have some breathtaking moments, but overall, even at only 80 minutes’ length, it somehow outstays its welcome.

I’m really glad I didn’t review this movie when I first saw it. I knew then that I wasn’t in the position to say what I wanted to say about it, and as time went on, and opinions emerged, I came to think less and less of my initially powerful emotional response. Seeing the movie as slightly hypocritical (using the same fear-mongering techniques Moore claims to be speaking out against), and so one-sided, I started to think I’d really hate it on a second viewing.

I couldn’t have been more wrong. This movie is exactly the “bad” things above, but it’s undeniably full of passion. After watching it today, I couldn’t get it out of my head at all for hours. Finally I came up with a good way to describe what I think is its real significance: it’s like someone made Schindler’s List in 1948. Fahrenheit 9/11 speaks volumes about how f**cked up the world is, that’s for damn sure: but the fact that someone can make a movie like this about events like this only 3 years after speaks even more for at least one of the ways our world has improved.

The other thing I noticed on this viewing was something I was clearly trying not to notice before, such is my love for Roger Avary and Bret Easton Ellis: Avary is (hopefully) going to be directing the movie version of Bret Easton Ellis’ novel “Glamorama,” one of my favourite novels ever that speaks similarly of how crazy our world has become. Written years before 9/11, it nevertheless bears eerie comparisons to the blur between fact and fiction that date now, for me at least, stands as a symbol of. I’m still convinced that Glamorama the movie will be one of the greatest movies of all time; only now, I have to admit, it has a big rival in Fahrenheit 9/11, because, in a way, with this movie, it’s already been done.

And that brings me to why I will probably forever consider this both one of my all-time personal favourites and among the greatest movies ever made: if we survive this period in time as a race, then the events this movies concern are going to go down as some serious moments in history, and there’s simply never going to be a greater presentation; and personally speaking, and I’m sure a few people will be with me on this, when those planes crashed and those towers collapsed, even though I wasn’t exactly familiar with the towers themselves let alone American politics, it shook my world forever, made me realise that every day after was a gift, that we could have all died that day or in the days that followed, and this movie completely encapsulates and gives me a place to release that momentous feeling. I mean, I feel dumb saying stuff like this because I’m not American and stuff, but the fact is, I do believe that America leads the way. I’m a movie buff, that says it all. The thing is, right now, it’s unfortunate that America leads the way, and that’s a bummer. I’m gonna have to come back to this review when the election results come in ‘cos I don’t know where to go after this sentence and this thing definitely needs closure.

I have conflicted opinions of Michael Moore. On the one hand he’s a major force for good, I’ve always had a ‘yay’ reaction to anyone willing to challenge corporate and political bulls**t spreaders. On the other hand, he can definitely go too far. But on the last point, I get conflicted again… how far is too far when I agree with his goals wholeheartedly? Do I care if he’s unfair if ultimately I’d probably do the same were I in his shoes? Is it okay to stoop (well, almost) to the bad guys’ level, as long as you’re the good guy?

The main place in Bowling for Columbine where all these questions rear their head is in the Charlton Heston sequence. I just don’t like Michael Moore’s tactics there, and it’s sort of clear that he hasn’t quite prepared, as his nerves allow him to go too far: he’s just received the miraculous news of success in stopping K-Mart from selling firearms, and he’s greedy. Yes, Charlton Heston comes across as the idiot he probably really is in this sequence, yes I like seeing him squirm and dodge the issue etc. But the whole moment is obtained under totally false pretenses, and Heston really should’ve been given the opportunity to prepare a response – he gives Moore an appointment at extraordinary short notice, Moore’s been working on and researching this subject for god knows how long, Heston gives himself barely over 12 hours. Serves him right? Maybe. Don’t get me wrong, I think he deserves to be seen like this, ‘cos showing up in those towns so soon after the tragedies was an a$$hole thing to do, and somebody must have informed him of the tragedies, he can’t have not known… but like I said, I have a mixed reaction, basically because you can never know the whole truth, even if Michael Moore’s telling it to you.

It’s like when Michael Moore appeared at the Oscars this year in the comedic opening. I couldn’t stand that moment. I loved the whole sequence except him lampooning his own Oscar speech tirade. I liked the idea of getting him in there, I appreciate it’s pretty funny… but the fact that Moore agreed to do it really gets me down. He has such power with words and can get these anti-lunacy messages across better than anybody, and he uses comedy to do that, but sometimes the comedy can take over too much, and people stop taking him seriously. They’d rather hear a Bush joke that simply has him jumble his words in a funny way than laugh at the idiocy of something he really said while at the same time fearing and wondering if maybe they should do something about it. I have mixed feelings.

But back to the documentary… mixed feelings aside, it’s probably the best documentary I’ve ever seen (I can’t really say “best documentary ever” though I’d like to, ‘cos I’ve not seen many documentaries and don’t really intend to). It’s funny, like I said, but also very moving, very insightful, and as you can see above, it raises many questions, for me, anyway. Everybody should definitely see it, ‘cos it really will start discussion, start you looking at things differently – the media and politics – especially if you’re in that increasing minority (whoo!) of people who aren’t cynical about such things yet.