They're fucking amazing. Caught them about this time last year in a tiny club in Berlin: they were mesmerising – the high praise of the Spaceman 3 comparison is fully deserved, I think.

Yeah, he's a funny bastard. And his solo albums are little short of breathtaking ('Minor Works' and 'Vacilando Territory Blues', in particular) - as are his life shows with his band, which leave the 'hushed folkie' thing behind and sound, at times, a lot like Earth.

I disagree. 'Home Field Advantage', 'You Got Another', 'Dancin Ricky', 'Purgatory Line', '(It's Gonna Be) I Told You So' – for all of those, she can hold her head high. She's a talented songwriter and, by all accounts, a really lovely person. I'm pretty sad about this.

You forgot Aimee Mann's 'I've Had It'. One of her best songs, I think – and extremely wise about knowing that even the shittiest day you have in a band ('Dan, I guess this is our prime …') will undoubtedly be better than the rest of the life that follows it.

I think 'Ten New Songs' is one of the best things he's ever done. 'Here It Is' alone ranks as one of his greatest songs. 'In My Secret Life', 'Love Itself', 'Alexandra Leaving' … All pretty awesome.

What kind of fuckery is this?

This is the thing: you don't realise, until you see them live, how staggeringly, cataclysmically LOUD they are. (Watching them at the Hordern Pavillion in Sydney – Christ, was that really fourteen years ago? – they sounded like the sky falling.) And studio-rat friends always cite 'Dummy' and 'Portishead' as two of the…

There was a paedophile in Australia called Mister Bubbles. For six months in 1987, while working to pay my way through university, I was his typist at Telstra Australia. If that is you, Tony, I still have your stapler.

'Les Bonnes Femmes' remains, I think, his greatest movie - and one of the best French films of the period.

In fairness, Gentle Herpes, you did have those blisters to begin with.

It's not - it's actually pretty rapturous and beautiful, with the air of a perfect (if odd) short-story: the voiceover has a literary quality that's balanced by the imagery, which is little short of stunning. You can even read it as a kind of murder-mystery, if you're so inclined. (Was Sergeev the wife's lover? and…

Having been forced to applaud the volunteers at EVERY FUCKING SCREENING
at Toronto over the nine years I went there, I can but applaud Madonna's
reassertion of the master-chattel dialectic. If only she'd managed to
put her cigarette out on a couple as well - ideally, while laughing
maniacally and screaming I OWN YOU…

Yeah. My wife and I saw him do a set at Largo last month, working off a notebook, mostly new material, so kind of rambling and unstructured - and he was still, hands-down, the best stand-up around. To try to deny that, at this stage, seems kind of perverse to me.

Not sure why this new system (is it seriously called 'Disqus'?) put all that empty space around my comment, but it certainly lends even the most lazy, half-assed opinion a sort of majestic, don't-fuck-with-this grandeur.

Infuriating.
And not only for the update to the 1960s, which makes no sense whatsoever, but
also for the bad habit — shared by Mike Leigh in 'Another Year' — of
characters addressing each other by name in every line of dialogue. ('Rose,
listen to me?' 'What is it, Pinky?' 'I don't want you going out, Rose.' 'Oh,
Pinky,…

It's also the texture of the images: I went to see him interviewed onstage in LA three weeks ago, and he said he's using the Red One camera, and admitted to being a total cinematography/tech geek. And it shows, I think; the whole thing has that slightly diffuse, cool-palette look the Red does really well. The front-on…

I always thought, in the first verse, that she sang, 'I got a big, bad beaver …'

I'd say the same of Harvey Keitel, for a while there - rarely has a man been so eager to show us his penis onscreen.

'Wrecking Bar' sounds pretty much exactly like The Chills, circa 1984, 'A Lack Of Understanding' sounds like an Editors B-side. And 'If You Wanna' for some reason reminded me of Kaiser Chiefs covering The Wendys.

If you can stay awake, yes. But this by far the stupidest movie I've seen here this year - one that actually functions as a kind of handy compendium of Things Lars Von Trier Knows Nothing About. Which on the face of it includes - but is not limited to - the advertising industry (all about 'tag-lines', apparently),…