Another film review (with no real spoilers)...

I went to see The Jacket on Tuesday night. Described by EntertainmentIreland.ie as a combination of Jacob's Ladder, Donnie Darko, The Manchurian Candidate, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, I'm not sure if it is in the same category as these greats, but it is quite good.

With music mainly by Brian Eno, a script by Massy Tadjedin, and directed by John Maybury, a filmaker with a background in experimental film and music videos, Steven Soderbergh and George Clooney are also in there as executive producers. Apparently these two have set up a independent company called Section Eight to bring fringe filmmakers closer to Hollywood. Long may it continue, considering this film was the only one worth checking out this week at the cinema ('Has Hollywood hit it's artistic nadir at this time? Discuss, using the thousands of examples out there...').

The story is this: Sergeant Jack Starks is killed while in the gulf war, but continues to live on, albeit in a state of amnesia, for some time afterwards, to inhabit and influence more than one timespan. Keira Knightley and Jennifer Jason Leigh are here, though I hardly recognised them, which can only be good for the sake of the story, really.

Anyway, that's all you need know. Go see. But don't take any popcorn breaks. Every scene is crucial to the one that follows it.

Star Wars opens this weekend. I really don't care. I remember seeing one or two of them when I was younger and not being too impressed. The whole thing reminds me of the Matrix: A big phenomenon, but precious little else. I don't remember any of them having the hold on the youth of Mallow that they had everywhere else, but maybe that's just selective amnesia.

When I was young, my parents (or more accurately, my father) had a grudge against TV in general, and we only ever rented one. It was promptly given back to the electronics shop at the start of the summer, and we had to find other ways of amusing ourselves. It was at its core not a bad idea, but I wonder how much of it rubbed off on me. I'll live for film until the day I die, though there is very little of the rubbish that clutters up TV stations that I actually watch (The Simpsons, E.R, Desperate Housewives, that's pretty much it). Anyway, the result of all this was that a lot of the crazes of the big and small screen were lost on our family, and Star Wars was one of them.

Apparently this one is good, and a fitting end to the whole thing, but George Lucas subscribes to an ethic that I don't much care for. Anyway, whatever. Maybe I'll check them all out sometime when I have some free time on my hands, to see if all the fuss is warranted.

Also, I saw a documentary about sex in film on (surprise!) Channel 4 the other night. It seems that sex no longer sells in Hollywood. Instead, it was said, special effects without stories are the money-spinners now. Then, in a move that I suppose was to prove a point, the documentary cut to a scene from a French film called 'Romance', which showed a guy with a rather substantial erection putting on a condom, about to engage his girlfriend in coitus. Then, in a move that I suppose was to reinforce to point, the documentary cut to another scene in the same film which featured a stylised orgy with lots of naked men walking around. You have to hand it to French cinema, at least they are egalitarian in their nudity, not like Hollywood, where breasts are everywhere but even the shadow cast by a boner would be enough to get a film banned. Channel 4's preoccupation with sex is starting to get very tiresome though.

Incidentally, the song that is played behind that cut-up collage of films that include Donnie Darko and Requiem for a Dream is Mogwai's Hunted by a Freak. It took me an age of trawling the net to find that out, but satisfaction was derived.

What am I doing here? I have work to do...