I’m crap at reviewing films (I’m pretty bad at reviewing music, as well, to be honest!). I think it’s because I enjoy the immersion aspect of watching them so much that when I resurface I can’t really distance myself from what I’ve been watching. In other words, I have ZERO critical faculties.

Don’t go to the cinema these days because it involves baby sitters and if you get a babysitter you want to, y’know, go out and get drunk and have conversations with each other which don’t revolve around the flat falling to pieces, imminent financial meltdown and the daughter’s pathological attraction to dangerous objects.

But we did rent City of God the other night. You’ve probably seen it already, but it’s great isn’t it? Utterly futile and depressing and chocka with soul-destroying senseless violence, but fantastic all the same – the glimmer of human creativity and consciousness emerging from underneath the hellishness.

I was conscious of all that stuff when we were in Brazil – it’s impossible to avoid it in most places, but obviously we stayed pretty much away from the hard-edged favellas. With a couple of notable exceptions, like ending up in the middle of nowhere one night after we’d been looking for Ronnie Biggs’ place.

You could do tourist trips into the favellas, but this just seemed like the most grotesque “bedlam” voyuerism to us. It was bad enough watching 8 year old kids sniffing glue in the centre of Rio without showing up in da ghetto and snapping away.

I should probably excavate the diary I wrote and stick some bits up here…