MC66

Caught this on C4.

A really great story, well written, simply told, full of understatement and the subtlest of non-verbal exchange. This reminds me of many people I know.

Top performances from both Daniel Kaluuya and Seraphina Beh - who riff off each other beautifully.

Shows the power of short film - so much more can be said with so much less. I love it.

I am so irate. Four shït hot actors, three score highly talented crew and creative experts, funded to put their spectacular energies into one piece of blatant, one sided, marvel comic propaganda. Don't get me wrong, I adore this film's leads, but in what way - tell me - IN WHAT WAY does John Cusack remotely resemble Michael Moore? Had good-looking, young, incisive, super-cool Cusack played 'The Bad Guy'; had Hackman been chosen to show us one or two of the human flaws to be found in our better known anti-gun-lobby campaigners - then we would have had a story.

Why does Hollywood have to do this? Is it because they themselves believe all human opinion can be bought for the price of a supermodel? Could anything be more patronising? But yes! Apple offer a few million bucks and suddenly the only computer you see is an i-Mac; an entirely irrelevant plot segment is stuck in, as if it were a three-minute Super Bowl commercial break, to remind viewers that Apple also make a kind of Walkman. America is sick. SICK! I can almost picture the film makers calling Charlton Heston and saying, 'OK, how much will your lobby pay us NOT to make this ninety minute advert?'

Gene Hackman is one of the finest actors known to the screen. Cusack - who gets to play 'The Good Guy' - was probably awe-struck to learn he would appear in a movie with him. So how come a man of Hackman's sensitivity and intelligence would cave in to the director and execs, just like that, and produce pantomime instead? Don't tell me it's about the million dollars, or whatever they're paying him. Almost all actors seem to do this. We've read the script. We've thought about our characters with utmost sympathy. We've found internally justified motives for heinous behaviour. We've made them human in all their frailty; understandable. Then the director says: 'You're not evil enough. Try to be a bit more nasty in this take. Your character's a coward, a bully, and greedy with it.' And what do we say? 'OK, Mr.Director. Now I get it. It's a Good Guy Bad Guy fable, and God forbid we would risk crediting the audience with the intelligence to decide for themselves which was which. I'll just camp up the villain for you, then, shall I?'.

In the real world, it's generally good people who go rotten - circumstance and history conspire to corrupt the better instincts of real human beings with flaws which, in truth, we probably share. In formulaic Hollywood scripts, the Gaddafis and Mugabes of this world were simply born that way - fully formed archetypes of sheer evil. Whilst we, the audience, are all with The Good Guys who would never stoop so low as to steal for drugs, bully their classmates or attempt to thwart the crime-fighting exploits of Spiderman; who devote happy hours to exterminating un-American villains wherever they lurk.

As I say, this had the potential to be a great movie in so many ways; by all accounts, the Grisham novel was on the nail. That so much talent has ultimately been poured into a dumb plot for cardboard characters will make the film entirely (and mercifully) forgettable. Ask me next month; I won't even remember the film's name, let alone the storyline. What a waste of everyone's time.

Yeah, I saw Dust at the FrightFest, too. I left with a headache tortuously far into the trippy bits. I know you get square-eyed at that Festival anyway - but this one went a long way to knocking me sideways good and early in the afternoon.

It was hard to follow - partly because of the fuzzy, Betamax projection and a somewhat loud, overly pumping soundtrack, which obscured key dialog. It didn't help that it screened in tandem with an empty, slick, self-consciously "Hey, kids, we're hip, too" C4 telly production about sleep deprivation that was, mercifully, as brief as it was irritating. Half an hour of that started the Exodus. I was ready to follow. But I guess something in the opening of Dust kept me in my seat.

From early on, there were bits that made me laugh out loud despite - or, as has been said, perhaps because of - a cast of unlikeable characters you thoroughly wanted to die. I was pleased to get away from it, but: something about the framing, the use of colour, the wacky jump-cuts and flash-frames; the sheer unpleasantness of the protagonists - perhaps sympathy for the half-wit, Pigsy, and his lovelorn, oafish brother - nagged me long after the rest of the film had faded in the back of my mind like one of those nine-hour, nightmare coach-rides from Newcastle.

Mason – and Jonty Acton (co-director of ‘13th Sign', that had screened fuzzily at the previous FrightFest) – seem to have a way of doing that. On the surface, you've just watched a half-finished, cliché-ridden, un-thought-through movie. Underneath, though, someone has tweaked your psyche in a nasty way – the sadist learing back at you behind soft, rosy, middle-class assurance – like Ronald Searle cartoons in the Sunday Times; or a Cohen Brothers movie set in Rickmansworth.

So when a friend insisted on showing me his pre-release DVD copy last week I was not totally out to resist. Viewed on telly - letterbox format – chillin out with a can or two of Stella, it suddenly came into its own. The picture quality was sharp, the sound quality clear - bassy, rather than booming - with a catchy soundtrack. And suddenly I got the point: I was watching TV. Despite the credits, this film wasn't designed to compete with cinematic masterpieces like Blood Simple, for example; or 'Henry, Portrait of a Serial Killer' (the latter was unfaultable but, let's face it, who actually rushed to see it again? Please don't give them my phone number).

It starts in the style of a kitsch TV movie already veering wildly off-course – as though the casting department and crew of Ballykissangel had just been introduced to PCPs. Set alongside your average peak-audience telly specials with the neurotic housewives, the balding detectives, the period-costumed soft-porn that fashionably debases our greatest literature, it would stand out a mile. Even compare it to those formulaic Lock-Stock spin-offs. Something DIFFERENT happens. And it's funny. And it is, in fact, very well shot. Yeah, there's still too much mayhem in the middle for my taste, and the hillbilly music gets a bit trying in places – but then the noise stops, and Mason leaves you with an almost wistful pastiche of some sixties European Film-Noir. And you get that creeping sense (probably false), that perhaps there was something more to it after all - and maybe you should watch it again, someday, just in case.

It's definitely not Paranoid Celluloid's masterpiece, which – yes - I believe is yet to come (rumours are of a Director's Cut and Sequel to 13th Sign next under commission from transatlantic distributors). But independent film-making it is. And - for any telly movie - that's a singular achievement. I guess people around the world will be tuning into this one on cable at four o'clock in the morning after Inspectors Morse and Frost, Monarch of the Glen, and the conceivers, producers and performers of BBC2's Crime and Punishment or ITV's lugubrious Forsyte Saga, are long-buried.