DIRECTED BY David Cronenberg
STARRING Ralph Fiennes, Miranda Richardson, Gabriel Byrne, Lynn Redgrave
Opens January 3, Cert 15, 99 mins
Over the years, with films like Rabid, Videodrome, Crash and eXistenZ, we've come to expect eerie, special-effects-laden, futuristic horror fare from David Cronenberg. His latest is a sinister but understated study of a schizophrenic (Ralph Fiennes) known only by his childhood nickname of Spider. The film opens in the 1980s with Spider checking into a grim halfway house in a run-down area of east London after 20 years in psychiatric care.
Probably the most wistful music you'll hear this year is on this debut album by Casino Versus Japan, which takes us back to the good old days when electronica wasn't afraid to be beautiful. Tracks like "The Possible Light" and "Summer Clip" have the same kind of warped grandiloquence as the Aphex Twin and Global Communications a decade ago: delicate melodic flakes magnified through a cosmic amplifier. On tracks like "Moonlupe", Vangelis is even brought to mind—and there's nothing illegal about that.
Playing while standing on a runway with planes roaring overhead in "Beautiful Day", introducing the Flys V Lemons Championships in "Stuck In A Moment...", and playing with cartoons and Batman footage in "Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me", U2 are as entertaining as they are enormous and serious. More intriguing, though, are the visits paid behind the scenes as U2 play Sarajevo, bribe Larry with a mermaid and film three videos for "One".
WAX CO SINGLES VOLUME 2 (1975-8)
BOTH EDSEL
If you hit puberty back in the '70s, your first vaguely sexual experience was, perhaps, handing over your 50p to purchase the latest must-have T. Rex single, seven inches of raucous beauty bedecked in a blue-and-red paper sleeve. Someone's had the very fine idea of re-fashioning these period gems on individual CDs and collating them into two box sets, 11 on each.