I don’t know when I’ll next be in Barcelona, a city that always felt like a home, but I’ll certainly look at it with fresh eyes when I do. Surely the mark of a great film.

Today has been a fun day, with a dash of gallic flavour. C’est bonne, ca.

Around midday we headed down to the Secret Cinema at Leake Street, the tunnels underneath Waterloo. As usual with Secret Cinema we had no idea what film was going to be shown, just general instructions on what to wear (50s/60s European with a white scarf) and where to turn up. I knew that Secret Cinema involved re-enactments of the film around seeing the film itself, but not much more than that. So, looking a lot smarter than usual for a Saturday afternoon, we rocked up to Leake Street to find a large queue of people entering, and lots of soldiers herding people along, all talking French. I was ‘lucky’ enough to be singled out by the soldiers, and made to stand with my hands against the wall as my identification documents were confiscated. Then after some minutes myself and the other detainees were taken to a dark room, followed by an indoctrination talk with spotlights in our eyes where we were asked to sign out name as belonging to a terrorist organisation. Even knowing that this was all an act it was pretty unnerving, especially when a planted audience member was taken to one side, beaten and thrown in a prison cell to be tortured. Magnifique!

Eventually all us detainees were allowed into the main area, which consisted of a fake souk, food stalls and a bar offering white russians. Could the movie be the Big Lebowski? Perhaps not. After negotiating with someone in French at the casbah I had some new fake identification, one French and one Arabic, with instructions to get a new stamp from a man round the corner. He greeted me as a fellow revolutionary, hugging and showing me his suitcase bombs then giving me a stamp for my French fake ID. My limited Arabic was ignored, thankfully he helped me anyway.. shukran. Then it was off to the Air France counter for a one way ticket to Paris, before that was later blown up and we were suddenly herded into the cinema proper. Finally the film started, it was the 1966 black and white French film, The Battle of Algiers, telling the tale of the Algerian revolution as the French tried to suppress the Algerian freedom fighters/terrorists. Although an old film, it was incredibly relevant to modern days and highly engaging. Good show, even if it wasn’t my original movie guess of Brazil.

I love events like Secret Cinema and suspect we will see increasing numbers of this sort of thing as modern media struggles to keep up with our changed attention spans and home cinema systems. Last week in New York I was lucky enough to see the new Punchdrunk show, Sleep No More, a dark, dance extravaganza set across five floors in three warehouses that I highly recommend you check out as they’ve extended their run till June. Although a very different beast, the high art of modern dance versus the ‘lower’ art of cinema, both events engage you in a similar way – you have a very unique experience, that generally equates to the more you put in, the more you get out – as opposed to normal media experience that is just a passive ’sit and receive’ transaction.

Punchdrunk are particularly good at these engaged experiences, creating dark, cavernous spaces with literally no clues as to where you find the actual show. You can walk around for the entire time and see no performance at all, just fellow spectators where masques. Then suddenly you find a performer who you watch and follow as you choose. These performers could just be walking along, or suddenly they could do the most amazing dances up walls, or get naked in a techno rave or just grab you and look at you intently then run off elsewhere. How you react to the performance is up to you, but the more you put in by following the performers – sometimes running up stairs at a quick pace (so glad I’ve been running more recently) – the more you get back by finding strange hidden rooms and wonderful experiences that stay with you. In my head I have this image of a sea of masked faces watching one of the performers disrobe and stand in front of a bathtub that will likely stay with me the rest of my life, a scene that likely few other people have as opposed to the exact shared images of every movie or stage show. A Punchdrunk show is an experience I recommend to everyone without exception.

However in the absence of any more engaged experiences today, the French theme continued with the biopic Gainsbourg, a movie about the troubled musical genius, Serge Gainsbourg. More good stuff and highly recommended, especially si tu veut pratiquer ta francais. Et maintenant, bonne nuit a tous. A demain.

There Will Be Blood is a real powerhouse of a movie. Daniel Day-Lewis takes the lead as an oil prospector, Daniel Plainview, who works his way up from the bottom through his own hard work and cunning, yet still acknowledging that only one in twenty prospectors ever strike big. Along the way he loses a lot of compatriots, and makes few friends, being unrelenting in his pursuit of oil success. After achieving some early finds, he is approached by a young man who tells him of oil on his farmstead in return for money. Plainview visits the farm and finds the boy’s twin brother, Eli Sunday, a fanatical Christian played with creepy genius by Paul Dano. Buying up the farm and the surrounding area, Plainview grows his empire – facing loss and gains along the way, within a circle of his own self-created loneliness.

There is no redemption in this movie for the principle players, just dark drilling into the human soul and psyche. The beauty here lies in the cinematic vistas of early oil fields, and the starkly wonderful soundtrack by Johnny Greenwood of Radiohead fame. There Will Be Blood is a must see movie, but have a cheery follow up film as a follow up – for us it was The Triplets of Belleville, a quirky French animated movie about one Grandmother’s quest to cheer up her Grandson with surreal consequences. Very enjoyable.

Last night we had the joy of seeing Terry Gilliam’s latest film, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, followed by a Q&A with the great director himself. All very exciting stuff.

The film is awesome, a fantastical myth making tale along the lines of Baron Munchausen, with great performances from all the actors. The way in which Heath Ledger’s untimely departure from halfway through filming is handled extremely well and, if anything, adds to the film – as in some scenes Heath’s English accent veers a little antipodean or is smothered in excessive use of the word ‘mate’.

Lily Cole is visually stunning and hypnotising as Parnassus’ daughter, unaware of her imminent fate as the trade made in a bet between Parnassus and the Devil – played excellently by Christopher Plummer and Tom Wait respectively. Why are Gilliam’s casting choices always so spot on?

After the fun of the film we got to spend a while in Q&A with Terry Gilliam. He was at ease, happy to go into stories, and full of interesting anecdotes. The only annoyance was the apparent inability for some audience members to not ask questions regarding Heath’s death and family, all of which had been answered by Terry in many of his recent interviews or were just deeply inappropriate.

Post Q&A Terry was thronged by fans outside in the bar, some more greedy with his time than others, but thankfully he found a few seconds on the way out the day to sign my favourite Brazil DVD. Huzah! Fanboy #2 goal achieved (#1 being meeting Eddie Izzard back in ‘98 of course).