Eagle-eyed visitors and, indeed, anyone delivered to these shores by a random Google search for Zombie And The Ghost Train (for which we remain your number one destination, Abas Kaurismaki fans!), will note that this blog, which has been active(ish) for six years now, no longer gets a whole lotta love. We do not, alas, have the time and tech to do it justice. So, for now, a line in the sand. (See fig 1, above.)

We do, however, anticipate launching something new and heroic next year, if the gods of storytelling keep smiling on us. In the meantime we leave the content as it is - a museum, or possibly a jumble sale - of half-formed thoughts for Google to trawl on slow afternoons. 
Fade to black. Credits roll. For now.  

With the Maylses brothers' 1975 documentary out again, here's what we had to say about Grey Gardens...

At the end of the 1960s and the start of the 1970s, Albert and David Maysles led a quiet revolution in documentary filmmaking. Salesman, their 1969 account of travelling Bible vendors was a brilliantly assembled portrait of blue collar America as the country's economy begin to fray. Gimme Shelter, their 1970 film about the Rolling Stones' doomed concert at Altamont, has passed into history as the moment when the hippy dream ran up against the grim reality of the underground's violent overlords, the Hell's Angels.

Grey Gardens, released in 1975, is equal to its predecessors, yet marks a subtle and not necessarily intentional shift in the Maysles approach, as the brothers themselves become players in the strange, dysfunctional, tragic-comic world of a co-dependent mother and daughter, who might have been conceived by a feverish Tennessee Williams.

Seventy-nine year old Edith Bouvier Beale and her 56-year-old daughter Little Edie live in the remaining serviceable rooms of their decrepit East Hampton mansion, most of which has now been overrun by possums, cats and raccoons. Edith is aunt to Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, widow of the assassinated president; Little Edie is Jackie's cousin. Mother and daughter have lived together in a dirty corner of their 28-room home for 25 years, during which time their relationship has taken on a perversely co-dependent, deeply eccentric aspect marked by both women's resentful conviction that the other has spoiled her life.

Surrounded by scrapbooks, photos and dusty mementos, the Bouviers' life in East Hampton is haunted by the past. Edith was a society singer before her husband left her for a younger woman. Little Edie had her time in the New York spotlight too, and was engaged to at least one millionaire. Then, depending on which side you believe, Little Edie was recalled to the family seat by her mother, who believed her daughter couldn't cope alone in the city. Or: Little Edie returned of her own volition because she believed her mother couldn't cope alone in East Hampton.

Now Little Edie is a childlike 56, and her conversation is a breathy mix of slightly surreal observations about her mother and animated non-sequitors. Waltzing through the ruined house singing her marching song, she dresses in a head scarf and a tight little skirt which she wears upside down. That way, she explains, she can whip it off if necessary and redeploy it as a cape. "When am I gonna get out of here?" wails Little Edie, who, like her mother, has barely left the grounds for years, and seems unlikely to make the break now. "I'll have to start drinking," says her Ma, bedridden but still sharp as bitter lemon. "You'll make a drunkard out of your own mother."

With two such unconventional and potentially fragile subjects, the film is open to accusations of exploitation, yet not once do the Maysles smirk at their subjects. Indeed, for flamboyant Little Edie, once so beautiful and so frustrated in her attempts to make it on the stage, the camera becomes a treasured companion, and as the film evolves the Maysles become her confidantes and private audience.

Unlike their previous films, the directors themselves are unavoidably present in Grey Gardens, and the Bouviers seem grateful for the company. "David, where have you been all my life?" sings Little Edie to the director at one point. In an addition to the Criterion Collection DVD, Edie confesses over the phone to David Maysles what's fleetingly apparent here: that for over 30 years she's been a little bit in love with him.

While Grey Gardens never laughs at the Bouviers, it does acknowledge the whiff of kitsch that hangs over the house. In 2006 the film inspired a Broadway musical. In 2007 Drew Barrymore and Jessica Lange are slated to star in a filmed adaptation, but no amount of artifice can match the febrile atmosphere or the filthy living conditions which the Maysles found in 1973, or the lightness of touch they grant the Bouviers' story.

Grey Gardens is a fascinating portrait of two ailing ladies whose blood will always be blue. It's a bittersweet portrait of Little Edie, so buoyant in the face of disappointment. But most of all it's a lingering film about family ties, which for the Bouviers are as tight as a tourniquet, with all which that implies.

Following his brief cameo in our Zombie And The Ghost Train review (see below - go on, you know you want to), here's a little more on director Louis Malle. There's endless food for thought in his 1981 film My Dinner With Andre. Here's what we had to say about the DVD reissue a while back.

One theory of film holds that all movies do one of two things. They can expand your conception of the world by taking you some place you've never been, or they can confirm your deepest convictions by telling you that you are right to remain where you are. Uniquely, My Dinner With Andre does both, and a whole lot more besides. It's a film loaded with speculation on everything from art to death via mysticism and the danger of electric blankets. It can be endlessly rewound and re-watched, the carousel of ideas turning at a different angle according to your mood, mindset and position in life. It's probably the least likely masterpiece ever made.

What My Dinner With Andre doesn't have, at least in any conventional sense, is a cast, a plot or even a destination in mind. New York playwright Wallace Shawn (who co-wrote the film) meets his friend, the successful and urbane theatre director Andre Gregory (who also co-wrote) for dinner at a swanky NYC restaurant. Both appear as themselves .The pair used to be close but they haven't been in touch for a while, Andre having given up his career and his family to drift around the world on a restless spiritual odyssey. They sit down and for 100 or so minutes they talk, director Louis Malle capturing their conversation as it unfolds in real time.

Andre, it transpires, hasn't been idle in the five years since he walked out of his own life. He spent time in Poland where he joined an experimental theatre group and enacted mysterious rituals in the forest. He befriended a Japanese monk and they ate sand together in the desert. He helped build the Scottish spiritual retreat Findhorn. His children grew. His mother died. Then he returned to New York, not really any wiser and slightly ashamed to have thought of himself as a cultured aesthete to whom the normal rules of life don't apply. ("Like Albert Speer," he says, in his disarmingly playful way.)

Meanwhile Wally, for whom a ride through the city's streets is enough of an adventure - possibly in ways Andre doesn't quite appreciate - has been writing his plays, spending time with his girlfriend and calibrating his own ordinary sense of defeat. As a kid, he says, he thought of nothing but art. Now he thinks of nothing but money. Wally's an attentive listener and for an hour or so he lets Andre expound his theories on theatre, the subconscious and new age metaphysics. And then Wally candidly confesses to Andre that none of it makes any sense to him at all.

My Dinner With Andre was born out of actual conversations which Shawn and Gregory had, and it arrived at a point when the self-obsession of the 1970s was giving way to the self-assertion of the 1980s. (The 1960s, Andre suggests, may have represented a highpoint in the evolution of the Western cultural mind.) Loosely put, Andre's the seeker, Wally's the pragmatist and each represents a different response to life in an accelerated society speeding away from reality - whatever that may be.

Andre articulates the problem in a potent little allegory which explains why so many New Yorkers say they dream of leaving the city, yet somehow never do. "New York is the model for a new type of concentration camp," he says. "The camp has been built by the inmates themselves, and the inmates are the guards. They have pride in this thing they've built. They've built they're own prison and as a result they no longer have the capacity to leave the prison they've made, or even to see it as a prison."

It's a proposition which might have found its way into Louis Malle's bleakly brilliant 1963 film Le Feu Follet, yet neither Malle nor Shawn nor Gregory display any agenda or judgemental tendency. As Malle's camera hovers over the table, gliding in for close-ups and then stepping back to consider the response, every idea is food for thought. My Dinner is erudite, witty and playful but also deadly serious in its attempt to make sense of problems which, it's eventually acknowledged, can be apprehended yet never resolved. That's just the way life is.

The sheer range of references - from Surrealism to Judaism, from Nazis to sex - is exhilarating. The performances are disarmingly natural, and although it's clear that the conversation's evolution is the consequence of artful deliberation, it never feels less than authentically organic.

At first it appears as if the natural-born storyteller Andre, with his silver tongue and foxy face, is the more charismatic partner, and his first-hand reports from the front-line of self-discovery make his position seem even more seductive. Then he shuts up and lets Wally have a go. Shawn, who appeared as Diane Keaton's ex in Manhattan, looks every inch the nervous schlub, but his own observations on New Yorkers' self-distracting strategies, on status anxiety, social roles and the barriers to honest compassion suggest a more grounded perspective than Andre's.

Eventually both, in their different ways, agree that life's meaning - if indeed it has any - resides in occupying the moment. For Andre that might mean dancing in the woods at dawn with people who don't speak his language. For Wally it's about enjoying a cup of coffee in the morning and sitting down to read the paper. In itself this may not be a mind-blowing observation, but the conversational journey that takes them there is. As in life, the trick is to keep on looking.

Those who love this film describe their own constantly evolving relationship with Andre and Wally and the arguments they propose: when you're young it's the idealistic Andre and his call for passion and magic that seems to triumph. In middle-age it's Wally and his sensible sense of expediency. In old age no doubt they'll both seem equally valid - as they clearly are for the filmmakers. At whatever point you encounter this, and whether you allow it to confirm or confound your convictions, the film is a timeless delight.

A chance encounter with one of Black Sabbath's most mournful moments - Solitude from Masters of Reality - reminded me how much I loved Mika
Kaurismaki's 1991 film Zombie and the Ghost train, to which Ozzy's lonely lament forms the coda. Here's what we had to say about the DVD a while back. After that, the closing scene itself, about which we appear to have waxed rather lyrically in the original review for Film4.

Something about those bitter Finnish nights chilled out the early work of the brothers Kaurismäki but it never froze their hearts. From the early 1980s and into the mid-1990s when Mika Kaurismaki relocated to sunny Brazil, he and his better known brother Aki mined a dry, mordant, tragic-comic sensibility in a series of films about aimless failures and passive losers adrift in the suicide capital of northern Europe.

Zombie And The Ghost Train from 1991 remains Kaurismäki Sr's most successful film and its odd blend of darkly absurd comedy and haunting fatalism suggests Withnail & I meeting Leaving Las Vegas in a Helsinki bar to watch Louis Malle's drink 'n' death drama Le Feu Follet while Jim Jarmusch gets the beers in.

Zombie is the shambling, cadaverous musician who looks like he's been fired from Finnish glam-rockers Hanoi Rocks and then remade as Edward Scissorhands. Returning home after a hopeless stint of national service, Zombie lives a skeletal existence in the chilly lock-up which he shares with his Hendrix poster, his bass guitar and a steady supply of vodka. Marjo (Leinonen) is the girl with whom he has a thing, and Zombie's friend Harri (Pellonpää) leads a comically earnest country and western band called Harri And Mulefukkers.

Like the young Jarmusch, Kaurismäki has a steady eye for restless hipster misfits. Also familiar from early Jarmusch is the deadpan tone and cheerfully sloppy plotting. Frankly puzzling though - perhaps purposefully so - is the faintly fantastical presence of mysterious rock band The Ghost Train, who give Zombie a lift at the start of the film and later spring him from hospital after another near-fatal bender. In the light of what's to come, it's tempting to cast them as Zombie's rock 'n' roll guardian angels.

Zombie And The Ghost Train is about a musician who can longer hit the right note, and Kaurismäki weaves music into the very fabric of the film. Most of the performers (including Seppälä and Leinonen) are musicians rather than professional actors and the story was inspired by Seppälä's own roadie flatmate. Following Zombie through the film - just as Erik Satie's 'Gymnopédies' wound their way through Le Feu Follet - is Black Sabbath's sorrowful dirge 'Solitude', the young Ozzy articulating - for once - all the languid, hopeless impulses which Kaurismäki can't always locate in the drama.

Stumbling through the snow from bar to bar or drinking his way towards oblivion alone, Zombie is bent out of shape and fits in nowhere. The death of his father barely registers, and when finally he's exhausted all Helsinki's charity, he disappears to Istanbul, where Europe gives way to Asia and where Zombie gives in to fate.

It's at this point that the film is suddenly transformed into an eerie reverie about a doomed drinker cast adrift by depression, Kaurismäki turning Istanbul into a smog-smothered dream city full of melancholic ghosts through which the wraith-like Zombie drifts endlessly in search of raki and who knows what the hell else.

It's only here at the end that Zombie ever looks at home, the final sequence arriving at a semi-mystical conclusion that wrestles the film away from comedy and recasts Zombie's plight in a terrible yet tender new light. It's a moment of strange yet perfectly pitched closure that grants this otherwise ramshackle, downbeat film a lingering power.