Make that THREE new poems this WEEK.

A Crash Without Burns.

It was Tuesday afternoon and I was driving along,
A bit of light rain was the only thing wrong.
When suddenly I felt and heard a loud smash,
Then it literally hit me, that I'd been in a crash!

There were three cars involved and I was in the middle,
The impact left me blown right back as straight as a fiddle.
The damage to the car was unfortunately far from little.
It was as noticeable as a predator's fangs dribbling spittle.

I felt a throbbing stiffness now in my shoulders and neck,
Which made sitting up feel like quite a painful trek.
I unclipped my seatbelt because that was making it hard to breathe,
But as you'd expect I really just wished I could turn the key and leave.

Yesterday I saw a doctor who gave me peace of mind,
By telling me I had whiplash but otherwise I was fine.
It turns out while my body in no way ages like wine,
As I went over my muscles tightened, in order to protect my spine.

I'm sure I can attribute this to my exercising daily,
Which I'd therefore recommend to any old George or Hayley.
And whether it's about indicating or not spilling your load,
Always cherish your vehicle, and take care on the road.

I wrote two new poems today.

The Mental Score-Sheet.

I am somebody prone to being very competitive,
And that's a streak in me which you could call repetitive.
Now it even includes a form of mental self-blame,
Which is how I'd describe things I apparently play, called mind games.

I can play them privately, subconsciously or in conversation,
And they can make my thoughts interact like two warring nations.
This form of cognitive dissonance is quite like a maze,
For while figurative and brief it can put me in a haze.

I know, also, how they can affect the other party,
Making them feel guilty or confused, as opposed to happily eating smarties.
I don't say that, either, to prove my mental size,
Only to challenge the stereotype that folks like me can't empathise.

I've learned about my mind games thanks to one particular friend,
Whose relationship with me is one we frequently have to mend.
Now some of you may know what it's like for your brain to be in a bend,
So to those of you, and all my friends, all my love I send.

A Rhyme for the Saga, with Love Even for Jar-Jar. With then blue words on black, in 1977, There was introduced a franchise that's intergalactic heaven. Once the Tantive IV and that Destroyer passed over the camera, Cinema and pop culture both suddenly had more stamina.

Three years later we all learned of a father-son link, Causing shock and debate that must've brought many to the brink. Three years after that we learned our heroes were brother and sister, Which may justify the thought that perhaps he shouldn't have kissed her.

Then for sixteen years it hibernated, just like Han in the carbonite, But then suddenly it was back and, more than ever, with box office might. Now it had aspects of which some fan disliked the flavour, But they still became iconic, as much as the image of a lightsaber.

Star Wars has the world's affection now in a permanent lock, Whether that's thanks to Droids, Wookiees, the Jedi, the Sith or of course the feisty Ewoks. And whichever planet we'd choose to inhabit, from Coruscant to Naboo, Star Wars is our religion, and the Force is with me - and you.

Let me tell you a little bit about resignation syndrome.

One of this year's Best Documentary (Short Subject) Oscar nominees is the 40-minute Netflix release Life Overtakes Me, which I watched this morning. It focuses on three families coping with resignation syndrome, a paralytic condition afflicting child refugees who struggle to adapt to their new lives in foreign countries. Its severity can range from children and teenagers becoming socially withdrawn and losing motion and/or speech to express a feeling of stress or hopelessness, to even having to be fed via a tube.

I had never even heard of this horrifying ailment before until Life Overtakes Me, but the documentary moved and enraged me so profoundly that I was shaking by the end of it. With a wholly admirable impartiality it reveals why and when these families emigrated Sweden, where it was made, to give a glimpse of some of the injustices that necessitate immigration to begin with (one of the children's fathers was an online political dissident in his family's home country), alongside actually showing RS at its worst.

Obviously I am no expert on RS; again I didn't even know of its existence until today. But what I have seen and learned about it now has already impacted me viscerally, and it sure as hell needs more awareness. Life Overtakes Me can obviously do that, and hopefully will continue to especially if it wins the Oscar, but it needs my help. Everybody's, in fact, and that also goes for the unpleasant side of, and reasons for, immigration.

Something Cult, Cult, Foreign-Language or Indie #174: Drunken Master (1978).

In the film that marked his breakthrough in Hong Kong, a 24-year-old Jackie Chan plays Wong Fei-hung (a true-life Chinese fighter), who's a mischievous young man with a knack for falling into threatening and embarrassing public incidents. When they become increasingly shaming, his father snaps and makes him trainer harder at martial arts. This soon sees Fei-hung come under the tutelage of Beggar So (Yuen Siu-Tin), a trainer notorious for punishing his students to the point of crippling them, but after rescuing Fei-hung during a street fight he is revealed to the fabled Drunken Master. Even so, Fei-hung resists his training and flees only to encounter contract killer Yim Tit-sam (Hwang Jang Lee) who hands his arse to him. Now with some reality literally kicked into him, Fei-hung returns to the Drunken Master and commits to his training there. This now includes a form of Drunken Boxing called "the Eight Drunken Immortals"; meanwhile Yim Tit-sam is contracted to murder Fei-hung's father and does so. Once his training is complete, Fei-hung goes on a quest for revenge.

As a massive Chan fan I was happy to be able to catch this on TV here this week. Now for a non-stop martial arts flick it didn't disappoint but do whatever you can to see it in Cantonese because dear God, the English version's dubbing is so poor it has to be heard to believed. When it's not out of sync, it frequently sounds jarringly American and like the voice actors were reading their lines lightheartedly off cue cards. Nonetheless, in this form the film (somehow) overcomes that to become genuinely rollicking action fun. In the director's chair was Yuen Woo-ping, probably the most famous and celebrated action director and choreographer in all Asian cinema (he even choreographed the fight scenes in the Matrix trilogy decades later), then just cutting his teeth on filmmaking but still demonstrating an innate gift for designing and pacing action scenes. Jackie, of course, essentially just plays himself but in his concentrated approach to the role you can see all the athleticism, comic timing and charisma that would later make him a Hollywood megastar, and Siu-Tin serves as an effectively ruthless yet avuncular mentor, in the (later) vein of Pat Morita's Mr. Miyagi in The Karate Kid (who Chan himself later played in the remake of that, come to think of it).

Overall, despite the fucking horrific dubbing I had to listen to, I had a whale of a time with Drunken Master. 

Something Cult, Foreign-Language or Indie #173: Loving Vincent (2017).

In 1891, a year after Vincent van Gogh's death, postman Joseph Roulin (Chris O'Dowd), finding the death suspicious, asks his son Armand (Douglas Booth) to deliver Vincent's last letters to his younger brother Theo, an art dealer. Armand reluctantly agrees and leaves for Paris. Once there, upon learning Theo himself has recently died, Armand is put on the trail of Dr. Paul Gachet (Jerome Flynn), van Gogh's therapist in his last weeks, and then stays at the Auberge Ravoux inn which had housed Vincent. There after meeting owner Adeline Ravoux, who was friends with Vincent and gives Armand more connections, he crucially meets Marguerite (Saoirse Ronan), Dr. Gachet's sheltered daughter who knew Vincent quite intimately. From here, Armand must untangle a great many threads to uncover who pulled the trigger.

This had immeasurable potential to be pretentious or boring but instead, alas, it had me truly transfixed from beginning to end. A Poland/UK co-production, directors/co-writers Dorota Kobiela (who had the original idea) and Hugh Welchmann employed 125 classically trained oil painters, rather than conventional animators, to bring this fictionalised story of van Gogh's life and legacy to the screen, and the effect is just ravishingly original, detailed and imaginative. But it doesn't stop with the application of van Gogh's own style or the landscapes' executions; the characters are all animated in a rotoscoped fashion. In other words, the cast's on-set performances were filmed and then traced and coloured over by hand. The degree of ambition and technical skill the entire film's visual palette, and particularly that element, demanded is absolutely painstaking, and the for the viewer the result is unshakable.

The narrative itself serves to distinguish this as an adult-oriented animated movie and while there are surely some anachronisms (for a start, as we know van Gogh wasn't famous until decades after his death), following history to the letter was never the point here. That was only to create a semi-original story around his work and to salute his legacy as the father of modern art. One of the purposes of that anyway is to cut a swathe through convention, and this movie sure does that. It also closes with Lianne La Havas performing Don McLean's classic hit Vincent, itself an homage to him. But long before you hear Lianne, you yourself will be Loving Vincent.

Something Cult, Foreign-Language or Indie #172: Hearts and Minds (1974).

Lyndon Johnson once famously said of the Vietnam War: "The ultimate victory will depend on the hearts and minds of the people who actually live out there." This unabashedly hardline 1974 Best Documentary Feature Academy Award winner, whose title that quote inspired, argues that victory was anybody but America's.

Produced and released while the war remained raging, Hearts and Minds is a very brave and liberal indictment of US foreign policy in Vietnam and as you'd probably suspect, ever since its release it's attracted reverence and scorn pretty equally depending on who's assessing it. I first head about it through one of my favourite film critics Marc Fennell's book Planet According to the Movies, in which Fennell says not to expect balance from it, as it is an activist film, and he's right. But I was surprised to find as I watched it this week that while it does focus deliberately on the experiences of the Vietnamese and disillusioned American vets, director Peter Davis actually takes a genuinely calm and impartial method of depicting the atrocities and handling the interviews. He lets the film's content and message speak for themselves without diluting his defiantly biased approach.

If you share my politics (which, therefore, admittedly make me a pretty easy-to-please critic here), Hearts and Minds will move and enrage you. The only negative I can link to it is how relevant it remains. In the most powerful and controversial scene, a South Vietnamese soldier is laid to rest in a funeral with his desperately grieving family, and then Davis cuts to an interview with US Army Chief of Staff General William Westmoreland, who claims: "The Oriental doesn't put the same high price on life as does a Westerner. Life is plentiful. Life is cheap in the Orient." Then we hear from former Captain Randy Floyd, who answers a question about whether America had learned anything from Vietnam with: "I think we're trying not to learn." 46 years on, the West is still trying not to.

Something Cult, Foreign-Language or Indie #171: Swiss Army Man (2016).

Young castaway Hank Thompson (Paul Dano) has given up on being rescued from a deserted island (yes, two such movies in one week; I promise that was unplanned), and so he's about to hang himself. Cue a corpse (Daniel Radcliffe) suddenly washing ashore just then, grabbing Hank's attention. After Hank then cuts himself free and resuscitates the corpse, it begins farting non-stop. His curiosity sparked, Hank then uses the corpse to go wind-surfing, and then learns it has even more powers including an endless drinking water supply. Soon after that, as it interacts more with Hank it learns to talk and adopts the name Manny. Manny remembers nothing about his former life and Hank seeks to teach him what he can about humanity and living. In the process they develop survival skills, watch movies, explore and party together until Hank discerns several important clues about Manny's story. Hank leads him to believe he's in love with Sarah (a wasted Mary Elizabeth Winstead), an individual bus passenger, but really it's Hank who has eyes for her but has never even spoken to Sarah because of his own shyness. (It turns out Sarah has a husband and young daughter anyway.) Now the boys hatch a plan to return to civilisation and meet their shared dream girl.

Dear God, this is a strange film. If I could compare it to something, I'd have to say it was like Cast Away meets Weekend at Bernie's meets Into the Wild. Please, take as long to process that as you need. But nonetheless, it somehow (if only just) steers clear of incoherence and pretension. Writer-directors Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, collectively known as the Daniels, here have concocted a narrative premise that shows an unabashed love of genre fusion and thinking outside the box, but they manage to make it into an engaging story because of the unusual yet metaphorically relatable character dynamic, which is performed with absolutely thorough chemistry. Dano is well-suited if typecast as Hank, but Radcliffe steals the show. Manny was a physically and mentally ambitious role, and by getting as much humour and pathos as he does from it alongside convincingly depicting all the rigorous gestures required, Radcliffe proves he was always going to have a steady post-Harry Potter career. I think it's easy his best turn yet.

The Daniels also infuse this with striking photography that does full justice to the Californian wilderness where it was filmed, and a score from Andy Hull and Robert McDowell that effectively contrasts the film's natural and urban settings and themes. As I said, Swiss Army Man is very strange, but never strange just for the sake of being different or important. A winner.

About when I needed - and had - an intervention.

Buckle up, folks. Because it's time I got personal on here again. It will be sad and dark but hopefully uplifting by the end.

From 2002 to 2003, when I was 14 to 15, I developed generalised anxiety disorder. Coupled with that and my Asperger's came a bout of severe depression. The causes were numerous: my GAD itself, my relationships at school (which I've already documented at length here) and the frequently rocky one I had at home with my dad. Today I know growing up was far harder for many others than it was for me, for which I'm grateful, but during this period I still felt so lost and tormented that I contemplated suicide, and openly showed increasing despair.

I want to focus here first on my home life then, especially with my relationship with my dad. It's really great now, and Dad will be the first to admit he has a pretty short and unpredictable temper (as do I), but in my early teens we very often were at each other's throats and not always over petty things. He would yell at me, for instance, whenever he tried to help me with my maths homework, or if I accidentally damaged something around the house. Those reactions just cut me like a knife, so much so that I still hesitate often before requesting his help with something. I'll never forget one Sunday afternoon, I was so upset about how he'd verbally attacked me for something (I forget what, but it was obviously the straw that broke the camel's back) that shortly afterwards, Mum forced him into my room to talk to me. I then demanded of him "I want you to tell me you love me. I want to hear you say it." (He never had, but this time he did, and he's repeated it numerous times since.) I was slouched down in my chair, just sobbing.

Soon after that, my parents staged an intervention for me. They took me to a local youth mental unit for numerous sessions, firstly with a delightful therapist named Cherry. (Meanwhile, at school I'd been seeing the guidance counsellors, chaplain and nurse for help.) After assessing me, she put me on an anxiety medication called Anafranil to help the nocturnal attacks I'd literally lost sleep over; I've since also been on Luvox and Pristiq. I can still vividly recall the waiting room and her office there; the latter was a very stark white with support messages pinned to noticeboards on the walls, toys on the carpet and whatnot. Her office, however, was painted grey. I think my predominant feeling when I was there was one of confidence and compassion, but without wanting anybody at school to know I was having to go there.

After almost 20 years I obviously can't recall much of any of our conversations, but I can recall everything else about that phase practically to a fever pitch. I still have photocopies I was given, for some reason, of two letters from the time from a male psychologist I saw there, himself a very helpful therapist, to my then-GP, outlining what he'd done there with me to bring the GP up to speed. I occasionally revisit those letters to this day, partly for posterity and partly to remember how far I've come and how far I still have to go.

But as of today, overall I'm content with myself. And I'm proud that I endured and participated in that intervention, and I'm definitely thankful my parents staged it for me. Now as you know, I've had a lifelong romance with the arts, so here's a song that also helped me through that very hard period, for any of you who might be enduring hardship now.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gobdU5Pycvg

Something Cult, Foreign-Language or Indie #170: The Red Turtle (2016).

An unnamed man washes up as a castaway on an uninhabited island. After then failing to adapt to island life and find rescue, he tries to build a raft, but once he sets sail, he encounters a giant red turtle who destroys the raft. So he builds another, but again the turtle destroys it, and then another, which meets the same fate. Finally he gives up when he gets to know the turtle and they make a most unexpected connection.

Let me flag this outright: The Red Turtle is an exceptionally demanding watch. It's glacially slow and entirely dialogue-free. I admit, it tried my patience in places. But if you truly stick with it, I think you'll be captivated; I sure was. Nominated for the 2016 Best Animated Feature Oscar, this effort from Dutch animation director Michael Dudok de Wit and Japan's iconic Studio Ghibli is daring, emotional, visually breathtaking and certainly unique. The less you know about the plot beforehand, the better, but I will say I ultimately found it tremendously affecting and surprising, with a very wise and lucid narrative arc exploring family, belonging and nature.

Another bonus here is Laurent Perez del Mar's rich and earthy musical score which helps to draw you even deeper into the protagonist's new life in a most dangerous and unfamiliar environment. But the narrative and visual backdrop to that is where its brightest beauty and power lies. The Red Turtle isn't for every taste, but I would challenge anybody to say they've seen something like it before.

Something Cult, Foreign-Language or Indie #169: Liberal Arts (2012).

35-year-old college admissions adviser Jesse Fisher (writer-director Josh Radnor) has hit a personal and professional wall. He still loves literature and linguistics but is dissatisfied with his current work. He's returned to his beloved former liberal arts college for the retirement party of his favourite former professor, Peter Hoberg (Richard Jenkins). While back at his alma mater, however, Jesse decides to stick around after the party and in doing so he meets several current students to whom he himself becomes a mentor: namely Zippy (Elizabeth Olsen, Mary-Kate and Ashley's younger sister), a drama student and Peter's friends' daughter, and Dean (John Magaro), a gifted but suicidal and substance-abusing bookworm. As Jesse helps these navigate their own troubled waters, he tries to find if not a loophole for new faith in his chosen career, then at least some peace and happiness from aiding and guiding others.

Josh Radnor's second film as writer-director after 2010's Happythankyoumoreplease (he made both while starring on the TV sitcom How I Met Your Mother), Liberal Arts is very artistically conventional, but it overcomes that so easily because as a genuine character study, it is as relatable and empathetic as they come. Personally, it reminded me very pleasantly and resonantly of my own university days and not just because I studied arts myself. It just evokes the sights, sounds and even the smell of campus life and young adulthood to a fever pitch, and Radnor cleverly neither romanticises nor vilifies any of that. 

He plays Jesse with just the right shadings of world-weariness and awkwardness, and his eye for performance also is evident in the engaging and affecting turns he turns he draws from Olsen and Magaro. (Not to be outdone, either, are Allison Janney as Judith Fairfield, romantics teacher and Jesse's former crush, and Zac Efron as oddball student Nat.)

As I said, aesthetically Liberal Arts brings nothing new to the table. But its power lies fully in its message, which is conveyed so sweetly and patiently that it will strike a very deep chord with you, whatever you've studied. Liberal Arts is a coming-of-age flick that gets top grades from me.

Something Cult, Foreign-Language or Indie #168: DOUBLE FEATURE! Caravan of Courage: An Ewok Adventure (1984) / Ewoks: The Battle for Endor (1985).

Firstly, happy 2020. Now, the end of the original Star Wars trilogy with Return of the Jedi in 1983 was really the spark for something new: two telemovies from Lucasfilm, aired on America's ABC network, starring RotJ's breakout characters, the Ewoks, in headlining roles, and set between the events of The Empire Strikes Back and RotJ.

In 1984's Caravan of Courage: An Ewok Adventure, young human stowaway Mace Towani (Eric Walker) and his baby sister Cindel (Aubree Miller) wake on Endor's forest moon, where their family's ship has crashed, to find their parents (Fionnula Flanagan and Guy Boyd) missing. They then come into contact with Wicket W. Warrick (Warwick Davis, reprising his role from RotJ) and his tribe of Ewoks, who subdue him after he tries to kill them. Now he and Cindel are taken to the Ewoks' tree city home, where she quickly becomes friends with Wicket and he gradually learns to trust the Ewoks. After then learning one of the Ewoks' main enemies, a Gorax, has taken his and Cindel's parents, Mace rallies all these galactic teddy bears to help him and Cindel rescue their folks.

Then in 1985's Ewoks: The Battle for Endor, it's almost six months later and the Towanis have fixed their ship and are about to leave for home when a band of marauders decimate the Ewok village. With them, their leader Terak (Carel Struycken) has brought the camp sorceress Charal (Sian Phillips, a Faye Dunaway doppelganger) to truly cause devastation and terror. While fleeing this, Cindel and Wicket meet fast young native Teek (Niki Botelho), who takes them to live with externally gruff human Noa (Wilford Brimley), who slowly warms to Cindel and Wicket. Amidst all this, the Ewoks must defend wage war on their invaders to save their home while the Towanis and Noa try to find a way back to theirs.

This telemovie double begins fairly well; I found Caravan of Courage by no means outstanding, but still very whimsical and pleasantly cute, and with a conscious effort at character development and logical plotting. Walker and Miller carry the film adequately on their own young shoulders, too, and director John Korty, a good friend of none other than George Lucas, and writer Bob Carrau, working from a story by Lucas, demonstrate true excitement for the project. But where Caravan of Courage worked because it was so distinctive for a slice of Star Wars, The Battle for Endor felt, to me, increasingly like one bloated war scene, with some superfluous characters (keep an eye out for Paul Gleason - aka assistant principal Vernon in The Breakfast Club and the idiot police chief in Die Hard - lasting literally about five seconds here as Jerritt Towani) truly ridiculous moments to boot. Writer-directors Jim and Ken Wheats, also working from a Lucas narrative, I think took a highly misguided and superficial route and their film suffers for it by comparison, but I sincerely praise them for not copying Korty's tack.

Interestingly, The Battle for Endor was considerably better-received than Caravan of Courage, but obviously I don't know why. Anyhow, for any committed Star Wars fan like me, there are still worse entries in the franchise to be witnessed.

Oh, and for some accompanying music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1dDBvOtRaSo.