A bizarre but gripping story about a taxi driver who accidentally founds a religion in the distant future.

I'd never read any Will Self books before, but I've often heard him speak on the radio or TV, so I'm not quite sure what I was expecting. The Book of Dave is funny, savage, depressing, satirical and often touching. It's also incredibly bizarre, and rather hard work, for reasons that I'll explain later. The plot is set in two time periods. In present day London, taxi driver Dave Rudman is separated from his wife and prevented by a restraining order from seeing his son Carl. He is angry and depressed, and evidently on the verge of a breakdown. In the far future, we meet the inhabitants of Ham, a small, rural settlement. It's obvious from the description and the maps at the start of the book that some great catastrophe has resulted in the flooding of most of Britain, and only the highest ground remains above the water.

We start off in the future, which requires a lot of work because the inhabitants of Ham ('Hamsters') speak 'Mockney' which is phonetically rendered. Their language is also peppered with taxi driving terms: the sky is known as the windscreen, the day divided into 'tariffs', and they greet each other with a cheery "Ware2Guv?". After a while, it gets easier to read, but the first couple of Ham chapters are rather slow going. I don't want to give anything away, because there are some fantastic Planet of the Apes style revelations in the book, but it seems that Dave the taxi driver -- in the depths of a mental breakdown -- has written a furious rant against the world, and a vision of how he thinks things should be. He buries the book for his son, only for it to be found in the future, where it becomes a holy book of sorts, founding a religion. Meanwhile, when his madness passes, he realises that what he has written is crazy, misogynistic rubbish, and he writes another book, setting things straight for Carl. This book is also discovered in the future, spawning a religious conflict between the orthodox 'Dävine' cult and the heretics or 'Flyers' who believe that the gentler teachings of the second book are the true Way of Dave.

The way that this plays out -- with the explanations for events and customs in the future only being found a few chapters later in the present -- is fascinating and gripping, but the tortuous chronology can make it hard to keep things straight in your mind. Within both time periods, events are often described out of their proper temporal order. Indeed, it's difficult to think of the events in Ham as the future, because their society has reverted to an agrarian, feudal system that wouldn't be out of place in any time period from the Middle Ages to the 17th Century.

The Book of Dave is one of those books that haunts you slightly after reading it -- it stays with you. I also fondly imagine that Will Self spent a few happy hours with a large map of Britain, drawing around contour lines with red felt-tip pen to decide the shape of the 'Ing Archipelago'. That might not be so funny in a hundred years or so, but I'm happy to say that 'Brum' survives.

A preposterous idea, but it makes for a funny film.

We've had a lot of very good but rather heavy films from Lovefilm recently, so it was with some relief that we found 'Blades of Glory' landing on our doormat. We watched it last night, and while it's pretty throwaway, it's a really fun film. The preposterous plot concerns two male figure skaters, banned from their division for life after brawling on the winners' podium (and incidentally setting the championship mascot on fire). Desperate to get back into competition, they decide to use a loophole in the rules and enter the pairs figure skating competition. A lot of the comedy comes from the Odd Couple mismatching of the personalities of the skaters, played by Jon Heder and Will Ferrell. There's a lot of slapstick, and a pleasing but not irritating amount of vulgarity, and the costumes are a scream.

Beautiful, political modern folk with its feet rooted in the past.

This was a birthday present from Mr. Bsag, and I think it's one of the best albums I've heard in a while. I loved his The Lark Descending (which was a present from Mr. Bsag two years ago), and I think Trespasser is probably even better. As the title implies, the theme of the album is enclosure, ownership and exclusion. He provides a wonderful mini-essay in the sleeve notes about what he sees as the ongoing effects of the enclosure of common land in England into the present day. He links that very deftly to the current depredations of 'developers', rampant materialism and the gentrification of rural areas. He's a very modern folk musician, and I don't think I've ever heard another songwriter make ancient folk songs sound so topical and contemporary at the same time as making modern folk songs which give you the sense of the deep roots of socio-political problems. It's not often you hear the words "plasma screen" or "four-by-four" in a folk song, but it sits very comfortably.

That probably makes his music sound very worthy and dreary, but it's absolutely beautiful, moving and stirring. He has a way of putting together words and music that can make you laugh, the hairs stand up on the back of your neck, and tears come to your eyes, all in the space of a few lines. The stories he weaves are utterly gripping. In 'The Cottager's Reply' an elderly Cotswold cottage owner talks to the rich young couple who want to pay him half a million pounds for his home. It's so quiet, gentle and dignified, and yet underscored by deep anger. When the cottager tells the couple that he can get to London in four hours, but in their four-by-four they will probably do it in three, he draws out the 'f's to extraordinary lengths. It's angry swearing without actually saying the words, and perfectly in keeping with the voice of the old man whose story he is telling.

'England in Ribbons' is a mummers tale made relevant to modern conflicts (no prizes for guessing who 'Brave St. George' is), and yet it has such ancient, layered resonances that it instantly makes you feel that the Tudor period was mere heartbeats ago. I also love 'The Lady of York'. It's a traditional song about a woman secretly abandoning her babies, and in the notes, Chris Wood says that it is usually known as 'The Cruel Mother', which he doesn't see at all. In anyone else's hands, it would be about a cruel mother, but he has such tenderness, humanity and understanding of the difficult situations that people face that it becomes an incredibly sad song about somebody with no choices and a broken heart. Chris Wood has a history of making me cry (the last time was when I was on a train), and this album was no exception.

Finally, I have to mention 'Come Down Jehovah'. Presumably working on the principle that the Church should not have all the best tunes, he wrote an atheist hymn. A passionate entreaty to enjoy paradise on earth rather than hoping for the hereafter, it has exactly the same sentiments expressed by Philip Pullman in His Dark Materials. He tells the Devil to come up from Hell, because humans are perfectly able to create evil and suffering on their own, and we should acknowledge that. It's a joyful, gentle song though and a hymn I'd be very proud to adopt.

A combination of a very unusual detective story and an epic story of the life of a nearly 100 year old woman.

I got this book with another of Nobbs' books for 50p from the library when they were having a clear out. I loved Reginald Perrin on TV (which he also wrote), but I hadn't read any of his books before. This story is -- in part -- a very unusual detective story, in which the detective is a woman (Kate Copson) a few days away from her 100th birthday, lying in hospital and paralysed by a severe stroke. As she lies there -- unable to move or speak, but still able to think very clearly -- she tries to work out which of her three sons murdered her fifth husband.

In the process, Kate thinks back over her long life, reliving her relationships. A feisty, witty, intelligent woman, she has clocked up around six marriages, depending on how you count re-marriages to the same man. She's a very warm sympathetic person, and the surrounding characters are also drawn with great affection and depth. Kate was born in South Wales, so the novel is also a wonderful evocation of her very religious, Chapel-going parents, and the sociable, death-obsessed community in that area. The book is by turns funny, moving and sad, and after about half way through, I found it hard to put down.

Quirky and gentle film about unrequited love, revenge, weird families and shell suits.

I was attracted to this film initially because it features Jemaine Clement (from Flight of the Conchords) as Jarrod, but his co-star Loren Horsley was equally good as Lily, and the film turned out to be a real gem. It's film with a slightly skewed sense of humour, with some great deadpan lines by the un-redeemably nerdy cast. Lily, who works in a burger bar, has a huge crush on the moody, mullet-haired Jarrod. He is completely oblivious until she turns up at his 'Favourite Animal' party (where everyone has to come dressed as their favourite animal, naturally), and gets through to the last round of his 'Fightman' videogame tournament. As an indication of the quirky, low-key humour involved, Lily is asked what her gaming nickname is, and she says 'Dangerous Person'. When she starts the game, everyone stands around waiting while she patiently inputs all the characters of 'Dangerous Person' using the game controller. It doesn't sound funny described like that, but it really made me laugh at the time.

Initially, Lily is a much more likeable character. She's passive, and you want to shake her and ask her why on earth she's hanging around with a man as self-involved as Jarrod, but she's obviously so besotted with him that you end up rooting for her. Jarrod becomes more sympathetic as the film progresses, and we find out more about his family and his relationship with his father and dead brother.

If you liked Napolean Dynamite (and I did), you'll probably love Eagle vs. Shark.

Intelligent WWII drama set in the Netherlands during its occupation.

I think if I'd realised that this film was directed by Paul Verhoeven (the man responsible for Basic Instinct and Showgirls), I might have given it a miss. That would have been a great shame, because this is an excellent film. Set towards the end of the Second World War in the Netherlands, 'Black Book' follows the story of Rachel Stein, a Jewish woman in hiding. Near the start of the film, her hiding place is bombed by the Allies, so she has to go on the run. It would be giving too much of the terrifically twisty plot to say much more, but she ends up working with a Resistance group, and when she goes undercover, she has to pretend to 'fraternise' with the Germans.

The plot, as I've mentioned, is very gripping, with lots of twists and turns, but one of the things I liked most about the film was the characterisation. Too many war films (with some notable exceptions, like 'Das Boot') fall into the trap of making the Resistance (or Allied troops) appear saintly and the Nazis thoroughly unpleasant. Black Book realistically and unflinchingly portrays the good and bad people on both sides. Rachel herself (or Ellis, as she calls herself later) is a very likeable heroine, and her quick-thinking and ability to improvise saves the day on a number of occasions. She is also quite non-judgmental of the actions of those around her, recognising that pragmatic issues sometimes override moral issues.

Understandably, given the subject matter, the film is pretty grim in places, with a lot of violence and one really disgusting scene. Despite that (and my general dislike of violence in films), I'd really recommend this film.

An acutely observed account of adolescence in 1980s Britain.

I've read most of Mitchell's books now, so was keen to read his latest. In many ways, it's quite a departure from his usual style. For a start, it's only told from the perspective of one of the characters -- 13 year old Jason Taylor -- rather than a whole host of different characters with different voices. It's also only set in one time period (the early 1980s). Despite this, the book still displays David Mitchell's amazing facility with capturing small details and the exact tone of voice of his characters.

The book is about a year in the life of Jason Taylor, who lives in a rural Worcestershire village called Black Swan Green (though the local joke is that the Green has no swans on it at all, not even white ones). Jason has a stammer, which causes him exquisite embarrassment while trying to fit in with the cool kids at school. His parents are also on the point of splitting up, and his big sister is going to University, so lots of things are changing in his life.

It brilliantly captures the torture of adolescence, with all its elaborate etiquette and almost feudal hierarchical system. He worries about everything: his stammer means that he often has to substitute words to avoid words that he will stumble over, but if he substitutes in an elaborate, scholarly word when talking to his school-mates, he'll be mercilessly teased. Often he chooses to look stupid and not say anything in class rather than either stammer or use a long word. He particularly doesn't want his friends to know that he writes poetry, as that would be the worse kind of social suicide. I didn't stammer as a child, but I remember vividly that feeling of picking your way through a minefield of responses that could make you look dorky or too clever to your peers. I'm so glad I'm not 13 anymore.

Jason is a very appealing character, and a realistic mix of childish naivety and world-weary clear-sightedness, but there are some other good characters too. I liked that way that Jason comes to see his parents and sister as real people with their own problems and failings, rather than just as his family. I was also delighted when it dawned on me that Madame Crommelynck -- a rather mysterious grand old woman who Jason visits to learn about poetry -- was no other than Eve Crommelynck, the haughty and wilful daughter of the composer Vyvyan Ayrs who featured in 'Cloud Atlas'. I'd wondered what would have happened to her, so reading about her in this book was like bumping into an old friend.

A strange and compelling story.

This -- it has to be said -- is a strange film. Based on the book by Patrick Suskind, it tells the story of a Parisian boy, born into abject poverty, but who has an extraordinary gift. Jean-Baptiste Grenouille has an almost supernatural sense of smell, and is alive to all the subtle and not-so-subtle smells that fill the streets. He becomes obsessed with capturing and preserving the scents of beautiful women he encounters, which leads eventually to serial murder.

It sounds like an odd premise, and it is. On one hand, Jean-Baptiste is a murderer you should hate, but on the other, you are fascinated by his abilities, and want to know whether he succeeds in his goal to make the perfect perfume. It's also quite a beautiful film. It doesn't flinch from showing the grime and dirt of 18th Century Paris, but by showing you the olfactory world through Jean-Baptiste's nose (as it were), it manages to make even maggot-infested rat corpses intriguing. Scent is such an intangible thing to try to capture in any format other than its own, because smells go so directly to our emotions, barely touching thought on the way. It's even harder when you choose to use only visual representations, rather than words, but Tykwer succeeds to some extent. I think I'm going to have to read the book now, if only to find out whether Suskind explains how someone who works in a tannery (especially one with an extraordinary sense of smell) could smell anything other than the stench from the tannery, and why someone who works in a fancy perfumery would even contemplate employing someone who worked in a tannery. I know that tanneries used to be built on the outskirts of towns because they stank so badly, and people who worked in them were outcasts for the same reason.

A rather beautiful book about the mostly mundane events in the lives of ordinary people.

I hadn't heard about this book or read any reviews when I saw it on the library shelf and grabbed it because the title appealed to me, but it turned out to be a lucky choice. The book describes the lives of people living in an ordinary street in Britain. Early in the book, we find out that a tragedy occurs in the street, but we don't know the details until the very end. There are teasing references and partial descriptions, which could have been irritating, but I found that they just drew me deeper into the book. The book takes the first person perspective of most of the characters in turn, but keeps coming back to and focussing on a girl who has moved moved away, and is remembering the inhabitants of the street during a crisis of her own.

The dialogue style is unusual, and almost none of the characters are named, but are referred to by description. That takes a little getting used to, and I found myself losing track of one or two of the characters, but it's quite a powerful device. Jon McGregor captures the hesitancy and incomplete thoughts of natural speech, and his descriptions of both people and events is ravishing -- it's a very vivid book, and a moving one.

I finished the last few pages this morning, and found myself with tears in my eyes as all the threads of the story were woven back together. He has created some great characters very economically, and like all good books, you find yourself wanting to read another book with more about some of the incidental characters. For example there was an elderly couple whose relationship was beautifully painted, with all its long familiarity, unspoken tenderness and secrets -- I would love to read a whole book about them and their lives.

A good conclusion to the series, but still not a patch on Philip Pullman's 'His Dark Materials' trilogy.

I've rather ground my way through the Harry Potter books. I enjoyed the early ones, but as the series wore on and the books got longer, I felt that there was rather too much filler material, and not enough meat (or vegetarian meat substitute) to the plot. The characters also have a tendency to be a bit one-dimensional, rather than subtle and nuanced. Despite that, Potter books are still quite fun to get your teeth into, particularly when you have no other entertainment, as was the case for me with the last two books in Brazil. In fact, we all ran out of reading material, so there was a lot of book-swapping going on, and Harry Potter was quite sought after.

I obviously don't want to give anything away about the plot, but some of the characters (notably Dumbledore and Snape) acquired more depth, and the tone was much darker than in the first few books. I quite enjoyed it (and was fairly gripped by the end), but on the whole I think I'm glad that I won't have to read any more Potter stories.

Great, action cop film parody with Simon Pegg and Nick Frost.

As a big fan of both 'Spaced' and Shaun of the Dead, I'd had Hot Fuzz queued up on LOVEFiLM since it was released in the cinema. We watched it last weekend, and I thought it was certainly up to the quality of Shaun of the Dead.

Hot Fuzz is a very affectionate parody of the genre of American action movies like Bad Boys and Lethal Weapon, but also 1970s British cop shows like The Sweeney, spaghetti westerns and so on. Wright and Pegg's knowledge about and love of this genre means that it is superbly balanced between comedy and drama. It's a very funny film, but the laughs never get in the way of the action.

Nicholas Angel (Simon Pegg) is a very straight-laced, by-the-book PC in the Metropolitan Police, who is literally making the rest of the Force look bad with his phenomenal arrest rate. So he's packed (unwillingly) off to a rural market town called Sandford, where he meets nice-but-dim PC Danny Butterman (Nick Frost). Danny is the son of the local Inspector, but when Nicholas first encounters him, he is attempting to drive his car while incredibly drunk. Danny hero-worships Nicholas, longing for what he sees as the exciting life of a Met police officer -- all car chases and gun fights, while Danny is stuck with retrieving escaped swans. Inevitably, all is not as it seems in sleepy Sandford, and Nicholas begins to suspect that the very low crime rate but incredibly high accident rate is hiding a sinister secret.

The relationship between Nicholas and Danny is actually quite touching, and there are great performances from the whole cast. There's quite a lot of swearing, and some pantomime violence and gore, but it all works really well. There are even a couple of cornetto jokes for Shaun of the Dead fans. It's one of those films that you can watch several times because you miss details, and the extras on the DVD are superb. There's a dubbed 'TV' version with all the swearing replaced with innocuous words, which is hilarious. "Peas and Rice!" might have to become my blasphemy replacement of choice.

As ever with Wright and Pegg, there are lots of quotable lines, but my favourite in this film was during a shoot-out in a local Somerfield supermarket (funny in itself if you know Somerfield), when one of the detectives, in full riot gear, was shot at down the pasta sauce aisle and splattered:

(In a West Country accent): It's alright, Andy! It's only bolognaise!

Given the poor reviews for this film, I expected to be disappointed, but really enjoyed it.

I'm a big Aardman fan, but approached this film with a bit of trepidation for two reasons. The first was because it was a CGI affair, rather than Aardman's hand-crafted plasticene-based approach. The second was that it got fairly poor reviews on release. However, I have to say that I was pleasantly surprised. While I don't think it's quite as good as Curse of the Were-Rabbit, it's a very funny film, with lots of nice Aardman touches in the background.

The plot concerns Roddy, a pampered pet rat whose owners live in Knightsbridge. When they leave for a holiday, he romps around the luxury house until an uncouth sewer rat called Sid invades and flushes him down the toilet. Once in the underground sewer city, he unwittingly gets involved with a streetwise rat called Rita, and her battle with the evil Toad. At first, he just wants to get home, but seeing Rita with her enormous and insane family reminds him that, while he might live in luxury, he lives there alone.

It's a kind of sewer-based, rodent rom-com, with singing slugs. Oh yes, the slugs are superb. Near the beginning, Roddy drops out of the sewer and is immediately confronted with a slug. He screams, the slug screams (in a tiny, high pitched voice), and the slug dashes off to escape at a blistering 1cm per second, screaming all the while.

David Mitchell's first novel is an amazingly absorbing read.

I've become quite a fan of David Mitchell's writing, enjoying number9dream and Cloud Atlas enormously. In the comments on my review of Cloud Atlas, Gordon recommended his first book, Ghostwritten. For some reason it has taken me nearly two years to get around to reserving it in the library, but I've now read it, and am as impressed with Mitchell as ever.

His real talent is in being able to inhabit an enormous variety of characters, and make them seem utterly real. In Ghostwritten, he weaves together the stories of ten people, or strictly ten beings. They are to some extent self-contained, but characters from one section make cameo appearances in another, and together they start to build up a coherent theme. Some of the stories span only a brief period of time in the life of the characters, others a whole lifetime.

The book starts inside the head of a member of some kind of Japanese cult. He has already committed terrorist attacks (reminiscent of the sarin gas attacks in Tokyo), and is now on the run. He believes utterly in what he is doing: ridding the world of the 'unclean' and un-enlightened, but we can see that the cult is nothing but a sham, with power-hungry men sending impressionable young people to their deaths and then disowning them. The rest of the book continues to explore themes of violence, power, consciousness, belief and morality in a variety of contexts. At the end, we go back to the Tokyo underground as 'Mr Kobayashi' starts to have second thoughts about his actions, and suddenly doesn't want to die.

By coincidence, David Mitchell was on Radio 4's Bookclub yesterday, talking about Cloud Atlas. It was an interesting listen, particularly concerning his influences, and how he finds the voices for his characters, so it's worth a listen if you like his books. I imagine they'll post the listen again link later in the week, or the programme is repeated on Thursday 7th June at 4pm.

Very powerful depiction of the Irish Uprising in 1920, and the birth of the IRA.

Despite winning a Palme D'Or, Ken Loach's film was widely criticised in the British press because of its perceived anti-British viewpoint. It's true that the 'Black and Tans' are depicted as violent, out-of-control psychopaths, but if you believe some of the testimony of the time, that's not too far from the truth. I can't say how accurate it is, because I wasn't there and don't know anybody who was. However, it's also true that the IRA are not depicted as angels either. You see the full horror of a guerilla war which turns into a civil war, dividing communities and families.

The story centres on Damien, a young man from Cork who is about to travel to London to become a doctor. After incidents with the Black and Tans in his village, he is torn between staying and helping with the resistance, or leaving and pursuing a peaceful and useful life abroad. He tries to stay out of the fight, but after a pivotal scene, he is drawn in against his will, and he can't get out again.

I think that Ken Loach tried to understand, through Damien's story, how people who are basically gentle, peaceful, good people can be pushed by complicated circumstances into doing terrible things which they can't even forgive themselves for. It's definitely not an attempt to excuse such behaviour -- just to try to understand it a little.

It's not an easy film to watch, but very worthwhile. It's quite unremittingly bleak, and there are brutal scenes of violence that I had to look away from. There are some great, natural performances, particularly from Cillian Murphy, who seems to have been in every film we've watched recently.

Stunning, distopian film.

For some reason, I hadn't seen any trailers or reviews for this film (nor had I read the book by P. D. James on which it is based), but when I saw it on LOVEfilm, I vaguely remembered that I'd heard some buzz about it. The plot synopsis looked intriguing, so I put it in the queue. The premise is this: 20 years from now (2027), humans are in crisis. No children have been born for 18 years, for some reason that no-one can understand. In the absence of either understanding or hope, society is breaking down, and the more prosperous countries like the UK are facing high levels of immigration from people trying to find a better life. As a consequence, Britain is in a fascist lockdown, and 'fugees' are rounded up and kept in cages or squalid refugee camps. Violent, half-feral terrorists called 'fishes' bomb businesses, throw rocks at commuter trains and act like highwaymen on motorbikes.

In the midst of this, our hero Theo (an ex-peace campaigner) is offered money by his ex-girlfriend Julian (and mother of their son who died in the 2008 'flu pandemic) to get papers for a fugee called Kee. Kee -- miraculously -- is pregnant, the first pregnancy in more than 18 years, and they want to get her to a free colony run by the mysterious 'Human Project'. Theo is reluctantly drawn into the action, and tries to protect Kee and her baby.

This film could have gone the Hollywood, gung-ho action route, but instead it goes with frighteningly realistic violence. There are passing shots of bits of technology, but it's clear that we haven't got very far: there's litter and grafitti everywhere, tuk-tuks puttering down Fleet Street, and choking pollution everywhere. I liked the fleeting juxtapositions that you see in this film. There are armed police lining railway platforms, adverts on TV screens that could be a joint production between the Daily Mail and the BNP, and the government is handing out suicide packs (called 'Quietude' 'Quietus'). But down The Mall, there are uniformed Horseguards on parade as usual, and zebras wandering around the city parks.

Unfortunately, you can easily imagine Britain going this way, particularly if there were no children being born. Whatever you think about children, they do at least tend to make people think about something other than themselves. In a world without them, I can imagine that it would be every person for themselves to an even greater extent than happens today. The armed lockdown and refugee camps don't seem like a big step away from our current steady erosion of civil liberties.

There's a climactic battle in the refugee compound in Bexhill, and the contrast between what we know today as a fairly sleepy seaside town and the warzone we see in the film is extreme. But while I was watching, I was thinking that this is exactly what people in Sarajevo and Baghdad and many other places experience for real. The shop where you used to buy your fruit is blown apart by tank shells, the bench on which you used to sit and chat to your friend on a Sunday morning is crushed by falling masonry. Meanwhile, you, your family, friends and neighbours cower like rats in the remaining buildings, dodging bullets and mortars and wondering where your unremarkable, quiet little town went.

Despite all this grimness, there are flashes of gallows humour in the film. During an escape, Theo has to leave his shoes behind. He tries to borrow some from ageing hippy Jasper, but the only ones he can find to fit are flip-flops. In most of the remaining action sequences, he's trying to dash about in this ridiculous footwear, cursing when he cuts his feet on broken glass or twigs. That's the kind of detail action heroes don't usually have to deal with. When Theo and Kee are stuck in the middle of some hellish crossfire, Theo asks of the crying baby, "How is she?". Kee answers (accurately), "Annoyed!". There's a wonderful visual joke for Pink Floyd fans that I won't spoil. There are also unexplained themes which add a lot of texture to the film. Despite the fact that the human species is unable to reproduce, animals seem to be doing fine, and almost every scene has animals in it. Theo seems particularly attractive to animals, and dogs come up to him wagging their tails and kittens try to climb his trouser leg.

There are some superb performances from the whole cast. Clive Owen underplays Theo brilliantly, Michael Caine is wonderful as a disreputable old hippy who used to be a political cartoonist (cartoons by Steve Bell, incidentally), and Pam Ferris plays out of work midwife Miriam with edgy intensity. Actually, Pam Ferris with dreads and a brow ring is quite a sight.

In short, this is a film I'd really recommend.