MONA (Lance Adams, 2012)

Jeff Hudson (Patton Oswalt) is thrilled when he lands a job as a writer for Bona Comics. He's been drawing and self-publishing his own titles for years with little success, and this opportunity is beyond his wildest dreams. His friends are confused that his chance has come now, and tease him about his love for Bona's most famous creation, Mona.

To them, Mona is nothing more than a refracted Wonder-Woman, a photocopied Supergirl; she has had so many shapely forms over the years, and been redrawn so frequently, that her face is a pixelated wash of back-stories. Up-close the dotted print of her skin is pockmarked with cancelled and re-cancelled origin tales, her hair burnt with re-dyed roots. But Jeff is in love, and encouraged by a dream in which it was prophesied that he would write 'The Greatest Story Ever Told In Boxes,' he approaches Bona with relish.

He has never before been past the lobby of the crumbling art-deco building in Midtown that has been home to Bona Comics since the late fifties, and he bounces his excitement off the high ceilings. His new colleagues are less enthusiastic. The other writers are depressed cynics who make it clear to Jeff that his writing abilities will rarely be used; The legendary originator of Bona and creator of Mona, Paul Bona (Frank Langella), has written every one of her stories for fifty years, and only takes on scraps of the team's ideas. Her shifting identity serves as testament to his obsessive attempts to perfect Mona.

Paul Bona lives and works on the top floor of the building, and rarely leaves. The writers send their efforts up to him in a dumbwaiter, and otherwise idle their days away playing pool. Jeff's illusions about his new employer are challenged, but when a combination of social ineptitude, persistence and a slapstick delivery mix-up (involving weary elevator man Tom Waits) results in Jeff stumbling into Bona's secret lair, he finds a surprise.

Rather than being the genius control freak of lore, Bona turns out to be a shambling wreck. He invites Jeff to stay and share Chinese food, and the pair sit in a dark room on furniture covered with sheets, while Bona tells his story. In the early years writing was easy for him. On any wet afternoon in the late fifties, Bona might invent and sketch a dozen superheroes, and fill in their histories before the bar closed. Those hopeful years were fuelled by his caffeinated energy and boozy enthusiasms. Of all of his creations, he loved none more than Mona. She grew from a blurry Amazonian pastiche into a modish icon by the mid-sixties, and flickered on the edges of mainstream success. Her small but loving fanbase stuck with her through manifold puberties and menopauses, as her powers evolved from the standard karate-expert/detective beginnings, on through various borrowed abilities, until the Mona we recognise today (a telekinetic sensitive),was established in the 1980s.

Bona tells Jeff that this was around the time that he realised, through the receding haze that was his recovery from alcoholism, that for a long time he had not been writing the stories. He'd always shared credits with younger writers to get them an avenue into the industry, but had written all the Mona stories himself. He hadn't remembered writing many of the seventies Mona strips, of course, because he was drunk for the whole decade. But that wasn't what he meant. 'At some point it dawned on me... that Mona herself has grown her own intelligence and is writing her own stories. She's already managed to siphon company funds into a new account in the name of her alter-ego, Jodie Green. I don't really understand how she did that. But I'm more concerned with what happens next.'

The shifting identity of Mona over the years wasn't caused by Bona's ego, fashion, or market forces it seems; but by Mona's own hand, as she aimed to craft her own personality. She is making herself into the woman she most wants to be.

Bona expects Mona to somehow make her escape. Can he stop her, with Jeff's help? Should they stop her? Would a flesh and blood Mona, filled with the good values Bona tried to instill in her, be a blessing to the world? And how will Jeff react to the prospect of his heroine threatening to become real?

Mona Directed by Lance Adams Produced by Rich Thompson Written by Art Poize, Lance Adams Starring Patton Oswalt, Frank Langella, Marianne Faithfull (voice), Tom Waits Universal Pictures 115 mins. Release Date UK/US: May 2012 Tagline: 'And Woman Created Woman.'

PSYCHIC PRECINCTS (Bill Rice, 1984)

... which could be anywhere, but in this case we are in the East End of London, and specifically Dalston, London Fields and Shoreditch. Psychic Precincts follows, slowly, several days in the meandering trajectory of a gentleman named William (Kenneth Inch, in his only acting appearance). He is 96. He wanders the streets, making notes of everything; he suffers from (we are told during a memorable hospital scene, during which William tells a young nurse the day she will die, making her cry), apophenia. He wanders the streets, quoting a textbook to passers-by:

'Apophenia is the experience of seeing patterns or connections in random or meaningless data. The term was coined in 1958 by Klaus Conrad, who defined it as the "unmotivated seeing of connections" accompanied by a "specific experience of an abnormal meaningfulness"'

More than a story about the plight of the lonely, sick and old in big cities, Psychic Precincts contains confounding joys because of the hopeful attitude of William; this also makes us, supposedly wiser, feel sorry for him. The central plotline of the film involves William trying to get people to read a draft of his novel, which he carries around in a holdall. The thousands of scrawled pages are what he describes as 'a psychogeographic murder mystery set in Dalston in the sixties. And then... (pause) at the beginning of chapter three... (long pause) the narrator wakes up and realises he is stuck in a dream'. He repeats this line to all kinds of people: Yawning checkout girls, the homeless, toddlers. Because of his curious aspect, William is constantly dismissed, but is never disillusioned. He just ambles along to the next person, spreading his stories, and witnessing the shape-shifting city.


One of the most beautiful moments comes at night: Clubbed shouts and traffic discolour the edges of the soundtrack, and William stops along the canal to talk to a young runaway who is asleep. No hellos are exchanged, William just nods politely and starts into a typical monologue:


I had a premonition of my death, and I am relieved: It is as I had hoped. The moon can't come too soon. I always wanted to die like a man, in a Paris bordello from a sexual injury, while the angels and whores stand all around reading my poetry. They'll say 'He can't shake it anymore; He can't shake it anymore...' I will be eighty-one years old... It was confidently predicted by a family member that I would write a book. Now my family has seen off many a flighty pre-cog who, with 'funny feelings' and dour cardigans, has come to inform us of our destinies. We don't take rash forebodings lightly; our own future radars are subtle and wise, and our own keen acumen has always sufficed. My sisters' births were pre-empted by dreamy visions. Other presentiments have been delivered as promised. And yet, I still have not written a book. This prediction hangs like a curse, a curse of a particular kind of genius, and yet it is something that I am loathe to turn my back on, as it's possibility is a comfort. Only in seeing its effects repeated in younger siblings, predicted themselves to perform great feats, does it ring hard and cold..... but this will be the book. On the cover will be a quote, from the greatest amn to have ever lived: Orson Welles, who I met on a film set in South America forty years ago. He said 'William, you're always moving; like a cat before they let it out of the bag... ' ha. And so how can this book fail, with a blessing from Mr Welles on the cover, that says 'He's like a cat before they let it out of the bag...'



Later in the film we come to doubt not only what William says, but what we are seeing; each time William bothers someone on the street with an anecdote we see his surroundings shift to convey these memories, with maybe a reflection of The Great Orsini in a shopfront, or echoing music from a passing car that bleeds into the electronic throb of Paddy Kingsland's music, and then into an image of a ballroom, Stoke Newington, in the fifties... the constant chatter of William's voice, the disorientating spin of the city's refracted lights throw images across our ceilings like car headlights in the night: I knew Lionel Bart. When he came to me and said 'William, I'm doing a musical of Oliver Twist' I said 'Terrible idea, Lionel. Forget about it.' Later, after Oliver! had won many Oscars, he asked me what I thought now. 'Terrible idea, Lionel. Popular, mind, but a terrible idea.' The London we see is so informed by William's future plots and reminiscences that it appears as if through a looking glass, its most speculative and vague aspects to the fore.


In another running together of fiction and fact, the lead actor Kenneth Inch was found by film-maker Bill Rice when scouting locations for the shoot. 'Kenneth appeared, as he does in the film, wandering around, in a battered suit. He was like a Dickensian waif aged hundreds of years in the pickle jar of Tom Waits. I had to have him'1 Rice said. Inch wore his own clothes in the film, improvised many of his lines, and insisted on being known as 'William' off-set for the duration of the shoot. By the end of filming, Rice had discovered that Kenneth Inch wasn't his real name (Inch Kenneth is an island to the West of Scotland), and that he refused payment for the film. Inch then disappeared. He was found by a BBC documentary crew2 in 1995, and claimed to be called William. He fled a proposed meeting with the film-makers, and was found dead on Brick Lane a week later. He was holding a battered paperback copy of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude.3 He was presumed to be at least 105 years old.


Psychic Precincts Directed by William Rice Produced by Paul Heller Written by William Rice, 'Kenneth Inch' Music by Paddy Kingsland Handmade Films. Release Date: US N/A, UK: November 1984 Tagline: 'There Is a City Within the City (Within the City) of His Mind'


1. Sight and Sound interview, July 1996
2. The Cat In The Bag (John Home, 1996) was an investigation into the possible past and present of the man known as Kenneth Inch.

3. The following passage in the novel was marked:

'That was not only his oldest memory, but his only memory of childhood. The other one, that of an old man with an old-fashioned vest and a hat with a brim like a crow's wings who told him marvellous things framed in a dazzling window, he was unable to place in any period. It was an uncertain memory, entirely devoid of lessons or nostalgia, the opposite of the memory of the executed man, which had really set the direction of his life and would return to his memory clearer and clearer as he grew older, as if the passage of time were bringing him closer to it.'

In the front cover, Inch himself had written the following:

'London is a hubbub of experimental auras, waiting to smash urgent sons and their bucking and braying theorems. It can offer apparent verifications for impossible philosophies and withdraw them suddenly, like little deaths. But still, I find futures, presents and other districts to investigate, and I travel for my health, plotting geographical emotions among the sacred boroughs around me. Everything evokes something. Lush precincts do not necessarily recall lush precincts, as we know. Like a world imagined from past experiences, each new house seen is a composite of previous ones, each new face a Frankenstein of schoolmates now grown.'