GENTLEMEN PREFER BLONDES   : [8/10] : US 53 : Howard Hawks : 90m : seen Cameo 25.8 (public - paid £6.50)
   "Men grow cold as girls grow old / And we all lose our charms in the end" - according to Gentlemen Prefer Blondes' most famous number, 'Diamonds Are A Girl's Best Friend'. But the film itself shows no sign of losing its charm: agreeably silly, this comedy-musical remains riotously enjoyable more than half a century on. And the luminous appeal of its two stars Jane Russell and Marilyn Monroe certainly hasn't dipped by a single candela.
   Modelling a series of startling outfits - lovingly captured via intense Technicolor - They dance, sing and show a real flair for comedy (both physical and verbal) as daffy gold-digging showgirl Lorelei Lee (Monroe) and her rather more practical-minded best pal Dorothy Shaw (Russell). After Lorelei gets fortuitously engaged to bumbling millionaire-in-waiting Esmond (Tommy Noonan), she and Dorothy embark on a trans-Atlantic cruise - only to be tailed by a private eye (Elliott Reid) hired by Esmond's disapproving father to uncover dirt on his lad's vivacious intended.
   Dorothy (implausibly) falls head-over-heels for the pipe-smokingly square snoop, just as she and Lorelei are getting themselves mixed up in silly shenanigans involving a titled, buffoonish Brit (Charles Coburn), his snooty wife (Norma Varden), and the latter's priceless tiara. Events spiral further out of control once the ship finally reaches France and our heroines make a bee-line for 'gay Paree'...
   The script - by Charles Lederer, based on the novel of the same name by Anita Loos (and its play adaptation by Fields and Loos) - has an amiably anything-goes feel, with perhaps even a slight screwball atmosphere as the chaos mounts. Though the big set-piece numbers are terrific, elsewhere a couple of the less spectacular musical numbers could perhaps have been profitably pruned. But then again it would be a shame to lose even a single frame of Russell and Monroe on this kind of form, enjoying one of cinema's great female friendships: turns out diamonds aren't a girl's best friend, after all.
  
TEKKONKINKREET   : [6/10] : Tekon kinkurito : Jpn 06 : Michael Arias : 111m approx : seen Cameo 25.8 (public - paid £6.76)
   OK, full disclosure: I struggled desperately to stay awake through the first hour or so of ambitious manga adaptation, Tekkonkinkreet.

   Likely causes :
   1. It was the 34th film I'd seen in nine days at Edinburgh 2007.
   2. I'd had a big plate of the Rainbow Arch's special fried rice ('Young Chow', aptly enough) - washed down with a large glass of house white - immediately before entering the dark, warm, crowded cinema.
   3. The film itself isn't exactly a model of narrative clarity or expert pacing...

   As far as I could tell through my drooping eyelids, Tekkonkinkreet (some kind of punning combination on the Japanese words for Iron, City and Muscles, apparently), is set in an imaginary megalopolis-type city, where sinister forces are trying to knock down old buildings and replace them with shiny edifices of capitalistic excess. Standing in their way, a couple of street-kids known as 'Black' and 'White', who together go under the gang-moniker of 'The Cats'. 
   This precocious pair (whose physical gifts include the ability to fly) enduring such a battering over the course of the movie that it would have been impossible to make the picture live-action. The early stages bog down in the kind of Yakuza imbroglio and verbiage that not even Takashi Miike can invigorate - but proceedings pick up when arch-villain 'Snake' (subtle, yes?) calls on a trio of colossal, robotic, possibly alien ubermenschen to eliminate the 'Cat problem'. Cue kick-ass, smash-mouth action sequences, making imaginative (if not quite eye-popping) use of the city's weirdly wonderful architectural melange.
   Director Arias (a 40-year-old American who's pulled something of a 'Lafcadio Hearn' by living in Japan since he was 24) and scriptwriter Anthony Weintraub lose their way somewhat in the final act, however - a repetitively talky section which veers off into incomprehensible, quasi-mythical pseudo-mythology. And there's little doubt that Tekkonkinkreet, for all its uncompromised distinctiveness, could easily shed half an hour or so - all the better to emulate the spring-heeled oomph of its lithely youthful protagonists.