Michael Bonner

As Bob Dylan, garbed in another of the natty Pimp-My-Confederate-General ensembles that have served as his working clothes these past few years, steps onto the stage of the Playhouse on Sunday into a jolting “Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat”, there is the small matter of him having just this afternoon officially clocked up his first Number One album in the UK for almost 40 years with Together Through Life.

In an era where science fiction movies are, perhaps aptly, about pushing forward the boundaries of digital technology, it’s refreshing to find a movie like Moon, which seemingly makes a virtue of its analog approach to film making. This is, I think, the first film to rely almost completely on model work, as opposed to CGI, since Blade Runner in 1982. In fact, on almost every level, Moon is retrofitted sci-fi, most conspicuously indebted to movies like Silent Running, Solaris, 2001 and Alien. It’s almost as if Star Wars never happened.

It remains to be seen whether the global credit gloom will have a negative effect on the parties, the glamour and the excessively large yachts that tend to provide entertaining if diversionary colour from the Cannes Film Festival. But, certainly, in terms of heavyweight talent on display at this year's festival, you might be hard pressed to think of a more Cannes-like line-up.

I first went to the Cannes Film Festival seven years ago; coincidentally, I’d just finished reading JG Ballard’s novel, Super-Cannes, about murder in an ultra-modern business park tucked away in the hills above town. On a morning unencumbered by meetings, film screenings or a hangover, I took a cab from my hotel in Grasse up to Sophia-Antipolis, one of Ballard’s models for the novel’s Eden-Olympia technopole.

In one of the best scenes in The Wrestler, Mickey Rourke's Randy and Marisa Tomei's Cassidy are propping up a bar, discussing the generally woeful state of modern music. They concur that Guns N' Roses, Motley Crue and Def Leppard set the bar astronomically high back in the day and, grumpy spoilsport that he was, "that Cobain pussy" pretty much ruined it all. The Nineties "sucked". And the Eighties? "Man, best shit ever!"

Well, maybe not quite a bonanza as such, but as we're now embedding videos at The View From Here, I thought it might be a neat idea to start running a regular round up of some of our favourite movie trailers. It might certainly help pass a few minutes while you're waiting to go to the pub.

Still somewhat giddy with yesterday's technological breakthroughs in terms of embedding videos and joining the Twittering masses (you'd think we were devising groundbreaking new techniques for nanosurgery here, rather than blogging), I thought I'd take the opportunity to post the trailer for one of the most anticipated movies in our world.

Some news that, we hope, will put a bounce in your Wednesday afternoon.

“I’ve been thinking a lot about dying recently,” says Philip Seymour Hoffman’s neurotic theatre director Caden Cotard early on. And, certainly, you could be forgiven for thinking that the odds were stacked against him. Within the first half hour of Synecdoche, New York, there are enough portents of doom lurking around you’d think you were watching a tragedy, were it all not so funny.

Here in Berlin, the annual film festival is gearing up for its closing weekend. But although the presence of Kate Winslet, Michelle Pfieffer, Keanu Reeves, Clive Owen and Demi Moore may have attracted the kind of flashbulb frenzy usually associated with more bling-heavy festivals like Cannes, few of the movie premieres here managed to generate the same level of excitement.