This collection of excerpts from interviews with Michael Parkinson goes way beyond indulging our fascination with the rich and famous and qualifies as a serious and intriguing examination of human nature. It takes a second look to realise that the star of the show is really Parkinson himself. His interviewing style remains the best in the business. Again and again he convinces the person he's talking to that he's really interested in what they have to say, and in them as a person. This must be a refreshing approach for people over saturated with media attention. Probably only possible in the extended 20 or 40 minute format Parkinson adopted. The research has been impeccable, the interviewees are at their ease, and Parkinson is quick to steer the conversation to where it is of most interest.

Subjects are:
1. James Stewart
2. Kenneth Williams
3. Orson Welles
4. Bette Midler
5. Joan Rivers
6. Victoria Wood
7. Richard Burton
8. Peter Sellers
9. John Cleese
10. Jonathan Miller
11. Peter Ustinov
12. Stephen Fry
13. Ben Travers/Henry Herbert 6th Earl of Carnarvon
14. Don McCullin/Wilfred Vaughn Thomas/Jacob Bronowski
15. Sharon Osbourne/Paul O'Grady
16. Oprah Winfrey
17. Judi Dench
18. Michael Caine

All these people have a fund of entertaining and revealing stories to tell, and Parkinson guides them and encourages them to do so. That most seductive form of flattery, interest and fascination with the other person, does its work. Whether Parkinson is deferent as he is to James Stewart, swapping stories about Orson Welles with Kenneth Williams or succumbing to the charms of Bette Midler, the audience sees the subject of the interview at their best. For me the most interesting interviews were at the start and at the end: few can match Michael Caine as a raconteur. I watched the DVD right through and would have done the same had there been another one. That's four hours of watching, and it went too quickly.

Still unreleased are interviews with John Lennon, Shirley Maclaine, Muhammad Ali, Jacques Tati, Peter O'Toole, Tony Curtis, David Niven, Duke Ellington, Jack Lemon, Jack Benny, Desmond Morris, Perry Como, John Romer, the Goons, Placido Domingo, Billy Connolly, Woody Allen, Richard Attenborough, Clint Eastwood, Sheryl Crow and Clive James. Parkinson says there are more than 2,000 interviews. Perhaps not all will be as fascinating as those on Parky's Picks, but, given Parkinson's skill as an interviewer, they probably will be. Let's hope the response to this DVD has been such as to encourage Parkinson to release more, though making the selection will be a tough job.

The Prison was first published as La Prison in 1968, and was translated into English by Lyn Moir. The man in prison is Alain Poitaud, an ex-journalist on an almost unbelievable trajectory of success. First the magazine he founded has become one of the most successful in France. The magazine, Toi, is designed to saturate the everyday reader with a surfeit of everyday facts and images, and the formula works. Another of Alain's magazines looks as though it will be equally successful. Poitaud starts writing and recording songs, and again is successful. He is not only rich, but a star. But then his wife, his closest companion, is arrested for the murder of her sister, an ex-lover of Poitaud, as are most of the attractive women he comes in contact with. Poitard is not involved with the murder, which comes as a complete shock to him. Trying to understand what has happened, he discovers he does not know anything about his wife. She is just one of the many companions he is compelled to surround himself with. His wife and her sister, in fact, have preferred a relationship with someone who is not a star, one of his own staff members, and have become rivals. Slowly he realises he has no relationships with any of these people, no relationships at all. They are merely hangers on. And Poitaud has wanted it this way because of an enormous fear within himself, the driving power of his success, but which has produced only a simulacrum of friends and family. He has built himself a prison. Shattered by this discovery, Poitaud's world collapses like a house of cards, and he kills himself. Perhaps an interesting reflection on Simenon's own spectacular success, and failed marriages, this characterisation of Poitaud is yet unconvincing, and feels schematic and contrived, not developed as we have come to expect of Simenon.

Maigret Takes the Waters was first published in 1968 as Maigret à Vichy. It was translated by Eileen Ellenbogen. Maigret is taking the cure at Vichy under doctor's orders, together with his wife. While there, he enjoys himself by noting the patients and their oddities. One woman he takes note of is later found strangled, and Maigret is unavoidably drawn into the investigation. It is not a matter of robbery, but seems a crime of passion. Yet the woman had no friends, almost no acquaintances, seemingly a real loner. Her only relative is her sister, and when she arrives to take charge of the funeral some interesting facts emerge. The dead woman had a regular source of income from an unknown donor, from which both sisters benefited. It suggests blackmail to Maigret, and he deduces the killer may be the one blackmailed, and a man connected in some personal way with the dead woman and perhaps a patient at Vichy. What he uncovers in the end is a deception of such cold-hearted cruelty that he thinks the murder almost justified. He finds and arrests his man, who is in the end exonerated for his crime under French law. This is quite a good tale of detection, but very low key.

Big Bob was first published as Le Grand Bob in 1954 and translated by Eileen M Lowe. Robert Dandurand has died, a cheerful, popular rogue of a man known to his many friends as `Big Bob'. Did he die accidentally? Did he commit suicide? What kind of a man was he anyway? His friend Charles starts an investigation into the life of Bob, trying to understand how he died, and why.

Bob and his wife Lulu had a large circle of friends. They were always surrounded by people, attracted by Bob's cheerfulness and ready wit. Charles discovers that Bob is the son of a distinguished lawyer, and was destined for the law himself, but had fled his wealthy family and chosen to live on his wits in Montmartre, where he met his wife to be, an almost prostitute called Lulu. Driven by urges he himself doesn't understand, Bob has a philosophy. If only every person in the world could make just one other person happy, what a wonderful world it would be. Bob chooses to make Lulu happy, and he becomes the centre of her world. Charles discovers that behind the drunkenness, easy virtue and raffishness of the life Bob and Lulu share, there is a great love story. Fenton Bresler says in The Mystery of Georges Simenon that this story was based on fact, on the life of one of Simenon's relatives.

There's an unsteady treatment to the story that distracted me from the involvement I usually experience with Simenon's books. Most of them are lived through imaginative crises of Simenon's, and I find make compelling reading. Perhaps because he is here telling a `true' story, Simenon seems a little external, as it were, seeing from the outside. There's no doubt the story is extremely touching. Bob chooses a death that will look like an accident, and conceals from Lulu the illness he is suffering from. It's his way of caring for her. She is distraught that he hadn't confided in her. Bob's paternalistic attitude has made him Lulu's support in life: without him, she withers and dies. We are left with a portrait of Bob that paints him halfway between a saint and an emotional fraud, and probably that ambiguity was important for Simenon to show (most of us fall between two stereotypes).

Maigret and the Minister was first published as Maigret Chez le Ministre in 1954. It was translated by Moura Budberg. The Calame Report, an architect's warning about an unsafe public project which has collapsed and resulted in the death of 128 young children, was disregarded when it was first published, and has subsequently disappeared. Now it has resurfaced, with allegations that several politicians and contractors involved with the project may have previously had it suppressed to avoid a scandal.

Maigret enters the shifty world of politics in this story, dodged by members of the security police wherever he goes. He has been appealed to by the Minister of Public Works to act privately on his behalf, and finds a situation where the very existence of the report can be used by unsavoury and unscrupulous politicians to lever influence. In an unfamiliar world of decadent diplomatic officials, fanatic followers of political parties, officials of the security police whom neither he nor his superiors can know anything about officially, renegade members of that force and suspicious staff in politicians' entourage, Maigret grimly sticks to what he knows best: finding the perpetrators of criminal acts.

This is a story which will appeal to lovers of the traditional detective story. Despite the quite believable situation described, the story revolves on tracing identity and following clues which slowly reveal the true course of events.

The Neighbours was first published in 1967 as Le Déménagement, and was translated by Christopher Sinclair-Stevenson. Emile Jovis, his wife Blanche and son Alain have just moved to a new apartment on the outskirts of Paris. Emile is a self-made man, a hard worker who has built a good life for his wife and son, looks good to assume a chief managerial position at the travel agency where he has a responsible job, and is outwardly happy and successful. But things are not what they seem. Emile's plain and unassertive wife Blanche is unable to have any more children, his son Alain seems cynical and secretive, and Emile begins to question whether he has done the right thing, whether he and his family are as happy as he thinks they are. In the new apartment the walls are as thin as paper, and lying awake one night Emile hears the couple next door making love. They seem to like exchanging obscene phrases, trying out deviant practices. This overheard conversation rocks Emile's little world and all his assumptions.

Simenon tells something of Emile's childhood: his father, a schoolteacher, has taught him to do the right thing, to always give of his best, but has shown him little tenderness. Emile has grown up in a narrow world where duty is the keyword. He dutifully does well at school, studies accountancy and then, later, languages, works for a solicitor and then betters himself by joining a travel agency and gaining a manager's job. Money is scarce, but Emile is careful. He provides for his family, and eventually has enough to buy into a new apartment complex outside Paris. He has done all the right things. But no-one has taught Emile how to live. He tells himself over and over that he is happy. Or should be. Here is a sad and compassionate look into the lives of people who have been denied the possibility of fulfilling themselves, and given the opportunity of buying things instead, if they work hard and save carefully.

Once Emile's neighbours have given him a glimpse of another world his fragile grasp on contentment is gone. He believes these people are dishonest, perhaps gangsters, totally immoral. Not only are they sexually depraved, they are seemingly shameless, confident, affluent. Emile discovers they work in a nightclub in Paris. Obsessing over the conversation he has heard, a catalyst which has uncovered the cracks in his contentment which he has hidden in his subconscious, Emile, for the first time, deceives his wife Blanche. He makes up a story to give him a pretense for being out at night, and goes to the nightclub, which features striptease dancers. He watches the women undress, has sex with one of the dancers, gets drunk. For the first time in his life he has not done his duty. While the neighbours seem to prosper in this world, for Emile the results are tragic.

Where you are makes a difference to what you see. New York photographer Lorenzo Dominguez found himself in a difficult position when his marriage failed. He, like many, had painted himself into a corner by accepting the values of others: the usual, wife, children, house in suburbia, mortgage, corporate job, respectability, doing the right thing. Everything was right. Everything was false.

Lorenzo's family had broken up, leaving him desperate and grieving. Somehow he broke free of self obsession. He sensed that many others shared his plight, if not his position. Armed only with a camera, Lorenzo took to the streets. The photographs he took were focused with the love he could not express to his wife any longer.

A twirl of the f-stop, a step to one side that moves the frame: the picture in the lens changes. Lorenzo went on a search for the beauty he had seen in his wife and children. He found there was not just a focus and a f-stop. There was an angle of beauty.

Because his photography was part of his healing process, Lorenzo learnt to see photography as a metaphor. If what you see causes you pain, you can move, adopt another viewpoint, another perspective. Happiness is mobility, flexibility. There is a perspective for everyone where what they see brings contentment and fulfillment. They just have to keep moving until they find it. There is a point of view we can all seek out. From it we can view the beauty inherent in all things. No need to resent the ugliness and sterility we see around us. Move!

Lorenzo formulated 25 lessons. Based on his adventures roaming the city taking photographs, they are techniques and tips about taking better photographs. They are also techniques and tips for leading a better life. The book is a compendium of what Lorenzo has learned. The book succeeds though because it is uniformly genuine. Based firmly on his life experience, Lorenzo is personal and unaffected throughout. He avoids playing the sage, though his book is generous with quotations and references from writers and sages he admires.

A photographer deals in light. Like a river, light is always changing. Like a river, a person is always changing. Just like a river, when we cease to change, we start to stagnate. Lorenzo's book is an autobiography. It begins with the drama of his marriage breakup, continues with his 'therapy' of photography and the wisdom he derived from this practice, and ends with the story of his early life. Unavoidably, the first section is more engaging, because tragedy is more involving. What Lorenzo calls lessons are wisdom he has distilled from his own life, and the reception this part is given by readers depends very much on their willingness to learn, and their willingness to match experience with Lorenzo.

The book I read ended with a selection of 37 photographs (though the text referred to photos in context eg "to the right" etc.) These are predominantly of people waiting in the streets of New York. Each picture tells a story, and the viewer can have a lot of fun decoding and telling each story. There are stories about illusions, fantasies, loneliness, poverty, celebration. The comparison with Cartier-Bresson is apt, however extraordinary that claim may seem.

The book goes a long way towards explaining why two people can photograph the same scene and end up with two very different photographs.

Leonardo was not appreciated in his own time. He was sidelined, persecuted and many of his works destroyed. A similar fate has befell this documentary. I saw this film in the 70s. It was shown on Australian TV (where I live) and I thought it then, and probably still do, the greatest TV film I have ever seen. Leonardo, I believe, excelled his contemporaries in the range of his discoveries, and I believe he excells our contemporaries in the same way: this is a man whom to see as a precursor of 20th century science is to belittle. Castellani's film now exists in three versions. To save other viewers the trouble of the research, following is what I have found out about each version.

"The Life of Leonardo da Vinci" was a 1971 Italian TV production directed by Renato Castellani, a famous and critically esteemed director of the time. It tapped into a moment of patriotic fervour in Italy and was funded by the Italian government to an unprecedented extent, becoming the most expensive production made in Italy up to that time. It was produced in the same way that Hollywood epics are fabled to be, with on location shoots at every place Leonardo was known to have lived or visited, and with a 'cast of thousands'. Meticulous care was taken with costumes and sets, without exception both luxurious and authentic. Particular care was also taken with casting. An innovative and appropriately experimental approach (for the time) saw the casting of a famous TV personality, Giulio Bosetti, as a modern dress narrator, strolling onto the historical sets to give a modern day perspective of the events depicted.

The original Italian version is available on a 3 DVD set. It has an Italian soundtrack and Italian subtitles, but no English, I presume to avoid competing with versions released in English speaking countries. If you understand Italian, this is the preferred version. It runs at the original broadcast time of 320 minutes.

The English language distribution rights for the film were secured by Questar Inc of Chicago, a specialist distributor of historical and other documentary material. Questar released a version on VHS videotape which dropped the Italian soundtrack for a (very well) dubbed English one. This version is still available for those not adverse to videotape. It is on a set of 3 videocassettes and runs for 270 minutes.

Questar Inc also released a DVD version of the film. This version has been shortened and is on 2 DVDs. Removed is all the material featuring Giulio Bosetti as the modern dress narrator, which would have also meant shortening some of the scenes on which he makes a commentary. Presumably the editors thought viewers would be puzzled by the sight of a modern narrator stepping out from an historical set (forget the contribution of structuralist film critics and the impact of Jean-Luc Goddard on cinema - this is supposed to be an historical epic, right?). The film survives this blundering butchery, it's that good. The dubbed soundtrack is slightly out of synch though. Somewhat unforgivably, Questar lifted the film specs from their video release and describe it as running at 270 minutes. There is no mention of any cuts. As a compensation, 5 short documentaries of 5-10 minutes each are included on the second disk. The film's running time is 230 minutes (total time including extras is back to 270 minutes).

This is the only version English speakers who prefer disk format can see Castellani's film. Even Japanese viewers have to watch this version (with Japanese subtitles). I think people who care about film, about Leonardo, who object to false advertising and concealed censorship, should object, but doubtless I'm in the minority.

Worth looking for is a 2004 BBC documentary, "Leonardo da Vinci", a 3 episode, 160 minute film which features spectacular photography, reconstructions and testing of some of Leonardo's machines (and some insights about them never before appreciated), location shoots, dramatic re-enactments, readings from the Notebooks and commentary by scholars. While not as good as Castellani's original film, it is better than the truncated version.

I've just watched Art School Confidential, a 2006 film from Terry Zwigoff, maker of Crumb (1994) and Ghost World (2001), two of my favourite films. It gets wildly divergent responses from reviewers, usually a sign the film maker has hit his mark.

Watch Crumb if you want to know what's wrong with America, dissected by an extraordinarily intelligent, very articulate and devastatingly vitriolic analyst who has worked through his own childhood abuse, art celebrity and exploitation and dysfunctional family life to achieve some kind of clarity. Robert Crumb is not just a talented artist and cartoonist but a master of black humour, whose comments are so accurate they make you feel uncomfortable even while you laugh.

In Ghost World two best friends are in league against the mediocrity that surrounds them, the parents, the nerds, the pretentious advocates of bad taste. Then one of the friends succumbs (grows up). The film has a lot of heart and is much more than satire, but the tasteless, the sellout and the lies we tell ourselves are held up to ridicule until right at the end of the movie when Enid has an epiphany. She learns that if we believe enough, then our bus will arrive.

Art School Confidential, made, like Ghost World, with Daniel Clowes (whose comics formed the basis for both films) attempts a more complex structure than the earlier films and is not entirely successful. Here the structural idea is to parody the teenage exposé film genre, as you can tell from the title, with all the stereotype characters and acts of violence, the rivalries and central love affair common to the genre. It's an easy target: even the best of the type, Rebel Without a Cause, now looks a bit dated.

At the same time the pretensions of the art world are skewered (without doubt other professions, like financial analysis for example, have their pretensions. The film doesn't claim there is something unusual about art in this respect. And of course this is not a real art school). John Malkovich is devastatingly good as a teacher whose self obsession makes him less than useless as an instructor. Steve Buscemi has a few good minutes as Broadway Bob, an egotistical gallery owner. The students' critique of each other's work is a marvel of obfuscation. Everybody at this school works really hard on the trappings of art, without creating any art at all. The film really excels here, though the satire is a bit distant. The film makers are not as threatened by the art bureaucracy as Enid and Rebecca were of adulthood in Ghost World. And they can hardly lampoon artists ambitious of financial success while making a movie themselves, a business venture designed to make money.

But there's more yet to the film. The central character, Jerome, wants to be as famous and admired as Picasso. He's shown as a good artist, but his emotional need is the motivation for what he does. He's at art school just as much to find the girl on the school catalog as to outpaint Picasso. While he dedicates himself to his painting he loses his girl and is sneered at by his fellow students. Once he joins the rat race and strives to impress, he gains ground, and when he exploits his notoriety as a suspected serial killer he not only starts to sell paintings, but his girl falls in love with him. He ends up with it all, but is separated from both girl and gallery by a visitors' glass wall in the prison where he awaits trial. So he doesn't get it all, merely the appearance of all. Needless to say this is not realism.

This is a serious attempt though to look at artists' motivations and the many ways you can sell out for success, with all the rewards and punishments this implies. And I wonder if the love affair, with beautiful music from a Beethoven concerto, was not self parody and a sellout as well. The acting was good enough to get me involved but I do have second thoughts. I did feel the love affair and the artistic ambitions illuminated one another.

All told the film tries to do too much and feels as if some of its many producers might have tinkered with the script or tried to interfere with its development. There's a too many cooks air about the film. Perhaps the film makers were just ambitious. My verdict would be that the parts are more than the whole, but that its worth seeing for those parts, especially the ridicule of the art mystique, where the blind very confidently lead the blind. Thank god there are people trying to achieve something as complex as this in film.

Watching Tarkovsky's Stalker was not an enjoyable experience, but it did make something about his achievement much clearer to me. In this film, and in most of his work that I have seen, Tarkovsky tells the viewer nothing: no plot, no characters, no resolution. He sets up an ambience through beautifully textured photography and lighting, stunning command of soundscapes, and a carefully undefined nexus of meaning. Then he allows the viewer to create a meaning. For some it is an overwhelming experience, for others a bore. This is not cinema as we normally know it but much closer to the effect of great poetry. It is sound and setting used as metaphor by means of which we can create what we can. Or not.

Forget the Strugatsky's Roadside Picnic (just as you had to forget Lem's Solaris when watching Tarkovsky's film of the same name). There is something called the Zone, but we don't know what it is, where or why it occurred. For the confused or troubled, something inside the Zone can provide a revelation. What it is or how it works we don't know. It's perimeter is guarded, but we don't know who guards it or why. Three men enter the Zone, we don't really know why, nor who they are. Viewers who claim to know more are reading information from the novel's plot, or quoting other viewers who are.

The Stalker (think of one of Fenimore Cooper's characters like the Deerstalker), the Writer, the Scientist are on a journey like Dante's. They seem confused and inarticulate, but they do know something is wrong, and they hope to remedy it, somehow, within the Zone. The Stalker is as driven as the other two. Tarkovsky suggests what the men are seeking by filming outside the Zone, a sterile no man's land of ruin, in a washed out sepia, and inside the Zone, a lush natural tangle of vegetation, in vibrant colour.

Stalker is about the search for redemption, filmed in such a way the viewer must conduct the search themselves. Unlike Solaris, whose themes of love and memory were presented in the form of a screenplay the viewer could engage with, Stalker is a much more extreme film which approaches the limit of what a film can do. It is a film which can have no clear climax, no rationale, no explanation. The journey is the important part.

I regret the fact my rational self would not let go while watching it, that I thought the lack of proper names risible and just like everybody's first novel, that the contrast between inside and outside the Zone was too obvious. I hated that the film was unnecessarily divided over two disks as it was for VHS release and that the subtitles were sometimes in such bad English they were hard to follow. This time around it wasn't for me. Maybe next time.