I've just started to watch American Splendour (no link – google your way there if you want to, but I'm busy watching it and I don't want to jeopardise the Purity of my First Response), and this is the first Definitely DVD movie to have come my way. By this I mean (a) you need to own it, and (b) you can't possibly get top value from it without regular use of the pause button.

Many of the early shots are of cartoons, and the editing went past them before I had time to read the captions. So: go back, pause.

Many of the frames make excellent pictorial decorl when paused. Here's what looks to be one of the key moments of the entire movie. This is when the central figure is first shown with a cartoon bubble over his head. Idea!!!

All good movies (and I rather think that this one is going to be very good indeed – one of my recent top favourites) about Creative Types seem to have one of those Creative Moments, when they Crack It. "You've cracked it!" says Mrs Pollock in Pollock, with some addition swearing if I remember the moment correctly, when Pollock finally gives up doing pictures of stuff and starts splashing and dripping his paint about, just like the real Pollock eventually did. "That's it, that's the sound", says Mrs Glenn Miller in The Glen Miller Story. It's the magic moment when our hero finally hits the trail.

What a splendid country America is. You get your chance to do this kind of thing. And if you succeed, they make a movie about you.

Actually, it turns out, maybe he's not a cartoonist, just the guy who did the words, while his pal Crumb takes it away and illustrates it. We're in the Restaurant. "Wow man. You'd do that?" Apparently so.

I'll keep you posted.

By the way. I did buy this, ex-rental. Sight unseen. Inspired purchase at £7.99. As Woody Allen says, the public just gets a feeling about a movie.