‘All The World’s A Car Park’

...or parking lot, to those of us who speak the American dialect of English. That's the headline in a Guardian Unlimited (U.K.) review of the film Chain, which examines "the homogenised interzones of privately owned public space - shopping malls, hotel complexes, theme parks - that multinational corporations have remade in their own global-branded image, letting regional colour fade to a concrete grey. "

Yet more proof that local planning officials have to be tough and demand designs that give us a sense of place, instead of soul-less sprawl.

Says the review: "The full power of Jem Cohen's feature film Chain doesn't hit until the closing credits, which reveal that the movie's anonymous landscape of chain stores and highway interchanges was shot in seven countries and 11 American states. . . .

"A hybrid of fiction and documentary, and a brilliantly discomfiting twist on the "location shoot", Chain is also something of a Ballardian horror story."