Watching Brief: All aboard

<i>Magic Trip: Ken Kesey's Search for a Kool Place</i> director Alex Gibney. Photo / Supplied

I hate Ken Kesey. That's hardly surprising. How could any writer not hate a guy who was a champion wrestler who nearly made the US Olympic team; whose all-American good looks put one in mind of Paul Newman (though without the piercing blue eyes); and who wrote two great novels (One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and Sometimes a Great Notion) in two years, while starting the drug-fuelled hippie revolution.

To be fair, I felt a lot less animosity after Ken let me on the bus. This was the decommissioned and hallucinogenically redecorated and refitted International Harvester school bus named Further in which he and the Merry Pranksters undertook a cross-country trip from California to New York in 1964.

I don't mean that he literally let me on the bus, of course. I was 12 at the time and we certainly weren't talking about Ken Kesey in Hamilton. But thanks to Alex Gibney's and Alison Elwood's Magic Trip: Ken Kesey's Search for a Kool Place, I now feel like I was there.

The film is essentially an assemblage of silent film footage with sound recorded at - or around - the same time and the portrait it provides of a moment in countercultural history is remarkably coherent considering how out of it everybody was at the time.

Gibney, you may remember, is the man behind a host of provocative and serious documentaries, notably the Oscar-nominated Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room and the Oscar-winning Taxi to the Dark Side, which anatomised the torture and killing of an innocent taxi driver by US troops in Afghanistan in 2002.

I'm tempted to say that Magic Trip, which probably wouldn't have been made if Gibney hadn't lent his weight to the project, shows he has a lighter side, but that would be to minimise what is a serious cultural achievement. The bus trip was brilliantly chronicled in Tom Wolfe's groundbreaking after-the-event book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test but this film gets us on the bus.

This is sometimes a little scary: watching Neal Cassady at the wheel, even with no soundtrack, makes you wonder how they made it to the California border. But any filmmaker who rescues a record of the past from a motley collection of unsorted film canisters is a hero in my book

Magic Trip is the first film on the last day, tomorrow, of the main festival programme. (The festival goes into overtime to run some of the 3D attractions because there was no way before now of wrestling the 3D-capable cinemas from the clutches of a certain Boy Wizard) I'm only reminding you about it now because I wouldn't want you to miss it while you were dawdling over a leisurely Sunday brunch.

My choices for today, as we enter the home straight so to speak, are the South African drama Beauty and Andrey Zvyagintsev's Elena. Having admired enormously the later director's The Return a few years back I am picking this could be one of the best of the weekend but there's a world of choice out there and it's your last chance. Take a kid (or your inner child) to A Cat in Paris; marvel at Buck, the best imported doco of the fortnight in my book. But get into it.