Well, folks, the magazine has been around for over two years now, and it's high time for our first reader survey. We'd love it if you could take the time to fill it in here. We're really excited to hear what you think. As a thank you, we're giving away a free subscription to four lucky survey-completers.

This photo of issue eight is from reader Helen Ogbourn, and the one on the front page is by Hannah Daisy.

Try and imagine, just for a few moments, that you are Mel Gibson.

Mel, while your movie star looks have aged relatively well, your career has not; this has less to do with your film choices and more to do with the person that you are. The problem is, you see, that you have lots of deep-seated views which are deeply offensive, some of which you might not fully be aware of in your day-to-day life: views such as anti-Semitism, homophobia and misogyny. You managed to keep this part of yourself internalised, or at least out of the public's view, for most of your successful career. And very successful it was: you were one of the biggest stars of the 80s and 90s, balancing popular action films with the occasional venture into more serious drama. Your work as a writer/director also, while containing a major obsession with physical suffering, was for the most part accomplished and interesting. You took some bold chances, funding by yourself a $30 million non-English language film you were making about the death of Jesus, which most people predicted would be a massive failure and end your career. It made $600 million, most of which went to you.

But then something happened. The thing is, you're a recovering alcoholic, and in 2006 you relapsed severely with an infamous arrest for drunk driving. It wasn't the arrest that shocked people, but the tirade of hate that accompanied it. You argued that the awful things you said weren't your real feelings but were instead the result of extreme drunkenness. Perhaps this could have been true, and perhaps people might have moved on, but then the vitriol poured out from you again, and again, and again. You’ve developed a nasty habit of leaving abusive voicemail messages, insulting co-workers, and threatening to kill your ex-wife. As such, your career has imploded, and it is now almost impossible for audiences to separate your damaged public image from the characters you play.

So what do you do now? You don't need the money, but everyone has to fill their days somehow, and presumably you still harbour a desire to perform. Perhaps you even think people might start liking you again if you appear in something they enjoy. Ultimately you’re an actor: you want to act. But what sort of films do you choose to appear in? You tried playing a lovable family man, attempting public rehabilitation with man-finds-happiness-through-a-hand-puppet movie The Beaver. It was a flop: while audiences could accept you playing someone mentally unhinged, someone who would speak entirely through a puppet of a beaver, they couldn’t accept you portraying a decent human being.

A year passed, and now you’ve tried another tack, producing and co-writing a film with your old first AD, Adrian Grunberg. The picture, How I Spent My Summer Vacation, casts you as the roguish Driver, a career criminal trapped in the notorious Mexican prison El Pueblito. Driver must learn to survive in El Pueblito whilst trying to recover his ill-gotten millions and protecting a 10-year-old boy (Kevin Hernandez) from the prison’s organ-harvesting kingpin Javi (Daniel Gimenez Cacho). Ostensibly a black comedy that’s supposed to grittily evoke genre pieces of the 70s, the film just doesn’t work, despite impressive production design and the tobacco-bleached cinematography of Benoit Debie. How I Spent My Summer Vacation is not nearly as funny or exciting as it tries to be, or as innovative as it imagines it is.

The real problem, as always, is you. Where once you fruitfully played against type as an anti-hero in darker fare such as Payback, here your public perception bleeds distractingly through: instead of Driver seeming like a world-weary cynic with a hidden kind streak, instead he just comes across as a horrible, cynical, bitter man. Driver’s fondness for the unnamed boy and the boy’s mother (Dolores Heredia) feels insincere, and his criminal resourcefulness doesn’t have the charm that it’s meant to. The mischievous charisma that has been your appeal since Lethal Weapon has deserted you: the joke isn’t funny anymore.

As a career choice, playing an unpleasant character wasn’t a bad impulse, and perhaps the strategy would have worked if the film itself was better. Unfortunately for you it wasn’t, and like the many, many other problems in your life, this is your own fault and you’re just going to have to live with it.

She is a believer in transformation and redemption, film director Tinge Krishnan. Lynette, the young homeless girl, and Frank, the wrung-out soldier, strike up an unlikely friendship in her latest film, Junkhearts, creating a fragile connection that exists only for a moment – but it is going to change everything.

While the film is beautifully shot with lingering scenes that seem to take us into the minds of the characters, the desperation of these two lonely souls means Junkhearts is an overwhelmingly bleak experience.

“It wasn’t intended to be bleak, does it feel bleak?” says Krishnan. We’ve been chatting while waiting for our tea to arrive, and the director has just told me how she’s always worried about letting the film down by saying silly things. And here I am, having possibly misread its intentions completely.

Krishnan seems genuinely interested in my interpretation of the film though. Watching Frank and Lynette connect and then come apart again is like a warning against trusting people, I say, awkwardly. Krishnan thinks about it for a moment.

“That does exist in Frank. His worldview is that people are not to be trusted, so he’s almost waiting for it to happen. All the little decisions he makes contribute to it. That is a pattern Frank has to shift, and in the end it’s proved, it was right to trust,” says Krishnan. “Frank couldn’t have continued to live the way he lived when he met Lynette. Yes, he did have to go through a lot of pain, but there was a lot that shifted in that pain and it opened him up.”

Frank suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) from being a soldier in Northern Ireland, and this was a key point of connection for Krishnan. A former doctor, Krishnan was in Thailand during the 2004 tsunami, and her experiences of helping in the aftermath of the crisis led to her developing PTSD.

“It was a very powerful experience,” says Krishnan, who received counselling after returning to the UK. “I wanted to find a way to creatively express those experiences in a way that could touch an audience. I think it’s hard to understand PTSD when you haven’t experienced it yourself.”

Before becoming a filmmaker, Krishnan worked as an A&E doctor - not exactly a typical route for budding creative types. Krishnan can trace the idea of a ‘detour’ back to school: “All the way through school I’d write plays and stories, reading them out in the playground. I assumed I was going to become a writer, but my English teacher said I should go do and do something different first.”

While the path to filmmaking wasn’t a conscious choice, Krishnan has no regrets about hanging up her white coat: “That’s fine, because I learned so much from it, it’s amazing.” It must have been great to have a job where you got to help people, I suggest, but Krishnan shakes her head: “Medicine isn’t all running around saving lives, sometimes it feels like its mainly banging your head against a bureaucratic wall!” She laughs. “I’m not sure to what degree doctors actually feel they’re making a difference.“

And as a filmmaker, does she feel like she’s making a difference now? Krishnan thinks about it for a moment: “I would hope so. It is my intention. Maybe not? I don’t know. All I can do is try.”

Krishnan still has dreams where she’s a doctor, but her heart belongs to film now. “It’s about that moment when we’re on set, and the actors are releasing powerful, in-the-moment performances. I can see it in the monitor and I can hear it in the headset and I can feel that electricity that means we’re getting something powerful. That’s the best feeling.” Krishnan pauses, she seems to have drifted off somewhere. “When making a film there will be a moment when there’s a commitment, you feel it coming from the crew and the cast when everyone knows they are working on something exciting. You really feel the moment when people start to walk through the fire.”

Issue ten is nearly out. It'll be with UK subscribers and independent stockists this week and in WHSmith stores next week. We're waiting for our copies in the office with bated breath and eyeing the subscribers in our twitter feed rather jealously.

This time, we tried our luck bidding for treasures at different auctions, and Olivia Wilson won this suitcase at a lost property auction. There was no treasure at this one, only a family's old holiday clothes and a Spot the Dog book. Liz Seabrook took this portrait of Olivia and her suitcase at Baker Street station.

The wonderful cover portrait is of Renee Lilley, photographed by Dusdin Condren.

Our friends over at Huck magazine have a wonderful little competition going on. You see, they went to interview surfer-artist Thomas Campbell at his Bonny Doon studio in North California, and he gave them two beautiful handmade flowers to giveaway. They are cheery and pretty, and we'd rather like to hang one on our wall to brighten up the day.

To win one of the flowers, send a postcard to: ATT: Ummm... TCOLondon, 71A Leonard Street, London, EC2A 4QS. All bad and boring postcards will be accepted, especially those that feature cats! Don’t forget to include your email address, postal address and phone number on the back and make sure you get it in by June 1st. For more information visit the Huck website. 

For issue nine, we asked five illustrators about the best advice they'd ever had, and this is what they said. All the illustrators involved have interesting and different styles of hand-drawn typography, and you can click their names to browse more of their work.

Ben Javens: "My gran was a very slight woman and she told me that this is what she would do on windy days to stop her from being blown away. Being much bigger than my gran, I’ve not yet felt the need to take her advice."

Mary Kate McDevitt: "This was my grandmother’s advice to my sister and I before we were even old enough to drink. When I take this advice I like to believe I exude the same elegance that my grandmother did."

Anke Weckmann: "This is something my mum used to say to me. Once, when I was quite small, I drew on my face with pens and got a rash all over my body. She continued to say it to me for years whenever I got out my drawing things, even though I wasn’t tempted to draw on my face any longer."

Sarah Abbott: "I tell myself this on an almost daily basis. A cup of tea won’t solve the world’s problems, but it definitely helps the small day-to-day woes. Pass me the kettle."

Sarah Julia Clark: "Moving from house to house, it’s hard to make a room feel your own. As a hoarder of dresses, a friend once suggested I use these to decorate. Ever since, they have had pride position around every new bedroom, sometimes acting as temporary curtains."

If you want a little summer-inflected escapism, Goodbye First Love is a good place to start. It's French director Mia Hansen-Løve's third feature film, and a semi-autobiographical tale of her teenage love affair.

We've got two tickets to giveaway for a screening of Goodbye First Love this Friday, followed by a Q&A session with Mia herself, at the Curzon Soho. Drop a hello to free@ohcomely.co.uk or retweet this link over on Twitter. See you there! 

American Pie’s transmogrification into a cinematic brand (ala National Lampoon) has had the effect of diminishing its cultural reputation, its original qualities drowned out by a series of substandard sequels and tangentially-related spin-offs; dire straight-to-video monstrosities whose only connection to the first film are some inept stabs at raunchiness and the depressing, contractually-obligated figure of Eugene Levy.

From its working title onward ("Untitled Teenage Sex Comedy That Can Be Made For Under $10 Million That Most Readers Will Probably Hate But I Think You Will Love”) American Pie was a witty, self-aware film. It’s easy to forget, as indeed the straight-to-video spin-offs did, that beneath the gross-out comedy was a disarmingly sweet story. The film understood that its protagonists’ abortive attempts to lose their virginities had little to do with their libidos and was instead an expression of their fear of leaving their comfortable adolescences behind for an adult world. As such, it treated the characters’ journeys with a surprising amount of sensitivity: it embarrassed them freely, of course, but was never cruel.

The film’s third (or seventh, depending on how you’re counting) sequel, American Pie: Reunion revisits those same characters – now with puffier faces and more facial hair – 13 years after the first film as they prepare for their school reunion. Despite the publicity material touting the return of the original cast to the series, notably missing is the original creative team of screenwriter Adam Herz and directors Paul and Chris Weitz. Their absence is sorely felt: the film misses an opportunity to genuinely explore the disappointments and pleasures of adulthood with the same perceptiveness that the original explored the end of adolescence, something that would have been greatly helped by the fact that the actors’ subsequent careers have largely unimpressed, despite their youthful promise.

A scene mid-way through the film illuminates this: the central characters, having met up ahead of the reunion, decide to head to the romantic lakeside which they remember from their school days. They arrive to find a party already in progress, populated by the current high school students. Crestfallen, they realise that they’re no longer welcome. They’ve had all the formative experiences at the lakeside that they’re ever going to get, replaced in their own youth by the teenagers who have followed them. A significant part of their youth has left without them noticing, never to return.

It’s a melancholic, very real moment, or at least it would be if it wasn’t immediately followed by the characters heading to the lakeside anyway, feeling in no way awkward about being thirtysomethings at a teenage party. The teenagers at the party all look like models and act like sexpots, which could be a comment on what youth looks like to those on the outside of it, but is probably just bad writing: outside of the returning characters, who at least have two dimensions to cling to, everyone else is frustratingly one-note. The world of American Pie: Reuinion is one of shouty bosses, libidinous neighbours, and jerk boyfriends, paper-thin creations whose existence furthers the plot but provides no mystery about where anything is heading. The returning characters don’t fare much better: each one is given a single issue revolving around their advancing age, which they must deal with in the most straightforward, obvious way possible, preferably culminating in a climactic sex scene with someone.

Disappointingly, American Reunion has nothing of interest to say about sex, adulthood, aging, or maintaining friendships with people with whom you have a shared history but little else in common any more. If a viewer were to play a drinking game where they had a drink every time a character walked in on another in a compromising situation, it wouldn’t be long before that viewer would need medical attention. This would be all forgivable if the film was funny, but its comedic set pieces are rote and overly familiar. Perhaps the first sequel in the series with the potential to be more than a tired retread, American Reunion ultimately joins the other instalments in having scant reason to exist, and in being destined to mean very little to anyone.

We're quite excited that oh comely's music editor, Dani Lurie, has just launched a club for shy but sociable book-lovers on trains and buses everywhere: The Back Cover Book Club. 

Her idea is to get people chatting on the train with the help of a handy strip of paper. You tuck it outside your reading material with a little sign saying, "Let's talk about this book." You can download a template here.

She says, "The best endorsement for the project came when I took it out into the world for the first time, on the London Undergound, wrapped around one of my favourite novels. After a couple of tube stops, the man sitting across from me smiled. 'That's a good book,' he said. 'It's great, isn't it?' I replied, and we both nodded as we continued our journeys."

If you give it a go, don't forget to let Dani know or post a pic on the Flickr pool.

The Muppets of Sesame Street were each specifically designed to embody a different teachable issue: Bert and Ernie show how friendship can endure despite differences; Oscar the Grouch teaches children how to react when someone shows positive and negative emotions; and Big Bird represents curiosity about an adult world that one is not quite able to understand yet.

Fashions changed, the curriculum evolved, and a few humans came and went, but other than that Sesame Street has otherwise remained largely the same show as it was when it debuted in 1969, until the arrival of puppeteer Kevin Clash and the attendant ascendency of Elmo in the 1980s and 1990s.

Photo: Elmo and Kevin Clash in BEING ELMO, a Submarine Deluxe release. Photo courtesy of Scott McDermott.

The reason for Elmo’s phenomenal success was simple: Elmo embodies indiscriminate, fullhearted love. As narrator Whoopi Goldberg points out in Constance Mark’s new documentary Being Elmo: A Puppeteer’s Journey, Elmo needs people, and that’s why they love him in return. His popularity has risen to the point where he has become the star of the programme, despite his inauspicious beginnings as a caveman-like Muppet that no-one could figure out how to perform successfully.

Photo: Kevin Clash and Elmo in BEING ELMO, a Submarine Deluxe release. Photo courtesy of Submarine Deluxe.

Being Elmo examines the popularity of Elmo as a character, but its main focus is squarely on Elmo’s performer, Kevin Clash, and his journey from being a child enchanted by Sesame Street to becoming the show’s “Muppet Captain”. Indeed, if Being Elmo has a problem at all it’s that the journey of the title is relatively straightforward: Kevin grew up in a poor but supportive family, was teased a little for his passion but people largely understood that he was special, and he worked solidly as a puppeteer from high school through to the point that he finally realised his dream of joining Sesame Street and then his breakthrough moment when he created the modern version of Elmo.

It’s certainly inspirational to see Kevin’s journey, and it would be almost impossible to come away from the film without developing admiration and respect for him, but there’s not much else to it: Kevin wants to become a puppeteer, and due to his talent and dedication is able to do so. That’s the entire narrative.

Kevin is an undoubtedly talented, hard-working, soulful person, but there are other layers to him that Being Elmo doesn’t fully engage with. There’s a more interesting, slightly underexplored thread about how he began to miss out on his daughter’s upbringing due to his commitment to performing Elmo for other children, but it’s largely brushed over in favour of footage of Kevin teaching new puppeteers and cheering up terminally ill children (both of which are compelling and inspiring, of course).

Photo: Kevin Clash (1975) from BEING ELMO, a Submarine Deluxe release. Photo courtesy of Kevin Clash.

The most memorable scene of the documentary is his daughter’s 16th birthday party: Kevin watches his daughter watch a video he made for her filled with birthday wishes from her favourite celebrities. At the end of the video is a message from Elmo, telling her that Elmo loves her. Kevin cries as the Muppet says the things that he couldn’t say in person. The love that Elmo expresses so freely – the quality has made him so popular – is love that Kevin himself can only properly express through a puppet. It’s a deeply sad moment, and one that says more about the documentary’s subject than any number adulatory talking heads ever could.

Photo: Kevin Clash training a French Puppeteer with the puppet “Griotte” in BEING ELMO, a Submarine Deluxe release. Photo courtesy of Submarine Deluxe.

Marks, whose husband James Miller (the film’s cinematographer) worked on Sesame Street for several years before making the film, clearly came to Being Elmo wanting to celebrate Kevin Clash and his life, and the film does this so successfully that it’s hard to begrudge her for that. Despite its unrealised potential to go a little deeper into Kevin’s mindset, it would be churlish to hold that against what is a charming and lovely documentary about a charming and lovely man: for anyone who not only adores Muppets but also what they represent – joyfulness and community – Being Elmo is a treat.