Review of Number 24

A film about the Norwegian resistance during WW2, with all the familiar themes of betrayal, collaboration, etc. It's a fairly conventional treatment - the resistance are all brave heroes, the collaborators are all monsters. It's not at all like "Black Book", the film about the Dutch resistance, which emphasises the blurred lines between resistance and collaboration.

It's gripping and well made, but not much stayed with me. Ruth on the other hand was overwhelmed by it...maybe I watch more war films than her.

On the other hand, I've just read the Wikipedia article about how collaborators were treated after the war ended, and I can't help thinking that would have made a much more interesting film.

Watched on Netflix.

Review of "The Flaming Corsage" by William Kennedy

I can't remember what happened between me and William Kennedy. I really liked his books, and then I stopped reading them. This has sat on the shelf for twenty years unread. I had a feeling that I'd started it and hadn't liked it, but I don't remember actually doing that.

Anyway I read it, and it was great. It's set in Albany around the beginning of the C20th, and it tells the story of a talented Irish-descended man who makes it...into the educated, cultured Protestant elite. He ascends from journalism on a local paper to play writing, and he marries into wealth and privilege too. There's lots about sex, and relations between rich and poor, Catholic and Protestants, men and women. The plot is quite complex...towards the end I lost it a bit, even though I was still enjoying it. It's quite a complex narrative structure too, with some switches of time-period and of narrative form...some "found" material, including fragments of the character's plays, reviews and newspaper articles, and so on.

Anyway great, and good to have rediscovered Kennedy.

Review of "Trumpet" by Jackie Kay

A striking book about a Jazz trumpeter, told through the eyes of the people who are affected by the trumpeter's death...The trumpeter presented as a man, but was actually a woman. His "wife" (were they legally married?) knew, and loved them all the same; but the son did not know, until told by the undertaker, who also had had no previous warning until he begins to prepare the body. The trumpeter's mother, still alive in a care home in Scotland, does not know that her daughter who left home but still writes to her, has spent a life as a man. There's a horrible tabloid reporter after a story, who seduces the son in an effort to get an inside track. 

It sounds creepy, but it's sort of beautiful. There's not a lot about trumpet playing, but it's enough of the story to be of interest to me as a trumpet aspirer.

Review of I am a noise

Fantastic biopic of Joan Baez. I wanted to watch this because I'd just watched "A Complete Unknown", about Bob Dylan, in which Joan Baez is just one of several women that he has brief relationships with. 

I was expecting another music biopic, but it turned out to be a heart-rending documentary about Baez's really quite sad life - broken relationships with friends, family and lovers, and mental illness. This is clearly someone who talent (extending beyond music, her drawing is really good too) and success have not made at all happy. And this despite a genuine commitment to political struggle, that gave her a sense of purpose, but still didn't make up for the sadness that has haunted her since childhood.

I was struck also by the talent of her less well known sister, Mimi Farina, who lost the lover of her life at 21 and died of cancer at 56 - Mimi is responsible for the tune of "Bread and Roses", one of my favourites.

Watching the footage of her and Dylan singing at the March on Washington in 1963 it's hard not to be affected by the hope that's present in that huge multiracial crowd, and also hard not to feel that the hope was betrayed - look at America now.

Review of To Leslie

Decent film about alcoholism. The eponymous Leslie is broken by drink and can't hold anything together, but she finds life and meaning at an out of town motel where she takes up residence, and a job cleaning. To her (and our) surprise the manager gives her one chance after another as she repeatedly fucks up. We gradually learn his back story as well as hers. Yeah, this is one is described as "heartwarming" but there's a lot of pain to go through before you get to that.

Review of "Orbital" by Samantha Harvey

A beautiful gem of a book...very short, barely even a novella, but I couldn't read it quickly because it was so beautiful. It's set in the International Space Station, more or less as it is now, though there's another moon mission in progress - the only thing in the book that makes it speculative fiction rather than just naturalistic fiction. 

It describes the back stories and inner lives of the occupants - Russians, Americans, Japanese - but also their sensuous experiences of the space station, and the physical sensations of being in weightless, and the impact on time perception of living through so many dawns in each 24 hour period. 

So well done, it's hard to believe that she hasn't been there.

And of course it's also about Earth, and what it looks like from the space station (humans largely invisible except at night), and there's the tiniest brush with climate turmoil - bigger, more unpredictable storms, changing seasons on the ground.

Review of "The Axeman's Jazz" by Ray Celestin

Nicely paced historical thriller/crime novel, set in an atmospheric New Orleans in the early 20th century, with lots of Jazz (one of the protagonists is a young Lewis Armstrong, not yet Louis) and sleaze and graft. A narrative that swaps between viewpoints - it's "close third" person narrative but the person swaps around, and it's well done. Actually based on a true story, so sprinkled with occasional genuine newspaper articles.

I hadn't previously heard of Ray Celestin, who doesn't seem to have written any other novels, but I will keep an eye out for him.

Review of "How Novels Work" by John Mullan

Nice, serious but not academic book about literature. Focused on slightly more serious fiction rather than the most popular stuff - so David Lodge and John le Carre are in, Bridget Jones and Katie Fforde are out. Well-written essays on structure, literary devices, narrative person and so on, without too much technical language and plenty of explication. Lots of stuff worth reading (and stealing) for aspiring authors!

Eulogy for my Mum Sylvia Green

 My Mum Sylvia Green died on the night of 2nd February 2025. This is what I said at her funeral.

Most of us knew Sylvia as an exemplar home-maker - a wife, mother, grandmother, and of course daughter. She fulfilled all of these roles to the max, and though she didn't really think men and boys needed to know how to cook, she did manage to teach me most of what I know about that.

And she was a transmitter of Jewish culture too, in language and home ritual and family stories, and of course food. Most of what is important to me about my Jewish identity is what came to me from my Mum.

But though she would have been the last to say so, she was also an intellectual. She loved books, and theatre and film. She would tell me the story of a film that she had seen, and it was like I'd seen it myself. She was a wonderful story-teller. 

This was despite the fact that she'd had almost no formal education at all. Her school life wad disrupted by the war. She stopped school at nine years old when the family moved to Brighton to escape the Blitz, and she never really went back. 

Her psyche was shaped by the war. She told me stories of the terror of nights spent in air raid shelters, of coming in the morning to find familiar buildings gone or in smoking ruins. Her rather was a registered alien, never naturalised as British. He had to report weekly to a police station. And he was never naturalised because of what happened to his own father, deported to Russia during WW1 for refusing to be conscripted in to the British army.

All of that shapes a person. My mum struggled for years with depression. Most of that struggle took place inside her. She never let it impact on how she behaved towards others. Mum was always in motion, always doing things for other people. Even when I visited her in the care home where she sat wheelchair bound, she was offering to go and make me a meal.

She was resilient and brave. When Louis was born in Sydney, she got on a plane, by herself, even though she had never spent a minute abroad without Dad before. She took a courier flight to Australia via Tokyo, and she told us how she'd left the hotel to go for a walk in a city where she spoke not one word of the language and could not read the street signs. 

Although it was Dad who told the stories of his activist past, Mum had her involvement too. She was probably the only person who took part in the 35s Group of Jewish women protesting for the right of Soviet Jews to emigrate and also went to Greenham Common, with Ruth, Minnie, Sharon and Karin to protest against cruise missiles.

And I want everyone to know how much fun she was - not only when she was a lovely booba to our boys, but also when I was little, and we sued to schlep all over London to medical appointments, and we would make up stories about the people we saw in the tube - who was a spy, which one was going to a secret meeting, and so on. 

And that's how I want to remember her, not as she was in her very last years, but how she had been for all the years before.

Post script - thinking of all the things we went through, like her teaching me to drive, and the time we had a front wheel tyre explode on the motorway en route to Manchester and did a 360 skid into the hard shoulder, and me walking round the lake at Valentines Park with her, trying to offer her undergraduate-grade psychotherapy...

Review of Catch and Release

Odd mixture of romcom, slapstick comedy, and tragedy. Young man dies suddenly, and his fiance discovers that he has a secret life, including a possible partner and child in another city.The film explores the woman's developing relationship with the ex-partner's roommates and friends. The klutzy friend delivers the slapstick notes, which really jar with the rest of the narrative. There's also a mean-but-sexy best friend.

Watched on Netflix, and it passed the time. I suspect that there might have been a better, more interesting film in there failing to get out.

Will and Harper

Another trans film (a road trip documentary), and a not very interesting one. Two people who were comedy writers together go on a journey across the US so that they can re-establish their friendship after one of them has become a woman. They wisecrack along in a not very funny way, they visit some awful ugly places, and they eventually arrive at the destination, by which I was sufficiently bored that I don't ever remember where it was. It was...er, heartwarming....all the rednecks that they met along the way were very kind and accepting, and they had no bumps in the road in their own relationship. I'm glad for them that they made it, I'm less glad that I had to watch it.