Review of "The Book of Trespass" by Nick Hayes

A beautiful book in every since; beautifully written, with clarity on the political and historical parts and lovely lyrical prose on the nature writing - and shifting seamlessly between the two without any jarring. And lovely illustrations, because the author also creates graphic novels. 

I couldn't help but get angry when I read it, about the process whereby the aristocracy and their late additions (like the thug Hoogstraten) have seized the whole country for themselves, and locked us out, and how it doesn't have to be that way and isn't in other countries quite nearby - nearby geographically but also economically. 

Review of "It's All Greek To Me" by Charlotte Higgins

I didn't have high expectations of this book - another privileged person with a Classics degree, telling us why what they had learned was really important for the modern world, I thought (see her bio on Wikipedia). And it was mostly like that, though it got a bit better towards the end with some consideration of gay sex in the ancient Greek world. 

My enjoyment was further limited by the terrible physical production of the book, which literally fell to pieces as I read it. Did they save on glue or something like that?

Review of Seaside Special

An interesting, sad film. It's organised around the end-of-the-pier show at Cromer, focusing on the performers and staff, but also some of the other people in the town, including a Tory fisherman. The film is set over the Spring and Summer of 2019, so it's post Brexit referendum, but during the period when it seemed that the political system was coming apart - when the government couldn't get its Brexit arrangements through Parliament. It wraps up with the end of the show and the lead-up to the 2019 election, and I think the chronology of some of that is necessarily a bit tangled.

The subject matter - Brexit, and Englishness - was going to be a bit sad anyway, and it's made worse by some interviews with people who were pro-Remain and didn't bother to vote. But it's sad too because of the characters from the show. They're middling talented, and even that level of non-superstar talent is way better than anything I could aspire to, and their life is precarious and ill-rewarded. The lead singer of the show in particular made me feel sad, because I thought she had a lovely voice and on-stage presence, and it wasn't going to take her anywhere.

And I was made even more sad because one of the performers - a comedian - reminded me very much of a friend of mine, and at the closing credits we learned that he had died since the film was shot. And I walked home in the rain thinking about all that.

I walked home in the rain from the Lansdown Film Club, where I'd watched the film,

Review of "Israelism"

A very good film about how American Jews are socialised into support for Israel and Zionism, and how some young Jews are increasingly taking a stand against the occupation and Israeli racism. 

The politics and personal relations of Jewish critics and opponents of Israel are always very fraught. There's not much trust between tendencies that ought to be allies. Most of us have been called a "self-hating Jew" by someone, and some of us have also been called a "Zionist lackey" by someone else.

Some Jewish critics of Israel think that everything was fine until the Netanyahu government, or the occupation, or...something...and all that is needed is to get back to the good old days of good old Israel, before it unaccountably turned a bit nasty. Others are convinced that Zionism was always not only bad but evil, and that colonialism and racism were baked in from the beginning.

This film somehow manages to avoid all of this, not least by the technique of not having a narrator voice. Its perspective on Jewish angst, on those who support Israel whatever, and those who have shifted from supporters to critics, is to let them speak for themselves, and it works really well.

The film was made before the events of October 2023 and the long Israeli retaliation that followed, and that somehow makes it all the more powerful. I was really taken with the way some of the American Jews talked about their journeys, and the not unsympathetic depiction of just how central identification with Israel is in Jewish communities.

I was particularly pleased (if that's the right word) that the film didn't soft-pedal the existence of real, fascist-inspired Jew-hatred in America. For many Jewish and other antagonists of Israel, the question of antisemitism begins and ends with the false accusations aimed at themselves, so there is little recognition that conspiracy theories about Jews are still very very important to the far right. That's definitely not the case here, though there is some consideration to the way in focusing on criticism of Israel has led American Jewish organisations to take their eye off the real threat from real antisemites.

I was also very moved by Sami Awad's spot in the film, where he talked about his visit to Auschwitz and his understanding that Jewish trauma and fear underlies support for Israel's racism. I've rarely heard Palestinians talk about the Holocaust, except in terms of "why should we have to pay for it?". 

Watched in the Middle Floor at Springhill, via informal distribution.

Review of Killers of the Flower Moon

A gruelling, long but worthwhile film, based on the true story of murders of Osage native Americans in Oklahoma in the 1920 - who became wealthy when oil was discovered on their tribal land. The film is very hard to understand at the beginning - maybe some audiences understand the way that the mineral rights were allocated and valued for the Osage, but I didn't and couldn't follow what was going on for a while. 

The film makes a good job of depicting racist white Americans, who are sometimes engaged with the Osage to various degrees; the chief villain, brilliantly played by Robert De Niro, speaks their language and seems to have some genuine personal relationships alongside deeply racist attitudes about how the Osage must die out and yield their mineral rights to whites. There's a newsreel depiction of the Tulsa race riots of 1921, which will be new to many Americans and others, and there's an affable chapter of the KKK taking part in what looks like the 4th of July parade in the town of Fairfax, where the story is mainly set.

The pace and tone of the film changes throughout, but especially in the final third, with the arrival of FBI agents in the town. The acting, especially by Leonardo DiCaprio, is really good.

We watched this in the Middle Floor at Springhill having obtained it via informal distribution.

Review of "The Lincoln Highway" by Amor Towles

A beautiful gem of a book, with great characters, a clever narrative with twists, and a real feel for the era. It touches on a lot of the issues of the period, but not in a heavy-handed way. Race, traumatised and abandoned veterans, class...

Really lots of characters, all of who get turns at being either a first-person or close-third narrator (and it really matters which, as becomes clear), and that's clever too.

I was actually sad that the end had come, even though it's not a short book.

Review of Good Luck to You, Leo Grande

A surprisingly interesting and thoughtful sex "comedy", though there were few actual laughs. Daryl McCormack plays a suave, cool, kind sex worker who is contracted by a frumpy widow played by Emma Thompson to give her some intimacy and sexual experience - she's not expecting an actual orgasm as she's never had one, not even by herself.

We see their four sessions together, and the development of their relationships with each other and with themselves. It feels a bit like a stage play transferred to the cinema (mainly just the two characters, almost all of it in the same hotel room setting) but is none the worse for that.

Watched on Netflix, natively on our new TV, so no Chromecast.

Review of Blow Up

I had good memories of watching this film, but it doesn't seem to have aged well (though it was probably old by the time I watched it first, I was only eight years old when it came out). London in the Swinging Sixties, a wealthy and successful photographer takes pictures of attractive models and has other wannabee-models throw themselves at him, and then he almost-witnesses a murder in a park; he doesn't see it when he's there taking pictures but it reveals itself when he develops them. And then he tries to find out what happened, and doesn't succeed.

There's a lot of stuff about appearance vs reality, and whether there is reality, which seemed important the first time but now comes across as pretentious rather than interesting. It made me think of The Society of The Spectacle, an anarchist/situationist pamphlet that appeared the year after the film, which also seemed to me to profound and important at one point, and now doesn't. There are some ghastly sex scenes with the implication of coercion (see the poster), and another scene in a London club that is both exploiting and poking fun at the tawdry glamour of the emerging rock scene.

Watched in the Middle Floor at Springhill Common House - I think from an actual DVD, which felt very old-school.

Review of Los Amantes Pasajeros

Dire Almodovar sex comedy, a return to his earlier slapstick form, without much merit. I dozed off almost immediately - despite some sexually explicit scenes which ought to have been at least arousing if not interesting. But they weren't enough to keep me awake, which means it's not easy to summarise the convoluted narrative. 

Basically there's a flight with faulty landing gear, and the passengers in business class are drugged by the camp gay stewards so that they end up having a lot of sex with each other - the passengers in economy are just drugged into a stupor. There's more, but you can read the Wikipedia article if you want a summary.

Watched at Jane's shop in Horns Road, Stroud, as part of an ongoing project to watch all of Almodovar's films. This was the worst one for a while. 

Review of "97 Orchard: An Edible History of Five Immigrant Families in One New York Tenement" by Jane Ziegelman

A nice idea - a history of immigration to the US (and New York's Lower East Side in particular) told through the stories of five families who had all lived in one building at different times; made easier by the fact that the building in question has become the Tenement Museum. 

To my surprise I learned quite a lot, about the different waves of immigrants...I'd thought that I knew most of it, but I was wrong. In particular, I learned how much more assimilation-oriented the German Jews who came in the 1850s were - Jewish cookbooks with recipes for ham, pork and shellfish, and justifications for why oysters were kosher; and I learned about how poor and despised the second wave of Italian immigrants had been, and how they had done the dirtiest jobs and lived in the worst places, and still believed themselves to be culturally superior (or at least superior in terms of food) to the "native" US population.

And lots more too. I read this on kindle, but I think it's going to be bought as a present for various friends.