Review of 'Paper Towns'

Like the high school noire film 'Brick', but without the plot complexity, the clever cinematography, the drugs, the intrigue...in fact, just a regular US high school rom-com, with a bit of mystery because the most popular girl in the school disappears, but not all that much mystery really because she's always been a bit wild and dark. Mainly a buddy movie about the two male friends who help our hero to look for her, and the relationship between the three boys. Watchable, but not immensely so.

Review of 'The Wolfpack'

Possibly the weirdest film I have ever seen, and I have seen some weird ones. This is shot and edited with all the visual sense of a family home movie. That's not surprising, since a lot of it appears to be found footage from the family's home movies. Watching it made Ruth feel physically sick as a result of all the handheld camera work and hosepipe pans. Youtube does a better job of stabilising video footage than has been done here.

That's part of the point, of course. This is supposed to look un-mediated, to enhance its authenticity. It is a documentary about a family of six children (now young adults) and their parents who grow up in a tiny apartment in New York city, with the children never ever leaving the apartment. They have grown up with almost no contact with the outside world - they are home educated, so they've not been to school or met other children...or anyone. Their knowledge of the outside world comes mainly from their DVD collection, which contains a lot of classics and quite a lot of horror or near-horror (like Reservoir Dogs). Their father, a South American man, has kept the family shut up in this way to protect them from the corrosive effects of contemporary culture, drugs, violence etc.

So they've grown up with Tarantino as their window on the world. The mother and father met when she was a hippy tourists, and they'd planned to move to Scandinavia where they thought the values were sound, but somehow they'd not made it and ended up stranded in the Lower East Side, high up in a housing project. No TV, no internet, just the DVDs. The children (five boys, one girl, all with Hindu names and long hair down to the base of their spines) amuse themselves by re-making the films with a home video camera and cardboard props; much of the film contains footage of their re-enactments. They seem to have a huge amount of equipment to help them do this. Later the film shows them emerging from the apartment and going outside for short trips - to the beach, to a forest, to the shops - all of which is a powerful experience for them.

All of them seem quite damaged by the experience, but they are not totally alien to me. I can't help thinking that some of the people I've known over the years who have sought to protect their children from the malign influences of the world have been a bit like this; I recognise some of the feeling in myself. The fact that they'd wanted to move to Scandinavia and thought well of its values somehow marks them out as not entirely insane.

Somehow the young adults came into contact with the woman who made this film, and she is almost present in it. It looks like a student project, and yet it must have had some money and some backing, if only for the post-production and the distribution. I would love to have been at the meeting where this was pitched.

A few notes on Zionism and the Jewishness of Israel

Two separate questions really. The historic status of Zionism, and whether Israel should be ‘the state of the Jewish people’.

On the first one, the story is complicated. Zionism has/had some of the features of a classic (Eastern) European nationalist movement, but it also differed from it in some important ways. I can’t think of another nationalist movement that wasn’t about a people living in its territory, and wanting that people to have self-government on that territory. That in itself makes Zionism problematic. Progressives generally support ‘the right of nations to self-determination’ in the sense that they allow territories to secede. Support for Zionism entails rather more than this basic principle.

The Zionists were also unusually uninterested in the national culture of the people that they represented; they mainly wanted to replace it with another culture which they intended to create. Of course, other kinds of nationalism to some extent ‘invented’ the nation which it championed, but I think Zionism rather took this to an extreme.

Historically, Zionism was a minority movement within the various Jewish communities of Eastern Europe, and even more so in the West. That doesn’t prove that its claim to represent that national movement of the Jews is necessarily wrong, but it is surely relevant. Zionism wasn’t even the only form of Jewish nationalism – there were others, including Territorialism and Sejmism, and the ‘distributed nationalism’ of the various Yiddishist nationalists. Without the sponsorship of the British Empire, and without the holocaust, it would have been an interesting, quirky footnote in Jewish history, like the Garveyites for Black America. There would have been some communities of ‘practical Zionists’ in Palestine, a bit like the Templar communities founded by German Protestants, and they might have survived depending on how an independent Palestine turned out.

And of course, up until the present time most Jews have not been nationalists, and many have argued that the Jews don’t have any national identity apart from citizenship of the countries in which they live. This view was particularly prevalent in Western Europe, where the idea of belong to an ethnos independent of citizenship was not well understood or widely believed in. Believing that ‘national self-determination’ didn’t apply to Jews didn’t make these people anti-semites. That Zionism has been successful in establishing a state doesn’t make them retrospective anti-semites, and therefore it surely doesn’t make anyone who holds this belief now an anti-semite either. It’s just a different view about the applicability of nationalism to the various Jewish communities around the world.

Has Zionism turned out to be a ‘good thing’, in some fair historical balance sheet? It’s possible that Zionism will turn out to have been a good thing for all Jews, or for some Jews. It’s plausible that it won’t, and taking that view doesn’t make someone an anti-semite either.

OK, now the other question. In what sense should Israel be a ‘Jewish State’? Most liberal democracies don’t privilege one ethnic group among their citizens. It’s unusual for the state to record or document individual citizen’s ethnicities. There are some exceptions, usually based on the idea of compensating for or redressing the effect of past discrimination – Australia does something like that as regards Aboriginal people, for example. But in France, and in Italy, the state at least regards everyone with citizenship as French or Italian. Why should Israel be different? Why can’t it accept an ‘Israeli’ national identity and status, irrespective of religion or ethnicity?

This is not an abstract question of tidiness. Ultimately the fate of the Israeli Jews will depend on their ability to make peace with the neighbours. That’s a very tall order, and the Israeli Jews would be foolish to disarm in the hope of this happening. They live in a very rough neighbourhood. It is managing to have plenty of nasty wars without them. The neighbours never wanted them to come, and don’t think they should be there – in the strong sense of ‘should’. Nevertheless, there is no long term future for Israeli Jews, and certainly no democratic future, without it.

I know that there are some Arab nationalists, and some others who are probably not nationalists, who would like all the trappings of Zionism stripped from the state, so that there would be no peculiar ethnic identity in its symbolic representation – changing the words of the Hatikvah, changing the flag, and so on. I can see the tidiness logic of this, but I don’t think it’s very important.

 I do think that legal and institutional discrimination, and segregation and economic disadvantage, for non-Jews in Israel should end. The historic relationship of Israel to the wider Jewish world, and the role of the Zionism movement in bring the state into being, is not sufficient justification for this to continue. Israel will remain a demographically and culturally Jewish country without them, and that’s Jewish enough for me.

Review of 'Mistress America'

A good, funny, quirky comedy that's perhaps a bit shallow, but in a good way. Tracey is having a hard time in her first semester (that's 'term', right?) at university in New York, where she feels patronised as a suburbanite in the big city. She can't make friends, she finds the work hard, she's shut out by the cool literary in-crowd.

Then she meets Brooke, who is the daughter of the widowed man her divorced mother is about to marry. Brooke is cool, interesting, and instantly engaged, engaging and sympathetic. Tracey is fascinated, and wants to join in all of Brooke's projects, but at the same time sees her with a more objective and adult eye than her behaviour suggests. She puts a lightly fictionalized Brooke into a short story she writes...well, I don't have to provide a complete synopsis.

But it's a really enjoyable film, with lots of acute observations, great dialogue, and some very funny situations, without a fart or barf joke in sight.

Review of 'Diary of a teenage girl'

This is a very powerful, and for me, rather disturbing film. It was made more disturbing by watching in the presence of two just-post-teenage girls, who were the daughters of friends from Australia that we thought we'd entertain by taking them to a film; the online reviews all suggested that this would be a comedy. Well, there are a few funny moments, but it's mainly painful to watch a young girl growing up among abusive and dysfunctional adults, having under-sex with her pot-head mother's pot-head boyfriend, giving blow-jobs to strangers she meets in bars because she thinks hookers are cool, and so on.

This is not your conventional coming of age film, and there are few tender and sensitive moments. It's raw and not pleasant - though, perhaps because it's contemporary Hollywood it has an implausible upbeat ending.

Review of ‘What we did on our holiday’

A comedy about dysfunctional families, break-up, ageing, disappointment and death. The poster, which makes it look like a British version of all the 'Vacation in Hell' comedies, is quite misleading. This is quite good actually, with David Tennant playing the dad and Rosamund Pike (rather against type) being a somewhat implausible thirty-something mum with three kids. The Tennant character’s own father is dying at his mansion in the Highlands so the family pretends to be together for one last visit. The three kids are great in an ‘Outnumbered’ sort of way, Tennant plays his usual desperate disorganised role, and Billy Connolly plays himself as the slightly curmudgeonly dad (former famous footballer, heart of gold). Celia Imrie as the social worker is also great.

Small note – can’t get over how weird Rosamund Pike looks when she’s not being glamorous. Not quite as alien-looking as Tilda Swinton, but definitely heading in that direction.

Review of ‘I could never be your woman’

Lame-ish romcom set in Hollywood around a 40-ish TV producer who falls for a younger man. Michelle Pfeiffer plays the producer, and lots of British comedy actors appear – maybe they were a job lot. Touches on some important issues, about the way it’s easy to fake photos, and about relationships between people of different ages, and the denial of ageing – but in a fairly useless and insincere way. Everyone else is fake because they are having work done, but Michele Feiffer is just physically perfect and not heir to any kind of mortality. Lots of philosophical crap about male-female attraction voiced by Tracey Ullman playing the part of Mother Nature. 

You can tell how bad this is by the fact that they clips which play over the credits are not ‘out-takes’ but what the film-makers must have decided are just the best funny bits from the film, repeated. Mainly they weren't that funny the first time and don’t bear repeating.