Review of 'Wild Nights with Emily'

Biopic with jumbled timeline about poet Emily Dickenson...some good knockabout comedy lesbian and straight sex scenes (no actual sex, just a lot of fooling with crinolines), and nicely filmed, but a bit boring if you don't really care about Dickenson or the mid-C19th American literary scene. Few actual wild nights.

Watched on All4.

Review of 'Minari'

Somewhat shapeless and occasionally boring film about Korean immigrants trying to make a life as farmers (and chicken sexers) in rural Arkansas.

It mainly avoids the usual cliches about immigrant life, but doesn't have much to put it their place. It just sort of meanders on, until the moment of redemption when the family comes together at the end.

Recommended by someone as one of the best films of the year, can't see why. Watched via informal distribution, laptop, VLC and Chromecast.

Review of "Don't Look Up"

Everyone is reviewing this and taking positions on it - does it help the climate change movement or not?

Well, it's clever and funny, though often too painful to watch. The Trumpesque White House, the Bezos-like billionaire with his insane plan to mine the comet for resources (and escape ship for when this fails), the trivial talk shows where the scientists try to reach the public...it's all much too true to be enjoyable. It also satirizes pop-star climate activists...Ariana Grande is really great in that role, and perhaps the movement as a whole. And scientists who find it hard to communicate, and liberal media who will speak truth to power if it works for their click-throughs...

I didn't need a happy ending, but I didn't find anything to take from it except despair. I wasn't comforted by the stoical and even religious way that the main characters end up facing the impending destruction of the planet. I'm also a bit miffed that whenever Hollywod tries to dramatize climate change, it has to dramatize it...making the disaster into a sudden catastrophic event where we all go together when we go, rather that a boiling-the-frog process that will eventually kill everyone, but will kill poor and brown people first. It's much harder to represent the latter, and the fact that Hollywood doesn't try makes it harder to get that across.

Watched on Netflix.

Review of 'The Spy Who Dumped Me'

Much more fun that I was expecting! Some of the reviews complain that the film tries to cross too many genres...spy movie, thriller, romcom, buddy movie...but actually it makes a good job of this. The action scenes are better than the ones in James Bond films, the plot is a bit shaky but no worse than other spy/terrorist-baddies films. I was reminded of 'Salting the Battlefield', only this is way better and makes more sense. And unlike other Americans-go-to-Europe films, it has chosen some good locations and filmed them well. I especially liked the opening scenes in a junk market in Lithuania, and it really made me want to go there.

Watched on All4.

Review of 'Carousel'

Rogers and Hammerstein's second musical together, and I don't remember any of the songs from this, except 'June is Bustin Out All Over' and 'You'll Never Walk Alone' - the latter is sung twice, near the end and then right at the end. It's a 'dead person allowed to come back to Earth for one day' sort of story, with most of the time spent on the backstory of the dead man - note that the frame for this is a sort of heaven, but without any religious trappings...the deceased spend their time polishing stars, and the whole place is presided over by a bureaucrat called The Starkeeper.

There are some tremendous dance numbers with better dancing than I remember from lots of Hollywood musicals. I looked up the background on Wikipedia, and it turns out that it's lifted from a Hungarian original set in Budapest, which is interesting in itself. It's set in Maine - perhaps if I was American I'd recognise the accents, which seemed a bit odd.

Rather spoiled by the last five minutes of the final return-to-Earth sequence, in which the male lead lashes out in anger at his now 15-year-old daughter. Later she tells her mother (the dead man's sweetheart and wife) that she felt the hit but that it didn't hurt, and the mother says dreamily that if someone who you love hits you it doesn't hurt. From early we know that he beat his wife - whenever anyone accuses him of beating her he belittles it and says 'hit', with the implication that it only happened once. If that isn't a justification and romanticisation of male violence and abuse against women, then I don't know what it is.

Chatting afterwards I realised how many carousel scenes there are in films!

Watched on BBC iPlayer.

Review of 'The Unforgiveable'

Really good emotional film about children separated from their birth sibling by adoption, and coming out of prison, and also being working class in America. Sandra Bullock is really good as a woman who comes out of prison and tries to reunite with her baby sister, to whom she has written for years but never received any reply. Lots about trauma, that rings true from my reading about this subject at the moment.

Resisting spoilers, but it's a long but good film.

Set in a grim looking Seattle - I think I remember some of the grimmer places from my work trip there, when I spent a lot of time walking around, and realised that it's a very small place. Didn't notice then that the street signs were in English and Chinese - perhaps they weren't then.

Watched on Netflix.

Review of 'Desperately Seeking Susan'

The 1980s film where Rosanna Arquette plays a bored suburban housewife (yes, that's what she calls herself, and how the blurb describes her) who follows the rendezvous of wild-at-heart urban coolster Madonna and her punk musician boyfriend Jim, who stay in touch with each other via personal ads in the New York Mirror.

The film seems to be from a world not unlike our own, but sits on the other side of the pre-internet chasm. There is no internet, no mobile phones (just great big chunky corded ones, and payphones, and answering machines)...and personal columns in local newspapers, in which people place ads in person, by filling in paper forms and handing over cash.

I note in passing that Rosanna Arquette won the award for 'best supporting actress' for this, even though she is the central character...it's her story, and she's on screen much more than Madonna, who barely acts. But hey ho, Hollywood. Just remember that if you are tempted to take any interest in the awards. I note also that Rosanna Arquette doesn't really act very well, and that she was never in much else.

Watched on BBC iPlayer via Chromecast and smartphone app.

Review of 'Trance'

Creepy and quite violent thriller, but well plotted and filmed - well, Danny Boyle, it's going to be good, isn't it? Hypnosis, false and unreliable memories, and so on. Set in London, but few recognisable establishing shots...I think I caught a glimpse of a familiar building once. Lots and lots of interiors with very shiny surfaces and moody lighting, and shots through narrow gaps. 

Watched on All4, which recommended this to us...I think the first time it's done that.

Review of 'Black Orpheus'

I set out to watch this mainly because it's the source of 'Manha Da Carnival', which I sometimes play on the trumpet. The song barely features at all in the film - the Orpheus character sings it once to a couple of small boys who think that his playing makes the sun rise. 

That said, it's a mainly interesting film with a lot about the life of a favela in Rio, and a carnival crew. It includes some reflections on the role of carnival in working-class Brazilian life (as a sort of bread-and-circuses distraction), and on the modernity and otherwise of Brazil...lots of the scenes where modern buildings are presented or used as backdrops are sinister, especially the hospital and morgue to which Orpheus goes to try to rescue Eurydice. 

There's also a powerful depiction of a candomble ceremony.

Watched via informal distribution, laptop and VGA cable - the Chromecast didn't want to play this one and its audio track and subtitles at the same time.

Review of 'The French Dispatch'

Some of Wes Anderson's films are great, and some aren't. This is one of the latter. It's beautiful, and that makes its failure as a film all the more depressing. It's like some beautifully wrapped present with nothing inside the box. It's a collection of stories, tied together through the theme of a fictionalised American magazine and its writers in an imaginary French town. And none of the stories have enough of a plot, or enough engagement with the characters, despite the beautiful cinematography and the good but stylized acting. I'm sure there are lots of clever allusions and homages to the greats of French cinema, but I didn't get them and it wasn't enough for me.

Watched via informal distribution, laptop and Chromecast - VLC quite happy to play this one.

Review of 'Germania' by Simon Winder

Well, I liked this almost as much as Danubia, but not quite. It's beautifully written, and good on some parts of the history, but as it gets closer to the close - which he takes as 1933 - I think it becomes less good. In particular I think he's bad on the shortcomings of Weimar and the defeat of the German revolution at the end of WW1 - having read Sebastian Haffner's "Failure of a revolution: Germany 1918-1919", I can't see the treachery of the Social Democrat leaders the way Winder does. There was a chance, in 1918-19, that the other Germany could run things now, in a way that was utterly diffeent from what the conservatives and the military had done before. And Ebert et al blew it, even with the popular support that they had. 

And once I'd noticed that, I started to notice other things that I didn't like quite so much...it's good the way he emphasises how much of the familiar had just collapsed for so many Germans in the Weimar period, but I think he downplays the continuity with pre-war Germany of the politics of the right (were the Nazis such a break with traditional German politics and culture?) and over-emphasises how much the Nazis stole from the left, so that it's almost as if they were a rogue variant of socialism rather than a traditionalist, business-backed variant of extreme conservatism.

So still lots in there to like, particular about art and architecture, and music and literature, but some things to not like so much.

Review of 'Bad Times at the El Royale'

On the surface a much more conventional crime/mystery/thriller movie, but actually really interesting and multi-layered. I can't stop thinking about this...I'm reading reviews and analysis of the symbolism and other elements in the film. Five strangers check in to a motel on the California-Nevada border in the late 1960s, and we get their backstories as well as a complex plot in which they all become differently entangled.

Lots of references to 1960s cults, politics and fabulous music...BTW, I noticed that in The Rest of Us the daughter is reading 'Helter Skelter', and in this film there's a Manson-like cult. Must just be a coincidence, or a reflection of how deep that runs in the American psyche.

Lots of violence, but it's never comic-book or enjoyable. Hard to say more without spoilers, so really just get this one and watch it.

We watched in on All4 but it's gone from that now, I think

Review of 'The Power of The Dog'

Really powerful, beautiful film - nice to know that there are still some really good ones being made. Atmospheric, menacing without any actual violence, fabulous acting and great cinematography without any gimmicks. Lots about suppressed and not-so-suppressed male homosexuality and toxic masculinity. Now I can't wait to read the book, though I will have to because I have so many other books stacked up waiting to be read.

Just wondering - it's set in 1925 Montana, so Prohibition is in force, but it doesn't actually seem to be. They are serving spirits in the hotel, cocktails at a party with the Governor, and Kirsten Dunst's character is drinking herself to death without a bootlegger in sight. Is that what Prohibition was actually like outside the big cities?

Best film watched on Netflix for years.

Review of 'The Rest of Us'

Quite good Canadian film about...well, it's not that easy to summarize. Successful divorced children's book author discovers that her ex has died suddenly, and then the women for whom he left her is suddenly broke because the now-dead husband was concealing his dire financial situation...and the bitter, broke widow and her sweet young daughter end up moving in with the author and her grumpy disaffected teen daughter.

It's well acted and nicely done, and though you couldn't call it enjoyable in a feel-good sort of way it's compelling enough to watch. Heather Graham has graduated nicely from so-nubile sexpot to still-attractive but fading divorced wife.

Watched on Netflix.

Review of Kick-Ass

Superficially enjoyable, with nods in the direction of liberal sensibilities, but actually a more or less fascist film. Nerdy comic book fan Dave decides that he will live out his fantasy of being a superhero and fighting crime, but despite the suit he's still a nerd so he gets stomped and hospitalised after he tries to take on a pair of thugs. Then he's rescued by a father-and-daughter crime-fighting superhero combo who are much, much better at violence than he is - their whole lives are dedicated to training for violence and the acquisition of weaponry.

There's plot, and teen stuff (his nerdy mates convince the gorgeous girl at school that he's gay, and she wants him for a Gay Best Friend even though she wouldn't look at him before), and lots and lots of violence - real splatter stuff, made slightly easier because it's supposed to be comic-book. But really it's almost snuff-grade, and there are no problems that can't be resolved with the application of sufficient force, violence and weaponry. The film's sympathies are entirely with the use of more and bigger guns, and the more skillful use of them. Our (anti)hero's moment of redemption, when he finally steps into his own power and authority, comes when he uses a really big machine-gun enabled jet-pack.

Oh, and the villains are all caricature Italian-Americans in a way that would be grossly unacceptable if they were say Jews or Chinese.

Watched this on BBC iPlayer.

Review of Human Traffic

There's a lot that's annoying about the film...the sound quality is poor, so that I kept turning the volume up but there's music track playing over a lot of the dialogue. There are annoying 'arty' techniques of characters speaking to the fourth wall and so on, and spoof documentary inserts. 

But it's also sort of likeable. It's a bit like Trainspotting, only with MDMA rather than Heroin at the centre. So the culture and the drug itself is more benevolent - the scene is mainly quite nice with lots of hugging of strangers, and good-looking young people dancing ecstatically (well, obviously). The five young people at the centre of the film are a bit messed up, but mainly in the way that young people are - one is jealous when his girlfriend interacts with other men, one is anxious about his sexual performance, and so on.  

For the most part it doesn't imply that they are messed up because of the drugs, and there's a nice insert from an actual stand-up comedian saying that he used drugs, he enjoyed it, and it didn't mess up his life or his career. But the young peope are all existing rather than thriving, in dead-end jobs or no jobs at all, and not on any ladders - career, property, whatever. There's a strong suggestion, amplified in the long shots over drab Cardiff at the end, that taking drugs and raving is a perfectly sensible response to the grim dullness of everyday life...and the young people seem to mainly understand that it relates to period in their life, and that it's not something that they will do forever.

The most miserable scenes in the film are in the post-party weed smoking session, where everyone is tired, ratty and paranoid. 

Obtained via informal distribution, watched via a USB stick stuck in the back of the smart TV.

Review of 'Danubia' by Simon Winder

I so loved this book, which felt like it had been written just for me. Lots of stuff about architecture, and music, and even regions and nationalities that I'd never heard of. It's by no means mainly about Jews, but there's lots of interesting stuff about them, including an important short passage that situates Zionism in the context of the competing nationalisms of the late C19th Habsburg empire...I knew Herzl was a Viennese Jew, but didn't realise that his family, like Freud's, were from Galicia. 

One thing he doesn't explain is why there are two regions called Galicia in Europe, which at one time were both Habsburg possessions. Turns out it's really just a coincidence. 

I wish I'd read this before I wrote The Girl in The Red Cape - if only because I would have stolen bits from the story of the  1882 Tiszaeszlár blood libel episode and put it in the book. But he's really good on the politics and the aesthetics of the Counter-Reformation too, and it would have been good to have known more about that.

I now want to read all his other books (already on order), and to listen to all the music he mentions, and to visit quite a few of the places in the book too. There were passages that I had to read out loud to Ruth because they were so beautifully written or so funny...how often do you say that about a work of popular history?

Review of Love Hard

A mainly trivial but quite enjoyable (and for once actually quirky) romcom about internet dating and catfishing...which in this film turns out to be OK really because it ends in true love between the catfisher and his victim.

Most memorable for me for the alternate 'less rape-y' version of 'Baby it's cold outside' that the two not-yet-lovers sing as a duet.

Watched on Netflix.

Review of Sunset Boulevard

Another one of those films you think you've seen, but you haven't. 

And really good...about Hollywood, and faded fame and glamour, and inequality, and gender relations, and lots more. Gloria Swanson is brilliant as the faded onet-time star of the silent screen who never made the transition to talkies and a different kind of cinematic acting. She's completely past it, old and over the hill, because she's...fifty.

Eric Von Stroheim is particularly great as her devoted butler and chauffeur, who once had a career as a director but abandoned it to look after her. This is particularly poignant because it's almost his own life story - he had a career as a director but was forced to abandon it because absolutely no-one would work with him.

Watched via informal distribution, and laptop, Chromecast and VLC - working happily again.

Review of 'Some Like It Hot'

 

Can't believe that I've never seen this, but I haven't.

It was more fun than I was expecting...the main joke is that the two main characters are dressed as women (because they are hiding out from prohibition-era mobsters in an all-woman Jazz band), and that no-one notices that they are men. It's done well and doesn't feel daft within the limits of the comedy genre, helped (as others have said) by the period setting. The jokes are mainly anti-sexist rather than sexist...the two men have difficulty walking in heels, and they can't believe how drafty it is wearing women's clothes.

And as soon as they adopt the female gender other men think that they are women and make passes at them.

I quite like the fact that George Raft is sending up his own gangster persona from his other films - another hood does his coin-tossing thing, and Raft's character says "where did you learn that cheap trick?".

And Marilyn Monroe is much more beautiful and sexy than I would have guessed, at the same time as not really being pretty. It's striking the way she absolutely shines on the screen, more than any other character...is it to do with lighting, or was she really that special? Also clear where Debbie Harry got her character tropes from...I sort of knew that, but much more striking seeing it for myself.

Obtained via informal distribution, and watched using VLC/renderer and Chromecast, which is now working well again.

Review of 'Falling for Figaro'

A poor rom-com, short on the rom and on the com. Millie is a fund manager but she dreams of being an opera singer...even though there is absolutely no sign of any other involvement in singing in her life. She's not in a choir or singing group, she doesn't sing with a band, nothing. It's just her dream. Which she then realises by going to a posh conservatoire where one of the tutors recommends her to a faded singing tutor in a remote part of Scotland. The tutor is mean to her - another one of those films, like Whiplash, where talent in developed through abuse and she blossoms into a reasonable successful singer, while developing a fragmentary and unconvincing romance with fellow-pupil Max. 

Another rubbish film on Netflix.

Review of 'The Incredible Jessica James'

Half way through watching this I realised that I'd started watching it before, and given up. I could see why, even though its heart is mainly in the right place...it's feminist, a little bit edgy, features a strong black woman as the lead...it's just a bit boring as a rom-com. Towards the end I was checking my phone quite often.

Watched on Netflix.

Review of "Frozen 2"

We had a little girl visiting us, and and a friend who has decided to watch only Disney films because everything else is so feel-bad, so we watched this. We watched Frozen four years ago (and I wrote a review at the time), and it was much better than I expected. I'm sorry that I can't say the same for this one, even though it was much more self-consciously inspired by good themes - eco-feminism, and anti-colonialism, for starters. 

But it felt much more of a mish-mash, with too many story lines, and too much going on. And I didn't think the music was so good either, though I rather liked the song the Sami-like people sing about half way through. Still visually impressive, with lots of good Sami-inspired graphics, and I suspect that the look of Arendelle is inspired by National Romantic architecture, which I've always liked.

Informal distribution, a USB stick and the new projector in the Springhill Common House.

Review of 'If Beale Street Could Talk'

Based on the James Baldwin novel, and really good, though hard to watch because it's so grim. The acting, the dialogue, the cinematography is all excellent, though I did miss occasional bits of speech.

The poster is very misleading, it's a story about racism, not true love. The love between the two main characters just makes the racism and oppression harder to bear. Impossible to watch without putting yourself in the shoes of the main characters - in my case, particularly the two fathers, knowing that the system of oppression is going to grind your children to powder, and that playing within the rules affords you no chance of coming through with either fortune or dignity intact.

Watched on BBC iPlayer.

Review of Cruella

This was more fun that I expected - I liked the music, the clothes, and wondering where the locations were (some of them weren't anywhere but had been created with CGI, bah!). The acting was sort of camp - especially Emma Thompson as the villain, but I didn't mind. And I'm sure the art directors must have a lot of fun...I was especially pleased to see the packet of Golden Wonder crisps with appropriate packaging. Because of the 1970s setting there was less product placement - no Apple laptops prominently in shot. 

I thought Emma Stone's english accent was perfectly good too.

Watched in the Middle Floor at Springhill, having been obtained by informal distribution. Loaded on to a USB stick, played on the new DVD player which has a USB slot, quality was really good.

Review of New York 2140 by Kim Stanley Robinson

I enjoyed this more than I have his other books - it's not only optimistic and left-wing (don't often go together, do they?) like his other books but also has decent, interesting characters and a few enjoyable plots. The bad guys are a bit vague and not so fully described or defined, but the good characters are likeable and interesting (again, that is not often a common pairing).

And I like the descriptions of future NY - the super-Venice of drowned downtown, the superscrapers with farm floors, the vaporettos and the hydrofoil yachts of the rich, and blimps and sky-villages...beautiful and possible.

Oddly it made interested in the geography of New York, and even made me want to go there, which is not likely to happen.

Review of Palm Springs

Sort of a second-rate, updated version of Groundhog Day, with the time loop theme, but without any of the poignancy or thoughtfulness. This time it's a family wedding in a ghastly Florida resort, and it's not just the main character who has to repeat the day, but also a woman (the bride's wayward sister) who follows him into the cave that is somehow the source of the time loop - and also another man, a grumpy vindictive sort who chases and wounds/kills the main guy, but it doesn't have any consequences since everything is reset whenever any of them goes to sleep.

Just about watchable, and the occasional funny groundhog-esque gag (he knows what's going to happen next so can anticipate it), but not a great film or a great use of time.

Watched on Amazon Prime.

Review of 'Eaten By Lions'

Nice British film about...well, quite a lot really. Two half brothers are brought up by their gran after their parents die in a freak ballooning accident in which they land in a safari park and are eaten by lions. One boy is brown and of Asian origin - his mum had a seaside fling but the dad of the other boy brings him up as his own - and the other brother is disabled. Then the gran dies, and an aunt wants to adopt the white brother but not the brown one, who goes off in search of his biological father. Lots more plot, and lots more issues.

Funny, sad, thoughtful, clever. More films like this please.

Watched on BBC iPlayer.

Review of The Mauritanian

A while ago I watched a documentary about the too-close relationship between Hollywood and the US military...I'd sort of suspected that the military cooperated with movie makers in exchange for help, but I hadn't appreciated the extent or the depth of the involvement...changing story lines even in science fiction films, for example. 

Well, I don't suppose the makers of this film got much cooperation. There are few punches pulled in the depiction of the US military's cruelty and caprice. We see torture and abuse of prisoners, much of it gratituitous, and some of it vile and porn-inspired. And it goes on way past any possible military or intelligence benefit, partly to cover arses and save higher-ups from embarassment. And the Obama administration did not behave better than its predecessors. 

It's a legal drama, with lots of stuff about release of documents, and privilege of counsel and so on, but it's well-made and well acted. I don't want to say more about just how well made because that'll spoil some of the film for anyone who reads it...but this is well worth watching.

Watched on Amazon Prime.

Review of Wild Bill

Gritty London-based crime and family drama, in which a rather deadbeat dad comes out of prison to find his two young sons living a precarious life in a tower-block council flat because their mum has abandoned them and moved to Spain with a new boyfriend. The dad is a hard man - the wild Bill of the title - but not much good for or at anything else, though he's not really a bad person. He tries to be a father to the boys, but they've been managing without him and are more than a little suspicious, except that they need him to pretend to be around or they'll be taken into care and split up.

There's a lot in this film, including the way that the authorities - even the ones that we think of as the good ones, like local authority social workers - manage the underclass. And the way that drug dealing looks like an attractive career option to kids with no other prospects. And how hard it is for ex-cons to move beyond their old circles when they come out.

It's from 2011, and the construction of the Olympic Village (where the older boy is working, illegally because he's too young) sets it at a precise moment in time. So does the mum going off to Spain, which couldn't happen post-Brexit. In every other respect it looks bang up to date...nothing else seems to make it dated, not the clothes or the phones.

Watched on Amazon Prime.

Review of "People Places Things"

Quite nice film about a NZ man living in NY, in the process of separating from his partner and mother of his cute twin daughters, and trying to be a good dad despite his catastrophically bad organisation and life skills. Some humour, some poignancy. Absolutely no connection to the play with a very similar name that was harrowing but much, much better.

Watched on Netflix

Review of Salting The Battlefield

A sort of spy/conspiracy thriller that ought to be good, but really isn't. Lots of good actors, directed by David Hare, but a half-assed script and a plot that doesn't really make much sense except in a very general conspiracy sort of way. Ralph Fiennes is the Blair-like PM who has connections to dodgy US financiers and torture networks, and Bill Nighy is a sort of rogue MI5/MI6 agent who is trying to bring him down...but it's not really clear why, or who is pulling the strings behind him. Lots of running across nice-looking locations in Europe, put together in ways that seem OK at the time but don't stand up to much reflection. Dubious politics, in that it's the security services and the press who eventually get rid of the PM, or rather allow him to resign to take a new and better job...there's no actual politics at all, not in Parliament, much less in the streets. 

Watched on Netflix.

Review of 'Victus' by Albert Sánchez Piñol

A surprisingly good novel about the 1714 siege of Barcelona. I set out to read this as background 'research' for the third book in my Ferenc Marlowe series, because it seemed like it would be easier reading than a history of the War of the Spanish Succession. In fact it turned out to be much better than I expected, and I also learned quite enough about the war itself. It starts out in what I think is the picaresque genre, with quite a bit of slapstick and knockabout humour, but gradually becomes more serious. I don't like war stories all that much, but this is well written and emotionally connecting, at the same time providing a lot of detail about the mechanics of the siege and the politics of C18th Catalonia.

Review of “Labour's Antisemitism Crisis: What the Left Got Wrong and How to Learn From It” by David Renton

The last few years have not been fun for a lot of Jewish socialists. No sooner had the Labour Party - which some of us had written off as a vehicle for political change - unexpectedly elected an actual socialist as its leader, than we were deluged with a flood of accusations that the man, who had a long history of involvement in anti-racist struggles, was actually racist towards Jews. 

A series of unfortunate events followed, and the responses to them became factionalised and also poisonous. It seemed almost impossible to assert that there was some truth on both sides of the many arguments - that the left generally, the left in the Labour Party, and the party itself really did have a problem with antisemitism and that at the same time there were unscrupulous people within and outside Labour who were “weaponising” this problem to attack the left in the party and Labour itself. And others who used the opportunity to attack anyone who’d ever tried to criticise Israel or Zionism.

David Renton gives a detailed account of many of the incidents and episodes...the Mear One mural, Naz Shah, Ken Livingstone’s Hitler outburst, Jackie Walker and the slave trade, IHRA definition, the Chakrabarti report, the EHRC investigation and its report...He’s a lawyer by profession, and this is reflected in the detail and also in the sometimes legalistic discussion; he refers to specific elements of anti-discrimination legislation and applies them to what actually occurred.. But despite this he remains resolute that no set of rules and procedures could have saved the day - what was needed, and still is, is a proper political understanding of antisemitism and its place in political culture.

The author is at great pains to be fair to the people he is writing about, and gives them the most sympathetic interpretation possible of what they said or meant to say. He does this with Jackie Walker, with Ken Livingstone, with Chris Williamson...and sometimes it feels like he’s just trying too hard, and that what he ought to be doing is blasting these people for wallowing in the fetid pools on the outskirts of political culture. He does the same with Luciana Berger, the JLM-supporting MP who I never had much time for, and who became a bitter enemy of the left.

He’s mainly kind to Jon Lansman, who emerges as something of a hero from the narrative, and he’s nicer to the JLM than I would have been, even though I know some people who are members and are actually quite decent. He’s even kind to the Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis, treating his thoughts on Corbyn as if they were part of a considered and intellectually coherent commentary.

And he has a sensible, balanced approach to what Zionism means to Palestinians, and what it means to middle-of-the-road British Jews, which is not the same thing at all.

There are some things - inevitably - that don’t make it into the book. The various episodes involving Ken Loach, stretching all the way back to the ‘Perdition’ affair. The way that Corbyn himself, and his supporters, seemed unable to issue any condemnation of antisemitism without immediately adding “and all forms of racism”...a verbal tick which some have compared to the “All Lives Matter” racist response to Black Lives Matter. The often-repeated assertion that “our movement has a proud history” of antiracism, which is both untrue and irrelevant. 

But there is lots more about the present conjuncture...the failures of the Jewish Communal leader in the UK - unlike their American counterparts - to address the antisemitism of the right. The characteristics of the Corbyn moment, including the influx of people who’d never been involved in politics before and the left’s inability to absorb them. The political culture of the left, and the nastiness of online communication and social media in general. And the strangeness of the political culture of the broader ‘movement’, which includes a huge swathe of people who identify with some sort of anti-establishment feeling, manifest this by a willingness to believe in multiple and sometimes contradictory conspiracy theories about ‘the elite’, and are ripe for harvesting by the far right even if they don’t think of themselves as any kind of facist. Anyone who has found themselves in a conversation with an anti-vaxxer, or a believer in 5G conspiracies, will recognise this and welcome Renton’s sensible discussions about what this means for us.

I’ve never met David Renton, though I’ve enjoyed reading his blog posts. We’ve exchanged a few messages via Facebook, mainly me telling him that I’ve appreciated something he’s written. But I wish I’d known him during the period that his book covers; it might have made it easier to live through the misery.

Review of "Caliban and The Witch" by Sylvia Federici

A Stroud Radical Reading Group book. I'm embarrassed to say I'd never heard of Federici before, because she's great. A brilliant Marxist-feminist account of the transition from feudalism to capitalism, and the way that this shaped the different roles of men and women in the total world that capitalism created. One of the great things about it is the focus on the relationship between 'production' - making stuff in what capitalism considers productive industry - and 'reproduction' - all the things that have to go on so that there is labour power to be exploited in that industry...things like food preparation, cleaning, childcare and child-rearing, care for the weak and sick. She argues that under feudalism the distinction between production and reproduction was not so sharp, with much production taking place within the sphere of the household, just like reproduction.

I have to say that there are things that I didn't like so much about the book. I think that she's oddly weak on the actual events and progress of the witch hunts which are one of the main focuses of the book. I'm no expert, but a quick bit of reading about the witch trials in Germany (for example in Trier) suggests a very different picture to the one that she describes - men, and children, executed en masse for witchcraft, prominent intellectuals standing up against the trials (and being executed as a result), men of property falling victim to the witch hunters. It's not at all a matter of old women with knowledge of herbs living on the margins of village society. 

I also suspect that she is not entirely right on the question of whether capitalist forms did, or didn't, develop within the belly of feudalism. She sets herself against this argument, advanced by Braudel, and to make a political point by lots of others including Paul Mason, Kevin Carson, Michel Bauwens and so on...it's an argument that informs others about the possibility of transition to socialism. She emphasises the violence with which capitalism was imposed - enclosures, witch-hunts, and so on, whereas the others emphasise the extent to which capitalist relations emerged without an 'overthrow' of feudalism. And she is keener than orthodox Marxists on the possibility that there might have been another route out of feudalism, one based in the resistance of peasants and townsfolk to their masters. I think that others have also suggested this (Christopher Hill in The World Turned Upside Down, for example). I keep an open mind on this (for all the difference that it makes) but the possibility that it's only capitalism that can develop the forces of production sufficiently to provide a material basis for proper communism doesn't seem to me to be self-evidently wrong.

But it's still a great book, and I want to read more by her.

Review of "We''ll take Manhattan"

OK film about David Bailey and Jean Shrimpton going to New York on Vogue's budget and making themselves famous, despite the best efforts of the Vogue staffers sent to mind them. Really good soundtrack of early 1960s Jazz, nice art direction and clothes and interiors, less good script and everything else.

Weirdly this film triggered a very powerful dream about corporate life, in which - like the David Bailey character in the film - I stood up to corporate bullies and told them that the report that I had written was theirs, and they could do what they wanted with it, but if they removed or watered down my key conclusion they would have to take my name of it...braver than I was in real corporate life, of course. Even more weirdly, my bravery was undermined by a typical piece of dream anxiety, in that I was about to storm out when I realised I couldn't find my overcoat or remember where I'd put it. Everyone had these fabulous blue wool overcoats, and I had one too, only I couldn't remember which cloakroom I'd put it in. I still had the tag, but it didn't provide any clues. Huh...

Watched on Amazon Prime.

Review of Ammonite

Worthy, beautifully filmed, but a bit dull biopic of Mary Anning, the early-Victorian working class fossil hunter who laid the basis for so much paleontology and earth science. Spiced up with a lesbian love story between Anning and her real-life friend Charlotte Murchison, that doesn't seem to figure in any of the biographical material I've read. This is nicely acted, and the way that the relationship is depicted is non-obvious....though I did wonder how Anning, who doesn't seem to have had any sexual involvement before this, seems to know exactly what to do.

Watched on Amazon Prime...the first film we paid for there for a long time.

Review of "Project Hail Mary" by Andy Weir

I sort of liked this...well, I read through 476 pages so it carried me along. It's hard science fiction, with lots of detailed descriptions of how things work, and lots of science...some of which I skimmed. In that it's a lot like Andy Weir's other book, The Martian, which I also sort of liked. 

Basic plot is that an alien virus is eating the sun, and our hero is on the one last desperate effort to find a cure. And he's alone, because the other astronauts died before he awoke from his induced space-travel coma.

No spoilers here, but I felt the end made it worth ploughing through some of the earlier material, and the sentiments and even the politics are mainly good. Not top of my recommend list, but enjoyable all the same.

Review of 'Downsizing'

This starts off as a silly comedy sort of film, like a slightly more grown-up version of "Honey I Shrunk The Kids"...scientists at a Norwegian research institute come up with a way of reducing humans to about five inches (it's an American film...say 12cm?) tall, with the suggestion that this is the answer to the crisis of sustainability - smaller people means less resource consumption and less waste. Soon it becomes a bit of a trend, with communities for small people spring up in several countries. And the main character (Paul), played by Matt Damon, and his wife, are going to become small and thereby become much richer...in a small gated (and netted, to keep out insects) community your money goes much further.

Soon, though, it changes tone. The wife doesn't go through with the process, leaving Paul alone in his new mansion. They divorce, and he ends up obviously lonely in a much smaller apartment. There's a lot about the emptiness of material satisfaction and consumerism, and then suddenly there's class. Not all of the small people are rich...there are poor small people who live outside the gated community, travel in on gritty buses, and do all the rotten jobs. They live in concrete sheds roughly fitted out for smalls...and there was something about the depiction that reminded me of the Torre David in Venezuela. And then - through a sort of friendship with a Vietnamese woman dissident who was shrunk against her will as punishment, and with the Balkan wheeler-dealers who live in the apartment above, Paul rediscovers people and community. 

I won't do turn by turn descriptions of the plot, some of which is a bit contrived, but I thought it was an interesting film with a good message and drive-by touches on a lot more...there's climate change, class, and a postive drug experience. In fact, I've noticed that most depictions of party drugs in contemporary American films seem to be positive (unlike depictions of cocaine, heroin or alcohol)...is this because the film makers known that showing them otherwise would just not be plausible to their target audience, who have grown up with this stuff and know it's mainly OK?

Review of "Why the Germans Do it Better; Notes from a Grown-Up Country"

I grew up British and Jewish, so it was pretty much inevitable that I'd start out not liking Germans. My youthful comic reading was full of war stories...yes, that war, because none of the wars that the British state got involved in after WW2 were deemed fit for comic book depiction. Biggles, Dad's Army, Colditz, Manhunt... 

And as Jews my parents dutifully hated everything German. They particpated unevenly in the long-running and least successful economic boycott in history, the Jewish boycott of post-war Germany. They avoided buying anything German, except when they didn't. My dad bought a German Heinkel bubble car, and as kids we absolutely loved it...no seat belts, a sun roof that we looked out of (by standing on the bench seat) as he drove along. 

My dad was a consistent anti-racist, except that this didn't apply to Germans, who it was OK to hate, especially older ones. Of course this didn't apply to the nice German lesbian who joined his Jewish Judo club, because even in the early 1960s she was aware and ashamed of what her parents had done. And despite his Germanophobia my dad wanted me to learn German at school because it was useful, and I disappointed him by choosing Latin because the teacher was cooler (wrong choice).

And then, in Israel, I met young German volunteers, and they were great. By then I'd grown out of being anti-German, but I sort of knew about the extent to which West Germany was still run by hastily polished-up ex-Nazis. Of course my new German friends knew this too. And they were really nice to be with, straightforward and decent in a way that English people wanted to be, but often weren't.

And then later I worked for German clients, and alongside German professionals, and they were always great too; honest, straightforward, well-organised. Meetings with Germans started on time, finished on time, and had proper notes and minutes. People stuck to the agenda and didn't have side conversations. When German clients asked for something that I explained couldn't be done in the way that they wanted it, they entered into a discussion about what could be done instead - they didn't treat it as the first stage in a negotiation about price. 

So when John Kampfner subtitles his book 'notes from a grown-up country' I get it. Not all Germans are great or grown-up, but it seems to be the default. 

That said, the book was a bit of a disappointment. There's lots in it about contemporary Germany, but I felt it was more about how much better the Germans are than about why they are. There are little bits about the legacy of history, and the education system, and so on, but it never seems to add up to a sustained hypothesis. Not enough about a culture of trust, and solidarity, and an attitude to authority and rules that is pretty much the opposite of that in the UK...where we are at once supine in the face of posh-boy class superiority and distrustful of authority, particularly that of experts. 

Review of "The Awakening of Motti Wolkenbruch"

Pretty dire film about a young orthodox Jew living in Zurich, full of cliches and stereotypes, and rather misognistic in its depiction of Jewish, non-Jewish and Israeli women. Motti is the last unmarried son of his parents, and his mother is desperate to get him married off, but he's not attracted to any of the dull ugly orthodox candidates that they find for him. Instead he ends up falling for a young woman in his economics class at the university (why is he studying there when he comes from such an orthodox background?) and they develop a relationship. There's a short interlude in a fantasized hedonistic Israel, where he is sent to find a bride but instead loses his virginity in a casual fuck with a beautiful, cool Israeli woman. 

He rejects his community and his heritage, brings his "shiksa" (there's no engagement with just how horrible that word is) home to meet his parents, and then is thrown out by his mother. Oh and there's a dying orthodox older woman with clairvoyant tarot-reading powers...reallly, it's just rubbish. Time wasted, slightly mitigated by some nice shots of Zurich.

Review of 'Dancing in the Streets: AHistory of Collective Joy' by Barbara Ehrenreich

As someone who has relatively recently discovered the joy of dancing (for years I was too self-conscious to really engage) I liked this book. I think I sort of knew a lot of it, including the efforts to suppress, or occasionally co-opt, collective expressions of joy by Church and State...but it was good to have it all in one place. Nice to have something of an explanation for why we enjoy it...because it helps to enable us to form groups larger than our immediate kin, and those who did enjoy it would have had an evolutionary advantage. Surprisingly little about chemical enhancements that make dancing even more enjoyable and help bring us nearer to that feeling of connection...she rather dismisses that as an ersatz experience and perhaps also recent innovation, which I think is rather unfair. But that's a quibble, it's a nice book.

Review of "Zami: A New Spelling of My Name" by Audre Lorde

Shamefully I've never heard of Audre Lorde, even though she is quite famous as a poet and writer, and activist. I hope to read more of her (prose anyway, I don't do that much poetry) because she's a very engaging writer, able to write in an articulate, non-academic way about the way that different kinds of oppression interlock and counter-balance each other. She writes about her life as a Black working class lesbian, and this book covers the period in which she is formed as a writer but before she is one. She writes about work, and racism (at school, college and work) and about the various lesbian tribes and subcultures of 1950s New York. 

She's brilliant at depicting the latter, and in bringing the city to life as it was at a very special moment of its history, when it was still possible to live as a bohemian (bourgeois or other) in Manhattan. I wish I'd read it with a map, and it would be great to have a 'virtual walking tour' of the New York she is writing about.

I note in passing that she obviously moved in Communist Party circles, was involved in the campaign to save the Rosenbergs from execution, relishes the very end of the 1940s as a time of hope, and is excited and enthusiastic about the creation of the State of Israel as a sign of that hope.

There's a lot of material about growing up the children of immigrants that I recognise...she wasn't just Black in New York, she was West Indian, which I think makes for a very different sort of Black experience. It would be good to know more about that.

Review of "Promising Young Woman"

Good enough thriller-drama about a not-so-young woman taking revenge on men in general, and some specific men (and women) who were involved in the rape of her best friend while at college. Lots of tension, plot twists, and some well constructed scenes. Some of the twists were visible before they arrived, but it works well as a film, and is a good one for bringing up the issues involved in the way men behave...especially the 'nice' ones.

Informal distribution, VLC on laptop and Chromecast - working again at the moment. Sometimes there's now sound but not on this one.

Review of Fatherhood

Sort of OK film about a man whose wife dies soon after childbirth, and ends up bringing up his daughter himself as a single dad. Mainly positioned as a comedy, but with lots of poignant moments. The most remarkable thing is that the dad is a black guy working in the tech industry in Boston (though the family are from Minnesota, and his mother and mother-in-law keep suggesting that he moves back there), and there's no racism at all in his experience. His white boss and white colleagues are mainly just great to him, and there is never any suggestion at all that anyone sees him as a black man. Oh, and in the way that seems to be really common in Hollywood movies, he seems to be much richer (and work much less) than would really be compatible with his job...it's not clear exactly what he does in what seems to be a CAD company, but he does give a few presentations.

Watched on Netflix.

Review of 'The Overstory' by Richard Powers

Very effective and moving novel, about trees. Reminded me a lot of Barkskins, partly because of the subject matter (which also focuses on the clearance of forests from North America) but also the structure, and the feeling. I didn't learn all that much that I hadn't previously heard about trees, but it did affect the way that I felt about them...I have much more respect for the HS2 protestors than I did before, for example. And I think it changed the way I thought and felt about people too, including the people who are wedded to the existing way of doing things, who have jobs in logging or in enforcement of property rights. I'd like to read more by Richard Powers, who on the strength of this is a very good writer.

Review of 'Promised Land' (2002)

Came across this pretty much by accident while looking for the other 'Promised Land' with Matt Damon and Frances McDormand. This is a different film altogether, though as with that one the title is ironic. It's in Afrikaans, and set mainly among Afrikaners in the world of immediate post-Apartheid South Africa. The main characters are a farming family in a bleak, dry spot, to which a young man who's been living in London returns after the death of his mother. 

It's creepy, and violent, and a bit cliched ("You don't understand our ways, you don't belong here any more"), but not without interest. Apparently it's based on an award winning novel. A curiosity is that it features Yvonne van den Bergh, an Afrikaner actor who went on to become a big thing in South African TV before outing herself as a dominatrix and then going all out into porn. It's supposed to be the other way round, isn't it?

Whole film was available on YouTube.

Review of "The Forty Year Old Version"

A nice, feelgood film about a middle-aged black woman living in Brooklyn who teaches theatre to kids but also aspires to be a playwright. She'd been tipped as a rising star but hasn't delivered on the promise...and now she has a chance to have her play produced, only she has to deal with manipulative and duplicitious financial backers and so on, who want her to change the focus, and wiggle around her wish for a black director, and so on. So it's about artists, and compromise, but it's also about being 40 (hence the title, a play on 'The 40 Year Old Virgin' film title, and wanting to be cool - she has a go at rapping in a club - but, well, forty...

Enjoyable to watch, nice acting, well observed. A rare good film from Netflix.

Review of "The Great Indian Kitchen"

Really good film, though somehow describing it makes it sound dreary and dull. Oddly the poster makes it look like it's a Bollywood romance, which much be someone's idea of irony. The film starts with a wedding, but after that there's little romance, though there is some unpleasant sex.

It's about a young Indian woman who marries into a middle-class family in Kerala, and the way that they are everyone else she knows expect to her accept a life of absolute servile drudgery. Interesting on several levels - in some ways her life was not so different from my own mum's. My dad thought of himself as modern and progressive, but helping around the house (let alone doing a share of the housework) was not his thing, and was not something that my mum ever seemed to expect. My mum expected no more of me or my brother, and always seemed at least bemused by the fact that we did housework in our own homes. Still, the men in this film do take it to another level; among her duties is putting toothpaste on her father-in-law's toothbrush. 

Worth noting is that this is a Hindu family - Muslims and even Orthodox Jews are often singled out as the epitome of patriarchal religion, but as the film makes clear Hinduism at least as depicted here has just as many taboos about contact with menstruating women, who are regarded as unclean and to be shunned. And these are middle-class, educated people in progressive Kerala - at one point towards the end of the film the woman walks past a mural of Che Guevara.

Made me realise the extent to which my favourite Indian foods (and most of my favourite foods are Indian) are labour-intensive, and not possible without either the unpaid labour of women or the underpaid labour of restaurant workers.

Watched on Amazon Prime.

Review of "Modern Persuasion"

No redeeming features whatsoever. Wash your hair, wash your eyes with lemon juice, just don't watch this film.