Review of Newsies

A 1992 Disney musical film about the 1899 New York newsboys' strike, recently adapted into a stage musical and now on in London. It's not a great film, and I have already forgotten all the songs, but it's likeable, and it's an actual Disney film and a musical about a strike in which the strikers are the heroes, beating up scabs is celebrated, and the strikers win through calling on working class solidarity. 

Sure, there are some less correct touches - at one point the strikers appear to have decided that physical confrontation with scabs is not a good thing, because it makes them look bad...though if my memory serves me right they then carry on doing it anyway. They also fight with the cops, who are almost always depicted negatively. And there's an intervention by NY Governor Teddy Roosevelt which means that the strike is at least partly won by appeal to the "good" authorities over the bad ones. And the depiction of Joseph Pullitzer verges on the antisemitic, which should be no surprise in a Disney film. And there's some schmaltzy scenes with the hero getting the girl at the end, though I'd have been disappointed if they didn't end up together.

But still, it's a strike movie with strikers as heroes, and with lines like "My dad's got no protection, they don't have a union in his factory." And somebody must have decided that now was a good time to turn it into a stage musical, which is interesting.

Watched via informal distribution and and HDMI cable.

Review of Pinoccio

I was surprisingly touched by this, which doesn't feel entirely like a children's film. It's a bit darker than the Disney Pinoccio, even though I have a memory of finding bits of that really menacing as a child. This is beautiful to look at, with backgrounds that look much more like traditional paintings than CGI landscapes. It's at least partly done with stop-motion puppet animation rather than CGI, and some of the puppets are brilliant to look at.

It's also very much an anti-fascist Pinoccio, set in 1920s and then wartime Italy, with Mussolini posters and fascist slogans on the walls, and a sinister fascist official in the village. It's not a sophisticated critique of fascist ideology or purpose, but at least the bad guys are recognisably historical bad guys rather than just all-purpose tyrants.

It felt to me like there were a few big ideas in there too, like the sweetness of human life coming from the knowledge that we are mortal - Pinoccio is reborn each time he dies, after a brief spell in a gloomy bardo populated with card-playing, Yiddish-inflected rabbits. And there is quite a lot about relations between fathers and sons, which got to me too.

And I noted in passing that one of the places visited by the travelling puppet show to which Pinoccio is seduced is Alessandria, outside Torino...which reminded me of my odd work trip there back in the 1980s, and convinced me that I ought to write up the memory of it.

Watched on Netflix.

Review of "Britt-Marie Was Here"

Dreadful Swedish "comedy drama" about a woman in late middle age (63, please tell me that's late middle age rather than elderly) who finds out that her boring husband is having an affair and leaves him, getting a job as a youth worker in a remote town where she is expected to coach the under-10s football team in a decrepit youth centre. 

It has all the cliches of an "underdog team" is redeemed by engaged coach type film, but someone forgot to write an actual plot. Hard to understand why this was released, it is so bad. Lots of plot elements casually strewn across the narrative as if something wandered across the script taking random shits...the inspiring older sister who dies in a car crash aged 10 and therefore blights the central character's life, the would-be love interest policeman in the remote town, the youth centre is going to be closed down...none of them treated with anything like attention. 

The mainly positive reviews of this film cast doubt on the whole online review system. It's based on a book, part of a series, with the character being recycled from an earlier one in the series. The reviews of this fourth book seem to have been bad, which suggests perhaps that the book reviewing process is not so corrupted.

Watched on BBC iPlayer, and a disgrace to the service.

Review of The Swimmers

 

Really good film about two young Syrian women who flee to Europe via the Istambul-Aegean route...scary scenes of the sea crossing in a deflating rubber boat with a faulty motor, and then having to deal with crooked and violent people smugglers. The two were champion swimmers, and the tale end of the film turns a bit into a sporting triumph movie - the younger one gets to swim in the Rio Olympic games as part of a refugee team, and that's not as interesting as the rest but sort of a come-down from the earlier tension. 

I was struck by how normal the family's Damascus life was - they really were people like us, not insurgents or Islamists, absolutely the opposite. Early in the film the girls are groped by a soldier who stops their bus at a checkpoint, and I wondered whether the family might actually have been regime supporters...not that it matters, and not that everyone either is or isn't, but it might have fleshed out their background.

Anyway, a good film - one of the best I've seen on Netflix for a while.

Review of "Cloud Cuckoo Land" by Anthony Doer

Really great multi-threaded novel, with five very different stories united around an almost-lost ancient greek text, a comic novel about a shepherd who gets turned into a donkey. Some of it's set around the fall of Constatinople, some in our time in Idaho, and some in the distant future aboard an ark-spaceship that has rescued a few people from a dying earth. The writing, the plotting, is all fantastic. Hard to say much more without spoliers, but I'm stunned by how good and clever this...and despite a lot of heaviness it's ultimately redemptive rather than depressing.

And now I have to read his other stuff - can't believe I have waited so long.

Review of Stutz

 

Surprisingly thoughtful and enjoyable black and white documentary movie about a youngish film-maker's relationship with his aging, Parkinson-crippled therapist, the eponymous Stutz. Some odd filming - the set looks like a therapist's room, but it's made clear to us that it's a set, as is also the case with the bedroom to which the therapist sometimes retires.

Two things stayed with me. First, Stutz's insistence that he wanted therapy to give people benefits right away - he doesn't hold to the "worse before it gets better" school of therapy, and he wants to give his patients tips and tricks (he calls them tools)to make them feel better right away - that's why the film-maker loves him so much. Second, he provides a pyramid model of human needs (a bit like the Maslow hierarchy, but simpler). The bottom is the body - you have to be right with your body, so eat well and exercise if you want your mind to be right. Obvious, but it bears saying. The middle is other people - you need to be right in your relationships with others, so fix things - again, obvious but still good. And the top level is yourself, you need to be right with yourself, and - he says - you address that by writing. 

So I started doing the morning pages thing that Ruth used to do with Marcus and Carly years ago, and I write three pages as early in the morning as I can. Just stream of consciousness, no editing or pre-thinking...and it really is amazing.

Review of "The Road to Little Dribbling: More Notes from a Small Island" by Bill Bryson

Mainly lovely, like sitting in a pub listening to Bill Bryson ramble on about things that he just finds interesting, whether they are relevant to the conversation or not. A nice break from darkness and somber stuff, with no underlying message - though a well-expressed hatred of Tories and other kinds of meanness and nastiness. He has a dislike of the National Trust that I find endearing.

His style might get wearing after a while, but I just enjoyed this from end to end.

Review of Skate Kitchen

Relatively easy if not terribly interesting film about a young woman (the script says she's eighteen but she seems younger) who is leading a lonely life in the Long Island suburbs with her divorced mother. But she's into skateboarding, and she discovers the lively and supportive skate girl culture in New York city, and soon she's part of an all-girl skating crew. There are ups and downs, and teen dramas and some drugs, but for once there's not much darkness or sense of impending disaster.

Watched on All 4.

Review of Girl

A Belgian film about a person who is transitioning from boy to girl (they are about sixteen), and also studying at a ballet school. It's a very well made film, and depicts a lot of kind people supporting the young person as they transition - doctors, psychologists, the ballet school, and the father and young brother. But despite all the support it's desperately hard - not everyone is nice, and there are some really painful episodes with the girls at the ballet school. Ballet school itself looks so painful and extreme that I think perhaps it should be banned, along with fox hunting. 

It's really worth reading the Wikipedia article about the film, which gives a lot of the background - it's based on a true story, though that seems to have worked out better than the story depicted in the film.

I note in passing that the family are also transitioning from the French-speaking to the Flemish speaking part of Belgium - they speak French at home to each other but mainly Flemish to everyone else.

It's really painful to watch, and there were some sections that I couldn't watch at all, and I came out exhausted and drained. 

Watched at Lansdown Film Club.

Review of Eagle vs Shark

Hoped I was really going to like this, because it was billed as a comedy and everything else I've watched lately has been dark, even the comedies. But of course it turned out to be mainly sad too - about a loser geek who works in a video game shop and hasn't got over (a) being bullied at school and (b) the fact that his brother, who took his own life, was the favoured son of his father. 

Another loser, a woman who works at a really depressing burger chain and is disliked by all her co-workers, who soon conspire to sack her while pretending that it was a decision by higher management, has a crush on the geek. They start a relationship, have terrible sex, and then she follows his back to his home town so that he can take revenge on the Samoan guy who bullied him at school...who of course has forgotten all about it and is in a wheelchair following an accident.

It's mainly very painful...the geek is a self-deceiving fantasist, not very bright and at once transparently stupid and tragic. The woman is also hopeless and sad, redeemed somewhat by the love of her quite-geeky brother, but the "happy ending" is that she restarts the relationship with the geek, even though he has previously broken off with her to claim that he is in relationship with the better-looking former girlfriend of his dead brother...though of course he never was.

Incidentally I learned that director Taika Waititi, surely NZ’s most famous, was born Taika Cohen, and is “Polynesian Jewish”. 

Review of "The Gustav Sonata" by Rose Tremain

Slightly depressing (but what isn't these days?) novel about a Swiss man growing up unloved by his depressed mother, and the back-story to that, and his relationship with a young apparently-talented Jewish peer who aspires to be a concert pianist. There's a Holocaust dimension, because the first boy's dad was a policeman who falsified documentation to allow fleeing German and Austrian Jewish refugees to stay in Switzerland rather than be deported. He dies not long after the character is born but his disgrace, because his falsification is uncovered, casts a long shadow over the mother and then the son.

Unhappy relationships, mental illness, mediocrity and failure...it's really a bundle of fun. It's beautifully written and captures Switzerland well, and the story carries the reader along - but I do need to read something cheerful or distracting now.

Review of The Worst Person In The World

Norwegian film about a young woman and her relationships. Starts off relatively light and funny, gradually becomes more dark and depressing - not the horror kind, just the misery of everyday life, and the way in which she is acutely depicted as a selfish and manipulative woman - all the more effective because it's not as if she is obviously nasty or uncaring. But her relationships with men are destructive - she's not a femme fatale, she's just easily bored and distracted, and that has horrible consequences for the men who become infatuated with her, because she's attractive and charming.

I note in passing that it's beautifully and cleverly filmed, and that Norway looks great in it, even the city and interior shots. She works in a bookshop, one of her lovers works in a coffee shop, and yet they manage to have a nice apartment. Well, maybe that's fantasy even in Oslo, but it didn't seem so.

Watched at Lansdown Film Club.

Review of "Circe" by Madeline Miller

Enjoyable classical-tale retelling. As far as I knew Circe was only a walk-on part in The Odyssey, though it turns out (thank Wikipedia) that her story has been re-told and embellished for a long time. Madeline Miller demonstrates that there is a point to a classical education, and manages to convey what it's like to be immortal and a god...even the rather weedy sort of god/ess that Circe is. 

Occasionally it felt a bit too long, but the ending made up for that.

Review of Sweetheart

Not the horror-survivalist film with the same name, thank goodness.

From the poster, and the blurb on the iPlayer home page, this looked like it would be a sweet and amusing coming-of-age comedy (it was described as such), but it was actually quite thoughtful but a bit sad. There's a happy ending with a reconciliation/redemption at the end, but along the way it's really challenging. Young lesbian teen on holiday at a depressing static caravan park with her separated mum, nine-year-old younger sister, and pregnant older sister and the sister's lovely kind and handsome boyfriend, develops a crush on one of the young female lifeguards, and then some fraught stuff about relationships in and out of the family.

Some good acting, and lovely shots of the park and the surrounding seascapes. Worth watching, I just need to see something that's actually funny at the moment.

Review of Who Do You Think I Am

Rather good French film starring Juliet Binoche as a middle-aged academic who has an online affair with a much younger man by assuming a fake identity as a younger woman - she "borrows" pictures and videos from her niece to use in her profile. Lots of plot twists and some really dark moments, and well worth watching. I suspect it's saying something quite interesting about desire and sexuality in the post-internet age.

Watched on BBC iPlayer - another good film there when we couldn't find anything to watch on the paid-for platforms.

Review of After Love

A woman in Dover grieves for the death of her husband, who dies suddenly in the first minutes of the film. She's an English convert to Islam, who has assimilated into her Pakistani husband's life and culture. But she discovers after his death that his work on a cross-channel ferry allowed him to have a second  family in Calais, and that his mistress has a son - her child in the Dover family has died. So she goes to Calais to find them, and is mistaken for a cleaner, and before she can explain she's doing the cleaning as the family prepare to move to another house.

It's painful to watch, but very well done, especially the relationship that develops between the English woman and the French son.

Watched on BBC iPlayer.

Review of The Banshees of Inisherin

 

A film by Martin McDonagh, set in the Arran Islands off the west coast of Ireland during the closing years of the civil war, and featuring some of his favourite actors from his other films, notably Brendan Gleeson. This is almost unbearably dark - it's called a dark comedy, but there aren't many laughs, and they get fewer as the film goes on. 

It's about the developing enmity between two islanders who were formerly close friends, where one of the pair (Brendan Gleeson) decides that the other is dull and a waste of his remaining years, which he could spend composing a piece of music that will give him some immortality. The other, played by Colin Farrell, takes this badly and wants to resume their easy if empty friendship, with increasingly tragic consequences. 

It's a beautiful well-made film, but hard to watch.

Watched at the Vue cinema in Stroud - first visit to an actual cinema for ages!

Review of "The Silence of the Girls" by Pat Barker

Ages since I've read any Pat Barker, and I'd forgotten how great she is. This is a re-telling of the Iliad story, focusing on the bits about Achilles that are the core of the actual Iliad (rather than what we think is in there because of all the other re-tellings), but told from the perspective of Briseis, the Trojan slave-woman prize that is the cause of Achilles's estrangement from the Greek army. 

It's really good. There's a little bit of supernatural stuff to bring it into line with the Iliad  - Achilles meeting his sea-nymph mother, mainly - but it's mainly realistic and gritty, with lots of ghastly depictions of Bronze Age warfare, and no punches pulled about the barbarity of the Greeks when they finally take and sack Troy.

Review of Rafiki

Kenyan film about two young women from different social backgrounds, whose fathers are rival local politicians, who fall in love. A bit slow and even dull in places, but it's great to see the Kenyan settings, and sobering to actually see what it's like being Gay or Lesbian in some places - it's one thing to know intellectually that there are lots of places where it's really lifethreatening to be LGBT, and another to see it depicted.

Watched on All4

Review of "Jews don't count" by David Baddiel

I appreciated (I can't say enjoyed) this much more than I expected to ("Sunday Times Bestseller" on the cover didn't help, because I don't expect the Murdoch press to be a reliable ally against racism, and it rather reinforces the idea that being against antisemitism is the establishment's favourite kind of antiracism).

I've never been a fan of Baddiel's comedy, and I had ingested the criticism of him as having done "blackface" in his comedy act, so how can he possibly have an opinion about racism? But actually he deals with that quite well in the book - he admits that the act was racist, and he apologizes, and asks why that disqualifies him from ever commenting about any other kind of racism. 

And yeah, the book is mainly about antisemitism among progressives - or more accurately, about the failure of progressives to respond to antisemitism, however blatant. And actually having read it has changed my perceptions of stuff that I wouldn't have made a fuss about a few weeks ago - a "Roald Dahl" show at our local theatre venue, because he may have been a Jew-hater, but that doesn't stop him being a posthumous national treasure. A friend who thinks of herself as an anti-racist springing to the defence of Kayne West on social media, because she thinks it's terrible the way the media persecutes Black men. Friends who say Jeremy Corbyn is a nice and sincere man (I'm sure he is, and there is so much about him to admire) so he can't possibly be antisemitic. 

For me there's still too much about Twitter in the book - I just don't engage with it that much, and I will engage lef

Review of "The Convert" by Stefan Hertmans

 

Well written historical novel, set in the eleventh century, about a young Norman aristocratic girl who meets a young Jewish man studying at the yeshivah in Rouen, falls in love and runs away with him to convert to Judaism and marry. It's well told, so that this almost inconceivable event - which is, as explained, based on a true story - feels plausible. There's lots of great detail, especially of the settings in southern France, and later in Egypt.

There's a split narrative going on, with the author describing his own journey across the places in the text and how he comes to write the book. I didn't like that so much, but in the end it turns out to have been more or less indispensable.

The setting in historic Provence reminded me of Langue[dot]doc 1305, which isn't really at all similar, but evoked some of the same feelings, especially from the landscape descriptions. My review of that here.

Review of Skandal: Bringing Down Wirecard

A Netflix-made documentary about a financial fraud centred on the German e-payments company Wirecard, this was quite gripping because of the style, and because of the constant hints we are about to find out what all this was really about - was the Russian FSB involved? 

Really this is a straightforward fraud in which a company inflates its revenues, pretending that it is earning more than it is, in order to push up its share price. Quite a few people notice that there's something dodgy about its accounts, and the short sellers take notice, and so does the Financial Times in London - but the German government and financial regulators continue to defend their hi-tech darling, and the management takes various actions against the FT journalists, some legal, some much less so.

Eventually the auditors EY - under lots of pressure from the FT and others - announce that there is indeed a EUR19bn hole in the accounts, that amount of declared revenue that can't be found. But no-one from EY appears in the film or explains why it took them so long...what is the point of an audit if it doesn't find things like that? What were the company's bankers doing?

The film has to make financial fraud look interesting, so it resorts to some KABOOM style graphic novel frames, and lots of shots of exotic or scary locations. The main point of financial fraud, though, is that there really isn't much to see, which makes a film sort of tricky. Hence the hints that the FSB were involved, and shots of migrant trafficking in Libya and so on - if that's really relevant it's hard to see how.

Review of "Living My Life" by Emma Goldman

I've never read any Emma Goldman before, though I used to read a certain amount of anarchist stuff, and I've returned to it recently via Kevin Carson, who I mainly think is great. This was the book for Stroud Radical Reading Group this month, and though I didn't read all 900 pages in time for the meeting

I got a lot out of it. EG lived through a huge part of the history of the left, in Europe, Russia and America, and she's a great witness - she picks up on little details that other left authors might ignore, like the tea that Kropotkin and his wife served when they visited him in 1920.

The most interesting part for me was the very long chapter about her time in Russia in the early 1920s, which I think has been published as a separate book. It's very painful to read in some places, because contrary to my vague Trotskyish legacy, it's clear that there were some major things wrong with the revolution as early as 1920 - particularly the already-crushing bureaucracy, and the extent of privileges for Communist Party members - extra rations, better accomodation, and so on. 

She's very good at conveying the pain of someone who doesn't want to line up with the enemies of the revolution, but is finding it increasingly hard to be part of. There's a little bit when she meets up with some Jews in the Ukraine, including a Zionist, a Bundist, some rabbis, and the Zionist poet Bialik. She's interested in what they have to say, and doesn't treat it as an opportunity for a polemic. Inspired by this I went and found something that she'd written about Zionism in 1938, which struck me as much more nuanced than I might have expected.

I note in passing that when she's in the Ukraine and southern Russia she is covering much the same territory that my great-grandfather did, and at about the same time.

Review of "The Island of Missing Trees" by Elif Shahak

 

Ruth read this in her book club, and I needed something that wasn't too heavy, so I gave this a go. It's a sort of magical realist novel with a Cyprus context, a pair of lovers across the Greek-Turkish divide, with a split narrative across different time periods. It was quite enjoyable, and it motivated me to read up a bit on the Cyprus conflict, which I thought I knew about. 

In doing so I was reminded how much the history of the island is bound up with the history of Israel and Palestine. The ethnic conflict there, eventually leading to partition, is in some ways a similar story. Also the illegal migrants of the Aliyah Bet were imprisoned on Cyprus, and later Israelis barred from marrying by the rabbis would go there to register a legal marriage which would then be recognised in Israel. And much later some of the Lebanese militias ran their radio stations, and even their cellular networks, out of Cyprus. 

Review of The Boat That Rocked

Richard Curtis "feelgood" film about a thinly fictionalised Radio Caroline, that didn't actually make me feel that good. Good actors, some nice cinematography and great music, but thin and (inevitably) sexist, and too long. They should have spent some more money on the writers.

Informal distribution and VLC.

Review of The Sea Beast

A Dreamworks animated film, which looked wonderful and had its heart in the right place (diverse "pirate" ship crews, ecological message) but felt a bit thin and contrived. In the end (well, quite quickly) the sea hunter learns to love the sea monsters, who have had a bad press and just want to be left alone.

Watched on Netflix via smartphone and Chromecast.

Review of "A Modest Proposal...to solve the Palestine-Israel Conflict" by Karl Sabbagh

This was sitting around for ages, and I thought I'd really better read it. And I started out wanting to like it. It's an argument in favour of a One State Solution, with some elaboration as to how aspects of it might work. These days I am mildly in favour of a one state solution, largely because I can't see how the two state solution which I once supported might ever come about, or how it would work if it did. I feel much the same way about a one state solution. Not every conflict is a puzzle that has a solution if only you can find it. But I can sort of see a way in which Israel and the territories it occupies might evolve into a single democratic state, through a civil rights movement and a democracy movement that was not focused on nationalism. 

So I was predisposed to like the book. But the more I read, the less I liked it. Sabbagh comes from a Palestinian nationalist perspective. He admits that there might once have been antisemitism, and that the Holocaust was a bad thing, but moves swiftly on from that to how it wasn't the Palestinians fault and why should they have to suffer for it? So he is great at recognising the extent to which Zionism was a colonialist program which could not have been realised without the support of British imperialism, but he is wilfully blind as to where the impetus for it came. Without antisemitism there would have been no Zionism, or it would have been a weird little footnote in history. 

He talks about the countries that the Jewish immigrants to Palestine came from, but only in the abstract. There is no sense that these were countries that practised increasingly severe discrimination against Jews, or that there was any reason why long-established Jewish communities no longer felt at home in them. He writes about the unwillingness of the Jewish immigrants to Palestine to give up the citizenship of the countries from which they had come and accept Palestine citizenship, as if this proves something about their colonialist and exclusionary intention. Well, maybe it does - but it was happening in a context in which the possession of the right piece of paper might mean the difference between life and death for many uprooted Jews. Perhaps it wasn't so unreasonable to not trust to the bureaucratic kindness of British colonial administration, or to the welcome of an Arab community that had made it very clear that it didn't want any Jewish immigrants.

There's lots more partial history. Like I said, I know that the Zionists really did intend to take over the whole of Palestine, and that they really did plan for there to be fewer Arabs there - perhaps no Arabs at all, despite what they said for outside consumption. But it's not necessary to pretend that this was the realisation of an American-British imperial plot. The British did not support the Partition resolution at the UN and abstained on the final vote. And he doesn't mention at all the extent to which the USSR, and its satellites in Eastern Europe, and the Communist parties in Europe, the middle east and elsewhere all supported partition and the creation of Israel. 

He suggests that the Jews all left the Arab countries in the early 1950s because they were tricked into it by Zionists. It's true and well documented there were Israeli false flag operations in some Arab countries. It's not true or even plausible that Jews in Iraq led happy integrated lives until this happened - the antisemitism in Iraq is well documented too. You have to be deeply embedded in an Arab nationalist viewpoint to find this sort of thing convincing.

The emigration of Moroccan Jews to Israel is a much more complex and nuanced business, with efforts by the Moroccan government to persuade Jews to stay and to return - nothing similar in Iraq or other countries, and limited success despite the miserable racist experience that the Moroccan Jews had when they arrived in Israel and for years afterward.

There's a lot in the book about how the principles of Palestinian return would be applied and paid for, but very little about how a one-state solution would work. What languages would be used in schools and in the civil service, for example? Would there be any institutions in place to ensure that one community did not dominate another? It would have been really good to have had some examples of where such things have worked out well - the way that the Swedish minority is treated in Finland comes to mind. It's not hard to think of examples where it hasn't worked out well, which I think places a special duty on those who do advocate a one-state solution. 

I suppose I think, in a not very well worked out way, that it's possible that Israel - racist as it is - could evolve into a democratic state. This would be uneven. Some things would be harder to change than others...some of those things - the name of the country, the flag, etc, have enormous symbolic significance, to Jews and to Palestinians. Maybe there are other things to focus on in the medium term, as a part of a struggle to bring democracy and maybe even socialism to the region. It's taken us a hundred years to get to here, with nationalism and counter-nationalism. Perhaps with a perspective of where we want to get to in the next hundred years we could start to see some positive change in our lifetimes, rather than the poisonous waiting game that both Zionism and Palestinian nationalism play in the belief that time is on their side.

Review of The Last Black Man in San Francisco

Bleak, beautiful, slow film about gentrification and alienation. The main protagonist is a young black man who is more or less homeless - he's couch surfing at the house of a slightly older friend, who in turn lives with his dad, and fantasizes that he's a playwright. There are other purposeless young black men hanging about on the street corner, not quite menacing, not quite friends. The central character is obsessed with a beautiful gothic mansion that his family once seem to have occupied, though they may have been squatting there illegally - it's not entirely clear. His father is a frequent nomadic squatter, and the house's formal occupant herself loses the house when her mother dies and she has to split the inheritance with her sister - giving the young man a chance to move in for a while and play at living there.

It's depressing, but worth sitting through.

Watched on BBC iPlayer.

Review of Jumping From High Places

Italian sort-of feelgood movie, about a young woman living in Bari who suffers from anxiety, and decides as part of a promise to a best friend who died suddenly that she will confront each of her separate fears - going on a boat trip, taking a flight, and so on.

It's not very taxing or tense to watch, and there are beautiful people and locations to look at. 

Watched on Netflix.

Review of Harriet

Conventional biopic about Harriet Tubman, an escaped slave who became an abolitionist, suffrage campaigner, and general all round heroine. She's famous to Americans, less so to a British audience. It's well made if conventional and a bit long, and justly celebrates her life and the realities of the Underground Railroad, including the awful impact of the Fugitive Slave Act.

Watched on BBC iPlayer in two tranches, because though it's not gory, it's not feelgood watching either.

Review of La Famille Bélier

This is the original French film, on which the subsequent American remake CODA was based. It's a bit unfair that I saw the American one first, because now it's the French one that feels a bit unnecessary. They are very similar - similar humour, similar plot development, and so on. A few differences - the French family are farmers not fishermen, the deaf dad runs for mayor rather than takes over the fish market, and so on. Curiously I think the American one was slightly more subtle - the French one is more knockabout, though the duet that the kids sing in the French version is more sexualised than anything that I could imagine in an American high school movie.

But they are pretty similar, and you don't need to watch both.

Watched on the big screen at Lansdown Film Societ.

Review of "Them: Adventures with Extremists" by Jon Ronson

I didn't much like this. Jon Ronson is not a person to engage seriously with the issues that he raises. He's trying to get laughs by reminding us that self-important conspiracy theorists still need to get the shopping in and so on, but it ends up humanising them rather than diminishing them. He mainly doesn't do any debunking, so it's hard to know what aspects of their narrative he accepts - and it sometimes seems like quite a lot, especially when he writes about the Bilderberg Group. 

There's a lot to be said about organisations like that - how they attempt to impose some sort of coordination on the chaos that is international capitalism, and how useless they mainly are at it, for example. There's a lot to be said about conspiracy theories, and why they are becoming so widespread and what role they play politically, but you won't find it here.

Review of "Rivers of London" by Ben Aaronovitch

It's not often I give up on a book, but this just isn't worth finishing. It's a bit like Harry Potter for...for grown-ups? Except that it's not all that grown up. There's a secret department of the Metropolitan Police that deals with magical matters, and our first-person narrator stumbles into when, as a beat policeman, he witnesses a horrible murder and then gets a tip-off from a ghost. It's not interesting, it's not well-written, I don't care about the characters...so enough. I notice that it's one of a series, which is depressing.

Review of Bacurau

This won lots of awards and has very good ratings on Rotten Tomatoes and IMDB, but it felt like a pointless splatterfest to me. A small isolated town in North Eastern Brazil is threatened by its corrupt mayor who cuts off the water, and then brings in a bunch of racist psycho murderers from the US and Europe to kill all the residents in some horrendous paid-for game. 

It's tense, and for a while there's an air of mystery as we try to work out what's going on, but ultimately it's horrible and pointless. It's resolved with all the murderers getting blown away by the townsfolk who arm themselves with ancient firearms from the town's museum. Yeah, it's a metaphor for colonialism and stuff, but it's also two hours I won't get back.

Review of "The Descent of Man" by Grayson Perry

I love Grayson Perry, so I was sorry when this book got off to a bad start - too much unfocused whining about "Middle Class" White Males. I think "Middle Class" is a dangerous and obfuscating term that hides much more than it reveals...we've been royally fucked over by bankers, and some kinds of professionals do have more privileges and a better quality of life than some people who work with their hands and their bodies. But surely teachers and social workers are "middle class", in the cultural sense, even though they sell their labour power to survive. Really, so do engineers and scientists...and for the most part they don't run the world or the country, and they aren't responsible for how fucked everything is.

But after the first whiny chapter the book looked up a lot, and he's really astute and clever about gender and masculinity. It's definitely worth reading, and I'm going to watch the associated TV series. I was particularly taken with the way he talks about how men perform their gender, and also about his references to Lori Gottleib's work on gender equality in housework and sex - the research appears to suggest that men who do more of the housework get less sex, and less enjoyable sex, from their female partners. This deserves further consideration, and for once by women as much as by men.

I would really like see what he's got to say about the trans wars. Uncomfortably I have friends...mainly women...on both sides of an argument that I don't entirely understand.

Review of "The Ghetto Fights" by Marek Edelman

A short, gripping, but painful to read book about the Jewish uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto in 1943, and the prelude to it. Especially painful is the account of how so many Jews desperately wanted to believe that the stories of extermination camps were not true, and that they really would be relocated to find work in the East...and the way in which traditional Jewish strategies of accomodating to even the most oppressive authority, which had been "successful" in the past, turned out to be so terribly wrong in the case of the Nazis.

The book was published in English in the immediate post war period by the Bund, in the US, but it was only published relatively recently in the UK, and by Bookmarks, the SWP's publishing house. So there is a foreword by John Rose, an SWP member who has also written some decent history books. I was pleasantly surprised by this. Rose goes over the story of how the author, Marek Edelman, has been largely ignored by mainstream Jewish and Israeli audiences, because he remained true to his Bundist principles and continued to oppose Zionism. But I'd say he does this in a surprisingly generous way. He doesn't at all play down the contribution of Zionist fighters from the various Socialist-Zionist groups, or repeat any of the allegations about Zionist collaboration with the Nazis. And he includes in afterwords the bad responses he's received from Zionist commentators, as well as his responses (which seem to me to be be scrupulously fair) to those when they were published.

It might have been interesting to have seen some discussion as to what the history means for the argument between Socialist-Zionists and Bundists. Zionists have generally acted as if the Holocaust proved that they were right all along. Bundists have often suggested that the way Israel has turned out proved that they were right all along. Still, this book probably isn't the place for that.

Review of "The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists: A Graphic Novel by Scarlett and Sophie Rickard"

I tried to read the actual book by Robert Tressell a few times, but never got very far. It seemed dauntingly long (though I usually don't mind long books) and a bit dull. So Scarlett and Sophie Rickard have done me a great service. The book is beautiful, and they've brought it to life in a way that (I think) keeps the feel of the original but makes it much more digestible.

That said, I still didn't really enjoy it. Much of the detail about grinding poverty in the Edwardian era seems all too contemporary, with working poor having to decide how to pay their rent to private landlords, while keeping enough back to both heat and eat. I'm sure there must have been times when the book just felt like a period piece, but it doesn't now.

I didn't enjoy the politics all that much. I don't Tresell was ever a Marxist really, and his cod version of the Labour Theory of Value doesn't feel very convincing. It's even less so given that the workers in the book are all painters and decorators, so they really don't fit with the narrative of surplus value that it tries to illustrate. When the book's socialist intellectual tells the workers that they ought to stop voting for Liberals or Tories, and instead "elect revolutionary socialists to the House of Commons" I couldn't help wishing that he'd actually spent a bit more time learning socialist theory.

The old socialist who tells the hero that he's given up, and the toiling masses deserve what's coming to them because they are so stupid...? Hard not to give in to that, particularly in the week of King Charles III's coronation.

And the fairy-tale ending in which one of the painters, George Barrington, turns out to be a socialist rich man temporarily playing at poverty so that he can develop his socialist understanding, and then gives out some big presents for Xmas before he leaves? Well, finger heading for throat.

I read the Wikipedia article about Tressell afterwards, and he's quite a nuanced character, with a bit of a background in the SDF who apparently never joined a union, and may have supported segregated labour markets in South Africa (like much of the rest of the white labour movement there).

Review of La Belle Epoque

If Guy Debord made a romcom this is what it would be like. This is a really unusual film, but no less enjoyable. In some ways it reminded me of "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind", because it has themes of identity and memory, but there's arguably nothing fantastic to make the plot line work - no magic, no implausible technology. The protagonist's son, a producer, makes content for streaming platforms, and as a sideline offers people direct personal experiences using the sets and actors - so that they can go back in time to an earlier era and just be there. And the protagonist, whose marriage is on the rocks, wants to go back to 1970s Lyon where he met and fell in love with his wife.

And it's brilliantly done - the bar they met in (the eponymous Belle Epoque) is lovingly recreated and populated, a woman plays the younger version of his wife-to-be, and he falls in love with her. And then this plays out, with all of its contradictions and difficulties.

That's not a plot summary - it's actually much more sophisticated and more interesting. It probably bears watching twice, which I almost never say.

Watched on BBC iPlayer via smartphone and Chromecast.

Review of Rango

A real disappointment, and an illustration of how a film can be less than the sum of its parts. Great art and animation, some good visual and verbal jokes, a great cast (though what was the point of having Bill Nighy in it as a voice and then having him put on an American accent?)...but let down by the plot and the pacing. Too many big scenes crammed in, too many set pieces...I can't exactly put my finger on it, but this just dragged, even though it's no longer than a regular Disney animated film. Curiously the bits that dragged the most were the action scenes.

Watched in the Middle Floor at Springhill from a USB drive, new DVD player and informal distribution.

Review of "Now we shall be entirely free" by Andrew Miller

I've only read one Andrew Miller book before - "Pure". That was great, and so was this...set for the most part in Regency-period England and Scotland during the Peninsular War, which looms large in the story though isn't really depicted except through the recollections of the characters. It's beautiful, clever, with a strong plot, lots of brilliant period detail and insight, and superb characters. A page-turner and a literary work at the same time.

Review of Behind The Curve

A film about flat earthers, which tries to be sympathetic but not uncritical. It doesn't really debunk or answer their "proofs" that the earth is flat and covered by a dome. Some of them look a bit ridiculous, but others seem nice and concerned with evidence and argument...it's not inconceivable that a naive person could watch the film and be led into becoming a flat earther. In fact, the podcasters and YouTubers featured in the film have said that it has increased their fan base.

There are interviews with the flat earthers, some of whom are bitter foes with each other...one of them argues on his YouTube channel that his rival is a Hollywood actor, hired by Warner Brothers but working for the CIA. And this hints at the main weakness in the film; although it does show that flat-earthism is more of a socio-political belief than a cosmological one, and it does show that the devotees are conspiracy theorists, it plays that down and makes them look mostly harmless. There's a hint that some of them blame the Jews (along with the Freemasons or the Vatican) for the 400-year hoax, but the nasty side is not emphasised.

Which leads rather nicely into my second criticism - the suggestion that the best thing to do it to treat them as genuinely intellectually engaged and to try to draw them towards an evidence-based approach to the rotundity of the earth, without ever shaming them. Lots of talking heads of scientists saying this, but they are for the most part natural scientists - physicists and astronomers. They are interviewed as experts, but they are talking about a subject in which they have no expertise. It might very well be that shaming is exactly the best way to deal with them - not enjoyable for them, or even for the people doing it, but it might be more effective than treating them as folk-scientists. That's a question for social science. 

The film makes it clear that however they became flat earthers, they now have emotional, and social, and even financial reasons for not abandoning their "theory" (as they point out credentialed scientists also do). So maybe emotion-based and social-based approaches will work better - if not at rescuing these heavily committed individuals, then at least in helping to prevent others from coming under their influence. If this was only a cosmological belief there might be an argument for letting them continue to think whatever they wanted (as long as they weren't involved in say aviation planning) but it's not. They need to believe that there is a hoax, and that there are dark powers behind it, and that's a political theory with bad consequences. 

I note in passing that the scientists in the film know a lot about their subject matter, but they have a very unsophisticated understanding of Science as a social phenomenon. They spout a lot of warmed-over Popperian falsificationism, as if that's how Science really worked; fifty years of social studies of science, and empirical research on the functioning of scientific institutions and communities, might as well never have happened. No-one seems to have an understanding of science that's more nuanced than "Science is True" or "Science is all made up". This is a pity, especially in the face of the present conversations about the pandemic and climate change.

Review of "Death in Venice" by Thomas Mann

Oh my, what a snoozefest! This reliably put me to sleep in about three minutes. The first story, Death in Venice itself, was kind of atmospheric, and it was possible to appreciate the central character's wrestling with his almost unacknowledged homoerotic attraction...though Mann rarely used one word where a couple of pages will do. It's a short book, but it felt much longer, perhaps because almost nothing happens, very slowly. That sort of fits with the scenario of hot, cholera-infused Venice - and I rather liked the rather contemporary threads about misinformation regarding the course of the epidemic. So I guess I'd give that story three stars. The second, Tristan, about not-very-ill patients in a sanatorium maybe two stars, and Tonio Kroger perhaps one star, if no lower ratings are permitted.

Review of That's Amor

Terrible, barely watchable rom-com about a young woman moving back to live with her mother in her small-town home town after a career and romance failure in San Fransico, who is then set up for a relationship with a visiting young Spanish aspiring chef. It's just awful, with stupid characters, rotten acting, terrible dialogue...everything really. Do avoid.

Watched on Netflix.

Review of "In My Grandfather's Shadow: A Story of War, Trauma and the Legacy of Silence" by Angela Findlay

I've got very mixed feelings about this book. Part of it is to do with my own feelings about Germans and German-ness. I have a lovely German brother-in-law and some very nice German friends. I don't hate Germans at all; my personal relations with many Germans have been very enjoyable, and I really enjoyed working with German people during my professional life - the honesty, the orderliness, the courtesy - it was all great.

And I have strong memories of how my first ever argument with my Dad was about Germans - how he'd raised me to be against racism but was telling me that he hated all Germans, because of what they'd done. I was about ten, and suddenly I was realising that he wasn't always right, and that he didn't live up to his own standards. Of course he didn't actually hate all Germans - his Jewish Judo club included a young German lesbian woman who was sort of an honorary Jew, and who he really liked.

But still, I find it hard to be sympathetic to the suffering of Germans - civilians and soldiers - that resulted from their defeat in WW2. Intellectually I can accept that the Allied bombing of German cities was wrong and bad, and that if there was an objective standard would be ruled to be a war crime. Only, I can't find it in my self to feel really sorry for the victims, or for the Germans who lost their homes in territories awarded to other countries after the war. Because of what they'd done, and what they had shut their eyes to.

Angela Findlay's book addresses all this, but not with the same structure of feelings that I'd bring to it. Not surprising, really, since she's a descendant of one of the perpetrators rather than one of the victims. Her grandfather wasn't in the SS, but he was a German general, and was doing his utmost to make sure that Germany won the war. So it's hard to work up much sympathy for his two years in captivity at the end of the war.

For the most part I liked the parts of the book where she details the personal histories, and I wasn't so keen on the parts where she describes her own personal history of psychological suffering. Nevertheless there's a good survey of all the current thinking about PTSD and trauma, including epigenetics, and it's worth reading for that. And I think she's been brave to have confronted her family story, and to have attempted to disentangle the ways in which it has reached from the past into the present. But I can't help thinking that she tried too hard, and too fast, to find a good thing that her grandfather had done (allowing some fleeing Italian civilians to hide in some tunnels that he'd been ordered to destroy), and to feel at peace from that. I can't blame her for that, but I can't feel the same, and that's partly what the book is about - how to feel about these legacies.

Review of "Post-Internet Far Right" by 12 Rules for What

The far right has changed, the authors of this excellent and timely book argue. Conventional fascist style political parties and street movements are only one component, and perhaps a small one at that. Responding as if these "classic" fascists are the main event means that anti-fascist strategy is mis-directed. The contemporary far right uses different organisational forms and styles, and has lots of different themes, some of which conflict with each other.  

But despite the differences, there are some common themes, all present to varying degrees. These include:

• Racism and ethno-nationalism
• Misognyny, homophobia and a sense of aggrieved and beleagured masculinity
• Antisemitism - not just as one more "flavour" of racism, but as an organising theory of the world, entwined with conspiracist fantasies.

The book has a lot of description of things that are utterly unfamiliar to me, about internet platforms and tools that I hadn't heard of, memes and symbols and codes that suddenly appear...Pepe the Frog as a far right identifier, and triple brackets around the names of (((Jews))). This is part of the way that the far right can signal to each other that an apparently innoccuous bit of content has a deeper significance. 

As the authors explain, this is not something that's entirely of the far right - it's part of the way that lots of online life is lived now, including the life of the far right.

The book distinguishes between a far right "swarm" of online participants ("activist" seems too strong a word and implies a level of consistent focus that may not be warranted), and "influencers" who direct and are amplified by the swarm - some of whom are deriving both social and financial capital from their online presence. There are the would-be intellectuals of the far right, and the conventional street and electoral organisations.

The book is mainly concerned with the US and UK, so there's not much discussion of the successful "mainstream" parties of the far right...like Fidesz in Hungary, or Law and Justice in Poland, or even the National Front in France. I think that these parties, like Ukip and Brexit in the UK and United Australia in Oz, have successfully driven the centre-right conservative parties further rightwards, and this deserves to be situated in the overall anatomy of the far right.

On the other hand, it does explain well that the organised fascist parties, and even their militarized wings like National Action and Combat-18, are not the far end of the right spectrum. Beyond lies what they call the Blackpilled, the lone wolves of anomised rightist terrorism like Anders Brevik and the Christchurch shooter, and all the shooters in the US. These aren't part of organised groups but do aim to inspire followers, and have had the effect of getting more "moderate" far rightists considerable airtime.

There are two more important aspects to the book. Firstly, the far right is situated in the context of "ecofascism" - the multifarious ways in which it is going to respond to climate breakdown and the turmoil that will create. As yet it's mainly concentrated on being anti-green, promoting climate change denial and crying crocodile tears for the poor people that will be affected by the cost of mitigation and adaption measures. I think there was a strong dimension of this in the Yellow Vest protests in France, and even more so in their imitators elsewhere. But it's perfectly possible for the far right to switch tracks, and to organise in favour of strong militarised measures needed to protect "our people" from climate change, especially in terms of calling on the state to be even harder on refugees. Or even to do both tracks at once.

Second, there's a critique of anti-fascist "culture", which sometimes becomes an identity in itself, abstracted from where the important developments are happening on the far right, and concentrating on street fights and/or re-enactment activities like Spanish Civil War commemoration. Not that those things aren't important, but they're not sufficient.

This is a great book. Sometimes I found the language a bit impenetrable, and I am a one-time social science academic. Sometimes the references are a bit obscure and unexplained - I had to read the book with my phone constantly to hand, to look things up. But these are quibbles. This book will inform and motivate those of us who struggle against the far right for years to come.

Review of "How I Grew" by Mary McCarthy

I picked this up for something to read at night, when I couldn't face reading "Post-Internet Far Right" as a I fell asleep. The idea was to find something interesting but not emotionally demanding, and it mainly did not disappoint in that respect. I'm not a fan of Mary McCarthy - so far I have not read any of her other books, though I may now. It's written from the perspective of an old person reflecting on childhood and youth, and the most interesting parts are where she engages with the fragmentary and unreliable nature of memories...where she admits that her memories can't possibly be right, because of other things that she knows or remembers. 

Some other aspects of the book are dull...her descriptions of her teachers at Vassar, who all seem old and dessicated (they were probably much younger than I am now), the books she read, how bad she was in the various am-dram things she did. But some depictions are really gripping - her accounts of 1920s sexuality, and her relationship to her own Jewish heritage and that of some friends. She's mildly antisemitic - it's a bit like the song in Cabaret, as she worries as to whether her grandmother really is unmistakeably Jewish in her looks, or is surprised that some of her pretty friends turn out to be Jewish even though they don't look it.

Strange afternote...I saved a picture of the cover design, but every time I touched it my laptop crashed. So this review is posted without a picture.

Review of "A Call to Spy"

 

It feels mean to be negative about this film, which is after all a tribute to some very brave women. But despite some graphic violence and some scenes of wartime courage, it has - as Rotten Tomatoes says "a surprising lack of tension". It's a bit dull. I checked my phone quite often as it went on.

Watched on Amazon Prime - we don't have it any more, but Louis does and he was visiting, so he cast it to our Chromecast.

Review of "The Fall of Roman Britain: and Why We Speak English" by John Lambshead

This is a really good work of popular history and science, bringing together scholarship from ancient history and modern population genetics, in an accessible form. And it makes sense of the some of the things in the conventional account of the history of Britain that have always been a bit hazy...in particular how did Roman and post-Roman Britain turn into Anglo-Saxon England? I won't attempt to summarize the argument here, but I found it convincing and well stated. I learned lots about the history of the Roman Empire too, even though I've read stuff in that area before. I can't recommend this strongly enough.

Review of "Ergot. The fungi that ate medieval Europe" by Theophrastus von Oberstockstall

I'd always thought of ergotism as slightly amusing - all those medieval peasants going on a mass acid trip and seeing hallucinations that inspired art and religious movements. Well, I won't think that any more. Ergotism is really ghastly, and the consequences for medieval Europe were horrible. Lots in the short book (more of a pamphlet really) about the impact on culture and medieval institutions. At 99p it's almost free - if you are at all interested in medieval history, or the relationship between humans and plants, then buy it and read it.

One small concern though - the author appears to have no online existence apart from this pamphlet, which makes me a little cautious. 

Review of "Fall, or Dodge in Hell" by Neal Stephenson

This is sort of a sequel to Stephenson's Reamde, but only a little bit - some overlapping characters with back-stories from that book, and one or two from Cryptonomicon too. But it's a very different kind of book. Ream.de was very much an action thriller, whereas this is philosophical science fiction. Where Reamde is taut, this is a bit flabby, and sometimes I skimmed or had to force myself to keep reading. A shame, because the subject matter - uploading minds into a virtual world so that we can live after our physical-body death - is interesting and engaging. 

The virtual world here is more or less created, ex nihilo, by the eponymous Dodge (Richard Forthrast from the first book) after his mind is uploaded, and he then loses control over it as other minds join him there. Somehow the minds end up recapitulating the myths of ancient Mesopotamia (more or less) - remember that Stephenson was keen on that as far back as Snow Crash - and sometimes that just drags a bit. I lost track of some of the too-many characters at this point, and the way in which the virtual world was and was not constrained by the principles of physics started to get on my nerves. Glad I read it, and worth reading, but I do wish an editor had cut it by at least a third.