Review of "Babylon Berlin" by Voler Kutscher

Weimar-set police procedural/detective thriller...well, the central character is a detective in the Berlin police but he's a lone wolf a lot of the time, and the procedures are mainly there to be subverted. 

Nicely written/translated, and atomspheric, with some decent characters and setting descriptions. I must admit I got a bit confused about exactly who some of the characters were, especially the cops. Is that the German names, or the fact that the non-stereotype ones are not actually that differentiated?

Better than the TV series - no deliberate anachronism or lazy history inaccuracy. I could imagine reading more from what the cover establishes as a series.

Review of Nightmare Alley

Tense, atmospheric and stylish film in depression-era America, with sleazy circus folk, geeks (the original kind, a horrible circus act in which a man is kept in a cage and bites the heads off live chickens), mind-reading acts and fake spiritualists. Very dark, both in substance and appearance, but some great acting, fab cast, and painterly shots by director Guillermo de Torro. Amazing interiors too!

Watched via informal distribution.

Review of 'The Making of the British Landscape' by Nicholas Crane

A bit of a disappointment. Lots of things that I would have expected to be in there weren't...no mention of the Forestry Commission, for example, or the creation of the New Forest, or the Charter of the Forests, or game laws. Something of an over-concentration on towns once they get going, and on the built forms therein, rather at the expense of the landscape itself - even though he acknowledges that towns even today don't make up the greater part of the landscape in this country. 

And within the towns no examination of come all the good bits came to be owned by a few aristocrats, nor how they managed to keep them - and why they so much want to. Nothing about the various attempts at a different politics of land - the Chartists land projects, the Henry George socialists, ideas about land tax. Not even the National Trust rates a mention.

Not much examination even of the idea that there is a 'British' landscape - even from the book it's clear that England, Wales and Scotland have very different landscapes, and that these were shaped by different geological, economic and cultural forces. That's just his default unit of examination, but it's not one that he reflects on very much.

Still, I did learn lots of things, particularly about the draining of the Fens and the end of Whittelsey Mere. I felt sad reading about the demise of the big wild animals in Britain, and I went to look up the various attempts to 'de-extinct' the aurochs. They've all failed - extinction really is forever.

Review of The Goldfinch

Really good, complex, film, with lots of good characters, plot and acting. I've not read the book, and I understand that even at nearly three hours long the film leaves a lot of complexity out, but it's still very good. Split narrative going backwards and forwards between time-periods, with different actors playing the younger and older versions of some of the characters - though not Nicole Kidman, who manages to play both versions of her character.

I won't try to summarize the plot, but it's well worth watching. I understand it was a box office flop, which says more about audiences than about the film.

Watched on Netfix.

Review of CODA

Surprisingly good film about a young teen woman who is the only hearing member of a family in which everyone else is profoundly deaf, and she has a talent for singing. Normally I hate films in which American kids pursue their dream of becoming a...dancer, singer, whatever...but this one really touched me. Maybe it was the genuine deaf cast, or naunced way that it dealt with the issues around sacrificing your own dreams for the sake of your family's needs. I found out afterwards that it's a remake of a French film, The Bellier Family, and I quite want to watch that too.

Watched via informal distribution.

Review of 'Rebellion'

More thoughtful documentary than I was expecting, and more nuanced. Shows some of the failures and inadequacies of the movement as well as the glorious successes, and the internal tensions. In particular, it shows up just how toxic and destructive Roger Hallam is/was - how unprepared for participation in anything like a democratic organisation. The movement's ad hoc nature was part of its strength at the beginning, but the same thing was what prevented it from succeeding - just like all the other unstructured movements that we've seen in the last ten year, from Occupy to the Arab Spring. No structure means never having to take decisions about tactics or strategy, so that everything and nothing gets done. The Canning Town tube train issue wasn't an irredeemable failure in itself, but it seems like no-one learnt anything from the episode. It doesn't feel to me like XR has the faintest idea what to do now, when its "demands" have apparently all been met, and nothing has been done that will actually reduce emissions.

Watched on actual Netflix.

Review of 'Behind the Scenes at the Museum' by Kate Atkinson

A friend really like Kate Atkinson, though I earlier gave up on her detective novels. But I persevered with this, and in the end it was worth it. It's a coming of age story set in and around the city of York, across the 19th and 20th centuries, with various plot devices to draw together characters across settings and generations. 

At first I didn't like the tone, which felt a bit sneery, but either it softened or I got used to it, and I engaged with the characters and the convoluted plots. 

Review of 'The New Wilderness' by Diane Cook

This book is most important for what it made me think about rather than the writing or the plotting. It's set in a near-term dystopian future where the environmental crisis has become noticeable worse, but is still not catastrophic. Life in cities goes on, but it's more horrible. Life outside the cities is mainly lived in areas of industrialised agriculture or extractive industries,  but an area is fenced over and preserved as 'wilderness'. The book centres on a small group of people who are allowed to live in this wilderness area, provided that the give up all technology and live as nomadic hunter-gathers. The terms of their existence are policed by rangers, who can order them about and fine them for non-compliance.

The book describes how hard this life is, and sometimes how beautiful too - but it's mainly hard, with existence on the margin of starvation, and the fear of death from illness, accident or predators. The principle character is a girl, Agnes, who grows up within the narrative but barely remembers life back in The City, and her mother, who moved to the Wilderness without wanting to, because her daughter was so sick from the bad air in The City. There's a lot of mother-daughter stuff, and some contrived plot elements to create tension. There's really good description of small-p politics within a small group, including a transition from consensus to authoritarian decision-making.

It rather reminded me of an idea that I think originated with James Lovelock...that it would be necessary to preserve one third of the Earth as wilderness without people, and that the rest should be...as described in the book, given over to either cities or industrialised agriculture. This describes what it would feel like to live in such a world, particularly under conditions of environmental crisis (though climate change barely gets a mention, it's in the background all the time), economic scarcity and political failure. It also made me think about how it is for people who live in areas designated as 'wilderness reserves' by conservation agencies; in this book the people are managed rather like one more species of animal in the reserve.

Well worth a read.

Review of Lucy and Desi

Pleasant enough biopic of Lucille Ball and her husband Desi Arnaz. I remember 'I Love Lucy' from when I was a kid, though not with any particular feeling. I hadn't realised how big their business had been.

Watched on Amazon Prime (not my subscription).