Review of The Human Voice

A one-woman film, based on a Jean Cocteau play, "freely adapted" by Almodovar, and wonderful to watch. The one woman is Tilda Swinton, and I'd probably watch her read from the phone directory, if such things still existed. It's a short film (28 minutes), with a set representing an apartment that is created within what appears to be a big studio or warehouse. Menacing, suspensful, clever, beautiful.

Watched on BBC iPlayer.

Review of Crazy Rich Asians

Watched this on BBC iPlayer, and my finger was rarely far from my throat. A really nauseating film, affecting to satirise the lifestyle of the absurdly rich, but actually celebrating it. A sort of romance, with clever Chinese-American in a relationship with absurdly handsome Singaporean Nick, but not knowing that his family are super-rich...as are his friends, so that when he brings her to meet them all they go on shopping sprees and parties on private islands in private helicopters and specially chartered party container ships.

No sign at all that Singapore is a repressive one-party state, or that it's the third most unequal country in the world...there are only hideously rich people in the film (apart from the odd servant or street food hawker). 

Reading about the critical reception of the film, it seems like the only "controversy" about the racial casting - was the guy who played Nick the right or the wrong kind of Asian? Nothing at all about the planet-killing lifestyles that are held up for us all to aspire to. 

Review of "Smiley's People" by John Le Carre

 

So I read another Le Carre, and I liked that too - was taken by the way in which his characters  - or at least Smiley - are in the Cold War, but not entirely engaged to its ideology. They are playing a game, with sides, but they know that they are not entirely different from their adversaries. It does spend a lot of time in the world of emigre societies, and probably doesn't dwell enough on how nasty some of those groups were - former fascists and collaborators, not just freedom-loving nationalists. On the other hand, the locations and the physical details are great.

Review of "The Spy Who Came In From The Cold" by John Le Carre

I've missed out on John Le Carre. I read The Honourable Schoolboy years ago, and didn't like it - not the plot, the characters or the writing. And I thought, he's writing about the world he knows, and that means he's a bit like that - posh, a former spook, what is there to like?

But now I want some familiarity with spy novels, so I thought I'd give some of his earlier work a go, and I realise I have indeed been missing out.

This is so good - all the things I didn't like about the schoolboy, I love here. The characters, especially the central character, is great, conflicted and complex. It's told in the third person, but mainly from his POV, so it's artful in keeping up all the deceptions that make the plot work - Leamis doesn't tell us all that he knows about what is going on, and sometimes seems to not even tell himself. 

One of the things that really struck me was the close attention to physical detail, which really evokes the world of the 1960s, a world before computers and smartphones (before any mobile phones, of course). I can just about remember this world myself in all its grittiness...and realise that while it was much poorer in lots of ways, it was also more abundant in others.  For example, the Liz character has her own bedsit...now she'd have to share a house or flat with others, and perhaps a room too. And Leamis just bounces into a job in a library via the Labour Exchange, even though he has no job history at all.

I won't try to summarise the plot for fear of spoilers, but it's just great.

Review of The Good Liar

Sort of disappointing film about a nasty conman getting his come-uppance. Ian McKellen is the conman, and he's so nasty that it's impossible to feel any identification with him at all. Helen Mirren is his chosen victim, a recently bereaved woman that he meets through a dating site, and she plays it a bit better. 

I'd have thought that anything with those two in it would have to be good - why would they agreed to be in a turkey?  Also Russel Tovey and Jim Carter, usually in good things.

But this comes quite close to being one a turkey. The last quarter, where the twist occurs, feels rushed and not related to the rest of the film at all...is it the same in the book on which it's based?

Watched on Netflix.

Review of "Golden Hill" by Francis Spufford

Ruth introduced me to Francis Spufford - she read "Light Perpetual" first, and then I followed her and thought it was great. And then she did this one, and recommended it, and it's also great - even better than Light Perpetual. It's a historical novel, set in New York in the 1740s, and has something of the flavour of a pastiche C18th style, brilliantly done with some nods in the direction of historically accurate spelling and grammar, but not so much as to make it hard going. The plot is always engaging, the writing beautiful, and I'm really jealous of his ability to describe action as well as inner life. And the politics, about race and sexuality, are spot on.

It reminded me a bit of the Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle, which I loved, though there are no conscious anachronism here as there are there...and also of John Barth's The Sot-Weed Factor, which I haven't read for many years but also did something similar with period and style.

I note in passing that there is a description of a plot to burn the great houses of the city, which has been foiled and the perpetrators executed and tortured to death...and that this was a real historical episode, described in some detail in The Many Headed Hydra.

Review of 12 Angry Men

Somehow I'd never got round to seeing this, even though it's a classic...but our local film club was showing it. We couldn't go, so I obtained it and we watched it a few days later.

It's really good, with Henry Fonda as the liberal juror who gradually wins over the other members of a jury in a murder case, worrying away at the details to convince them, one by one, that there are after all grounds for reasonable doubt in what at first seemed like an open-and-shut case. All character actors, a claustrophobic theatre-like setting in one room, and lots of close-ups of the jurors' faces. For me Lee J Cobb as the last to be convinced steals the show.

Chromecast, VLC, informal distribution.