Review of Schooling The World: The Last White Man's Burden

A polemical, one-sided look at the damage done by exporting western models of education to non-western societies, with a particular focus on Ladakh. Lots about how western-mode education destroys traditional culture and robust, locally-adapted societies, which are seen through a rose-coloured filter. Yeah, Ladakh does seem pretty great, and the way in which western-style education has been imposed as part of a development model that assumes the path followed by the West is the best and only way to develop is pretty awful. A more nuanced film would have taken a more critical look at some of the other non-western cultures, where sometimes there is a genuine, well-founded and justified hunger for any education...think about the girls that the Taliban is preventing from getting any kind of education. I suspect the Taliban wouldn't have many problems with this film.

There is of course plenty wrong with the western model of education, which was designed to discipline working-class children for a life in factories and mills, and to teach them what they needed to know for that life, and to indoctrinate them into cultural submission to the values of capitalist society. Even with its own terms it's not a great success. 

And there's no doubt that, as the film illustrates with quotes and artefacts like old posters, the export of this model was tied in to the expansion of imperialism; there most certainly was an intention to eradicate the "backward" cultures of those who were sitting on land that the imperialist powers wanted. There was a similar move to eradicate Welsh, and Catalan, within the metropolitan territories of the imperialist powers.

And it's lovely to see the ethnobotanist Wade Davis interviewed as one of the talking heads in the film. He makes lots of good points about what might be thought as "cultural biodiversity" - that as we increasingly inhabit a world of multiple concurrent crises one of those "primitive" cultures might contain something that we are going to need, and it would be shame if it were too late to pick it up because we'd extinguished it.

But there's lots left out that doesn't fit into the monodimensional critique that the film offers.Most of all I missed even a hat-tip to Paolo Freire, the Brazilian educational theorist whose "Pedagogy of The Oppressed" not only anticipated the film's critique but actually proposed something more positive, and more useful, than the "everything traditional is just great" panacea that the film effectively endorses. And there are other kinds of informal and community-organised education that ought to be recognised...I know I'm partial, but think of the musical education provided by brass band culture without conservatoires.

The uneasy feeling that I had as I watched was that in essence this film is rooted in the conservative critique of modernity, not a progressive critique. Traditional societies are not, for the most part, utopias. They are often hierarchical, oppressive, and reactionary. And outside tiny isolated pockets they don't really exist...in a capitalist world everything is touched by the hand of capital. We can do better than this.

Review of "No one round here reads Tolstoy" by Mark Hodgkinson

Occasionally interesting but mainly rambling and self-indulgent book about a man's love of books and what they meant to him through his life. He's slightly younger than me, but there are some things from his life that I recognise, even though he grew up in a poor working class family in the north and I grew up in a comfortably lower-middle class family in the north London suburbs...the Essex ones, mind, not the posh and cultured ones in the north-west. I enjoyed a lot of his reading choices, but didn't really share his love of punk and new wave...even then I knew it wasn't that good, though I was less interested in music then.

There are bits of life story, bits about the publishing industry (he creates his own publishing company), and lots about bookshops, but it doesn't add up to anything that was really enjoyable to read. I think I may have had it with white male autobiographies.

Review of "Station Eleven" by Emily St John Mandel

Really good dystopian/post-apocalyptic novel about a world devastated by a pandemic that kills 99 per cent of the population. Quite a complex narrative that darts about across the timeline, pre- and post-pandemic, and some implausible link-ups between the characters that survive...but it doesn't matter, this is brilliant writing, and full of menace and danger without any need for graphic descriptions of death or violence. 

Most of all it brought the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic back to me; our pandemic was not nearly as terrible as the one in the book, but in the early days we didn't know how bad it was going to be. I've been dreaming about our pandemic, and disasters and terrorist attacks, ever since I read it.

Review of Ay Carmela

Not very satisfying film by Carlos Saura about an entertainer couple in the Spanish Civil War. Early on in the film they are busy cheering up a mixed bunch of Republican soldiers - some proper soldiers mixed in with anarchist militia, both men and women. It's 1938, so that may be a historical inaccuracy - weren't the women relegated to behind-the-lines roles by then? 

The entertainers get lost on the road to Valencia and find themselves trapped behind enemy lines, and they transform their act into a pro-fascist one, even though the woman half of the couple is not so happy about it. But there's something lacking in the depiction - they are neither agonized (though she is a bit, sometimes) not cynical. Maybe that's realistic, but it doesn't feel right in the film. 

Some great details in the filming...flags, and posters, and trashed towns and villages, but a bit of a disappointment.

Watched via PC, HDMI cable and informal distribution.

Review of Who Killed The KLF?

A film almost as weird as the KLF itself, which seems to have been as much prank as music band. I must admit that I rather liked "Last Train to Transcentral", and I really loved "Justified and Ancient", and now I'm not sure if that makes me a dupe of the prank or a knowing participant in the satire - I don't know whether it matters either. I quite enjoyed The Illuminatus trilogy, about which they made quite a big deal...though in the world in which we now live it doesn't seem quite as funny as it did.

This stuff was all coming out in the early 1990s, when I was the dad of very young children and not in any way a participant in rave culture, but I did like the KLF. The film is interesting and shows the extent to which they were always as much pranksters (and perhaps even conmen) as much as artists. Their early hits were based on ripping off other stuff and a sharp understanding of howto game the music business, which - delightfully - they then shared with others.

I am pleased to see that though they were absolutely embedded in the music business, they don't seem to have been posh boys - their rejection of the business was not based on noblesse and largesse.

The film spends quite a lot of time talking about the famous money-burning stunt. I still have very mixed feelings about that, but I'm also aware that it shows a better and more nuanced critique of what mone means in a capitalist system than the daft twats who claim that "cash is freedom".

Review of "Back to The Bible" by H G G Herklots

A surprisingly enjoyable read from the 1950s, written by the Vicar of Doncaster and intended as a guide for other parish priests covering what they need to know about the scriptures. Amazing that at that period it seemed possible for a local vicar to be familiar with and on top of this stuff...I rather feel that their equivalents today don't have the time or inclination to deal with any of this. I wonder how many local vicars even know what Aramaic is - I rather thnk that the one here, who is a lovely man in many ways, might not. 

This is primarily a straightforward non-fundamentalist view of how the various texts were created and transmitted. The early bit focuses on translations of the texts, and the later bit on different versions. There's not much on how texts were chosen or rejected for inclusion in the canon, which I would have liked. And the author assumes familiarity with the structure of the New Testament, though not so much with the Hebrew Bible (the "Old Testament")...whereas for me the opposite is true.

I got a lot out of it, though, including a confirmation of my gradually strengthening view that Christianity is not a "descendant" of Judaism, but that both religions are descendants of the earlier "Judaite" (my word, I'm sure there is a better one) religion, that centred on a single temple, hereditary priests and animal sacrifice - nothing at all like present-day Judaism, even though the latter presents itself as a natural continuation of the former. 

Review of The Lobster

Oh blimey this is a weird, mind-blowing one. In a future in which it's not permissible to be single, those without relationships are sent to a special hotel where they have 45 days to partner up, and if they fail they are turned into an animal of their choice. The hotel is presided over by a cruel manager brilliantly played by Olivia Colman, and there are some tropes that wouldn't be out of place in a BDSM-themed porn film - the chambermaids provide perfunctory regular sexual teasing to keep the male "guests" focused on their task of finding a mate, and masturbation is punished with mutiliation of the hand by insertion into a toaster. The acting is weirdly dead-pan, and there are lots of strange details.

Oh, and in the woods there is a community of singles, The Loners, who enforce the state of not being partnered with the same cruelty that the mainstream society punishes singleness. This community is also provided over by a matriach, played by the gorgeous Lea Seydoux. The hotel dwellers hunt the loners with dart guns, and when they catch them they are allowed extra days at the hotel before the ultimate penalty of being turned into an animal is enforced.

There are lots of other weird and horrible details, but really you are going to have to watch this one for yourself...and you should.

Watched on Netflix.

Review of Master Cheng

A soppy, sentimental film about migration and being a foreigner by Finnish director Mika Kaurismäki, who has done much better than this. Chinese guy turns up in a small Lapland town looking for a Finnish hockey player who bailed him out of a debt to "bad guys", and ends up staying to become the cook in the gruesome local diner where the cute but troubled owner reguarly provides horrible food to a community of humourous curmudgeons. He wins her heart and theirs, and ends up marrying her and staying, and becoming reconciled to Finnish culture as they all become enthusiasts for Chinese cooking.

It's a sweet, beautiful but not very interesting film, and it soft-soaps the problems of migration and exile into a fairy tale. It's also oddly like the film Le Havre, by Kaurismäki's younger brother Ari, which also features a refugee taken in and cherished by the local community.  

Review of "The Second Sleep" by Robert Harris

Not one of his better books, but I am amazed at the volume of his output, all of which is at least good enough. This is a post-apocalyptic story, set in an England which has returned to a mainly medieval level of technological and economic civilisation, dominated by an Anglican church that jealously guards access to any knowledge about the past. The world making is a bit better than the plot and the characters, and it carried me along, but I wasn't all that engaged.

Review of Bergman Island

Beautiful but slightly boring film about a film-making couple on a trip to the island where Bergman made a lot of his films...they are a bit troubled in their relationship - he's more successful and famous, she is stuck on a film that she can't finish. And then we get the story of her film as a story-within-the-story, still on the same island and with some overlapping actors. And that's a good thing, because it's much more interesting than the frame-story. Forty-five minutes in and I couldn't see how the film could be saved, because it was so dull, but the story-within-the-story redeemed it. Lots of messing with your head with narrative inconsistencies, buildings that aren't there in both stories, etc.

Watched at Lansdown Film Club, sitting on the agonizingly painful chairs.

Review of You People

Mainly grim "comedy" about relations between Black people and Jews in contemporary America, framed by a youngish Jewish man (who loves "the culture", meaning Black American culture) who accidentally meets and then falls in love with a young Afro-American woman. Then they introduce each other to their respective families and it all goes wrong - the Jewish family is painfully and awkwardly liberal, the Black family father is a follower of the antisemite Louis Farrakhan, and they break up before being re-united in an implausible fairy-tale reconciliation ending.

Netflix.

Review of "Lila: An Inquiry into Morals" by Robert Pirsig

I made it to about page 100 and then gave up. This is pompous, pseudy unreadable stuff, and if there are important philosophical ideas in there then I will have to find them some other way. I've had it on my bookshelf for years, thinking that I ought to read it one day because I had some vague memory of enjoying the author's first book, "Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance". As I tried to plough through this I began to remember that I hadn't actually enjoyed that either...I just thought that it was somehow good for me, because it was supposed to be profound and all the cool people were reading it.

Now I know better and life is too short.

Review of Gravity

Enjoyable gripping space-set disaster movie, with Sandra Bullock as a non-astronaut scientist marooned in space by a debris storm that kills her colleagues and destroys her spacecraft. Agrophobia, claustrophobia, and vertigo in equal measures, but very well made and engaging.

Watched on Prime Video via Louis's phone.