Review of Living

Is it possible for a film to be boring and enjoyable at the same time? Well, this one does a pretty good job. Bill Nighy is a bureaucrat at the London County Council in the 1950s, and he's emotionally sclerotic (with his co-workers and his son) and acts as a road block to stop anything happening - a group of women from an estate in the East End want to turn a bomb site into a children's playground, and they are routed back and forth between departments to ensure that nothing ever happens to their proposal.

Then he learns that he's going to die from cancer, and he goes very slightly off the rails, visiting an improbably bohemian Brighton, taking a young woman who is a former colleague to lunch at Fortnum's, not turning up to work, and so on. 

It's all beautifully done, though not much really happens. It's all about the feelings, and the facial expressions that are about not revealing them.

I note in passing that there's something of a geographical error in the film. The bureaucrat and his colleagues arrive by suburban commuter train into Waterloo Station, and then cross a bridge over the Thames to approach County Hall, then the HQ of the London County Council. Except that County Hall is on the same side of the river as Waterloo, so how can they be crossing the river to approach it?

Watched in the Middle Floor at Springhill, having obtained it via informal download.

There's a very good review in the London Review of Books here.

Review of "On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous" by Ocean Vuong

A short book, but one with a lot to it...coming of age as gay in rural Connecticut, the Vietnam war and its impact on Vietnamese and Americans, the devastation wrought by opioids on working class communities, deindustrialisation and poverty...and what it's like to be a writer in the shadow of all that. And death, and abandonment, and separation. Just brilliant really, and I may read it again.

Review of Where the Crawdads Sing

A feel-good film about nature, child abuse, male violence, rape, murder...what's not to like? Actually a really good film, with a moderately complex narrative structure, some nice acting, lovely nature footage, a courtroom drama aspect, and a great ending. Hard to say much else without spoiling, but well worth watching.

Watched in the middle floor at Springhill, obtained via informal distribution.

Review of "The Debt to Pleasure" by John Lanchester

Hard to do justice to this while avoiding spoilers. It's a great, clever, well-written and thoroughly nasty book. It's written in the first person by a snobbish food bore, who writes pretentiously about a journey to his summer home in France through a series of menus and recipes. Despite the fact that he's deeply unpleasant it's not too terrible to spend all this time in his company, because some of his knowledge about food and history is actually enjoyable. 

It's so pretentious that there are laugh-out-loud moments, along with insights into the narrator's history and personality of which he seems to be unaware. We gradually learn that he's an unreliable narrator, though this is done so slowly that it wasn't apparent to me. 

And that's pretty much all I can say without ruining it for you. 

Review of Flee

Really good animated feature film about a young gay man who is fleeing from Afghanistan. Every so often it's inter-cut with some archive film, including scenes of pre-war Kabul, and it's sort of shocking how modern the dress and the shops look. Lots of happy, smiling young women in modern dress on the streets and on public transport. There are also some scenes from what must be Communist Party congresses, with lots of uniformed mustachioed men single The Internationale. And without wanting to romanticise the period of Communist rule, it's hard not to wonder where all those men went, and whether any of them are still there as the potential constituency for a very different kind of Afghanistan.

But it's mainly about the experience of being a displaced refugee, and it's grim and very effective. 

Watched via informal distribution.

Review of "Elmet" by Fiona Mozley

Oh blimey, what a book! A depiction of rural, underclass, off-the-grid life. The people here are one fraction of that subculture...the kind that intermingles with Travellers, takes part in illegal bare knuckle prizefights, poaches and hunts...not the solar-powered vegan off-grid van-dwelling underclass, even though vans also feature here. Heroin addiction is in the background, though not specifically mentioned.

It's rough and violent, and often shocking. The book is also well written, structured and has some very evocative nature writing. It sometimes uses language that I don't think the first-person narrator would actually use, but that doesn't matter too much.

This is a debut novel, and it's pretty brilliant, though not an easy read.

Review of Vandana Shiva: Seeds of Change

A film about activist and scientist Vandana Shiva that left me slightly uneasy. It's more or less a biopic, from her early days as a sort of privileged middle-class Indian woman who wants to study Physics even though her convent school tries to dissuade her, to her involvement with the Chipko movement, and on to her campaigns in support of small farmers in India and against the global seed companies in general, and GMO in particular. And then there she is, on the stage at the anti-globalisation protests in Seattle alongside trade unionists and campaigners, and being cheered to the rafters.

Most of the time I was carried along and just thought how wonderful she was, but I was surprised to see that one of the people she cites as a sort of corporate shill who's been attacking her was Mark Lynas, who I had always thought well of as a climate activist and writer. So I searched a little, and I found that George Monbiot - who I also think well of - is not very keen. And some of this is about the debate over veganism and lab-grown meat vs. "natural" organic farming, and I've said before that I am not entirely happy with Monbiot's uncritical acceptance of food produced in factories rather than on farms. I wish it were true that we could feed everyone well from small organic mixed farms, but I don't think it is.

So there's something about Vandana Shiva that doesn't quite feel right either..the big bindi on her forehead, the spiritual influences that she cites, and which the audience for the film lapped up . For her Gandhi is the shaping influence, but I can't feel entirely good about him since I read Perry Anderson's rather critical articles...like this one and also this.

Watched at a special screening at Hawkwood College, which has also been a venue for some dodgy events in the past, which didn't help any.

Review of Neptune Frost

Really interesting as a phenomenon, but as a film...well, that's two hours of my life I'm not going to get back. Nothing that you call a plot, or dialogue...just a long stream of declaimed technospeak from the various characters, and striking images and scenes juxtaposed next to each other without any purpose or narrative. I read a plot summary and a blurb, and that might describe what's going on, but it might easily not. 

Watched at the Stroud Film Festival, and I had a little doze despite the fiercely uncomfortable chairs. For all the understanding that I got I might as well have slept through the whole thing.

Review of Ali and Ava

Nice, sweet film about the relationship between an older white woman and an isolated British-Asian young man in Bradford. Among the things I liked about it were the positive depictions of what white people had got from their encounter with their Asian-origin neighbours...the little white girl doing Indian-style dancing from a video (with her sometimes-racist older brother joining in) is the example that struck me first. This is a depiction of two communities living alongside each other and picking stuff up...not exactly integrating, but not hostile and hating either. 

In an understated way both the protagonists are people who are not completely limited by their class position either; she's been to university and got a degree in Criminology, he reads poetry. And it avoids the familiar rom-com tropes of will-they-won't-they, while remaining gentle and affection all along.

This is the second time I've watched it, but I couldn't find an earlier review.

Watched via informal distribution too.

Review of Chatter

A lovely short film shot within 100m of where I live, with people I know as actors. Despite the brevity (11 minutes) it covers a lot of stuff, including depression and family relationships, and relationships with nature. Mainly it's about the impact of the pandemic and lockdown, especially the early period when we really didn't know what was happening or whether we were all going to die.

Watched at the Stroud Film Festival.

Review of Mario's Cafe

I was so excited by Roland Denning's film about James Castle, The Society for the Protection of Unwanted Buildings, that I had to watch others....he'd referred to this one at the Q&A after the other film, and I knew the area. It's nice, but without the personal connection it didn't do as much for me. Maybe it would have been better at a public showing too.

Review of The Society for the Protection of Unwanted Objects

I'd seen this film before, about my friend and fellow Red Band member James Castle, but it was different watching it with an audience...last time I'd watched it at home via Vimeo. It's nominally about his business, the eponymous Society for the Protection of Unwanted Objects, though really it's about him, and his hoarding addiction, and what it has done to his relationships, especially with his former partner Karen. 

The film is as charming and funny as James is, but it's also sad, watching someone destroy their relationships and damage themselves as a result of what really is an addiction. James (who I really love dearly) has all the characteristics of a fully-fledged addict, including denial and bargaining, and subterfuge. The moment when he says "I only have two cars - two Audis and two Alpha Romeos" is both hilarious and tragic, because at the moment he says it he really does believe it.

A genius film, only 30 minutes long, but really worth watching. You can see it online here, but we got more out of watching it at Stroud Film Festival.

Review of Dunkirk

A fairly straightforward war film, rather well done by Christopher Nolan as director. I didn't recognise many of the actors, so it felt like it was real stories...even though there are some big names in there. It cuts backwards and forwards between different groups in various kinds of peril, thus keeping up the tension. It's very well done, with more horror than heroism...the civilians are rather more heroic than the soldiers. There are a few cliched lump-in-throat moments...the navy captain on the mole remaining unflustered as the bombs fall around, the arrival of the little ships. The soldiers do look genuinely shell-shocked and fatigued.

Oddly the Germans barely appear at all, except as the origination point of bombs and shots. Right at the very end there are some shadowy figures in coal-scuttle helmets, but otherwise we see German planes but no pilots, whereas the British pilots get lots of close-ups. Come to think of it, there are no French people either, even though this is a town in France and 1,000 French civilians were killed. Actually tens of thousands of French soldiers were evacuated, and the French navy was heavily involved, but you wouldn't know it from the film. Nor would you know about the Indian, Moroccan and Senegalese soldiers present.

And there's no feeling for the battle itself, which was hard-fought and quite complicated, and involved strategic choices on both sides that had long-lasting implications. The Germans stopped their attack and concentrated on other pockets of British troops. The British refused the French request that they counter-attack rather than evacuate. 

Review of "The Song of Achilles" by Madeline Miller

Not as enjoyable as her Circe. The latter part seems to be mainly a straightforward retelling of the Illiad, which was made even less enjoyable because I'd just read the rather more creative retelling in Pat Barker's "The Silence of The Girls". The earlier sections which seem to me to more made-up (especially the backstory of Achilles and Patroclus) are more enjoyable, though I think there's something not quite right about the shame that the two boys seem to feel about their homosexual love - not very Greek, surely?

Also by making Patroclus the first-person narrator she's sort of stuck once he dies. First it seems that there's no narrator at all - or rather an omniscient third-person narrator...and then it seems that it's Patroclus's spirit after all, which isn't very satisfying either.