Review of "Drink?: The New Science of Alcohol and Your Health" by David Nutt

I like what David Nutt writes about other recreational drugs - he's sensible rather than sensationalist and gives good evidence-based advice.

I knew he was a bit down on alcohol, and since I don't think of myself as having a problem with it, and quite like it, I was reluctant to read this book.

But I'm glad that I did. I learned a lot, both about how alcohol works in the brain, and how really bad it is. I don't think I will stop drinking completely, but I am really going to try to drink less, and to examine my own relationship with the drug, and with other people where it's mediated by alcohol.

Towards the end he writes a lot about policy, and his experiences trying to advise government. That is really...dispiriting. It's an eloquent description of how a moderately powerful industry captures the institutions intended to regulate it, and writes policies that suit itself despite the harm that they do to society and individuals. It's particularly depressing to see how much worse the UK has done than other countries, and how useless our legislators and governments are. And this is only the drinks industry...just think what it is like to go up against the fossil fuels industries.

It's also an illustration of how daft the conspiracy nut-jobs view of the world is. Powerful industries don't have to use secret conspiracies to control governments - they can do it right out in the open, using mechanisms that are not secret or illegal.

Review of "Use of Weapons" by Ian M Banks

 

This is the third novel in The Culture series, and quite different from the others. The plot is more complex, it shifts backwards and forwards in time, and there is some confusion about who the characters are. I have a slight suspicion that it was assembled out of a series of disparate stories, because the atmosphere and the descriptions of places and characters are great - it's just a hard-to-follow narrative thread. 

Still enjoyable, mind you.

Review of "Noughts and Crosses" by Malorie Blackman

I suppose this is not really aimed at me - it's Young Adult fiction - and maybe that's why I didn't like it. It's easy to read, with short chapters and un-challenging language, and a plot with plenty of emotion and action to carry the reader along. Still, I was a bit bored. And I can't see the point about writing about a fantasised, alternative-reality racism, when the real thing is everywhere and needs writing about.

Do young adult readers respond to an account of racism in which the positions of blacks and whites are reversed, and Black Africans have colonised white Europe? Maybe they do, though I can't see why. And there's so much about the scenario that's not really fleshed out. Why are the Blacks called Crosses and the Whites Noughts? Are the Crosses and Noughts roughly equal in number, or are the Crosses a tiny colonial elite? There's some suggestion that the Noughts were once enslaved, but we don't know how long ago this was...within living memory, like in the US? Or way back in history? Is this our Earth with a point of departure in history, or a parallel one? And so on...

Review of "Demon Copperhead" by Barbara Kingsolver

I finished this a few weeks ago, but it has taken me ages to get around to writing a review...perhaps because I hoped that I would have something profound to say, but I haven't. It was a great and mainly enjoyable novel, even though the subject matter was anything but enjoyable. It's a retelling of Dickens's "David Copperfield", but relocated to the Appalachian mountains. It focuses on an orphaned poor White boy, and his progress through the "care" system. It has Dickens's eye for the details and the nuts and bolts of institutions, and how they grind people down. And it's set against the background of the opioid plague that has devastated regions like that, as well as much of the rest of the US.

It's a great book, another triumph from Barbara Kingsolver. 

Review of Hugo

Nice enough steampunk-ish (well, period drama really, but with so much steampunk detail that it felt faux-period) kids' film about a boy living in the walls of a Paris railway station, trying to solve a mystery that was left to him by his now-dead father. Quite a lot of cinema history in that rose-tinted way that Hollywood sometimes likes. Lots of famous people in cameo roles - Jude Law, Sacha Baron Cohen, Frances de la Tour, Peter Ustinov, Ben Kingsley, and the lead for Asa Butterfield, before he became famous as Otis from Sex Education.

Whisper it not, but I was a bit bored by the end, despite the chases and the drama. For the most part the peril never felt very perilous. Still, it was lovely to look at.

Watched via informal distribution.

Review of "Operation Mindfuck QANON AND THE CULT OF DONALD TRUMP" by Robert Guffey

Much more detail about the nature of the Qanon conspiracy theories than I was prepared for...I knew this stuff was pretty batshit crazy, but I was still unprepared for how stupid it all is. And at some level I can't help thinking that the people pushing it out know that it's stupid, and are laughing at their followers; for example, the references to Deep Underground Military Bases, for which the followers unreflectingly use the acronym D.U.M.B. 

Some of this was compellingly awful, and other parts were mind-numbingly boringly awful...not the author's fault, it's just that there's only so much of this you can take. 

Sometimes his political instincts are spot on - he manages to despise the right-wing nutjobs who perpetrate this stuff without embracing their opponents, the mainstream Democrats who really don't give a shit about the damage that they've done with their policies and their wars. 

At other times he - no doubt exasperated by the depth of the bullshit he's had to wade through - descends into sarcasm that isn't interesting or edifying to read. That's a shame, a better editor would have cut a lot of that out.

He's quite well informed on the historical background to conspiracy theories, but I found that there are things that I wish he'd known about - for example, he cites Will Eisner's "The Plot: The Secret Story of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion" for an explanation of the historical background to this foundational conspiracy theory, rather than Norman Cohn's "Warrant for Genocide: The Myth of the Jewish World-Conspiracy and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion". 

Probably not the definitive source on Qanon, but a good one to read. I was reading this as the news came through about Trump's indictment, and it made me glad that there was a prospect, however small, that the bastards responsible for all this might go to jail.

Review of Barbie

I enjoyed this a lot more than I expected to. It seemed quite clever and funny to me, and I liked the acting - playing the live-action equivalent of plastic doll is obviously role that Ryan Gosling has been waiting for.  The Guardian review is itself clever and funny, and hard to improve on...but a few things in passing occur to me that don't seem to have been noted elsewhere. 

Firstly, this film is overtly self-referential - it doesn't quite have characters addressing the fourth wall, but the narrator does refer to it being a film, with casting choices - not something I remember from anything else. It does't need to make sense of the fact that Barbieland is a fantasy, and instead it chooses to make fun of this...Barbie doesn't expect drinking vessels to have fluids in them when she's in the real world, and the wave on the beach is of course solid, as is the surface of the pool at Barbie's dream house.

Is this lost on what I assume is the film's target audience...young girls who either still play with Barbies or did until recently? Or is that not the target audience at all? The film opens with a parody of the opening of 2001 A Space Odyssey, complete with Thus Spake Zarathustra, and showing very young girls smashing their baby dolls as they embrace the possibilities of the new Barbie toy. I thought it was funny...but who else did? Is today's pre-teen audience so media-literate that they get this joke too? Or what?

Watched at an actual cinema, the Vue in Stroud - the first time in ages!

Review of Pixie

Quite enjoyable Irish dark comedy, set in the wild west where we've just been on holiday, and populated with feuding drug-dealing families, some of whom are priests. Held my attention, had a few laughs, a strong woman character and some interesting takes on male buddydom and sexuality. 

I note in passing that the font for the titles suggested the 1974 film "Foxy Brown", which was also about a woman taking revenge on drug gangs. Pixie, Foxy, that's not an accident, is it?