Review of Denmark

Watched in two tranches, because we gave up at the first attempt - it was so unremittingly miserable. An unemployed recently divorced bloke in Wales lives in a squalid flat below a neighbour who plays loud house and techno all the time, and he's estranged from his son and his mother and pretty much everyone. He has almost no money, though he has a little for drink and weed. But he's robbed, and everything bad happens to him, and then he hears that prisons in Denmark are really nice places to live, so he resolves to go to Denmark and get sent to prison.

Which was where we stopped watching. But the next night I was home alone, and watched the rest, and there is a sort of redemption and a development of characters, and it was worth staying and seeing it through.

Watched via BBC iPlayer, smartphone and Chromecast.

Review of Baby Done

A really terrible New Zealand comedy about a young woman who becomes pregnant but doesn't want to embrace parenthood and give up her life as an aboriculturalist and competitive tree-climber. Her British partner really wants to be a dad, so she doesn't tell him she's pregnant, though he finds out soon enough. I laughed once or twice, but really it was not funny, and sleazy and slightly misogynist - no-one could really be as stupid as this woman. 

Watched on BBC iPlayer via smartphone and Chromecast. Apparently it was only 84 minutes long, but it felt much much longer.

Review of Liquorice Pizza

An odd and rather unsatisfying film...I'm sure when they pitched it the word "quirky" was used, but it's as much shapeless as quirky. At first I liked the fact that is was not only set in the early 1970s but seemed to have been made then too - the colours, the shots, the camera resolution... And some of it is nicely observed, with good close-ups and dynamics between the characters. But the narrative becomes a set of increasingly implausible vignettes and incidents that don't seem to relate to each other.

Quite fed up by the end, it seemed overlong and not so interesting.

Review of The Old Oak

Not one of Ken Loach's best, though it is moving and well acted. It's about a former mining village in the north-east where everything is closed down and the local pub - the eponymous Old Oak - is just about holding on. A group of Syrian refugees are housed in the village, where house prices are in free fall, and where the locals who already feel dumped on feel that these people are just one more thing that's been dumped on them. The pub landlord tries to be kind and welcoming, but his remaining regulars are hostile and racist. 

A good scenario, and lots of sensitive and thoughtful portrayal of the locals...the Syrians are more like ciphers, apart from the female lead played by Ebla Mari, who is a photographer and a rounded-out character. Incidentally, I note in passing the actor is actually a Druze woman from the Golan Heights, so she's never lived in Syria, having been born and grown up under Israeli occupation; oddly this may have kept her alive, because ISIS massacred Druze in the civil war. 

The film is pretty bleak, but then ends with an entirely implausible happy ending in which one of the Syrian families hears that their father, who was missing and then briefly believed to have been found, has died. The entire community, including some of the horrible racists, rallies round to support them in their mourning. The final scene shows the refugees accepted into the traditions of the local labour movement and marching with their own Arabic-inflected banner in the Durham Miners' Gala.

Review of "The Perfect Heresy; the revolutionary life and death of the Medieval Cathars" by Stephen O'Shea

Nicely written popular history about the Cathars with an entirely reasonable focus on southern France and Languedoc. Mainly focuses on the Albigensian crusades and the suppression of the heresy, and not much about how the Cathars grew and became established in the first place. Very little about the intellectual roots of Gnosticism, but hey you can't have everything. I still learned some stuff about Cathar practices, not least the names of the prayers and rituals that they used.

I'd happily read more by this author.