Review of "On Java Road" by Lawrence Osborne

A noire-ish thriller set in post-handover Hong Kong, set against the background of the student protests of 2014, and made all the more poignant because we know, as the characters in the novel can only expect, that the protests will go nowhere and achieve nothing, but destroy the lives of many participants.

It's very atmospheric and I liked the settings and the characters, but it's rather let down by the plotting. It takes a really long time for the mystery - the disappearance of a young wealthy student protester, who is having an affair with the super-wealthy frenemy of the journalist first-person narrator - to get started. She doesn't actually disappear until two thirds of the way through the book, and after which there's a lot of suspense and threat, but not much really happens. 

I'm aware that Lawrence Osborne, the writer, has written a Philip Marlowe novel with the blessing of the Raymond Chandler estate, and I couldn't help thinking that Chandler would have got the basic scenario set up much more quickly/

So I sort of had mixed feelings about the book. But the next novel that I picked up wasn't nearly as well written, so I retrospectively like it more than I did straight after I finished it.

Review of Gettysburg

I watched this mainly because Facebook reels kept showing me clips of it, and the "prequel" Gods and Generals. 

There are lots of bad reviews, but it seemed a fairly decent battle picture, not prettifying war though perhaps investing it with more grandeur and dignity than it deserves. We do see men die and get wounded, but we don't see the after-effects or the gruesome battlefield amputations or deaths from festering wounds. 

It is very very long - four and a half hours. I treated it like a series and watched it in chunks.

There were a few map shots at the beginning but I think I would have appreciated a bit moe about the strategic significance of the battle, and some understanding of how the war went on for so long after this "decisive" battle.

Watched on a USB stick via informal distribution.

Review of "The Glass Room" by Simon Mawer

 

I was a bit bored with this to start with...it seemed sort of plodding, and I wasn't very interested in the characters. The rise of Hitler, the Anschluss, and so on, all felt very predictable and formulaic. Somehow it came alive for me when the consequences of the main male character's affair with a Jewish Viennese prostitute started to play out, and by the end I was moved and engaged. Not sure that I will be reading any more Simon Mawer though.

Review of "The Spinning Heart" by Donal Ryan

A really hard read, about a rural (or perhaps peri-urban) community in the west of Ireland in the aftermath of the property boom and collapse. It's told from multiple perspectives - each chapter written by a different first person narrator - but describing linked events. Along the way it shows how the boom and collapse exacerbated tensions and fault lines that were already present in the community.

Not a long book, but I could only read a few pages at a time, because it felt so intense. Highly recommended.

Review of That We May Face The Rising Sun

Well that's nearly two hours of my life that I'm not getting back. Slow, beautiful but very dull Irish film about a handsome young Irish writer and his beautiful European (French? German? Impossible to say and not explained in the narrative) living in a remote Irish village as sometime farmers, though still pursuing their more urban careers - in the absence of internet or even telephones. 

There's an awful lot of not much happening, apart from some knowing smiles between the couple, and drinking booze and tea between the couple and the other villagers. 

I fell asleep for at least half an hour but I didn't seem to have missed anything.

Oddly the man character reminded me of the man from the Oxo advert series from the 1970s, which I didn't even know I had remembered. Looking again it turns out to have been a false memory, there's little resemblance. Maybe I was thinking of the Tom character from 1970s sitcom The Good Life, where the resemblance is really very strong.

Watched at the Lansdown Film Club.

Review of "Travels with Myself and Another" by Martha Gellhorn

Martha Gellhorn made her reputation as a war correspondent, but most of this book (compiled, I think, from previously published essays) is about all the other stuff that happens around the edge of the fighting. The first long section takes around China during the war between the Japanese and various Chinese forces, and it's brilliantly evocative of the misery of travel - the damp, the dirt, the waiting...

And then she's in the Caribbean, sailing between islands to try to find German U-boats...which she doesn't find at all, but she does encounter lots of other stuff - racists, expats of various nationalities and persuasions, some American air force people. 

It's not all war time. She goes to French West Africa as it transitions to phoney independence, and she writes about the racism of the French residents but also her own racism, and in particular the visceral, unwelcome physical reaction she has to the smell and the appearance of some (but not all) Africans. 

There's lots more - her attempt to go on a safari with a guide who is a Kikuyu gay Presbyterian "driver" who can't really drive and doesn't know the country at all is brilliant.

Really enjoyable read.

Review of "Timothy's Book: Notes of an English Country Tortoise" by Verlyn Klinkenborg

Gentle, enjoyable book about...well, a tortoise, imported into a C18th village in Surrey, where it lives in the sometimes-care of a country vicar who is a naturalist. It's based on a real tortoise, and a real vicar, and most of the book is based on his field notes, which were eventually published. 

There's lots of beautiful nature writing, and the additional twist is the imagined perspective of a tortoise, which is slower, but also much longer-lived, than any of the humans in its environment.

This sounds really dull, and I was a bit put off by four pages of celebrity endorsements and quotes from reviews, but it was actually a great read. Oddly I have no memory of how it came to be on our bookshelf, though I see it was purchased from Oxfam in Muswell Hill.

Review of Moulin Rouge

I haven't watched this since it came out back in 2001, and it was an absolute joy to watch - fabulous sets, lovely costumes, surprisingly good singing from a younger Euan McGregor and Nicole Kidman. Lots of nice details that bear looking at more than once, like Kylie's cameo as the anise fairy early on.

I noticed that the very large elephant in the forecourt of the Moulin Rouge nightclub is surprisingly similar to the the animatronic "Sultan's Elephant" that came to London in 2006 - did the latter borrow from the former, or were they both based on something that existed previously?

Watched in the Common House at Springhill via a USB stick and informal distribution.

Review of Rose

A Danish film about a middle-aged woman with schizophrenia whose sister (and sister's husband) takes her on a coach trip to Paris. It's not billed as a comedy, but there are some very funny moments in it, along with lots of pathos and tragedy. I don't know to what extent schizophrenia is like this - and there's not much attempt to portray Rose's inner world, just her outer behaviour. 

I was particularly touched by the way that Rose is more confident and competent when she's in France (where she had a teenage love affair with a married man that precipitated her illness) and when she's speaking French.

Along the way I learned that D-Day is really important to Danish historical memory - I had no idea about this, and about the exiled Danish sailors who participated.

Watched at Lansdown Hall through the film club, and one of the best films I've seen there for a while.

Review of "Mr Phillips" by John Lanchester

How I struggled through this. I like John Lanchester's writing in the LRB, but his fiction leaves me cold. This was particularly depressing. Mr Phillips is a man in his 50s, who has been made redundant from his accountancy job but hasn't told his wife or anyone else yet - and like the Japanese salarymen who might perhaps have inspired the book, he gets dressed for work and heads out for his usual train as if he was going to work. Then he wanders around London all day, thinking about his life, and thinking a lot about sex, and having some interesting and some dull experiences. 

He reflects on the pleasures and frustrations of modern life - this book was published in 2000, but it already feels like ancient history...this is a world with compact disc shops in railway stations. There are no smartphones - there may have been one mobile phone mentioned. There's no internet, no online anything. 

And Mr Phillips, who is eight years older than me, feels like a person from another era. I know he's supposed to be a big dull and emotionally sclerotic, but none of the people I know who are eight years older than me are like this.

Review of "Cahokia Jazz" by Francis Spufford

I really loved this book, but I haven't managed to write a review since finishing it more than two weeks ago - I wonder why not?

Let's started with what I liked. It's alternative history, which is a genre I enjoy - speculative fiction merged with history, what's not to like? And I like the scenario of this one, which is that the variant of smallpox that arrived in North America with the first Europeans was the non-lethal variety, so the Native American population was not devastated. And it ties really nicely into what I recall from The Dawn of Everything including how advanced Native American civilisations were, the existence of potential other routes of development, and Cahokia itself, a Native American urban civilisation.

Spufford has imagined how such a civilisation would have advanced into and alongside the modern, urban, industrial civilisation of the United States - the alt-history Cahokia is part of the US but still somewhat distinct politically and much more distinct culturally.  It's well imagined and beautifully described.

I also like the way that Spufford has avoided those long passages explaining the course of the alternative history - in the best tradition of alt-history there's an author's after-note, but no long explanatory passages. 

As in his book Golden Hill, Spufford - an English white bloke, as far as I know - has a great insight into the workings of race in America. The main character is of Native American descent but grew up in a white-run orphanage, so he both is and isn't connected to the Native American civilisation of Cahokia. And he's a Jazz musician, so his friends are mainly Black Americans, and he's partly connected to their world too.

The actual murder mystery plot, and the other characters - are great too. I was really sorry when it ended.

I'd like to say a bit more about the ending, which has some parallels with what happened at the end of The Lincoln Highway, but that would be a spoiler.

Review of His Three Daughters

Moving but not exactly enjoyable film about three women - two sisters and a half-sister - gathered in a New York apartment to be there for their father in his dying days. There's a few palliative care nurses who come in and out, and a few other characters, but mainly it's just the three women and their difficult relationships.

It feels like it could have been a stage play without much difficulty, even though the youngest of the woman sometimes goes outside the apartment to smoke weed.

Definitely worth watching - and I'd be grateful if someone could explain the ending to me.

Watched on Netflix.

Review of The Big Sleep

Watched this again last night - I've seen it before but I felt like watching it again. I've read the book, which was also confusing. I think I read somewhere that Chandler cobbled it together from bits that he had written, with the result that it's stylish and atmospheric but the plot doesn't really make sense. Also that the screenwriters on the film asked him to explain the plot, and he couldn't. On top of that I think that some things seem to have been cut from the book's narrative - wasn't the Geiger character involved in some sort of porn racket, and wasn't Carmen Rutledge being blackmailed because the photos of her were porn? I didn't get that from the film, though I did have a few little sleeps of my own during it.

Despite all this I did enjoy it. I note in passing that Lauren Bacall was not conventionally pretty, and that Humphrey Bogart would be scrawny by the standards of today's Hollywood. The men all wear great suits and hats, the women - even the minor characters - wear great outfits.

Watched on BBC iPlayer via Chromecast. 

Review of Elizabethtown

Another overlong and somewhat shapeless comedy. It felt like the plot was made up of bits left over from other films...a young man who is a shoe designer for a fictionalised version of Nike has a spectacular (and implausible) failure with one of his projects, decides to kill himself in an implausible and horrible way, but is interrupted by the news that his father has died. He must go back to his father's Kentucky small town hometown, and on the way he meets heartwarming people including the quirky but attractive air stewardess on his otherwise-empty flight, and they fall in love, and...get the idea?

Too long, not funny enough, kept feeling like it should have ended.

Watched on Netflix.

Review of Lee

Biopic about the war photographer Lee Miller. Ruth liked it, I didn't so much - it felt overlong, with terrible stilted dialogue and not very interesting storytelling. Shame, because Kate Winslet's acting is fine, and the cinematography is good too.

I was surprised, though, to find out that Miller covered the war, and took some of the first and most harrowing pictures of the Nazi concentration camps, while working for British Vogue. She's really shocked towards the end when she discovers that Vogue hasn't published her most searing pictures; I'm shocked that she ever thought that it might. 

Watched at the Vue cinema - haven't done that for a while.

Review of La Chimera

Strange Italian film, billed as a "comedy-drama" (that really ought to be a warning bell by now) but with no actual laughs. It's about archaeological looters - grave robbers who find Etruscan tombs, steal the grave goods and sell them to a fence, who sells them on to collectors. The central character is a tall, gangling, troubled English man who has just returned from a prison term and re-establishes contact with his gang of fellow-looters and with an older woman, living in a decaying grand house, who may be the mother of his former (and deceased) lover.  He seems to have some unexplained ability to find graves, either just by feeling them or with a dowsing rod.

There are some fantasy sequences - things that can't happen in a realistic narrative (for example, when the people on a train turn out to be the dead souls of the graves that he has robbed who want their votive offerings back).

There's a particular good, sinister moment when the gang board a grand and marvellous paddle steamer ship where the fence is making a slick sales presentation to some museum curators, including the presentation of documents of provenance which we know to be forged. 

It felt a bit overlong and sometimes confusing, but it was still good.

Watched at Lansdown Hall - a Stroud Film Club showing.

Review of Anna+

 Slow and not entirely interesting Dutch film about a young lesbian whose partner moves to Montreal, and she's supposed to follow in a few months, only they both agree to be open and polyamorous and it doesn't work out well as they both find new people to have sex with. 

Lots of sex in the film, none of which seemed erotic. The young woman identifies as queer but both her and her girlfriend (the word they use in the subtitles) seem very vanilla and un-queer, though there's a bit of drag dressing up with her bunch of lovely lesbian and gay friends.

Watched on Netflix. I'm glad it was there - positive role models for young LGBTQ people and all that - but it was a bit boring for me.

Review of "Another Country" by James Baldwin

I know I am a bit late to the party, but James Baldwin is an amazing writer. This one is set (mainly) in New York and follows the lives of several characters, white and Black, male and female, gay and straight. Close third person narrative, so it feels very immediate but the reader doesn't have a guarantee that it's going to turn out OK, as first person narrator tends to imply. Lots of pain and suffering, as much from gender and orientation as from race - Baldwin is really good at getting inside the heads of different kinds of people. 

Review of "Harlem Shuffle" by Colston Whitehead

This followed on from If Beale Street Could Talk...another book set mainly in Harlem, with a protagonist who has raised himself out of the criminal underclass and into the petit-bourgeois shop trading class (he's a dealer in furniture), but the temptation to re-engage with criminality as a fence continues to loom. It's a very compelling read with strong characters and plot, and another look at what it was like to be a Black person in a "less" racist northern US city.

Review of 3000 Years of Longing

Enjoyable fantasy romp with a bit of an Orientalist slant - sultans, harems, that sort of thing - but it's based on a short story by A S Byatt, and it stars Tilda Swinton, who is pretty much never in anything bad. Surprisingly Ruth enjoyed it too, even though she doesn't really do fantasy much - I think the plot was good enough, and it had a bit of emotional depth.

Review of Joyride

Another Olivia Colman showcase, this time she's Irish and about to give birth to a daughter that she plans to give away to her sister, only she runs into a young boy who's enmeshed in a complex relationship with his really bad dad, a thief and a cheat. Some great chases and escapes, lots of lovely local details. 

Review of Wicked Little Letters

 

A nice period piece of a film, with Olivia Colman as the recipient (and - spoiler alert, but not much of one - the writer) of obscene poison pen letters in Littlehampton. Lots of cameo roles for great British actors - Colman is just great.

Review of "The New Authoritarians Convergence on the Right" by David Renton

 

Declaration of interest - I know David Renton, and I think he's great. He's very astute politically, he avoids glib explanations and snappy prescriptions, and he writes very well in a way that is accessible and intelligent.

So no surprise that I liked this book very much. It makes several very important points; firstly that not every manifestation of the far right is fascist - fascism is a particular form of far right politics, with an emphasis on violence, control of the streets, and a "revolution" against the liberal state. So other versions of the far right, including the electorally successful versions in Europe, North America and Asia, have made their peace with elections and with a version of the liberal state. I don't think Renton says so explicitly, but the main differentiator isn't ideological or policy content. Fascists have been all over the place in terms of policies. They are clearly not free market ideologues, and often advocate a role for the state in managing the economy that would not be out of place in middle-of-the road Social Democracy. 

The second important point is that calling out the far right as fascists isn't only inaccurate, it's also decreasingly effective. There was a time, especially in the 1970s, that it was enough to demonstrate the historic links between the far right and the fascists of the inter-war and wartime periods. Since everyone thought that Nazis and fascists were bad, proving the connection was enough to place the far right outside the domain of acceptable politics. Sadly, that's no longer the case. The taint of Nazism is wearing thin and as a younger generation without personal memories of the antifascist generation don't care nearly so much. Nazism isn't as a toxic as it once was.

Which means that different tactics, and different arguments are called for in confronting the far right in its present manifestations. Responding with classic antifascist rhetoric and tactics is not going to work in the way that it once did.

I think Renton is also saying that addressing the root causes from which the far right draws its strength - in particular the failure of liberal capitalism to live up to its promises - is not only the most comprehensive response to the far right, but it's ultimately the only thing that will be effective.

Review of "Hot Time in the Old Town: The Great Heat Wave of 1896 and the Making of Theodore Roosevelt" by Edward P. Kohn

A slightly plodding account of the New York heatwave of 1896, and the impact that it had on the careers of two American politicians - Teddy Roosevelt and William Jennings Bryan.  Bryan is the more interesting, though the least successful - a failed almost-populist, almost-radical who's career came off the rails at a mass rally in Madison Square Gardens, during the heatwave. The book doesn't say this, but some people think that Bryan was the model for the cowardly lion in The Wizard of Oz. 

Despite this not being a brilliant book there's lots to think about - how our cities are going to cope with climate change, for one thing. And also about how the United States has always been separate economies forced into a single sovereign state, and the Populist moment was about the way that the agricultural west didn't really belong in the same monetary system as the industrial North East. 

Review of "Lily" by Rose Tremain

A Victorian melodrama. It's Rose Tremain, so it's very well written, with lots of beautiful description and a well observed interior life for the main character. Lots about the misery of orphans and foundlings in this time, and a not at all sympathetic portrait of the Coram orphanage. 

I read it during my recent bout of covid, and it was absolutely perfect for that - engaging without being too intellectually or emotionally demanding.

Review of All Quiet on the Western Front

Long, gruelling, realistic...I watched it in four tranches because it was too much all at once. My first thought was that this was actually like being there...without the smells, of course, but with lots of noise and mud and gore. But on reflection, it's not - the cinematic "God's Eye" view means that you see the enemy approaching as you would if you were, because the camera keeps cutting from one side to the other, and providing longer views so that the watcher can understand what's going on. Which means it's not like being there at all.

It does capture the randomness of death and the awful pathos of war, even though this was mainly a war in which combatants died and civilians didn't - perhaps it was the last such war.

I have a dim memory of the first film on the book, and this includes things that I don't remember being in that, as well as leaving out some of the poignant details from that - wasn't the protagonist a butterfly collector? Doesn't he die reaching for a butterfly?

Review of "Pigs in Heaven" by Barbara Kingsolver

A sequel to The Bean Trees, and a much better book - not really positioned as a sequel, but I realised a little way in. Readable without having read the previous book. I read it during my recent bout of covid, and it was just perfect - interesting and engaging enough without being too emotionally taxing (despite themes of racism, abandonment, child abuse and so on). I learned a bit about how racism against Native Americans has worked, and a bit about Cherokee culture. I had a little cry at the end.

Review of "Every Secret Thing: My Family, My Country" by Gillian Slovo

A well-written personal memoir of the Apartheid years and the end of white South Africa by one who was intimately connected with the struggle, this swing back and forward between the big-p political and the entirely personal.

Gillian Slovo is (or at least was, when she wrote the book) still angry with her parents for not loving her as much as they loved the struggle; something she acknowledges herself finding in the children of other figures from the movement, including Mandela's daughter. So there's sometimes a petulant, aggrieved tone to the book, and it doesn't make me want to know the author.

But there's lots to absorb, about what people in the opposition to Apartheid went through, especially those white people in leadership roles - and about the way it played out in their personal lives. 

And I'm aware, too, that it's a little bit of insight into the world in which Ruth grew up, even though her parents were not actively engaged in any kind of anti-Apartheid politics while in South Africa - though they did have personal relationships with many of the people that were. 

Every so often Slovo seems to remember that her parents were both Jewish, but it doesn't feature in a major way - maybe it didn't for them either. Some of the considerations of this seem implausible - could her grandmother really have forgotten her childhood Yiddish so thoroughly that she was no longer able to speak to her own mother?

Review of The Ballad of Buster Scruggs

I'd never heard of this film (even though it came out several years ago), until I came across it in covid-dazed mindless scrolling through reels on Facebook. I almost never do this, but I sought out the film and watched it (lots of time during covid, I can't do much else). Unlike many reviewers I think it's great - beautifully filmed, lots of great actors, and cleverly crafted if somewhat bleak stories, each one perfect in its own right as a critique of the American dream and fantasies about the Old West.

Well worth watching.

It's on Netflix but I foolishly watched it via informal channels, meaning I had to faff about with USB stick unecessarily.

Review of Civil War

Gruelling violent dystopian war film, set in more-or-less contemporary America in which a civil war has broken out. with a secessionist movement implausibly consisting of California and Texas, and maybe Florida. There's never any discussion as to what the background to secession or the war, just lots of scenes to remind Americans what it looks like when the war comes home. So mass graves, execution of prisoners, shattered towns, that sort of thing.

The narrative focuses on a group of press photographers, and there is some reflection on the role of the media in war time, but it doesn't go very deep.

The film ends with the storming of Washington DC, and then the White House, where team of soldiers find and kill the defeated US President, and then pose smiling by his body.

Lots of affect, but not much thought - perhaps just a warning for Americans to draw back from the brink?

Watched via informal distribution.

Review of Georgia Rule

Mostly watchable "comedy-drama", though not all that much comedy. Set in a small town in Idaho (which in my mind was one of those flat states, but there seems to be a lot of mountains). California-dwelling woman drives back to small hometown to dump wayward teenage daughter on her own mother, with whom she doesn't get on, for the summer. Grandmother is strict and believes in discipline etc, grand-daughter doesn't - could be a relatively straight conflict of wills comedy. In fact it has themes of paedophilia, child sex abuse (oops a bit of a spoiler there), alcoholism and drug addiction. 

Not many laughs, and a narrative structure that lurches from crisis to crisis rather than building up a plot and characters.

Watched on Netflix.

Review of "Bournville" by Jonathan Coe

Another book by Jonathan Coe that's well written but not very enjoyable. I think that it's because it really is a heart of England story, and he does it well but the heart of England is a bit rotten. Not completely, and he doesn't make out that it is, but we quite rightly spend a lot of time with some unpleasant right wing racists, and the series of episodes that he chooses as a slice through English history are all in some way about patriotic fervour - VE Day, the Coronation, the Investiture of Charles as Prince of Wales, and so on.

I remember quite a few of these myself - especially the Investiture, the wedding of Charles and Di, and Di's funeral. Recalling them didn't bring me any pleasure.

Looking forward to another Coe book with a subject that I can get behind, because I do like his writing.

Review of The Sisters Brothers

A mainly nice western, despite lots of heavy duty violence. Lots of really beautiful landscapes too. Two brothers are hired killers for a local boss in Oregon, and they are hired to track down and kill a man who the boss ("the Commodore") has taken against. Another guy is actually doing the finding and the tracking, and he will detain the planned victim until the brother arrives. But the victim persuades the tracking guy to join him in his venture - he has developed a chemical method of illuminating gold in rivers, making it easy to extract - and he plans to make money in order to fund a utopian community in Dallas. 

I don't need to talk you through all the rest of the plot twists, but there are plenty, and it's a lot to do with the relationship between the brothers, and with their now-dead father. 

I watched this with Covid, and I liked it much more than I expected to.

Thanks to BBC iPlayer.

Review of "Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow" by Gabrielle Zevin

Nice book about a couple of young people (not a couple in the romantically-attached sense) who become close friends, make computer games together and found a company which becomes successful in the games business. It's a very easy read and enjoyable. It's also something of a period piece, set during the period when games were already an important cultural form, but when it was still possible for a couple of creatives to make something good and successful without major corporate backing.

Review of "If Beale Street Could Talk" by James Baldwin

Surprisingly I'd never read any of James Baldwin's fiction before, just a few political essays. I had seen the film that was made from the book, so I sort of knew what the plot and the tone would be. But even so I was bowled over by how good it was. The writing is beautiful, the narrative structure is clever, and it doesn't jar at all that the first-person narrator is a young heterosexual woman, even though the author is a gay man. It's about racism of course, and the way in which the system - including "justice" and the labour market, and the housing market, treat Black people, but it's also about love and sex, and he makes a really good job of that.

It's not long but it took me quite a while to read, because I wanted to savour each passage.

Review of Fighting with my family

CineMaterial, Fair use,
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=59374165

A literally knockabout comedy about a young woman from a wrestling family who is selected to go to America to make it big in professional wrestling their. I am not sure where to put the quote marks, because is it a profession? Is it really wrestling? 

It's a form of dramatised acrobatics really, with a morality play overlay - the villains, the surprises, the comebacks. Everybody involved knows it's not real fighting, especially the audience, but they relish the opportunity to participate in the fiction that it is.

The film was quite enjoyable, but wasn't quite able to make up its mind as to whether there really is any drama in who "wins" the bouts - to be a sport film the hero has to have an against-the-odds triumph, but since the film makes it abundantly clear that professional wrestling is a choreographed acrobatic drama, not a contest, we can't really have that. But then we get it anyway, which feels wrong.

I note in passing that none of the actors playing the wrestlers have tattoos, which seems improbable.

Review of Random Hearts

Romantic drama in which a quite-young Harrison Ford and Kristin Scott Thomas are thrown together when they discover that their respective spouses, who have just died in a plan crash, were having an affair. He's a cop, she's a congresswoman, and both of their careers are not going so well. The film is really sad and affected me quite a lot, because of the impact that the deceit and the discovery has on the protagonists. Interesting in that it avoids conventional happy resolution. It made me thing about the legacy adultery in my dad's family and the effect that it had on him. 

I note in passing that the film is 25  years old, and that the main way this manifests itself is the phones - one or two characters have cellphones, but there's a lot of payphone usage, and plot elements turn on messages left on answer machines. Will this be incomprehensible to a future generation?

Watched on Netflix, a rare decent film there.

Review of "The Virgin and The Gipsy" by D H Lawrence

Odd period piece of a book, about a "family" - rector father, three daughters and his mother and sister, from which the daughter's mother has absconded with a lover. The youngest daughter is the central character, and it's about her inner life and the way she experiences social constrictions and conventions. Part of her inner life includes her infatuation with the eponymous gypsy, a young dark brooding type with almost no character of his own - tellingly, it's only in the final lines of the book that the young woman realises that he has a name.

Review of Pressure Point

Not very interesting film about competitive college rowing, so centring on privileged white men and their affairs - sexual and sporting. Some plot twists and drama, but it's hard to really care about the characters. As a team sport film it has the obligatory structure, where a tough coach eventually gets the guys to work together as a team and get in touch with their inner motivation to succeed over a group of similar young men.

Watched on Netflix.

Review of De Lovely

An enjoyable Cole Porter biopic that captures something of the man's genius - especially in the performance of the songs by some very talented singers. It can't really hide the fact that CP had a mainly dull life, enlivened only by his sexless but love-filled marriage and his gay lovers.

Watched via informal distribution.

Review of "Zarafa: The true story of a giraffe's journey from the plains of Africa to the heart of post-Napoleonic France"

If it's possible for a book to be enjoyably boring, that's what this is. It's a bit padded - a lot of history about Muhammad Ali, Mameluke ruler of Egypt, description of the geography of the Nile, and so on. And the story is engaging enough, though not really of any major consequence. This is really a footnote in several stories, including that of colonial collections, European involvement in the Near East, Egyptology, and so on.

It was a nice enough read, and not at all emotionally taxing while just interesting enough to keep me engaged.

I note in passing that the author describes the mayors of small towns in the Rhone valley as wearing tricolour sashes - did they do that during the period of the Bourbon restoration, when the events described are supposed to be taking place?

Review of "Aftermath: Life in the fallout of the Third Reich" by Harald Jahner

 

What an absolutely amazing book.  I thought I'd done all the reading that I needed to about the Third Reich, and the de-Nazification process. But I learned so much from reading this - about the way that the Black Market re-socialised Germans, about the craze for American music (and American soldiers, for the German women) that swept through the ruined cities, about the revival of businesses that underlay the economic miracle. 

Two things in particular stood out for me - first, the experience of the Jews in the DP camps around Europe. I'd been busy composing some words about the nature of Zionism before I started to read that chapter, and it was along the lines of "Zionism says that the Jews of each country, whatever their citizenship, are Jews by nationality". And as I read the chapter, I considered that it wasn't at all surprising that this was how the Jews of the DP camps came to view themselves, whatever they may have thought about themselves before. Even within the camps Polish Jews were persecuted by their "fellow" Poles, and the same happened in other nationality camps like Ukrainians. It must have seemed natural to regard oneself as of Jewish nationality - the more so because Poland, and Czechoslovakia, and the USSR (and no doubt other countries) always designated the Jews as a nationality. 

And for the survivors of the Holocaust and also the aftermath, the Nakba in Palestine might not have seemed so bad. The number of Palestinians displaced was big in absolute terms, and relative to the size of the Palestinian population, but it was a drop in the ocean compared to the displacements that were taking place in Europe.

The last chapter of the book, about the extent of de-Nazification, and about all the functionaries that were allowed to return to their posts despite their Nazi pasts, and about how the Germans came to regard themselves as the victims of Nazism rather than the perpetrators, was really enlightening too.

Review of The Heat

Cop buddy movie, with Sandra Bullock as the semi-elite but annoying FBI agent who wants to pull rank and play by the rules, and Melissa McCarthy as the slightly gross and rough-edged junior detective who breaks all the rules but knows how to get things done. Formulaic but good fun, with some good jokes - a nice one about Boston accents.

Review of Scrapper

Nice sort of coming-of-age movie about a twelve-year old girl, living on her own in an Essex housing estate - her mum has died and she's pretending that she's being looked after by an uncle, fooling the social services with phrases recorded on her mobile with the help of a cooperative stoner. She gets by with money from stealing and selling bicycles, with help from a friend who lives nearby and is in on her secret. Then her deadbeat dad turns up from Ibiza, and the rest of the film is about their developing relationship.

It's very well done - I think it's the debut for the writer-director and the main actor. 

It rather reminded me of Fish Tank, with similar themes and locations, but also of Aftersun (similarly about a father-daughter relationship) though it's not as dark as either. 

Watched via informal distribution.

Review of "Burning Country: Syrians in Revolution and War" by Robin Yassin-Kassab and Leila Al-Shami

This is a detailed, principled, engaged and informative book about the Syrian Civil War.  I'd been aware for some time that I had a muddled and not entirely thought out position about the Syrian revolution. I'd managed to pick up that it had started out as one of the later uprisings inspired by the Arab Spring wave, and that it had degenerated into a brutal militarised civil war in which no-one seemed to be the good guys. 

Assad was clearly a bad guy, leading a nasty one-party militarised regime with torture chambers and mass disappearances. But at least some of the opposition seemed to be bad-guy Islamists, and then Assad seemed to be fighting against ISIS, which turned Islamism into a death cult. And the Russians were helping their client, Assad's regime against ISIS, and the West (well, Britain and America) seemed to want to help him too - given the track record of western interventions in Middle Eastern revolutions being against that, as were the Stop the War Campaign seemed like a good idea, and I stood on a street corner with some lefties holding "Don't Bomb Syria" signs.

Well, after reading the book I am much better informed, though I'm not sure how much wiser I am. I understand better that some of the people I thought of as Islamists were not so bad, and that some of them had a commitment to religious pluralism and civil society...lots of Syria's revolutionaries talk about "freedom", but few seem to articulate a vision about what they are fighting for.

But others in the anti-Assad camp really were pretty nasty. The Al Nusra front, which is the local Al Qaeda franchise, sometimes seems to get an unnecessarily easy ride in the book. The information about how awful it is, is reported honestly in the book, but it doesn't seem to reach a compelling narrative. The book is not nearly as warm towards the various Kurdish factions and parties, and the Rojava project, as the only other book I'd read on the subject. Actually that was a bit of a relief, because the supporters of the PYD and the YPG that I'd met on demonstrations in London had more than a whiff of a cult about them.

Elsewhere I missed some bits of narrative. The Syrian Communist Party, that ought to have been engaged in a struggle against the regime, was hopelessly co-opted by it, because Syria and the regime were Soviet clients. Even the fall of the Soviet Union doesn't seem to have disturbed this. And a small part of the book's critique of Assad (both Assads, actually) is that they weren't as anti-Zionist as they made out. There is a part of me that thinks there is another story here, about the role of anti-Zionism as an "escape valve" and as an acceptable form of anti-imperialism across the entire Arab world, that no-one really wants to think about.

So I still don't really feel like I understand the Syrian conflict properly. I am aware that here, more than anywhere else, there are powerful forces at work seeking to ensure that I don't understand it. People who I have always trusted, like Noam Chomsky, and Seymour Hersch, and John Pilger, seem to have defended or whitewashed the Assad regime out of some bizarre "campist" motive. Places that I would normally go for information aren't at all reliable. 

I'm really lucky to have met Rami, a young Syrian activist refugee living in Stroud; I feel like I can trust his narrative and his experiences, not least because he's so open about where it has turned out that he was wrong about something. Reading the book I had some idea as to what he's been through, and it was worth it for that.

Review of For Sama

A film about the Syrian revolution and civil war, mainly about the siege of Aleppo, as seen through the eyes of a young woman citizen journalist, who documents the siege from the inside. I learned a lot about the horror of being starved and bombed, but not very much about the politics of the revolution. Part way through the film the journalist-woman starts wearing a hijab, but this is not discussed or even commented on. It's not clear at all from the film who the opposition are or what they are fighting for. 

Reading the Wikipedia article about the siege I feel not much wiser, even though I am now better informed. This is part of what it feels like to be living in a post-truth age, where there are no reliable sources of information about anything, and engaging with any aspect of international politics feels like an enormous effort. The article says that both sides used chemical weapons - do I find this plausible? I don't think so, but there is enough doubt in my mind to not know for sure. I know that the Assad regime is monstrous, but I am not at all sure that what the opposition became turned out to be very different.  

Films that focus on the experience on the ground, without any of the background or political context, become an exercise in emotional manipulation. I was put in mind of the film about the Kyiv uprising, Winter on Fire. Watching that I thought I was being played, and that's my ultimate conclusion about this too.

Review of Phantom of the Open

A film about golf turns out to be boring and depressing...who would have thought it? 

This is a biopic of Maurice Flitcroft, a working-class man from Barrow-in-Furness who decides to take up golf. It's a middle-class sport, and he's not at all good at it, but he pushes himself forward to compete in the British Open. 

It's got all the usual "plucky underdog" themes going on, and the very British celebration of people who keep going even though they aren't very good. Think Eddie the Eagle, or even Cool Runnings, even though that's about Jamaicans. 

The film is from 2021 but it looks like it was made in the 1970s, gloomy and with bleached out colours. There's some stuff about class in it - none of it very profound; sometimes the film seems to be laughing at Flitcroft and his working-class manners, not with him. 

There is a spot in the last 30 minutes that is slightly better, with a bit of focus on family dynamics and whether Flitcroft's obsession with pursuing your dream no matter what is really good advice (his twin sons aim to become disco dancing champions, but the international competitions in which they take part falter and fade). But this moment doesn't last long, and soon slides into more sentimentality and triumph-over-adversity stuff.

What was Mark Rylance thinking?

This was on BBC iPlayer but I couldn't find it, so we watched it via informal distribution. That may have further detracted, because the sound was really low.

Review of "Middle England" by Jonathan Coe

How can a book be so well-crafted, and have such a good narrative and great characters, and yet be so un-enjoyable?  Jonathan Coe, who I generally love, has written the Great Brexit novel, covering the period before and after the referendum, from the perspective of a group of mainly middle-aged, middle-class people.  Some of them are the characters from his previous two novels, The Rotters Club and The Closed Circle, but there are some new people too.

Some of the misery comes from the bits of the novel that don't work so well - some of the "funny" bits, like Benjamin's sex scene in the wardrobe with teen crush Jennifer, are both implausible and not very funny. At other times the attempts at "balance", such as Sophie's persecution by the forces of Political Correctness, don't feel all that convincing.

But mainly it's the good parts that make it so awful to read. It's like reliving the Brexit nightmare all over again, the awful debates, the vicious effectiveness of the Leave campaign vs the hapless, rambling, arrogant and patronising Remain campaign. And yeah, a lot of Remain supporters had no idea that it was even going to be close (let alone that they were going to lose) because they lived in a bubble. And this books lets us see outside our bubble, and into the minds and values of the other side. And still, eight years on, that's not pretty.

And yes, as Coe and his characters say, Brexit really did fuck the country over, and it might not recover in my lifetime, and that's not an enjoyable thought either.

Review of 1917

Straightforward war mission film about a couple of young soldiers who have to take a message across no-man's land to prevent a colonel sending his men into a prepared German trap. Lots of cameos by great British actors, some impressive design and battle scenes, but it all adds up to a film that is tense without being interesting. Maybe I don't actually like war films after all.

Watched on Netflix.

Review of "Music: A Very Short Introduction" by Nicholas Cook

 

I really liked this...it's not really an introduction to music so much as an introduction of how people think about music...maybe a short introduction to "musicology", but who would buy that?

Anyway, it was really enjoyable, and set out lots of good stuff about the role of the canon of western music, performance culture, the status of performers vs composers, and so on.

I'd like to read the next level up (or down?) about this, but wonder if there is such a book.

Review of "Rules of Civility" by Amor Towles

This felt a bit of a guilty pleasure - a celebration of Depression-era New York City, with lots of outrageously wealthy people having a great time going to Jazz bars and drinking endless cocktails in swanky hotels and restaurants. There's a bit of a plot but it's not really essential to the enjoyment, and I did get a little confused between the rich people.

But it was enjoyable, even though I think it's one of Towles's books that has been resurrected after the more successful and better later ones. 

Interesting that it's told in first person narrator, though that narrator is a young working class woman of Russian Orthodox extraction. Glad that he ignored the "write from experience" advice, because it seems to me like he made a good job of it.

Review of Food for Ravens

Biopic of Nye Bevan, made in 1997, with a confusing narrative structure (the ailing Bevan meets and talks to his younger self, among others). There's no depiction of him as a fiery socialist, only of the old man remembering this. So it's slow, and a bit dull really. Heart in the right place, but not very interesting.

Watched on BBC iPlayer.