Review of Rustin

Enjoyable biopic about Bayard Rustin, black gay socialist pacifist who did most of the organising for the 1963 March on Washington, at which Martin Luther King spoke and made his "I have a dream" speech. This film is for all the people who do the organising but don't get to make the big speak. Rustin was clearly a wonderful leader who inspired people to give their all, despite the movement's disapproval of his sexuality. The film shows lots of behind the scenes manoeuvring in the Civil Rights movement, as well as giving a quite good potted history of the actual political processes and outcomes.

It (probably rightly) doesn't reveal that Rustin in his older years remained committed to workers' rights but became a neoconservative and was praised by Reagan after his death. 

Watched on Netflix.

Review of "Cole Porter" by William McBrien

I gave up on this.  I kept going to page 150, which I think is absolutely giving it a fair chance, but it was so boring that I could only read a few pages at a time without falling asleep. Cole Porter is an absolute genius, and I love his work - his songs and his lyrics. But his early life is so dull - doting mother, rich grandfather, nonentity dad who barely features in the story; good at school, athletic and popular, nothing goes wrong...and then he's gadding about with other rich Americans in Paris, and cruising backwards and forwards across the Atlantic. And I just could be bothered anymore.

Maybe it's just what reading biographies is like, and I should remember not to read them.

Review of "The Honourable Schoolboy" by John le Carre

Another good one from le Carre, though it took me a while to get into it. Whereas "The Spy Who Came in From the Cold" is taut and economical, this is a bit flabby, and some episodes seem to take forever, to no really obvious purpose. I won't attempt to summarise the plot, which is really convoluted and defies a quick description.

Eventually I was hooked, though, and engaged with most of the characters (though there were some that were a bit fuzzy for me, so that I had trouble remembering who they were). There's a lot of stuff about the nastier aspects of the Cold War, and no punches pulled about the bad things that "our side" did - in particular involvement in the opium trade. The parts set in Hong Kong, and Indochina, are really evocative - I can actually smell the places he describes.

Review of Leave the World Behind

An unsatisfying dystopian end-of-the-world film, in which a family of white liberals travel to a holiday home in upstate New York for a short break just as there's a cyber attack and associated real attack on the US by unnamed and unspecified enemies. The film illustrates well how fragile our civilisation is and how dependent on a few pieces of technology we've become, and there's some interesting dynamics between the white family and the prosperous black family who own the luxurious holiday-home and turn up to reclaim it as the catastrophe unfolds. 

But there's lots that doesn't make any particular sense and seems just added in for pointless menace...the house is surrounded by oddly courageous deer, for example. And the underlying narrative seems like something from the Qanon playbook - secretive powerful elites, leaflets dropped from planes that are written in Farsi and Korean, and so on.

I was sucked in rather after the fashion of "Lost" (now our reference points for initially intriguing and mysterious narratives that ultimately turn out to be load of meaningless crap), but ended up really disliking this film, despite some good acting and interesting cinematography.

Watched on Netflix.

Review of Go!

Surprisingly good crime/drug film that manages to be both gripping and funny, about young adults blundering into club scene drug dealing. It's structurally quite complex - we see the same events several times over through the eyes of different characters, so it takes a while to work out what is going on. Nice dialogue, editing, acting...not short but it felt really tight.

Watched this one on a USB stick via informal distribution.

Review of Marry Me!

Absurd rom-com with Owen Wilson and Jennifer Lopez, which was nevertheless quite enjoyable on an over-full Xmas stomach. She's going to marry another Latino singer during a big concert at which they will sing their joint hit "Marry Me!", but just as she's about to she sees a shared video of him carrying on with her assistant, so she impulsively decides to marry Wilson's character instead - he's a maths teacher who has been dragged to the concert by a friend because his teen daughter likes Lopez's character.

Yeah, it's that stupid. But it wasn't as bad as it sounds, and there were a few nice moments. And Wilson's character isn't as stupid as some he has played.

Watched on Netflix.

Review of The Courier

Straightforward cold war spy thriller about the KGB double agent Oleg Penkovsky, who was giving Soviet secrets to the west, especially during the Cuban missile crisis. The film focuses on the relationship between Penkovsky and the British businessman Greville Wynne, who acted as courier for his drops of material. It doesn't address any of the complexities of the affair, including who betrayed Penkovsky, how long the Soviets knew that he was providing material to the west (some say that it was within two weeks of his defection), or even whether he might have been a fake defector, as Peter Wright suggested in his book Spycatcher.

Some interesting filming and camera angles, but not much narrative complexity.

I note in passing that at the end there's some footage of the real Greville Wynne, and that he (unlike his portrayal in the film) spoke in a cut-glass upper class accent that absolutely no-one uses any more...though Queen Elizabeth continued to talk like that until her death. What does it mean that a way of speaking can die out so thoroughly?

Watched on BBC iPlayer.

Review of Resistance

Very straightforward biopic about Marcel Marceau's time in the French resistance, about which I had known absolutely nothing. The Nazis are very nasty, especially Klaus Barbie, who is depicted in some detail. There's some suspenseful moments, and it held our attention, but it's not a great film. 

The Jewish children are in some sort of scout uniform, though this is never explained or even referred to - are they scouts, or is a Jewish (even Zionist) youth movement? 

Watched on Channel4 online - I don't think it's called All4 any more.

Review of Outside In

Nice thoughtful film about a young man out on parole after twenty years in prison for his minor part in a crime - as a result of a mandatory minimum sentence. There's relatively little excitement, but lots of examination of relationships, particularly the one between the man and the older woman teacher who supports his case while he's inside - he seems very confused as to whether there is a romantic dimension to this, though she's insistent that there isn't. That brief summary doesn't really do it justice - it's worth watching...on Netflix.