Review of "Bleeding Edge" by Thomas Pynchon

I loved this, though a week after finishing it I'm not entirely able to express why. It's Pynchonesqe in its plotting, and its language, and there are some great characters - perhaps too many characters, because I did begin to feel like I was losing track.

It's very Jewish, and though there are some Israeli characters it's mainly a paean to New York diaspora Jewish culture, though I don't think Pynchon is Jewish. He's got it down really well, though, the language, the preoccupations. 

The plot takes place against the background of the dot.com crash, and the Twin Towers attack, and a complex financial fraud (the main character Maxine is a fraud investigator, working freelance and on her own time for most of the book), so it's sometimes hard to follow. I suspect I missed some of it, but it doesn't seem to have detracted from my enjoyment. It even made me want to visit New York again, which probably isn't going to happen.

Review of Dolly Parton: Here I am

Slightly dull but informative documentary about Dolly Parton and her career. Almost nothing about her private life, which she keeps private; she's been married to the same bloke for fifty years, after they met at a laundromat at her first day in Nashville. She's unashamed about her working-class rural roots, and connects with a variety of very different audiences - rednecks, gay men, drag queens...to some extent because she's careful not to say or do anything to offend any of them.

Which makes for a somewhat boring film. She's clever, talented (she's written some great songs), and opaque - a wise decision in an industry that eats people up and spits them out. But she's not great documentary material. We don't even learn anything about her friendships, outside of work relationships.

Watched on BBC iPlayer via Chromecast.

Review of Millie Lies Low

Sad New Zealand comedy about a young woman who's about to go to New York for a prestigious architecture internship, but panics on the plane and then sneaks back into her home town (Wellington) but doesn't want anyone to know. It's occasionally funny, but mainly painful - her relationships with her mum, her boyfriend and her best friend are challenged and exposed, and don't emerge well. There's some stuff about the nature of talent, and about the relentless pressure to post positive stuff on social media. 

The film was just over 90 minutes but felt longer, though it wasn't bad - just painful.

Well worth watching - we watched on Channel 4 via Chromecast.

Review of Anatomy of a Fall

Atmospheric tense French drama about an accidental (or is it?) death in an alpine chalet, where a key witness is a blind ten-year-old boy. Hard to say much more about it without spoiling, but it's really good, and manages to get to the end of the story without definitively resolving all of the unknowns. In that sense it rather reminded me of The Night of The Twelfth, another French drama (though that's more a police procedural), which also tells a story of death without resolving the question of who did it. Strangely both films are set in Grenoble. 

Watched via informal distribution - our new TV has a slot for USB drives, which makes that rather easier.