Review of Blow Up

I had good memories of watching this film, but it doesn't seem to have aged well (though it was probably old by the time I watched it first, I was only eight years old when it came out). London in the Swinging Sixties, a wealthy and successful photographer takes pictures of attractive models and has other wannabee-models throw themselves at him, and then he almost-witnesses a murder in a park; he doesn't see it when he's there taking pictures but it reveals itself when he develops them. And then he tries to find out what happened, and doesn't succeed.

There's a lot of stuff about appearance vs reality, and whether there is reality, which seemed important the first time but now comes across as pretentious rather than interesting. It made me think of The Society of The Spectacle, an anarchist/situationist pamphlet that appeared the year after the film, which also seemed to me to profound and important at one point, and now doesn't. There are some ghastly sex scenes with the implication of coercion (see the poster), and another scene in a London club that is both exploiting and poking fun at the tawdry glamour of the emerging rock scene.

Watched in the Middle Floor at Springhill Common House - I think from an actual DVD, which felt very old-school.

Review of Los Amantes Pasajeros

Dire Almodovar sex comedy, a return to his earlier slapstick form, without much merit. I dozed off almost immediately - despite some sexually explicit scenes which ought to have been at least arousing if not interesting. But they weren't enough to keep me awake, which means it's not easy to summarise the convoluted narrative. 

Basically there's a flight with faulty landing gear, and the passengers in business class are drugged by the camp gay stewards so that they end up having a lot of sex with each other - the passengers in economy are just drugged into a stupor. There's more, but you can read the Wikipedia article if you want a summary.

Watched at Jane's shop in Horns Road, Stroud, as part of an ongoing project to watch all of Almodovar's films. This was the worst one for a while. 

Review of "97 Orchard: An Edible History of Five Immigrant Families in One New York Tenement" by Jane Ziegelman

A nice idea - a history of immigration to the US (and New York's Lower East Side in particular) told through the stories of five families who had all lived in one building at different times; made easier by the fact that the building in question has become the Tenement Museum. 

To my surprise I learned quite a lot, about the different waves of immigrants...I'd thought that I knew most of it, but I was wrong. In particular, I learned how much more assimilation-oriented the German Jews who came in the 1850s were - Jewish cookbooks with recipes for ham, pork and shellfish, and justifications for why oysters were kosher; and I learned about how poor and despised the second wave of Italian immigrants had been, and how they had done the dirtiest jobs and lived in the worst places, and still believed themselves to be culturally superior (or at least superior in terms of food) to the "native" US population.

And lots more too. I read this on kindle, but I think it's going to be bought as a present for various friends. 

Review of "In the Skin of a Lion" by Michael Ondaatje

Beautifully written historical novel about the immigrants who built Toronto, with good characters, a slightly confusing plot, but fantastic descriptions of buildings and places - well, it is about construction and infrastructure. Definitely worth a read.

Review of "Occult America: The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped our Nation" by Mitch Horowitz

A nice, readable ramble through the undergrowth of the American mind, with lots of stuff about weird sects, cults, communities and religions. 

The author is more than a little sympathetic to the claims of alternative religious movements, and while he's critical of the worst excesses of some exploitative leaders I think he tries hard - perhaps too hard - to be fair to most of them.

There's some bonkers stuff towards the end that might be categorised as metaphysics, but it's mainly readable and enjoyable.

Review of "The Solutions are Already Here Strategies for Ecological Revolution from Below" by Peter Gelderloos

It seems a bit unfair for me to write a review of this, because I didn't read all of it - just the first and the last chapters. The first was a decent run through of a lot (though not everything) that's wrong with our current technical-economic system, though without much new, and in the manner of books already a bit out of date. 

The last bit, that was supposed to be a vision of how things could be better, seemed disappointing. I don't want a catalogue of techno-fixes that promise a continuation of our present way of life without the environmental costs, but this seemed to be mainly a repetition of "we won't want all that stuff once the miseries of capitalism have been abolished", and I didn't find it satisfying or convincing.

I want to like anarchist approaches to strategies for system change, and to the future organisation of society, but I rarely find much likeable. This wasn't an exception. 

Review of "Fight Club" by Chuck Palahniuk

A distillation of the toxic masculinity in the world, with all the violence and resentment that implies. I'm not entirely sure whether it's supposed to be a satirical critique of all that or a paean to it - in the manner of such things, it seems to want to have it both ways. I watched the film a long time ago, and so I remembered the images of that as I read the text - I couldn't imagine Marla except as Helena Bonham Carter, for example. 

I think that in some ways the film was more subtle, and more ambiguous about the apparent merging of the two main characters - was Tyler Durden always a version, or a personality disorder, of the first-person narrator? 

One major difference, at least as far as a remember the film, was the prominence of a castration theme - more than one character is threatened with castration in the book, though it doesn't seem to actually happen. All part of the ugh factor.

Review of "Trouble is my business" by Raymond Chandler

I'm a big fan of Chandler, and while I was reading this Ruth and I were listening to an audio version of "The Black-Eyed Blonde", which is a sort of sequel to The Long Goodbye. That felt a lot like a pastiche, but after reading a succession of Chandler short stories I am more aware of how formulaic Chandler's writing for the pulps was. 

His heroes are always mopping their sweaty necks, and they get hit over the head with monotonous regularity - leaving them with similar wounds on the back of their heads. And they drink all the time from similar sized bottles, and the women are all ciphers rather than proper characters. There are two flavours of cop, corrupt and repulsive or decent and career-blocked. Once or twice I'm pretty sure that the same descriptions popped up in more than story.

I was a bit surprised, though I shouldn't have been, by the casual racism. Some characters - not fully drawn ones - are "heebs", and when there are stereotypical black people they are referred to with a series of racist epithets that I hadn't even heard before - "shine" was one. This isn't to say that race is important in Chandler's fiction (as it is say in Sax Rohmer or John Buchan), but he's certainly not better than the time he lived in.

Review of The Noel Diary

Slightly soppy but enjoyable romantic drama, a bit self-knowing (characters say things like "If this was a rom-com"). A best-selling author goes to clear up the house of his recently-deceased mother from whom he has been estranged for years, and there meets a young woman searching for her own mother, who gave up for adoption and had been a nanny in the parents' house.

It was a nice 90 minutes, and I did have a lump in my throat from time to time.

Watched on Netflix, which seems to have finally got some half-decent films on board.

Review of Poor Things

Amazing film - every time I watch a Yorgos Lanthimos film I think "that's the weirdest film I am ever likely to see", and this one was no exception. Visually stunning, with some fabulous real sets in Hungary and elsewhere, and some CGI creations too. The scenes on a cruise ship were particularly attractive, the more so because we got on a dreary Brittany Ferries ship the following day, which was comfortable enough but might as well have been an airport lounge.

The plot was implausible (is the book different?) but that didn't really matter - it felt much like a fable or a dream. There have been some nasty comments online that it's a "male gaze" film, but it didn't feel like that to me (or to Ruth, thankfully). 

Some great acting, especially by Emma Stone, who manages to make the intellectual and physical development of her character from baby-brain in an adult body to fully grown ersatz human seem entirely believable.

We watched this at a cinema and you should too.

Review of The Monuments Men

Ruth stopped watching after ten minutes, but as a completist I had to see whether it got any better. It didn't. Lots of good actors, great sets and locations, and what looks like a big budget, totally wasted. Boring, bad dialogue, plot without suspense or interest. 

Watched via BBC iPlayer I think - I have mainly suppressed the memory.