Review of "Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Baghdad's Green Zone" by Rajiv Chandraskeran

 

A not altogether satisfactory book about the US occupation of Iraq. Lots of fun anecdotes about how awful and stupid the Americans were, but not that much analysis. Not much questioning of the reasons for the war, and though it's made clear almost in passing that neither they nor anyone else found Saddam's weapons of mass destruction, it generally seems to take the view that the regime was bad so overthrowing it was a good thing, just badly managed thereafter.

It's funny how the Americans put in to run the occupation administration were firm believers in free markets for everything and that government couldn't do anything well - and because they were all cronies appointed on the basis of their personal connections to US Republican Party worthies, they illustrated this perfectly. The possibility that there might be people in public service who could actually do things properly doesn't seem to have occurred to them. Nor does the idea that anyone who actually knew anything about the Arab world, or spoke Arabic, might have had anything to contribute.

I note in passing that when I worked, briefly, in Hong Kong for a team of Americans bidding for a GSM mobile licence, they rarely ventured outside the hotel. They were staying in rooms (and suites) in a big hotel, and they worked in offices on a different floor. They ate in the hotel restaurant and rarely went out at all. I took a few trips on the MRT underground network to other fairly central districts, and I took a ferry across the harbour every day from my hotel, and the knowledge that I picked up doing this was treated as something wondrous. 

Emilia Perez

Astonishing Mexican film - a musical (of sorts) about a drug warlord who decides to disappear and transition to become a woman, leaving behind his trophy wife and their children. He's helped by a desperate and cynical criminal lawyer who finds herself helping the corrupt rich and powerful to evade the law and the consequences of their choices, and takes the job helping the warlord. 

It's often terrifying, as it should be - the world of drug warlords is full of violence and terror. But it's also very clever, and depicts brilliantly a number of complex emotional journeys. And it's often stunning to look at too.

So good that we watched it twice within a month, which I almost never do.

Watched on Netflix - I think it was one of their originals.

Review of Wallace and Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl

Absurdly, there appear to be people who didn't like this - not as good as the early ones, and so on. Ignore them, it's great. Lots of cinematic references - it's worth watching again to see how many I will catch, and lots of great visual jokes. I loved the narrowboat chase, where a pedestrian on the canal towpath is walking faster than the boats involved in the chase. 

It helped that I watched it live, as it was broadcast on BBC (how often do I do that?) and with my family, so that it evoked all the warm fuzzy feelings of watching previous Wallace and Gromit films with the boys. But is was just lovely anyway.

I note in passing that the threat of, and fear of, technology has moved on. In The Wrong Trousers the technology is just malfunctioning. Here it's clearly hacked by a bad actor, the evil penguin, who uses the internet to take control over Wallace's robot gnomes, which don't have very good IT security.

Review of Ballywalter

One of several films that I watched this week about alcohol and alcoholism, and how it fucks people up. This one takes a while to get going. A young woman drives a taxi in Ballywalter, a small town along the coast from Belfast, and it's not going too well for her. She lives with her mother and sister, she's dropped out of university and the taxi, which is decrepit and barely still functioning, belongs to a bloke who might be an ex. A bloke in the town, living on his own after a split from his wife and family because he killed someone while drunk-driving, starts getting a regular ride from her to a comedy course that he's doing in the city, and the film is about the relationship between the two of them. They don't become lovers, but they do become each other's redemption.

Worth watching. We watched it on BBC iPlayer, which once again describes this as a comedy, for no obvious reason.

Review of "Utopia Avenue" by David Mitchell

I mostly loved this book. Lovely descriptions, great characters, poignant moments, and set in and around the music industry just before the time of rock megastars...so that some of the real people who later become megastars (Syd Barrett, David Bowie, even the Beatles) drift in and out of the scenes. 

I'm not quite old enough to remember this period, but the tail end of it was visible to me as I grew up. Denmark street was still full of decrepit music shops, and I remember some of the clubs that he writes about - especially Bunjies, where I often went with friends on a Saturday evening.

I even quite liked the way that characters and places from David Mitchell's other books turn up for a while, and then slide out of the story. Some of it is set around Gravesend, also an important location in The Bone Clocks. 

But (spoiler alert) there's a part where Mitchell's supernatural frame-tale of a conflict down through the ages between evil drinkers of a human souls and their eternal opponents organised in "Horology" becomes important to the plot, and I really didn't like that. It must be really important to Mitchell, but it feels to me like a turd on an otherwise beautiful carpet. It could so easily have been done without, which only makes it even clearer that he really cares about this. 

It did spoil my enjoyment a bit, but on balance I still really liked the book.

Review of "The Priest, The Poet and The Pimp" by Malcolm Eva

First, to declare an interest - or rather two interests. Malcolm Eva is a friend, and he's also a self-published author (like me) who I have encouraged to go down that route.

That said, this is an enjoyable, nicely written book, with a well constructed narrative, interesting characters and a great feel for location and period. It's a period that I lived through as an adult, but which now seems almost as remote as the time of WW2...it's hard to imagine a world without the internet, search engines, and smartphones. Of course the plot would barely work with them. The texture of that world, and a time when the part of west London depicted was still dingy rather than gentrified, is very vivid.

I was a little bit worried with the Muslim pimp praying on vulnerable white girls - it's not hard to see how that could turn nasty - but there's more than one good Muslim character too, so I didn't have to wait too long to exhale. 

Definitely worth a read, and I hope Malcolm gets on and finishes his other novels-in-waiting.