Review of "The Jazz Scene" by Francis Newton

This has sat on my shelf for more than a year. Someone was clearing out his Jazz books collection, and I took this one, mainly because I remember that "Francis Newton" was a pseudonym for the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm, who wrote Jazz reviews for various left wing publications.

Anyway, it turns out that it is a very good book, intelligent, informed and very sensible about Jazz, its audience, its players, and its history. The author (whatever we want to call him) situates Jazz in its historical and social context, without resorting to vulgar Marxism or daft economic determinism. Really great, well worth reading. 

Review of Benedetta

A Paul Verhoeven historical drama with heresy, blasphemy, lurid visions and lesbian nuns. Not ridiculously over the top like Ken Russel's "The Devils", this nevertheless managed to be quite salacious, but also anticlerical and anti-religious in a good way.

Benedetta is given to a convent as a quite young child, but almost immediately begins to have visions. These become progressively more lurid, but she's also doing miracles - bleeding wounds of Christ, that sort of thing. The local clerics decide to believe her (good for the pilgrimage trade), others are not so sure but she sees them off. Then the Papal Nuncio gets involved, and it's torture and burning at the stake...

Watched on Channel 4's app via Chromecast.

Review of Lots of Kids, a Monkey and a Castle

A disappointing, ramshackle, often boring film, with occasional glints of interest. It's a fly-on-the-wall documentary - no narrative or narrator - made by a son about his eighty-year-old mother.  She's not an obvious choice for a film. She's overweight, unattractive, and she doesn't stop talking. She has not much interest in other people, and little insight into her own life.

The title comes from her own declaration of what she wanted from life. The film rather glosses over how it came about that her and her husband were wealthy enough to buy the castle. It seems that money was inherited, but it's not entirely clear from who. The family were Falangists, and some members were executed "by the Reds" during the Civil War. The woman (Julita) talks about her own membership of the Falangist youth, the uniform she wore and so on; but later on she criticises Franco for abolishing the Republic, because her present-day political views extend to disapproval of the Spanish monarchy and monarchies in general.

Much of the film centres on the amount of crap that she has accumulated and preserved. The castle, and the now abandoned engineering factory that her husband once operated, are absolutely rammed full of junk - broken objects, tattered remnants of clothes that might one day be mended, and many small and labelled boxes with dolls house furniture, pins, stationary, and so on. 

That's sort of poignant, because I can't help feeling that my own life is full of crap that I am holding on to and shouldn't. The film is inter-cut with footage from home movies of the family when the children were younger, and they look to have had a fun, happy childhood - beach holidays and so on. Again, I look at that and wonder what the arc of my own life would like if it were made into a film like this.

But most of the time it's boring and depressing, and I missed some of it when I fell asleep. Ruth missed almost all of it, but still saw enough to remember how much she didn't like it.

Watched at Jane Opher's house - the old Co-op on Horns Road - as part of an ongoing series of Spanish films. The occasion was enjoyable even if the film wasn't.

Review of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg

I watched this as part of my birthday celebrations. A few months ago I found myself - unusually - listening to Radio 4, and there was a program about musicals where they raved about this as one of the best musicals ever. And then it was scheduled to be on the Stroud Film Festival, but I missed it.

So I obtained it and put it on in the Middle Floor at Springhill Cohousing - a bit of a challenge because the file was too big to copy on to a USB, and my mini PC sometimes forgets how to produce sound output from its earphone jack. But all sorted, and the showing was a success; quite a few people came, and they - like me - enjoyed it.

But it's a weird musical. Apart from the fact that there's no spoken dialogue at all, everything is sung - it's an anti-romantic romance. Sorry for the spoiler, but the main story line is that the young woman does not wait for her lover to return from the Algerian War, but marries someone else instead, because she is forgetting her absent lover even though she is carrying his child.

He comes back, marries someone else (the woman who had cared unceasingly for the dying aunt who raised him), and when the original pair meet again the moment of love has passed. There is no sense that they might yet get back together, just a feeling of a future that didn't happen.

The beautiful theme song for the film, performed by many artists, is "I Will Wait For You", but she doesn't.

Review of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

I've belated become a John Le Carre fan. I think this film captures the atmosphere of the books, especially the shabby interiors of the intelligence agency premises and safe houses. I liked the acting, but somehow I literally lost the plot - I couldn't figure out what was happening. I read the Wikipedia article about it, and realised that I'd fallen asleep and missed a major section, which might have made it easier to follow.

Watched on BBC iPlayer