Review of The Blue Caftan

Sad, slow but engrossing Moroccan film about a man who works as a maker of embroidered kaftans, and his wife who is dying of cancer. Their business is struggling, the wife suspects their new apprentice of stealing from them, and the husband is secretly gay and goes to the hamam for casual sex with men.

Why this is described as a comedy completely escapes me. There are no laughs, though the couple laugh at something once in the film. It's about death, grief, deception, love and sex, and also about craft skill. Along the way I learned something about Moroccan society and customs, especially death and funeral customs.

This was on Channel 4, but we watched it on an old fashioned hard disc recorder at Minnie's rather than on catch-up.

Review of Deep Cover

A fun comedy-thriller that actually has some laughs. Three improv comedians (well, one is a class tutor and one has just walked in off the street by mistake) get suckered by a rogue policeman into going undercover to investigate a cigarette smuggling racket, but stumble into a much bigger and scarier drug smuggling gang war. 

It's genuinely suspenseful and funny, though don't watch it if you can't take violence.

Watched via informal distribution and a USB drive.

Review of "Veteranhood" by Joe Glenton

Interesting and thoughtful book about the politics of veterans - both the politics of the veterans themselves and the way they are used by politicians, including mainstream and far right politicians. Glenton is a good writer and he says a lot that has wider relevance, especially in terms of how the cultural left relates to actual working class people.

Review of "The Western Wind" by Samantha Harvey

Remarkable book by the author of "Orbital", and almost nothing like that. It's a first-person narrative set in the late C15th, in which the narrator is the parish priest in a not-very-prosperous west country village. It's of course embedded in the world of medieval Christianity, a mixture of theology and folk-superstitions and lots in between (how would you characterise the belief that someone who dies "un-shriven" cannot enter heaven?). There's a suspicious death that's being investigated by an outsider, a rural dean who is in effect the narrator's boss. 

What makes it quite so special is the narrative structure. It takes place over four days, but as readers we experience them in reverse order, so that the narrative really unfolds, but in an unexpected way - we learn gradually that what we think we have "seen" is actually something very different. 

Definitely worth a read. We listened to it as an audio book first, and I didn't get the structure properly until I actually read a paper copy.

Review of The End of The Tour

A very unusual film - about how David Lipsky (a journalist for Rolling Stone) goes to interview the writer David Foster Wallace by joining his writer's book tour, and the relationship that develops between them. In between it's about what goes on between writers and their subjects, and the business of book tours, and what integrity demands of reporters, and so on.

It's slow, and not so beautiful to look at, but really interesting. And now I want to read more of David Lipsky.

Watched on Netflix.