Review of We Live in Time

A poignant romantic drama, made much more interesting by the unusual narrative structure - non-linear, so events are jumbled up in an out-of-sequence timeline. This allows for multiple dramatic crises, whereas if it had been linear we'd have expected it to build towards one. It's got a lot of domestic drama, hard to discuss without spoiling. But it's well acted and beautifully put together, well worth watching.

Unusual good film on Netflix.

Review of Kensuke's Kingdom

Nice, mainly gentle animated film, in which a young boy is storm-washed from the deck of his parents' sailing boat and (somewhat implausibly) finds himself on a tropical island paradise presided over by the eponymous Kensuke, a former Japanese sailor whose family were all killed in the Nagasaki nuclear bombing. 

Perhaps I missed it, but I had thought that when the storm hits the family sailing boat is still in the Atlantic Ocean, heading for South Africa, which makes the presence of a Japanese sailor hard to explain. The Wikipedia article about the book makes it clear that they are in the Pacific, which makes much more sense.

Despite the subject matter I didn't get too emotionally involved - not as much as I did in the The Wild Robot, another animated film which strangely I don't seem to have reviewed. 

Review of "Toussaint Louverture: The Story of the Only Successful Slave Revolt in History" by C.L.R. James Illustrated by Sakina Karimjee and Nic Watts

As I write here quite often, I'm not a big fan of graphic novels. I find them hard to read, distracting and non-linear- maybe I have an old-fashioned attention span. This one felt different, perhaps because it's adapted from a play, and it reads like the script of a good play. I am a big fan of CLR James, and his intelligence and his willingness to deal with difficult and contradictory elements (like the slave-owning planters' enthusiasm for the French Revolution) shines through.

It's still bloody confusing though, and hard to keep track of all the currents - the revolting slaves loyal to the kings of France and Spain, the interventions of the British and the Americans, the shifting loyalties of the mulattoes and the free blacks. I'm glad there was a list of dramatis personae at the beginning, and I referred back to it more than once.

Still hard to read of Toussaint's betrayal and death without a lump in the throat, and the graphic novel removes many of the details that are in James's book The Black Jacobins.

A great introduction to the Haitian revolution though, with a good bibliography. 

Review of "Spies" by Michael Frayn

A beautiful, clever book, mostly told through the eyes of an eight-year-old boy in wartime England, though with a frame first person narrative told by the same person in his old age. It touches on everything about England - class, race, town and country (and new suburb), manners, sexuality.  Two boys who are uncertain friends play lots of fantasy-based games around their newly built suburb, which still shades into rough rural at its edges, and they create a scenario around the idea that one of their mothers is a German spy. It's hard to say more without spoiling.