Review of Mothering Sunday

Painful (but in a good way) period drama, based on a Graham Swift book, about upper class families devastated by the loss of their young men in WW1, and the journey of a young woman in service who becomes a writer. Good acting, good script, nice to look at...though a bit slow. 

Small quibble about detail - it seems dreamily hot, but it's supposed to be March. Was Spring hotter in the early 1920s?

Watched on Channel 4 online.

Review of The Holiday

Fairly ghastly rom-com, with sanitised "sex" scenes and a cutesy plot. Cameron Diaz looks like an AI robot, even though the film is from 2006 so she can't be. Everyone in the film is implausibly rich. There's almost zero tension, and what little there is, is resolved in minutes. 

Watched on Channel 4 online. 

Review of One Battle After Another

A politically correct action thriller, what's not to like? Featuring an armed underground group that hits ICE immigration detention camps as well as banks, and armed right wing police forces working together with independent armed militias and racist conspirators...just great. Very scary and threatening, largely because it felt so real and relevant. Tense all the way, though the violence is mainly suggested rather than actually experienced. Long at nearly three hours, but we treated it like a series and watched it in blocks.

Echoes of The Company You Keep, which was about the real Weather Underground, and Running on Empty, about a radical family in hiding and trying to stay one jump ahead of investigators.

Watched via informal distribution, which felt especially appropriate. Incidentally, the underground seems to mainly organise via CB radio rather than anything more technologically sophisticated, relying on old fashioned agreed code words rather than encryption. I think they have a point.

Review of "The Peacock and The Sparrow" by I S Berry

So the author of this first novel is a former CIA operative, which didn't make me well disposed to it. But it's set in the sleazy and unpleasant world of Gulf state expats, and that's rather well depicted. And the Agency were presented as dishonest and not very bright, which made me like it more.  Lots of well described settings, a decent plot that rolls along (though with one or two blind alleys that I didn't really understand), and by the end I was quite enjoying it. 

I have to say the denouement wasn't so good. The opposition to the regime (it's set in Bahrain, after the very Arab Spring moment that happened there) turn out to have been the Iranian backed Shiite authoritarians that the CIA and the regime said they were, and they end up taking over Bahrain and using it as a launch pad for a nuclear-armed regional Shiite movement against America and human rights and gay people and books...