Review of "Disobedient" by Elizabeth Fremantle

A fictionalised biography of the early life of Artemisia Gentileschi, a real Italian baroque painter. A bit slow to get started, but I was gradually drawn in and quite enjoyed it. Lots of textural detail, fabrics and smells and birdsong.

I felt a bit annoyed by the violation of the convention that close third person narrative shouldn't switch between the inner lives and thoughts of multiple characters, but maybe that's a bit nit-picky.

Review of Bowie: The Final Act

Relatively nice and enjoyable Channel 4 documentary about Bowie's life and career, showing off his extraordinary talent, but also his remarkable fragility - how he wept when his rather dreary old school rock band venture "Tin Machine" was panned by critics. 

Review of "The Matchbox Girl" by Alice Jolly

Amazing, clever, beautifully crafted book that left me emotionally drained when I'd finished it. It's written from the perspective of a young girl (who becomes a woman during the course of the narrative) with autism in Vienna in the 1930s, through the Anschluss and the Nazi period. The girl is sent to the institute in which Hans Asperger works, and the book explores his contribution to the care of autistic patients and his engagement with the Nazi regime. Asperger didn't join the Nazi party, unlike many of his doctor colleagues, but he seems to have gone further than he might have done in sending some children off to be exterminated.

There's so much to say about the book - the clever structure, the narrative style, the characters real and invented, the texture of wartime Vienna - just get it and read it.

Review of "The System of The World" by Neal Stephenson

The third in the series, and now that I've finished it I'm a bit bereft. Just as fabulous as the other two volumes. I was sure that I'd read the whole trilogy 20 years ago, but this one brought back no memories, so maybe I bought it but never even started it. Anyway it's again brilliant, and it's a bit sad that it will never be made into a glorious TV series - but it won't because it's too big and broad, with too many plot lines and events.

Everything is brought to a conclusion and pretty much everything is finished and tied up, in a mainly happy way. Still plenty of anachronistic jokes, which I continued to enjoy.

I was aware that my historical knowledge of this period, after the Restoration and the "Glorious Revolution", is really sketchy - I didn't realise how much I didn't know about the Hanoverian succession.

Review of The Master

For some reason everyone seems to think that this is a magnificent film, but I'm not sure why. It's atmospheric, and the acting is good to watch, but it's also overlong and a bit boring. It's a not-very-well disguised biopic of L Ron Hubbard, and actually a real biopic would have been better. Apparently there's an HBO documentary, and other thinly disguised fictional depictions (The Profit, for one).

Review of Marty Supreme

Odd, long but captivating sports film. It's early 1950s New York, and young Marty Mauser works in his uncle's shoe shop while developing his career as a table tennis champion. Marty is a hustler and borderline small-time crook and fraud, with no regard for anyone else, including the young woman downstairs who is pregnant with his child and the many friends that give him much more loyalty than he deserves.

It looks like an older film, gloomy and washed out, though this might have something to do with the copy that I obtained, which has a watermark and some odd splashes of colour.

Marty is not a likeable character, but neither are most of the other people in the film. Still, I was completely engaged - I didn't look at my phone once.

Informal distribution, with some odd downsides. I couldn't find a version that would transfer to a USB stick, and then when I did it was in an odd unsupported format that needed a new codec, and so on.

Review of Prime Minister

Sympathetic and engaging portrait of Jacinda Ahearn, Prime Minister of New Zealand - who comes across as really nice and normal, even though she has had no career or work experience outside politics. Made possible in part by the footage taken by her rock-solid loyal partner, and by an audio diary that she kept.

For me the most unsettling part was the portrayal of the anti-vaxxers' demonstrations, which wore her down until she was ready to resign, despite a strong majority in parliament. We avoided this in the UK, even though there were big "freedom rallies" in London and elsewhere, in part because the government was half-way to their position, in particular sacrificing safeguards and lives in the name of "the economy". 

Watched via informal distribution.

Review of "The Confusion" by Neal Stephenson

I read this twenty years ago, loved it then and loved it on the re-reading. It's not possible to do a plot summary, even if I didn't care about not delivering spoilers. The plot is too big and rambling - not helped by the fact that it's really two slightly linked books, one set across the globe involving a group of ex-slaves in a complicated plot to steal Spanish gold, and one in central Europe involving some jobbing monarchs who eventually become the Hanoverian dynasty in England. 

It's just brilliant, read Quicksilver and then read this.

Review of Hamnet

Loved the book and had a cry at the end. Loved the film and had a cry at the end, though in a different place to where I'd cried in the book. Beautiful, clever, moving.

Watched at the Vue in Stroud.

Review of Blue Moon

Really sad biopic about Lorenz Hart, once the lyricist who worked with Richard Rodgers before he was supplanted by Oscar Hammerstein. Very claustrophobic - almost all of it takes place in Sardi's New York Bar, at the bar itself, in one of the booths and in the toilet. It could be a stage play. Hart is bitter, jealous, sexually confused and frustrated; he's 47 and in unrequited love with a beautiful blond 20-year old, and bisexual before it was fashionable. 

There's a piano player in the bar, working through all the jazz standards, including Hart's own.

A brilliant film, though it took a while to get into it.

Watched via informal distribution.

Review of Song Sung Blue

Kind, thoughtful biopic of two artists who make a career out of their Neil Diamond tribute act, and their struggles as working-class Americans - the absence of health care, precarious wages, their daughter's unplanned pregnancy...

At first it felt really schmaltzy because everything seemed to go so well for them, but engagement with the characters was followed by some painful struggles that really struck home,

Long but very engaging and likeable.

Watched via informal distribution, with hard-coded Russian subtitles that only came on during the songs - WTF? 

Review of Secret Mall Apartment

A documentary with lots of found-looking (well, it's video footage from a very old camera that they used in the early 2000s) footage about a group of radical artists who find an unused space in a shopping mall, and then smuggle in furniture to convert it into a domestic space. Except it's a faux-domestic space, because no-one actually lives there, and it's too cold to inhabit in the winder. It's more of a secret art installation than a secret apartment, but it's still fun. The film touches on the surface of the politics of redevelopment and shopping malls without really engaging with it. It's definitely engaging, though.

Appropriately we watched this via informal distribution.

Review of "The Lost Cause" by Cory Doctorow

I like Cory Doctorow a lot, though not so much for his fiction. This isn't brilliantly written, but the scenario of how the US responds to a slow climate collapse is good and well depicted, including some latter-day Trumpists and some bonkers sea-steading libertarians. It's good the way that he explores the appeal of that kind of Blockchain anarchism to some on the left who ought to know better.

Review of The Life of Chuck

Clever interesting film that's quite hard to characterise. The websites describe it as Sci-Fi/Fantasy, but it's not really that. It's based on a short story by Stephen King, so I thought it would be horror, but it's not that either, even though it starts off with an end-of-the-world thing.  It also contains some lovely dance scenes, and some arc-of-a-life things. There's a few plot weaknesses/holes, but they are excusable given the overall narrative. I think you will just have to watch it.

Watched on Netlix, one of the few good films there.

Review of "The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage" by Sidney Padua

 

I don't always enjoy graphic novels, but I loved this. Lots of actual science, history and maths, and details about how Babbage's difference engine would have looked. Shelved under "teen" in our local library - makes you wonder if librarians just put all graphic novels under "teen".

Birkenstock fascists

We are living in chaotic, unsettling times. The pandemic and the muddled, contradictory imperfect response to it leaves people frightened, confused, and often impoverished. This isn't made any easier by the fact that a few people are celebrating the 'slowdown' and arguing that the disruption of 'business as usual' is good for the environment and therefore for all of us.

These conditions are providing an opportunity for the far right, and they are not wasting it. In Stroud we've had leaflets from the "classic" nationalist right shoved through doors in Paganhill and Rodborough. But lots of people who don't identify as any kind of nationalist - let alone as fascist - are helping to open the door to the far right. Every week we see - on the streets and on social media - organised campaigns against lockdown that spread misinformation about the virus and measures to suppress it. They're anti-mask, anti-lockdown, anti-vaccination.

It's not hard to understand why this can be appealing. Masks are uncomfortable. Lockdown brings real hardship (and we're in Lockdown for the third time in part because of the government's inept handling of the pandemic). Vaccination involves a big scary needle, and it's hard to understand the science behind it. The companies that make the vaccine, and other pharmaceuticals, have a long track record of greed, regulatory capture, deceit and cover-ups of their failures. 

Those who believe in alternative and complementary medicine, and who stress the importance of lifestyle and connection with nature in promoting health and well-being, are predisposed to see the government's response to the virus as part of a bigger picture including increased personal and technological surveillance.

Of course your Birkenstock-wearing friend is not an actual fascist. They most likely think that in speaking out against anti-Covid measures they are being some sort of anti-fascist resister. They're just not aware that behind the "scepticism" about lockdown and vaccines there's another agenda. Spend a little time researching the other views of the anti-lockdown folk and you'll find - along with a fear of big corporations and a concern for the poor and downtrodden that might be genuinely felt - climate change denial, and racist conspiracy theories that promote hatred of Jews, and Asian and Black people. 

Piers Corbyn and Sandi Adams, who spoke at Stroud's anti-lockdown rally in Stratford Park, either write this stuff themselves or provide a platform for it. Both Adams and the actual 'classic' fascists promote the idea of The Great Replacement, whereby white people in Britain will be replaced by non-whites.

They're not aware, either, that the far right has a deliberate strategy of drawing people in this way, through 'good causes' like opposition to animal cruelty, and introducing them to the overall world-view only gradually. 

Your Birkenstock-wearing friend is not going to be wearing a swastika armband any time soon. Neither will most of the 'real' fascists; apart from a few re-enactment enthusiasts they mostly don't these days, and they won't while the memory of the Nazi atrocities remains strong (one reason why the real fascists seek to deny, or minimise, or relativize the actual history).

Remember that last time round real fascism wasn't obviously evil to everyone. It celebrated nature and beauty, it liked nature and organic food and kindness to animals. And fascist movements and regimes attracted support and loyalty from people who had no intention to commit genocide. Your Birkenstock friend thinks they are standing up for freedom and nature; but they are being led down a path that leads to genocide. They yet may step off that path, but failing to recognise who they are hanging out with is not a good start.

Review of One Chance

Sentimental triumph-over-adversity film based on truth about a bloke who wins Britain's Got Talent by singing opera. Probably the most interesting thing is that the film shows you don't only get one chance - he stuffs up quite a few times, and then comes back...from the near-failure of his relationship, from his cock-up at opera school in Venice (his nerve fails), and so on.

He works in Carphone Warehouse (depicted so sympathetically that I can't help feeling they must have paid something) and 

Watched on Netflix.

Review of Bugonia

Oh blimey! I keep writing "possibly the weirdest film I have ever seen", which must surely mean that the films I am watching are getting weirder. 

It's hard to really write about this without spoiling it, but it's about a couple of loser conspiracy nerds who kidnap the CEO of pharma company in the belief that she is an alien who is part of a vast plot to subjugate and enslave the Earth's population. They take her to their basement and abuse her - trigger warning, there are scenes of abuse and torture, as well as an abuse backstory.

That's most of it, but there's more, and it's more horrible than I am conveying here. I do like Yorgos Lanthimos's films, but maybe he's gone too far here. 

Apparently this is a remake of a Korean film - do I need to watch that too?

Watched in the Middle Floor at Springhill from a USB stick, the film having been informally obtained.

Review of Cabaret

Watched again after a very long time, and it has aged well. The atmosphere, the staging, the design, the music, all felt great...perhaps helped by the fact that we'd all had a cocktail first.

I noticed lots of things that I hadn't spotted previously - the defaced posters on the walls, the way that some shots were designed to look like Weimar-era art, the way that Sally Bowles looks just like Louise Brooks...

Afterwards I found out that Liza Minnelli was only 26 when it was made.

Watched in the middle floor at Springhill, from an old-fashioned DVD - I think one of those ones that were given away with newspapers for a while in the early 2000s.