Review of Sanatorium

A really dismal and depressing documentary film about a crumbling sanatorium in Ukraine. Someone thought it was quirky and charming, but it's grim watching. A sanatorium is a weird thing anyway, a cross between a hotel-resort and a hospital, with lots of unpleasant looking treatments administered by weird overweight therapists using antiquated equipment that looks like it belongs in a steampunk movie. Mud baths, inside wrapped in plastic sheet, and outdoors in the shallow waters of a river estuary that is silting up.  The guests are mainly miserable - bereaved, ill, and overweight like the staff - though some of them cheer each other up occasionally. And all this against the background of the war with Russia - one of the guests is a recovering soldier with PTSD, one a bereaved widow, and there are frequent air raid alerts and trips to the shelters.

Watched at Lansdown Hall as part of the Stroud Film Festival.

Review of A Real Pain

Unsatisfactory film about two American youngish men on a trip to Poland to honour the memory of their grandmother. They're first cousins and their relationship is complex - a bit angry, a bit adulatory. But the film has little nuance in its treatment of the relationship between American Jews and their European ancestry. There's a lachrymose scene in which the tour group visits a death camp and it makes them all speechless, but the film has got nothing to say about this apart from the obvious.

Oddly this covers the same territory as "Everything is Illuminated" which is a much better film (but which I don't seem to have reviewed).

Even more oddly there's a scene in this film where the two Americans go up on to the roof of their hotel to smoke dope, and we see them going up the hotel staircase. When I was in Warsaw, on a work trip, there was a fire alarm and I had to go down the hotel stairs, from the 12th floor. The stairs in my hotel looked a lot like the stairs in theirs.

Watched on a USB stick, via informal download.

Review of A Bridge Too Far

Star studded but not all that engaging war movie about Operation Market Garden, and what a dreadful cock-up it was. Not a bad study of military incompetence, but it grinds on at great length to its obvious conclusion, and tries to provide some dignity and honour to the Allied soldiers when there wasn't really much to go round.

Small personal note; my Dad's 43 Group hero Gerry Flamberg fought at Arnhem, was taken prisoner, and was decorated for his bravery.

Watched on BBC iPlayer.

Review of Palestine 1936

A drama (rather than a documentary) about the Arab Revolt in Palestine of 1936. As a young teenager I watched Exodus, and Cast A Giant Shadow - Hollywood Zionist films about heroic Jews fighting against the British and the Arabs (not Palestinians then) to establish the state of Israel. I'd been previously sort of unconsciously Zionist - my Zionist Jewish education made me feel that Israel was to do with me, and in some sense "my country", but I didn't think much about it until then. Those films made me a proud, conscious Zionist, and they had a similar effect on some of my non-Jewish friends - particularly the bits in which the nasty British prevented Jewish refugees from reaching Palestine.

This film is in some ways a mirror image of those, and even though I don't identify at all as a Zionist any more, it's still a hard, gruelling watch. It's not intended as a neutral, balanced history but as a tribute to the struggle of the Palestinians against British rule and Zionist expropriation. It manages to slip in some early references to why the Jews were coming to Palestine, and it does capture some of the conflict within Palestinian Arab society about how to respond to Zionism, but it's mainly about the bravery of the resistance. There are some very romantic looking freedom fighters with horses, keffiyehs and big moustaches. We see some sabotage on the railways but not much footage of the struggle in the cities, or of the general strike - that's covered mainly be visuals of newspaper headlines. 

The British are rightly depicted as brutal and cruel. After the film I went home and read the Wikipedia article about the revolt, and realised that I hadn't appreciated the scale of the casualties. Wingate is depicted as a cruel bully. It would probably come as a surprise to lots of British Jews, for whom he is still something of a hero - football clubs are named after him, for example.

There are a few weird historical anomalies and errors. One of the Palestinian elite - the newspaper owner/editor - is found to have been receiving payments from the Zionists; his wife finds cheques from the "Zionist Commission for Palestine" in his desk drawer. But the Commission was a short lived body, soon replace by the Palestine Zionist Executive, and then in 1929 by the Jewish Agency for Palestine. This isn't very important, except that it's part of a wider tendency in the film not to show any Jews at all. We do see a few people in European dress in some early street scenes, and they might be Jews, though there are plenty of Arabs in European dress too. We see some refugees arriving by boat in a very short segment, and we see a long distance shot or two some pale people working in the fields of a kibbutz.

But there's not much sign of the Zionist settlement, though it's talked about often enough by the characters. There's a scene in which Palestine Radio is launched, and the Jew at the joint British-Arab-Jewish ceremony is a long-bearded, hatted orthodox man. There's a shot of Jerusalem railway station devoid of Hebrew, even though the real station most definitely had trilingual signage - you can see it in old photos, and Hebrew was one of the three languages of the British Mandate authority. Like I said, almost the mirror image of my teenage Zionist movies. It does seem as if the film wants to minimise the existence of Jews in the country, even as part of the colonial apparatus. 

The final scene, after most of the credits, shows a silhouette of a Palestinian bagpiper playing what seems to be a Scottish lament. I've asked a Palestinian friend what's the thing with Palestinians and Scottish bagpipes.  

Review of "The Oxford History of the Holy Land" by by Robert G. Hoyland (Editor), H. G. M Williamson (Editor)

 

A detailed, grown up sort of book with a lot of knowledge about history, scripture and theology. Not for the casual reader, I'd say, but no less enjoyable for that. Some discussion about whether the Abrahamic religions really have a place for "holy places" at all in their theologies, and perhaps not enough consideration as to whether the idea of a sacred location is really a hangover from previous non-monotheistic religions. 

Review of Sirat

Stunning, emotionally draining film about a group of ravers in the Moroccan desert. The film starts with a middle aged Spanish man and his young son moving through the crowds at a desert rave, passing out flyers because they he is looking for his teenage daughter, who has vanished into the world of desert raves.

There are weak signals that something bad in happening in the outside world - crackly radio reports of preparations for a major war, sudden unavailability of petrol. Then Moroccan soldiers arrive to evict the ravers, and the Spanish man and his son impulsively fall in with a small group who decide to drive deeper into the desert rather than wait in line to be repatriated.

Saying anything more than this would be a spoiler, but the film is tense, visually striking, and with a remarkable soundtrack. I think it had more of an impact on us because we've been in on the fringes of the world that it depicts - dancing with drug-addled people in the techno pit at We Out Here, attending the Nowhere festival in Spain in a tiny scrap of desert, and beginning to understand the power and attraction of that kind of music.

We watched this via a USB stick in our TV, having obtained it informally.

Review of "Agent Running in the Field" by John le Carre

Another not very good late John le Carre. This is what I imagined his books would be like when I chose not to read them, before I found out that some of them were in fact very good. A clapped out ageing spy in the final stages of his not very illustrious career, put in charge of a London  based department where the not very good spies are left to fester, stumbles into something that might be a bit bigger than him. It feels dated, because I associate the world from which the clapped out spy comes with the past - men wearing blazers and grey flannel trousers, posh clubs and schools - but really all that is still here, it's just not part of my world at all. 

Part of the tension in the book comes from the fact that even for people in that separate world, there are points of overlap with the world that I know - wives who work as human rights lawyers, kids who go off to work on eco projects rather than into the city or the law. 

For a while the pace of the plot and the series of unexpected twists got me more involved, but by the implausible and not very interesting denouement I was waiting for it to be over.

Quakers and antisemitism

A Quaker friend passed me a copy of the new Quaker document "Challenging antisemitism: reflections for Quakers on recognising and responding to anti-Jewish prejudice", asking me what I thought and saying that there had been a lot of discussion about it among Quakers locally and nationally. Shortly after I came across this response to the document by the Quaker Socialist Society. 

I think the response is mainly fair, and I agree with most of the points that it makes. For example, it is indeed odd that the document doesn't have any named authors, and that though it says the writers talked to lots of groups and individuals, it doesn't say who they are. There doesn't seem to have been much engagement with Jewish groups who are critical of Israel and Zionism, who might have been thought of as natural points of contact for Quakers. The Quaker Socialists mention Jewish Voice for Liberation, and I'm disappointed that there is no mention of my own group, Na'amod. The reading list, and the list of groups to learn from, is also somewhat partial. The discussion on definitions of antisemitism, which mainly focuses on the IHRA definition and the rival Jerusalem definition, is both partial and muddled.

But that's not my main criticism. There's a small section at the back that is labelled "How this guide came about", which says it started life as a advice to ecumenical accompaniers who spend time in Israel-Palestine. This really shows - it's too much about when it's OK and not OK to criticise Israel and Zionism, and how that might land with different kinds of Jewish people. Although there is some kind and thoughtful material about how to talk to and listen to Jews about their experiences and feelings, it's not grounded in a proper understanding of contemporary antisemitism.

There's a view among some progressive people that antisemitism is not really a big deal these days. Sure, it was nasty in the Middle Ages, and the Holocaust was really bad, but these days Jews don't face much racism - they're white, after all, and often privileged too. So how can they really be victims of racism?  An addition to this is that responding to antisemitism somehow claims precedence, that there is a hierarchy of forms of racism where Jew-hatred is (wrongly) put at the top. And this is supplemented by a thread about how accusations of antisemitism are used to deflect criticism of Israel and Zionism - something that very much does happen, but surely shouldn't be the first thing to speak about when one speaks about hatred towards Jews. Though it often is.

What I felt was missing from the pamphlet is how absolutely fundamental antisemitism is to far right politics and ideas. This isn't always immediately apparent. The mobs that gather outside migrant hotels don't chant slogans about Jews. But if you look at how they talk about migrants to each others, and to their target audiences, theories about powerful Jews are never far from the surface - the so-called "Great Replacement" is allegedly a conspiracy by Jews to bring migrants in to replace "indigenous" white people. Almost any far right commentary on what's really happening in the world, from Covid to 9-11 to the financial crisis, quickly becomes a conversation about Jews. Curiously, the far right, and antisemites, are represented among the ranks of both pro-Zionists (like Tommy Robinson, and Victor Orban) and anti-Zionists (like Nick Fuentes, and British neo-Nazis including Nick Griffin and the Patriotic Alternative group). 

I won't explain here why antisemitism is so important to the far right ideologically and intellectually. That deserves a separate, longer piece. But it's a big thing, and by omitting it the pamphlet makes it look like antisemitism mainly belongs to history and to conversations about Israel.

One more thing. For a pamphlet aimed at people in the UK it was rather thin on the special contribution that England has made to Jew-hatred - the first country to expel Jews, the place where the blood libel (the idea that Jews kill Christian children so as to obtain and use their blood) originated, the introduction of the first immigration controls to bar the entrance of Jews fleeing pogroms in the Russian empire.

So I'm grateful that the Quakers have had a go at addressing the subject, and I do appreciate some of the good parts of the report. I just wish it had been better.

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. 

Watched on Channel 4 online, with repeated breaks for annoying ads. The voice over explains that these are there, even in the premium paid for version "for commercial reasons", but most of the ads are for other Channel 4 content. Bah. 

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.