Review of Our Friend

Emotional true-story drama about a young mum (two daughters) who is dying of cancer, and how she, her journalist partner and their somewhat gooseberry-like partner manage their tangled relationships amidst the inevitably of death. I was drawn in despite myself (I don't like films this sad) and thought that it handled a lot of the issues very well without being maudlin or religious about death.

Watched on Channel 4 online.

Review of Charlotte Gray

Better than usual war film based on the Sebastian Faulks book, in which Cate Blanchett plays the Scottish woman parachuted into France to work with the Resistance - though it really isn't clear what she's supposed to be doing, because the radio valves she is bringing are captured by the Germans almost as soon as she arrives, and after that she's mainly floundering. Still, it's a good film, tense and atmospheric without dwelling on the violence too much - there are a lot of guns but not that much shooting. And I could watch Cate Blanchett's weird but beautiful face all day.

Review of Tony

Sort of coming of age picture about the early life of Anthony Bourdain (celebrity chef and writer), which portrays him as a sleazeball, loser and slightly pathetic liar, who follows a girl on whom he has an utterly unrequited crush to Cape Cod and ends up working as a dishwasher in a fast-food restaurant presided over by implausible skilful and masterly chef (played by Antonio Banderas).

Some bits are really painful, including some bits that I think are supposed to be funny. In the end Tony, and the film, comes good, but there are some uncomfortable moments.

Watched at the Art House cinema in Crouch End.

Review of "Red Plenty" by Francis Spufford

Unusual book by one of my favourite writers. It's one of his earliest pieces of fiction, and it's obvious that it wasn't original planned as fiction at all. It's a sort of history of Soviet economic planning and policy, from the perspective of several different characters and across different time periods. Underlying it is the idea, now sort of preposterous, that the orderliness of a planned economy would allow the USSR to not only catch up with but then far outstrip the prosperity enjoyed in the capitalist west. The book works by showing us all the cynical grifters and dull bureaucrats who made the system work, but also the true believers who thought that with proper science (especially cybernetics) the planned economy really could deliver. One of these is Khrushchev himself, both in his period of power and after his fall; but there are lots of other characters, some of them real people and others composites of real people.

The first proper book that I've read on my new Kobo device, and slightly more enjoyable than the ailing Kindle, but not as pleasurable as a real paper book.

Review of Small, Slow and Steady

Slow, gloomy and depressing (though not entirely in a bad way) Japanese film about a profoundly deaf young woman training to be a boxer in a downbeat boxing gym that has seen better days and is on the verge of closing - and the gym owner is near death's door himself.

Lots of stuff about her family relationships, and some exploration into her motivation that doesn't really explain anything. Some hard-to-watch boxing footage that really does show the pain and the exhaustion.

Watched on BBC iPlayer.

Review of Me Without You

This was a really good, quite moving though sometimes funny about the friendship between two girls (who in the course of the film become young women, then not-so-young women) that seemed to avoid all the coming of age cliches.  Sometimes made more enjoyable by the fact that they are almost the same age as me, so their time at university in Brighton almost overlaps with my time at university in Brighton - though the film doesn't actually use Brighton, or Sussex University or Brighton Poly (as it was then) for any of the Brighton-period filming. 

Some sex, some drugs (including a heroin scene that doesn't lead to addiction and disaster, just one more thing that they try out), lots of deceit and conflict.

This was the second film we watched on our BFI subscription (via Chromecast and the BFI app), and it was as good as the first.