Review of 'Marshlands'

Set in Spain the early 1980s, just as the country emerges from fascism and into an uneasy democracy, this is a conventional police procedural that turns into a murder investigation. It's got lots of the usual tropes - the two cops are an ill-matched pair - one has a reputation as a trouble-making leftist, the other as a fascist thug and torturer, the local politicians want the case cleared up quickly, the case is in a remote town where the central authority's writ does not really run...

The disappearance and murders turn out to be linked to the local power elite, there's a background of strikes and class struggle, local heroin dealers...lots of very conventional plot devices (notes under the door, half-developed photographs on unusual film stock, a local investigative journalist) but some striking photography,  especially the amazing high aerial shots - which seem to me to emphasize the futility and insignificance of the events that we are witnessing.

Despite the straight narrative and characterisation this is a really good, gripping film.

Review of 'Post Capitalism' by Paul Mason

This is simultaneously an important book and a somewhat disappointing one. Here, as with his other book ‘Why it’s still kicking off everywhere’, he’s taken a really important topic and written about it with great clarity and a style that makes quite difficult stuff rather accessible. The disappointment (which also applied to the other book) is that the analysis is great but the prescription falls rather flat.

Here he’s writing about the way in which the present model of capitalism, and by extension the capitalist system itself, has reached a critical point. The old model is coming off the rails, sinking under the weight of the massive debts that it has created as a result of financialization and downright fraud, and finding that its very success in transferring wealth upwards leaves it short of the demand that it needs to keep the wheels turning. It’s not suited to a world in which the marginal cost of the stuff that people want to buy is approaching zero. It is in any case ill-equipped to deal with the challenges of climate change, an ageing population and instability-induced mass migrations.

What’s really great about this book is the way it synthesises some of the best writing about the transformative potential of the internet and the web with a non-dogmatic perspective from the Marxist tradition. So on the one had we get Yochai Benkler, who I think is rather brilliant but have never seen anyone on the left even notice, and on the other hand we get Kondratieff, and also Preobrazhensky and Hildferding on the transition from capitalism to socialism. There’s an account of the difficulties that the Soviets had in running a planned economy, and no concessions to the notion that the USSR was in any sense ‘actually existing socialism’ or even ‘a degenerated workers’ state’. And some interesting observations about mainstream economic and management theory that I didn't know about.  

There’s a critical account of how the Marxist tradition has been wrong about the politics of skilled workers, and of the working class as a whole – how it has historically sought to build institutions and mechanisms of solidarity within capitalism, rather than simply set its face against it because it had nothing to lose but its chains. There’s a great discussion of the role of skill in the labour process under capitalism, and the extent to which capitalism in its Taylorist and Fordist modes needed to expunge skill from work.

There are sections that made me smile, and others that made me want to punch the air in gratitude that someone else had ‘got it’ and expressed it better than I could.

I learned lots – not least about Bogdanov, a sometime ex-Bolshevik and early Soviet sci-fi writer with a powerful view of a post-capitalist society (among lots of other things). But I was also struck by some omissions. There’s no mention of Harry Braverman, whose ‘Labour and Monopoly Capital’ is all about Taylorism and capitalism’s relationship to skill; or to Mike Cooley, whose ‘Architect or Bee’ addressed the same issues – rather prophetically, I’d say – in relation to the automatization of white collar work. Stafford Beer, who tried to deploy early computers in support of Allende’s socialist planning, doesn’t get a mention.

And since he makes much of the idea that the left can and should learn from the transition from feudalism to capitalism, it’s a surprise to find no mention of E P Thompson, who explored the same idea at length in ‘The Poverty of Theory’. And I’d like to have seen at least a nod to Karl Polanyi, who wrote about the cruelty explicit in the emergence of the market economy, and about the first wave of globalisation and its collapse, in ‘The Great Transformation’. Polanyi’s important, too, in that he writes about how the rise of capitalism created capitalist people, and how by implication another society would bring about different people – it’s a rather strong rebuttal of the ‘human nature’ argument for capitalism and greed.

It’s a book, not a three-year university course, so all of these omissions can be forgiven. So, ultimately, can the fact that ‘what is to be done’ section is a bit thin and a bit lame. Some of it reads like a lefty version of the ‘Californian ideology’ – technology is great and it will enable super new stuff that makes things better. I don’t think he gives sufficient weight to the way in which new communications technologies do allow the marketization of things that have hitherto not been susceptible – I’m thinking of ‘task-sharing’ websites like TaskRabbit, which are the 21^st century equivalent of the hiring fair for domestic servants. Trebor Scholz has written some good stuff about ‘platform capitalism’, and it also doesn’t get a mention here.

I’m aware too, that the internet has rubbed away some of the scraps of autonomy and economic independence that were – precariously – available to some self-employed ‘creative’ artisans. CD sales at the end of a gig helped some independent musicians to make a living, but no-one buys them anymore except as a way of making a donation. Writers might expect to get paid for freelance contributions; now they are offered ‘guest blogs’ to which they are expected to contribute for free.

But I don’t want this to come over as a sustained whine. I really liked this book, and my disappointment with the end is in proportion to my exultation at the strength of the analysis. I hope that Paul Mason find a way to build on it, and to provide concrete examples of successful prefigurative projects. I don’t have any problem with the idea of building a new world within the shell of the old one; there are many variants of this strategy, and they’re not all utopian or apolitical or reformist. We just need to find the right ways to do it.

Review of 'The Global Minotaur' by Yanis Varoufakis

An overview of global finance and economics, from the perspective of someone who is clearly a radical dissenter but not a complete outsider. In person and when speaking Varoufakis is more radical than this book, which ends up calling for a revived, fairer Bretton Woods with America at the centre - not what I expected from a Marxist. Still, there's lots of very clear explication of how the system works, and the roles of the various countries within it. I suspect it will stand a re-reading...I get CDOs, but can't follow CDSs no matter how often I read about them.

I kept wanting to take bits of this and shove it under the noses of those of a self-deceiving mainstream-economics persuasion, but it's not appropriate for that. I'd really like for there to be a shorter, simpler version aimed at that.

Review of 'Jurassic York'

This book is a hysterical mash-up of Shakespeare, Star Wars, 1984 and Brave New World, the Carry On films, dystopian cyberpunk…well, it’s just wonderful. There’s a tongue-in-cheek Hibernophobia about it, but I don’t think any Scots people could really take offence. The plot is at least partly borrowed from Star Wars, but set in a fictional future England (Scotland having become independent long ago) ruled by a cloned and re-vivified Richard III, who is just as nasty as Shakespeare makes his first incarnation.

Lots of quoting from Shakespeare and contemporary pop songs, tons of humour, characters with names from contemporary British politics, a feminist slant (the warriors are mainly girls because lots of men died in a plague a while back)…what’s not to like?

A slightly serious point; the Wars of the Roses were the classic period of so-called “Bastard Feudalism”, when traditional loyalties and obligations broke down and political relationships were fluid and fast-changing. I think it might have been better to depict a contemporary version of “Bastard Feudalism” (after all, our contemporary Tories fit the bill on most counts) rather than try to squeeze the plot of this on to a precise mapping of the Yorkist-Lancastrian divide. I think the authors could have more fun with Johnson and Cameron, or their latter-day avatars, than they do with revivified defunct noblemen.

But that’s a quibble. This is enormous fun, and much to be enjoyed.

Review of 45 Years

I saw this a few weeks ago and still haven’t written a review – very unusual for me. I think it’s because this film affected me so much. It’s about a couple who have been married for a long time, and as they prepare to celebrate their 45^th anniversary comes the news that the body of his old girlfriend, frozen in an underground glacier since she died on a walking holiday before he ever met his wife, has been found.

This unsurprisingly generates much reflection on the road not taken – what sort of life he might have had if she hadn't died. He’s sensitive enough to not do much of this in front of his wife of 45 years, but she can see that he’s doing it, and it’s painful for her, and thus for him.

My first response was that this was an example of the inherent sadness of human existence. Nobody behaves badly, and yet they both are badly hurt. Life is a collection of roads not taken, and roads taken. We make the best choices we can with the knowledge we have and the hands we are dealt, and we have to live with the consequences even – especially – when hindsight shows the choices not to have been the best they could have been. That’s why seeing any story that takes in the whole arc of a life – Pinter’s ‘Betrayals’ comes to mind, but also the brilliant puppet show about gay men 'Or You Could Kiss me' – is so moving and also so disquieting.

But I think that there’s more to this particular story. After I thought about I decided that actually the husband had done something wrong, and that this was actually the most painful thing about the story; more, that my initial failure to allow this, and read this as a story about everybody doing the best they can, actually says something about me and how I've lived my life. (I won’t say more about what it was, because it would spoil a really good film, with great acting, for anyone who hasn't seen it. If you want to know, talk to me when you've seen it; or talk to your therapist, or your partner of many years.)

Which is probably why it’s taken me so long to write the review.

Review of ‘The Second Mother’

A Brazilian film about the relationship between families and their household servants. I’ve little experience of this myself, but my wife and her family (South African) know all about kids being brought up by servants. There are loving relationships between the servants and their charges, but everyone knows – or grows to know – the precise boundaries that delineate the extent to which the servants are, and are not, family members.

And that’s what the film is about. Val, a poor woman from the North East of Brazil, brings up the nice young son in a beautiful modernist house in Sao Paolo, with pool, lovely garden, cute Labrador and all the other trimmings. She is trusted, loyal, loves the son and is loved by him in a way that he doesn’t love his real mother – the Portuguese title is ‘When is she coming home?’, a question that the boy asks about his mummy early on, when he’s about six and being cared for by Val.

But the stable equilibrium is disrupted by the introduction of Val’s daughter Jessica, who comes to Sao Paolo to take the entrance exam for university. The family – Dona Barbara really, who runs the show – gives permission for Jessica to stay in the house, in Val’s servant room. But Jessica doesn’t understand the rules of the master-servant game and all the little ways in which Val diminishes herself to maintain those boundaries. Oh, and she’s beautiful and clever.

This film is actually painful to watch, though it does have some comic moments. Dona Barbara reacts very badly to the disruption – when Jessica swims in the family pool she orders it to be drained, claiming to have seen a rat in there. Her husband, a failed artist, makes a fool of himself because Jessica is beautiful and young.

This is a bit slow in the beginning, and a bit long, but really worth staying with. 

Review of 'Paper Towns'

Like the high school noire film 'Brick', but without the plot complexity, the clever cinematography, the drugs, the intrigue...in fact, just a regular US high school rom-com, with a bit of mystery because the most popular girl in the school disappears, but not all that much mystery really because she's always been a bit wild and dark. Mainly a buddy movie about the two male friends who help our hero to look for her, and the relationship between the three boys. Watchable, but not immensely so.

Review of 'The Wolfpack'

Possibly the weirdest film I have ever seen, and I have seen some weird ones. This is shot and edited with all the visual sense of a family home movie. That's not surprising, since a lot of it appears to be found footage from the family's home movies. Watching it made Ruth feel physically sick as a result of all the handheld camera work and hosepipe pans. Youtube does a better job of stabilising video footage than has been done here.

That's part of the point, of course. This is supposed to look un-mediated, to enhance its authenticity. It is a documentary about a family of six children (now young adults) and their parents who grow up in a tiny apartment in New York city, with the children never ever leaving the apartment. They have grown up with almost no contact with the outside world - they are home educated, so they've not been to school or met other children...or anyone. Their knowledge of the outside world comes mainly from their DVD collection, which contains a lot of classics and quite a lot of horror or near-horror (like Reservoir Dogs). Their father, a South American man, has kept the family shut up in this way to protect them from the corrosive effects of contemporary culture, drugs, violence etc.

So they've grown up with Tarantino as their window on the world. The mother and father met when she was a hippy tourists, and they'd planned to move to Scandinavia where they thought the values were sound, but somehow they'd not made it and ended up stranded in the Lower East Side, high up in a housing project. No TV, no internet, just the DVDs. The children (five boys, one girl, all with Hindu names and long hair down to the base of their spines) amuse themselves by re-making the films with a home video camera and cardboard props; much of the film contains footage of their re-enactments. They seem to have a huge amount of equipment to help them do this. Later the film shows them emerging from the apartment and going outside for short trips - to the beach, to a forest, to the shops - all of which is a powerful experience for them.

All of them seem quite damaged by the experience, but they are not totally alien to me. I can't help thinking that some of the people I've known over the years who have sought to protect their children from the malign influences of the world have been a bit like this; I recognise some of the feeling in myself. The fact that they'd wanted to move to Scandinavia and thought well of its values somehow marks them out as not entirely insane.

Somehow the young adults came into contact with the woman who made this film, and she is almost present in it. It looks like a student project, and yet it must have had some money and some backing, if only for the post-production and the distribution. I would love to have been at the meeting where this was pitched.

A few notes on Zionism and the Jewishness of Israel

Two separate questions really. The historic status of Zionism, and whether Israel should be ‘the state of the Jewish people’.

On the first one, the story is complicated. Zionism has/had some of the features of a classic (Eastern) European nationalist movement, but it also differed from it in some important ways. I can’t think of another nationalist movement that wasn’t about a people living in its territory, and wanting that people to have self-government on that territory. That in itself makes Zionism problematic. Progressives generally support ‘the right of nations to self-determination’ in the sense that they allow territories to secede. Support for Zionism entails rather more than this basic principle.

The Zionists were also unusually uninterested in the national culture of the people that they represented; they mainly wanted to replace it with another culture which they intended to create. Of course, other kinds of nationalism to some extent ‘invented’ the nation which it championed, but I think Zionism rather took this to an extreme.

Historically, Zionism was a minority movement within the various Jewish communities of Eastern Europe, and even more so in the West. That doesn’t prove that its claim to represent that national movement of the Jews is necessarily wrong, but it is surely relevant. Zionism wasn’t even the only form of Jewish nationalism – there were others, including Territorialism and Sejmism, and the ‘distributed nationalism’ of the various Yiddishist nationalists. Without the sponsorship of the British Empire, and without the holocaust, it would have been an interesting, quirky footnote in Jewish history, like the Garveyites for Black America. There would have been some communities of ‘practical Zionists’ in Palestine, a bit like the Templar communities founded by German Protestants, and they might have survived depending on how an independent Palestine turned out.

And of course, up until the present time most Jews have not been nationalists, and many have argued that the Jews don’t have any national identity apart from citizenship of the countries in which they live. This view was particularly prevalent in Western Europe, where the idea of belong to an ethnos independent of citizenship was not well understood or widely believed in. Believing that ‘national self-determination’ didn’t apply to Jews didn’t make these people anti-semites. That Zionism has been successful in establishing a state doesn’t make them retrospective anti-semites, and therefore it surely doesn’t make anyone who holds this belief now an anti-semite either. It’s just a different view about the applicability of nationalism to the various Jewish communities around the world.

Has Zionism turned out to be a ‘good thing’, in some fair historical balance sheet? It’s possible that Zionism will turn out to have been a good thing for all Jews, or for some Jews. It’s plausible that it won’t, and taking that view doesn’t make someone an anti-semite either.

OK, now the other question. In what sense should Israel be a ‘Jewish State’? Most liberal democracies don’t privilege one ethnic group among their citizens. It’s unusual for the state to record or document individual citizen’s ethnicities. There are some exceptions, usually based on the idea of compensating for or redressing the effect of past discrimination – Australia does something like that as regards Aboriginal people, for example. But in France, and in Italy, the state at least regards everyone with citizenship as French or Italian. Why should Israel be different? Why can’t it accept an ‘Israeli’ national identity and status, irrespective of religion or ethnicity?

This is not an abstract question of tidiness. Ultimately the fate of the Israeli Jews will depend on their ability to make peace with the neighbours. That’s a very tall order, and the Israeli Jews would be foolish to disarm in the hope of this happening. They live in a very rough neighbourhood. It is managing to have plenty of nasty wars without them. The neighbours never wanted them to come, and don’t think they should be there – in the strong sense of ‘should’. Nevertheless, there is no long term future for Israeli Jews, and certainly no democratic future, without it.

I know that there are some Arab nationalists, and some others who are probably not nationalists, who would like all the trappings of Zionism stripped from the state, so that there would be no peculiar ethnic identity in its symbolic representation – changing the words of the Hatikvah, changing the flag, and so on. I can see the tidiness logic of this, but I don’t think it’s very important.

 I do think that legal and institutional discrimination, and segregation and economic disadvantage, for non-Jews in Israel should end. The historic relationship of Israel to the wider Jewish world, and the role of the Zionism movement in bring the state into being, is not sufficient justification for this to continue. Israel will remain a demographically and culturally Jewish country without them, and that’s Jewish enough for me.

Review of 'Mistress America'

A good, funny, quirky comedy that's perhaps a bit shallow, but in a good way. Tracey is having a hard time in her first semester (that's 'term', right?) at university in New York, where she feels patronised as a suburbanite in the big city. She can't make friends, she finds the work hard, she's shut out by the cool literary in-crowd.

Then she meets Brooke, who is the daughter of the widowed man her divorced mother is about to marry. Brooke is cool, interesting, and instantly engaged, engaging and sympathetic. Tracey is fascinated, and wants to join in all of Brooke's projects, but at the same time sees her with a more objective and adult eye than her behaviour suggests. She puts a lightly fictionalized Brooke into a short story she writes...well, I don't have to provide a complete synopsis.

But it's a really enjoyable film, with lots of acute observations, great dialogue, and some very funny situations, without a fart or barf joke in sight.

Review of 'Diary of a teenage girl'

This is a very powerful, and for me, rather disturbing film. It was made more disturbing by watching in the presence of two just-post-teenage girls, who were the daughters of friends from Australia that we thought we'd entertain by taking them to a film; the online reviews all suggested that this would be a comedy. Well, there are a few funny moments, but it's mainly painful to watch a young girl growing up among abusive and dysfunctional adults, having under-sex with her pot-head mother's pot-head boyfriend, giving blow-jobs to strangers she meets in bars because she thinks hookers are cool, and so on.

This is not your conventional coming of age film, and there are few tender and sensitive moments. It's raw and not pleasant - though, perhaps because it's contemporary Hollywood it has an implausible upbeat ending.

Review of ‘What we did on our holiday’

A comedy about dysfunctional families, break-up, ageing, disappointment and death. The poster, which makes it look like a British version of all the 'Vacation in Hell' comedies, is quite misleading. This is quite good actually, with David Tennant playing the dad and Rosamund Pike (rather against type) being a somewhat implausible thirty-something mum with three kids. The Tennant character’s own father is dying at his mansion in the Highlands so the family pretends to be together for one last visit. The three kids are great in an ‘Outnumbered’ sort of way, Tennant plays his usual desperate disorganised role, and Billy Connolly plays himself as the slightly curmudgeonly dad (former famous footballer, heart of gold). Celia Imrie as the social worker is also great.

Small note – can’t get over how weird Rosamund Pike looks when she’s not being glamorous. Not quite as alien-looking as Tilda Swinton, but definitely heading in that direction.

Review of ‘I could never be your woman’

Lame-ish romcom set in Hollywood around a 40-ish TV producer who falls for a younger man. Michelle Pfeiffer plays the producer, and lots of British comedy actors appear – maybe they were a job lot. Touches on some important issues, about the way it’s easy to fake photos, and about relationships between people of different ages, and the denial of ageing – but in a fairly useless and insincere way. Everyone else is fake because they are having work done, but Michele Feiffer is just physically perfect and not heir to any kind of mortality. Lots of philosophical crap about male-female attraction voiced by Tracey Ullman playing the part of Mother Nature. 

You can tell how bad this is by the fact that they clips which play over the credits are not ‘out-takes’ but what the film-makers must have decided are just the best funny bits from the film, repeated. Mainly they weren't that funny the first time and don’t bear repeating.

Review of 'Going Clear: Scientology and The Prison of Belief'

A documentary about Scientology, based on a book, that reveals a lot about the inner workings of the 'church' but leaves a lot of questions unanswered. The main one is 'how come Scientology got to be so powerful when it's obviously ridiculous and run by repellent people?' L Ron Hubbard, the founder, was fat and ugly with bad teeth. So how come? Perhaps part of the answer is that there's nothing so stupid that it won't attract some people, and that the need to belong is so strong that once in some people will find any number of reasons not to leave, however nasty. Look at the WRP, for example. I do rather wonder if there was a relationship between the 'church' and some US government agencies; it does seem to have had rather an easy ride from the authorities. Trouble is that lots of the commentary on Scientology is almost as nutty as they are, so of course there are suggestions that it was a front for the CIA, and the Illuminati, and so on.

The film is a bit on the long side, with lots of testimony from ex-members about the nasty stuff they did, and how it ended up being done to them. I was really struck by the inter-cutting between clips of these people denying that they did some nasty stuff, and other later clips admitting that they had done the same nasty stuff; because what it shows is that demeanour is no guide to truthfulness. We tend to believe that we can tell when people are lying by looking at them. The movies and TV have taught us to believe that people look shifty when they are lying, and that we won't be taken in. Actually, they don't. Maybe decent people squirm a bit when they lie, but bad people, and people who think that it's OK to lie for a purpose, seem not to. Yet our system of justice is in part premised on the idea that ordinary people will be able to tell who is telling the truth.

Review of 'Love and Mercy'

A bio-pic of Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys, who turns out to have been much more troubled than I  could have imagined from the music. A good film, with some good acting, and an interesting split-narrative structure (part during the 1960-70s heyday, part in the early 1990s).

Interesting counterpart with the story of Amy Winehouse. AW was left to the care of people who cared more about themselves, and how they could advance themselves through her career, than they ever did about her physical or mental health. It seems that a bit of dedicated competent professional help might have saved, and allowed her to graduate from youthful excess to grand old lady of Jazz.

Whereas Wilson had professional help in the shape of rogue shrink Dr Eugene Landy, who kept him sick and exploited him ruthlessly. If we are to believe the film then Wilson hit lucky in that he was rescued by car salesperson Melinda Leadbetter, who saw that something was wrong in the doctor-patient relationship. But it does highlight the problem for people who are talented, but not either commercially savvy or strong enough to cope with the pressures of a life in the limelight. How do you know who trust as doctor, counsellor, agent, lawyer, even accountant?

There is, of course, no mention in the film of the Beach Boys's politics, including their performance at a Republican fundraiser in 1984 (from which Brian was ejected). For that you'll have to read this.

Review of 'Amy'

Watched this last night, at the cinema, as part of a ‘première’ with live Q&A with director and producer. Glad I did, because some films need to be seen in a darkened room with a crowd and no other distractions.

This is a beautifully made documentary, without talking head interviews but with lots of found footage with audio interviews running over. It left me profoundly sad, of course, but also angry. I wasn't a huge AW fan, and didn't consume much of the celeb coverage while she was alive. But anyone can see what a huge talent she was, both as a singer and as a writer. So it’s hard to watch her entourage failing her. Other celebs have been protected from the worst impacts of media attention, but she wasn't. She was left to be exposed to it, because the sight of her cracking under the pressure somehow enhanced her market value. Others have survived drugs and bad relationships, but she wasn't given the time or space to regroup and recover, again because those around her wanted to keep her touring and performing. She was too young, inexperienced, and already damaged by early life to take control herself.

I note in passing that it was alcohol and bulimia that killed her rather than the shedloads of drugs that she took, but this is not to defend the drugs and the drug-taking; it all contributed to the dissolution of her personality. I also think that no-one watching this will learn anything. Young people won’t do any less booze and drugs, young women will still want to be thin, the business will still batten on to anyone with talent, and destroy them if they let it.

So sad to think that she wrote all those beautiful songs about someone as obviously shitty as her ex-husband.

Review of "London Road"

A musical about a serial killer. Well, actually a setting to opera-style music of the verbatim transcripts gathered by researchers who spent time with the residents of London Road, Ipswich, where a man murdered five prostitute women during three months. You won't come out humming the tunes, though some of the images last for a long time - particularly the shots of surviving prostitutes, who have more dignity than the other characters.

This is a brilliant, clever, moving film - though it rather does confirm my prejudice that one should never let the media in any form near one's personal life. The residents do not come out of it very well, and there's more than a touch of sneering at the chavs. But no-one comes out of it very well - not the local politician, and not the voyeuristic media either.

Review of 'Sparkle'

Slightly dull and plodding romcom, without much rom or com. Young man channelling his inner 'Alfie' comes to London, uses his charm and sexual magnetism to get a job in PR by screwing the boss...unknowingly meets her daughter and becomes involved with her too...his mum is a sort of singer (really a karaoke singer, as far as I can see) but she follows him to London to have a 'career' but ends up romantically involved with failure Bob Hoskins, whose more successful brother is the PR-boss's long term lover and the father of the daughter (unbeknown to her, of course). Implausible, not interesting enough, and much too long, presumably because the quality didn't justify spending any more money on editing.

I watched this on iPlayer, and couldn't help wondering whether the person who wrote the description had seen it - it was utterly wrong.

Review of "The Fourth Estate"

Watched this in a free screening at the achingly cool venue Passing Clouds, in super-hip Dalston. A zero budget film made over three years by two people with a cheap camera and a ten-year old laptop, it's better than most films about what's wrong with the British media. Lots of talking heads, but really good ones, with smart perspectives, incisive analysis and an ability to talk to the point. Touches on a lot of subjects, including media ownership and regulation, the economics of the media, representations of race, gender and class.

In some ways too long to be really punchy (it's only 80 minutes, but it tries to cover a lot in that time) but too short to do justice to all the things it raises. I would have liked more on the first bit - ownership and regulation - and possibly more on Leveson, which is where it starts. (I was most affected, though, by the short segment in which a young black woman responds to that Lilly Allen video, which I hadn't previously seen - I'd rather ignored the furore over it as being the usual music industry PR shit). Interestingly the two film-makers didn't know that they were going to make a documentary when they started - they thought it might become lots of shorts on YouTube. I hope they do that too, because they've got lots more to say.

Review of 'French Film'

Watched on iPlayer via Chromecast, and watched for the second time. Not entirely through choice, because it isn't really worth watching twice, but Ruth couldn't remember seeing it so...

Nominally a rom-com, and about relationships with some funny bits, there's nevertheless a lot of sadness and misery in this film. Hugh Bonneville establishes himself as the "poor man/woman's Colin Firth" by playing an ineffectual, uncomfortable posh bloke who is a journalist in an unsatisfactory relationship with his girlfriend Cheryl (Victoria Hamilton).

There's a good deal of un-reflective stereotyping of French people and French-ness - the couples counsellor that they go to is a self-important over-intellectual French guy, for example. Eric Cantona plays a gnomic French film director. Although HB is the sympathetic focus of the story, and a self-proclaimed anti-French xenophobe, the French people in the film all turn out to have been right all along - the couple should split up, how relationships begin determines how they'll end, love is something that you just know when it happens...

Review of 'Queen and Country'

A largely pointless, shapeless film. I went to see this because I understood it was a follow-on from 'Hope and Glory', also semi-autobiographical by John Boorman. But that's a much better film, with the alien-ness of childhood in wartime to provide it with a dramatic focus.This just went on through a series of episodes about army life, mainly without purpose or narrative direction. It felt like watching an over-long pilot for a TV series.Pretty enough to look at, and occasionally amusing, but that's all. Lots of talent, mainly wasted.

I note in passing that the poster displays a moment in the film that is entirely unmemorable - the main character is shown here hugging his sister, who has returned from Canada. Would you know that from the picture? I don't think you would.

Review of 'A Good Woman'

This is a film version of Oscar Wilde's "Lady Windermere's Fan", transposed to a 1930s Amalfi ex-pat scene of wealthy Americans and Brits. It's mainly Wilde's dialogue, it has great scenery and settings, decent actors, and is faithful to Wilde's plot - so why does it drag, and why did I doze off? I think because it's too slow for the plot and the dialogue. The director lingers too long on the beautiful cast in the beautiful outfits, draped over the beautiful settings. Not really bad, but not as good as it ought to have been with the assets.

One odd thing - it's set in Fascist Italy, but there are no fascists at all, and almost no Italians. Why put it there at all? And could it have been set in 1930s Germany without any Nazis? One does wonder what goes on in the mind of Hollywood people. Also, the producer is Alan Greenspan, but it's not that Alan Greenspan.

Review of 'Grasp the Nettle'

I watched this last night at the Earl Haig Hall in Crouch End, projected from a laptop (as is typical of such showings, there was a low battery warning on the screen at around three quarters of the way through).

This is a zero-budget, over-long, slightly shapeless, but honest and evocative film about two overlapping communities of activists; an eco-village of benders on a site awaiting development near Kew Bridge, and the 'Democracy Village' in Parliament Square. Both communities no longer exist, having been evicted by bailiffs and police. Both were affected by an influx of the casualties of life - junkies, alcoholics, and nutters, with whom they found it increasingly difficult to deal. The early phase nutters included David Shayler, the ex-MI5 agent who in the film dressed as a woman, said that he was Jesus and rambled on about the Zionist World Government. Later he came to seem quite reasonable as the next wave arrived, including 'Freemen' who denounced Shayler and others as police agents.

After the Freemen came the drunks, the junkies and the mentally ill. Several of the activists complained that they were 'not social workers', and at least one hoped to camera that they would lose their forthcoming court case so that they wouldn't have to deal with the problem people any more.

It would be hard to say that either community achieved anything at all. Some of the people who were watching at the same time were inspired by the dedication and selflessness of the activists, and the way in which they did look after the victims who they found themselves looking after. I was just depressed by all the wasted energy, and the way that the communities got progressively smaller rather than bigger as the nutters made life unbearable for others.

I do remember that student occupations in the 1970s used to have a no-drugs, no alcohol rule. That seems like basic common sense now. I can see that eco-anarchists don't like the idea of having rules (after all, who can enforce them?) but I'd say that the need for that nettle to be grasped is one of the key learnings from the film.

Review of 'The Lady from Shanghai'

Watched this again last night, on an old-fashioned DVD. Had forgotten how brilliant it is - the complexity of the plot (not only is it not easy to guess, I'm still not sure I understand it all), the camera work, and the political sensibilities. There is no attempt to pretty up the lives or the qualities of the idle rich people it depicts. They are just nasty, in a way that only cartoon rich villains with ludicrous world domination plans get to be in modern films.

We know straight away that Welles' character, Michael O'Hara, is a good sort because he killed a 'Franco Spy' in Spain; we know straight away that George Grisby is a bad guy because he was on a pro-Franco committee. And as a modern audience we know that this film was made at a specific time (1947) because this probably the last moment at which Hollywood was prepared to celebrate a 'premature anti-Fascist'.

Fabulous camerwork, especially the Chinese theatre scenes, and the lovingly lit shots of Rita Hayworth, who is very sexy but probably wouldn't get a look-in in today's Hollywood because she isn't conventionally pretty at all.The end sequence in the hall of mirrors at the abandoned amusement park probably provided the template for all subsequent versions of this.

Review of 'Boy meets Girl'

A striking example of how far mainstream attitudes have moved on issues of gender and sexuality. This film depicts the life and loves of a young transgender person in small-town Kentucky. It's mainly about characters and relationships (between trans Ricky and Ricky's best friend Robby, between Ricky and new girlfriend Francesca, and Ricky and Francesca's marine boyfriend David), but there is enough plot stuff for me to not want to spoil it for you.

A fair bit of sex between Ricky and the other protagonists, either described or depicted. Implausibly nice, in that Ricky encounters almost no hostility from the other small-town residents - not the dad, not Francesca's dad (even though he is a conservative Republican) and ultimately not even David the marine. Perhaps this a bit of an outreach film, aimed at helping trans people feel braver and more supported - it does have a fairy-tale happy ending.

Review of Calvary

A really, really good film, though not at all a feel-good film. It's a slice through contemporary Ireland with all its pain and troubles. From the very first minute the theme of child abuse by Roman Catholic priests is introduced; this is the framework for the plot, because an abuse victim wants to kill the main character as an act of revenge, in the knowledge that he is a good priest and not an abuser. The film works its way towards this inevitable denouement via the other suffering characters in the village where the priest and the abuse victim, whose identity is known to the priest but not to us, both live.

The final shots are evocative of a sort of reversed version of "It's a wonderful life". In that film the character (a banker, BTW) is persuaded not to kill himself by seeing all the lives he has touched and what would have happened to them without him. Here the priest does go, half-willingly, to his own death, and we see all the people he might have helped but now won't.

The film is full of stunningly beautiful scenery and cinematography, and the acting and the characters are great. Particular mention is due to Chris O'Dowd, who I don't always like, simultaneously playing against and drawing on the sweet-bloke characters that he usually portrays.

One thing puzzles me. When the disgraced, disgraceful banker wants to show the priest how little everything means to him, he says that he can take a valuable painting off his wall and piss on it - which he then proceeds to do. The painting is Holbein's 'The Ambassadors', which is in the National Gallery, not on an Irish banker's wall. It's a famous painting, so the film makers must know that the audience will recognize and know that it can't be there for the banker to piss on it. So why? Because the painting is a puzzle for which the solution is death underlying everything, particularly ill-gotten wealth? Or is there some other puzzle that I have missed?

Review of Death Defying Acts

I quite liked this - CZJ is at her best, actually acting as opposed to just looking beautiful, though she is a bit implausibly beautiful as a woman who is supposed to be very poor and living on her wits. Reasonable plot tension and character development, nice tie-in with what we know about Houdini - surprised that Timothy Spall as the manager doesn't even bother to try an American accent, though he is otherwise quite good. Saoirse Ronan as the is-she/isn't-she psychic daughter is really great.

Review of 'Chef'

Cheerful restaurant cooking film, devoid of tension or narrative interest. 'Artist' chef who loves food loses job when he refuses to cook the same menu that his commercially-oriented boss insists on, and instead gets a food truck (we'd say catering van) on the insistence of his loving and gorgeous ex-wife. He takes his ten-year old son on the road trip to bring it from Miami to LA, they bond over cooking, the food is great, and he ends up re-marrying the gorgeous ex-wife.

Fantastic Latin music, an amazing cast, all more or less tipped down the drain in what was a watch-able but uninteresting film. Some mild interest in the fact that it's mainly a 90-minute commercial for Twitter - the dad doesn't really get how Twitter can be used to publicize a new business, but the smart ten-year old shows him, so that every time the truck turns up in a new town there are crowds of people waiting to eat the great food. (Small side note - the food looks really horrible to me, but I am a near-vegetarian.)

Review of 'Begin Again'

Quite pleasant no-rom com about the music business - Keira Knightley is a singer-songwriter with integrity who gets taken up by a washed-up drunk of an A+R man. They record an album in the streets using mobile equipment ("Hey kids...let's record the whole album right here!").

Keira's character (probably has a name, don't remember it) finds out her big-star singer boyfriend is cheating on her with someone from the crew, they nearly get back together but don't because she dislikes the way he has sold out to the suits.

In passing Keira heals the exec, cures his alcoholism and reconciles him to his family. Absolutely no sex or drugs, though a bit of profanity and drink. KK looks like the pretty alien that she is - attractive without being remotely sexy - so the absence of any sexual chemistry in the film makes complete sense.

Nevertheless quite enjoyable.

Review of 'A Little Chaos'

Pretty to look at but dull. Not much plot, a few moments of nearly pointless melodrama, acting generally not all that good – though Alan Rickman is clearly having fun as Louis XIV.

Of course no sign of the poverty on which the court rested, or the cruelty which was necessary and unremarkable to ensure its survival. There’s a hint that the nobles are prisoners of a court system that keeps them busy and out of trouble, but even there the film is a pale shadow of the depiction of this in Ridicule (a much better film).

The Rabbi's Hat

This picture from the Girona Jewish Museum apparently depicts a Jewish wedding. The rabbi is wearing a bishop's mitre. Did rabbis ever wear such headgear? If not, how come this picture? Was it done by a non-Jew who thought that's what clerics wear? What seem to be crosses on the hat makes that seem more likely. In which case, how did the picture happen?

I have something of an interest in the story of Jewish hats (we didn't always keep our heads covered, not before the 14th century) and am also intrigued by ecclesiastical headgear. So I'd really like to know the answer to this.

Review of 'Woman in Gold'

I didn't think much of this. First, I was bored much of the time. Lots of courtroom scenes, without much drama. I never really engaged with any of the characters or their dilemmas, in so far as they had any.

But mainly I think the effort to restore Nazi-looted art to its owners leaves me cold. Valuable paintings are a form of money. That Manet or Van Gogh isn't worth squillions because that is its intrinsic value, but because it’s scarce and monetary value can be attached to it. So everyone who owns a valuable painting is by definition part of the super-rich.

In this story the happy ending is that the Klimpt paintings are transferred from a public gallery in Vienna to a privately owned gallery in New York, where they are on public display. The heroine realises that the return of the paintings doesn't resolve her sense of loss of world and family, her guilt at fleeing and leaving her parents behind – she still has to live with that. Well, guess what? Other holocaust victims have to live with that too, only they weren't ever rich, so they didn't either have to deal with losing their valuable art, or have any prospect of getting it back.

And a small quibble. In the apartment, at Maria’ wedding (and what sort of name is that for a Jewish girl anyway?) the exquisitely bourgeois Viennese Jews dance a hora. Would they have, or is this just the film trying to connect them with the European Jewish world as imagined by an American audience?

Review of ‘The Grand Seduction’

This film is very much in the tradition of small-community-conspires-to-deceive-outsider movies, as established by ‘Whisky Galore’ and refined by ‘Local Hero’. This is not nearly as good as the fore-runners. Apparently it’s a Canadian remake of an earlier Canadian film, which rather begs the question why bother? This one has Brendan Gleeson, but the other one looks like it might have been better. Oh, wait a minute, it was in French...presumably this was remade for the US market.

It’s watchable enough, though the deceived outside barely escapes the too-stupid-to-live designation in noticing what is going on. There is a vague sense that someone has cut all the more interesting parts out of the film. The enigmatic post-mistress who provides the love interest for the deceived outsider is barely a character at all. Nevertheless, at one point she raises the question as to whether the town will really benefit from having a petroleum waste reprocessing place – an issue which is never mentioned again, or even considered by any of the other inhabitants of this pristinely beautiful harbour.

Part of the process of the town being able to secure the oil company’s decision to locate its reprocessing plant there involves a personal bribe to one of the executives. This is presented as a technical challenge, and thus forms part of the plot (will the local bank manager be able to get this approved as a loan, or will he just steal the money from his own bank?) but it is not presented as a moral or a political element at all. It’s not even reflected on much by the characters – it’s just one more hurdle, like pretending to understand and like cricket.

Technical note: watched on telly via HDMI cable from laptop, because the film was downloaded.

Review of ‘X+Y’

A film about maths nerds and autism, rather well done; had to choke back the odd tear. The protagonist is a maths prodigy and ends up competing in the International Mathematics Olympiad. Nice depictions of relationships between nerds, male and female nerds, and savants and their parents. A few actors usually seen in Mike Leigh films (Sally Hawkins, Eddie Marsan, and I think Rafe Spall) give great performances. 

Nice footage of Taipei; small autobiographical note, I spent some time there during the Ovum Asia Pacific tour a few years ago and found it a surprisingly pleasant place. Several of the places I visited (the big park, the night market) were in the film and it was nice to see them again.

Review of “Dear White People”

A film about racial politics on US campuses, with particular reference to a recent fad for rich white students to organise ‘blackface’ parties and the offence that it caused to African-American students.

Interesting, sharply shot and edited, and with some good conflicted characters, interesting scenario, and some good dialogue. Clearly shows, as if such a thing were necessary, that America is not any kind of ‘post-racial’, just differently racial.

But less than satisfactory for me, and lots of it frankly incomprehensible. I couldn’t understand much of the material about the American university culture (I don’t even know what a sophomore is), or pick up some of the nuances of American racial politics and/or African-American culture, or teen culture – what’s all that stuff about hair-styles really about? I don’t know or care enough to find out.

And I’m a bit mystified by having two of the main protagonists be the son of the white college president and of the black college dean respectively. I don’t know what the two roles mean (are they two halves of the Vice-Chancellor role, maybe?). And is the fact that one boy is white and the other black all that matters here? What about all the other people who aren’t from privileged backgrounds? Well, this is supposed to be an Ivy League university, so maybe they’re just not in the story, unless I missed something.

Review of 'Cuban Fury'

Very disappointed that this was not a searing account of armed struggle in the Cuban Revolution, as I had been led to believe. There were no Cubans in this film at all, and very little fury, though the Brits in it were occasionally a bit peeved.

It turned out to be a mildly amusing romcom with salsa dancing, office rivalry between men over the hot new boss, a bit of slapstick, and some good character acting, particularly Ian McShane as the seedy salsa coach. Not memorable, but not awful to watch either.

I note that the boss didn't need to be American at all. She's learning to salsa like everyone else. It's not part of her latino heritage or anything like that. So presumably British film-makers are back to the old device of putting in an American character in the hope that they can increase US sales. Ho hum...

Review of 'Saturday Night Fever'

Rewatched a few weeks ago, on telly via laptop and informal distribution; tried to watch via Chromecast but found the streaming couldn't handle an HD film.

Of course it's a great soundtrack, and very evocative of the period. And some of the social observation (particularly the social climbing of Stephanie, the dance partner who has relocated to Manhattan through her job and philandering boss).

I'd forgotten how nasty it was, though - apart from the ethic gang wars and the dead end jobs, and the boys' attitude to women in general, there are two rapes, neither of which seem to be taken very seriously.

Review of 'Strangers on a Train'

Watched this at a little arthouse cinema in Girona - very comfortable seats, but hard-to-hear soundtrack. I presume the mainly Catalan audience were reading the subtitles and didn't much care.

A classic suspense thriller, perfectly made, though some aspects of the plot don't stand up to much scrutiny. I especially enjoyed it because I'd recently listened to the rather good radio play 'Strangers on a Film', about the tension between Hitchcock and Raymond Chandler, whose name appears on the credits but didn't really write the screenplay.

In the play Hitchcock and Chandler argue about whether it's important for the plot and the characters to make sense; Hitchcock says that's not important in a film, which is a different medium from print. Seeing the movie I can see that he was undoubtedly right. Lots of the plot doesn't make much sense but it doesn't matter.

Small other note in passing; watching it I found it hard to know exactly when it was set. It looked like the 1930's, and only the small poster inviting travellers to visit New York to see the UN was a give-away that it was post-war. No sign in the film that anyone is a veteran, or that the war even had happened. It was made in the early 1950's, which really did look like a vanished world. Interesting how 'grown-up' the actors/characters look, even though they are much younger than me.

Review of "R100".

A Japanese shop worker whose wife is in a coma signs up to a mysterious S&M agency (‘Bondage Corp.’) to provide him with surprise dominatrix attacks in public places, which appears to be the only way he can obtain some sort of ecstasy.

At first it goes well, and we see him reaching this state in a wide range of places – a coffee bar, a sushi counter, the street, even a children’s playground. But the agency increasingly crosses the boundaries between those domains where the protagonist thinks interaction with the dominatrices are appropriate. He’s happy to be attacked in proper ‘public’ – he’s obviously got a thing about being humiliated in front of strangers, but not in his house (where his seven-year old son is cared for by his retired father-in-law) his place of employment, or the hospital room where he sits by the bed of his unconscious wife.

He seeks to have the contract cancelled but is told that he can’t. He goes to the police, but of course they are not interested in what perverts get up to, or enforcing some incomprehensible distinction between acceptable and unacceptable humiliation.

Then he accidentally kills one of the women who has him tied up at home on a waterproof sheet so that she can spit at him. From here on the film moves into pastiche thriller. The CEO of Bondage Corp, a large blonde latex-clad American, flies in the corporate jet to supervise the company’s revenge. Lots of madcap car chases and cartoon violence, as an army of leather-wearing ninja women attempt to storm the father-in-law’s house in the forest while the protagonist holds them off with a box of hand-grenades that he has found.

There are some additional surreal touches. We see a group of people discussing what the film is about between scenes. We see the film-maker watching his movie in a private screening. The characters keep wondering whether they've just felt a minor tremor that might signal an earthquake, though it never materialises. It’s silly, not very erotic, and a not particularly profound exploration of the psychological dimensions of S&M fantasies. Probably better than ‘Fifty Shades’, though.

Review of 'Suite Francaise'

If I hadn't read the book I would have thought that this was a great film about the Occupation of France that focused on everyday life rather than the heroes of the Resistance. But I have, so it was a bit of a disappointment. It was too much of an adventure story, and not enough about the dynamics of the relationship between conquered and conquerors. The silly poster makes it look like it's "Love in the Occupation", and it mainly isn't. In fact, the posters at our local cinema seemed to only have the bottom section of the one on the right.

Naturally it's simplified, with many of the story threads and characters from the book left out altogether; I think it left out some of the best bits in pursuit of more drama and action.

On the positive side, Kirsten Scott Thomas is brilliant - she could probably read the phone book and it would still be captivating. And the early scenes of the refugees from Paris does a good job of evoking the chaos.

Review of 'Good Vibrations'

Watched this on the telly (well, BBC Iplayer via Chromecast actually - included this in case it becomes useful in a future social history of technology; I can't remember the last time that I watched a film on telly as it was actually broadcast). I was a bit disappointed, the more so since at least one friend with good judgement recommended it.

It seems to me that it's basically a 'kids are all right' sort of film, with a background of paramilitaries for a bit of gravitas. There's some great washed-out and gritty footage of this, but it doesn't add up to anything except the atmosphere. Like 'Northern Soul', but with guns instead of drugs - though of course in real life it was guns and drugs.

Terri is running a record shop in Belfast, and ends up running a label that discovers the Undertones among others. Although it's suggested that he was political before the start of The Troubles (and even that he had left-wing mates in both 'communities') he seems to have no politics at all now, apart from the 'music transcends all boundaries' and 'why can't we just be friends' sort of politics. Bombs go off, nasty sectarian graffiti appears (and is papered over by Terri's army of non-sectarian punks) but there's no meaning or context to it. The only British soldier who appears in the film is a Black squaddie who stops Terri's roadshow one night in the rain, but turns out to be sympathetic to his project and basically decent and respectful. That's just how it was, right?

Review of 'Maleficent'

I really couldn't see the point of this. I'm all in favour of retellings of traditional fairy tales, and I've really liked some of those (not to mention my own One Shoe Tale, of course). But this is dire. You can tell it's going to bad from the very start, because the Disney castle that appears in the opening credits become the castle in which the not-very-nice king lives. Yes, he lives in the pink Disney castle. Later on it inexplicably becomes rather gloomier, but the overall sugar-coated-ness of the story never goes away.

It's supposed to be the backstory of how the bad fairy got to be bad, but she mainly isn't. She's wicked for about ten minutes, before her heart melts and she tries to undo the evil that she has unthinkingly created. Similarly Aurora, the girl who become Sleeping Beauty actually only sleeps for ten minutes, before Maleficent wakes her with a loving kiss - not the Prince, though there is nothing event slightly homoerotic about the girl-on-girl kiss, it's a mother's love even though Maleficent isn't actually Aurora's mother. And Aurora does end up marrying the Prince who failed to wake her with a kiss, because it's not that radical a retelling, despite the big dragon-fight sequence in the castle which I don't remember from the original fairy tale.

It might have been saved by the look of the film, the sets and the special effects, but it wasn't - not creepy enough to be interesting. I can't imagine who this is aimed at - it's not really suitable for little ones, and not interesting enough in for older viewers. I had hoped that Angelina Jolie's costume as featured on the poster might be a hint about some dark erotic content (they are porno horns, aren't they?) but it isn't.

A vanity project, I'd say.

The Floating Finger of Blame; My super idea for an Internet of Things start-up

An add-on to project management software for large organisations. A software agent identifies whose fault it is that a project is off-track or behind schedule. The agent then controls a giant floating hand with a pointing finger to hover over the person responsible. A premium version ensures that the hand will track the relevant person as they move round the building. Options to include audio stream 'It's all his/her fault'. Also customisable for organisational culture, so as to identify either the most senior person who can be blamed or the most junior.

Review of 'Not Another Happy Ending'

A lightweight film about books, writers, publishers, occasionally amusing but not really quite good enough. A brief hint of the misery of rejection letters (the young author has them pinned up on a 'wall of pain', and some stuff about not being able to get down to writing, but mainly it's just unexpected celebrity, awards ceremonies and signings. There are a few bits of tension and character dynamics - the unspoken attraction between the author and her publisher, the shitty screenwriter boyfriend who moves in with her, the absent dad who is the main focus of her first book and turns up at a reading...but mainly it's all just fun, hallucinatory conversations with an imaginary friend, and impossibly good hair.

Review of 'The Imitation Game'

Two weeks since I saw this, and still no review - probably because there's so little to say. It focuses on Alan Turing as played by Cumberbatch, thereby making him out to be a near-autistic geek. I understand that the real Turing was charming and sociable, but films like to represent people who are good at science and maths as awkward as a sort of consolation prize for the rest of us. You know, they understand maths but we can talk to people normally, so yah boo.

Most of the story, including the possibility of Soviet spies, was already told by Enigma, which I think was a better film.

A few things to note, though. MI6 are the goodies, and their desire to intercept and read everyone's communications completely justified by the lives saved - I don't think the real MI6 was nearly as interested and involved in this. And the decrypt, and Colossus, are presented entirely as the result of the genius of Turing and his very small team - though actually Bletchley was an industrial-scale code-breaking installation, and Colossus was built by lots of people, and not just a bunch of posh boys.

Review of 'Inherent Vice'

I really love Pynchon’s books, but I haven’t read the one that this film is based on (yet). If I had the film might have been a disappointment, though the reviews are mainly so bad that my expectations had already been managed sharply downwards.

In fact it turned out to be pretty good – I didn't find the voice-over narrative at all annoying, as some critics have suggested it would be – it was an opportunity to enjoy some Pynchon-esque language, though that is also well represented in the dialogue.

It’s a bit of an art director’s film, in that it looks great – you can almost smell the grease on the hippie characters’ hair and the dirt on their feet. The textures are all there too, and the film is suffused with sex even though not much of it actually happens on the screen.

There were times when I literally lost the plot, as I've done in the novels too. I think that’s partly because it sits somewhere between a detective story and a parody of one, so that the plot is deliberately over-complex with lots of telegraphed twists and turns – and I'm not sure it actually makes sense as a whole. I must read the book.

Great soundtrack, somewhat spoiled by the fact that the North Finchley Vue Cinema insisted on playing it through a speaker slightly smaller than the one on my phone, and stuck in the bottom left hand corner of the screen. And while we’re on the subject of the venue, why whack the air-conditioning up to max on what must have been one of the coldest nights of the year? Just saying.