Review of Nightmare Alley

Tense, atmospheric and stylish film in depression-era America, with sleazy circus folk, geeks (the original kind, a horrible circus act in which a man is kept in a cage and bites the heads off live chickens), mind-reading acts and fake spiritualists. Very dark, both in substance and appearance, but some great acting, fab cast, and painterly shots by director Guillermo de Torro. Amazing interiors too!

Watched via informal distribution.

Review of 'The Making of the British Landscape' by Nicholas Crane

A bit of a disappointment. Lots of things that I would have expected to be in there weren't...no mention of the Forestry Commission, for example, or the creation of the New Forest, or the Charter of the Forests, or game laws. Something of an over-concentration on towns once they get going, and on the built forms therein, rather at the expense of the landscape itself - even though he acknowledges that towns even today don't make up the greater part of the landscape in this country. 

And within the towns no examination of come all the good bits came to be owned by a few aristocrats, nor how they managed to keep them - and why they so much want to. Nothing about the various attempts at a different politics of land - the Chartists land projects, the Henry George socialists, ideas about land tax. Not even the National Trust rates a mention.

Not much examination even of the idea that there is a 'British' landscape - even from the book it's clear that England, Wales and Scotland have very different landscapes, and that these were shaped by different geological, economic and cultural forces. That's just his default unit of examination, but it's not one that he reflects on very much.

Still, I did learn lots of things, particularly about the draining of the Fens and the end of Whittelsey Mere. I felt sad reading about the demise of the big wild animals in Britain, and I went to look up the various attempts to 'de-extinct' the aurochs. They've all failed - extinction really is forever.

Review of The Goldfinch

Really good, complex, film, with lots of good characters, plot and acting. I've not read the book, and I understand that even at nearly three hours long the film leaves a lot of complexity out, but it's still very good. Split narrative going backwards and forwards between time-periods, with different actors playing the younger and older versions of some of the characters - though not Nicole Kidman, who manages to play both versions of her character.

I won't try to summarize the plot, but it's well worth watching. I understand it was a box office flop, which says more about audiences than about the film.

Watched on Netfix.

Review of CODA

Surprisingly good film about a young teen woman who is the only hearing member of a family in which everyone else is profoundly deaf, and she has a talent for singing. Normally I hate films in which American kids pursue their dream of becoming a...dancer, singer, whatever...but this one really touched me. Maybe it was the genuine deaf cast, or naunced way that it dealt with the issues around sacrificing your own dreams for the sake of your family's needs. I found out afterwards that it's a remake of a French film, The Bellier Family, and I quite want to watch that too.

Watched via informal distribution.

Review of 'Rebellion'

More thoughtful documentary than I was expecting, and more nuanced. Shows some of the failures and inadequacies of the movement as well as the glorious successes, and the internal tensions. In particular, it shows up just how toxic and destructive Roger Hallam is/was - how unprepared for participation in anything like a democratic organisation. The movement's ad hoc nature was part of its strength at the beginning, but the same thing was what prevented it from succeeding - just like all the other unstructured movements that we've seen in the last ten year, from Occupy to the Arab Spring. No structure means never having to take decisions about tactics or strategy, so that everything and nothing gets done. The Canning Town tube train issue wasn't an irredeemable failure in itself, but it seems like no-one learnt anything from the episode. It doesn't feel to me like XR has the faintest idea what to do now, when its "demands" have apparently all been met, and nothing has been done that will actually reduce emissions.

Watched on actual Netflix.

Review of 'Behind the Scenes at the Museum' by Kate Atkinson

A friend really like Kate Atkinson, though I earlier gave up on her detective novels. But I persevered with this, and in the end it was worth it. It's a coming of age story set in and around the city of York, across the 19th and 20th centuries, with various plot devices to draw together characters across settings and generations. 

At first I didn't like the tone, which felt a bit sneery, but either it softened or I got used to it, and I engaged with the characters and the convoluted plots. 

Review of 'The New Wilderness' by Diane Cook

This book is most important for what it made me think about rather than the writing or the plotting. It's set in a near-term dystopian future where the environmental crisis has become noticeable worse, but is still not catastrophic. Life in cities goes on, but it's more horrible. Life outside the cities is mainly lived in areas of industrialised agriculture or extractive industries,  but an area is fenced over and preserved as 'wilderness'. The book centres on a small group of people who are allowed to live in this wilderness area, provided that the give up all technology and live as nomadic hunter-gathers. The terms of their existence are policed by rangers, who can order them about and fine them for non-compliance.

The book describes how hard this life is, and sometimes how beautiful too - but it's mainly hard, with existence on the margin of starvation, and the fear of death from illness, accident or predators. The principle character is a girl, Agnes, who grows up within the narrative but barely remembers life back in The City, and her mother, who moved to the Wilderness without wanting to, because her daughter was so sick from the bad air in The City. There's a lot of mother-daughter stuff, and some contrived plot elements to create tension. There's really good description of small-p politics within a small group, including a transition from consensus to authoritarian decision-making.

It rather reminded me of an idea that I think originated with James Lovelock...that it would be necessary to preserve one third of the Earth as wilderness without people, and that the rest should be...as described in the book, given over to either cities or industrialised agriculture. This describes what it would feel like to live in such a world, particularly under conditions of environmental crisis (though climate change barely gets a mention, it's in the background all the time), economic scarcity and political failure. It also made me think about how it is for people who live in areas designated as 'wilderness reserves' by conservation agencies; in this book the people are managed rather like one more species of animal in the reserve.

Well worth a read.

Review of Lucy and Desi

Pleasant enough biopic of Lucille Ball and her husband Desi Arnaz. I remember 'I Love Lucy' from when I was a kid, though not with any particular feeling. I hadn't realised how big their business had been.

Watched on Amazon Prime (not my subscription).

Review of "Tel Aviv on Fire"

A Palestinian-Israeli comedy about the occupation. Salam is a production assistant on the popular Palestinian soap "Tel Aviv on Fire", which features a Palestinian woman spy disguised as an Israeli, seeking to become romantically involved with the general so that she can obtain the secret plans for the Six Day War. Oh, and she's played by a visiting French actor. Salam is ostensibly there because he speaks good Hebrew and can advise her and others on the dialogue, but really he's there because his uncle is somehow senior in the production team.

But Salam keeps getting hauled in at the checkpoint between Ramallah where he works and Jerusalem where he lives, and the Israeli officer in charge wants to know about the show, because his wife watches it. In fact everyone watches it - Israelis, the staff and patients at the hospital where Salam's would-be girlfriend works...Salam lies that he is the writer, and then the officer (who is a bit of a thuggish buffoon, but also a bit comic rather than really nasty) wants to change the script. Then somehow Salam becomes the writer, and...

Well, you get the idea. It's a comedy about soaps, and TV production, but also about the occupation, and the unequal relations between Israelis and Palestinians. And it's both quite funny and quite poignant, and worth watching.

One from Netflix.

Review of 'Unquenchable Fire' by Rachel Pollack

Oh God, what a book! I had never heard of Rachel Pollack, and I didn't get this on recommendation or anything like that. I picked it up from one of those book swap tables, this time at Highgate Underground station. I was stuck for something to read and I got this. 

And the first few pages seemed really annoying, because I felt like I would have to engage with the details of the made-up religion...who all the Gods and Goddesses were, and so on. But I read on, and I realised that wasn't really the point. It's about the social and organisational dimensions of the religion, and the theology barely matters at all. 

And it's great - one of the best science fiction books I've read for a while. It depicts a future America - actually a future New York State, with much of the action taking place in Poughkeepsie and the rest in NYC - in which there has been a revolution, but a theocratic one, that has overthrown the Old World. Now the religion is in the process of being institutionalised, but doesn't fit very well into the structures being created - it's a polytheistic, decentralised sort of belief system, with magic, and multiple kinds of spiritual beings, and without a very strong good and evil thing going on. 

It's also more than a little mad, at least by our thinking; the stories of Christianity or Judaism seem models of rationality by comparison. It's a bit like the ancient Egyptian myths, with gods eating each other and going into the Land of The Dead, but even that sounds more rational than the mythological world depicted here.

It reminded me a bit of The Handmaiden's Tale, in that there are odd juxtapositions of theocracy and 'normal' American life - alongside the institutions of spiritual policing there are still multinational corporations, bars and restaurants and supermarkets, and processed food. But reading about Rachel Pollack, I see that she is described as an "expert on divinatory tarot [and]...a great influence on the women's spirituality movement". And then I can't help wondering whether this is not, after all, a dystopian satire, but actually something else. And I feel weird for liking it so much, but I still think it's a great book.

Review of 'The Duke'

Meh. Can't understand why everyone loves this so much. Predictable and a bit plodding, full of cliches and national treasure actors being national treasures. Was surprised to hear that it was a true story, but that was more surprising than anything in the film. I think they must all have had fun making it, especially the art director.

Informal distribution, this one.

Review of "Confronting Antisemitism on the Left: Arguments for Socialists" by Daniel Randall

The first thing to say that is I really, really liked this book. I thought there wasn't much that I could learn about this subject, but I think Daniel Randall brings a sensitivity and a clarity to it that make the book really worth reading. I plan to give it to friends in the small town where I live, in the hope that they will understand something of what I would want to tell them if only we both had the time. You can open it any page and find a few sentences that deserve to go on a t-shirt. He's particularly good on the complexities and contradictions of British Jews' relationship to Israel and to Zionism...the extent to which their loyalties are far from unswerving, and are connected to a 'gag reflex' that comes from a genuinely felt sense of precariousness in and alienation from an increasingly nationalist Britain. 

He's sophisticated in the distinctions he makes between different kinds of antisemitism on the Left - the 'primitive antisemitism' of wealthy Jewish banker stereotypes and 9/11 conspiracy theorists...the sort of thing that has permeated the left from aspects of the neo-anarchist tradition best represented by the Occupy movement, vs the "anti-imperialism of fools" variant that is a descendant of Stalinist perspectives on international struggles, with nations and states and movements all sorted neatly in goodies and baddies, so that if someone is against the United States then they must ultimately be on the side of the angels. He points out how these two threads came together in the Corbyn moment in the Labour Party. I think he rather tends to play down the extent to which some of the accusations about antisemitism were made in bad faith, as part of a factional struggle by people who didn't care much about Jews but wanted to get at the Left. That goes for Corbyn's enemies within the Labour Party and for some elements of the 'leadership' within the Jewish community. 

Where I think the book disappoints is in its account of Zionism. Sure, Zionism functions as a "nationalism of the oppressed" for some diaspora Jews, and did even more so at times when Jews were a persecuted and endangered minority. And yes, Zionism is now bound up with the personal identity of many diaspora Jews who half-imagine themselves as a sort of expatriate Israeli, so that they think of  Israeli culture as their culture. But still, I don't think it's right to treat Zionism as just the Jewish flavour of Eastern European nationalism, so that we hold the left to account for not treating it in the way that we treat other nationalisms.

Zionism was always a weird kind of nationalism. Other nationalisms were engaged with the folk culture of the nation that they claimed to represent - the songs, the dances, the language. But Zionism, very unusually, was utterly uninterested in the language/s that its constituencies actually spoke, or the songs that they sang, or their literatures. Instead it favoured a language and a culture that it made up - modern Ivrit is a creole of liturgical Hebrew, and the Zionist folk songs that I grew up with have tunes that are lifted from other cultures - Russian and Rumanian, for example. There is no sentimentality about the beautiful mountains and forests of the homeland, because the territory on which the Zionists sought to create their nation was not one with which they had anything except a historical and religious connection. And quite unusually, there's quite a lot of contempt for the actual members of the constituency, who are believed to have weak, submissive, ghetto-dweller characteristics. Again, this is not absolutely unique among nationalisms; I'd say that some of the currents in Black nationalism among African-Americans are sometimes like that. 

In fact, as Randall notes elsewhere, Zionism has/had lots in common with Garveyism. The latter rightly attracted a lot of hostility from African-American socialists and communists, and it's possible to imagine another world in which hostility to Zionism as reactionary and utopian might have stayed like that, rather than shifting into the full "anti-imperialism of fools" that it did.

Perhaps in that world the Zionist settlements in Palestine might have ended up like the German Templar colonies (also in Palestine), a quirky blind alley of history with a few thousand (or perhaps tens of thousand) inhabitants, funny little communities in an independent, post-colonial multi-confessional Palestine. 

None of this really distracts from the value of the book, which is about antisemitism rather than about the politics of Israel and Palestine. I'm going to recommend it to all of my friends, especially my friends who are engaged in active or passive solidarity with the Palestinians, and see what they make of it.

Review of "Queer; a graphic history" by Meg-John Barker and Jules Scheele

I didn't get much out of this. I was hoping to become a bit better informed than I am. I went through most of life not having to think about this area very much. I have some gay and lesbian friends, and, and I want to say that I am on their side, but other than that I've managed without having to take positions on questions of sex, and gender, and intersexuality and non-binary...it's not a luxury I can afford any longer. These questions are dividing my friends, and I think I can't be agnostic about them any more.

But this book wasn't much help. I think I must accept that I don't find graphics a great way to organise a book, and this felt very superficial...not much more than some name-checks of intellectuals who have contributed to thinking in this area, but even though I really haven't explored it very much, I don't know much more now I've read the book.

Review of 'The Phantom Tollbooth" by Norton Juster

I read this book as a child of about ten...pretty sure that I just came across it in the children's library. I loved it then, and I'm pleased to say that, having renewed my aquaintance 53 years later, I still enjoyed. It's full of wordplay, and a nice child-level introduction to magical realism, and some good moral messages about how to live. I also enjoyed the pictures by Jules Feiffer, who often did cartoons in the New Yorker...oddly they'd not made so much impression on me the first time round. Now I need a ten-year-old to give it to!

I read the Wikipedia article about Norton Juster, and was surprised to discover he'd remained a working architect all his life...and that there's an animated film of the book, which I will seek out. Juster died around a year ago, otherwise I would have tried to write to him.

Review of Parallel Mothers

Almodovar's films just keep getting better. This one is part personal drama, part political exploration about contemporary Spain. It's hard to talk about the personal bit without spoiling it...except to say that Penelope Cruz is one of the two mothers in the plot, and though she is still beautiful as ever, she presents a lot of emotional range as an actor in this too. So does Milena Smith (not seen her before) as the other, younger mother...and nice to see Rossy de Palma (she of the amazing nose) back in business.

The political part is about exhumations of anonymous mass graves from the Civil War - Cruz's character wants an excavation of a village unmarked grave where her great -grandfather is reputedly buried, and the male lead is the forensic anthropologist who carries this out. Along the way there's discussion of Spain's unexamined past and the fault lines that still run through its society.

Watched via VLC, Chromecast, and informal distribution.

Review of 'Pig'

That rare thing, a really good film with Nicholas Cage in the lead role. This is beautifully simple in narrative structure, but full of depth and emotion. It's about a truffle hunter whose pig is stolen, and his journey into his past life in the city (Portland, Oregon) to get it back. It feels like it's a Greek tragedy, including a remarkable, terrifying journey into a literal underworld beneath one of the city's squares in a hidden sub-basement of a demolished hotel. Lots of stuff about food and foodies, and an almost perfect example of the three-act structure. Slow but clever, and definitely worth watching.

Informal distribution, VLC and Chromecast.

Review of Winter on Fire

Watched this last night. I learned very little about Ukranian recent history...hard not to feel that I was being played to some extent. There's nothing about the divisions in Ukraine between East and West, or about the murky history of the Orange Revolution, or the background to it...just lots of footage of ghastly brutality by the riot police. 

Watched it thinking about how pitiful the XR matras about nonviolence seem...according to the Hallam/Chenoweh formula, this was a "non-violent" struggle (less than 1000 people died), but it really really wasn't, and it was only the protestors' use of physical force that kept them in place and allowed the uprising to succeed. And none of them begged to be arrested so as to clog up Ukraine's justice and prison system.

Watched on Netflix.

Review of 'Light Perpetual' by Francis Spufford

There's a bit of a fantasy-style conceit right at the beginning of this book - all the characters are children killed in a V2 rocket strike on south London, and the book tells the stories how their lives would have turned out if they'd lived. The first chapter dwells on the rocket strike, the physics and chemistry, and some Achilles-and-the-tortoise style paradoxes about time. After that it's a much more conventional set of interconnected stories, checking in with the same characters over the years from 1949 to 2009. Since they are all working class children, it's a sort of history-survey of what happened to working class people over this period. Some rise out of their class, some try to rise with it, some rise and then fall. One is typesetter in Fleet Street; another becomes a shyster property developer. Tragedies befall them, but in the sort of random way that they do in real life, not as a carefully contrived story arc.

It's beautifully written, and it's hard not to care about the characters, even the nastier ones. Lots about the music business, because one of the characters is an almost-successful singer in LA before she goes back to south London and becomes a music teacher.

Really enjoyable and profound at the same time, and I will read more by him.

Review of "How to Blow Up a Pipeline" by Andreas Malm

Short essay with footnotes and links about the tactics and strategy of the climate movement, with the emphasis on a critique of the commitment to non-violence. Like everything that's clever it's better on diagnosis and analysis than it is on prescriptions. He's very good on all the things that has been wrong with XR, including the fetishisation of the rather dodgy analysis of Erica Chenoweh and Mariah Stephan (both of whom have links to the US intelligence establishment), the wrong lessons it has learned from the history of direct action movements, and so on. He's much less good on what is to be done, though he does talk interestingly about the distinction between violence against property and violence against persons, about coordinated vandalism against SUVs, and climate camps. 

It's not surprising, and this stuff is just hard. Getting off fossil fuels is more like dealing with an eating disorder than kicking a heroin habit. We can't live without energy, and fossil fuels are a fabulous convenient source of concentrated energy, which underwrite our social and technical system. There's no way out of them without changing all that, and there are very powerful forces standing against.

Not the end of a discussion, but a good start. Everyone interested in politics outside and against the system should read.

Review of "Patrick Leigh Fermor; An Adventure" by Artermis Cooper

I finished this book with a feeling profound disquiet and unhappiness. I had read PLF's two major travel books, "A Time of Gifts" and "Between the Woods and the Water", and I'd loved them, even though I could sense that he was a posh boy with a sense of entitlement who strode across Europe with a string of aristocratic connections and the hospitality that this provided for succour. The privations he endured were real, but must have been softened by the knowledge that he would always be a posh boy with posh friends to bail him out. 

And reading the biography, without the beauty of his writing or the charm of experiencing his personality directly, that becomes much much more apparent. So I'm not attracted to him as a character at all, even though Cooper clearly loves him and thinks he's wonderful. His politics are reactionary. He's not a racist, though he doesn't seem to have a really big problem with people that are. He is a charmer, and a chancer, and a serial shagger - not sure if it can be called serial adultery when he's not married to the woman that he sort of shares his life with. There are a lot of pretty young women.

There's a lot of scrounging too. For most of his life he lives off the generosity of posh friends - they give him houses to live in, in London, in Greece, in Paris. He gets commissions to write travel books and film scripts without any particular qualification, and he is published in little literary magazines by his editor friends. He does have obvious talent as a writer, but there are a lot of other people who have just as much or more talent who will never have this kind of leg-up. Or not need to support themselves.

I suppose it's a sign of Artemis Cooper's talent that I can read her book and come to different conclusions from her. But I also feel kind of dirty, and a bit stupid, that despite myself I was charmed in this way, and it retrospectively detracts from my enjoyment of his books.  

Review of Encanto

Nice and thoughtful Disney film, set in Colombia, with some interesting sibling rivalry themes (like Frozen) but also a character who is ADHD/Aspergers, and therefore absent and not talked about. There's some magic and light supernatural stuff, referred to in the film as a "miracle" - perhaps so as to not upset the American viewing public, which is increasingly hostile to anything that could possibly be construed as anti-Christian. 

Some of the moderate peril (collapsing buildings, jumps over ravines) felt quite tense to me, though a grandparent I spoke to said that they only place that their little ones had actually been scared was an in-song depiction of the three-headed dog that Hercules kills. 

Oh, and beautiful depictions of plant and animal life...personally I liked the donkeys best, though the rats ran them a close second. And better music than I can remember for a long time in a Disney film, I kept wanting to get up and dance.

A real pleasure to watch, and I was really pleased to hear that the Colombian side of my family had all watched it together and loved it too.

Watched in the middle floor at Springhill on a legitimate Disney Channel subscription!

Review of 'The Alchemical Marriage of Alastair Crompton' by Robert Sheckley

I haven't read Robert Sheckley since I was in my 20s, but I had fond memories of 'Mindswap'. I saw this in a charity shop, bought it and put it on the shelf - probably ten years ago. I just read it...and it got off to an amazing start, with lots of interesting psychological insights. I was particularly struck by this quote, which reminded me of my recent experience with Internal Family Systems therapy:

"How many identities do you have?" Crompton asked.

"Inumerable," Secuille said.

"I find all of this difficult to believe," Crompton said.

"That is only because you haven't consciously experienced for yourself the influences which your selves, past and present, have on the identity you happen to be at the moment. Crompton, every sentient creature lives simultaneously in various timebound sequences, and tries to better things for himself by influencing one or more of his selves. The voices that you hear in your head, telling you what to do and what not to do, these are the voices of your other selves at other times and places, casting their votes, trying to improve conditions for themselves."

There are lots of funny and clever bits later, and then suddenly it seems as if Sheckley got bored with it, because the end is pretty rubbish. It would have been better just to have stopped it twenty pages earlier. 

Review of 'Good Behaviour' by Molly Keane

Beautifully written book about awful gentry in the Anglo-Irish ascendancy, I think in the inter-war period. Put me in mind of the Mitfords, but also the awful aristocracy depicted in the recent BBC series about the Duke and Duchess of Argyll...partly because the people in this book, like the Argylls, are utterly disinclined to pay any bills that they owe. Nice to be reminded that being landed, and perhaps even rich, does not make you happy - it's possible to perfectly miserable despite a privileged background. 

Review of 'Never, Rarely, Sometimes, Always'

Grim, gritty film about a young woman from small-town Pennsylvania who is pregnant, can't tell her parents or get an abortion in the small town, and goes to New York with her young cousin to get that abortion. Starkly filmed, lots of hand-held cameras and unpleasant surfaces, with no detail about the process of getting or experiencing an abortion left out. Not fun to watch, but good, should be widely seen, especially by young men.

Review of "The Year of Living Danishly" by Helen Russell

I thought this would be fluffier than it was, but actually there's quite a lot of serious stuff in there about how Denmark functions as a society, and about what might be behind its status as "the world's happiest country". Lots of it is about equality - it's a high-tax society with a high level of state provision in terms of welfare, education and healthcare. Some of it might be about perceived ethnic homogeneity too - it's easy to support levelling when you feel that the beneficiaries are "people like me", though of course the political culture of the place helps to define where those boundaries are.

It's nice that it's not completely soppy about everything Danish. Denmark seems to tolerate a high level of interpersonal violence, and drunkenness. Women have it better there than in other OECD countries, but it's far from perfect. There's lots in the book about hetero swingers, but I have no idea what it's like to be LGBT in Denmark. 

Still, this is a nice book, worth the time spent reading it.

Review of 'Dune'

Sort of had to watch this, though I wasn't a huge fan of the books...not sure I even finished the second one, though I quite liked the first one.  Overall impression was that it was a sort of "thinking person's Star Wars", with similarly wooden acting and stilted dialogue, great sets and locations, and lots of big action and battle scenes. I'd have happily watched a twenty-minute "art director's cut" (why oh why doesn't anyone do these?) because it looked great - I loved the details on the machines, including the analog interiors of the ornithoper things they fly around in. Nearly three hours felt much, much too long. 

I note in passing that it's obvious how the 'fremen' are based on beduin, but is House Harkonnen based on Finns? The word looks Finnish, doesn't it? And they do seem to live in gloom and not talk much. 

I also note how ten thousand years into the future there seems to have been very little social evolution. Fighting men, women like nuns but with magical powers, the universe ruled by an empire and noble houses...can't anyone imagine a future with different social arrangements? 

Well, Iain Banks could (The Culture series) but I see that the planned TV adaptation of that by Amazon has been cancelled. Can't think why...

Watched in the Middle Floor at Springhill via the USB-enabled DVD player, the film having been obtained (thankfully) by informal distribution.

Review of 'No Time to Die'

Not sure why people continue to watch James Bond films. Despite the constant bangs and crashes on the screen, and the constant level of tension and excitement that this is intended to create, I nearly dozed off a few times. The plot is more or less incomprehensible, the characters flat and uninteresting...though I almost make an except for Daniel Craig, who somehow manages to put a bit of emotional depth into the Bond character.

I suspect anti-vaxxers would rather enjoy the film...the evil super-villain, who is actually called "Lyutsifer Safin", has a secret super-factory where he is making a DNA specific bioweapon to kill off huge numbers of the world's population, and he makes an evil speech about his motivation that basically says people want to be controlled...and the bioweapon originated in a UK project run by Bond's boss M (who unaccountably sets it in a glass skyscraper in central London rather than say Porton Down)

They might not like so much that the baddies appear to be Russian (accents, the language that the evil genius base guards speak to each other, and the fact that the base has obviously Soviet-era murals on the walls, including a hammer-and-sickle logo), though they are not The Russians, not the Russian government of Putin, who after all pours money and resources into medical disinformation in the west. We know this because at one point near the end M is having to allay the concerns of the Russian goverment, who wonder why the British navy is launching a powerful nuclear missile strike on an island that the Russians claim is their territory.

The implication of the location is that this is the Kuril Islands.  Not the Spratly Islands, though that reminded me that there are absolutely no Chinese villains or mention of China in the whole narrative...it's like it doesn't exist. There is a section set in Cuba, which looks rather nice.

Watched in the Middle Floor at Springhill, via Amazon Prime.

Review of 'The Lost Daughter'

Surprisingly creepy film about a middle-aged academic woman (played by Olivia Coleman) having a holiday by the beach on a Greek island. It's hard to write much about it without spoiling it, even though aren't really plot twists as such...more a constant feeling of unease, and some weird behaviour by Coleman's character. Watching this made me realise how much difference the acting makes to this sort of film...the ambiguity and ambivalence is absolutely crucial to the effect. The woman playing the younger version of her (lots of flashbacks) who I didn't know is great too. A long film but worth the effort, though it is an effort.

Watched on Netflix.

Review of 'My Normal'

Better-than-the-reviews suggested film about BDSM. Smart New York young lesbian works at a BDSM parlour while hoping to break into the film business, hangs out with her workmates, goes to lesbian clubs, has a loveable drug dealer friend. This differs from most other BDSM films in that she's not at all unhappy about her work; she and her workmates are obviously having fun and getting a kick out of the pain and humiliation that they heap on their male clients, all in the name of customer service. 

There are a few scenes, though nothing at all heavy. The plot comes from her finding a 'normal' lesbian girlfriend who isn't at all happy about the work, and for a while we see it through her eyes...but then they break up, and that isn't so dramatic, and then the thread about her making it into film-making takes over. A low-end film boss tries to persuade her to give him sex in return for a career break, she ties him up and threatens him instead, and he finds that he likes it, so she gets her break.

Watched via informal distribution.

Review of 'Bewilderment' by Richard Powers

Another remarkable book by Richard Powers, centred on the relationship between an astrobiologist dad and his autistic/aspergers son after the death of the mum. Lots of clever, thoughtful stuff about SETI, brain training, American politics, and environmental catastrophe. I loved The Overstory, but this feels better, partly because there are fewer characters and a bit less plot, so I didn't have to keep checking back to work out what was going on. It's set in a fictional version of the Trump presidency, but one in which The Donald succeeds in having the election result nullified and goes on to win a second term in a re-run election...so dreadful though the events depicted are, at least that didn't happen.

Review of 'My Mistress'

A coming of age BDSM movie, in which Australian teenager Charlie is dealing with the death-by-suicide of his much-loved dad (Charlie is the one that finds him hanging in the garage, but seems to get little counselling or support) and finds that a beautiful young French woman in his neighborhood makes her living as a dominatrix. Charlie is smitten and insinuates himself into her life, and then into a sort of half-sexual relationship. Of course she's dealing with her own stuff too, like trying to get back the child that's been taken into care because of her addiction and neglect.

It's very slow, and not at all erotic, but sometimes poignant and touching, and like any serious reflection on the subject, addresses the ironies of the BDSM service relationship.

Watched via informal distribution.

Review of Rocketman

Sometimes surreal and hagiographic biopic of Elton John, which actually provides a lot of information that I didn't know -  well, I'm not a huge fan, though the film did remind how good some of the songs are. I didn't know he had a long term lyrics partner...almost the only person he doesn't seem to have fallen out with. If we are to believe the film he was an absolute musical genius from an early age, but I don't know if we are to believe it or not. 

Sort of unusual in that there's almost nothing of the years of struggle to make it, which all look really easy...only the going off the rails with drink and drugs after he's made it. 

Watched on All4

Review of Mystere

Nice-ish French film about a bereaved little girl and father living in mid-France who adopts a wolf cub, that grows up to be a full grown wolf but still loves her like a pet. It's described as 'based on a true story', but parts of it seem quite implausible. Beautiful scenery, some nice music. Partly it's about rewilding, but it doesn't really cover the issues - the farmers don't like it and want to shoot the wolves, the remote government thinks it's a good idea...

Watched on Netflix.

Review of 'Lotharingia; a personal history of France, Germany, and the countries in between' by Simon Winder

Another enjoyable popular history book from Simon Winder, again with lots that I didn't know, despite having covered some of the periods in History 'A' Level. I'd never heard of the Cautionary Towns, for example, and neither had a well-informed Dutch friend that I asked about it.

Once again I think he gets less good as he approaches the modern period, and I think his account of the Nazi period and the campaigns through this area in 1940 and in 1944-5 are a bit idiosyncratic. 

But these are quibbles, and it's not as if he offers a full-blown revisionist history of WW2 or anything like that. It's really worth reading, and like I said, enjoyable. Again it makes me want to visit the places and look at the works of art he describes.

Review of 'Wild Nights with Emily'

Biopic with jumbled timeline about poet Emily Dickenson...some good knockabout comedy lesbian and straight sex scenes (no actual sex, just a lot of fooling with crinolines), and nicely filmed, but a bit boring if you don't really care about Dickenson or the mid-C19th American literary scene. Few actual wild nights.

Watched on All4.

Review of 'Minari'

Somewhat shapeless and occasionally boring film about Korean immigrants trying to make a life as farmers (and chicken sexers) in rural Arkansas.

It mainly avoids the usual cliches about immigrant life, but doesn't have much to put it their place. It just sort of meanders on, until the moment of redemption when the family comes together at the end.

Recommended by someone as one of the best films of the year, can't see why. Watched via informal distribution, laptop, VLC and Chromecast.

Review of "Don't Look Up"

Everyone is reviewing this and taking positions on it - does it help the climate change movement or not?

Well, it's clever and funny, though often too painful to watch. The Trumpesque White House, the Bezos-like billionaire with his insane plan to mine the comet for resources (and escape ship for when this fails), the trivial talk shows where the scientists try to reach the public...it's all much too true to be enjoyable. It also satirizes pop-star climate activists...Ariana Grande is really great in that role, and perhaps the movement as a whole. And scientists who find it hard to communicate, and liberal media who will speak truth to power if it works for their click-throughs...

I didn't need a happy ending, but I didn't find anything to take from it except despair. I wasn't comforted by the stoical and even religious way that the main characters end up facing the impending destruction of the planet. I'm also a bit miffed that whenever Hollywod tries to dramatize climate change, it has to dramatize it...making the disaster into a sudden catastrophic event where we all go together when we go, rather that a boiling-the-frog process that will eventually kill everyone, but will kill poor and brown people first. It's much harder to represent the latter, and the fact that Hollywood doesn't try makes it harder to get that across.

Watched on Netflix.

Review of 'The Spy Who Dumped Me'

Much more fun that I was expecting! Some of the reviews complain that the film tries to cross too many genres...spy movie, thriller, romcom, buddy movie...but actually it makes a good job of this. The action scenes are better than the ones in James Bond films, the plot is a bit shaky but no worse than other spy/terrorist-baddies films. I was reminded of 'Salting the Battlefield', only this is way better and makes more sense. And unlike other Americans-go-to-Europe films, it has chosen some good locations and filmed them well. I especially liked the opening scenes in a junk market in Lithuania, and it really made me want to go there.

Watched on All4.

Review of 'Carousel'

Rogers and Hammerstein's second musical together, and I don't remember any of the songs from this, except 'June is Bustin Out All Over' and 'You'll Never Walk Alone' - the latter is sung twice, near the end and then right at the end. It's a 'dead person allowed to come back to Earth for one day' sort of story, with most of the time spent on the backstory of the dead man - note that the frame for this is a sort of heaven, but without any religious trappings...the deceased spend their time polishing stars, and the whole place is presided over by a bureaucrat called The Starkeeper.

There are some tremendous dance numbers with better dancing than I remember from lots of Hollywood musicals. I looked up the background on Wikipedia, and it turns out that it's lifted from a Hungarian original set in Budapest, which is interesting in itself. It's set in Maine - perhaps if I was American I'd recognise the accents, which seemed a bit odd.

Rather spoiled by the last five minutes of the final return-to-Earth sequence, in which the male lead lashes out in anger at his now 15-year-old daughter. Later she tells her mother (the dead man's sweetheart and wife) that she felt the hit but that it didn't hurt, and the mother says dreamily that if someone who you love hits you it doesn't hurt. From early we know that he beat his wife - whenever anyone accuses him of beating her he belittles it and says 'hit', with the implication that it only happened once. If that isn't a justification and romanticisation of male violence and abuse against women, then I don't know what it is.

Chatting afterwards I realised how many carousel scenes there are in films!

Watched on BBC iPlayer.

Review of 'The Unforgiveable'

Really good emotional film about children separated from their birth sibling by adoption, and coming out of prison, and also being working class in America. Sandra Bullock is really good as a woman who comes out of prison and tries to reunite with her baby sister, to whom she has written for years but never received any reply. Lots about trauma, that rings true from my reading about this subject at the moment.

Resisting spoilers, but it's a long but good film.

Set in a grim looking Seattle - I think I remember some of the grimmer places from my work trip there, when I spent a lot of time walking around, and realised that it's a very small place. Didn't notice then that the street signs were in English and Chinese - perhaps they weren't then.

Watched on Netflix.

Review of 'Desperately Seeking Susan'

The 1980s film where Rosanna Arquette plays a bored suburban housewife (yes, that's what she calls herself, and how the blurb describes her) who follows the rendezvous of wild-at-heart urban coolster Madonna and her punk musician boyfriend Jim, who stay in touch with each other via personal ads in the New York Mirror.

The film seems to be from a world not unlike our own, but sits on the other side of the pre-internet chasm. There is no internet, no mobile phones (just great big chunky corded ones, and payphones, and answering machines)...and personal columns in local newspapers, in which people place ads in person, by filling in paper forms and handing over cash.

I note in passing that Rosanna Arquette won the award for 'best supporting actress' for this, even though she is the central character...it's her story, and she's on screen much more than Madonna, who barely acts. But hey ho, Hollywood. Just remember that if you are tempted to take any interest in the awards. I note also that Rosanna Arquette doesn't really act very well, and that she was never in much else.

Watched on BBC iPlayer via Chromecast and smartphone app.

Review of 'Trance'

Creepy and quite violent thriller, but well plotted and filmed - well, Danny Boyle, it's going to be good, isn't it? Hypnosis, false and unreliable memories, and so on. Set in London, but few recognisable establishing shots...I think I caught a glimpse of a familiar building once. Lots and lots of interiors with very shiny surfaces and moody lighting, and shots through narrow gaps. 

Watched on All4, which recommended this to us...I think the first time it's done that.

Review of 'Black Orpheus'

I set out to watch this mainly because it's the source of 'Manha Da Carnival', which I sometimes play on the trumpet. The song barely features at all in the film - the Orpheus character sings it once to a couple of small boys who think that his playing makes the sun rise. 

That said, it's a mainly interesting film with a lot about the life of a favela in Rio, and a carnival crew. It includes some reflections on the role of carnival in working-class Brazilian life (as a sort of bread-and-circuses distraction), and on the modernity and otherwise of Brazil...lots of the scenes where modern buildings are presented or used as backdrops are sinister, especially the hospital and morgue to which Orpheus goes to try to rescue Eurydice. 

There's also a powerful depiction of a candomble ceremony.

Watched via informal distribution, laptop and VGA cable - the Chromecast didn't want to play this one and its audio track and subtitles at the same time.

Review of 'The French Dispatch'

Some of Wes Anderson's films are great, and some aren't. This is one of the latter. It's beautiful, and that makes its failure as a film all the more depressing. It's like some beautifully wrapped present with nothing inside the box. It's a collection of stories, tied together through the theme of a fictionalised American magazine and its writers in an imaginary French town. And none of the stories have enough of a plot, or enough engagement with the characters, despite the beautiful cinematography and the good but stylized acting. I'm sure there are lots of clever allusions and homages to the greats of French cinema, but I didn't get them and it wasn't enough for me.

Watched via informal distribution, laptop and Chromecast - VLC quite happy to play this one.

Review of 'Germania' by Simon Winder

Well, I liked this almost as much as Danubia, but not quite. It's beautifully written, and good on some parts of the history, but as it gets closer to the close - which he takes as 1933 - I think it becomes less good. In particular I think he's bad on the shortcomings of Weimar and the defeat of the German revolution at the end of WW1 - having read Sebastian Haffner's "Failure of a revolution: Germany 1918-1919", I can't see the treachery of the Social Democrat leaders the way Winder does. There was a chance, in 1918-19, that the other Germany could run things now, in a way that was utterly diffeent from what the conservatives and the military had done before. And Ebert et al blew it, even with the popular support that they had. 

And once I'd noticed that, I started to notice other things that I didn't like quite so much...it's good the way he emphasises how much of the familiar had just collapsed for so many Germans in the Weimar period, but I think he downplays the continuity with pre-war Germany of the politics of the right (were the Nazis such a break with traditional German politics and culture?) and over-emphasises how much the Nazis stole from the left, so that it's almost as if they were a rogue variant of socialism rather than a traditionalist, business-backed variant of extreme conservatism.

So still lots in there to like, particular about art and architecture, and music and literature, but some things to not like so much.

Review of 'Bad Times at the El Royale'

On the surface a much more conventional crime/mystery/thriller movie, but actually really interesting and multi-layered. I can't stop thinking about this...I'm reading reviews and analysis of the symbolism and other elements in the film. Five strangers check in to a motel on the California-Nevada border in the late 1960s, and we get their backstories as well as a complex plot in which they all become differently entangled.

Lots of references to 1960s cults, politics and fabulous music...BTW, I noticed that in The Rest of Us the daughter is reading 'Helter Skelter', and in this film there's a Manson-like cult. Must just be a coincidence, or a reflection of how deep that runs in the American psyche.

Lots of violence, but it's never comic-book or enjoyable. Hard to say more without spoilers, so really just get this one and watch it.

We watched in on All4 but it's gone from that now, I think

Review of 'The Power of The Dog'

Really powerful, beautiful film - nice to know that there are still some really good ones being made. Atmospheric, menacing without any actual violence, fabulous acting and great cinematography without any gimmicks. Lots about suppressed and not-so-suppressed male homosexuality and toxic masculinity. Now I can't wait to read the book, though I will have to because I have so many other books stacked up waiting to be read.

Just wondering - it's set in 1925 Montana, so Prohibition is in force, but it doesn't actually seem to be. They are serving spirits in the hotel, cocktails at a party with the Governor, and Kirsten Dunst's character is drinking herself to death without a bootlegger in sight. Is that what Prohibition was actually like outside the big cities?

Best film watched on Netflix for years.

Review of 'The Rest of Us'

Quite good Canadian film about...well, it's not that easy to summarize. Successful divorced children's book author discovers that her ex has died suddenly, and then the women for whom he left her is suddenly broke because the now-dead husband was concealing his dire financial situation...and the bitter, broke widow and her sweet young daughter end up moving in with the author and her grumpy disaffected teen daughter.

It's well acted and nicely done, and though you couldn't call it enjoyable in a feel-good sort of way it's compelling enough to watch. Heather Graham has graduated nicely from so-nubile sexpot to still-attractive but fading divorced wife.

Watched on Netflix.

Review of Kick-Ass

Superficially enjoyable, with nods in the direction of liberal sensibilities, but actually a more or less fascist film. Nerdy comic book fan Dave decides that he will live out his fantasy of being a superhero and fighting crime, but despite the suit he's still a nerd so he gets stomped and hospitalised after he tries to take on a pair of thugs. Then he's rescued by a father-and-daughter crime-fighting superhero combo who are much, much better at violence than he is - their whole lives are dedicated to training for violence and the acquisition of weaponry.

There's plot, and teen stuff (his nerdy mates convince the gorgeous girl at school that he's gay, and she wants him for a Gay Best Friend even though she wouldn't look at him before), and lots and lots of violence - real splatter stuff, made slightly easier because it's supposed to be comic-book. But really it's almost snuff-grade, and there are no problems that can't be resolved with the application of sufficient force, violence and weaponry. The film's sympathies are entirely with the use of more and bigger guns, and the more skillful use of them. Our (anti)hero's moment of redemption, when he finally steps into his own power and authority, comes when he uses a really big machine-gun enabled jet-pack.

Oh, and the villains are all caricature Italian-Americans in a way that would be grossly unacceptable if they were say Jews or Chinese.

Watched this on BBC iPlayer.

Review of Human Traffic

There's a lot that's annoying about the film...the sound quality is poor, so that I kept turning the volume up but there's music track playing over a lot of the dialogue. There are annoying 'arty' techniques of characters speaking to the fourth wall and so on, and spoof documentary inserts. 

But it's also sort of likeable. It's a bit like Trainspotting, only with MDMA rather than Heroin at the centre. So the culture and the drug itself is more benevolent - the scene is mainly quite nice with lots of hugging of strangers, and good-looking young people dancing ecstatically (well, obviously). The five young people at the centre of the film are a bit messed up, but mainly in the way that young people are - one is jealous when his girlfriend interacts with other men, one is anxious about his sexual performance, and so on.  

For the most part it doesn't imply that they are messed up because of the drugs, and there's a nice insert from an actual stand-up comedian saying that he used drugs, he enjoyed it, and it didn't mess up his life or his career. But the young peope are all existing rather than thriving, in dead-end jobs or no jobs at all, and not on any ladders - career, property, whatever. There's a strong suggestion, amplified in the long shots over drab Cardiff at the end, that taking drugs and raving is a perfectly sensible response to the grim dullness of everyday life...and the young people seem to mainly understand that it relates to period in their life, and that it's not something that they will do forever.

The most miserable scenes in the film are in the post-party weed smoking session, where everyone is tired, ratty and paranoid. 

Obtained via informal distribution, watched via a USB stick stuck in the back of the smart TV.