I don't need to talk you through all the rest of the plot twists, but there are plenty, and it's a lot to do with the relationship between the brothers, and with their now-dead father.
I watched this with Covid, and I liked it much more than I expected to.
Thanks to BBC iPlayer.
It's not long but it took me quite a while to read, because I wanted to savour each passage.
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It's a form of dramatised acrobatics really, with a morality play overlay - the villains, the surprises, the comebacks. Everybody involved knows it's not real fighting, especially the audience, but they relish the opportunity to participate in the fiction that it is.
The film was quite enjoyable, but wasn't quite able to make up its mind as to whether there really is any drama in who "wins" the bouts - to be a sport film the hero has to have an against-the-odds triumph, but since the film makes it abundantly clear that professional wrestling is a choreographed acrobatic drama, not a contest, we can't really have that. But then we get it anyway, which feels wrong.
I note in passing that none of the actors playing the wrestlers have tattoos, which seems improbable.
I note in passing that the film is 25 years old, and that the main way this manifests itself is the phones - one or two characters have cellphones, but there's a lot of payphone usage, and plot elements turn on messages left on answer machines. Will this be incomprehensible to a future generation?
Watched on Netflix, a rare decent film there.
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Watched on Netflix.
Watched via informal distribution.
It was a nice enough read, and not at all emotionally taxing while just interesting enough to keep me engaged.
I note in passing that the author describes the mayors of small towns in the Rhone valley as wearing tricolour sashes - did they do that during the period of the Bourbon restoration, when the events described are supposed to be taking place?
Cop buddy movie, with Sandra Bullock as the semi-elite but annoying FBI agent who wants to pull rank and play by the rules, and Melissa McCarthy as the slightly gross and rough-edged junior detective who breaks all the rules but knows how to get things done. Formulaic but good fun, with some good jokes - a nice one about Boston accents.
It's very well done - I think it's the debut for the writer-director and the main actor.
It rather reminded me of Fish Tank, with similar themes and locations, but also of Aftersun (similarly about a father-daughter relationship) though it's not as dark as either.
Watched via informal distribution.
Assad was clearly a bad guy, leading a nasty one-party militarised regime with torture chambers and mass disappearances. But at least some of the opposition seemed to be bad-guy Islamists, and then Assad seemed to be fighting against ISIS, which turned Islamism into a death cult. And the Russians were helping their client, Assad's regime against ISIS, and the West (well, Britain and America) seemed to want to help him too - given the track record of western interventions in Middle Eastern revolutions being against that, as were the Stop the War Campaign seemed like a good idea, and I stood on a street corner with some lefties holding "Don't Bomb Syria" signs.
Well, after reading the book I am much better informed, though I'm not sure how much wiser I am. I understand better that some of the people I thought of as Islamists were not so bad, and that some of them had a commitment to religious pluralism and civil society...lots of Syria's revolutionaries talk about "freedom", but few seem to articulate a vision about what they are fighting for.
But others in the anti-Assad camp really were pretty nasty. The Al Nusra front, which is the local Al Qaeda franchise, sometimes seems to get an unnecessarily easy ride in the book. The information about how awful it is, is reported honestly in the book, but it doesn't seem to reach a compelling narrative. The book is not nearly as warm towards the various Kurdish factions and parties, and the Rojava project, as the only other book I'd read on the subject. Actually that was a bit of a relief, because the supporters of the PYD and the YPG that I'd met on demonstrations in London had more than a whiff of a cult about them.
Elsewhere I missed some bits of narrative. The Syrian Communist Party, that ought to have been engaged in a struggle against the regime, was hopelessly co-opted by it, because Syria and the regime were Soviet clients. Even the fall of the Soviet Union doesn't seem to have disturbed this. And a small part of the book's critique of Assad (both Assads, actually) is that they weren't as anti-Zionist as they made out. There is a part of me that thinks there is another story here, about the role of anti-Zionism as an "escape valve" and as an acceptable form of anti-imperialism across the entire Arab world, that no-one really wants to think about.
So I still don't really feel like I understand the Syrian conflict properly. I am aware that here, more than anywhere else, there are powerful forces at work seeking to ensure that I don't understand it. People who I have always trusted, like Noam Chomsky, and Seymour Hersch, and John Pilger, seem to have defended or whitewashed the Assad regime out of some bizarre "campist" motive. Places that I would normally go for information aren't at all reliable.
I'm really lucky to have met Rami, a young Syrian activist refugee living in Stroud; I feel like I can trust his narrative and his experiences, not least because he's so open about where it has turned out that he was wrong about something. Reading the book I had some idea as to what he's been through, and it was worth it for that.
Reading the Wikipedia article about the siege I feel not much wiser, even though I am now better informed. This is part of what it feels like to be living in a post-truth age, where there are no reliable sources of information about anything, and engaging with any aspect of international politics feels like an enormous effort. The article says that both sides used chemical weapons - do I find this plausible? I don't think so, but there is enough doubt in my mind to not know for sure. I know that the Assad regime is monstrous, but I am not at all sure that what the opposition became turned out to be very different.
Films that focus on the experience on the ground, without any of the background or political context, become an exercise in emotional manipulation. I was put in mind of the film about the Kyiv uprising, Winter on Fire. Watching that I thought I was being played, and that's my ultimate conclusion about this too.
This is a biopic of Maurice Flitcroft, a working-class man from Barrow-in-Furness who decides to take up golf. It's a middle-class sport, and he's not at all good at it, but he pushes himself forward to compete in the British Open.
It's got all the usual "plucky underdog" themes going on, and the very British celebration of people who keep going even though they aren't very good. Think Eddie the Eagle, or even Cool Runnings, even though that's about Jamaicans.
The film is from 2021 but it looks like it was made in the 1970s, gloomy and with bleached out colours. There's some stuff about class in it - none of it very profound; sometimes the film seems to be laughing at Flitcroft and his working-class manners, not with him.
There is a spot in the last 30 minutes that is slightly better, with a bit of focus on family dynamics and whether Flitcroft's obsession with pursuing your dream no matter what is really good advice (his twin sons aim to become disco dancing champions, but the international competitions in which they take part falter and fade). But this moment doesn't last long, and soon slides into more sentimentality and triumph-over-adversity stuff.
What was Mark Rylance thinking?
This was on BBC iPlayer but I couldn't find it, so we watched it via informal distribution. That may have further detracted, because the sound was really low.
Some of the misery comes from the bits of the novel that don't work so well - some of the "funny" bits, like Benjamin's sex scene in the wardrobe with teen crush Jennifer, are both implausible and not very funny. At other times the attempts at "balance", such as Sophie's persecution by the forces of Political Correctness, don't feel all that convincing.
But mainly it's the good parts that make it so awful to read. It's like reliving the Brexit nightmare all over again, the awful debates, the vicious effectiveness of the Leave campaign vs the hapless, rambling, arrogant and patronising Remain campaign. And yeah, a lot of Remain supporters had no idea that it was even going to be close (let alone that they were going to lose) because they lived in a bubble. And this books lets us see outside our bubble, and into the minds and values of the other side. And still, eight years on, that's not pretty.
And yes, as Coe and his characters say, Brexit really did fuck the country over, and it might not recover in my lifetime, and that's not an enjoyable thought either.
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Watched on Netflix.
But it was enjoyable, even though I think it's one of Towles's books that has been resurrected after the more successful and better later ones.
Interesting that it's told in first person narrator, though that narrator is a young working class woman of Russian Orthodox extraction. Glad that he ignored the "write from experience" advice, because it seems to me like he made a good job of it.
Watched on BBC iPlayer.
It's really well told, not long on horrible graphic details, and more focused on the way in which everyone in a small town can choose not to see what is happening around them. And it's the small details, picked out with a sharp eye by Claire Keegan, that bring this to life.
I know it's not at all the same, but it made me think about the people who turned a blind eye to the Holocaust as it unfolded around them.
She doesn't really explain why the first person narrator is called Piranesi - it's a name one of the other characters gives to him - but it actually does quite a lot of descriptive work, suggesting the vast, mysterious and gloomy spaces of that artist's work.
It's still a bit flabby at the beginning - it felt like it took too long to get going, but by about a third of the way in she absolutely had me.
Odd personal connection is that a lot of it involves people at Manchester University in the early 1980s, where I was studying. If the people in the novel had been real I probably would have known them.
It put me in mind of my dad, who was evacuated to Biggleswade during the Second World War, and seems to have had a wonderful time. He remembered that the family to which he had been allocated bought him a bicycle for his birthday, and he never shared any memories of any such memories of his own family. Of course Dad never kept up with them after the war, though I think he may once have made a trip to Biggleswade.
I sort of assumed that it would be a very dated book, with old fashioned sexism and racism - but it's mainly not. There are some black and other foreign characters - Maltese gangsters, some Indians - but they aren't depicted as stereotypes. The main characters are all borderline proletarians - seamen, policemen, criminals, prostitutes and pimps.
It's set in the 1950s, and it's a very vivid evocation of a London that was just passing when I was a child - bombsites, street entertainers, sleazy pubs and strip joints.
Although the characters aren't educated or particularly articulate they are represented as having real and complex emotional lives, and though it's not really plot-driven the narrative is well structured - and it's only a little book, some 200 pages.
I note in passing that the characters are depicted as using working-class London speech, but some of the words don't feel right to me. Did English men call their girlfriends "chicks" in the 1950s?
Anyway, I liked it, and I think I'll read some more of MacInnes.
Twelve years later they find each other via Facebook, and re-develop the friendship as remote strangers. And twelve years after that he comes to visit, by which time she is married to a Jewish guy (like her, a writer)...and their meeting is poignant, about the lives that they might have had but didn't.
For me it was emotional...I'm always affected by stories in which the arc of a life becomes visible...but not sad. It's not as if they could now get together, or even as if they would have had better lives if only...but the road not taken is still a visceral, live presence.
Watched via informal distribution and a USB stick in the back of the TV.
And some slightly unusual sex tropes in this one; the two young men both fancy the same woman, but really (or as well) they fancy each other - lots of hints about homoerotic attraction, which never become quite explicit.
Anyway, I enjoyed this - despite some odd choices of music to accompany the narrative.
Watched via informal distribution and the USB slot at the back of the TV; unusually this is probably the first time a download has ever turned out to be a cam, so that at one point a head briefly travelled across the bottom of the screen. Worse, it was intercut with a lot of adverts for an online gambling service, which was really annoying. Still, you get what you pay for, and what you don't.
Based on a book, so perhaps better than some, and quite watchable.
Watched on Netflix.
Perhaps the seeds of this movement had been germinating out of sight for a while, but the first shoots became apparent with the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic. It began with “Stand in the park” protests against the lockdown restrictions, and soon there was a movement - or at least a series of Telegram channels and social media presences - with various names, including the Freedom Movement, the Sovereign Citizens Movement, the White Rose (named after the German resistance to the Nazis).
And there was The Light, a free newspaper full of anti-vaccination misinformation, anxiety-inducing material about radio waves and surveillance by the state and big tech, and a ragbag of other conspiracy theories.
It’s hard to overstate how horrible The Light is. It contains sympathetic articles by and about figures from the traditional far right, like Anne Marie Waters of “For Britain” and “Pegida UK” - who in turn uses the paper as a platform to praise Tommy Robinson of the English Defence League. Another regular contributor is Niall McCrae, a former lecturer involved in far right organisation Hearts of Oak, with Tommy Robinson. McCrae has co-authored with Robin Tilbrook, the founder of the far right “English Democrats” party, originally known as the English National Party. There are articles in defence of Holocaust denial and supporting the genocidal antisemite Graham Hart.
There’s homophobia and transphobia, and misinformation about sex education in schools. There are attacks on feminism, women’s equality, contraception and abortion rights, and the claim that there is a “war on masculinity”.
And there is a relentless promotion of climate change denial and obfuscation, alongside attacks on environmentalists and especially on any restrictions on car use.
The themes in the paper are picked up by an emerging street movement. There are rallies with speakers whose websites feature antisemitic material drawn from “The Protocols of The Elders of Zion” and conspiracy-laden accounts of the toothless United Nations sustainability initiative Agenda 2030. In towns across the UK, and now in Ireland, there are weekly stalls distributing the paper as well as other books and pamphlets. There is a strong presence in several towns in the South West, and the paper has been spotted in London and in towns in the North.
Groups of protestors converged on Oxford to protest against traffic calming schemes and “Fifteen Minute Cities”, another well-intentioned town planning idea about localisation of services that is characterised as a plan to create urban ghettos in which citizens will be confined. A mob of ‘conspiraloons’ stormed a meeting of Glastonbury Town Council and then crowed that it had forced the administration - the equivalent of a parish council, with few powers - to abandon its non-existent plans for a fifteen-minute city.
What is this?
For some, this phenomenon is both unprecedented and confusing. Sure, the movement’s messages seem to come from the right, but its cultural style doesn’t. The people who hand out The Light look like hippies. The material often has an anti-corporate or Trump-style “workerist” slant to it, with lashings of libertarianism. In our little town of Stroud, where the movement has gained a foothold among wellness practitioners and some members of the Steiner community, the most prominent supporters are ex-socialists and environmental activists. Some continue to wear Jeremy Corbyn t-shirts and loudly profess themselves to be socialists. The Light’s editor (a flat-earther) began his involvement in politics as an anti-fracking campaigner.
So a new description and analysis is proposed to explain what’s going on. Unsurprisingly some commentators revive the vapid “horseshoe theory”. Others have coined the term “diagonalism” to characterise the leftists who turn right, and this seems to have struck a chord in Germany (as Querdenker), where the pandemic and anti-vaxx activism created a steady pipeline from the Greens and Die Linke to the AfD.
Naomi Klein, in her recent perceptive book Doppelganger, prefers to talk about the “mirror world”, in which rightwing politicians pick up on areas of anxiety that the left has either ignored or lost its interest - technological surveillance, the failings of the medical-industrial complex, the capture of international organisations by mega-corporations, the hypocrisy of the liberal elite and its techno-fixes for profound systemic failures…
I’m not so sure that what we’re looking at is so unprecedented. When “classic” fascism first arrived, in Italy in the early 1920s, some people on the left were confused. Fascism was against traditional conservatives and institutions, against laissez faire and free market economics. It presented itself as a “third way”, modernising, beyond traditional conservatism and socialism, and it was in favour of a great deal of state direction of the economy and society - unlike traditional conservatives.
Mussolini’s movement in Italy recruited syndicalists and anarchists as well as nationalists. Mosley’s British Union of Fascists was preceded by his “New Party” which attracted former members of the left-wing Independent Labour Party, and a few stayed the course with the later incarnation as fully fledged fascists. Despite his enthusiasm for the British Empire and colonial wars, Mosley was a campaigner for “peace” in the later 1930s, opposing any kind of confrontation with Europe’s Nazi and fascist regimes. Our new rightists are keen to advocate for peace with Putin.
In Germany there were so-called “Beefsteak Nazis”, allegedly brown on the outside but red on the inside. Fabians like George Bernard Shaw admired Mussolini’s hostility to Italy’s liberal institutions. Mainstream social democrats like Henri de Man in Belgium openly embraced fascism.
It’s a defining feature of the far right that it presents itself as against the system. Whereas the mainstream right says that the system is under threat and needs to be defended, the far right says that the system has already been conquered by those it defines as enemies, and it needs to be taken back so that the natural order of things can be restored. So they might be revolutionaries, but they want a revolution that will reimpose hierarchy and inequality.
This can get very weird. In the US the QAnon movement and its wider circle of alt-right militant Trump supporters, which talked a lot about the elites and the ‘deep state’, hoped for a military coup to restore the constitution and Trump to the presidency. It is quite alarming to see Free Alex Jones Tee-shirts on the High Street in Stroud.
So the far right will sometimes be hostile to the same things that the left opposes - but this doesn’t really mean that we share common ground. They are hostile to the banking system, but this hostility is grounded in a racialised understanding of financial institutions (“controlled by Jews”). They are hostile to the international organisations intended to ameliorate the worst aspects of capitalist chaos - not because they are too weak to do the job, but because they believe that these institutions are too strong and so impinge on the rights of nation-states and the free market. They are critical of the healthcare system, not because it's inadequate to meet the needs of the population but because it’s too powerful - and they don’t much like welfare or redistribution of any kind.
To be absolutely clear, I’m not saying that they are really classic fascists, and that all that’s needed is a Scooby-Doo type unmasking.
The Light is part of a new kind of far right. It doesn’t look like old-style conservatives or fascists. It’s prepared for the internet age, but unlike recent conspiracism with rarely moved offline, has adherents prepared to spend several days a week handing out a paper in the cold, organising face to face meetings and rallies. Their ideas and rhetoric are much more like the US “libertarian” far right, opposed to state intervention and welfare, and in support of “freedom” for those with money and privileges. And although The Light and its supporters are not themselves fascists, the paper has a problematically cosy relationship with some actual fascists.
It picks up supporters in strange places and funnels them towards far right politics. Many of them don’t realise that they are being funnelled, and don’t have the political background to see what is happening. It builds on seemingly innocuous campaigns such as ‘keep cash’, which offer gateways to conspiracy theories which only become evident when one looks further into the promoters, such as the campaign run by Debbbie Hicks in the Hayes and Harlington local elections.
It’s possible that some of the most committed supporters don’t even realise this - hence the protestations that they are not far right, the Jeremy Corbyn T-shirts, the claims to be a left splinter group, and so on. It doesn’t matter what they think about this, what matters is what they do - and from that it’s clear that The Light is a phenomenon and a project of the far right. Its positions on LGBTQ people, refugees and migrants, and feminism (all attacked as ‘woke’ at best and part of a conspiracy to divide at worst), free speech for racists and antisemites, and climate change denial, should be enough to demonstrate this.
It’s important not to be taken in by rhetoric that says we are “all on the same side”. However nice the people handing out the paper are, whatever they used to be, they are, wittingly or unwittingly, part of a project that’s aimed at building a far right movement.
The purpose of classic fascism was to defend capitalism against the labour and socialist movements - to smash workers’ organisations. It’s not entirely clear yet, but it looks to me like the primary purpose of this new far right is to defeat environmentalist organisations and protect a system based on the production and consumption of fossil fuels.
Though Hope Not Hate have published a piece (written by our Stroud-based campaigning group) and referred to The Light and some other aspects of this phenomenon, and the 12 Rules for What podcast has also explored this issues in audio form and in their book, it’s disappointing that the main anti-fascist organisations don’t seem to be taking much notice.
It’s easy to dismiss this new movement as just a bunch of cranks who will turn out to be mostly harmless. I think that’s wrong. Sure, they don’t look like the Nazis in 1933 - but they do look a lot like the way the Nazis looked in 1923, a mostly fringe group in funny outfits who believed in all sorts of occultist nonsense and were only picking up limited numbers of recruits and votes. We should be taking notice, and preparing to confront their ideas and their presence.
This article appeared in Jewish Socialist (Issue 79, Spring 2024)
This is a really well-written book about fraud and confidence trickery in the world of art. The main character and first-person narrator is a philosophy lecturer transitioning to art historian - his wife is an actual art historian, and the dynamic involved in that is less explored than it might have been. There's lots of brilliantly well observed stuff about city people with "places in the country" and how they are received by the rural people, and about dodgy money and family inheritances. There's some great historical context about the period of Breughel's life, and about the context in which he was painting, and about how fragmentary knowledge about art and works can be.
But I can't entirely say I enjoyed it, because of the all-pervading sense of dread that hangs over it. The first-person narrator is increasingly stupid as he gets deeper into the opportunity that he thinks has opened up before him, and it feels a bit like watching a slow-motion car crash - the reader can't help but know this is going to end badly, and there enough clues sprinkled through the text that it will too. So it's a bit miserable, because the narrator - unlike most of the other characters - is quite sympathetic.
I'm not usually a big fan of sports films. They are usually variations on the "determination will win through in the end" theme, and this one was sort of like that, but it did have some interesting twists - particularly the title character's wish for his girls to have more than one focus - education as well as tennis. It didn't soft-pedal the relationship difficulties in the household. It didn't make much of the racism that they faced - most of that is in reported speech, whereas we actually see Richard beaten up by young black criminal men.
Anyway, I enjoyed it more than I expected to, even though it was long - two and a half hours.
Watched on Netflix.
But it sort of grew on me. The setting - a weird neo-pagan cult in London, with a grifter "priest" and gullible toff congregation - was interesting, and the place descriptions were evocative. And though the few working-class characters are dreary stereotypes, the toffs are not at all sympathetic - they are stupid, duplicitous, drug addicts and drug pushers. It's sort of interesting to see the slightly impoverished lives that even moderately well-off people lived in London at that time, despite the presence of either personal or shared "service flat" servants.
Anyway, I ended up enjoying it more than I'd expected.
Among the things that is great about it is the honesty, and the willingness to face the truth - that those protests achieved very little of what the organisers intended, and that the fallout from them often achieved the very opposite. For example, in Brazil the mass protests against transport fare increases, organised by libertarian socialists and anarchists, ended up creating an opportunity for the far right through which Bolsanaro marched to victory.
The last two chapters are analytical, in which Bevins attempts some synthesis and reflection of all that went wrong. This is mostly great, except that there's not enough of it. He's rightly critical of "leaderless" and "horizontal" forms of organisation, and comes across as a reluctant convert to Leninism - though those aren't the only options, are they?
He's also very good on the limits of "protest" as a strategy for opposition movements, and how muddle-headed it is to expect serious change to come from protest.
I hope he writes another book soon, with more learnings, and maybe a bit less grinding detail about who turned up where.
This time round I noticed that although Joey "Lips" Fagan is one of the main characters, you can barely hear his trumpet on any of the performances. Just saying...
I was a bit disappointed. It's a bit formulaic, which is not great. But I just couldn't believe in a plot that was based on the North Koreans activating a sleeper cell in the UK intended to embarrass the UK government by reviving one of its old plans to destabilise a third world country. There are lots of plausible terrorist groups that might attack the UK, but I don't think that the North Koreans are included. So I was carried along by the narrative but unconvinced by the basic premise.
Not sure if I will read any of the others; Le Carre is better.
Watched on BBC iPlayer.
I couldn't help but get angry when I read it, about the process whereby the aristocracy and their late additions (like the thug Hoogstraten) have seized the whole country for themselves, and locked us out, and how it doesn't have to be that way and isn't in other countries quite nearby - nearby geographically but also economically.
My enjoyment was further limited by the terrible physical production of the book, which literally fell to pieces as I read it. Did they save on glue or something like that?
The film was made before the events of October 2023 and the long Israeli retaliation that followed, and that somehow makes it all the more powerful. I was really taken with the way some of the American Jews talked about their journeys, and the not unsympathetic depiction of just how central identification with Israel is in Jewish communities.
I was particularly pleased (if that's the right word) that the film didn't soft-pedal the existence of real, fascist-inspired Jew-hatred in America. For many Jewish and other antagonists of Israel, the question of antisemitism begins and ends with the false accusations aimed at themselves, so there is little recognition that conspiracy theories about Jews are still very very important to the far right. That's definitely not the case here, though there is some consideration to the way in focusing on criticism of Israel has led American Jewish organisations to take their eye off the real threat from real antisemites.
I was also very moved by Sami Awad's spot in the film, where he talked about his visit to Auschwitz and his understanding that Jewish trauma and fear underlies support for Israel's racism. I've rarely heard Palestinians talk about the Holocaust, except in terms of "why should we have to pay for it?".
Watched in the Middle Floor at Springhill, via informal distribution.
The film makes a good job of depicting racist white Americans, who are sometimes engaged with the Osage to various degrees; the chief villain, brilliantly played by Robert De Niro, speaks their language and seems to have some genuine personal relationships alongside deeply racist attitudes about how the Osage must die out and yield their mineral rights to whites. There's a newsreel depiction of the Tulsa race riots of 1921, which will be new to many Americans and others, and there's an affable chapter of the KKK taking part in what looks like the 4th of July parade in the town of Fairfax, where the story is mainly set.
The pace and tone of the film changes throughout, but especially in the final third, with the arrival of FBI agents in the town. The acting, especially by Leonardo DiCaprio, is really good.
We watched this in the Middle Floor at Springhill having obtained it via informal distribution.
Really lots of characters, all of who get turns at being either a first-person or close-third narrator (and it really matters which, as becomes clear), and that's clever too.
I was actually sad that the end had come, even though it's not a short book.
We see their four sessions together, and the development of their relationships with each other and with themselves. It feels a bit like a stage play transferred to the cinema (mainly just the two characters, almost all of it in the same hotel room setting) but is none the worse for that.
Watched on Netflix, natively on our new TV, so no Chromecast.
