Review of 'Spring, Summer. Autumn, Winter...and Spring Again'.

An odd Korean film, which felt like it was heavy with symbolism and allegory that passed me by. A monk lives in a temple which is on a beautiful island in a beautiful lake. The temple is a traditional wooden building, and for some reason it reminded me of the dacha at the end of the 'Solaris', which is also on an island, but in the boiling sea of the sentient planet.

The monk is bringing up a small boy who lives with him, also wearing monk's garb. The boy roams freely but then performs various cruelties on local wildlife - he ties a stone to a fish, a frog and a bird. The monk shows him how it feels by tying a very heavy stone to the boy, who then remorsefully sets out to free the animals but finds some of them have died. In the next season a woman brings a sick girl to recuperate on the island; the boy, now grown in to a young man, has sex with the girl in various nooks on the island. He and the girl sleep in a boat on the lake, and the monk removes the bung from the boat so that it fills with water.

The young man leaves but returns as a not-so-young man on the run from the police for killing his wife; the monk takes him and hides him from the police who come looking for him. The now old monk dies, the younger man takes his place, and in the final scene a young woman brings a baby for him to look after. There is a lot of footage of scenery with a Buddhist hymn (with lyrics that don't hold up well in translation) sung by a female choir in the background.

The film is very slow, beautiful to look at but not very engaging as cinema. Not sure that this was time well spent.

Review of 'Expo 58'

I've really loved some of Jonathan Coe's books (The Rotters' Club, House of Sleep) and not liked some others (Dwarves of Death). This one sits somewhere in the middle, to my surprise. It takes a long time to get started, and I found the mundane details of the main character's life dull - well, they are supposed to be, but couldn't we have established that rather more quickly? It's more interesting when he gets to Belgium, and by the end I was emotionally engaged with him, his wife, his situation. 

By the end I was sorry it was over - the impact of finishing with a present-day epilogue in which many of the main characters are dead is poignant. On the other hand, I didn't like the MI5 characters' double act - it reminded me too much of Ealing comedies, and felt like it was played for laughs according to a formula.

I note that 1958 was the year of my own birth, so the main characters are contemporaries of my parents. I don't know whether Coe is over-doing it, but London in 1958 seems really depressing, as if the war and rationing have only just finished.

Review: Carnal Machines

A very mixed collection - well, that's how it is with anthologies, isn't it? At least one reviewer has speculated that all the stories are written by one (male) author. I don't think so - they're different enough, and variable enough in quality.

Some of them really worked for me, and others made me want to skip quickly on to the next. Quite a few stories in which men are raped by machines. I liked best those that took the steampunk technology for granted rather than made it the focus of the technology, and those that managed to do a workable pastiche of Victorian style.

A number of the stories feature female oriental villains which rather reminded me of Christopher Lee as Fu Manchu, even though the characters are mainly women. Is that OK in a retro context?

General thought is that I still haven't found much steampunk fiction where the writing lives up to the visual aesthetic - the cover is rather better than the stories!

Review: The Hundred Foot Journey

Limp, lame, implausible, though at least pleasant to look at. A family of Indians open a restaurant in a small French village which already has a Michelin-starred restaurant, owned and run by Helen Mirren. After a hesitation of perhaps 20 seconds by the locals the restaurant is soon filled with happy French customers who have all embraced Indian food; it takes another minute for Mirren's sour hater to reveal that she has a heart of gold and wants no underhand tricks against the Indians (her chef had just tried to burn them out, in the worst misunderstanding of managerial directions since Thomas A'Beckett).

The Indian's golden-boy son becomes a fabulous celebrated French cook but nevertheless leaves celebrity in Paris to work in Mirren's provincial restaurant. There's almost no racism, no commercial competition, no family rows that last longer than a nano-second, and absolutely no tension.  It did make me quite hungry watching it, though.

Review of “Alice's Adventures in Steamland: The Clockwork Goddess”

A disappointment - some nice ideas, good descriptions of the steampunk technology, and some good jokes, but ultimately not very well written, with too much unjustified graphic violence and poorly described sex. I like sex, violence and violent sex as much as the next person, but this didn't work for me. Actually the Alice in Wonderland motifs made it worse - it felt like they'd been crowbarred in to keep a running joke going, and it would have been better without them. Somewhere in here there's a better book trying and failing to get out.

Review of 'The Radetzky March' by Joseph Roth

It took me a while to get into this book, but I ended up loving it and feeling sorry that it had ended. It's a detailed, evocative portrayal of the end of the Hapsburg empire, and captures well the feeling of inevitability and sentimentality that characterised that ending, at least for some members of the Austrian elite. It's all there - the clash of nationalisms, the ossification of the monarchy in the person of Franz Joseph, the rise of the workers' movement, the stultifying formality and prison of manners. It focuses on the relationship between three generations of men - their mothers and spouses are barely present - and how they are each diminished by their relations with each other. Both father and son are in the shadow of the grandfather, who had accidentally been a hero at the battle of Solferino; the father loves his son but correctness and a sense of what is honourable and dignified prevents either of them having a proper relationship with each other. The grandson has a military career which brings him no sense of self-worth but finds it impossible to leave the army.

At first I found the detail crushing and a bit dull, but it become a way of making the characters real, so that the final unfolding with the outbreak of war feels like a personal tragedy that involves people you know; otherwise, as the author himself hints, the death of one young man among so many can have no significance.

Really enjoyed this, and will read more by Roth

Review of 'Spectre'

I went expecting to really hate this, and ended up quite liking it. The new James Bond is a lot more Guardian-reader friendly than the Ian Fleming version. If there was any doubt, the fact that the first image after the credits is of the front page of The Guardian should dispel these; I'm sure Fleming thought of all Guardian readers as either traitors or fellow-travelling useful idiots.

There's less camp humour, but also less sexism. Daniel Craig's Bond seems to form genuine emotional relationships with women rather than treat them as recreational toys. The pace is more controlled - it's not all crashes and bangs and stunts. As every, the sets, the locations and the clothes are nice to look at.

The plot doesn't make a great deal of sense (why is the secret surveillance centre located on top of a remote desert petrochemical plant?), but it's grounded in a different moral universe to the old style of Bond. Here the boundary between the security services and the baddies - Spectre - is thin and faint. In a nod to 9-11 conspiracy theories it's clear that the terrorist attacks which are being used to justify constant global surveillance are being orchestrated by the security services themselves. The nasty posh-boy new head of the merged MI5/MI6 looks a lot like George Osborne and is described as having 'gone to school with the Home Secretary'. Surveillance is something that the baddies do, as compared to traditional old-style secret agents. Spectre looks like a corporate entity and talks the language of business; it's also ethnically diverse, as is the security service.

Still loads of product placement, but I could imagine watching another one of these.

Review of 'Romantics Anonymous'

Daft French romcom about a very awkward shy woman (for some reason this is translated as 'emotional' in the subtitles - maybe that's the French for 'shy', or maybe the French have a different understanding of the nature of the phenomenon) who is an expert chocolatier but can't handle the people aspects of the job. She gets a job with a failing chocolate company, where the boss is also awkward and shy, and naturally falls for her, but because he's...well, you can see where this went.

It has its moments - mainly where it's being very specifically French, like the chocolate convention they both attend - but it's not really worth the time it takes to watch it.

Review of 'The Wonders'

A bleak and depressing film about artisanal agriculture and food production in Tuscany - an antidote to all those films in which that setting is necessarily idyllic. A family keep bees and produce honey at a near-derelict farm. Lots is not explained - there's a German father, his Italian wife who is constantly on the brink of leaving him, another German woman (who is she?), and four daughters who provide child labour for the honey business rather than going to school. There's also a young German delinquent boy, left by a social worker in what is supposed to be a reforming placement, though if she had had any eyes to see she wouldn't have left a dog with these people. Somehow the eldest daughter, the only one with any brains and talent, comes across a tacky agricultural-themed reality show in which contestants are required to dress up as ancient Etruscans and pitch their businesses to a studio audience. Neither it nor the business itself go well; the film is a bit of an illustration as to how some people just aren't very good at life.

Interesting ideas and characters, a dismal setting and bleak cinematography, but too long without enough happening - I had several micro-dozes during the film.

Review of 'Lucky Them'

This could so easily have been a conventional romcom, but it's not. It's a comedy of sorts, though there aren't that many laughs. It's got a strong female lead who's not soppy or ditzy, and it doesn't end up with true love taking its expected course - even though the plot-line is about a woman journalist trying to find her ex so that she can either write a feature about him, or re-kindle their past love, or both. Set in Seattle, with some journalist in-jokes and lots of really quite grimy interiors, so this is more like the real world where actual people live rather than the sanitized and glamourized version that Hollywood usually presents.

Not a major triumph, but worth watching.

Review of 'Hunk Dory'

A sort of coming-of-age movie set in 1976 Wales, with a group of teens doing a version of 'The Tempest' with 1970s pop songs under the direction of their not-too-competent drama teacher, played by Minnie Driver. Some teenage angst - unrequited teen love, concealed gay sexuality, absent mum who's gone off and left the family - and some teacher angst too. The kids all have rather good voices, the school band sounds suspiciously good, and the staging final production (outdoors because the school has been the subject of an arson attack) is quite wonderful.

It's supposed to be set in the long hot summer of 1976, but it doesn't look nearly hot enough. The end credits say what happened to the characters next, which rather implies that this is a true story, but I can find nothing to substantiate that - so it feels like a rather cheap trick to give the film more weight than it really has.

An agreeable way to pass 90 minutes, but not brilliant.

Review of 'The Martian'

A nicely shot science fiction film, with the Jordanian desert looking much like I'd imagine Mars to look. But a bit plodding and over-long, and lacking some of the best bits of the book. The latter was really about the science and engineering - a Robinson Crusoe for the modern age, which went into lots of detail about how the hero uses his scientific knowledge to solve practical problems that might kill him. In the film we know that he is using some science, and lots of techie stuff, but we don't see him working hard at it - just doing physical stuff. We know he's brave, but we don't see that he is also clever and knowledgeable. That's a shame, because one of the merits of the book is that it makes clever, science-knowing people cool. In the film, it's just the usual physical skill and bravery that's cool.

The film also depicts the workings of the NASA bureaucracy, and management and PR structures - which the task of rescuing the man stuck on Mars ultimately subverts. In films we are used to seeing people bravely cut through red tape to get things done, so the feeling that something special is happening is not nearly as strong. Strange though it may sound, the book has more emotional and character depth than the film - and the book was not strong on that sort of thing.

Apart from the relentless cheer leading for NASA and space programmes generally I counted two bits of product placement - the use of Cisco video-conferencing equipment, with the Cisco logo prominent in the top right corner of the screen, and - more subtly - the fact that the door monitoring systems in the HAB and the spacecraft have exactly the same UI as the Google NEST home thermostat.

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.