Review of Casablanca Beats

I watched this at the Lansdown Film Club, where there is a post-film "bead voting" system, and I was the only person to put a bead in the bowl marked "Poor".  I didn't enjoy it much. I was bored, I dozed off sometimes, and I felt that it was shapeless and bad storytelling. I'm all in favour of films that leave the viewer to fill in or imagine some of what's left unsaid, but this felt like there were gaps in the narrative that had just been overlooked. 

There were some great young Moroccans who were learning to rap with a charismatic teacher at a cultural centre called Les Etoiles de Sidi Moumen - Sidi Moumen is a poor district of Casablanca . The young people were playing themselves, and the teacher is played by moody Moroccan actor Abdelilah Basbousi. There are some really great set-piece debates between the kids, notably about whether young women ought to dress "decently" in order to be respected. There's a big dance "fight" between the kids and some religious fundamentalists.

Ultimately though it was a disappointment. It feels a bit like it ought to have been a documentary, without the pretence of a plot, and with lots of interviews with the kids about why they felt that an American art form spoke to them as a young Moroccans.

Like I said, watched at Lansdown, and a testament to how bad the film was is that I managed to doze off even on the world's most uncomfortable chairs.

Review of "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre" by B Traven

An absolute ripping yarn about American hobo-adventurers in Mexico in the 1920s, written by a mysterious perhaps-German author about whom almost nothing is known. I've known about B Traven for years and have thought about reading this, but it was only when I picked up a free copy at a tube station book drop that I finally got round to it - partly as a way of avoiding reading a heavier non-fiction book that I was supposed to be doing.

It's in a spare, hard-boiled style, with little description and not much introspection, and yet it was absolutely compelling reading that carried me on. The characters are casual workers who become gold prospectors, set in a background of reforming post-revolutionary Mexico, with Indians and Mestizos and bandits. There's some nods in the direction of progressive politics - a paean to the railway workers' union, a brief speech in favour of Bolshevism and Communism by one of the characters - but there's some racism that would be unacceptable now too.

Review of My Sailor, My Love

Ireland-set, Scandinavian-made romantic drama about an older man finding love late in life with an older woman sent by his daughter to be housekeeper-carer, and the impact that has on the very troubled daughter who has spent her whole life traumatised by the effort of caring for first her mentally ill mother and then her deteriorating and unloving father. Lots of heavy emotional work, and lots of beautiful scenery and perfectly drawn interpersonal dynamics. It's not as unremittingly bleak as this makes it sound, but there aren't many laughs.

Watched on Netflix via phone and Chromecast, an unusual good film found there.

Review of "All the Light We Cannot See" by Antony Doerr

I really liked and enjoyed this lovely book. It's hard to imagine that something about a blind girl making her way through the world of occupied Brittany during WW2 could be so heartwarming, but it was, despite all the awful things that happen to the characters. There's a narrative that's split between different characters and switches backwards and forward in time, which can sometimes be annoying but wasn't here. One of the central characters is a very young German soldier, and I'm sometimes upset by books which foreground the experiences of people like that, but this didn't affect me that way at all. 

It was long and occasionally harrowing, but I'm so glad I read it and was sorry when it ended.

Review of Oppenheimer

The fact that it's been several weeks between seeing the film and writing a review says something. I know it's an important subject and that it's seen as an important film, but despite the length (3 hours) I was a bit underwhelmed. Visually it felt a bit trite. And I've often liked Christopher Nolan's films for complex narrative structures, but this one felt ponderous and contrived rather than interestingly complex. 

I thought I knew the story of Los Alamos, and I wasn't aware of any major surprises as I watched the film. It felt to me like the conflict with Lewis Strauss, which I didn't know about, was the dramatic centre of the film...I think I'd rather that it hadn't been so long and convoluted, and that it had focused on that more. The claustrophobic scenes of the private hearing that more or less finished Oppenheimer as a public figure, because his security clearance was not renewed, are really well done.

Despite the length of the film the tension between Oppenheimer and Strauss doesn't really feel well explained - was it really because Oppenheimer said something that made Strauss feel humiliated at a Congressional hearing of some kind? Was there really nothing more to it than that?

Watched at the Vue in Stroud with two good friends and an extra large popcorn.

Review of "Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind" by Yuval Noah Harari

Forced my way through this, didn't like it so much. It's a "broad sweep" history, with a perspective that wobbles between neo-liberal ("hasn't capitalism made everything brilliant!") and neo-conservative ("medieval peasants were perhaps happier than modern people because they believed that their lives had a purpose in a way that secular people can't). As I read it I found myself coming up with objections to the broad sweep argument from stuff that I knew, and I suspect that people who know more about the disciplines he references - archaeology, anthropology, and so on - might find lots more.

Looking forward to reading "The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity" which I understand has a more detailed take-down.

Review of "Drink?: The New Science of Alcohol and Your Health" by David Nutt

I like what David Nutt writes about other recreational drugs - he's sensible rather than sensationalist and gives good evidence-based advice.

I knew he was a bit down on alcohol, and since I don't think of myself as having a problem with it, and quite like it, I was reluctant to read this book.

But I'm glad that I did. I learned a lot, both about how alcohol works in the brain, and how really bad it is. I don't think I will stop drinking completely, but I am really going to try to drink less, and to examine my own relationship with the drug, and with other people where it's mediated by alcohol.

Towards the end he writes a lot about policy, and his experiences trying to advise government. That is really...dispiriting. It's an eloquent description of how a moderately powerful industry captures the institutions intended to regulate it, and writes policies that suit itself despite the harm that they do to society and individuals. It's particularly depressing to see how much worse the UK has done than other countries, and how useless our legislators and governments are. And this is only the drinks industry...just think what it is like to go up against the fossil fuels industries.

It's also an illustration of how daft the conspiracy nut-jobs view of the world is. Powerful industries don't have to use secret conspiracies to control governments - they can do it right out in the open, using mechanisms that are not secret or illegal.

Review of "Use of Weapons" by Ian M Banks

 

This is the third novel in The Culture series, and quite different from the others. The plot is more complex, it shifts backwards and forwards in time, and there is some confusion about who the characters are. I have a slight suspicion that it was assembled out of a series of disparate stories, because the atmosphere and the descriptions of places and characters are great - it's just a hard-to-follow narrative thread. 

Still enjoyable, mind you.

Review of "Noughts and Crosses" by Malorie Blackman

I suppose this is not really aimed at me - it's Young Adult fiction - and maybe that's why I didn't like it. It's easy to read, with short chapters and un-challenging language, and a plot with plenty of emotion and action to carry the reader along. Still, I was a bit bored. And I can't see the point about writing about a fantasised, alternative-reality racism, when the real thing is everywhere and needs writing about.

Do young adult readers respond to an account of racism in which the positions of blacks and whites are reversed, and Black Africans have colonised white Europe? Maybe they do, though I can't see why. And there's so much about the scenario that's not really fleshed out. Why are the Blacks called Crosses and the Whites Noughts? Are the Crosses and Noughts roughly equal in number, or are the Crosses a tiny colonial elite? There's some suggestion that the Noughts were once enslaved, but we don't know how long ago this was...within living memory, like in the US? Or way back in history? Is this our Earth with a point of departure in history, or a parallel one? And so on...

Review of "Demon Copperhead" by Barbara Kingsolver

I finished this a few weeks ago, but it has taken me ages to get around to writing a review...perhaps because I hoped that I would have something profound to say, but I haven't. It was a great and mainly enjoyable novel, even though the subject matter was anything but enjoyable. It's a retelling of Dickens's "David Copperfield", but relocated to the Appalachian mountains. It focuses on an orphaned poor White boy, and his progress through the "care" system. It has Dickens's eye for the details and the nuts and bolts of institutions, and how they grind people down. And it's set against the background of the opioid plague that has devastated regions like that, as well as much of the rest of the US.

It's a great book, another triumph from Barbara Kingsolver. 

Review of Hugo

Nice enough steampunk-ish (well, period drama really, but with so much steampunk detail that it felt faux-period) kids' film about a boy living in the walls of a Paris railway station, trying to solve a mystery that was left to him by his now-dead father. Quite a lot of cinema history in that rose-tinted way that Hollywood sometimes likes. Lots of famous people in cameo roles - Jude Law, Sacha Baron Cohen, Frances de la Tour, Peter Ustinov, Ben Kingsley, and the lead for Asa Butterfield, before he became famous as Otis from Sex Education.

Whisper it not, but I was a bit bored by the end, despite the chases and the drama. For the most part the peril never felt very perilous. Still, it was lovely to look at.

Watched via informal distribution.

Review of "Operation Mindfuck QANON AND THE CULT OF DONALD TRUMP" by Robert Guffey

Much more detail about the nature of the Qanon conspiracy theories than I was prepared for...I knew this stuff was pretty batshit crazy, but I was still unprepared for how stupid it all is. And at some level I can't help thinking that the people pushing it out know that it's stupid, and are laughing at their followers; for example, the references to Deep Underground Military Bases, for which the followers unreflectingly use the acronym D.U.M.B. 

Some of this was compellingly awful, and other parts were mind-numbingly boringly awful...not the author's fault, it's just that there's only so much of this you can take. 

Sometimes his political instincts are spot on - he manages to despise the right-wing nutjobs who perpetrate this stuff without embracing their opponents, the mainstream Democrats who really don't give a shit about the damage that they've done with their policies and their wars. 

At other times he - no doubt exasperated by the depth of the bullshit he's had to wade through - descends into sarcasm that isn't interesting or edifying to read. That's a shame, a better editor would have cut a lot of that out.

He's quite well informed on the historical background to conspiracy theories, but I found that there are things that I wish he'd known about - for example, he cites Will Eisner's "The Plot: The Secret Story of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion" for an explanation of the historical background to this foundational conspiracy theory, rather than Norman Cohn's "Warrant for Genocide: The Myth of the Jewish World-Conspiracy and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion". 

Probably not the definitive source on Qanon, but a good one to read. I was reading this as the news came through about Trump's indictment, and it made me glad that there was a prospect, however small, that the bastards responsible for all this might go to jail.

Review of Barbie

I enjoyed this a lot more than I expected to. It seemed quite clever and funny to me, and I liked the acting - playing the live-action equivalent of plastic doll is obviously role that Ryan Gosling has been waiting for.  The Guardian review is itself clever and funny, and hard to improve on...but a few things in passing occur to me that don't seem to have been noted elsewhere. 

Firstly, this film is overtly self-referential - it doesn't quite have characters addressing the fourth wall, but the narrator does refer to it being a film, with casting choices - not something I remember from anything else. It does't need to make sense of the fact that Barbieland is a fantasy, and instead it chooses to make fun of this...Barbie doesn't expect drinking vessels to have fluids in them when she's in the real world, and the wave on the beach is of course solid, as is the surface of the pool at Barbie's dream house.

Is this lost on what I assume is the film's target audience...young girls who either still play with Barbies or did until recently? Or is that not the target audience at all? The film opens with a parody of the opening of 2001 A Space Odyssey, complete with Thus Spake Zarathustra, and showing very young girls smashing their baby dolls as they embrace the possibilities of the new Barbie toy. I thought it was funny...but who else did? Is today's pre-teen audience so media-literate that they get this joke too? Or what?

Watched at an actual cinema, the Vue in Stroud - the first time in ages!

Review of Pixie

Quite enjoyable Irish dark comedy, set in the wild west where we've just been on holiday, and populated with feuding drug-dealing families, some of whom are priests. Held my attention, had a few laughs, a strong woman character and some interesting takes on male buddydom and sexuality. 

I note in passing that the font for the titles suggested the 1974 film "Foxy Brown", which was also about a woman taking revenge on drug gangs. Pixie, Foxy, that's not an accident, is it?

Review of Belfast

Nice, beautiful-to-look-at coming of age movie by Kenneth Branagh that is apparently autobiographical. Young Buddy is growing up at the start of the troubles - the first scene takes place in August 1969, in an idyllic mixed working class Belfast neighbourhood, where Catholics and Protestants live happily together. Perhaps it's too romanticised...I'm sure everyone who was there has their own version of what this experience was like. Certainly we don't see any sign of the symbols of sectarianism, no union flags or tricolours, no Orange lodges...even the murals on the gable ends of terraces are harmless.

But then we see things quickly slide into pogroms and burning-out of Catholics from the Protestant streets, and vigilantes and barricades - though only in a Protestant street. In fact, Catholics are largely absent from the story, except in the imaginations and conversations of the Protestant characters, especially the ones from the central family. 

One thing struck me - the family, especially the mum and the dad, and some of the other characters including the local Protestant thug-gangster - are all really gorgeous to look at. Funny how striking that is, because almost everyone in documentary footage from this period looks so ugly.

Watched in the Middle Floor at Springhill, via usb stick and informal distribution...one consequence of this was odd melting transitions between some scenes, because the video player couldn't quite cope. It made it even more arty.

Review of Aftersun

Moody slightly menacing film about a dad on holiday in a Turkish resort with his pre-teen daughter. At first it has all the dullness of a resort holiday (and I admit to having a little doze) but the mood and the menace take over, and I ended up being really quite moved by it. It's a depiction of a father-daughter relationship that's kind and loving, even though the dad is really troubled. 

It's occasionally a bit confusing - most of the narrative is set during the holiday but some of it is in the future when the girl is grown up and reflecting back on the past...and perhaps some of it is in the further past, depicting the dad's break-up with the girl's mother - it's not 100% clear. 

Not what you'd call enjoyable but I am pleased I watched it...via informal distribution and USB stick to the projector in the Springhill Middle Floor.

Review of The Last Letter From Your Lover

Sort of OK, watchable romantic drama with a split-chronology narrative. In the 1960s a wealthy socialite has an affair that ends abruptly, and in the present a young woman journalist finds love letters in her magazine's archive and becomes intrigued by the story. It's engaging enough, but not really great...the 1960s scenes are sumptuously filmed and the socialite wears some great clothes. Some nice backing track music.

Watched on Netflix - the film was produced independently but Netflix bought it up.

Review of Escape From Room 18

Unsettling but also unsatisfactory documentary about a Jewish young man who was a member of a Nazi skinhead gang in the US...at first the Nazis don't know he's Jewish, but then they find out and try to murder him, and he miraculously survives and escapes to Israel, where he and his family make a new life. Later - at the time the documentary is made - he meets up with one of his old Nazi skinhead friends, now no longer a Nazi or a skinhead, and they go on a trip to the Theresienstadt concentration camp together.

There's so much about this film that's weird - of course - but also so much that is unsatisfactory. There's not much consideration about the roots of Nazism and White Supremacy in the US, and no examination at all of what it means to escape from racists by going to live in Israel. The main character has moved to Israel with his mum, who speaks with a strong Southern accent, obviously misses the food and culture of the American South, and has a twin sister (who has also moved to Israel), and the two of them dress identically. Which would have been enough for a weird documentary in itself.

Review of Wild Men

 

Billed as a comedy but dark and violent and a bit nasty - a little like Riders of Justice. What is it with Danish comedies? Is the audience in a Danish cinema roaring with laughter at this, or do they just mean a different thing by 'comedy'?

This one features an unhappy man who has left his family to live in the wilds of Norway so that he can reconnect with his proper, natural, manly self...but he's actually not very good at it. Failing to kill anything to eat bigger than a frog, he ends up robbing a petrol station instead, and is then half-hardheartedly pursued by the local police, who are mainly oblivious of a trio of drug smugglers in their neighbourhood. The drug smugglers hit a moose/elk, and one of them runs off with the cash leaving the others for dead, but they aren't, and then they run in to the aspirant wild man.

Lots of violence, and blood, and unhappiness, and almost no laughs at all. Even so I found it quite thoughtful and interesting, though Ruth didn't.

Watched on BBC iPlayer. 

Review of Transition by Ian Banks

A novel set in the multiverse, with characters who are aware of and can travel between parallel universes. It's nicely done (or perhaps nicely overdone, since quite a lot of the descriptions are sort of camp in the way that steampunk sometimes is - especially the lavish settings and costumes of Madame d'Ortolan, who functions as a principal villain). 

Lots of drugs, some sex, not much rock and roll.

It took me a little while to get into it, but I ended up enjoying it and was almost sorry when it ended.