Review of 20th Century Women

A feminist coming of age film about a boy, being raised by his single mother in late 1970s Santa Barbara, with the help of her young female art-school punk lodger who is recovering from cervical cancer and a fragile, damaged younger woman who literally sleeps with the boy but doesn't want sex to spoil their relationship, though he clearly feels otherwise.

This is a really good film, with nice observations, and great acting, and a way of addressing the emergence of feminism as it appears to a sympathetic boy as he turns into a man. As a bloke watching feminist films I sometimes feel like I am the problem (not unreasonably) but this was both pointed and pointful, but at the same time a joy to watch.

Lots of great scenery in Southern California, some emergence of punk footage, and lots of good teen stuff too.

It happens to be the period in which I came of age too, and it's striking how much it seems to be in a parallel universe - at one point we get Jimmy Carter's 1979 State of the Union message, and whatever you think of Carter, it's hard to imagine how one could ever get from an America in which that mensch was president to this one.

Watched on Amazon Prime on the new TV.

Review of Amnesia

A post-holocaust movie set in Ibiza, and without any holocaust stuff at all. Young German DJ/producer moves to Ibiza for his career, finds himself living next door to an older woman who [SPOILER ALERT] turns out to be a German who refuses to speak the German language because of what happened to her young Jewish love during the war. They develop a relationship (which he thinks is romantic love, but she knows better) but it's all thrown into turmoil when his mother and much-loved grandfather come to visit, causing everyone to re-examine their pasts and the stories they tell about it.

It's beautiful, and Ibiza looks stunning, and even the clubs (especially the one called Amnesia - geddit?) look great. I'm afraid I was a bit annoyed by a film that focused on the holocaust from the perspective of how it felt to people who were either perpetrators (the grandfather, portrayed by Bruno Ganz, who has told various conflicting stories about his role as a 'rescuer') or who were...well, what is my issue here? She lost a loved one. Does that make her, a non-Jewish German who was herself never under threat but fled to Switzerland, a holocaust survivor?

I've been critical of other holocaust films before which focus on the experience of German and Austrian Jews...do I subconsciously think that the holocaust was only about what happened to 'my' people, the Jews of Poland and Eastern Europe that were the object of the explicit policy of extermination? Maybe I do...

Aside from that this is not a bad film and worth watching. We watched on Netflix, on our new TV  but via Chromecast rather than via the native Netflix support...slightly easier to manage...

An economics reformation

I went to this event yesterday at UCL - Time for an Economic Reformation. Mainly focused on the academic discipline of Economics and its teaching, with the mission of reforming what is taught and studied - rather than about revising economic thought per se...there seemed to be a view, not explicitly stated, that there wasn't much of a need for new thinking itself, just for the academic discipline to reflect the new thinking that was already around.

Good, clear speakers - perhaps a function of the fact that almost all the panel were women? But the only man, Steve Keen, was also very clear, even though I find much of the econometrics that he presents pretty incomprehensible. Other panelists were: Victoria Chick; Mariana Mazzucato; Kate Raworth, of Doughnut Economics fame; and Sally Svenlen, of the Rethinking Economics student group.

The audience was also star-studded - Hilary Wainright, Charlie Leadbetter, and my favourite - David King, formerly Chief Scientist at DECC, who spoke from the floor with some passion - about how the extent to which our economic system had undermined the ability of our species to continue living on our planet was something of an indictment of our economic theories.

Panel chaired by Larry Elliot, economics editor of The Guardian, and event as a whole compered by Andrew Simms of the New Weather Institute (I hadn't heard of that before).

Good discussions, sensible contributions - nothing that made me groan, though equally nothing that looked like it was the key to a root and branch transformation of economic life and organisation. I suspect that one of the reasons for this, and for the slightly lackluster nature of the '33 Theses for an Economics Reformation' is that it's pitched as a conversation with mainstream economists. So though the implications of what is proposed might actually be very radical (as Andrew Simms proposed) it's all positioned as super-sensible.  Mariana Mazzucato cited Polanyi in her short contribution (which was sparkling and interesting) but there wasn't anything in the proposals that matched up to his ideas about how economies are made and unmade.

Delightfully, we were all asked to comment on the 33 Theses. I didn't contribute, but if I had I might have mentioned that the importance of 'intellectual property' - patent and copyright based monopolies - seemed to be missing; and that there wasn't anything about the process whereby economic ideas move from economists to public discourse (as discussed in this paper by Laurie Laybourn-Langton and Michael Jacobs), and at length in‘Inventing the Future’ by Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek - see my review here.

I think that this second aspect is really important; one of the ways in which what is often called 'neo-liberalism' has been so successful is that it's really hard to think about other kinds of economic relationships, outside the framework of 'market economics'. Pseudo-economic ideas about governments not being able to spend more than they 'earn', and about the private sector as the only place where value is created, become the commonsense of our age. Making other kinds of ideas into common sense is a key task for any economic reformation.

Review of 'The Fencer'

Beautiful to look at Estonian film (actually a Finnish-Estonian co-production, but I've never seen an Estonian film before) set in the early 1950s and featuring a young fencer who moves to a small town to become a PE teacher and ends up starting a fencing club for his students. He's on the run from the secret police because he was conscripted into the German army and has to choose between loyalty to his committed pupils (who want to go to a fencing competition in Leningrad, where he is wanted) and maintaining his low profile. He goes, and then it turns into one of those underdog sports team films. It's well made, without cliches, and the Estonian kids are great.

It's very washed out and grim looking, and the Estonian people and landscapes look very authentic. I was a bit uncomfortable about the way the film treats his 'conscription' into the German army. Estonia and Finland both seem to me to have not really reflected very much on the fact that they fought on the side of the Nazis. It is perhaps forgiveable (if wrong) that young Estonian men thought the Nazis were the lesser evil compared to the Soviets, but some recognition that they were evil, and that they chose to do a bad thing that might have had even worse consequences seems warranted. That rarely happens.

My extensive research (well, the Wikipedia article) tells me that the Estonians who fought for the Nazis were volunteers, not conscripts, and that they fought in a Waffen SS Legion. Most Estonian Jews escapted (some taken into the USSR by the occupying Soviet armies in 1940-41 but there were massacres of those that remained, of Roma, Soviet prisoners of war and Jews from other countries in concentration camps located in Estonia.

The film depicts ruthless Soviets hunting down kindly Estonians; naturally it doesn't reflect that the west was by the early 1950s running networks of former Nazi collaborators as anti-communist partisans, the Forest Brothers.

Watched at the Lansdown Film Club on a proper cinema screen on a very snowy and cold night, which made the whole experience more authentic.

Review of 'Band of Brothers'

Read this, about a volunteer company in the US 101st Airborne (paratroopers) and their experiences in WW2. I found the parts about their training, and the psychological and sociological process of becoming a unit, very interesting - the shot-by-shot descriptions of the actual fighting less so. The battles mainly seem like a series of cock-ups redeemed by the iniative and bravery of the men on the spot; curious that one of the features for which the men were screened was a positive attitude towards authority, and yet authority seems to have let them down again and again.

Very aware that I would not in any way have been capable of anything that these men went through. I'm not any kind of tough, don't have much willpower or endurance, don't have the kind of positive attitude that they did (see what I did with that cynical thought about cock-ups and authority?). Wonder what that says about me as a man, and very glad that there are more ways to be a man than there used to be.

Review of "Breakfast at Tiffany's"

One of those books that you think you've read, but you haven't. In my mind it was a frothy quirky romantic comedy sort of thing. On reflection after reading the book I thought it might have been because I was influenced by the film, only then I realised I hadn't actually seen the film either...just seen the poster with Audrey Hepburn looking pretty and cute, and maybe seen a few clips. I'll remedy the film thing shortly.

But the book turns out to be really dark, and rancid, which is not surprising given that it's Truman Capote. It is a fine piece of writing, though it's hard to ignore the casual racism with which Holly Golightly peppers her speech. Holly is not quite a prostitute - Capote subsequently described her as an American Geisha, though that's not quite right either...she's more of a professional mistress, in the French nineteenth century mode. The book is very direct about what that involves, physically and emotionally. Most of the men to whom Holly makes herself available are pretty nasty - Mafia Dons, pro-Nazi tycoons, and so on. She is almost totally devoid of sentimentality herself. The denoument is not exactly unexpected, but the book is well structured and plotted, and a pleasure to read despite the material and the tone.

It's set at a time in which people like the narrator, an aspiring writer without money or success, can apparently afford to rent his own apartment in Manhattan - something that seems much further away than the sexual and social mores it depicts. Oh, and it's war time, 1943, though that barely intrudes on the narrative, apart from the odd military parade in the city. Somehow that seems to magnify the cynicism of the book.

Review of 'A Scanner Darkly' - Philip K Dick

I watched the animated film made from this book a while back, and thought it was good, but this is really powerful. I've never been addicted to any kind of narcotic or hallucinogenic drug, but this book feels right as it describes, from the inside, the dissolution of a mind and a personality. A lot of the book is autobiographical, transposed into a then-future of 1994 because Dick didn't believe he could sell a book that didn't have a science-fiction dimension. It's about the world of loser stoners that he himself was inhabiting, and contains a moving afternote dedication to the young people he hung out with who had since died or ended up mad.

The plot is about an undercover police agent, who is cracking under the strain of maintaining two personalities and narratives, exacerbated by the fact that in his report-back to his handler he must remain anonymous and invisible as a safeguard against corruption, and is required to spy on his own alter-ego,,,all while his brain is deteriorating under the impact of the drugs he is taking to maintain his cover.

It's intentionally hard to distinguish between reality and the character's paranoid fantasies and illusions. Of course stoners are often paranoid, and Dick was himself a clear example; but the real stories of what transpires in the shadowy world of parapolitics and the deep state, and its overlap with the world of drug trafficking, are as weird and alarming as anything a paranoid would make up. We'd call it all conspiracy theories, except that some of these conspiracies actually happened. Alfred McCoy's "The Politics of Heroin: Central Intelligence Agency Complicity in the Global Drug Trade" is a good place to start if you want to know more about that sort of thing.

Review of Loving Vincent

Visually remarkable animated film about the last days of Vincent Van Gogh, done in the style of his paintings, and involving hundreds of artists. It's presented as a mystery, with the son of Vincent's last host going to the town where he died, ostensibly to deliver a letter but becoming drawn into elucidating the confused circumstances of his last days. Did he really commit suicide, or...

Watched at the Vue cinema in Stroud, at a special lunchtime showing.

Review of Carol

An oddly soulless film, given that it was supposed to be about a forbidden and taboo love affair between two women (one older, one younger) in 1950s New York. Rooney Mara looks like a young Audrey Hepburn, Cate Blanchett looks like some kind of alien - her face just isn't put together right. And although she manages to convey feeling between herself and her daughter, and even between herself and her not-loved husband, there doesn't seem to be any feeling between Carol and the young Therese.

The film is beautiful to look at, though. It's dominated by long lingering shots of things, which are beautifully depicted and very evocative. There's a shot of a camera being loaded with 35mm film, which is already more alien to many people than writing with a quill pen. We also see Therese developing a film in a darkroom, which reminded me of doing the same thing with my dad in our kitchen - does anyone recognize those smells nowadays? There are shots of Therese playing records on a huge wooden gramophone - kids today would recognize a turntable and a needle/cartridge/arm because vinyl is still alive, but what was the point of such a huge piece of furniture to host a record deck? In the unlikely event that we had gramophones now, they'd be flatpack and made out of MDF - but this was clearly something made by skilled cabinet-maker...another thing that more or less doesn't exist now.

Lots of fabulous clothes, and textures - of walls, tables, payphones. Everything was so big in the 1950s - cars, steering wheels and gear sticks (with big white balls on the end). Suitcases. Bedsteads - even though the beds themselves looked rather small - when did the King Size bed arrive?

The score is quite wonderful too; I was convinced it was by Philip Glass as I watched the film, but it's not - it's just very much like his work.

Watched on Amazon Prime on our new clever TV....two Amazon Prime films in two days. It does seem to have more good stuff than Netflix.

Review of Jackie

A longish film about the JFK assassination and its aftermath, including the background conflicts about the funeral, from the perspective of Kennedy's wife Jacqueline Bouvier.

The most notable thing about this (everybody knows, or thinks they know, about the assassination itself) is the non-linear structure of the narrative. The film darts about between the assassination, the immediate aftermath, a later interview that Jackie gives to a carefully selected and briefed journalist, the earlier episode in which she had welcomed TV cameras into the White House and another in which Pablo Casals performs for the President and his entourage. And yet it's never confusing, even though there is no heavy-handed signalling as to where these segments fit together temporally. Is that because it's particularly well done, or have we all just got very good at reading this sort of thing?

I thought it conveyed very well the ambivalence and ambiguity about Jackie's response to the death of JFK - it managed to show both her vulnerability/fragility and the extent to which she and other members of the family (especially Bobby) were thinking strategically about how the funeral would create JFK's legacy.

BTW I knew that Jackie subsequently married Aristotle Onassis, but I didn't know that she did a proper job as a book editor for the twenty years after the assassination.

Watched on our new clever TV via entirely legitimate Amazon Video.

Review of 'In the Heart of the Sea'

A visually stunning sea-faring movie, with lots of sails ripping, masts splintering and so on. It's based on the true story that inspired Herman Melville's Moby Dick, about a Nantucket whaling ship called the Essex that was sunk by a white whale bent on revenge. Melville appears in the film, interviewing the now-older sailor who was one of the survivors of the disaster, and helping him to resolve his torments via a talking cure of telling his story.

The film wasn't on release for long, which is a bit of a surprise because it's very well made. The cinematography is really striking...it really felt like I was on the ship, in the storms and out on the whaling boats.

Of course no-one has much sympathy with whaling now, but it's impossible not to be struck by the bravery of the men involved; it was brave and physically demanding for anyone to put to sea in tiny fragile boats, but the demands of whaling were so much more - going out in tiny boats, being dragged across the rough seas by huge whales, fires on deck to boil down blubber...

It does make it clear just how significant the discovery of oil in the ground was - it gets a mention towards the end of the film. For the northern world whale oil was an industrially significant source of fuel for lamps. Only the non-availability of other sources in sufficient quantities could have justified the effort and risk to which the whalers subjected themselves; only the absence of other sources of employment could have compelled men to take up such work.

Watched on TV via Chromecast, PC, Chromestream - and informal distribution.

Some things I particularly liked in 'Sharing Cities: A Case for Truly Smart and Sustainable Cities'

Some things I particularly liked in 'Sharing Cities: A Case for Truly Smart and Sustainable Cities'

Most of them are from Seoul, where I once spent a day and a half on the gruelling Ovum Asia-Pacific tour, but nevertheless have positive memories.

• Kozaza and Lobo Korea – local alternatives to Airbnb
• Woozoo – a house-sharing platform and social enterprise
• Wonderlend and Billi – platforms for sharing goods.
• Socar – car sharing
• Kiple – for exchanging children’s clothes
• Zipbob – a meal sharing platform

 Sadly, few of them have anything much to read in English.

Review of Run Lola Run

A German film from 1998 which illustrates the contingency of events. Lola's drug-dealer boyfriend is in trouble, and she has twenty minutes to come up with DM100,000 to pay off his boss. We see the same story play out three times, in which small changes (whether she trips on the stairs leaving her flat) have consequences as to what happens thereafter. (BTW It's not a patch on Hal Hartley's Flirt, in which we see three different films with exactly the same dialogue).

It's a nice idea, but the film isn't really satisfying. Unlike say Sliding Doors it doesn't play by its own rules - we don't really see the consequences of a single action because other new elements are introduced into the three versions of the story line. And the film looks really dated - not just in the big red landline phone that Lola uses, and the payphone from which the boyfriend calls, but also in the annoying jump cuts and animation inserts.

Watched on TV from a usb drive, the film having been earlier obtained via informal distribution network.

Review of 'People First Economics'

Too bad Amazon doesn't let me give this three-and-a-half stars, because that's what I think it deserves. I've only just read it, which seems a bit unfair because it was published in 2009. Some of it feels very dated (lots of hope and expectation about Obama in some of the chapters); I think a contemporary version would be sharper about the way in which not just 'neoliberalism' but also mainstream liberals abandoned the inhabitants of their countries' rust belts, and how this led to Trump and Brexit, and the rise of right-wing populism across Europe.

There isn't much about the economics of migration, or about 'platform capitalism' either - not surprising, but a warning that it's easy to miss what's coming. On the other hand, there is quite a lot about the Commons, which illustrates how long ideas about that have been swilling about...to no particular end?

Some very good essays - I was particularly impressed by Susan George and Naomi Klein, but also by Walden Bello (who I had never heard of) on emerging global social democracy and Danny Chivers on Climate Choices - the latter was really good and still valid eight years on.

I'd still like a primer on progressive economics that was definitively, robustly argued but easy to read. This is easy to read but despite the variety of authors and scope doesn't cover everything. On the other hand, I think it has persuaded me to re-subscribe to New Internationalist.

Review of 'Sharing Cities: A Case for Truly Smart and Sustainable Cities'

I loved and hated this. There's so much in terms of examples and analysis of the sharing economy, but I found the structure (an example of a city and the way it demonstrates particular aspects of sharing, and then a general discussion of those aspects...which touches on the cities in the other chapters) confusing, and the language downright impenetrable. It's hard to believe that I could once read and write the language of academic social science - now I find it impossible to engage with. I really have to fight to engage with content that's written like this. I notice it particularly in the sentence structure, which could easily be fixed either by the authors or by a tougher editor - but also in the choice of words, and in particular in the use of everyday words in special meanings.

A real shame, because the authors have a superb depth of knowledge and understanding, and the book is full of links and references that make it a great gateway...I hope that they write another, more accessible one soon, perhaps with more of a handbook for activists and cities feel.

Review of 'Mudbound'

Well-crafted period drama about racism and poverty set in post-war Mississipi, and focusing on the relationships between a relatively poor family of white farmers and their extremely poor black tenant-neighbours. It's a Netflix original, and rather well made, though nothing terribly innovative in terms of narrative or cinematography - does Netflix specify that its original-made content has to work on a range of devices?

It becomes generally harder to watch as it sinks from casual racism to the muderous kind, driven by the way in which the young returning ex-soldier son from the black family no longer properly knows his place in the white-dominated order; his 'crime' is compounded by the unlikely friendship he develops with the white farmer's returning brother, since neither of them can get over the undigested experience of the war and the death of comrades alongside them.

Worth watching, and what I thought was a good performance from Carey Mulligan as the farmer's wife - would be interested to hear from friends who know better how she did with the accent.

Watched at home on TV via Netflix on phone and Chromecast.

Review of 'A Little Life'

A brilliant and terrible book which has haunted me for the last six weeks. Not at all the sort of thing I usually read - I'm more a person for genre fiction that provides me with a light and slightly dull escape in the evenings, rather than something that offers intense emotional catharsis. But I couldn't stop reading, in part because it's very well written, and also because it would have felt too much like cowardice and betrayal.

This starts of as a sort of multiple life story - four friends who had met at Harvard and their continuing lives threaded together. They are living cool lives in Manhattan and they are bourgeois-bohemian poor (a bit) but marked for success. Gradually it begins to focus on the life of one of the young men, who is a brilliant but damaged lawyer.

Most of the book is about how he got to be that damaged and how it plays out into his life and those of the others. It's very hard to read - lots of abuse, child-rape, unspeakable violence, self-harm, mental and physical disease. I'm glad I read it, and I appreciate what a superb work it is, but I am really relieved that it's over.

Review of Effie Gray

Standard period drama about the unhappy marriage (imdb calls it a love triangle, but there is nothing of the kind going on here) between John Ruskin and his wife Euphemia Gray. Written by and starring Emma Thompson, and her partner Greg Wise as Ruskin. A bit slow, a bit Merchant-Ivory when they get to Venice, and generally rather old-fashioned looking...in general period dramas have moved on a bit, but this look tired and made-for-TV.

Ruskin comes across as a damaged and nasty person who is under the thumb of his dominating parents, Effie is more or less a doormat who is suddenly empowered by the advice of Emma Thompson's character into seeking a scandalous annulment for impotence and non-consummation. Ruskin's suspected pedophilia is hinted at.

I thought it didn't entirely convey how important a cultural figure Ruskin was; his reactionary ideas about art and aesthetics really set the tone for the second half of the Victorian period and have arguably plagued Britain's sense of itself and its place in the world ever since.

Watched on BBC iPlayer, now built in to our new Samsung TV so no need to use Chromecast.

Review of 'Primer'

Watched this confusing film about start-up geeks who invent a time machine by mistake. I really didn't understand or follow it - not just the technology, but the plot. I managed fine with other time travel films, so I think the problem here was that the narrative hooks that are meant to show what is going on were absent; as with so much you don't realise how much work these do until they aren't there. Impressive that a film which looks OK could be made for so little money ($7k I think) and it would have been interesting to see whether a less complex plot and subject material could have made a more mainstream film for the same money.

Watched on our TV via Chomestream (on Linux PC) and Chromecast. That worked fine at least.

Review of 'The Death of Stalin'

A well-made British 'comedy', with all of your favourite character actors, about the last days of Stalin and the aftermath. Ought to be required watching for anyone still a bit soppy about the USSR. Not many laughs, though the couple next to us seemed to find lots of it very funny; even the absurdities of the dictatorship and the bureaucracy can't be very funny against a background of so many juidicial and extra-judicial murders.

A few odd things; what seems to take a few days in the film (death of Stalin to fall of Beria) actually took a year. Almost no mention of anti-semitism, though of course it pervaded everything - even the references to the Doctors' Plot are without a mention of Jews, though that's what it was about.  And I didn't much like the depiction of Nikita Kruschev as a wise-cracking New Yorker - I much preferred the way Bob Hoskins played him in Enemy at the Gates, as a rather coarse USSR native.

But these are quibbles, and it's a really good film. Ruth and I couldn't help but think about our grandfathers who had so loved Stalin.

Watched at the Everyman Cinema in Muswell Hill.