Review of "Bleeding Edge" by Thomas Pynchon

I loved this, though a week after finishing it I'm not entirely able to express why. It's Pynchonesqe in its plotting, and its language, and there are some great characters - perhaps too many characters, because I did begin to feel like I was losing track.

It's very Jewish, and though there are some Israeli characters it's mainly a paean to New York diaspora Jewish culture, though I don't think Pynchon is Jewish. He's got it down really well, though, the language, the preoccupations. 

The plot takes place against the background of the dot.com crash, and the Twin Towers attack, and a complex financial fraud (the main character Maxine is a fraud investigator, working freelance and on her own time for most of the book), so it's sometimes hard to follow. I suspect I missed some of it, but it doesn't seem to have detracted from my enjoyment. It even made me want to visit New York again, which probably isn't going to happen.

Review of Dolly Parton: Here I am

Slightly dull but informative documentary about Dolly Parton and her career. Almost nothing about her private life, which she keeps private; she's been married to the same bloke for fifty years, after they met at a laundromat at her first day in Nashville. She's unashamed about her working-class rural roots, and connects with a variety of very different audiences - rednecks, gay men, drag queens...to some extent because she's careful not to say or do anything to offend any of them.

Which makes for a somewhat boring film. She's clever, talented (she's written some great songs), and opaque - a wise decision in an industry that eats people up and spits them out. But she's not great documentary material. We don't even learn anything about her friendships, outside of work relationships.

Watched on BBC iPlayer via Chromecast.

Review of Millie Lies Low

Sad New Zealand comedy about a young woman who's about to go to New York for a prestigious architecture internship, but panics on the plane and then sneaks back into her home town (Wellington) but doesn't want anyone to know. It's occasionally funny, but mainly painful - her relationships with her mum, her boyfriend and her best friend are challenged and exposed, and don't emerge well. There's some stuff about the nature of talent, and about the relentless pressure to post positive stuff on social media. 

The film was just over 90 minutes but felt longer, though it wasn't bad - just painful.

Well worth watching - we watched on Channel 4 via Chromecast.

Review of Anatomy of a Fall

Atmospheric tense French drama about an accidental (or is it?) death in an alpine chalet, where a key witness is a blind ten-year-old boy. Hard to say much more about it without spoiling, but it's really good, and manages to get to the end of the story without definitively resolving all of the unknowns. In that sense it rather reminded me of The Night of The Twelfth, another French drama (though that's more a police procedural), which also tells a story of death without resolving the question of who did it. Strangely both films are set in Grenoble. 

Watched via informal distribution - our new TV has a slot for USB drives, which makes that rather easier.

Review of Rustin

Enjoyable biopic about Bayard Rustin, black gay socialist pacifist who did most of the organising for the 1963 March on Washington, at which Martin Luther King spoke and made his "I have a dream" speech. This film is for all the people who do the organising but don't get to make the big speak. Rustin was clearly a wonderful leader who inspired people to give their all, despite the movement's disapproval of his sexuality. The film shows lots of behind the scenes manoeuvring in the Civil Rights movement, as well as giving a quite good potted history of the actual political processes and outcomes.

It (probably rightly) doesn't reveal that Rustin in his older years remained committed to workers' rights but became a neoconservative and was praised by Reagan after his death. 

Watched on Netflix.

Review of "Cole Porter" by William McBrien

I gave up on this.  I kept going to page 150, which I think is absolutely giving it a fair chance, but it was so boring that I could only read a few pages at a time without falling asleep. Cole Porter is an absolute genius, and I love his work - his songs and his lyrics. But his early life is so dull - doting mother, rich grandfather, nonentity dad who barely features in the story; good at school, athletic and popular, nothing goes wrong...and then he's gadding about with other rich Americans in Paris, and cruising backwards and forwards across the Atlantic. And I just could be bothered anymore.

Maybe it's just what reading biographies is like, and I should remember not to read them.

Review of "The Honourable Schoolboy" by John le Carre

Another good one from le Carre, though it took me a while to get into it. Whereas "The Spy Who Came in From the Cold" is taut and economical, this is a bit flabby, and some episodes seem to take forever, to no really obvious purpose. I won't attempt to summarise the plot, which is really convoluted and defies a quick description.

Eventually I was hooked, though, and engaged with most of the characters (though there were some that were a bit fuzzy for me, so that I had trouble remembering who they were). There's a lot of stuff about the nastier aspects of the Cold War, and no punches pulled about the bad things that "our side" did - in particular involvement in the opium trade. The parts set in Hong Kong, and Indochina, are really evocative - I can actually smell the places he describes.

Review of Leave the World Behind

An unsatisfying dystopian end-of-the-world film, in which a family of white liberals travel to a holiday home in upstate New York for a short break just as there's a cyber attack and associated real attack on the US by unnamed and unspecified enemies. The film illustrates well how fragile our civilisation is and how dependent on a few pieces of technology we've become, and there's some interesting dynamics between the white family and the prosperous black family who own the luxurious holiday-home and turn up to reclaim it as the catastrophe unfolds. 

But there's lots that doesn't make any particular sense and seems just added in for pointless menace...the house is surrounded by oddly courageous deer, for example. And the underlying narrative seems like something from the Qanon playbook - secretive powerful elites, leaflets dropped from planes that are written in Farsi and Korean, and so on.

I was sucked in rather after the fashion of "Lost" (now our reference points for initially intriguing and mysterious narratives that ultimately turn out to be load of meaningless crap), but ended up really disliking this film, despite some good acting and interesting cinematography.

Watched on Netflix.

Review of Go!

Surprisingly good crime/drug film that manages to be both gripping and funny, about young adults blundering into club scene drug dealing. It's structurally quite complex - we see the same events several times over through the eyes of different characters, so it takes a while to work out what is going on. Nice dialogue, editing, acting...not short but it felt really tight.

Watched this one on a USB stick via informal distribution.

Review of Marry Me!

Absurd rom-com with Owen Wilson and Jennifer Lopez, which was nevertheless quite enjoyable on an over-full Xmas stomach. She's going to marry another Latino singer during a big concert at which they will sing their joint hit "Marry Me!", but just as she's about to she sees a shared video of him carrying on with her assistant, so she impulsively decides to marry Wilson's character instead - he's a maths teacher who has been dragged to the concert by a friend because his teen daughter likes Lopez's character.

Yeah, it's that stupid. But it wasn't as bad as it sounds, and there were a few nice moments. And Wilson's character isn't as stupid as some he has played.

Watched on Netflix.

Review of The Courier

Straightforward cold war spy thriller about the KGB double agent Oleg Penkovsky, who was giving Soviet secrets to the west, especially during the Cuban missile crisis. The film focuses on the relationship between Penkovsky and the British businessman Greville Wynne, who acted as courier for his drops of material. It doesn't address any of the complexities of the affair, including who betrayed Penkovsky, how long the Soviets knew that he was providing material to the west (some say that it was within two weeks of his defection), or even whether he might have been a fake defector, as Peter Wright suggested in his book Spycatcher.

Some interesting filming and camera angles, but not much narrative complexity.

I note in passing that at the end there's some footage of the real Greville Wynne, and that he (unlike his portrayal in the film) spoke in a cut-glass upper class accent that absolutely no-one uses any more...though Queen Elizabeth continued to talk like that until her death. What does it mean that a way of speaking can die out so thoroughly?

Watched on BBC iPlayer.

Review of Resistance

Very straightforward biopic about Marcel Marceau's time in the French resistance, about which I had known absolutely nothing. The Nazis are very nasty, especially Klaus Barbie, who is depicted in some detail. There's some suspenseful moments, and it held our attention, but it's not a great film. 

The Jewish children are in some sort of scout uniform, though this is never explained or even referred to - are they scouts, or is a Jewish (even Zionist) youth movement? 

Watched on Channel4 online - I don't think it's called All4 any more.

Review of Outside In

Nice thoughtful film about a young man out on parole after twenty years in prison for his minor part in a crime - as a result of a mandatory minimum sentence. There's relatively little excitement, but lots of examination of relationships, particularly the one between the man and the older woman teacher who supports his case while he's inside - he seems very confused as to whether there is a romantic dimension to this, though she's insistent that there isn't. That brief summary doesn't really do it justice - it's worth watching...on Netflix.

Review of "Burial Rites" by Hannah Kent

Gloomy but very well written first novel about a murder and subsequent execution in early C19th Iceland. That's not a very promising summary, but the book was really compelling...though I can't say it was enjoyable, it did hold me the whole time, even though I knew how it would end. The life depicted is almost impossibly grim - not much good old days here, with filth, freezing to death, miserable food, back-breaking work. 

The book is very modern, with multiple narrators and time periods, and inserts of official documents and other found material. There's some background material about how it came to be written...but why was a woman from Adelaide studying Icelandic in the first place? We're not told that.

Review of Napoleon

I'm afraid this lived down to expectations. Very long, a bit boring. No good acting, no good dialogue, and no insights into the history depicted. Nothing useful about the French revolution, and nothing in the depiction of the battles that actually explains how they went and how Napoleon's generalship contributed to the French victories. The depiction of Waterloo is mainly just a mess, unlike the 1970 film with Rod Steiger as Napoleon.

Review of Maestro

Long and not entirely satisfactory biopic about Leonard Bernstein. It doesn't mention any of his political engagement or activism, but that's not my main gripe. It was quite boring (had a little doze) despite really good actors. It was boring in a rather special way, in that it didn't feel as if the dialogue mattered at all. It was often quite hard to hear, and the narrative was mainly carried by facial expressions. It didn't really feel like there was a story or a script. Stuff just happened, as if what we saw on screen were the linking shots between the real (somehow excised) scenes that were supposed to make up the film.

I'm sure that this was deliberate - this is a work of one man's passion, with lots of other big names (Scorsese, Spielberg) behind it, so it can't have been omission. So I just don't get it.

Watched at the cinema - Crouch End Art house - and beautiful to look at on a big screen, and yet that still wasn't enough.

BTW the 'Jewface' thing didn't bother me at all, the nose prosthetic was really good, though Cooper's whiny voice was annoying.

Review of Nuovo Olimpo

Unexpectedly good Italian gay romantic drama, about two guys who meet in a cinema that's used for casual gay sex hook-ups, develop an intense connection that's not just about sex, and then lose contact because of a protest broken up by violent riot police...and the rest of the film is about the loss that affects both of their lives, and the lives of others that they touch. It's beautiful and well done (unlike a lot of Italian films that I've watched lately) and I didn't even mind that one of the two men is a film-maker...films about film-makers often piss me off.

Long but I still had a feeling that something had been cut from it without quite enough care...there were some character developments that didn't quite add up. Still, well worth watching...we watched on Netflix.

Review of Polite Society

Lots of promise, largely not delivered. Written by the woman behind "We Are Ladyparts", which was brilliant, but this isn't. It's like someone thought that they should do a toned-down version of Ladyparts, so it's still set in a British-Muslim family context, but it's less harsh about the constricting nature of that family life for those who don't fit in - here the young heroine isn't a lesbian, she just aspires to do martial arts and be a stuntwoman. So non-normative, but more in a silly way than a threatening one.

And it is mainly just silly. It's knockabout in a way that makes it seem like it was intended to be a kids' film, but with enough sexual content to make it inappropriate for that. Maybe there's an Asian martial arts movie genre that I am not familiar with, so I'm missing some of of the parody references. Some occasional funny bits, but mainly not all that funny.

Review of "Non-Jewish Zionism: its Roots in Western History" by Regina Sharifa

There's lots of good stuff in this book, and much that I wasn't really aware of. I was aware that Protestant Christianity was a lot keener on "the Old Testament" than the other flavours, and that consequently there has often been a weird kind of philosemitism about it. Protestants, especially the English Puritans, often identified themselves with the Israelites. And that led to a kind of romantic notion of restoring the Jews to the Holy Land, either in fulfilment of millenarian prophecies or as a good thing in its own right. This made some Protestants proto-Zionists before there was any Jewish Zionist movement, and made politicians steeped in that kind of Christianity particularly receptive to both philosemitic ideas and plans for the appropriation of Palestine from the Ottomans.

Lots of this was going on before there was any kind of Jewish Zionism, but it did make British and American politicians in particular receptive to the Zionist movement when it emerged. The same romantic notions of Jews meant that the same politicians who were proto-Zionists didn't like actual Jews very much; they failed to live up to the image of ancient Israelites, and they wanted emancipation and equal rights rather than national restoration.

Where I think the book falls down is that its picture of Jewish Zionism, when it emerges, is utterly divorced from the context in which Zionism grew among Jews. There's no account of the upsurge of antisemitism in the Russian Empire, and then in its Polish successor state. The word "pogrom" does not appear in the index, and there's no reference to the May Laws of 1882. The Nazis mainly appear in terms of the Ha'avara agreement with German Zionists, and this is - as is so often the case - represented as if it were a convergence of equals. We learn that the British initially promoted and encouraged Jewish immigration to Palestine, and that they later put up quotas to stop too many Jews arriving; but although the book talks about other western countries refusing to take Jewish refugees, there's not much recognition that the Jews who were trying to migrate to Palestine were desperate refugees too, not pith-helmeted colonists.

I note in passing that there's nothing about the Communist honeymoon with Zionism either, though there is a discussion about the influence of Zionists (again via Christians) on the American labour movement.

Review of "Wagons West: The Epic Story of America's Overland Trails" by Frank McLynn

A long and grindingly detailed account of the wagon-driving pioneers who colonised California and Oregon in the years before the Gold Rush. The book had its merits - it was great for reading last thing at night, because it invariably put me (and Ruth, if I read it out loud to her) to sleep very quickly. 

For the most part the stories of the individual wagon trains seem to follow a common pattern. Lots about what provisions the pioneers took. Stories about how they got into trouble, mainly through stupidity. The miserable privations that the pioneer women experienced, with huge amounts of women's labour needed to keep the men in the style to which they quickly became accustomed. Mainly good relations with the native Americans, who were kind and helpful to the pioneers, and who received little recognition or kindness in recompense. "Attack by Indians" was what the pioneers worried about most, but in so far as some of them died it was a result of stupid behaviour (children sitting on wagon yokes and so on). The book isn't really in line with anti colonial sensibilities; it details how the pioneers were motivated by the possibility of cheap land, but doesn't reflect much on how it came about that there was all that land that "didn't belong to anyone" there.

I skipped some of the middle of the book, coming back to the final chapter about the Mormon wagon trains, which was weirdly fascinating. The book ends just before the gold rush, which transformed California, its population and the trail. I hadn't really been aware that both California and Oregon, the destination of the land-hungry pioneers, were both outside the control of the United States at the time of the trails - Oregon was not really under anyone's control but was part of a dispute with the British, and California was part of Mexico until after 1848.