Review of "Altered Carbon" by Richard Morgan

The hardest science fiction I've read for a long time, and a mashup of cyberpunk and hard boiled detective noir. I really loved it. It's been on my Kindle for years, but somehow I never got round to reading it. I must say that I couldn't follow every twist and turn of the plot - the fact that characters can die and be restored most of the time, and that they slip in and out of each other's bodies - sorry, "sleeves" - makes this harder. I couldn't explain who turned out to have done it if any of my lives depended on it. Still, it was good if not great, and I will be back for more. I have a feeling that I started to watch the TV series once, and I might even have another look at that.

Review of Radical Love: The Life and Legacy of Satish Kumar

I watched this in the company of about a hundred people who were devotees of Kumar and thought he was perhaps literally God's gift to humanity. Some of these people were friends whom I admire, and others were fascist-adjacent woo lovers, so perhaps he is some sort of Rorschach inkblot on to who you can project whatever you want. 

I was depressed and bored by the film, which at just over an hour felt way too long. Lots of spiritual practices and pilgrimages, described as if they were effective political actions. A long section with Vananda Shiva, which brought to mind the film about her watched in the same place, and which left me with the same uncomfortable feeling. 

So yeah, watched at Hawkwood as part of Stroud Film Festival. Based on the venue I had an expectation about what the film would be like, which was not disappointed. However, Ruth and I walked there across the fields and through the woods by moonlight, and that was wonderful.

Review of Conclave

A papal election thriller, with lots of twists as the various candidates are revealed to have things in their past, or even in their presents, that don't look good in a putative Pope.

Very lush to look at, but not that much actually happens - unsurprisingly, because the cardinals doing the voting are locked in to the Vatican, so all that we can really see are side conversations and voting procedures.

Sort of tense without being actually interesting, though it held our attention.

Watched via USB and informal distribution.

Review of No Other Land

Absolutely relentless documentation of the way that first the Israeli army, and then settlers, try to evict a group of Palestinian villagers from their land in the West Hebron hills. It's crushing to watch, and there's no Hollywood-style redemption. One of the film makers is a Jewish Israeli, and the villagers are suspicious of him - not unreasonably, as we see him leaving the West Bank via the Israelis-only road back into Israel. 

There's been a lot of controversy over the film, which won an Oscar for best foreign film. Unsurprisingly many Israelis think it's propaganda, but some Palestinians also condemned it because the Israeli-Palestinian team that made it didn't use the right words to denounce Israel's occupation and genocide, and were therefore guilty of "normalisation". Fortunately other Palestinians, including the villagers most directly affected, were wiser.

Watched via informal distribution, even though it was available for free on Channel 4...mainly because I wanted to show it from a USB stick on the DVD player in the Springhill Common House. Only it wouldn't play there, even though it worked fine at home.

Review of "Falling Angels" by Tracy Chevalier

It's been a long time since I read any Tracy Chevalier - so long that there aren't any reviews of the books that I did read in my blog. I had a sort of feeling that I didn't like her all that much, that "Girl With A Pearl Earring", which I did like, had been a one-off.

But this - about the English way of death, and the transition from the Victorian to the Edwardian period, is really great. Told through multiple narrators, including children and adults, and with multiple perspectives on the same events, with a background of the emerging suffragette movement. Just great.

Review of "Where The Crawdads Sing" by Delia Owens

I really enjoyed the movie a few years ago, and reading the book I see that it was really faithful to the text. I enjoyed the book too - the nature writing is lovely, the plot carried me along - shame that I couldn't enjoy the ending twist, having seen the film.

Review of Love, Divided

Spanish rom-com about two introverted people living in adjoining apartments who develop a relationship without actually meeting- he's an extremely introverted game designer, she's a wannabe classical pianist/singer. After some initial conflict about noise the film becomes about the relationship between the two, and their other relationships - she with her ex-husband and imperfect mentor, he with his business partner and friend.

It's contrived but not too bad. I was pleased that I understood a lot of the Spanish.

Watched on Netflix.

Review of Leave No Trace

Sad but nicely executed film about a young girl and her dad living rough in the woods in an effort to avoid contact with authority and bureaucracy. He's a traumatised ex-veteran, she's a bright girl who appreciates what she has with her dad, but also what she's missing. 

Watched on Netflix.

Review of Triangle of Sadness

Heavy handed buy enjoyable satire about wealth and power. Young bloke model Carl is in a relationship with model-influencer Yaya, who is narcissistic and exploits him. The depiction of this, which makes up the first part of the film along with various gruesome auditions for Carl, is skin-crawlingly awful but compelling. Then she blags a trip on a luxury cruise with rich and powerful people, all of whom are horrible in different ways...and then there's a pirate attack and a shipwreck. 

Bits of it are horrible slapstick - lots of vomit as the ship hits a storm, for example - but the film carried me along.

Watched on BBC iPlayer.

Review of Baby Girl

Well, that was quite hot. Not my kind of erotic fantasy, but still quite sexy. Nicole Kidman is the CEO of a warehouse automation company, and has an affair with a young intern who gives her what she needs, which turns out to be humiliation and domination. She has a kind, loving husband, but it's not what she needs in bed. She's already been masturbating over that kind of porn while he sleeps next to her, but the intern guy is the real thing.

There's a certain amount of exploration of the issues - nothing too clever or deep, but enough to be interesting. Lots of gloomy and seedy hotel interiors, and some glossy ones too. Nicole Kidman gets to wear some nice clothes too.

And there's a treatment of the overall nastiness of corporate politics, with several people trying to blackmail Kidman's character as they find out about the affair.

Watched at the Vue Cinema.

Review of A Complete Unknown

That Bob Dylan film, which everyone has seen and everyone has liked. Not surprising, because it's very good...the acting, the cinematography, the singing - all the actors sing the tunes themselves, and do it very well. It reminded me very strongly of the days when we all had a different relationship to music, when it felt like you had found something special to you - even if you had taped it off someone else's vinyl, it felt like you had in some sense co-created it. Whereas now it just comes out of a tap in the wall, and the issue is more about how to discover or filter what's out there. 

I had a strong sense of Dylan as a genius (even though we rarely see him actually doing any writing work, just performing or jamming with others) but also as a thoroughly selfish narcissist. It's hard to feel that the politics ever really meant anything to him except as a stepping stone to a career. On the other hand seeing this film inspired me to obtain and watch "I am a noise", the Joan Baez biopic, and that has footage of the two of them singing at the 1963 March on Washington, and it's hard not to believe that must have meant something, at least at the time.

We watched this at the cinema, and I'm glad that I did. Everyone else in the cinema was of a certain age and was a fan, and I really felt a connection with tehm.

Review of Citizen Ashe

Tennis biopic of Arthur Ashe. I've watched a few tennis films lately, and I think this was the least interesting. Although the film says that Ashe was in the forefront of the struggle for Black liberation, he mainly seems to have fulfilled this role by winning at tennis. I remember that he played in South Africa and thought that had been a bad thing, but Nelson Mandela sought Ashe out when he came to the US for the first time, so maybe not.

Watched on BBC iPlayer, eventually, after several false starts.

Review of Timestalker

Embarrassingly bad. Gave up after 40 minutes

Watched via informal distribution...at least we didn't pay money to see this.

Review of Number 24

A film about the Norwegian resistance during WW2, with all the familiar themes of betrayal, collaboration, etc. It's a fairly conventional treatment - the resistance are all brave heroes, the collaborators are all monsters. It's not at all like "Black Book", the film about the Dutch resistance, which emphasises the blurred lines between resistance and collaboration.

It's gripping and well made, but not much stayed with me. Ruth on the other hand was overwhelmed by it...maybe I watch more war films than her.

On the other hand, I've just read the Wikipedia article about how collaborators were treated after the war ended, and I can't help thinking that would have made a much more interesting film.

Watched on Netflix.

Review of "The Flaming Corsage" by William Kennedy

I can't remember what happened between me and William Kennedy. I really liked his books, and then I stopped reading them. This has sat on the shelf for twenty years unread. I had a feeling that I'd started it and hadn't liked it, but I don't remember actually doing that.

Anyway I read it, and it was great. It's set in Albany around the beginning of the C20th, and it tells the story of a talented Irish-descended man who makes it...into the educated, cultured Protestant elite. He ascends from journalism on a local paper to play writing, and he marries into wealth and privilege too. There's lots about sex, and relations between rich and poor, Catholic and Protestants, men and women. The plot is quite complex...towards the end I lost it a bit, even though I was still enjoying it. It's quite a complex narrative structure too, with some switches of time-period and of narrative form...some "found" material, including fragments of the character's plays, reviews and newspaper articles, and so on.

Anyway great, and good to have rediscovered Kennedy.