Review of Wallace and Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl

Absurdly, there appear to be people who didn't like this - not as good as the early ones, and so on. Ignore them, it's great. Lots of cinematic references - it's worth watching again to see how many I will catch, and lots of great visual jokes. I loved the narrowboat chase, where a pedestrian on the canal towpath is walking faster than the boats involved in the chase. 

It helped that I watched it live, as it was broadcast on BBC (how often do I do that?) and with my family, so that it evoked all the warm fuzzy feelings of watching previous Wallace and Gromit films with the boys. But is was just lovely anyway.

I note in passing that the threat of, and fear of, technology has moved on. In The Wrong Trousers the technology is just malfunctioning. Here it's clearly hacked by a bad actor, the evil penguin, who uses the internet to take control over Wallace's robot gnomes, which don't have very good IT security.

Review of Ballywalter

One of several films that I watched this week about alcohol and alcoholism, and how it fucks people up. This one takes a while to get going. A young woman drives a taxi in Ballywalter, a small town along the coast from Belfast, and it's not going too well for her. She lives with her mother and sister, she's dropped out of university and the taxi, which is decrepit and barely still functioning, belongs to a bloke who might be an ex. A bloke in the town, living on his own after a split from his wife and family because he killed someone while drunk-driving, starts getting a regular ride from her to a comedy course that he's doing in the city, and the film is about the relationship between the two of them. They don't become lovers, but they do become each other's redemption.

Worth watching. We watched it on BBC iPlayer, which once again describes this as a comedy, for no obvious reason.

Review of "Utopia Avenue" by David Mitchell

I mostly loved this book. Lovely descriptions, great characters, poignant moments, and set in and around the music industry just before the time of rock megastars...so that some of the real people who later become megastars (Syd Barrett, David Bowie, even the Beatles) drift in and out of the scenes. 

I'm not quite old enough to remember this period, but the tail end of it was visible to me as I grew up. Denmark street was still full of decrepit music shops, and I remember some of the clubs that he writes about - especially Bunjies, where I often went with friends on a Saturday evening.

I even quite liked the way that characters and places from David Mitchell's other books turn up for a while, and then slide out of the story. Some of it is set around Gravesend, also an important location in The Bone Clocks. 

But (spoiler alert) there's a part where Mitchell's supernatural frame-tale of a conflict down through the ages between evil drinkers of a human souls and their eternal opponents organised in "Horology" becomes important to the plot, and I really didn't like that. It must be really important to Mitchell, but it feels to me like a turd on an otherwise beautiful carpet. It could so easily have been done without, which only makes it even clearer that he really cares about this. 

It did spoil my enjoyment a bit, but on balance I still really liked the book.

Review of "The Priest, The Poet and The Pimp" by Malcolm Eva

First, to declare an interest - or rather two interests. Malcolm Eva is a friend, and he's also a self-published author (like me) who I have encouraged to go down that route.

That said, this is an enjoyable, nicely written book, with a well constructed narrative, interesting characters and a great feel for location and period. It's a period that I lived through as an adult, but which now seems almost as remote as the time of WW2...it's hard to imagine a world without the internet, search engines, and smartphones. Of course the plot would barely work with them. The texture of that world, and a time when the part of west London depicted was still dingy rather than gentrified, is very vivid.

I was a little bit worried with the Muslim pimp praying on vulnerable white girls - it's not hard to see how that could turn nasty - but there's more than one good Muslim character too, so I didn't have to wait too long to exhale. 

Definitely worth a read, and I hope Malcolm gets on and finishes his other novels-in-waiting.

Review of "The Bone Clocks" by David Mitchell

An uneven and somewhat unsatisfactory book. Bits of are beautifully written and compelling. The different chapters have different narrators and occupy different time periods; part of the point of the book is that some of the supernatural characters live very long lives and experience time differently from ordinary mortals. Some of the ordinary-mortal characters are well drawn, and either very funny, or very creepy, or sometimes both. The final dystopian chapter, set in a part of Ireland that I have visited (Sheep's Head in West Cork) was mainly very good, and almost stands alone as a piece of writing.

But the overall supernatural frame story wasn't interesting or compelling at all, and the elements of horror (which Mitchell seems to like - see "Slade House" - were a bit repulsive without being interesting.

Review of Howl's Moving Castle

I so wanted to like this - Studio Ghibli, a bit steampunk...but I didn't much. The narrative was confusing and muddled, a bit dreamlike but not in an interesting way. The characters developed relationships with each other, but there didn't actually seem to be any development. One minute they were scared of each other, and then they were best friends and lovers.

It looked great, of course, but that wasn't enough.

Watched on Netflix.

Review of Paris:13th Arrondisment

A black and white, moody and somewhat disjointed French film, about young people and their relationships. For most of the film these seemed doomed and hopeless - lots of energetic casual sex without love or any kind of emotional connection. One of the story threads is about a young woman who is mistaken for a cam girl who performs sex online, and is humiliated by her fellow students as a result.

Surprisingly, but not entirely implausibly, things sort of work out for everyone in the end.

Watched on BBC iPlayer

Review of The Holdovers

A really enjoyable and sometimes moving film about an unlikely subject - the boys who have to stay behind at Christmas in a posh New England private school and the curmudgeonly classics teacher who gets lumbered with looking after them.  Good acting, clever script, some unexpected plot developments, and art direction that convinced my friends who watched it with me that it really was made in the 1970s - rather than being made in 2022 but set in the 1970s. It even had the old-style "British Board of Film Censors" insert at the beginning.

Watched at Lansdown Film Club, and even though the film was two hours long it went by quickly, with no napping at all.

Review of What's Love Got To Do With It?

An arranged marriage romcom that wants to have its cake and eat it - to first make the case for arranged marriages and matchmakers, and then to undermine it, unsatisfactorily, with a plea for true love however incompatible the the lovers seem to be.

Some funny observations about the British Pakistani community, and some nice comic touches every so often. A long middle section in Lahore which felt like it was at least approved, and perhaps funded, by the Pakistan Tourist Board - Lahore looks wonderful and everyone is kind and happy.

Watched on BBC iPlayer. It's theoretically possible to watch iPlayer directly on our internet-connected TV, but in practice it's easier to watch it via phone, app, and Chromecast.

Review of The Boy and The Heron

Miyazaki's comeback film, the one he made after he'd retired. Not entirely sure he should have bothered. It's beautiful to look at, of course, and some of the fantasy landscapes and interiors are amazing. But the narrative and the plot are hard to follow and increasingly silly. A world populated entirely by giant carnivorous parakeets? Vicious pelicans that exist only to devour airborne souls on their way to earth for reincarnations (or is it just incarnation?)?

It's a bit like listening to someone tell you their dream, which is really important to them but makes little sense.

There are lots of explanations online, but none of them feel particularly satisfying.

Oh, and long too, and feeling even longer. 

Review of Joy

Nice film about the team who developed in vitro fertilisation ("test tube babies), showing the resistance they faced from the medical establishment, the press and the public. Bill Nighy good as one of the doctor researchers, and lots of nice art direction to reproduce the 60s and 70s.

Watched on Netflix.

Review of "Slow Horses" by Mick Herron

I'd seen the TV series first and loved it, but was still able to enjoy the book. It's mainly straightforward spy-thriller fiction, though every so often there is a little flash of stylistic excellence. There a few minor differences from the series, and in almost every case the book is more cynical and nastier about the security services - and the TV series was already pretty nasty. Very good, very subversive.

Review of "Shy" by Max Porter

Another short but powerful book from Max Porter, this time about a troubled young man in the care system. As with the other books, the typography and layout are important, so that the book is almost a piece of visual art. But just before I read this I saw Max Porter do some of it as a performance piece at the Stroud Book Festival, backed by two drum and bass producer-DJs, and with a young man taking the part of Shy...not saying any of the words, all of which were performed by Porter, but altering his posture on stage in response to the narrative. It sounds a bit pretentious, but it was actually amazing.

The book, and the performance, alternates between Shy's own voice and those of all the people around him - his mum, his stepfather, the therapists and care workers...

I rarely queue up after the event to meet the author and get a signed book, but I had to do it this time, because I wanted to tell Max Porter how great he had been...I was especially moved by the fact that in his "chat" session at the festival he referred to the Ceasefire vigil taking part outside the venue (none of the other authors seemed to have noticed it) and said that he'd joined for a while and had noticed the Jewish participants. 

Ruth read the book after me and wasn't as affected as I was, or as she had been by the other books, which makes me think that the experience of the performance was important in shaping my reading.