Review of Let Go (spoilers)

Surprisingly decent Swedish film about a family on the point of break-up...the husband is having an affair
and is poised to leave his wife, the teenage daughter is going to a pole dancing competition, the grandmother is controlling and passive-aggressive, the son has a demanding coeliac condition that is hard to manage. Halfway through we learn that the mother has terminal cancer but isn't telling anyone for fear that the family will fall apart.

It doesn't sound much fun, but it's actually thoughtful and good to watch, with a redemptive happy ending.

Watched on Netflix.

Review of How Do You Know?

A dreadful rom-com, made slightly more tolerable by Owen Wilson's horribly narcissistic character, who demands gratitude every time he does anything even vaguely decent. But it's mainly ghastly, and predictable, and dull. I had heard that Reece Witherspoon has some sort of control over what she appears in...maybe that was after this film was made, in 2010. But what was Jack Nicholson doing in this/

Watched on Netflix.

Review of "On Java Road" by Lawrence Osborne

A noire-ish thriller set in post-handover Hong Kong, set against the background of the student protests of 2014, and made all the more poignant because we know, as the characters in the novel can only expect, that the protests will go nowhere and achieve nothing, but destroy the lives of many participants.

It's very atmospheric and I liked the settings and the characters, but it's rather let down by the plotting. It takes a really long time for the mystery - the disappearance of a young wealthy student protester, who is having an affair with the super-wealthy frenemy of the journalist first-person narrator - to get started. She doesn't actually disappear until two thirds of the way through the book, and after which there's a lot of suspense and threat, but not much really happens. 

I'm aware that Lawrence Osborne, the writer, has written a Philip Marlowe novel with the blessing of the Raymond Chandler estate, and I couldn't help thinking that Chandler would have got the basic scenario set up much more quickly/

So I sort of had mixed feelings about the book. But the next novel that I picked up wasn't nearly as well written, so I retrospectively like it more than I did straight after I finished it.

Review of Gettysburg

I watched this mainly because Facebook reels kept showing me clips of it, and the "prequel" Gods and Generals. 

There are lots of bad reviews, but it seemed a fairly decent battle picture, not prettifying war though perhaps investing it with more grandeur and dignity than it deserves. We do see men die and get wounded, but we don't see the after-effects or the gruesome battlefield amputations or deaths from festering wounds. 

It is very very long - four and a half hours. I treated it like a series and watched it in chunks.

There were a few map shots at the beginning but I think I would have appreciated a bit moe about the strategic significance of the battle, and some understanding of how the war went on for so long after this "decisive" battle.

Watched on a USB stick via informal distribution.

Review of "The Glass Room" by Simon Mawer

 

I was a bit bored with this to start with...it seemed sort of plodding, and I wasn't very interested in the characters. The rise of Hitler, the Anschluss, and so on, all felt very predictable and formulaic. Somehow it came alive for me when the consequences of the main male character's affair with a Jewish Viennese prostitute started to play out, and by the end I was moved and engaged. Not sure that I will be reading any more Simon Mawer though.

Review of "The Spinning Heart" by Donal Ryan

A really hard read, about a rural (or perhaps peri-urban) community in the west of Ireland in the aftermath of the property boom and collapse. It's told from multiple perspectives - each chapter written by a different first person narrator - but describing linked events. Along the way it shows how the boom and collapse exacerbated tensions and fault lines that were already present in the community.

Not a long book, but I could only read a few pages at a time, because it felt so intense. Highly recommended.

Review of That We May Face The Rising Sun

Well that's nearly two hours of my life that I'm not getting back. Slow, beautiful but very dull Irish film about a handsome young Irish writer and his beautiful European (French? German? Impossible to say and not explained in the narrative) living in a remote Irish village as sometime farmers, though still pursuing their more urban careers - in the absence of internet or even telephones. 

There's an awful lot of not much happening, apart from some knowing smiles between the couple, and drinking booze and tea between the couple and the other villagers. 

I fell asleep for at least half an hour but I didn't seem to have missed anything.

Oddly the man character reminded me of the man from the Oxo advert series from the 1970s, which I didn't even know I had remembered. Looking again it turns out to have been a false memory, there's little resemblance. Maybe I was thinking of the Tom character from 1970s sitcom The Good Life, where the resemblance is really very strong.

Watched at the Lansdown Film Club.

Review of "Travels with Myself and Another" by Martha Gellhorn

Martha Gellhorn made her reputation as a war correspondent, but most of this book (compiled, I think, from previously published essays) is about all the other stuff that happens around the edge of the fighting. The first long section takes around China during the war between the Japanese and various Chinese forces, and it's brilliantly evocative of the misery of travel - the damp, the dirt, the waiting...

And then she's in the Caribbean, sailing between islands to try to find German U-boats...which she doesn't find at all, but she does encounter lots of other stuff - racists, expats of various nationalities and persuasions, some American air force people. 

It's not all war time. She goes to French West Africa as it transitions to phoney independence, and she writes about the racism of the French residents but also her own racism, and in particular the visceral, unwelcome physical reaction she has to the smell and the appearance of some (but not all) Africans. 

There's lots more - her attempt to go on a safari with a guide who is a Kikuyu gay Presbyterian "driver" who can't really drive and doesn't know the country at all is brilliant.

Really enjoyable read.

Review of "Timothy's Book: Notes of an English Country Tortoise" by Verlyn Klinkenborg

Gentle, enjoyable book about...well, a tortoise, imported into a C18th village in Surrey, where it lives in the sometimes-care of a country vicar who is a naturalist. It's based on a real tortoise, and a real vicar, and most of the book is based on his field notes, which were eventually published. 

There's lots of beautiful nature writing, and the additional twist is the imagined perspective of a tortoise, which is slower, but also much longer-lived, than any of the humans in its environment.

This sounds really dull, and I was a bit put off by four pages of celebrity endorsements and quotes from reviews, but it was actually a great read. Oddly I have no memory of how it came to be on our bookshelf, though I see it was purchased from Oxfam in Muswell Hill.

Review of Moulin Rouge

I haven't watched this since it came out back in 2001, and it was an absolute joy to watch - fabulous sets, lovely costumes, surprisingly good singing from a younger Euan McGregor and Nicole Kidman. Lots of nice details that bear looking at more than once, like Kylie's cameo as the anise fairy early on.

I noticed that the very large elephant in the forecourt of the Moulin Rouge nightclub is surprisingly similar to the the animatronic "Sultan's Elephant" that came to London in 2006 - did the latter borrow from the former, or were they both based on something that existed previously?

Watched in the Common House at Springhill via a USB stick and informal distribution.

Review of Rose

A Danish film about a middle-aged woman with schizophrenia whose sister (and sister's husband) takes her on a coach trip to Paris. It's not billed as a comedy, but there are some very funny moments in it, along with lots of pathos and tragedy. I don't know to what extent schizophrenia is like this - and there's not much attempt to portray Rose's inner world, just her outer behaviour. 

I was particularly touched by the way that Rose is more confident and competent when she's in France (where she had a teenage love affair with a married man that precipitated her illness) and when she's speaking French.

Along the way I learned that D-Day is really important to Danish historical memory - I had no idea about this, and about the exiled Danish sailors who participated.

Watched at Lansdown Hall through the film club, and one of the best films I've seen there for a while.