Review of The Teachers' Lounge

Well crafted drama about an episode in a modern German secondary school, in which a young teacher gets caught up when someone (A colleague? A student?) is suspected of stealing from others. The film deals well with racism in the school and among the staff, and with the way that management processes can spiral into a nightmare with minimal bad intention.

Watched on BBC iPlayer.

Review of Corsage

Strange, slow film about the life of Elizabeth Empress of Austria-Hungary. The depiction of her life in the film appears really improbable, but a reading of her actual bio from Wikipedia is even weirder. The film doesn't seem to be very concerned to stick to the historical narrative, which seems odd in a biopic. For example [spoiler alert], it shows Elizabeth committing suicide by jumping into the sea, but the real Elizabeth died as a result of an unlikely assassination.  

It's just about possible that the film is an alternative account of the known facts (rather than a parallel account) because we are shown Elizabeth increasingly changing places with one of her ladies-in-waiting...so maybe she does commit suicide, and it's the lady-in-waiting who dies in the assassination many years later. Of course the Emperor Franz Josef would have had to been in on this, because although they don't spend that much time together they do occasionally have perfunctory sex, and he would surely have noticed.

Despite the slowness I enjoyed it, particularly the depictions of stultifying court life. Elizabeth doesn't seem to have much fun. I note in passing that although the rooms in the Imperial palaces are very grand, the corridors between them are shabby and cluttered with old furniture. Maybe that's how they were.

Review of "We, The Drowned" by Carsten Jensen

Big saga-type book about the seagoing inhabitants of the Danish town/island of Marstal over the period 1848 to 1945 - largely defined by a succession of wars against first Prussia and then Germany. It's also defined by the age of sailing merchant ships and their replacement by steamships; there are lots of vivid descriptions of how hard and injurious the life of the sailors were.

It took me a while to get into it, and I was a bit confused by shifting narrators, but I ended up enjoying it very much.

Review of "A History of The World in 47 Borders" by Jonn Elledge

Read this on holiday, and it was um sort of OK...some interesting geographical peculiarities, some of which I hadn't heard of. I think some of my favourites weren't in then - the enclave of Llivia, for example, a little bit of Spain inside the borders of France. Some others that felt like they could have been left out. A generally politically progressive sort of outlook, but a slightly "chap-ish" sense of humour that didn't land so well with me.

Review of Rental Family

A surprisingly enjoyable Japanese-American comedy about a big goofy American actor who finds himself working with an agency that supply actors into personal and domestic situations. Of course he becomes emotionally engaged with the people to whom his efforts are directed (not the "clients" as such because they are the ones who have hired him to deceive someone else) - an old and dementing man who was once a notable actor, and a young girl who needs a second parent to get into a private school.

Watched in the cinema on the Brittany Ferry ship to Santander!

Review of "Transgressions" by Sarah Dunnant

Not read any Sarah Dunant before, but on the strength of this I will. It starts off a bit dull, about a woman who has recently separated from her apparently rather obnoxious partner getting used to being alone, and sometimes missing things that he's taken in the separation of things. And she's a translator, translating a rather sleazy novel from Czech to English, which gives Dunant permission to indulge in writing sleaze - porn-adjacent crime fiction, I'd say.

But then there's a stalker, and the vague threats coalesce into something much darker, and the sleaze migrates from the book-within-a-book to the main narrative, and it went from being something that I read at night to go to sleep to something that I had to avoid reading last thing at night. Trigger warning - there's some rape, but also some hint of rape fantasies too.

There's a small additional pleasure in the technology, which is pre-mobile and pre-web, even though it's by no means a "historical" novel.

Small declaration of interest. I haven't actually met Sarah Dunant, but she is the partner of a member of the Stroud Red Band, so that's sort of connected.

Review of Bhaji on The Beach

We were after a feelgood film, but this wasn't it. I guess it just hasn't aged well - it's from 1993, and it features a group of women from an Asian women's centre being taken for a day's outing from the West Midlands to Blackpool. It mainly felt like a collection of not very interesting or engaging stereotypes.

Watched at Jane's house, streamed via Amazon Prime.

Review of Tar

Long, with a slow start, but after about half an hour it become absolutely gripping - even though it's about the world of high culture music, with which I have relatively little connection. Because it's also about corruption, and privilege, and exploitation and treachery, and how far it's possible for someone to fall. 

Just brilliant, watch it.

Watched on BBC iPlayer.

Review of Brides

A surprisingly light but clever and thoughtful film about two British Muslim girls who journey to Syria to join Daesh - obviously based on the Shamira Begum case. It explores their reasons for wanting to leave their families and go somewhere unknown and dangerous - unhappy family relationships, a rotten environment at school and teachers who really don't seem to notice what is going on. They're not fanatics or even very devout.

A lot of the action happens in Turkey, as they try to reach and then cross the border into Syria. There's tension but no real terror for most of the film - it almost feels like a caper movie. Most of the Turkish people are kind and helpful to them.

Watched as part of the Stroud Film Festival, with a discussion afterwards featuring women from the Bristol Somali Kitchen (one of the girls in the film is Somali).

Review of Sometimes, Always, Never

Strange, sad film about a man (Bill Nighy) whose son has disappeared, and how he and his other son pass their time searching for him, physically and online. The family used to play Scrabble - in fact, Bill Nighy's character is something of a Scrabble hustler, playing against strangers for money, and there's a lot about the game in the film.

From the descriptions I'd expected it to be funny, but it mainly wasn't - not bad, just not at all feelgood. The end is supposed to be a sort of redemption, but it didn't feel like it to me.

Watched via USB stick and informal distribution.

Review of "The Time of Our Singing" by Richard Powers

A wonderful, long (one of the reviewers on the cover describes it as "epic" and that felt right) book about music, culture, race, antisemitism and the Holocaust, and how all that plays out through the life of a mixed race couple and their children. It takes in key moments in Black American history, and even touches on some important Physics stuff - Albert Einstein has a walk-on part, because one of the main characters is a scatty German-Jewish physicist genius. Something on how a life can have a shape, and touch on other lives.

I've read other books by Richard Powers, and they were also good, but this shows how broad his range is.

So much to think about - I was really sad when I'd finished it.

Review of Wild Rose

Lovely feelgood film that ended the Stroud Film Festival. I'd seen it before, but enjoyed it a lot more this time - maybe because I watched it in a cinema surrounded by lots of other people who were enjoying it, maybe because it followed a succession of good but grim films at the festival. Oh, and Jessie Buckley now carries all the wonderfulness of her other roles, which were not part of my experience last time round. 

Review of The Half of It

A nice, enjoyable American High School romcom, if that's not an oxymoron. It's a re-telling of Cyrano de Bergerac, only this time the clever writer hiding behind the goofy and inept would-be lover is a Chinese migrant girl, who is already writing her co-students' essays for them with the full knowledge of the class English teacher. And though she's writing the love letters and text messages for the goof, she herself has a lesbian crush on the object of his romantic love.

Anyway, it's a surprisingly nice film. 

Watched on someone else's laptop via HDMI cable to someone else's big TV - so I don't know how it came to be obtained.

Review of "Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities" by Rebecca Solnit

I used to write about technology for a living, and I ended up writing about first technology-enabled transport, and then “smart cities”. There’s quite a lot of overlap between these two domains. One of the things that I encountered was what I ended up calling “zombie projects” – pilots and trials that had come to an end, but continued to be reported as if they were contemporary and ongoing. Unlike the way zombies are usually depicted, though, zombie projects were the subject of relentlessly cheerful narratives. Ideas that had turned out to be dead ends, or moderate failings from which learnings could be drawn, were still success stories in zombie-project-land. 

I was reminded of this when I read Rebecca Solnit’s book. It’s about hopefulness, so it’s inevitably a compilation of success stories. Trouble is, it’s from 2016, so we know how a lot of the stories turned out. Solnit’s a “horizontalist” anarchist, and she wants to believe that spontaneous non-hierarchical organisation works well. Truth is, sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn’t. It seems to me that it can sometimes work for short term mutual aid settings, and for organising protests, but that it doesn’t for long term projects about political or social transition. 

For the most part the Arab Spring was a ghastly failure. There was a transition in Tunisia, though I haven’t followed up on how it’s turned out now. But in other countries the decentralised non-hierarchical organisation that is so celebrated didn’t lead to anything good. In Bahrain the pro-democracy protesters were gunned down. In Egypt the non-hierarchical opposition led first to the triumph of the entirely hierarchical and disciplined Muslim Brotherhood, and then to the overthrow of the elected Muslim Brotherhood government by the same militarist forces who had been in control in the first place. 

And the protests and boycotts that the book celebrates? Sometimes they were successful, at least in their own limited terms, but the world is not transformed. Capitalism is more powerful than it was in 2016, economic inequality is worse, the atmosphere is more full of Carbon Dioxide…

There’s no analysis of what worked and what didn’t – even though such analysis is possible...Vincent Bevin’s book “If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution” did this in an honest way, though it’s still short on prescriptions. If we keep learning the wrong lessons from our experiences, and in particular if we fetishise some kinds or organisation (the leaderless, non-hierarchical thing) despite experience, then we will never move forward.

I understand that it’s important to raise our spirits, and to keep believing that things might go our way. But transparent dishonesty about success stories has the opposite effect, at least for me. If we are not prepared to learn anything from both our successes and our failures, then we are engaged in pointless gestures, not actual political transformation.