Review of Skate Kitchen

Relatively easy if not terribly interesting film about a young woman (the script says she's eighteen but she seems younger) who is leading a lonely life in the Long Island suburbs with her divorced mother. But she's into skateboarding, and she discovers the lively and supportive skate girl culture in New York city, and soon she's part of an all-girl skating crew. There are ups and downs, and teen dramas and some drugs, but for once there's not much darkness or sense of impending disaster.

Watched on All 4.

Review of Girl

A Belgian film about a person who is transitioning from boy to girl (they are about sixteen), and also studying at a ballet school. It's a very well made film, and depicts a lot of kind people supporting the young person as they transition - doctors, psychologists, the ballet school, and the father and young brother. But despite all the support it's desperately hard - not everyone is nice, and there are some really painful episodes with the girls at the ballet school. Ballet school itself looks so painful and extreme that I think perhaps it should be banned, along with fox hunting. 

It's really worth reading the Wikipedia article about the film, which gives a lot of the background - it's based on a true story, though that seems to have worked out better than the story depicted in the film.

I note in passing that the family are also transitioning from the French-speaking to the Flemish speaking part of Belgium - they speak French at home to each other but mainly Flemish to everyone else.

It's really painful to watch, and there were some sections that I couldn't watch at all, and I came out exhausted and drained. 

Watched at Lansdown Film Club.

Review of Eagle vs Shark

Hoped I was really going to like this, because it was billed as a comedy and everything else I've watched lately has been dark, even the comedies. But of course it turned out to be mainly sad too - about a loser geek who works in a video game shop and hasn't got over (a) being bullied at school and (b) the fact that his brother, who took his own life, was the favoured son of his father. 

Another loser, a woman who works at a really depressing burger chain and is disliked by all her co-workers, who soon conspire to sack her while pretending that it was a decision by higher management, has a crush on the geek. They start a relationship, have terrible sex, and then she follows his back to his home town so that he can take revenge on the Samoan guy who bullied him at school...who of course has forgotten all about it and is in a wheelchair following an accident.

It's mainly very painful...the geek is a self-deceiving fantasist, not very bright and at once transparently stupid and tragic. The woman is also hopeless and sad, redeemed somewhat by the love of her quite-geeky brother, but the "happy ending" is that she restarts the relationship with the geek, even though he has previously broken off with her to claim that he is in relationship with the better-looking former girlfriend of his dead brother...though of course he never was.

Incidentally I learned that director Taika Waititi, surely NZ’s most famous, was born Taika Cohen, and is “Polynesian Jewish”. 

Review of "The Gustav Sonata" by Rose Tremain

Slightly depressing (but what isn't these days?) novel about a Swiss man growing up unloved by his depressed mother, and the back-story to that, and his relationship with a young apparently-talented Jewish peer who aspires to be a concert pianist. There's a Holocaust dimension, because the first boy's dad was a policeman who falsified documentation to allow fleeing German and Austrian Jewish refugees to stay in Switzerland rather than be deported. He dies not long after the character is born but his disgrace, because his falsification is uncovered, casts a long shadow over the mother and then the son.

Unhappy relationships, mental illness, mediocrity and failure...it's really a bundle of fun. It's beautifully written and captures Switzerland well, and the story carries the reader along - but I do need to read something cheerful or distracting now.

Review of The Worst Person In The World

Norwegian film about a young woman and her relationships. Starts off relatively light and funny, gradually becomes more dark and depressing - not the horror kind, just the misery of everyday life, and the way in which she is acutely depicted as a selfish and manipulative woman - all the more effective because it's not as if she is obviously nasty or uncaring. But her relationships with men are destructive - she's not a femme fatale, she's just easily bored and distracted, and that has horrible consequences for the men who become infatuated with her, because she's attractive and charming.

I note in passing that it's beautifully and cleverly filmed, and that Norway looks great in it, even the city and interior shots. She works in a bookshop, one of her lovers works in a coffee shop, and yet they manage to have a nice apartment. Well, maybe that's fantasy even in Oslo, but it didn't seem so.

Watched at Lansdown Film Club.

Review of "Circe" by Madeline Miller

Enjoyable classical-tale retelling. As far as I knew Circe was only a walk-on part in The Odyssey, though it turns out (thank Wikipedia) that her story has been re-told and embellished for a long time. Madeline Miller demonstrates that there is a point to a classical education, and manages to convey what it's like to be immortal and a god...even the rather weedy sort of god/ess that Circe is. 

Occasionally it felt a bit too long, but the ending made up for that.

Review of Sweetheart

Not the horror-survivalist film with the same name, thank goodness.

From the poster, and the blurb on the iPlayer home page, this looked like it would be a sweet and amusing coming-of-age comedy (it was described as such), but it was actually quite thoughtful but a bit sad. There's a happy ending with a reconciliation/redemption at the end, but along the way it's really challenging. Young lesbian teen on holiday at a depressing static caravan park with her separated mum, nine-year-old younger sister, and pregnant older sister and the sister's lovely kind and handsome boyfriend, develops a crush on one of the young female lifeguards, and then some fraught stuff about relationships in and out of the family.

Some good acting, and lovely shots of the park and the surrounding seascapes. Worth watching, I just need to see something that's actually funny at the moment.

Review of Who Do You Think I Am

Rather good French film starring Juliet Binoche as a middle-aged academic who has an online affair with a much younger man by assuming a fake identity as a younger woman - she "borrows" pictures and videos from her niece to use in her profile. Lots of plot twists and some really dark moments, and well worth watching. I suspect it's saying something quite interesting about desire and sexuality in the post-internet age.

Watched on BBC iPlayer - another good film there when we couldn't find anything to watch on the paid-for platforms.

Review of After Love

A woman in Dover grieves for the death of her husband, who dies suddenly in the first minutes of the film. She's an English convert to Islam, who has assimilated into her Pakistani husband's life and culture. But she discovers after his death that his work on a cross-channel ferry allowed him to have a second  family in Calais, and that his mistress has a son - her child in the Dover family has died. So she goes to Calais to find them, and is mistaken for a cleaner, and before she can explain she's doing the cleaning as the family prepare to move to another house.

It's painful to watch, but very well done, especially the relationship that develops between the English woman and the French son.

Watched on BBC iPlayer.

Review of The Banshees of Inisherin

 

A film by Martin McDonagh, set in the Arran Islands off the west coast of Ireland during the closing years of the civil war, and featuring some of his favourite actors from his other films, notably Brendan Gleeson. This is almost unbearably dark - it's called a dark comedy, but there aren't many laughs, and they get fewer as the film goes on. 

It's about the developing enmity between two islanders who were formerly close friends, where one of the pair (Brendan Gleeson) decides that the other is dull and a waste of his remaining years, which he could spend composing a piece of music that will give him some immortality. The other, played by Colin Farrell, takes this badly and wants to resume their easy if empty friendship, with increasingly tragic consequences. 

It's a beautiful well-made film, but hard to watch.

Watched at the Vue cinema in Stroud - first visit to an actual cinema for ages!

Review of "The Silence of the Girls" by Pat Barker

Ages since I've read any Pat Barker, and I'd forgotten how great she is. This is a re-telling of the Iliad story, focusing on the bits about Achilles that are the core of the actual Iliad (rather than what we think is in there because of all the other re-tellings), but told from the perspective of Briseis, the Trojan slave-woman prize that is the cause of Achilles's estrangement from the Greek army. 

It's really good. There's a little bit of supernatural stuff to bring it into line with the Iliad  - Achilles meeting his sea-nymph mother, mainly - but it's mainly realistic and gritty, with lots of ghastly depictions of Bronze Age warfare, and no punches pulled about the barbarity of the Greeks when they finally take and sack Troy.

Review of Rafiki

Kenyan film about two young women from different social backgrounds, whose fathers are rival local politicians, who fall in love. A bit slow and even dull in places, but it's great to see the Kenyan settings, and sobering to actually see what it's like being Gay or Lesbian in some places - it's one thing to know intellectually that there are lots of places where it's really lifethreatening to be LGBT, and another to see it depicted.

Watched on All4

Review of "Jews don't count" by David Baddiel

I appreciated (I can't say enjoyed) this much more than I expected to ("Sunday Times Bestseller" on the cover didn't help, because I don't expect the Murdoch press to be a reliable ally against racism, and it rather reinforces the idea that being against antisemitism is the establishment's favourite kind of antiracism).

I've never been a fan of Baddiel's comedy, and I had ingested the criticism of him as having done "blackface" in his comedy act, so how can he possibly have an opinion about racism? But actually he deals with that quite well in the book - he admits that the act was racist, and he apologizes, and asks why that disqualifies him from ever commenting about any other kind of racism. 

And yeah, the book is mainly about antisemitism among progressives - or more accurately, about the failure of progressives to respond to antisemitism, however blatant. And actually having read it has changed my perceptions of stuff that I wouldn't have made a fuss about a few weeks ago - a "Roald Dahl" show at our local theatre venue, because he may have been a Jew-hater, but that doesn't stop him being a posthumous national treasure. A friend who thinks of herself as an anti-racist springing to the defence of Kayne West on social media, because she thinks it's terrible the way the media persecutes Black men. Friends who say Jeremy Corbyn is a nice and sincere man (I'm sure he is, and there is so much about him to admire) so he can't possibly be antisemitic. 

For me there's still too much about Twitter in the book - I just don't engage with it that much, and I will engage lef