Review of Newsies

A 1992 Disney musical film about the 1899 New York newsboys' strike, recently adapted into a stage musical and now on in London. It's not a great film, and I have already forgotten all the songs, but it's likeable, and it's an actual Disney film and a musical about a strike in which the strikers are the heroes, beating up scabs is celebrated, and the strikers win through calling on working class solidarity. 

Sure, there are some less correct touches - at one point the strikers appear to have decided that physical confrontation with scabs is not a good thing, because it makes them look bad...though if my memory serves me right they then carry on doing it anyway. They also fight with the cops, who are almost always depicted negatively. And there's an intervention by NY Governor Teddy Roosevelt which means that the strike is at least partly won by appeal to the "good" authorities over the bad ones. And the depiction of Joseph Pullitzer verges on the antisemitic, which should be no surprise in a Disney film. And there's some schmaltzy scenes with the hero getting the girl at the end, though I'd have been disappointed if they didn't end up together.

But still, it's a strike movie with strikers as heroes, and with lines like "My dad's got no protection, they don't have a union in his factory." And somebody must have decided that now was a good time to turn it into a stage musical, which is interesting.

Watched via informal distribution and and HDMI cable.

Review of Pinoccio

I was surprisingly touched by this, which doesn't feel entirely like a children's film. It's a bit darker than the Disney Pinoccio, even though I have a memory of finding bits of that really menacing as a child. This is beautiful to look at, with backgrounds that look much more like traditional paintings than CGI landscapes. It's at least partly done with stop-motion puppet animation rather than CGI, and some of the puppets are brilliant to look at.

It's also very much an anti-fascist Pinoccio, set in 1920s and then wartime Italy, with Mussolini posters and fascist slogans on the walls, and a sinister fascist official in the village. It's not a sophisticated critique of fascist ideology or purpose, but at least the bad guys are recognisably historical bad guys rather than just all-purpose tyrants.

It felt to me like there were a few big ideas in there too, like the sweetness of human life coming from the knowledge that we are mortal - Pinoccio is reborn each time he dies, after a brief spell in a gloomy bardo populated with card-playing, Yiddish-inflected rabbits. And there is quite a lot about relations between fathers and sons, which got to me too.

And I noted in passing that one of the places visited by the travelling puppet show to which Pinoccio is seduced is Alessandria, outside Torino...which reminded me of my odd work trip there back in the 1980s, and convinced me that I ought to write up the memory of it.

Watched on Netflix.

Review of "Britt-Marie Was Here"

Dreadful Swedish "comedy drama" about a woman in late middle age (63, please tell me that's late middle age rather than elderly) who finds out that her boring husband is having an affair and leaves him, getting a job as a youth worker in a remote town where she is expected to coach the under-10s football team in a decrepit youth centre. 

It has all the cliches of an "underdog team" is redeemed by engaged coach type film, but someone forgot to write an actual plot. Hard to understand why this was released, it is so bad. Lots of plot elements casually strewn across the narrative as if something wandered across the script taking random shits...the inspiring older sister who dies in a car crash aged 10 and therefore blights the central character's life, the would-be love interest policeman in the remote town, the youth centre is going to be closed down...none of them treated with anything like attention. 

The mainly positive reviews of this film cast doubt on the whole online review system. It's based on a book, part of a series, with the character being recycled from an earlier one in the series. The reviews of this fourth book seem to have been bad, which suggests perhaps that the book reviewing process is not so corrupted.

Watched on BBC iPlayer, and a disgrace to the service.

Review of The Swimmers

 

Really good film about two young Syrian women who flee to Europe via the Istambul-Aegean route...scary scenes of the sea crossing in a deflating rubber boat with a faulty motor, and then having to deal with crooked and violent people smugglers. The two were champion swimmers, and the tale end of the film turns a bit into a sporting triumph movie - the younger one gets to swim in the Rio Olympic games as part of a refugee team, and that's not as interesting as the rest but sort of a come-down from the earlier tension. 

I was struck by how normal the family's Damascus life was - they really were people like us, not insurgents or Islamists, absolutely the opposite. Early in the film the girls are groped by a soldier who stops their bus at a checkpoint, and I wondered whether the family might actually have been regime supporters...not that it matters, and not that everyone either is or isn't, but it might have fleshed out their background.

Anyway, a good film - one of the best I've seen on Netflix for a while.

Review of "Cloud Cuckoo Land" by Anthony Doer

Really great multi-threaded novel, with five very different stories united around an almost-lost ancient greek text, a comic novel about a shepherd who gets turned into a donkey. Some of it's set around the fall of Constatinople, some in our time in Idaho, and some in the distant future aboard an ark-spaceship that has rescued a few people from a dying earth. The writing, the plotting, is all fantastic. Hard to say much more without spoliers, but I'm stunned by how good and clever this...and despite a lot of heaviness it's ultimately redemptive rather than depressing.

And now I have to read his other stuff - can't believe I have waited so long.

Review of Stutz

 

Surprisingly thoughtful and enjoyable black and white documentary movie about a youngish film-maker's relationship with his aging, Parkinson-crippled therapist, the eponymous Stutz. Some odd filming - the set looks like a therapist's room, but it's made clear to us that it's a set, as is also the case with the bedroom to which the therapist sometimes retires.

Two things stayed with me. First, Stutz's insistence that he wanted therapy to give people benefits right away - he doesn't hold to the "worse before it gets better" school of therapy, and he wants to give his patients tips and tricks (he calls them tools)to make them feel better right away - that's why the film-maker loves him so much. Second, he provides a pyramid model of human needs (a bit like the Maslow hierarchy, but simpler). The bottom is the body - you have to be right with your body, so eat well and exercise if you want your mind to be right. Obvious, but it bears saying. The middle is other people - you need to be right in your relationships with others, so fix things - again, obvious but still good. And the top level is yourself, you need to be right with yourself, and - he says - you address that by writing. 

So I started doing the morning pages thing that Ruth used to do with Marcus and Carly years ago, and I write three pages as early in the morning as I can. Just stream of consciousness, no editing or pre-thinking...and it really is amazing.

Review of "The Road to Little Dribbling: More Notes from a Small Island" by Bill Bryson

Mainly lovely, like sitting in a pub listening to Bill Bryson ramble on about things that he just finds interesting, whether they are relevant to the conversation or not. A nice break from darkness and somber stuff, with no underlying message - though a well-expressed hatred of Tories and other kinds of meanness and nastiness. He has a dislike of the National Trust that I find endearing.

His style might get wearing after a while, but I just enjoyed this from end to end.