Review of "Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow" by Gabrielle Zevin

Nice book about a couple of young people (not a couple in the romantically-attached sense) who become close friends, make computer games together and found a company which becomes successful in the games business. It's a very easy read and enjoyable. It's also something of a period piece, set during the period when games were already an important cultural form, but when it was still possible for a couple of creatives to make something good and successful without major corporate backing.

Review of "If Beale Street Could Talk" by James Baldwin

Surprisingly I'd never read any of James Baldwin's fiction before, just a few political essays. I had seen the film that was made from the book, so I sort of knew what the plot and the tone would be. But even so I was bowled over by how good it was. The writing is beautiful, the narrative structure is clever, and it doesn't jar at all that the first-person narrator is a young heterosexual woman, even though the author is a gay man. It's about racism of course, and the way in which the system - including "justice" and the labour market, and the housing market, treat Black people, but it's also about love and sex, and he makes a really good job of that.

It's not long but it took me quite a while to read, because I wanted to savour each passage.

Review of Fighting with my family

CineMaterial, Fair use,
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=59374165

A literally knockabout comedy about a young woman from a wrestling family who is selected to go to America to make it big in professional wrestling their. I am not sure where to put the quote marks, because is it a profession? Is it really wrestling? 

It's a form of dramatised acrobatics really, with a morality play overlay - the villains, the surprises, the comebacks. Everybody involved knows it's not real fighting, especially the audience, but they relish the opportunity to participate in the fiction that it is.

The film was quite enjoyable, but wasn't quite able to make up its mind as to whether there really is any drama in who "wins" the bouts - to be a sport film the hero has to have an against-the-odds triumph, but since the film makes it abundantly clear that professional wrestling is a choreographed acrobatic drama, not a contest, we can't really have that. But then we get it anyway, which feels wrong.

I note in passing that none of the actors playing the wrestlers have tattoos, which seems improbable.

Review of Random Hearts

Romantic drama in which a quite-young Harrison Ford and Kristin Scott Thomas are thrown together when they discover that their respective spouses, who have just died in a plan crash, were having an affair. He's a cop, she's a congresswoman, and both of their careers are not going so well. The film is really sad and affected me quite a lot, because of the impact that the deceit and the discovery has on the protagonists. Interesting in that it avoids conventional happy resolution. It made me thing about the legacy adultery in my dad's family and the effect that it had on him. 

I note in passing that the film is 25  years old, and that the main way this manifests itself is the phones - one or two characters have cellphones, but there's a lot of payphone usage, and plot elements turn on messages left on answer machines. Will this be incomprehensible to a future generation?

Watched on Netflix, a rare decent film there.

Review of "The Virgin and The Gipsy" by D H Lawrence

Odd period piece of a book, about a "family" - rector father, three daughters and his mother and sister, from which the daughter's mother has absconded with a lover. The youngest daughter is the central character, and it's about her inner life and the way she experiences social constrictions and conventions. Part of her inner life includes her infatuation with the eponymous gypsy, a young dark brooding type with almost no character of his own - tellingly, it's only in the final lines of the book that the young woman realises that he has a name.

Review of Pressure Point

Not very interesting film about competitive college rowing, so centring on privileged white men and their affairs - sexual and sporting. Some plot twists and drama, but it's hard to really care about the characters. As a team sport film it has the obligatory structure, where a tough coach eventually gets the guys to work together as a team and get in touch with their inner motivation to succeed over a group of similar young men.

Watched on Netflix.

Review of De Lovely

An enjoyable Cole Porter biopic that captures something of the man's genius - especially in the performance of the songs by some very talented singers. It can't really hide the fact that CP had a mainly dull life, enlivened only by his sexless but love-filled marriage and his gay lovers.

Watched via informal distribution.

Review of "Zarafa: The true story of a giraffe's journey from the plains of Africa to the heart of post-Napoleonic France"

If it's possible for a book to be enjoyably boring, that's what this is. It's a bit padded - a lot of history about Muhammad Ali, Mameluke ruler of Egypt, description of the geography of the Nile, and so on. And the story is engaging enough, though not really of any major consequence. This is really a footnote in several stories, including that of colonial collections, European involvement in the Near East, Egyptology, and so on.

It was a nice enough read, and not at all emotionally taxing while just interesting enough to keep me engaged.

I note in passing that the author describes the mayors of small towns in the Rhone valley as wearing tricolour sashes - did they do that during the period of the Bourbon restoration, when the events described are supposed to be taking place?

Review of "Aftermath: Life in the fallout of the Third Reich" by Harald Jahner

 

What an absolutely amazing book.  I thought I'd done all the reading that I needed to about the Third Reich, and the de-Nazification process. But I learned so much from reading this - about the way that the Black Market re-socialised Germans, about the craze for American music (and American soldiers, for the German women) that swept through the ruined cities, about the revival of businesses that underlay the economic miracle. 

Two things in particular stood out for me - first, the experience of the Jews in the DP camps around Europe. I'd been busy composing some words about the nature of Zionism before I started to read that chapter, and it was along the lines of "Zionism says that the Jews of each country, whatever their citizenship, are Jews by nationality". And as I read the chapter, I considered that it wasn't at all surprising that this was how the Jews of the DP camps came to view themselves, whatever they may have thought about themselves before. Even within the camps Polish Jews were persecuted by their "fellow" Poles, and the same happened in other nationality camps like Ukrainians. It must have seemed natural to regard oneself as of Jewish nationality - the more so because Poland, and Czechoslovakia, and the USSR (and no doubt other countries) always designated the Jews as a nationality. 

And for the survivors of the Holocaust and also the aftermath, the Nakba in Palestine might not have seemed so bad. The number of Palestinians displaced was big in absolute terms, and relative to the size of the Palestinian population, but it was a drop in the ocean compared to the displacements that were taking place in Europe.

The last chapter of the book, about the extent of de-Nazification, and about all the functionaries that were allowed to return to their posts despite their Nazi pasts, and about how the Germans came to regard themselves as the victims of Nazism rather than the perpetrators, was really enlightening too.

Review of The Heat

Cop buddy movie, with Sandra Bullock as the semi-elite but annoying FBI agent who wants to pull rank and play by the rules, and Melissa McCarthy as the slightly gross and rough-edged junior detective who breaks all the rules but knows how to get things done. Formulaic but good fun, with some good jokes - a nice one about Boston accents.

Review of Scrapper

Nice sort of coming-of-age movie about a twelve-year old girl, living on her own in an Essex housing estate - her mum has died and she's pretending that she's being looked after by an uncle, fooling the social services with phrases recorded on her mobile with the help of a cooperative stoner. She gets by with money from stealing and selling bicycles, with help from a friend who lives nearby and is in on her secret. Then her deadbeat dad turns up from Ibiza, and the rest of the film is about their developing relationship.

It's very well done - I think it's the debut for the writer-director and the main actor. 

It rather reminded me of Fish Tank, with similar themes and locations, but also of Aftersun (similarly about a father-daughter relationship) though it's not as dark as either. 

Watched via informal distribution.