Review of Joy

Nice film about the team who developed in vitro fertilisation ("test tube babies), showing the resistance they faced from the medical establishment, the press and the public. Bill Nighy good as one of the doctor researchers, and lots of nice art direction to reproduce the 60s and 70s.

Watched on Netflix.

Review of "Slow Horses" by Mick Herron

I'd seen the TV series first and loved it, but was still able to enjoy the book. It's mainly straightforward spy-thriller fiction, though every so often there is a little flash of stylistic excellence. There a few minor differences from the series, and in almost every case the book is more cynical and nastier about the security services - and the TV series was already pretty nasty. Very good, very subversive.

Review of "Shy" by Max Porter

Another short but powerful book from Max Porter, this time about a troubled young man in the care system. As with the other books, the typography and layout are important, so that the book is almost a piece of visual art. But just before I read this I saw Max Porter do some of it as a performance piece at the Stroud Book Festival, backed by two drum and bass producer-DJs, and with a young man taking the part of Shy...not saying any of the words, all of which were performed by Porter, but altering his posture on stage in response to the narrative. It sounds a bit pretentious, but it was actually amazing.

The book, and the performance, alternates between Shy's own voice and those of all the people around him - his mum, his stepfather, the therapists and care workers...

I rarely queue up after the event to meet the author and get a signed book, but I had to do it this time, because I wanted to tell Max Porter how great he had been...I was especially moved by the fact that in his "chat" session at the festival he referred to the Ceasefire vigil taking part outside the venue (none of the other authors seemed to have noticed it) and said that he'd joined for a while and had noticed the Jewish participants. 

Ruth read the book after me and wasn't as affected as I was, or as she had been by the other books, which makes me think that the experience of the performance was important in shaping my reading.

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.