Review of "Altered Carbon" by Richard Morgan

The hardest science fiction I've read for a long time, and a mashup of cyberpunk and hard boiled detective noir. I really loved it. It's been on my Kindle for years, but somehow I never got round to reading it. I must say that I couldn't follow every twist and turn of the plot - the fact that characters can die and be restored most of the time, and that they slip in and out of each other's bodies - sorry, "sleeves" - makes this harder. I couldn't explain who turned out to have done it if any of my lives depended on it. Still, it was good if not great, and I will be back for more. I have a feeling that I started to watch the TV series once, and I might even have another look at that.

Review of Radical Love: The Life and Legacy of Satish Kumar

I watched this in the company of about a hundred people who were devotees of Kumar and thought he was perhaps literally God's gift to humanity. Some of these people were friends whom I admire, and others were fascist-adjacent woo lovers, so perhaps he is some sort of Rorschach inkblot on to who you can project whatever you want. 

I was depressed and bored by the film, which at just over an hour felt way too long. Lots of spiritual practices and pilgrimages, described as if they were effective political actions. A long section with Vananda Shiva, which brought to mind the film about her watched in the same place, and which left me with the same uncomfortable feeling. 

So yeah, watched at Hawkwood as part of Stroud Film Festival. Based on the venue I had an expectation about what the film would be like, which was not disappointed. However, Ruth and I walked there across the fields and through the woods by moonlight, and that was wonderful.

Review of Conclave

A papal election thriller, with lots of twists as the various candidates are revealed to have things in their past, or even in their presents, that don't look good in a putative Pope.

Very lush to look at, but not that much actually happens - unsurprisingly, because the cardinals doing the voting are locked in to the Vatican, so all that we can really see are side conversations and voting procedures.

Sort of tense without being actually interesting, though it held our attention.

Watched via USB and informal distribution.

Review of No Other Land

Absolutely relentless documentation of the way that first the Israeli army, and then settlers, try to evict a group of Palestinian villagers from their land in the West Hebron hills. It's crushing to watch, and there's no Hollywood-style redemption. One of the film makers is a Jewish Israeli, and the villagers are suspicious of him - not unreasonably, as we see him leaving the West Bank via the Israelis-only road back into Israel. 

There's been a lot of controversy over the film, which won an Oscar for best foreign film. Unsurprisingly many Israelis think it's propaganda, but some Palestinians also condemned it because the Israeli-Palestinian team that made it didn't use the right words to denounce Israel's occupation and genocide, and were therefore guilty of "normalisation". Fortunately other Palestinians, including the villagers most directly affected, were wiser.

Watched via informal distribution, even though it was available for free on Channel 4...mainly because I wanted to show it from a USB stick on the DVD player in the Springhill Common House. Only it wouldn't play there, even though it worked fine at home.

Review of "Falling Angels" by Tracy Chevalier

It's been a long time since I read any Tracy Chevalier - so long that there aren't any reviews of the books that I did read in my blog. I had a sort of feeling that I didn't like her all that much, that "Girl With A Pearl Earring", which I did like, had been a one-off.

But this - about the English way of death, and the transition from the Victorian to the Edwardian period, is really great. Told through multiple narrators, including children and adults, and with multiple perspectives on the same events, with a background of the emerging suffragette movement. Just great.

Review of "Where The Crawdads Sing" by Delia Owens

I really enjoyed the movie a few years ago, and reading the book I see that it was really faithful to the text. I enjoyed the book too - the nature writing is lovely, the plot carried me along - shame that I couldn't enjoy the ending twist, having seen the film.

Review of Love, Divided

Spanish rom-com about two introverted people living in adjoining apartments who develop a relationship without actually meeting- he's an extremely introverted game designer, she's a wannabe classical pianist/singer. After some initial conflict about noise the film becomes about the relationship between the two, and their other relationships - she with her ex-husband and imperfect mentor, he with his business partner and friend.

It's contrived but not too bad. I was pleased that I understood a lot of the Spanish.

Watched on Netflix.

Review of Leave No Trace

Sad but nicely executed film about a young girl and her dad living rough in the woods in an effort to avoid contact with authority and bureaucracy. He's a traumatised ex-veteran, she's a bright girl who appreciates what she has with her dad, but also what she's missing. 

Watched on Netflix.

Review of Triangle of Sadness

Heavy handed buy enjoyable satire about wealth and power. Young bloke model Carl is in a relationship with model-influencer Yaya, who is narcissistic and exploits him. The depiction of this, which makes up the first part of the film along with various gruesome auditions for Carl, is skin-crawlingly awful but compelling. Then she blags a trip on a luxury cruise with rich and powerful people, all of whom are horrible in different ways...and then there's a pirate attack and a shipwreck. 

Bits of it are horrible slapstick - lots of vomit as the ship hits a storm, for example - but the film carried me along.

Watched on BBC iPlayer.

Review of Baby Girl

Well, that was quite hot. Not my kind of erotic fantasy, but still quite sexy. Nicole Kidman is the CEO of a warehouse automation company, and has an affair with a young intern who gives her what she needs, which turns out to be humiliation and domination. She has a kind, loving husband, but it's not what she needs in bed. She's already been masturbating over that kind of porn while he sleeps next to her, but the intern guy is the real thing.

There's a certain amount of exploration of the issues - nothing too clever or deep, but enough to be interesting. Lots of gloomy and seedy hotel interiors, and some glossy ones too. Nicole Kidman gets to wear some nice clothes too.

And there's a treatment of the overall nastiness of corporate politics, with several people trying to blackmail Kidman's character as they find out about the affair.

Watched at the Vue Cinema.

Review of A Complete Unknown

That Bob Dylan film, which everyone has seen and everyone has liked. Not surprising, because it's very good...the acting, the cinematography, the singing - all the actors sing the tunes themselves, and do it very well. It reminded me very strongly of the days when we all had a different relationship to music, when it felt like you had found something special to you - even if you had taped it off someone else's vinyl, it felt like you had in some sense co-created it. Whereas now it just comes out of a tap in the wall, and the issue is more about how to discover or filter what's out there. 

I had a strong sense of Dylan as a genius (even though we rarely see him actually doing any writing work, just performing or jamming with others) but also as a thoroughly selfish narcissist. It's hard to feel that the politics ever really meant anything to him except as a stepping stone to a career. On the other hand seeing this film inspired me to obtain and watch "I am a noise", the Joan Baez biopic, and that has footage of the two of them singing at the 1963 March on Washington, and it's hard not to believe that must have meant something, at least at the time.

We watched this at the cinema, and I'm glad that I did. Everyone else in the cinema was of a certain age and was a fan, and I really felt a connection with tehm.

Review of Citizen Ashe

Tennis biopic of Arthur Ashe. I've watched a few tennis films lately, and I think this was the least interesting. Although the film says that Ashe was in the forefront of the struggle for Black liberation, he mainly seems to have fulfilled this role by winning at tennis. I remember that he played in South Africa and thought that had been a bad thing, but Nelson Mandela sought Ashe out when he came to the US for the first time, so maybe not.

Watched on BBC iPlayer, eventually, after several false starts.

Review of Timestalker

Embarrassingly bad. Gave up after 40 minutes

Watched via informal distribution...at least we didn't pay money to see this.

Review of Number 24

A film about the Norwegian resistance during WW2, with all the familiar themes of betrayal, collaboration, etc. It's a fairly conventional treatment - the resistance are all brave heroes, the collaborators are all monsters. It's not at all like "Black Book", the film about the Dutch resistance, which emphasises the blurred lines between resistance and collaboration.

It's gripping and well made, but not much stayed with me. Ruth on the other hand was overwhelmed by it...maybe I watch more war films than her.

On the other hand, I've just read the Wikipedia article about how collaborators were treated after the war ended, and I can't help thinking that would have made a much more interesting film.

Watched on Netflix.

Review of "The Flaming Corsage" by William Kennedy

I can't remember what happened between me and William Kennedy. I really liked his books, and then I stopped reading them. This has sat on the shelf for twenty years unread. I had a feeling that I'd started it and hadn't liked it, but I don't remember actually doing that.

Anyway I read it, and it was great. It's set in Albany around the beginning of the C20th, and it tells the story of a talented Irish-descended man who makes it...into the educated, cultured Protestant elite. He ascends from journalism on a local paper to play writing, and he marries into wealth and privilege too. There's lots about sex, and relations between rich and poor, Catholic and Protestants, men and women. The plot is quite complex...towards the end I lost it a bit, even though I was still enjoying it. It's quite a complex narrative structure too, with some switches of time-period and of narrative form...some "found" material, including fragments of the character's plays, reviews and newspaper articles, and so on.

Anyway great, and good to have rediscovered Kennedy.

Review of "Trumpet" by Jackie Kay

A striking book about a Jazz trumpeter, told through the eyes of the people who are affected by the trumpeter's death...The trumpeter presented as a man, but was actually a woman. His "wife" (were they legally married?) knew, and loved them all the same; but the son did not know, until told by the undertaker, who also had had no previous warning until he begins to prepare the body. The trumpeter's mother, still alive in a care home in Scotland, does not know that her daughter who left home but still writes to her, has spent a life as a man. There's a horrible tabloid reporter after a story, who seduces the son in an effort to get an inside track. 

It sounds creepy, but it's sort of beautiful. There's not a lot about trumpet playing, but it's enough of the story to be of interest to me as a trumpet aspirer.

Review of I am a noise

Fantastic biopic of Joan Baez. I wanted to watch this because I'd just watched "A Complete Unknown", about Bob Dylan, in which Joan Baez is just one of several women that he has brief relationships with. 

I was expecting another music biopic, but it turned out to be a heart-rending documentary about Baez's really quite sad life - broken relationships with friends, family and lovers, and mental illness. This is clearly someone who talent (extending beyond music, her drawing is really good too) and success have not made at all happy. And this despite a genuine commitment to political struggle, that gave her a sense of purpose, but still didn't make up for the sadness that has haunted her since childhood.

I was struck also by the talent of her less well known sister, Mimi Farina, who lost the lover of her life at 21 and died of cancer at 56 - Mimi is responsible for the tune of "Bread and Roses", one of my favourites.

Watching the footage of her and Dylan singing at the March on Washington in 1963 it's hard not to be affected by the hope that's present in that huge multiracial crowd, and also hard not to feel that the hope was betrayed - look at America now.

Review of To Leslie

Decent film about alcoholism. The eponymous Leslie is broken by drink and can't hold anything together, but she finds life and meaning at an out of town motel where she takes up residence, and a job cleaning. To her (and our) surprise the manager gives her one chance after another as she repeatedly fucks up. We gradually learn his back story as well as hers. Yeah, this is one is described as "heartwarming" but there's a lot of pain to go through before you get to that.

Review of "Orbital" by Samantha Harvey

A beautiful gem of a book...very short, barely even a novella, but I couldn't read it quickly because it was so beautiful. It's set in the International Space Station, more or less as it is now, though there's another moon mission in progress - the only thing in the book that makes it speculative fiction rather than just naturalistic fiction. 

It describes the back stories and inner lives of the occupants - Russians, Americans, Japanese - but also their sensuous experiences of the space station, and the physical sensations of being in weightless, and the impact on time perception of living through so many dawns in each 24 hour period. 

So well done, it's hard to believe that she hasn't been there.

And of course it's also about Earth, and what it looks like from the space station (humans largely invisible except at night), and there's the tiniest brush with climate turmoil - bigger, more unpredictable storms, changing seasons on the ground.

Review of "The Axeman's Jazz" by Ray Celestin

Nicely paced historical thriller/crime novel, set in an atmospheric New Orleans in the early 20th century, with lots of Jazz (one of the protagonists is a young Lewis Armstrong, not yet Louis) and sleaze and graft. A narrative that swaps between viewpoints - it's "close third" person narrative but the person swaps around, and it's well done. Actually based on a true story, so sprinkled with occasional genuine newspaper articles.

I hadn't previously heard of Ray Celestin, who doesn't seem to have written any other novels, but I will keep an eye out for him.

Review of "How Novels Work" by John Mullan

Nice, serious but not academic book about literature. Focused on slightly more serious fiction rather than the most popular stuff - so David Lodge and John le Carre are in, Bridget Jones and Katie Fforde are out. Well-written essays on structure, literary devices, narrative person and so on, without too much technical language and plenty of explication. Lots of stuff worth reading (and stealing) for aspiring authors!

Eulogy for my Mum Sylvia Green

 My Mum Sylvia Green died on the night of 2nd February 2025. This is what I said at her funeral.

Most of us knew Sylvia as an exemplar home-maker - a wife, mother, grandmother, and of course daughter. She fulfilled all of these roles to the max, and though she didn't really think men and boys needed to know how to cook, she did manage to teach me most of what I know about that.

And she was a transmitter of Jewish culture too, in language and home ritual and family stories, and of course food. Most of what is important to me about my Jewish identity is what came to me from my Mum.

But though she would have been the last to say so, she was also an intellectual. She loved books, and theatre and film. She would tell me the story of a film that she had seen, and it was like I'd seen it myself. She was a wonderful story-teller. 

This was despite the fact that she'd had almost no formal education at all. Her school life wad disrupted by the war. She stopped school at nine years old when the family moved to Brighton to escape the Blitz, and she never really went back. 

Her psyche was shaped by the war. She told me stories of the terror of nights spent in air raid shelters, of coming in the morning to find familiar buildings gone or in smoking ruins. Her rather was a registered alien, never naturalised as British. He had to report weekly to a police station. And he was never naturalised because of what happened to his own father, deported to Russia during WW1 for refusing to be conscripted in to the British army.

All of that shapes a person. My mum struggled for years with depression. Most of that struggle took place inside her. She never let it impact on how she behaved towards others. Mum was always in motion, always doing things for other people. Even when I visited her in the care home where she sat wheelchair bound, she was offering to go and make me a meal.

She was resilient and brave. When Louis was born in Sydney, she got on a plane, by herself, even though she had never spent a minute abroad without Dad before. She took a courier flight to Australia via Tokyo, and she told us how she'd left the hotel to go for a walk in a city where she spoke not one word of the language and could not read the street signs. 

Although it was Dad who told the stories of his activist past, Mum had her involvement too. She was probably the only person who took part in the 35s Group of Jewish women protesting for the right of Soviet Jews to emigrate and also went to Greenham Common, with Ruth, Minnie, Sharon and Karin to protest against cruise missiles.

And I want everyone to know how much fun she was - not only when she was a lovely booba to our boys, but also when I was little, and we sued to schlep all over London to medical appointments, and we would make up stories about the people we saw in the tube - who was a spy, which one was going to a secret meeting, and so on. 

And that's how I want to remember her, not as she was in her very last years, but how she had been for all the years before.

Post script - thinking of all the things we went through, like her teaching me to drive, and the time we had a front wheel tyre explode on the motorway en route to Manchester and did a 360 skid into the hard shoulder, and me walking round the lake at Valentines Park with her, trying to offer her undergraduate-grade psychotherapy...

Review of Catch and Release

Odd mixture of romcom, slapstick comedy, and tragedy. Young man dies suddenly, and his fiance discovers that he has a secret life, including a possible partner and child in another city.The film explores the woman's developing relationship with the ex-partner's roommates and friends. The klutzy friend delivers the slapstick notes, which really jar with the rest of the narrative. There's also a mean-but-sexy best friend.

Watched on Netflix, and it passed the time. I suspect that there might have been a better, more interesting film in there failing to get out.

Will and Harper

Another trans film (a road trip documentary), and a not very interesting one. Two people who were comedy writers together go on a journey across the US so that they can re-establish their friendship after one of them has become a woman. They wisecrack along in a not very funny way, they visit some awful ugly places, and they eventually arrive at the destination, by which I was sufficiently bored that I don't ever remember where it was. It was...er, heartwarming....all the rednecks that they met along the way were very kind and accepting, and they had no bumps in the road in their own relationship. I'm glad for them that they made it, I'm less glad that I had to watch it.

Review of "Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Baghdad's Green Zone" by Rajiv Chandraskeran

 

A not altogether satisfactory book about the US occupation of Iraq. Lots of fun anecdotes about how awful and stupid the Americans were, but not that much analysis. Not much questioning of the reasons for the war, and though it's made clear almost in passing that neither they nor anyone else found Saddam's weapons of mass destruction, it generally seems to take the view that the regime was bad so overthrowing it was a good thing, just badly managed thereafter.

It's funny how the Americans put in to run the occupation administration were firm believers in free markets for everything and that government couldn't do anything well - and because they were all cronies appointed on the basis of their personal connections to US Republican Party worthies, they illustrated this perfectly. The possibility that there might be people in public service who could actually do things properly doesn't seem to have occurred to them. Nor does the idea that anyone who actually knew anything about the Arab world, or spoke Arabic, might have had anything to contribute.

I note in passing that when I worked, briefly, in Hong Kong for a team of Americans bidding for a GSM mobile licence, they rarely ventured outside the hotel. They were staying in rooms (and suites) in a big hotel, and they worked in offices on a different floor. They ate in the hotel restaurant and rarely went out at all. I took a few trips on the MRT underground network to other fairly central districts, and I took a ferry across the harbour every day from my hotel, and the knowledge that I picked up doing this was treated as something wondrous. 

Emilia Perez

Astonishing Mexican film - a musical (of sorts) about a drug warlord who decides to disappear and transition to become a woman, leaving behind his trophy wife and their children. He's helped by a desperate and cynical criminal lawyer who finds herself helping the corrupt rich and powerful to evade the law and the consequences of their choices, and takes the job helping the warlord. 

It's often terrifying, as it should be - the world of drug warlords is full of violence and terror. But it's also very clever, and depicts brilliantly a number of complex emotional journeys. And it's often stunning to look at too.

So good that we watched it twice within a month, which I almost never do.

Watched on Netflix - I think it was one of their originals.

Review of Wallace and Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl

Absurdly, there appear to be people who didn't like this - not as good as the early ones, and so on. Ignore them, it's great. Lots of cinematic references - it's worth watching again to see how many I will catch, and lots of great visual jokes. I loved the narrowboat chase, where a pedestrian on the canal towpath is walking faster than the boats involved in the chase. 

It helped that I watched it live, as it was broadcast on BBC (how often do I do that?) and with my family, so that it evoked all the warm fuzzy feelings of watching previous Wallace and Gromit films with the boys. But is was just lovely anyway.

I note in passing that the threat of, and fear of, technology has moved on. In The Wrong Trousers the technology is just malfunctioning. Here it's clearly hacked by a bad actor, the evil penguin, who uses the internet to take control over Wallace's robot gnomes, which don't have very good IT security.

Review of Ballywalter

One of several films that I watched this week about alcohol and alcoholism, and how it fucks people up. This one takes a while to get going. A young woman drives a taxi in Ballywalter, a small town along the coast from Belfast, and it's not going too well for her. She lives with her mother and sister, she's dropped out of university and the taxi, which is decrepit and barely still functioning, belongs to a bloke who might be an ex. A bloke in the town, living on his own after a split from his wife and family because he killed someone while drunk-driving, starts getting a regular ride from her to a comedy course that he's doing in the city, and the film is about the relationship between the two of them. They don't become lovers, but they do become each other's redemption.

Worth watching. We watched it on BBC iPlayer, which once again describes this as a comedy, for no obvious reason.

Review of "Utopia Avenue" by David Mitchell

I mostly loved this book. Lovely descriptions, great characters, poignant moments, and set in and around the music industry just before the time of rock megastars...so that some of the real people who later become megastars (Syd Barrett, David Bowie, even the Beatles) drift in and out of the scenes. 

I'm not quite old enough to remember this period, but the tail end of it was visible to me as I grew up. Denmark street was still full of decrepit music shops, and I remember some of the clubs that he writes about - especially Bunjies, where I often went with friends on a Saturday evening.

I even quite liked the way that characters and places from David Mitchell's other books turn up for a while, and then slide out of the story. Some of it is set around Gravesend, also an important location in The Bone Clocks. 

But (spoiler alert) there's a part where Mitchell's supernatural frame-tale of a conflict down through the ages between evil drinkers of a human souls and their eternal opponents organised in "Horology" becomes important to the plot, and I really didn't like that. It must be really important to Mitchell, but it feels to me like a turd on an otherwise beautiful carpet. It could so easily have been done without, which only makes it even clearer that he really cares about this. 

It did spoil my enjoyment a bit, but on balance I still really liked the book.

Review of "The Priest, The Poet and The Pimp" by Malcolm Eva

First, to declare an interest - or rather two interests. Malcolm Eva is a friend, and he's also a self-published author (like me) who I have encouraged to go down that route.

That said, this is an enjoyable, nicely written book, with a well constructed narrative, interesting characters and a great feel for location and period. It's a period that I lived through as an adult, but which now seems almost as remote as the time of WW2...it's hard to imagine a world without the internet, search engines, and smartphones. Of course the plot would barely work with them. The texture of that world, and a time when the part of west London depicted was still dingy rather than gentrified, is very vivid.

I was a little bit worried with the Muslim pimp praying on vulnerable white girls - it's not hard to see how that could turn nasty - but there's more than one good Muslim character too, so I didn't have to wait too long to exhale. 

Definitely worth a read, and I hope Malcolm gets on and finishes his other novels-in-waiting.