Review of Small, Slow and Steady

Slow, gloomy and depressing (though not entirely in a bad way) Japanese film about a profoundly deaf young woman training to be a boxer in a downbeat boxing gym that has seen better days and is on the verge of closing - and the gym owner is near death's door himself.

Lots of stuff about her family relationships, and some exploration into her motivation that doesn't really explain anything. Some hard-to-watch boxing footage that really does show the pain and the exhaustion.

Watched on BBC iPlayer.

Review of Me Without You

This was a really good, quite moving though sometimes funny about the friendship between two girls (who in the course of the film become young women, then not-so-young women) that seemed to avoid all the coming of age cliches.  Sometimes made more enjoyable by the fact that they are almost the same age as me, so their time at university in Brighton almost overlaps with my time at university in Brighton - though the film doesn't actually use Brighton, or Sussex University or Brighton Poly (as it was then) for any of the Brighton-period filming. 

Some sex, some drugs (including a heroin scene that doesn't lead to addiction and disaster, just one more thing that they try out), lots of deceit and conflict.

This was the second film we watched on our BFI subscription (via Chromecast and the BFI app), and it was as good as the first.

Review of See How They Run

Enjoyable almost-spoof period-drama detective thriller, with a hapless drunk police inspector and his newly enlisted woman PC investigating the murder of a blacklisted American director who's been recruited to make a film of The Mousetrap, but is killed before he can start. Lots of plot twists, and lots of Mousetrap jokes. Acting and script a bit lame, but some cool cinematography, and jokes about cinematography. 

Watched on Channel 4 online, which kept buffering and dropping.

Review of 27 Dresses

 

Pretty awful cliched romcom, with the woman lead eventually ending up with the insipid male lead.

Review of Silent Roar

Weird surf-centred film about a young man/boy on the Isle of Lewis, whose dad has gone missing - he's a fisherman, he's probably drowned, and the boy is holding on to his boot which was washed up. He's a surfer, and he has hallucinations - first of mystical otherworldly surfers that no-one else can see, and then of a Black woman Jesus and his missing dad. There's some teen sex with a smouldering young girl at his school - she doesn't have sex with him, but she does make another boy who fancies her wank while she watches. 

There's religion, and anti-clericalism, and some miracles.

I quite enjoyed it, others who watched with me were not at all sure. Beautifully filmed though.

Watched via BBC iPlayer,

Review of 9 to 5

Watched this in honour of Dolly Parton, who has just died and was a real good one. But the film is just awful. The best bit is the title song, after which it goes rapidly downhill. It's supposed to be feminist, but the women characters are really stupid and are consistently outsmarted by their evil sexist male boss. Their attempts to expose his embezzlement (and thus prevent him sending them to prison for attempting to poison him) are hopeless. The jokes (sometimes at the expense of other women, like the boss's helper and snitch) are not at all funny. The resolution is through a deus ex machina (the appearance of the remote chairman of the board), not through any cleverness on the part of the three central characters. Why did the women actors agree to appear in this rubbish?

Watched at Jane's shop via laptop and what appeared to be a legitimate streaming vehicle, can't say which one.

Review of The Edge of Summer

The first film that we watched under our BFI subscription. Set in 1991 (so no-one has internet or mobile phones) in a depressed Cornish seaside town where the tin mine has closed down, the film centres on two young people - a girl of 11 (celebrates her 12th birthday during the film) and her mother who has recently separated from her father, and a boy of about the same age whose father has "gone away" and the boy hopes that he will return.

They form a friendship and explore the creepy derelict mine, where they have some experiences that are probably consensual hallucinations - the boy also repeatedly sees his absent father at a distance. It's clever and atmospheric, and says a lot about children with absent or departed parents. 

Review of "Vineland" by Thomas Pynchon

Re-read this because I re-watched One Battle After Another, because that film is supposed to be inspired by this book. Well, I can see how, but I can't say I enjoyed this on the second reading (and I don't remember anything from the first reading, which isn't a good sign). It's not long but it's flabby and shapeless, with lots of surreal stuff (a community of "Thanatoids", who seem to be some sort of Zombie) and too many scenarios and characters, and a plot that is pretty much incomprehensible. By the end I was just turning the pages without really reading. Glad this isn't the only Pynchon I've read.

And yet, you can sort of see the contours of the film hidden beneath the layers of dross and muddle, which makes the achievement of that all the more remarkable.

Review of "From The Holy Mountain: a journey in the shadow of Byzantium" by William Dalrymple

I've listened to William Dalrymple on the "Empire" podcast, and I think of him as a decent, progressive, liberal and intelligent sort of guy. This book came as a bit of shock. The framework is him following in the footsteps of a learned Byzantine monk who decided to go with a mate to visit the monasteries of the Byzantine empire, so he goes to the same monasteries, now much depleted or deserted and left as tiny islands of Christianity in a world that is mostly Muslim (and in one small corner, Jewish). He meets a lot of monks who he experiences as very good, ascetic and holy, and he repeats apparently unquestioningly the bollocks that they believe about demons, possession, miracles and relics. 

He's learned in a way that upper class Brits who have had a "classical" education can be, and he can draw on lots of background about the history of the Empire and of religion to make it interesting. As we went through I occasionally noted places where he'd left things out that didn't favour his narrative of beleaguered Eastern Christians keeping alive a flame of holiness. 

The book is from 1998, and what's changed and what hasn't in terms of the contemporary politics that he describes is interesting. The Kurdish PKK has laid down its arms and ended its guerrilla war against Turkey, and the Islamists that are only just beginning to appear on the horizon in 1998 are now firmly in power. The lovely orderly oasis of religious toleration that he finds in Syria is its exact opposite, and probably wasn't nearly as nice as he seemed to think it was even back then. Lebanon is an even bigger shit heap than it was then.  I was reminded by the book about the trail of massacre and counter-massacre...I suspect that almost all of my friends know about the Deir Yassin massacre, but I bet not one of them has heard about the Damour massacre, when Fatah and Palestinian Ba'athist fighters slaughtered hundreds of Lebanese Christians in retaliation for an earlier massacre, and for which the subsequent slaughter of Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatila massacre was claimed as a retaliation by some of the victims' relatives. 

The Israeli pogroms against Palestinians in the West Bank, and persecutions in Israel proper, have notched up a gear - he doesn't mention or go to Gaza, which is funny because there's quite a lot Byzantine Christian stuff there, including a very old and famous monastery. 

And his analysis of the Mubarak regime and its "crackdown" on the Muslim Brotherhood is so misguided as to be comical. I guess "experts", and people who visit and talk to others on the ground, are not really better informed than anyone else. Did the Western intelligence agencies see the fall of Mubarak coming? I don't think so.

Review of Margarete: Queen of The North

A well-plotted, well acted and beautifully shot Danish history movie, about the woman who managed to unify the warring kingdoms of Denmark, Sweden and Norway in the fourteenth century. The apparently massive budget definitely shows - stunning landscape shots, beautiful interiors and clothes. 

The drama comes from the sudden appearance of a man claiming to be the Queen's supposedly dead son Oluf, which undermines her plans to marry her adopted son and co-ruler Erik to an English princess and thereby solidify the dynasty and the union. The real history says that the impostor's claims were not at all believable, and the plot was amateurish. In the film it's left uncertain as to whether "Oluf" is genuine is not - I incline to think that the film is saying that he was, and that the Queen believed him.

Watched on BBC iPlayer.

Review of "Swing Time" by Zadie Smith

Not really my sort of book - coming of age novel about a young mixed race women living in Willesden with a politically engaged mother and a loving but ineffectual dad, and her better-dancer friend who has a brief West End chorus line career, and the protagonist's career as a gopher for an Australian pop-singer celeb (who seems to me to be thinly disguised Kylie). 

But I enjoyed it lots anyway...Zadie Smith (who I don't think I've actually read before) is a very good writer and lots of it is beautifully observed, particularly the bits about NGOs and aid projects in Africa - the celeb wants to save the world one village at a time, and is really obnoxious about it.

Review of "Looking Backward" by Edward Bellamy

I decided to read this because I'd read William Morris's News from Nowhere, which is a response to this different vision of a socialist utopia. It's a strange and not particularly socialist book, though perhaps also an illustration of how many different things have been called "socialist" over the years. Bellamy's socialist future is one in which everything is run on corporate/military lines. Socialist has grown "naturally" out of the tendency of capitalism to monopoly - eventually all the big monopolists corporations merge into one, and then there's no capitalist competition so that's socialism, right? And work and production are organised via an "industrial army", with ranks and units and so on.

I have a vague memory that some of the German Social Democrats, in particular Hilferding, thought along similar lines - that Monopoly Capitalism would make socialism thinkable and possible.

Bits of are repulsive, though I think Bellamy has tried to think kindly about the way in which a future society will include women (somewhat better than Morris did), and about how "from each according to their ability" really does mean that those who can't contribute much deserve just as much as everyone else.

As a piece of fiction it's not great, but better than Morris's book, which has a lot of people floating about dressed as happy medieval peasants and doing cute crafty things. Bellamy's frame tale, in which he explains how his protagonist arrives in the future, also seems better crafted than Morris's, which is barely explained at all.

Review of "A Tree of Night and Other Stories" by Truman Capote

A collection so hard to review...just to say that each of the stories in this collection is a jewel, creepy but beautiful at the same time. Is Truman Capote under-appreciated? I think so.

Review of "News from Nowhere" by William Morris.

I've written elsewhere about how I feel like I ought to like William Morris, but somehow I end up not liking him. This book very much bears that out. It's supposed to be about a future socialist England (socialist guy goes to sleep in the late C19th and wakes up in the future), but it feels to me a reactionary sort of socialism...lots of medieval cosplay, a rejection of science and learning in favour of (literally) arts and crafts, no automation or even much mechanisation. There's a kind of equality between men and women, based on women's work being equally recognised as valuable rather than an end to the distinction between men's and women's work. I can't help thinking that reactionary medievalists like Chesterton and Ruskin would find little to dislike.

The book was a response to Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward, which set out a much more modernist mechanised automated future, and I'm looking forward myself to reading that and seeing if it's closer to fully automated luxury communism...I guess I will have to read that too!

Review of "The Land In Winter" by Andrew Miller

Poignant book about the life of two couples living in the countryside near Bristol, with both the wives pregnant. One of the men is a farmer who appears to have a Rachman-like figure as his father, the other a country doctor having an affair. It sounds a bit dull, but it's so brilliantly written, and the descriptions of the bleakness of both rural and urban life in what I think is the early 1950s is very vivid. 

I've liked everything Andrew Miller has written so far - I think it's all been historical novels so far, so this was a bit different, but still very good.

Review of All of Us Strangers

A beautiful, clever, touching film about love, death, loss, loneliness. Based on a book (the 1987 novel Strangers by Taichi Yamada), which is often a good sign. There was an earlier Japanese adaptation ( The Discarnates) which I would also like to see now.

The plot is about a lonely gay man living in a near-empty newly-built tower block in London, who is visiting his dead parents in his childhood home in a small town to the South of London. It's beautiful done, without much explanation of the mechanism but with plenty of mystery, and it's not entirely clear how it works for the dead parents either.

Watched on Channel 4 catch-up.

Review of "Lacunae and Laocoon: For The Triumph of Democracy over Oligarchy" by Molly Scott Cato

I'm not really sure what the point of this book is. Molly Scott Cato said that she was writing a book about fascism, but it isn't that - fascism gets a bit of a walk on part, but there isn't even much about the relationship between it and the super-rich. It's a bit about some of the mechanisms used by corporations to subvert national governments and so on, though it doesn't seem to have much new in it. If you've been reading say New Internationalist, or even The Guardian, most of this will be familiar. Is it useful because it's a compendium and a guide to the existing literature? Not really...it's not comprehensive or well referenced enough. Does it offer a new way of thinking about it? Not that I noticed.

And it's sort of odd that it's so much about the way that the "rules based international order" is rigged, even as that order seems to be coming to an end and being replaced by something even worse.

There's not much reflection on what democracy means, or why it's a good thing...there's some stuff about the rule of law, also taken to be self evidently a good thing, without much reflection.

Review of The Idea of You

Silly but enjoyable romcom about a woman in her 40s who gets into a relationship with a boyband singer. No dramatic tension, every bit of conflict resolved almost as soon as it appears. Watched on BBC iPlayer or something.

Review of "Clown Town" by Mick Herron

I enjoyed this enough, but it was entirely formulaic. MH just winds up his characters and lets them go. Judd is pompous and conniving, Lamb is snarky and physically revolting, Caroline Standish struggles with her drink problem...

The plot is a thinly veiled version of Stakeknife, come back to haunt the new Labour Prime Minister, who had some hand in it back in the day.

A small mystery is why the right wing press like Herron so much, when his stories are so critical and subversive of their cherished institutions.

Review of Crush

2020 High School teen gay romcom. Light and fluffy - somehow the fact that all the teen romances are lesbian makes the film sweeter and more innocent. Lots of talk about sex, but very little actual sex apart from some teen girl kissing, though the central character's mum does some great dirty talking.

Watched on Channel 4 online.

Review of They Came to a City

A very dated black and white fantasy film from 1944, adapted from a 1943 stage play, in which nine characters from then-contemporary England find themselves in modernist utopia. The nine are supposed to represent a cross-section of English class society - there's a shady businessman, a caricature aristocrat, a charwoman, a seaman, a waitress...and so on.

It's very stage-y - we won't actually see the utopia, just the faces of the characters talking about it from a weird castle overlooking the wonderful city. They go into it, and then return to the castle to talk about it. The upper class characters mainly hate it, and the working class ones mainly love it. From their descriptions it seems a very limited sort of utopia - clean houses and streets, gardens, and everyone happy in their jobs. 

The frame tale is a man and a woman, both in uniform, talking about what England is going to be like after the war, and a stranger (played by J B Priestley, who wrote the play and the film screenplay) comes to describe the story to them.

I couldn't help noticing the accents - which along with the clothes, were the class markers for the characters. The posh accents felt authentic; after all, there's plenty of actual footage of posh people talking from that period, and they more or less all sound like Queen Elizabeth. The working class accents felt wrong - a lot of substitution of "eh" sounds for "ah" sounds - did working class people actually speak like that in the 1940s, or is that just how posh-speaking actors thought they spoke?

Watched on YouTube via Chromecast.

Review of "Hag-Seed" by Margaret Attwood

I think that this might be a picaresque novel...it's about a pompous, self-satisfied and lazy theatre director that gets his deserved comeuppance early in the book, and then - after a miserable decline that's hard to feel too sorry for - plots and achieves revenge over his equally awful enemies. It was not very enjoyable spending so much time in the company of not-so-pleasant people, but I gradually warmed to the book because despite everything Attwood is a such a good storyteller. Much of the narrative takes place in a prison, because the central character becomes the director of a prison theatre program, which he uses for the revenge.

Review of "The Historical David: The Real Life of An Invented Hero" by Joel Baden

Easy to read, slightly repetitive book that aims to decode the Biblical narrative through the methods of text analysis...although the author knows about the archaeological evidence he doesn't go there much. Still, it's from a solid historical perspective, and doesn't do the daft "but what was David really like" stuff that some analysis of Biblical stories that some authors do.

Review of The Teachers' Lounge

Well crafted drama about an episode in a modern German secondary school, in which a young teacher gets caught up when someone (A colleague? A student?) is suspected of stealing from others. The film deals well with racism in the school and among the staff, and with the way that management processes can spiral into a nightmare with minimal bad intention.

Watched on BBC iPlayer.

Review of Corsage

Strange, slow film about the life of Elizabeth Empress of Austria-Hungary. The depiction of her life in the film appears really improbable, but a reading of her actual bio from Wikipedia is even weirder. The film doesn't seem to be very concerned to stick to the historical narrative, which seems odd in a biopic. For example [spoiler alert], it shows Elizabeth committing suicide by jumping into the sea, but the real Elizabeth died as a result of an unlikely assassination.  

It's just about possible that the film is an alternative account of the known facts (rather than a parallel account) because we are shown Elizabeth increasingly changing places with one of her ladies-in-waiting...so maybe she does commit suicide, and it's the lady-in-waiting who dies in the assassination many years later. Of course the Emperor Franz Josef would have had to been in on this, because although they don't spend that much time together they do occasionally have perfunctory sex, and he would surely have noticed.

Despite the slowness I enjoyed it, particularly the depictions of stultifying court life. Elizabeth doesn't seem to have much fun. I note in passing that although the rooms in the Imperial palaces are very grand, the corridors between them are shabby and cluttered with old furniture. Maybe that's how they were.

Review of "We, The Drowned" by Carsten Jensen

Big saga-type book about the seagoing inhabitants of the Danish town/island of Marstal over the period 1848 to 1945 - largely defined by a succession of wars against first Prussia and then Germany. It's also defined by the age of sailing merchant ships and their replacement by steamships; there are lots of vivid descriptions of how hard and injurious the life of the sailors were.

It took me a while to get into it, and I was a bit confused by shifting narrators, but I ended up enjoying it very much.

Review of "A History of The World in 47 Borders" by Jonn Elledge

Read this on holiday, and it was um sort of OK...some interesting geographical peculiarities, some of which I hadn't heard of. I think some of my favourites weren't in then - the enclave of Llivia, for example, a little bit of Spain inside the borders of France. Some others that felt like they could have been left out. A generally politically progressive sort of outlook, but a slightly "chap-ish" sense of humour that didn't land so well with me.

Review of Rental Family

A surprisingly enjoyable Japanese-American comedy about a big goofy American actor who finds himself working with an agency that supply actors into personal and domestic situations. Of course he becomes emotionally engaged with the people to whom his efforts are directed (not the "clients" as such because they are the ones who have hired him to deceive someone else) - an old and dementing man who was once a notable actor, and a young girl who needs a second parent to get into a private school.

Watched in the cinema on the Brittany Ferry ship to Santander!

Review of "Transgressions" by Sarah Dunnant

Not read any Sarah Dunant before, but on the strength of this I will. It starts off a bit dull, about a woman who has recently separated from her apparently rather obnoxious partner getting used to being alone, and sometimes missing things that he's taken in the separation of things. And she's a translator, translating a rather sleazy novel from Czech to English, which gives Dunant permission to indulge in writing sleaze - porn-adjacent crime fiction, I'd say.

But then there's a stalker, and the vague threats coalesce into something much darker, and the sleaze migrates from the book-within-a-book to the main narrative, and it went from being something that I read at night to go to sleep to something that I had to avoid reading last thing at night. Trigger warning - there's some rape, but also some hint of rape fantasies too.

There's a small additional pleasure in the technology, which is pre-mobile and pre-web, even though it's by no means a "historical" novel.

Small declaration of interest. I haven't actually met Sarah Dunant, but she is the partner of a member of the Stroud Red Band, so that's sort of connected.

Review of Bhaji on The Beach

We were after a feelgood film, but this wasn't it. I guess it just hasn't aged well - it's from 1993, and it features a group of women from an Asian women's centre being taken for a day's outing from the West Midlands to Blackpool. It mainly felt like a collection of not very interesting or engaging stereotypes.

Watched at Jane's house, streamed via Amazon Prime.

Review of Tar

Long, with a slow start, but after about half an hour it become absolutely gripping - even though it's about the world of high culture music, with which I have relatively little connection. Because it's also about corruption, and privilege, and exploitation and treachery, and how far it's possible for someone to fall. 

Just brilliant, watch it.

Watched on BBC iPlayer.

Review of Brides

A surprisingly light but clever and thoughtful film about two British Muslim girls who journey to Syria to join Daesh - obviously based on the Shamira Begum case. It explores their reasons for wanting to leave their families and go somewhere unknown and dangerous - unhappy family relationships, a rotten environment at school and teachers who really don't seem to notice what is going on. They're not fanatics or even very devout.

A lot of the action happens in Turkey, as they try to reach and then cross the border into Syria. There's tension but no real terror for most of the film - it almost feels like a caper movie. Most of the Turkish people are kind and helpful to them.

Watched as part of the Stroud Film Festival, with a discussion afterwards featuring women from the Bristol Somali Kitchen (one of the girls in the film is Somali).

Review of Sometimes, Always, Never

Strange, sad film about a man (Bill Nighy) whose son has disappeared, and how he and his other son pass their time searching for him, physically and online. The family used to play Scrabble - in fact, Bill Nighy's character is something of a Scrabble hustler, playing against strangers for money, and there's a lot about the game in the film.

From the descriptions I'd expected it to be funny, but it mainly wasn't - not bad, just not at all feelgood. The end is supposed to be a sort of redemption, but it didn't feel like it to me.

Watched via USB stick and informal distribution.

Review of "The Time of Our Singing" by Richard Powers

A wonderful, long (one of the reviewers on the cover describes it as "epic" and that felt right) book about music, culture, race, antisemitism and the Holocaust, and how all that plays out through the life of a mixed race couple and their children. It takes in key moments in Black American history, and even touches on some important Physics stuff - Albert Einstein has a walk-on part, because one of the main characters is a scatty German-Jewish physicist genius. Something on how a life can have a shape, and touch on other lives.

I've read other books by Richard Powers, and they were also good, but this shows how broad his range is.

So much to think about - I was really sad when I'd finished it.

Review of Wild Rose

Lovely feelgood film that ended the Stroud Film Festival. I'd seen it before, but enjoyed it a lot more this time - maybe because I watched it in a cinema surrounded by lots of other people who were enjoying it, maybe because it followed a succession of good but grim films at the festival. Oh, and Jessie Buckley now carries all the wonderfulness of her other roles, which were not part of my experience last time round. 

Review of The Half of It

A nice, enjoyable American High School romcom, if that's not an oxymoron. It's a re-telling of Cyrano de Bergerac, only this time the clever writer hiding behind the goofy and inept would-be lover is a Chinese migrant girl, who is already writing her co-students' essays for them with the full knowledge of the class English teacher. And though she's writing the love letters and text messages for the goof, she herself has a lesbian crush on the object of his romantic love.

Anyway, it's a surprisingly nice film. 

Watched on someone else's laptop via HDMI cable to someone else's big TV - so I don't know how it came to be obtained.

Review of "Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities" by Rebecca Solnit

I used to write about technology for a living, and I ended up writing about first technology-enabled transport, and then “smart cities”. There’s quite a lot of overlap between these two domains. One of the things that I encountered was what I ended up calling “zombie projects” – pilots and trials that had come to an end, but continued to be reported as if they were contemporary and ongoing. Unlike the way zombies are usually depicted, though, zombie projects were the subject of relentlessly cheerful narratives. Ideas that had turned out to be dead ends, or moderate failings from which learnings could be drawn, were still success stories in zombie-project-land. 

I was reminded of this when I read Rebecca Solnit’s book. It’s about hopefulness, so it’s inevitably a compilation of success stories. Trouble is, it’s from 2016, so we know how a lot of the stories turned out. Solnit’s a “horizontalist” anarchist, and she wants to believe that spontaneous non-hierarchical organisation works well. Truth is, sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn’t. It seems to me that it can sometimes work for short term mutual aid settings, and for organising protests, but that it doesn’t for long term projects about political or social transition. 

For the most part the Arab Spring was a ghastly failure. There was a transition in Tunisia, though I haven’t followed up on how it’s turned out now. But in other countries the decentralised non-hierarchical organisation that is so celebrated didn’t lead to anything good. In Bahrain the pro-democracy protesters were gunned down. In Egypt the non-hierarchical opposition led first to the triumph of the entirely hierarchical and disciplined Muslim Brotherhood, and then to the overthrow of the elected Muslim Brotherhood government by the same militarist forces who had been in control in the first place. 

And the protests and boycotts that the book celebrates? Sometimes they were successful, at least in their own limited terms, but the world is not transformed. Capitalism is more powerful than it was in 2016, economic inequality is worse, the atmosphere is more full of Carbon Dioxide…

There’s no analysis of what worked and what didn’t – even though such analysis is possible...Vincent Bevin’s book “If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution” did this in an honest way, though it’s still short on prescriptions. If we keep learning the wrong lessons from our experiences, and in particular if we fetishise some kinds or organisation (the leaderless, non-hierarchical thing) despite experience, then we will never move forward.

I understand that it’s important to raise our spirits, and to keep believing that things might go our way. But transparent dishonesty about success stories has the opposite effect, at least for me. If we are not prepared to learn anything from both our successes and our failures, then we are engaged in pointless gestures, not actual political transformation.

Review of Lute Como Uma Menina

Documentary about a wave of school occupations in Brazil in 2015 (the film was made in 2016), and screened by local radical youth group The RYSE.

The student strikers interviewed are all young women - there are some men/boys involved in the strike, but the film doesn't centre them. They're all passionate, articulate and thoughtful, and it's a joy to watch. Lots of surprises about corruption in the Brazilian school system, and the brutal response of the police.

Watched at the Trinity Rooms as part of Stroud Film Festival.

Review of Shoot The People

Another documentary in the Stroud Film Festival, this time about photographer Misan Harriman, who captures pictures of people engaged in protest. It was good, enjoyable and moving, though I did wonder whether - in the era of facial recognition - it's actually a good thing to put pictures of protesters online. Not a few were wearing masks, but not all of them. 

Misan Harriman is clearly a mensch - even though he's documenting the protests for Palestine he makes it clear he's not on the side of Hamas, or hostage taking, and he has lots of pictures of Jews protesting for Palestine.

Review of Santosh

Really good Indian film about a police investigation, in which the main investigators are both women  -because the case, which is about the rape and murder of a Dalit woman, is handled by a special women's police unit.

The younger of the police women is only in the force because she has "inherited" her policeman husband's job on his death, which seems like a very weird arrangement, but turns out to be a real thing.

It's a very hard watch, with lots of graphic depictions of police brutality, corruption and caste-based hatred. 

Reminded me again why I really don't want to go to India and experience the beauty and the culture.

Watched at Lansdown as part of Stroud Film Festival.

Review of Blue Has No Borders

Nice and rather beautiful documentary about the way different people in Folkestone have responded to the arrival of migrants crossing the channel in small boats, and featuring the documentary maker's attempt to get people with very different perspectives to talk and listen to each other. As the film unfolds there's a lot about identity, and belonging, and of course Brexit. At one point there are interviews (voice over only, we don't see the people talking) with French people about how they feel they've lost their connection with England, which had been important to them. 

The film was very moving, the more so because of the panel discussion with the director Jessi Gutch, who moved to Folkestone from London and spoke about how she'd set out to make one film (about confrontation with the far right) and found herself making another. The panel was chaired by one friend and included two others - I love Stroud.

It rather reminded me of another film from a couple of years ago - Seaside Special, about Cromer and how it processed Brexit.

Watched in Lansdown as part of Sroud Film Festival.

Review of Sanatorium

A really dismal and depressing documentary film about a crumbling sanatorium in Ukraine. Someone thought it was quirky and charming, but it's grim watching. A sanatorium is a weird thing anyway, a cross between a hotel-resort and a hospital, with lots of unpleasant looking treatments administered by weird overweight therapists using antiquated equipment that looks like it belongs in a steampunk movie. Mud baths, inside wrapped in plastic sheet, and outdoors in the shallow waters of a river estuary that is silting up.  The guests are mainly miserable - bereaved, ill, and overweight like the staff - though some of them cheer each other up occasionally. And all this against the background of the war with Russia - one of the guests is a recovering soldier with PTSD, one a bereaved widow, and there are frequent air raid alerts and trips to the shelters.

Watched at Lansdown Hall as part of the Stroud Film Festival.

Review of A Real Pain

Unsatisfactory film about two American youngish men on a trip to Poland to honour the memory of their grandmother. They're first cousins and their relationship is complex - a bit angry, a bit adulatory. But the film has little nuance in its treatment of the relationship between American Jews and their European ancestry. There's a lachrymose scene in which the tour group visits a death camp and it makes them all speechless, but the film has got nothing to say about this apart from the obvious.

Oddly this covers the same territory as "Everything is Illuminated" which is a much better film (but which I don't seem to have reviewed).

Even more oddly there's a scene in this film where the two Americans go up on to the roof of their hotel to smoke dope, and we see them going up the hotel staircase. When I was in Warsaw, on a work trip, there was a fire alarm and I had to go down the hotel stairs, from the 12th floor. The stairs in my hotel looked a lot like the stairs in theirs.

Watched on a USB stick, via informal download.

Review of A Bridge Too Far

Star studded but not all that engaging war movie about Operation Market Garden, and what a dreadful cock-up it was. Not a bad study of military incompetence, but it grinds on at great length to its obvious conclusion, and tries to provide some dignity and honour to the Allied soldiers when there wasn't really much to go round.

Small personal note; my Dad's 43 Group hero Gerry Flamberg fought at Arnhem, was taken prisoner, and was decorated for his bravery.

Watched on BBC iPlayer.

Review of Palestine 1936

A drama (rather than a documentary) about the Arab Revolt in Palestine of 1936. As a young teenager I watched Exodus, and Cast A Giant Shadow - Hollywood Zionist films about heroic Jews fighting against the British and the Arabs (not Palestinians then) to establish the state of Israel. I'd been previously sort of unconsciously Zionist - my Zionist Jewish education made me feel that Israel was to do with me, and in some sense "my country", but I didn't think much about it until then. Those films made me a proud, conscious Zionist, and they had a similar effect on some of my non-Jewish friends - particularly the bits in which the nasty British prevented Jewish refugees from reaching Palestine.

This film is in some ways a mirror image of those, and even though I don't identify at all as a Zionist any more, it's still a hard, gruelling watch. It's not intended as a neutral, balanced history but as a tribute to the struggle of the Palestinians against British rule and Zionist expropriation. It manages to slip in some early references to why the Jews were coming to Palestine, and it does capture some of the conflict within Palestinian Arab society about how to respond to Zionism, but it's mainly about the bravery of the resistance. There are some very romantic looking freedom fighters with horses, keffiyehs and big moustaches. We see some sabotage on the railways but not much footage of the struggle in the cities, or of the general strike - that's covered mainly be visuals of newspaper headlines. 

The British are rightly depicted as brutal and cruel. After the film I went home and read the Wikipedia article about the revolt, and realised that I hadn't appreciated the scale of the casualties. Wingate is depicted as a cruel bully. It would probably come as a surprise to lots of British Jews, for whom he is still something of a hero - football clubs are named after him, for example.

There are a few weird historical anomalies and errors. One of the Palestinian elite - the newspaper owner/editor - is found to have been receiving payments from the Zionists; his wife finds cheques from the "Zionist Commission for Palestine" in his desk drawer. But the Commission was a short lived body, soon replace by the Palestine Zionist Executive, and then in 1929 by the Jewish Agency for Palestine. This isn't very important, except that it's part of a wider tendency in the film not to show any Jews at all. We do see a few people in European dress in some early street scenes, and they might be Jews, though there are plenty of Arabs in European dress too. We see some refugees arriving by boat in a very short segment, and we see a long distance shot or two some pale people working in the fields of a kibbutz.

But there's not much sign of the Zionist settlement, though it's talked about often enough by the characters. There's a scene in which Palestine Radio is launched, and the Jew at the joint British-Arab-Jewish ceremony is a long-bearded, hatted orthodox man. There's a shot of Jerusalem railway station devoid of Hebrew, even though the real station most definitely had trilingual signage - you can see it in old photos, and Hebrew was one of the three languages of the British Mandate authority. Like I said, almost the mirror image of my teenage Zionist movies. It does seem as if the film wants to minimise the existence of Jews in the country, even as part of the colonial apparatus. 

The final scene, after most of the credits, shows a silhouette of a Palestinian bagpiper playing what seems to be a Scottish lament. I've asked a Palestinian friend what's the thing with Palestinians and Scottish bagpipes.  

Review of "The Oxford History of the Holy Land" by by Robert G. Hoyland (Editor), H. G. M Williamson (Editor)

 

A detailed, grown up sort of book with a lot of knowledge about history, scripture and theology. Not for the casual reader, I'd say, but no less enjoyable for that. Some discussion about whether the Abrahamic religions really have a place for "holy places" at all in their theologies, and perhaps not enough consideration as to whether the idea of a sacred location is really a hangover from previous non-monotheistic religions. 

Review of Sirat

Stunning, emotionally draining film about a group of ravers in the Moroccan desert. The film starts with a middle aged Spanish man and his young son moving through the crowds at a desert rave, passing out flyers because they he is looking for his teenage daughter, who has vanished into the world of desert raves.

There are weak signals that something bad in happening in the outside world - crackly radio reports of preparations for a major war, sudden unavailability of petrol. Then Moroccan soldiers arrive to evict the ravers, and the Spanish man and his son impulsively fall in with a small group who decide to drive deeper into the desert rather than wait in line to be repatriated.

Saying anything more than this would be a spoiler, but the film is tense, visually striking, and with a remarkable soundtrack. I think it had more of an impact on us because we've been in on the fringes of the world that it depicts - dancing with drug-addled people in the techno pit at We Out Here, attending the Nowhere festival in Spain in a tiny scrap of desert, and beginning to understand the power and attraction of that kind of music.

We watched this via a USB stick in our TV, having obtained it informally.

Review of "Agent Running in the Field" by John le Carre

Another not very good late John le Carre. This is what I imagined his books would be like when I chose not to read them, before I found out that some of them were in fact very good. A clapped out ageing spy in the final stages of his not very illustrious career, put in charge of a London  based department where the not very good spies are left to fester, stumbles into something that might be a bit bigger than him. It feels dated, because I associate the world from which the clapped out spy comes with the past - men wearing blazers and grey flannel trousers, posh clubs and schools - but really all that is still here, it's just not part of my world at all. 

Part of the tension in the book comes from the fact that even for people in that separate world, there are points of overlap with the world that I know - wives who work as human rights lawyers, kids who go off to work on eco projects rather than into the city or the law. 

For a while the pace of the plot and the series of unexpected twists got me more involved, but by the implausible and not very interesting denouement I was waiting for it to be over.

Quakers and antisemitism

A Quaker friend passed me a copy of the new Quaker document "Challenging antisemitism: reflections for Quakers on recognising and responding to anti-Jewish prejudice", asking me what I thought and saying that there had been a lot of discussion about it among Quakers locally and nationally. Shortly after I came across this response to the document by the Quaker Socialist Society. 

I think the response is mainly fair, and I agree with most of the points that it makes. For example, it is indeed odd that the document doesn't have any named authors, and that though it says the writers talked to lots of groups and individuals, it doesn't say who they are. There doesn't seem to have been much engagement with Jewish groups who are critical of Israel and Zionism, who might have been thought of as natural points of contact for Quakers. The Quaker Socialists mention Jewish Voice for Liberation, and I'm disappointed that there is no mention of my own group, Na'amod. The reading list, and the list of groups to learn from, is also somewhat partial. The discussion on definitions of antisemitism, which mainly focuses on the IHRA definition and the rival Jerusalem definition, is both partial and muddled.

But that's not my main criticism. There's a small section at the back that is labelled "How this guide came about", which says it started life as a advice to ecumenical accompaniers who spend time in Israel-Palestine. This really shows - it's too much about when it's OK and not OK to criticise Israel and Zionism, and how that might land with different kinds of Jewish people. Although there is some kind and thoughtful material about how to talk to and listen to Jews about their experiences and feelings, it's not grounded in a proper understanding of contemporary antisemitism.

There's a view among some progressive people that antisemitism is not really a big deal these days. Sure, it was nasty in the Middle Ages, and the Holocaust was really bad, but these days Jews don't face much racism - they're white, after all, and often privileged too. So how can they really be victims of racism?  An addition to this is that responding to antisemitism somehow claims precedence, that there is a hierarchy of forms of racism where Jew-hatred is (wrongly) put at the top. And this is supplemented by a thread about how accusations of antisemitism are used to deflect criticism of Israel and Zionism - something that very much does happen, but surely shouldn't be the first thing to speak about when one speaks about hatred towards Jews. Though it often is.

What I felt was missing from the pamphlet is how absolutely fundamental antisemitism is to far right politics and ideas. This isn't always immediately apparent. The mobs that gather outside migrant hotels don't chant slogans about Jews. But if you look at how they talk about migrants to each others, and to their target audiences, theories about powerful Jews are never far from the surface - the so-called "Great Replacement" is allegedly a conspiracy by Jews to bring migrants in to replace "indigenous" white people. Almost any far right commentary on what's really happening in the world, from Covid to 9-11 to the financial crisis, quickly becomes a conversation about Jews. Curiously, the far right, and antisemites, are represented among the ranks of both pro-Zionists (like Tommy Robinson, and Victor Orban) and anti-Zionists (like Nick Fuentes, and British neo-Nazis including Nick Griffin and the Patriotic Alternative group). 

I won't explain here why antisemitism is so important to the far right ideologically and intellectually. That deserves a separate, longer piece. But it's a big thing, and by omitting it the pamphlet makes it look like antisemitism mainly belongs to history and to conversations about Israel.

One more thing. For a pamphlet aimed at people in the UK it was rather thin on the special contribution that England has made to Jew-hatred - the first country to expel Jews, the place where the blood libel (the idea that Jews kill Christian children so as to obtain and use their blood) originated, the introduction of the first immigration controls to bar the entrance of Jews fleeing pogroms in the Russian empire.

So I'm grateful that the Quakers have had a go at addressing the subject, and I do appreciate some of the good parts of the report. I just wish it had been better.

Review of "Disobedient" by Elizabeth Fremantle

A fictionalised biography of the early life of Artemisia Gentileschi, a real Italian baroque painter. A bit slow to get started, but I was gradually drawn in and quite enjoyed it. Lots of textural detail, fabrics and smells and birdsong.

I felt a bit annoyed by the violation of the convention that close third person narrative shouldn't switch between the inner lives and thoughts of multiple characters, but maybe that's a bit nit-picky.