Review of "The System of The World" by Neal Stephenson

The third in the series, and now that I've finished it I'm a bit bereft. Just as fabulous as the other two volumes. I was sure that I'd read the whole trilogy 20 years ago, but this one brought back no memories, so maybe I bought it but never even started it. Anyway it's again brilliant, and it's a bit sad that it will never be made into a glorious TV series - but it won't because it's too big and broad, with too many plot lines and events.

Everything is brought to a conclusion and pretty much everything is finished and tied up, in a mainly happy way. Still plenty of anachronistic jokes, which I continued to enjoy.

I was aware that my historical knowledge of this period, after the Restoration and the "Glorious Revolution", is really sketchy - I didn't realise how much I didn't know about the Hanoverian succession.

Review of The Master

For some reason everyone seems to think that this is a magnificent film, but I'm not sure why. It's atmospheric, and the acting is good to watch, but it's also overlong and a bit boring. It's a not-very-well disguised biopic of L Ron Hubbard, and actually a real biopic would have been better. Apparently there's an HBO documentary, and other thinly disguised fictional depictions (The Profit, for one).

Review of Marty Supreme

Odd, long but captivating sports film. It's early 1950s New York, and young Marty Mauser works in his uncle's shoe shop while developing his career as a table tennis champion. Marty is a hustler and borderline small-time crook and fraud, with no regard for anyone else, including the young woman downstairs who is pregnant with his child and the many friends that give him much more loyalty than he deserves.

It looks like an older film, gloomy and washed out, though this might have something to do with the copy that I obtained, which has a watermark and some odd splashes of colour.

Marty is not a likeable character, but neither are most of the other people in the film. Still, I was completely engaged - I didn't look at my phone once.

Informal distribution, with some odd downsides. I couldn't find a version that would transfer to a USB stick, and then when I did it was in an odd unsupported format that needed a new codec, and so on.

Review of Prime Minister

Sympathetic and engaging portrait of Jacinda Ahearn, Prime Minister of New Zealand - who comes across as really nice and normal, even though she has had no career or work experience outside politics. Made possible in part by the footage taken by her rock-solid loyal partner, and by an audio diary that she kept.

For me the most unsettling part was the portrayal of the anti-vaxxers' demonstrations, which wore her down until she was ready to resign, despite a strong majority in parliament. We avoided this in the UK, even though there were big "freedom rallies" in London and elsewhere, in part because the government was half-way to their position, in particular sacrificing safeguards and lives in the name of "the economy". 

Watched via informal distribution.

Review of "The Confusion" by Neal Stephenson

I read this twenty years ago, loved it then and loved it on the re-reading. It's not possible to do a plot summary, even if I didn't care about not delivering spoilers. The plot is too big and rambling - not helped by the fact that it's really two slightly linked books, one set across the globe involving a group of ex-slaves in a complicated plot to steal Spanish gold, and one in central Europe involving some jobbing monarchs who eventually become the Hanoverian dynasty in England. 

It's just brilliant, read Quicksilver and then read this.

Review of Hamnet

Loved the book and had a cry at the end. Loved the film and had a cry at the end, though in a different place to where I'd cried in the book. Beautiful, clever, moving.

Watched at the Vue in Stroud.

Review of Blue Moon

Really sad biopic about Lorenz Hart, once the lyricist who worked with Richard Rodgers before he was supplanted by Oscar Hammerstein. Very claustrophobic - almost all of it takes place in Sardi's New York Bar, at the bar itself, in one of the booths and in the toilet. It could be a stage play. Hart is bitter, jealous, sexually confused and frustrated; he's 47 and in unrequited love with a beautiful blond 20-year old, and bisexual before it was fashionable. 

There's a piano player in the bar, working through all the jazz standards, including Hart's own.

A brilliant film, though it took a while to get into it.

Watched via informal distribution.

Review of Song Sung Blue

Kind, thoughtful biopic of two artists who make a career out of their Neil Diamond tribute act, and their struggles as working-class Americans - the absence of health care, precarious wages, their daughter's unplanned pregnancy...

At first it felt really schmaltzy because everything seemed to go so well for them, but engagement with the characters was followed by some painful struggles that really struck home,

Long but very engaging and likeable.

Watched via informal distribution, with hard-coded Russian subtitles that only came on during the songs - WTF? 

Review of Secret Mall Apartment

A documentary with lots of found-looking (well, it's video footage from a very old camera that they used in the early 2000s) footage about a group of radical artists who find an unused space in a shopping mall, and then smuggle in furniture to convert it into a domestic space. Except it's a faux-domestic space, because no-one actually lives there, and it's too cold to inhabit in the winder. It's more of a secret art installation than a secret apartment, but it's still fun. The film touches on the surface of the politics of redevelopment and shopping malls without really engaging with it. It's definitely engaging, though.

Appropriately we watched this via informal distribution.

Review of "The Lost Cause" by Cory Doctorow

I like Cory Doctorow a lot, though not so much for his fiction. This isn't brilliantly written, but the scenario of how the US responds to a slow climate collapse is good and well depicted, including some latter-day Trumpists and some bonkers sea-steading libertarians. It's good the way that he explores the appeal of that kind of Blockchain anarchism to some on the left who ought to know better.

Review of The Life of Chuck

Clever interesting film that's quite hard to characterise. The websites describe it as Sci-Fi/Fantasy, but it's not really that. It's based on a short story by Stephen King, so I thought it would be horror, but it's not that either, even though it starts off with an end-of-the-world thing.  It also contains some lovely dance scenes, and some arc-of-a-life things. There's a few plot weaknesses/holes, but they are excusable given the overall narrative. I think you will just have to watch it.

Watched on Netlix, one of the few good films there.