Review of Tony

Sort of coming of age picture about the early life of Anthony Bourdain (celebrity chef and writer), which portrays him as a sleazeball, loser and slightly pathetic liar, who follows a girl on whom he has an utterly unrequited crush to Cape Cod and ends up working as a dishwasher in a fast-food restaurant presided over by implausible skilful and masterly chef (played by Antonio Banderas).

Some bits are really painful, including some bits that I think are supposed to be funny. In the end Tony, and the film, comes good, but there are some uncomfortable moments.

Watched at the Art House cinema in Crouch End.

Review of "Red Plenty" by Francis Spufford

Unusual book by one of my favourite writers. It's one of his earliest pieces of fiction, and it's obvious that it wasn't original planned as fiction at all. It's a sort of history of Soviet economic planning and policy, from the perspective of several different characters and across different time periods. Underlying it is the idea, now sort of preposterous, that the orderliness of a planned economy would allow the USSR to not only catch up with but then far outstrip the prosperity enjoyed in the capitalist west. The book works by showing us all the cynical grifters and dull bureaucrats who made the system work, but also the true believers who thought that with proper science (especially cybernetics) the planned economy really could deliver. One of these is Khrushchev himself, both in his period of power and after his fall; but there are lots of other characters, some of them real people and others composites of real people.

The first proper book that I've read on my new Kobo device, and slightly more enjoyable than the ailing Kindle, but not as pleasurable as a real paper book.

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.