Review of 'How I stopped being a Jew' by Shlomo Sand

A hard one to review, because it arouses such mixed feelings. Shlomo Sand is a clever, sharp thinker and writer who says a lot of sense about Jewish history and Zionism. He’s got an honest perspective on where Zionism came from and how it has turned out. He understands what Israel has done to the Palestinians, and what Zionism means for both Israelis and for diaspora Jews – which is not the same, but related. In this very short book he gives a potted history of the Jews that isn’t bad, though sometimes the language is over-complex and academic. For the record I entirely agree with it, and with his disappointed hope that Israel would recognise an Israeli nationality and build its own identity around a civic nationalism that wasn't explicitly Jewish. I think he argues some of this with a great deal of sensitivity, and it’s hard to find fault with it.

He’s left out some of the personal anecdotes that he sprinkled through the ‘Invention of the Jewish People’ that I rather liked, though there are some new ones that also help to build sympathy with what might otherwise seem a somewhat unsympathetic position.

Which is, that there isn't really any such thing as a ‘secular Jew’, and that those of us who want to define ourselves that way are both deluding ourselves and also giving tacit support to an ethnocentric and even racist ideological perspective on Jewish history – and one that might once have been just a harmless fantasy but is now intrinsically linked with a racist political system in Israel. And my problem is that I can see some validity in what he says but I don’t want to agree. He rather makes fun of people who disagree with him, and tells the story of a meeting at the London Review of Books bookshop (which I attended) where he presented his views and where the liberal Jewish audience appeared to be arguing that he was wrong because they were allowed to define themselves however they wanted to.

Having spent more than half of my life feeling like a non-religious, non-Zionist Jew it’s not nice to be made fun of, or to be told that one’s self-chosen identity is (like all identities, but more so) a fiction. If I felt confident enough to argue with him (which I don’t, because he’s a sharp debater with lots of good examples at his fingertips) I’d say that he persuades himself with a certain sleight-of-hand. He seems to accept that even if there never was a ‘Jewish People’ there was a Yiddish People, created in the same way and at much the same time as the Polish or Lithuanian People. I think he’s a bit flaky with his chronology but we can let that go. He says that Yiddish people has ceased to exist as a result of the holocaust and Zionism and successful assimilation, which I can accept.

But I'm very clearly the grandchild of that people that were part of that people, or at least its tail end. I can accept that there isn't a successful self-sustaining secular Jewish culture that has a creativity of its own. I've tried to be part of passing on the remains of its legacy to my kids (and other people’s kids), and though we had fun I don’t believe the exercise was particularly fruitful. And still I don’t see why I need to repudiate my personal history to gratify the need that others (Israel, the Orthodox, Shlomo Sand) have for sharp and clearly defined boundaries. If others want to say that being a Jew is a religious identity, or a national one that requires loyalty to the ethnos, then I'm going to differ, out of loyalty to myself and my personal history, but also because it’s useful politically to do so. So I won’t stop being a Jew just now, thanks Shlomo. You be what you like, and so will I.

Review of 'Wedding Belles'

A made-for-TV film, watched via the All4 app and Chromecast - actually the first thing I've watched in exactly that way, as until recently All4 didn't support Chromecast and playing it via TV and an HDMI cable from a laptop was a really miserable experience.

This is billed as it's a comedy, and it just about is, but it's very dark - child abuse, drunkeness, drug abuse, other forms of addiction, violence, suicide, murder...it's got the lot. It opens with a dockside execution by the four women and goes on in much that vein. There are scenes in a mental institutions, a nurse dressed as a nun jerking off an elderly patient...if that's the sort of thing that bothers you then you won't like this.

But it's also got four very strong women characters, played by really good actors (Michelle Gomez has been a favourite since Green Wing), and a sharp script written by Irvine Welsh. For an English viewer it was sometimes hard to understand (I had to turn up the sound to quite loud and listen to a few sections more than once).

Well worth watching.

Review of 'Alice in the Cities'

Watched on the Middle Floor screen at Springhill Cohousing, on a DVD from the private collection of the incomparable George Platts. A really slow black and white film, in which nothing much seems to happen for a lot of the time, and yet is really engaging and moving.

A young German writer has been engaged to write a story about his travels across America, but has not managed to actually write anything. Instead he meanders aimlessly from motel to diner, taking pictures without people on a Polaroid camera. In New York he helps a young woman and her nine-year old daughter book a flight back to Amsterdam (the ground crews at German airports are on strike) and somehow ends up with the daughter but without the mother back in Europe. The mother doesn't turn up, and he ends up travelling around Germany trying to find the girl's grandmother, even though the girl doesn't seem to know her family name or any addresses.

It's very clear that the early 1970s were a very different time (lots of smoking, and no-one seems to think it's odd that a young man is looking after a little girl who is not a relative), but I'm not sure if the film is entirely realistic in this depiction. There's lots of stuff about alienation through technology - horrible television programs, tinny transistor radios, juke boxes - and about the penetration of American culture into Europe, which is clearly not a good thing. But looking after the girl redeems the young man, who seems to reconnect with people again, something he has unlearned in America.

After the film we discussed it for almost an hour, and everyone seemed to have noticed something different. Well worth watching.

Review of 'Johanna'

Watched on a laptop from a library-rented DVD, this is one of the strangest cinematic experiences I've had for a while. Although none of the blurb and reviews say so, this is an opera, sort of. It's entirely sung, though there aren't what you'd call songs - just like an opera, then. The actors' voices are actually performed by others who presumably can sing better.

It's Hungarian, with all the melancholia that I would expect - I know there are a number of Magyar humourists, but somehow comedy doesn't seem to pervade the national culture. It's loosely based on Joan of Arc, apparently, though the eponymous Johanna is as much a martyred Jesus-figure as a Joan-figure. It's shot in murky colour in the tunnels underneath a hospital - there don't seem to be any windows or daylight in this place. A few of the scenes reminded me of the tunnels under the St George hospital in Barcelona, recently reopened as a monument. It looks pretty much like a nightmare - some scenes are redolent of the early episodes of 'Being Human', with blood and darkness.

Not a waste of time, but not what you'd call enjoyable either.

Review of 'Ride'

I watched this on Netflix last night (via Android phone and Chromecast) and ought to write a review, except that this one from The Guardian is so spot-on it leaves with little more to say. This is a film about privileged people who do think there's nowhere in the world to live except Greenwich Village or Santa Monica, and that the existential choices one faces are about whether to give up one's college place/fabulous editing job on the 'New Yorker' to be a surfer. Still, there are some good moments, and the underlying tension, about how the death of a child affects the relationship between parents and surviving children, is well handled. Better than the descriptions of it suggest.

Review of 'Joy'

Not much joy in this one. It's a rather long, remorseless account of life in what Americans call the middle class (and is really the working class), among people who are for the most part not very good at life. But Joy herself is smart and has (mostly abandoned) aspirations to greatness. She invents things, even though she's never been able to capitalise on those inventions.

At last she invents something that she wants to turn into a business - a new kind of mop. She encounters lots of obstacles, some from people who are just sceptical or unhelpful, and some from genuine crooks. In some ways this film could be a business school case study - it's just rather miserable to watch for most of the way, though there a few laughs here and there.

Because it's American it has an upbeat ending; a realistic ending would have seen Joy falling back into the morass of debt-ridden poverty that she fears all the way through.

Not without merit, but on balance one to avoid.

For the record, watched at the new Everyman cinema in Muswell Hill; comfortable but over-priced for experience. The cinema was more or less empty.

Review of 'The Danish Girl'

A much more emotionally engaging film than any I've seen lately. This deals with the relationship in the 1920s between two young Danish artists, one of whom decides that he wants to be a woman, not a man. Unsurprisingly it wasn't comfortable to watch - either in terms of what that character goes through or how it effects the relationship between the couple. I've no direct experience of this, but it seemed to me that the direction and the acting were excellent and treated the narrative with the sincerity and dignity that it deserved.

Of course it brought up lots of stuff, about the relationship between 'straight' and transgender people, and how to process that sort of transition. And naturally, about what kind of thing it is when people want to change their gender. In the film most of the doctors treat the character as insane. Mainly we don't do that now in this country, though I'm not sure how far popular attitudes have kept up with psychiatric and psychological procedure.

My own feelings are mixed up and muddled. I don't wish trans people any ill will, I don't want to stand in their way and I don't think they are 'insane'. But I do sort of think, in an amateur and not very focused way, that a more nuanced view of the nature of gender identity and sexual preferences than the 'woman trapped in a man's body' is possible.

Nevertheless this is a good, well-made film - watched at the Vue cinema in Stroud on a rainy Sunday night with few others there, BTW.

Review of 'Skyfall'

Watched as broadcast on ITV2, with lots and lots of breaks for adverts. I've not been a James Bond fan for years, but I recently found myself watching Spectre so I thought I'd see what this was like. Spectre is James Bond for Guardian readers (see earlier review) and this is a transitional form - some distinctly modern elements that don't fit with the earlier James Bond (M is a woman - Judy Dench, the locations are not so glamorous, Bond's relationships with women are less casual and more caring, etc).

But the politics are still more Daily Mail/Telegraph than Guardian; the baddie is a rogue agent turned against MI6 because the service sold him out to please the Chinese government and thereby ensure a peaceful transition in Hong Kong. In fact given that he's a lone rogue his power and influence, and the resources he can command, seem implausible - not that anyone cares about that sort of thing in a Bond film.

It also sets up the scenario for the next film, with Bond's upbringing in a remote house in Scotland, and a bit of a 'bureaucrats want to close down the field agents and replace them with technology' story line.

More watchable than I expected, and the filming in Scotland was quite beautiful, at least until it gets all shooty.

Review of “The Jane Austen Book Club”

Pleasant romcom with some nice characters and a few good jokes – or rather one good one, developed to the full. A group of women set up a book group to read the works of Jane Austen, and find themselves slipping into Austen-esque roles and situations – the more so since they have recruited a young cool dude to join the group and read Austen with them, even though he’s a science fiction fan. If you can swallow that the film is nice.

Review of Brasslands

I've been meaning to watch this for ages, as compensation for deciding not to go to the Guca festival itself (Ruth decidedly lukewarm, and the idea of trying to take trains to the migrant crisis frontline somehow seems both unkind and potential uncomfortable).

Watching the film I feel better about the decision. Guca looks like a pissed-up version of the nastiest English funfair you can imagine, with lots of beer tents, burger vans and hog roasts, only with a huge arena and main stage for some of the best music on the planet. Serbian culture, at least as represented here, is not all that attractive to an outsider – it’s about ethnic nationalism, Orthodox religion, and the consumption of vast quantities of pork and booze. There are pictures of saints and military heroes, including Radovan Karadzic. Not much sign of Yugo-nostalgia, lots of flags with double-headed eagles.

And yet the music is so, so wonderful – a bit like klezmer but with more dynamic and tonal variation, and with fabulous infectious percussion rhythms. The film follows a New York group that plays Serbian music even though none of them are of Serbian or Slavic extraction – quite a few are obviously Jewish; they are captivated by the music but not unreflective about the culture from which it comes, including the fact they are the only band with women musicians. It also follows two Serbian bands vying for the ‘best band’ prize; these are characterized by the Serbs as a ‘black’ band – meaning it’s from the South and seems to mainly include Roma players, and a ‘white’ band – paler, beefier crop-haired men. There’s a bit of discussion about how the music of the two streams differs. The ‘black’ band also needs to play at the tables of the beer tents for money.

A good, thoughtful music documentary – I'm only sorry there wasn't more concert footage.

Review of Pitch Perfect

A better than average American college movie, with some romcom and some buddy-movie elements. Too-cool girl goes to college (she wants to move to LA and pursue her career as a DJ/music producer, but college-professor dad gets free tuition for his kids and won’t let her waste it), is too cool to join the girls’ a capella singing group but is forced to give everything a go by the dad, ends up liking it and finding true love with the slightly nerdy boy from the rival boys’ singing group. Quite a few good visual and verbal jokes – I especially liked Rebel Wilson as Fat Amy. Also some barf jokes, and some implausible singing scenes, but overall much more enjoyable than I expected.

I watched this as it was broadcast on Film4; looking it up I was mildly pleased to discover that there’s a sequel.

Review of "Star Wars: the force awaken"

Went to see this yesterday, with my sons, their friend, and my nephew - all in their twenties. We watched it at an Imax cinema in 3D, and we were seated in row B - almost at the front, and too close to the screen for comfort really. The 3D effects were occasionally interesting (mainly in the opening graphics) but were often just a bit uncomfortable - most of the close-up head-shots looked out of focus.

The film itself had all the qualities of a pantomime; familiar characters doing familiar things, in exactly the way that the audience expected. Perhaps the predictability is part of the charm, though it didn't do much for me. Lots of it looked very much like the first film, and their were reprises from some of the others too - what is it with this franchise and Oedipal conflicts?

Funny how the bad guys keep re-inventing themselves with new evil names, but don't do anything about their design - the stormtroopers still look the same, the uniforms on the bridge of the death star are the same - oh, and they don't even bother to fix the design flaws on the death star that makes it so vulnerable to attack by silly lighter X-wing fighters with minuscule bombs.

We had the bar scene, the fight on the high gantry, the bit were the goodies are taken prisoner on the death star (they escaped so quickly I missed the whole prisoner episode while rooting around for some popcorn).

The action was diverting, but the plot was laughable and the characters not very interesting. The locations were more interesting than the special effects. I'm glad I went because it's a cultural phenomenon, and I miss out on most of those, but it was, in the words of Adam Leach, "a bit shit".

Review of 'Mary Poppins'

Watched for the first time in many years, via a laptop, VGA cable, and projector, on the big screen in the Common House at Springhill Cohousing; the film was obtained via an informal distribution system.

I don't think I ever watched this with my own kids (not the sort of thing that they would have liked at any point, I think) so it was the first time I'd seen it since I was about six. I remembered being really scared at the part where the children run away in the City of London, and seeing it again I still understood why. Remarkable to see the depiction of alleyways and courts, all done - like the roofscape scenes - without CGI.

I'm sure someone has done a critical analysis of the film, which I think is about the emergence of new models of family - the father and mother are depicted as wrongly directed towards the outside world (he to his career, her to her involvement in the Suffragette movement), and must learn that they should be focused instead on the inner life of the family and the care of their children. The happy ending is the father being happy to be sacked from his job at the bank, and the mother giving up her Suffragette sash so that it can be used as a tail for the children's kite. And then the father gets made a partner at the bank (which comes to him because he doesn't care about it any more), though the mother doesn't achieve women's suffrage as part of the same happy ending.

Review of 'Still Alice"

I watched this on our TV, via Chromecast and Netflix. It's a very well made film, but I found it really upsetting. It's about a case of early onset Alzheimer's in an intelligent, ambitious, driven 50-year old woman academic. Seeing her too-rapid degeneration, of which she is only too aware, is very painful to watch. Julianne Moore plays the part very well. The confusion, the repetition - especially of questions - reminded me of my dad's degeneration, and reminded me too that I was not as kind as I should have been. The film depicts the impact on the family too, who all try to do their best but also want to get on with their own lives, even as Alice realizes that her life as the person she is, is coming to an end. Unbearable.

Review of 'The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry'

I didn't like this very much. Rather like Harold, I felt compelled to finish what I'd started, but it was really a hard slog. There were parts that I liked, and I didn't feel able to give up, but I couldn't say the experience was enjoyable.

That's partly because it touches on subjects that are uncomfortable. I'm aware that as a bloke I am inclined to avoid books that are emotionally difficult in favour of those with intellectually interesting subject matter, evocative atmospheres or complex plots that are like puzzles. I don't often read things that deal with difficult feelings, particularly feelings about stuff that is difficult for me personally - and this has lots of that. Death of loved ones, ageing and dementia, relationships between fathers and sons, love between partners, suppressed anger at work...so some of my discomfort in reading the book might have been about that.

But it's uncomfortable in another way too. Like lots of 'walking across England' books (mainly non-fiction) this is a state of the nation book, and Rachel Joyce looks and England and doesn't much like what she sees. A lot of the time it felt like sneering to me. Part of the point of the main character is that he is emotionally constipated, that he feels much but does not express it or deal with it. But that's overlaid with the idea that this is function of his lower-middle-class outlook and tastes. It seems to me to come from the same place that once found ceramic flying ducks on a sitting-room wall to be screamingly funny, before they became ironic and thus a signifier of good (i.e. metropolitan) taste. The author is mainly sympathetic to 'ordinary' people, but I can't help thinking that she finds their tastes both sad and funny, and that we are meant to do the same.

And some of the plot devices are frankly clunky. I might have let them go if I was enjoying it anyway but I wasn't, so they were annoying. Half the time Harold is emotionally illiterate, and then he sits down and writes a long and heartfelt letter to a virtual stranger (the girl in the garage) that ties up the various loose plot ends that haven't been explicitly revealed. And the girl then takes the letter to show it to Harold's wife. I know it's fiction, but still.

Review of 'The Crusades: a very short introduction'

Very disappointed with this, and I think it is part of a general trend with the 'very short introduction' series - they are often not introductions at all. The language of this is tortured and unsuitable for a general reader who isn't used to the funny way academics write for each other. It assumes a lot of knowledge. I think it's partial too. That might seem odd in the context of a book about the Crusades, but as the author himself points out, they are a live issue now. The book 'The Crusades through Arab Eyes' doesn't make it into the bibliography, and neither does that perspective, though we hear that the Outremer lords weren't any worse than their Turkish equivalents. There is some interesting stuff about the doctrine of Holy War and Just War, and its origins in the Old Testament and Roman Law.

I note in passing that he thinks the Crusades left no permanent legacy in the region apart from the monumental - the various castles. I'm no expert but I wonder if that is true in terms of the genetics of the Palestinian population (quite a few blue-eyed Palestinians) or the practices of the local Christians.

Review of 'Death at the Blue Elephant'

Janeen Webb is a good writer with a wild imagination. That's my conclusion after reading the whole collection - but I was tempted to give up after the first few stories, which I didn't really enjoy. But I pressed on, and the later ones are really, really good. I especially liked 'Niagra Falling', which is set in a future Japan-dominated world, and 'The Fire Eater's Tale', both co-written with Jack Dann. I'll look out for more by the author, and also seek out some of the collections in which these stories appeared.

Review of 'Bridge of Spies'

A suspense thriller without much suspense or thrills, this was nevertheless enjoyable to watch, if only for the way that the environment of the early 1960s in the US and Berlin has been so lovingly recreated. The politics are pretty liberal - Tom Hanks respects the spy he is defending as an honourable soldier, Mark Rylance is brilliant as the self-effacing but self-disciplined spy, the morals about personal loyalty and decency under conditions of adversity. The Soviets behave well within the rules of the Cold War (though it seems that their interrogation techniques are much less gentle than those of the Americans - I wonder whether there are any proper studies on this?), virtue is rewarded, and so on.

The plot bowls along so that it doesn't drag, but as I said there isn't much tension. We don't know for sure whether the spy swap will go through, or what will happen to the Soviet spy afterwards, but I have to say by that point I didn't care all that much.

Review of 'Langue[dot]doc 1305'

This is an enjoyable time-travel science fiction novel, mainly set in the 1300s in Languedoc. It's about a scientific mission, but there's more academic politicking than science - which suits me fine, because in so far as there is any real time-travel science I don't have a hope of understanding it. I can relate to office politics, and to medieval studies - and it does both of these rather well. Lots of humour and nice descriptions of both the scientists and the villagers, and quite a lot of thought about how travellers from the future would appear to medieval villagers. A very Australian book, especially in the language - I wonder whether the author did this deliberately or unthinkingly. Anyway, that made it more enjoyable for me.

Review of 'Measuring the World'

An enjoyable historical novel, mainly about the characters of the two men - Humboldt and Gauss - who each seem to have been insufferable in their own way. Lots of detail and some insight into what it must feel like to be cleverer than everyone you ever meet; sensitive depiction of the plight of poor old Bonpland, Humboldt's companion on his voyages, who went through all the misery but gets none of the credit. It's suggested that Humboldt was gay, though very much in passing.