Review of Lady Susan

A fun, enjoyable piece of C18th chick-lit, with lots of nicely observed bitchiness; I'm not sure why this isn't part of the regular Jane Austen canon, because it's beautifully written. It took me about ten minutes to get used to the language. I particularly liked the way Austen manages to progress the story without any third person narrator. The epistolary novel may be very dated form, but it seems bang up to date, sharp and contemporary, here. I'm only sorry that she seems to have given up at the end, so that the denouement comes from the perspective of an omniscient third-party narrator. Actually, I'm also sorry that I couldn't work out what was going on with Lucy Manwairing at the end - I can tell that she is humiliated, but I'm not sure exactly how.

Which leads me to another observation - the characters in this seem like C18th versions of us, but they aren't. They are as foreign as women in ancient Athens or contemporary Saudi Arabia, an idle rich 'leisure class' who live off the labour of others and spend their lives managing the consolidation of property through marriages.

Review of 'Love and Friendship'

A bit of a meringue of a film - too sweet and light, not quite sour and sharp enough for the content. It's a movie treatment of a Jane Austen epistolary novel, Lady Susan, not published in the author's lifetime - and recently 'novelised' by the film's writer. The book is bitchily great, and the film isn't quite good enough. It's clear the cast of luvvies had a lot of fun making it, especially the dressing up and the hair and the sets - Kate Beckinsale alone seems to have three different hair artists working on her. Despite this, though, she's just not mean enough - the Lady Susan in the book is really rather darker.

I note in passing that the best friend character has been turned in to an American - she isn't in the book. Haven't we grown out of that yet?

It's watchable enough though, and there are quite a few laughs, and it did persuade me to read the book (free for kindle, unlike the re-novelisation), so not a complete loss.

Watched at the Everyman Cinema in Muswell Hill, in one of the newly refitted screens - a bigger screen than previously, sofa seats with little tables on the arms for drinks and snacks. It's clear where the cinema business model is going.

Review of Operation Basalt

A well-written and gripping account of a little-known incident in WW2, this book also raises interesting questions about the nature of historical memory and the purpose of writing history.

In October 1942 with the Axis powers still in the ascendant the British launched a small-scale raid on the German-occupied island of Sark, one of the smallest of the Channel Islands. It was a tiny pinprick against the Nazis, yet it had significant consequences, not only of the people whose lives it touched but also for others far away – civilian and military prisoners who were caught up in the cycle of repression and counter-repression that it triggered, and all those Allied soldiers engaged in commando and partisan warfare, who were henceforth to be summarily executed if captured.

Eric Lee conveys the military and political context of the raid with a deft touch, setting out the background without labouring it. He also describes the raid itself with all the skills of a thriller writer, and it’s easy to imagine oneself there with the commandos, stumbling about in the dark and finding that things aren’t the way they look on maps or aerial photographs. I couldn’t help thinking how we have become used to our present surfeit of information – I can look up any of the unfamiliar terms in the book in a second (even when I’m on a train, as I did yesterday), or check out a Google map or street view of the places mentions. Then, the commandos and their leaders back in Britain had little idea what was going on in the islands – almost impossible to contemplate now.

On the other hand, the extent to which the raid unleashed a round of information warfare seems very modern. It’s hard to believe that the Nazis claimed to be the injured party in breaches of the ‘rules of war’, but they did.

One other thought struck me. This event was relatively recent, and well-defined. It took place within the context of military bureaucracies that tried to keep accurate and detailed records, and several of the participants left eye-witness accounts.

Yet it’s already impossible to dis-entangle some of the details – how many prisoners did the commandos take, and how many casualties were there? What happened to one of the civilians who played a key role? It’s to the author’s credit that he manages to solve some mysteries, shed some light on others, and admit where he is unable to do either.

This is a great and enjoyable book, and I look forward to reading more history by this author.

Review of The Portable Veblen

I picked this up because I rather like the odd economist-anthropologist Thorsten Veblen; I’d used terms like ‘conspicuous consumption’ and ‘leisure class’ loosely for ages until I actually read him, and found him to be brilliant and insightful, and rather relevant to our emerging post-capitalist civilisation.

But while the main protagonist of this novel is named for and keen on the original Veblen, it’s not really about him at all. Instead, it’s about relationships – between lovers, between parents and children, between siblings, old friends and everyone else. Oh, and trauma-induced brain damage, and medical experiments, and the regulation of medical trials, and the treatment of the mentally ill.

A few pages in I decided that this was not my sort of book at all, but I am so glad that I stayed. McKenzie is a very good writer, with a superb eye for details. There’s a good and well-structured plot for those that need that sort of thing (me), and sometimes the interplay between parents and children, and between siblings and parents, was so good it seemed that she’d been listening in on my sessions with my therapist.

So just read this. And then go read some Veblen too – I went and got myself a new copy of the Theory of the Leisure Class when I finished this book.

Review of Florence Foster Jenkins

Much lighter than the recent French film ‘Marguerite’, which was a more fictionalised version of the same story but dwelled more on the tragic aspects of the story. The acting is more camp and over-done, though it’s interesting to see Hugh Grant actually acting. It still has some poignancy, especially in terms of the relationships that MFJ develops with the men around her, who come to care about her feelings enough to protect her from realising how dreadful she is. It also doesn’t shrink from the fact that she had syphilis, which is surely a first in a film designated as suitable for general viewing. And it manages to imply that her pianist is gay without over-doing it.

Also beautiful to look at, in the interiors, the lighting, the costumes, and even the long shots down New York avenues – how did they manage to get the city back to the 1940s? I noticed in the credits that some of it was shot in Liverpool and Glasgow – I wonder which scenes. And a lovely scene with 'Sing Sing Sing' on a gramophone at a party.

Watched at Woodford Odeon, with my mum, in a surprisingly full cinema for a Wednesday night.

Review of Sing Street

Disappointing Irish teen band film – so transparently a wish-fulfilment fantasy that it didn’t really hold my attention. Nice premise – posh kid gets sent to tough school because his parents are broke, survives and attracts cute (slightly older) girl by forming a band with his mates. But if we are expecting a teen version of The Commitments, that’s not what we get. The band are brilliant from the very start. He writes brilliant songs with no apparent effort. There’s no conflict within the band, they all practice regularly at one of the band member’s house while his mum bring them tea and snacks, the pretty girl is snaffled straight away – even the lead’s violent school-bully nemesis is won over and becomes the band’s roadie. Too good be true, and too good to be an interesting film.

Review of Mustang

A beautiful, sad film about five young girls growing up in a rural community in North Eastern Turkey. Though the reviews seem to present this as a ‘coming of age’ story, it’s something rather nastier than that implies. The girls are brought up by their conservative grandmother and their patriarchal uncle, both of whom are very conservative and apply increasingly strict controls over their lives. The house is gradually turned into a prison from which a family-arranged marriage is the only sanctioned escape, and the girls respond to this in different ways. There are a few light moments when they occasionally break out, but it becomes increasingly dark and claustrophobic. A good advert for mainstream feminism and modern liberal urban life; almost the only decent man in the film is the gay truck delivery man befriended by the girls (they do refer to him as ‘queer’, but it’s only the slightly unusual facial hair that marks him out).

It's a Turkish-German co-production, with great music. It also has a sort of German look to it, which set me to wondering whether that was measurable. Are there national (or personal) styles in film making that would be revealed by statistical analysis – length of static or panning or zooming shots, length and angle of close-ups, time between cuts, etc? I wonder whether there has been any work on this. It seems so obvious that I can’t help thinking someone must have done it.

Anyway Mustang (I don’t know why it’s called that – a Turkish cultural reference that is lost on me?) is a good but sombre film.

Review of Dr Strangelove

Somehow I've never got round to seeing this, so I was grateful for the chance to watch it in the Middle Floor at Springhill.

It's horrible, though not in a bad way. Although it's billed as a black comedy there aren't many laughs. It's mainly a believable story about how a rogue air force general goes nuts and starts the slide towards a nuclear war, which then can't be stopped by any human agency.

It's very anti-military, and also quite anti-American. The Russians are largely invisible - the Soviet premier is on the end of a phone line but we don't hear his voice, and the Russian ambassador is mainly decent, though he does take pictures of everything in the secret war room. The Americans are bureaucratic, at least slightly mad, and sex-crazed. I don't think a film like this could be made now, though I suppose 'In the Loop' wasn't all that far off, particularly in the way it portrayed the relationship between the sensible but ineffectual Brits and the crazy but powerful Americans.

Review of Electricity

I didn’t know anything about this – just found it on BBC iPlayer while looking for something to do, but it was really rather good. It’s about a Lancashire girl with severe epilepsy searching for her lost brother in the London underclass, and it’s beautifully shot and very well acted, with lots of emotional depth. 

There are a few implausible plot developments (everyone she meets is really nice to her), and she seems to have an enormous cool wardrobe contained within her small wheelie suitcase; in fact she dresses rather too well for the character she is supposed to be playing.

But it’s quality British drama all the same. Lots of stuff about how people can manage their conditions, and about how they are treated as they do so - something I hadn't thought about much for years, but this made me think about it again.

I was sort of puzzled why it appears to be set in the North East when it’s not in London, even though she’s from Lancashire. Maybe that was explained somewhere and I missed it.

Review of 'Miles Ahead'

Not a terrible film, but not a great one either, and Miles deserves better. This is not a full musician biopic, so it misses out on lots of the familiar ‘struggle to be excellent’ themes. Instead it focuses on the fallow period of five years when Miles wasn’t recording or performing; the earlier years are done by flashback. We see some of his early performances, and so on, as recollections. The present – the time when the film’s main narrative is taking place – is more about guns, shoot-outs, car chases and drug deals. 

This means that there isn’t enough about the music; for me the best bits were where Don Cheadle is playing Miles working with other musicians. There’s nothing wrong with the acting – Cheadle acts well, and if he can’t actually play the trumpet (maybe he can?) he can certainly act trumpet playing.Ewan McGregor's fictional Rolling Stone journalist is quite good too.

Just as Miles makes his comeback and starts playing again the film ends – not before time, because it’s quite long, and the car chases got on my nerves. But I’m sorry it ended where it did, and that there wasn’t more about the creativity rather than about the tortured-ness of it all.

Watched on the cinema screen in a nearly empty Holloway Odeon.

Review of 'I Married a Communist' by Philip Roth

This is one of the good Roth books (I really hate some of them) – well written, and with several important subjects addressed; McCarthyism, the failure of the American Left, and relationships between people with…um…issues.

Still, it’s a mixed bag. It has a weird structure, with a youngish narrator being told most of the events by an older man recalling them…only the narrator was there for some of the narrative so can provide his own perspective – and sometimes it becomes hard to remember who is talking or what they are saying. It’s a bit muddled and confusing, and not strictly necessary.

It starts out exploring the impact of the blacklist on people’s lives, and the impulses that drove good people into first the Henry Wallace Progressive movement and then to the Communist Party. It covers well the fine impulses that drove people there, and also the sheer misery of the CP’s twists and turns and what they meant for those people. It explains how the New Dealers and liberals were the real target of the red-baiters, and how much nasty score-settling went on.

But two thirds of the way it seems to change tack and sentiment; the liberal and communist characters are suddenly driven not by personal or political conviction but by their own emotional flaws. Some of this is revelation of the plot, and some of it feels like Roth changed his mind and started to write a different book.

And the portrayal of the mutually destructive relationship between the main protagonist and his wife, and her previous destructive relationships with men and with her daughter, are really horrible. It’s put into the mouths of those characters who are generally reliable and insightful witnesses, so we are supposed to take it as a true and honest account.

This is just misogyny, spiced up with some racial and class awkwardness. The knowledge that this is really about Roth’s relationship with Claire Bloom, and that many of the facts map on to the real story, makes it skin-crawling.

At the end Roth brings it back to the historical events covered in American Pastoral – the failure of liberalism in the face of Black-led riots and urban degeneration. It’s all hopeless and depressing, and the moral is that those who pursue political or civil goals based on the possibility of change are fools who waste their own time and put themselves and those they care about in harm’s way. There is some ‘bracketing’ of the view, but the argument against it which is offered doesn’t feel strong or deeply felt.

Very painful to read much of the time, although it is a mostly good book.

Review of 'The Wolf of Wall Street'

Hard to know how to review this. It's much too long, for a start. Jordan Belfort is too disgusting a person with whom to spend three hours - doesn't Scorsese know how to indicate that time passes without...it actually having to pass? The film does show how nasty the crowd around him and his brokerage company was, but it's mostly in terms of their moral depravity - drugs and hookers. There isn't much sense that what they in business terms was wrong, and had victims - just that it was against the rules. And Belfort is portrayed as someone with his own moral code, that he stuck too - he never ratted on his real friends, the guys from his neighbourhood that he recruited to run the company with him. (In this he is rather like the Mafia types in Scorsese's Goodfellas; maybe that's the best way to think about Wall Street, as just another organised crime gang.) Even when he's wearing a wire because he has become a cooperative witness, he takes risks to indicate to them that he is doing so - though inexplicably that doesn't seem to have any consequences. He still only serves three years, in a nice prison with tennis courts.

That's the message of the whole film, really, that this stuff doesn't have consequences. His marriage is wrecked, mainly by his drug and hookers habits - but he didn't seem to care much about any of that anyway. After his imprisonment he's still giving motivational lectures on selling. Of course, it would be wrong for this to have a happy ending, with justice being served and the evil-doers getting their just desserts. That isn't what happens in real life, and it would be implausible to tell a financial story that ended that way. There is a touch of consolation in the familiar Hollywood theme that the rich and powerful aren't any more happy than the rest of us, but even that is not really carried through. A certain kind of young man seeing this film would think of it as a recruiting commercial for the financial services industry.

Review of 'Frozen'

My kids were grown up by the time this came out, and they are possibly of the wrong gender too, so I never got to see this. This weekend we decided that since so many little girls have grown up with it, it must be a cultural reference point, and we ought to see it anyway. So we watched it from a DVD in the Middle Floor at Springhill Cohousing.

It was much, much better than I was expecting. The merchandise from the film is of course aimed at providing stuff to buy for the little-girl fans. But the film itself is quite dark, and touches on some quite heavy issues - the things that are never talked about in families, what it feels like to have an older sibling grow away from you, having powers (feelings) that you can't control. The love between sisters is a major theme and well handled. Even the silly snowman character, who is unaware that his enjoyment of warmth will bring about his own demise, brings up some stuff about mortality.

It's also worth noting that it comprehensively trashes the idea that you will know true love when you find it - and I was pleased to see that the worst baddie doesn't look or sound like a villain at all, at least for most of the film. We are as taken in as the characters in the film.

It's great the way it engages with Norse and Sami mythology, and the look of it is really great - though there are goofy comic characters, and the marshmallow monster was lame and not frightening, some of the others are well drawn and wouldn't look out of place in Studio Ghibli steampunk. I particularly liked the way that the ships looked, and the vision of frozen Oslo. The ice storm effects, and the way that the ships crash about towards the end, are very effective.

Interesting that some of those who watched it with us, and who had seen it several times before, felt the need to disparage it as soppy, even though they clearly wanted to watch it again.

The poster above is the soppiest version - there were others which looked darker, and which emphasise the relationship between the film and the Hans Christian Andersen story, 'The Snow Queen', on which it is based.

Review of 'Burlesque'

Unbelievably, Netflix gave this 4.5 stars. Execrable dialogue, lame and predictable plot, squeaky-clean burlesque club where the healthy and apparently wealthy dancers are all one big happy family...mainly an opportunity for Christina Aguilera to sing and dance with few clothes on.

I have a soft spot for Cher, though I can no longer remember why. Has she actually ever been in any good films?

Almost embarrassed to post this review because it means I'm admitting that I watched the film.

Review of 'Marguerite'

Watched at a cinema in Bath, on a rainy Easter Saturday, partly to get out of the rain.

This is a rather long but very good period drama, loosely based on the life of the American woman Florence Fletcher Jenkins, who thought she was a great singer but wasn't. Curiously, there is another film about her life about to be released, starring Meryl Streep, more closely based on her actual life and apparently much more obviously comic.

The reviews of this one were rather misleading, in that they describe it as a rather light period comedy, but it's actually very painful to watch - about self-delusion, deceit, and the corrupting power of money. The Baroness Marguerite has never been told that she has a dreadful singing voice and appalling technique, and hasn't worked it out for herself. Everyone in her life has an interest in deceiving her about this, including some young blades who think her lack of talent is both powerfully symbolic of something-or-other and screamingly funny.

It builds to a humiliating public performance and then worse for Marguerite, who it's impossible not to like despite everything. It's impossible to like almost everyone else in the film.

It's odd that you wait half a lifetime for a film about such a woman and then two come along at once. For me the film evoked the feelings I associate with impostor syndrome, even though it depicts what seems to be the opposite. Marguerite thinks she has talent even though she doesn't, whereas impostor syndrome is about the feeling that you don't have competence but have thus far fooled everyone - a bit like feeling that you are a Marguerite. Not exactly the same, because impostor-syndrome sufferers don't think that everyone is conspiring to deceive them, but rather that no-one else has realised...

A really good film - looking forward to seeing the other one.

Review of 'The Guard'

A brilliant dark comedy drama centred on a policeman in rural Ireland caught up in a flawed operation to intercept a major drug shipment through his patch. The cop (Brendan Gleeson) is only a bit corrupt, but he's sarcastic and magnificently unambitious, so he's not afraid to offend either his bosses or metropolitan sensitivities, liberal or otherwise.

The plot involves a preppy Black FBI man, IRA arms caches, a terminally ill mother, philosophically inclined drug smugglers...and plenty more that can't really be discussed without drifting into spoilers. Lots of the cinematography is beautiful, and much of the rest is effectively claustrophobic. The dialogue is so sharp I wanted to hear it all again, or see it written down - but there are lots of really good visual jokes too. A great film - I wish there were more like this.

Review of "The Fracking Cult Murders: A Steampunk Novel"

I'm sorry I didn't like this more, because I recognise that it's a bit like my own book - alternative history, a lot of humour, and self published (though unlike me the author has made a good job of that - a proper name for his publisher, and I like the cover).

I liked the version of the modern world that has evolved without electricity or the internal combustion engine, but is nevertheless recognisably modern. It's not a cod-Victorian world. I think that's clever.

On the other hand, I really couldn't be bothered with the plot, and I didn't find most of the characters engaging enough. There were also too many plot elements - the late introduction of the S&M brothel is particularly irritating in that respect. I'm not adverse to a bit of S&M sex, but it's either part of the story or it isn't. And there's an awful lot of food descriptions, particularly cake. It's funny at first, but it began to get on my nerves.

Nevertheless, I'm not sorry I spent the time with this book, and hope to read some others by the author.

Review of 'Parrot and Olivier in America'

A very well-written, cleverly structured, thoughtful historical novel. Lots of insight into character, but also into big issues like the meaning and values of democracy. It’s a sort of fictionalised account of De Tocqueville’s visit to America, but with more fun and adventures, and tension between the two very different narrators. I usually enjoy Peter Carey’s work, and this one makes up for the awful ‘True History of the Kelly Gang’.

I found the last few pages particularly poignant, especially since it’s the insights of the anti-democratic aristocrat that turn out to be the more astute and prophetic.

Review of 'Solar'

A comic novel of sorts, with a rather nasty after-taste. It's well written, because McEwan  is a brilliant writer, and he has engaged with science (both the content and the organisational aspects) in some depth. But the main character is quite horrible, and it's impossible to ignore that the author has tried to make him more horrible by making him short and fat. Most of the other characters are horrible too, apart from the protagonists' long string of long-suffering wives and lovers.

There are great descriptions of the kinds of magical thinking and self-bargaining that goes on when anyone fails to resist temptation. Science Studies comes off rather badly - although McEwan isn't a physicist he does seem to have bought into the physicists' view of their own perceived place in the intellectual hierarchy. On the other hand, he does engage properly with climate change, even if he puts the arguments in the mouths of some horrid people.

Review of "The Way of the Cross (The Cathar Wars Book 1)"

This is a well-written historical novel with a focus on the military aspects of the Albigensian Crusade. Although the political issues and the social significance of Catharism are not ignored, that’s not what this is about. The central character is Simon de Monfort, and it’s more or less told from his point of view. This rather obscures some of the real nastiness, though it’s not glossed over – we do have heretics burned alive and showing real courage, but it’s not from their point of view – they are more or less ciphers. Lots of detail about medieval siege-craft, which was interesting but not really what I was after.