Review of Living

Is it possible for a film to be boring and enjoyable at the same time? Well, this one does a pretty good job. Bill Nighy is a bureaucrat at the London County Council in the 1950s, and he's emotionally sclerotic (with his co-workers and his son) and acts as a road block to stop anything happening - a group of women from an estate in the East End want to turn a bomb site into a children's playground, and they are routed back and forth between departments to ensure that nothing ever happens to their proposal.

Then he learns that he's going to die from cancer, and he goes very slightly off the rails, visiting an improbably bohemian Brighton, taking a young woman who is a former colleague to lunch at Fortnum's, not turning up to work, and so on. 

It's all beautifully done, though not much really happens. It's all about the feelings, and the facial expressions that are about not revealing them.

I note in passing that there's something of a geographical error in the film. The bureaucrat and his colleagues arrive by suburban commuter train into Waterloo Station, and then cross a bridge over the Thames to approach County Hall, then the HQ of the London County Council. Except that County Hall is on the same side of the river as Waterloo, so how can they be crossing the river to approach it?

Watched in the Middle Floor at Springhill, having obtained it via informal download.

There's a very good review in the London Review of Books here.

Review of "On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous" by Ocean Vuong

A short book, but one with a lot to it...coming of age as gay in rural Connecticut, the Vietnam war and its impact on Vietnamese and Americans, the devastation wrought by opioids on working class communities, deindustrialisation and poverty...and what it's like to be a writer in the shadow of all that. And death, and abandonment, and separation. Just brilliant really, and I may read it again.

Review of Where the Crawdads Sing

A feel-good film about nature, child abuse, male violence, rape, murder...what's not to like? Actually a really good film, with a moderately complex narrative structure, some nice acting, lovely nature footage, a courtroom drama aspect, and a great ending. Hard to say much else without spoiling, but well worth watching.

Watched in the middle floor at Springhill, obtained via informal distribution.

Review of "The Debt to Pleasure" by John Lanchester

Hard to do justice to this while avoiding spoilers. It's a great, clever, well-written and thoroughly nasty book. It's written in the first person by a snobbish food bore, who writes pretentiously about a journey to his summer home in France through a series of menus and recipes. Despite the fact that he's deeply unpleasant it's not too terrible to spend all this time in his company, because some of his knowledge about food and history is actually enjoyable. 

It's so pretentious that there are laugh-out-loud moments, along with insights into the narrator's history and personality of which he seems to be unaware. We gradually learn that he's an unreliable narrator, though this is done so slowly that it wasn't apparent to me. 

And that's pretty much all I can say without ruining it for you. 

Review of Flee

Really good animated feature film about a young gay man who is fleeing from Afghanistan. Every so often it's inter-cut with some archive film, including scenes of pre-war Kabul, and it's sort of shocking how modern the dress and the shops look. Lots of happy, smiling young women in modern dress on the streets and on public transport. There are also some scenes from what must be Communist Party congresses, with lots of uniformed mustachioed men single The Internationale. And without wanting to romanticise the period of Communist rule, it's hard not to wonder where all those men went, and whether any of them are still there as the potential constituency for a very different kind of Afghanistan.

But it's mainly about the experience of being a displaced refugee, and it's grim and very effective. 

Watched via informal distribution.

Review of "Elmet" by Fiona Mozley

Oh blimey, what a book! A depiction of rural, underclass, off-the-grid life. The people here are one fraction of that subculture...the kind that intermingles with Travellers, takes part in illegal bare knuckle prizefights, poaches and hunts...not the solar-powered vegan off-grid van-dwelling underclass, even though vans also feature here. Heroin addiction is in the background, though not specifically mentioned.

It's rough and violent, and often shocking. The book is also well written, structured and has some very evocative nature writing. It sometimes uses language that I don't think the first-person narrator would actually use, but that doesn't matter too much.

This is a debut novel, and it's pretty brilliant, though not an easy read.

Review of Vandana Shiva: Seeds of Change

A film about activist and scientist Vandana Shiva that left me slightly uneasy. It's more or less a biopic, from her early days as a sort of privileged middle-class Indian woman who wants to study Physics even though her convent school tries to dissuade her, to her involvement with the Chipko movement, and on to her campaigns in support of small farmers in India and against the global seed companies in general, and GMO in particular. And then there she is, on the stage at the anti-globalisation protests in Seattle alongside trade unionists and campaigners, and being cheered to the rafters.

Most of the time I was carried along and just thought how wonderful she was, but I was surprised to see that one of the people she cites as a sort of corporate shill who's been attacking her was Mark Lynas, who I had always thought well of as a climate activist and writer. So I searched a little, and I found that George Monbiot - who I also think well of - is not very keen. And some of this is about the debate over veganism and lab-grown meat vs. "natural" organic farming, and I've said before that I am not entirely happy with Monbiot's uncritical acceptance of food produced in factories rather than on farms. I wish it were true that we could feed everyone well from small organic mixed farms, but I don't think it is.

So there's something about Vandana Shiva that doesn't quite feel right either..the big bindi on her forehead, the spiritual influences that she cites, and which the audience for the film lapped up . For her Gandhi is the shaping influence, but I can't feel entirely good about him since I read Perry Anderson's rather critical articles...like this one and also this.

Watched at a special screening at Hawkwood College, which has also been a venue for some dodgy events in the past, which didn't help any.

Review of Neptune Frost

Really interesting as a phenomenon, but as a film...well, that's two hours of my life I'm not going to get back. Nothing that you call a plot, or dialogue...just a long stream of declaimed technospeak from the various characters, and striking images and scenes juxtaposed next to each other without any purpose or narrative. I read a plot summary and a blurb, and that might describe what's going on, but it might easily not. 

Watched at the Stroud Film Festival, and I had a little doze despite the fiercely uncomfortable chairs. For all the understanding that I got I might as well have slept through the whole thing.

Review of Ali and Ava

Nice, sweet film about the relationship between an older white woman and an isolated British-Asian young man in Bradford. Among the things I liked about it were the positive depictions of what white people had got from their encounter with their Asian-origin neighbours...the little white girl doing Indian-style dancing from a video (with her sometimes-racist older brother joining in) is the example that struck me first. This is a depiction of two communities living alongside each other and picking stuff up...not exactly integrating, but not hostile and hating either. 

In an understated way both the protagonists are people who are not completely limited by their class position either; she's been to university and got a degree in Criminology, he reads poetry. And it avoids the familiar rom-com tropes of will-they-won't-they, while remaining gentle and affection all along.

This is the second time I've watched it, but I couldn't find an earlier review.

Watched via informal distribution too.

Review of Chatter

A lovely short film shot within 100m of where I live, with people I know as actors. Despite the brevity (11 minutes) it covers a lot of stuff, including depression and family relationships, and relationships with nature. Mainly it's about the impact of the pandemic and lockdown, especially the early period when we really didn't know what was happening or whether we were all going to die.

Watched at the Stroud Film Festival.

Review of Mario's Cafe

I was so excited by Roland Denning's film about James Castle, The Society for the Protection of Unwanted Buildings, that I had to watch others....he'd referred to this one at the Q&A after the other film, and I knew the area. It's nice, but without the personal connection it didn't do as much for me. Maybe it would have been better at a public showing too.

Review of The Society for the Protection of Unwanted Objects

I'd seen this film before, about my friend and fellow Red Band member James Castle, but it was different watching it with an audience...last time I'd watched it at home via Vimeo. It's nominally about his business, the eponymous Society for the Protection of Unwanted Objects, though really it's about him, and his hoarding addiction, and what it has done to his relationships, especially with his former partner Karen. 

The film is as charming and funny as James is, but it's also sad, watching someone destroy their relationships and damage themselves as a result of what really is an addiction. James (who I really love dearly) has all the characteristics of a fully-fledged addict, including denial and bargaining, and subterfuge. The moment when he says "I only have two cars - two Audis and two Alpha Romeos" is both hilarious and tragic, because at the moment he says it he really does believe it.

A genius film, only 30 minutes long, but really worth watching. You can see it online here, but we got more out of watching it at Stroud Film Festival.

Review of Dunkirk

A fairly straightforward war film, rather well done by Christopher Nolan as director. I didn't recognise many of the actors, so it felt like it was real stories...even though there are some big names in there. It cuts backwards and forwards between different groups in various kinds of peril, thus keeping up the tension. It's very well done, with more horror than heroism...the civilians are rather more heroic than the soldiers. There are a few cliched lump-in-throat moments...the navy captain on the mole remaining unflustered as the bombs fall around, the arrival of the little ships. The soldiers do look genuinely shell-shocked and fatigued.

Oddly the Germans barely appear at all, except as the origination point of bombs and shots. Right at the very end there are some shadowy figures in coal-scuttle helmets, but otherwise we see German planes but no pilots, whereas the British pilots get lots of close-ups. Come to think of it, there are no French people either, even though this is a town in France and 1,000 French civilians were killed. Actually tens of thousands of French soldiers were evacuated, and the French navy was heavily involved, but you wouldn't know it from the film. Nor would you know about the Indian, Moroccan and Senegalese soldiers present.

And there's no feeling for the battle itself, which was hard-fought and quite complicated, and involved strategic choices on both sides that had long-lasting implications. The Germans stopped their attack and concentrated on other pockets of British troops. The British refused the French request that they counter-attack rather than evacuate. 

Review of "The Song of Achilles" by Madeline Miller

Not as enjoyable as her Circe. The latter part seems to be mainly a straightforward retelling of the Illiad, which was made even less enjoyable because I'd just read the rather more creative retelling in Pat Barker's "The Silence of The Girls". The earlier sections which seem to me to more made-up (especially the backstory of Achilles and Patroclus) are more enjoyable, though I think there's something not quite right about the shame that the two boys seem to feel about their homosexual love - not very Greek, surely?

Also by making Patroclus the first-person narrator she's sort of stuck once he dies. First it seems that there's no narrator at all - or rather an omniscient third-person narrator...and then it seems that it's Patroclus's spirit after all, which isn't very satisfying either.

Review of Schooling The World: The Last White Man's Burden

A polemical, one-sided look at the damage done by exporting western models of education to non-western societies, with a particular focus on Ladakh. Lots about how western-mode education destroys traditional culture and robust, locally-adapted societies, which are seen through a rose-coloured filter. Yeah, Ladakh does seem pretty great, and the way in which western-style education has been imposed as part of a development model that assumes the path followed by the West is the best and only way to develop is pretty awful. A more nuanced film would have taken a more critical look at some of the other non-western cultures, where sometimes there is a genuine, well-founded and justified hunger for any education...think about the girls that the Taliban is preventing from getting any kind of education. I suspect the Taliban wouldn't have many problems with this film.

There is of course plenty wrong with the western model of education, which was designed to discipline working-class children for a life in factories and mills, and to teach them what they needed to know for that life, and to indoctrinate them into cultural submission to the values of capitalist society. Even with its own terms it's not a great success. 

And there's no doubt that, as the film illustrates with quotes and artefacts like old posters, the export of this model was tied in to the expansion of imperialism; there most certainly was an intention to eradicate the "backward" cultures of those who were sitting on land that the imperialist powers wanted. There was a similar move to eradicate Welsh, and Catalan, within the metropolitan territories of the imperialist powers.

And it's lovely to see the ethnobotanist Wade Davis interviewed as one of the talking heads in the film. He makes lots of good points about what might be thought as "cultural biodiversity" - that as we increasingly inhabit a world of multiple concurrent crises one of those "primitive" cultures might contain something that we are going to need, and it would be shame if it were too late to pick it up because we'd extinguished it.

But there's lots left out that doesn't fit into the monodimensional critique that the film offers.Most of all I missed even a hat-tip to Paolo Freire, the Brazilian educational theorist whose "Pedagogy of The Oppressed" not only anticipated the film's critique but actually proposed something more positive, and more useful, than the "everything traditional is just great" panacea that the film effectively endorses. And there are other kinds of informal and community-organised education that ought to be recognised...I know I'm partial, but think of the musical education provided by brass band culture without conservatoires.

The uneasy feeling that I had as I watched was that in essence this film is rooted in the conservative critique of modernity, not a progressive critique. Traditional societies are not, for the most part, utopias. They are often hierarchical, oppressive, and reactionary. And outside tiny isolated pockets they don't really exist...in a capitalist world everything is touched by the hand of capital. We can do better than this.

Review of "No one round here reads Tolstoy" by Mark Hodgkinson

Occasionally interesting but mainly rambling and self-indulgent book about a man's love of books and what they meant to him through his life. He's slightly younger than me, but there are some things from his life that I recognise, even though he grew up in a poor working class family in the north and I grew up in a comfortably lower-middle class family in the north London suburbs...the Essex ones, mind, not the posh and cultured ones in the north-west. I enjoyed a lot of his reading choices, but didn't really share his love of punk and new wave...even then I knew it wasn't that good, though I was less interested in music then.

There are bits of life story, bits about the publishing industry (he creates his own publishing company), and lots about bookshops, but it doesn't add up to anything that was really enjoyable to read. I think I may have had it with white male autobiographies.

Review of "Station Eleven" by Emily St John Mandel

Really good dystopian/post-apocalyptic novel about a world devastated by a pandemic that kills 99 per cent of the population. Quite a complex narrative that darts about across the timeline, pre- and post-pandemic, and some implausible link-ups between the characters that survive...but it doesn't matter, this is brilliant writing, and full of menace and danger without any need for graphic descriptions of death or violence. 

Most of all it brought the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic back to me; our pandemic was not nearly as terrible as the one in the book, but in the early days we didn't know how bad it was going to be. I've been dreaming about our pandemic, and disasters and terrorist attacks, ever since I read it.

Review of Ay Carmela

Not very satisfying film by Carlos Saura about an entertainer couple in the Spanish Civil War. Early on in the film they are busy cheering up a mixed bunch of Republican soldiers - some proper soldiers mixed in with anarchist militia, both men and women. It's 1938, so that may be a historical inaccuracy - weren't the women relegated to behind-the-lines roles by then? 

The entertainers get lost on the road to Valencia and find themselves trapped behind enemy lines, and they transform their act into a pro-fascist one, even though the woman half of the couple is not so happy about it. But there's something lacking in the depiction - they are neither agonized (though she is a bit, sometimes) not cynical. Maybe that's realistic, but it doesn't feel right in the film. 

Some great details in the filming...flags, and posters, and trashed towns and villages, but a bit of a disappointment.

Watched via PC, HDMI cable and informal distribution.

Review of Who Killed The KLF?

A film almost as weird as the KLF itself, which seems to have been as much prank as music band. I must admit that I rather liked "Last Train to Transcentral", and I really loved "Justified and Ancient", and now I'm not sure if that makes me a dupe of the prank or a knowing participant in the satire - I don't know whether it matters either. I quite enjoyed The Illuminatus trilogy, about which they made quite a big deal...though in the world in which we now live it doesn't seem quite as funny as it did.

This stuff was all coming out in the early 1990s, when I was the dad of very young children and not in any way a participant in rave culture, but I did like the KLF. The film is interesting and shows the extent to which they were always as much pranksters (and perhaps even conmen) as much as artists. Their early hits were based on ripping off other stuff and a sharp understanding of howto game the music business, which - delightfully - they then shared with others.

I am pleased to see that though they were absolutely embedded in the music business, they don't seem to have been posh boys - their rejection of the business was not based on noblesse and largesse.

The film spends quite a lot of time talking about the famous money-burning stunt. I still have very mixed feelings about that, but I'm also aware that it shows a better and more nuanced critique of what mone means in a capitalist system than the daft twats who claim that "cash is freedom".

Review of "Back to The Bible" by H G G Herklots

A surprisingly enjoyable read from the 1950s, written by the Vicar of Doncaster and intended as a guide for other parish priests covering what they need to know about the scriptures. Amazing that at that period it seemed possible for a local vicar to be familiar with and on top of this stuff...I rather feel that their equivalents today don't have the time or inclination to deal with any of this. I wonder how many local vicars even know what Aramaic is - I rather thnk that the one here, who is a lovely man in many ways, might not. 

This is primarily a straightforward non-fundamentalist view of how the various texts were created and transmitted. The early bit focuses on translations of the texts, and the later bit on different versions. There's not much on how texts were chosen or rejected for inclusion in the canon, which I would have liked. And the author assumes familiarity with the structure of the New Testament, though not so much with the Hebrew Bible (the "Old Testament")...whereas for me the opposite is true.

I got a lot out of it, though, including a confirmation of my gradually strengthening view that Christianity is not a "descendant" of Judaism, but that both religions are descendants of the earlier "Judaite" (my word, I'm sure there is a better one) religion, that centred on a single temple, hereditary priests and animal sacrifice - nothing at all like present-day Judaism, even though the latter presents itself as a natural continuation of the former.