Review of "The Jazz Scene" by Francis Newton

This has sat on my shelf for more than a year. Someone was clearing out his Jazz books collection, and I took this one, mainly because I remember that "Francis Newton" was a pseudonym for the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm, who wrote Jazz reviews for various left wing publications.

Anyway, it turns out that it is a very good book, intelligent, informed and very sensible about Jazz, its audience, its players, and its history. The author (whatever we want to call him) situates Jazz in its historical and social context, without resorting to vulgar Marxism or daft economic determinism. Really great, well worth reading. 

Review of Benedetta

A Paul Verhoeven historical drama with heresy, blasphemy, lurid visions and lesbian nuns. Not ridiculously over the top like Ken Russel's "The Devils", this nevertheless managed to be quite salacious, but also anticlerical and anti-religious in a good way.

Benedetta is given to a convent as a quite young child, but almost immediately begins to have visions. These become progressively more lurid, but she's also doing miracles - bleeding wounds of Christ, that sort of thing. The local clerics decide to believe her (good for the pilgrimage trade), others are not so sure but she sees them off. Then the Papal Nuncio gets involved, and it's torture and burning at the stake...

Watched on Channel 4's app via Chromecast.

Review of Lots of Kids, a Monkey and a Castle

A disappointing, ramshackle, often boring film, with occasional glints of interest. It's a fly-on-the-wall documentary - no narrative or narrator - made by a son about his eighty-year-old mother.  She's not an obvious choice for a film. She's overweight, unattractive, and she doesn't stop talking. She has not much interest in other people, and little insight into her own life.

The title comes from her own declaration of what she wanted from life. The film rather glosses over how it came about that her and her husband were wealthy enough to buy the castle. It seems that money was inherited, but it's not entirely clear from who. The family were Falangists, and some members were executed "by the Reds" during the Civil War. The woman (Julita) talks about her own membership of the Falangist youth, the uniform she wore and so on; but later on she criticises Franco for abolishing the Republic, because her present-day political views extend to disapproval of the Spanish monarchy and monarchies in general.

Much of the film centres on the amount of crap that she has accumulated and preserved. The castle, and the now abandoned engineering factory that her husband once operated, are absolutely rammed full of junk - broken objects, tattered remnants of clothes that might one day be mended, and many small and labelled boxes with dolls house furniture, pins, stationary, and so on. 

That's sort of poignant, because I can't help feeling that my own life is full of crap that I am holding on to and shouldn't. The film is inter-cut with footage from home movies of the family when the children were younger, and they look to have had a fun, happy childhood - beach holidays and so on. Again, I look at that and wonder what the arc of my own life would like if it were made into a film like this.

But most of the time it's boring and depressing, and I missed some of it when I fell asleep. Ruth missed almost all of it, but still saw enough to remember how much she didn't like it.

Watched at Jane Opher's house - the old Co-op on Horns Road - as part of an ongoing series of Spanish films. The occasion was enjoyable even if the film wasn't.

Review of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg

I watched this as part of my birthday celebrations. A few months ago I found myself - unusually - listening to Radio 4, and there was a program about musicals where they raved about this as one of the best musicals ever. And then it was scheduled to be on the Stroud Film Festival, but I missed it.

So I obtained it and put it on in the Middle Floor at Springhill Cohousing - a bit of a challenge because the file was too big to copy on to a USB, and my mini PC sometimes forgets how to produce sound output from its earphone jack. But all sorted, and the showing was a success; quite a few people came, and they - like me - enjoyed it.

But it's a weird musical. Apart from the fact that there's no spoken dialogue at all, everything is sung - it's an anti-romantic romance. Sorry for the spoiler, but the main story line is that the young woman does not wait for her lover to return from the Algerian War, but marries someone else instead, because she is forgetting her absent lover even though she is carrying his child.

He comes back, marries someone else (the woman who had cared unceasingly for the dying aunt who raised him), and when the original pair meet again the moment of love has passed. There is no sense that they might yet get back together, just a feeling of a future that didn't happen.

The beautiful theme song for the film, performed by many artists, is "I Will Wait For You", but she doesn't.

Review of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

I've belated become a John Le Carre fan. I think this film captures the atmosphere of the books, especially the shabby interiors of the intelligence agency premises and safe houses. I liked the acting, but somehow I literally lost the plot - I couldn't figure out what was happening. I read the Wikipedia article about it, and realised that I'd fallen asleep and missed a major section, which might have made it easier to follow.

Watched on BBC iPlayer

Review of "L.A. Noir: The Struggle for the Soul of America's Most Seductive City" by John Buntin

The ratings and reviews of this book seem to be overwhelmingly positive, and I see it's been turned into a TV series. Still, I wasn't all that impressed, though it was something to read in the small hours to help me go back to sleep. 

The central conceit is that it's a dual biography of mobster Mickey Cohen and LA Police Chief William H Parker. But Cohen is a lesser figure, and his biography and career are not all that interesting. Parker bestrode the city as it grew, and dominated its politics and its policing, and it's hard to avoid the conclusion that Buntin really wanted to write a biography of him, or should have anyway. 

The author has had a lot of help from the LAPD and various Parker-related foundations and organisations, so though it's pretty obvious from reading the book that the man was a megalomaniac and a racist, and a right-wing operator who couldn't get on with other right-wing operators (especially J Edgar Hoover), the author doesn't want to say so. The book almost ends with Parker's death, though there's a longish epilogue that covers the 1991 riots. It's not clear whether it wants to say that the riots were Parker's legacy, or that if he'd been in charge they would have been crushed more effectively - I think it wanted to have it both ways, which makes it confusing and unsatisfactory.

I read this on kindle, so I'm not putting up a cover picture. 

Review of Shoshana

 

This is a film about Shoshana Borochov, a real person who was the daughter of Dov Ber Borochov, a "Marxist Zionist". There's lots to say about his ideas and his politics, which were in my lifetime influential in a retro sort of way about young Jews with contradictory ideas about Zionism and revolutionary socialism - but the film doesn't say much about his, though it alludes to the way he would have liked Zionism to have turned out nice. 

The film is about Shoshana's relationship with a British policeman, who is part of the Mandate authority trying to fight against the Irgun and its breakaway faction Lehi. This troubled love story is the centre of the film

The Irgun suspended hostilities against the British for the duration of WW2, Lehi didn't, and famously tried to develop a relationship with the Nazis on the basis of common hostility to the British Empire.

The film does make some efforts to show the different currents within the Palestinian-Jewish community in Palestine, but it's pretty cartoon-ish. We see that the mainstream Zionists (Labour Zionists, though it doesn't really say so) don't like the Revisionist Zionists (Irgun, and then Lehi) much, but there's not all that much substance to the disagreement - though the mainstream Zionists do call the Irgun fascists, which is justified. There are occasional Palestinian-Arab victims depicted (an Irgun attack on a bus, and then bombs in marketplaces) but there are no voices from the Arab community, no Arab characters...apart from one scene where the Mandatory Police carry out frightening round-ups in a village.

The Revisionist Zionists want to proclaim a Jewish (or rather a Hebrew) state right now, even though there's nothing like a Jewish majority. The mainstream Zionists are gradualists, and believe that continued Jewish immigration will eventually produce a Jewish majority, at which point the locals will accept a Jewish state. I can't help wondering when they thought this was going to be - the 1950s? The 1960s? With the British providing the umbrella under which this demographic and political shift would take place?

The film ends with the very beginning of what Israelis call the War of Independence and Palestinian Arabs the Nakhba...but all that's shown is a group of disorganised Arab fighters running to attack a group of Haganah fighters, lying in wait with machine guns. There's no refugees, no displacement...nothing of the civil war between the Haganah and the Irgun either. 

A few details are worth noting. We see the Irgunists flyposting their posters, with the emblem of a fist holding a rifle over a map including both Palestine and Transjordan, and the slogan (in Ivrit) "Rak Kach" - that is, "Only Thus". Until this point I hadn't really appreciated the continuity between the Irgun and the Kahanist party, which was of course called "Kach".

Also, Shoshana and her mother seem to be speaking to each other in Russian - presumably this was much more common in the Yishuv than we are given to understand, though Dov Ber Borochov was a Yiddishist as well as a Zionist, and the party he founded (Left Poalei Zion) was also pro-Yiddish. 

At one point in the film some bright-eyed young Zionists say that they have recently arrived from Kiev - was this ever possible in the 1930s?

Watched via informal distribution.

Review of "Altered Carbon" by Richard Morgan

The hardest science fiction I've read for a long time, and a mashup of cyberpunk and hard boiled detective noir. I really loved it. It's been on my Kindle for years, but somehow I never got round to reading it. I must say that I couldn't follow every twist and turn of the plot - the fact that characters can die and be restored most of the time, and that they slip in and out of each other's bodies - sorry, "sleeves" - makes this harder. I couldn't explain who turned out to have done it if any of my lives depended on it. Still, it was good if not great, and I will be back for more. I have a feeling that I started to watch the TV series once, and I might even have another look at that.

Review of Radical Love: The Life and Legacy of Satish Kumar

I watched this in the company of about a hundred people who were devotees of Kumar and thought he was perhaps literally God's gift to humanity. Some of these people were friends whom I admire, and others were fascist-adjacent woo lovers, so perhaps he is some sort of Rorschach inkblot on to who you can project whatever you want. 

I was depressed and bored by the film, which at just over an hour felt way too long. Lots of spiritual practices and pilgrimages, described as if they were effective political actions. A long section with Vananda Shiva, which brought to mind the film about her watched in the same place, and which left me with the same uncomfortable feeling. 

So yeah, watched at Hawkwood as part of Stroud Film Festival. Based on the venue I had an expectation about what the film would be like, which was not disappointed. However, Ruth and I walked there across the fields and through the woods by moonlight, and that was wonderful.

Review of Conclave

A papal election thriller, with lots of twists as the various candidates are revealed to have things in their past, or even in their presents, that don't look good in a putative Pope.

Very lush to look at, but not that much actually happens - unsurprisingly, because the cardinals doing the voting are locked in to the Vatican, so all that we can really see are side conversations and voting procedures.

Sort of tense without being actually interesting, though it held our attention.

Watched via USB and informal distribution.

Review of No Other Land

Absolutely relentless documentation of the way that first the Israeli army, and then settlers, try to evict a group of Palestinian villagers from their land in the West Hebron hills. It's crushing to watch, and there's no Hollywood-style redemption. One of the film makers is a Jewish Israeli, and the villagers are suspicious of him - not unreasonably, as we see him leaving the West Bank via the Israelis-only road back into Israel. 

There's been a lot of controversy over the film, which won an Oscar for best foreign film. Unsurprisingly many Israelis think it's propaganda, but some Palestinians also condemned it because the Israeli-Palestinian team that made it didn't use the right words to denounce Israel's occupation and genocide, and were therefore guilty of "normalisation". Fortunately other Palestinians, including the villagers most directly affected, were wiser.

Watched via informal distribution, even though it was available for free on Channel 4...mainly because I wanted to show it from a USB stick on the DVD player in the Springhill Common House. Only it wouldn't play there, even though it worked fine at home.

Review of "Falling Angels" by Tracy Chevalier

It's been a long time since I read any Tracy Chevalier - so long that there aren't any reviews of the books that I did read in my blog. I had a sort of feeling that I didn't like her all that much, that "Girl With A Pearl Earring", which I did like, had been a one-off.

But this - about the English way of death, and the transition from the Victorian to the Edwardian period, is really great. Told through multiple narrators, including children and adults, and with multiple perspectives on the same events, with a background of the emerging suffragette movement. Just great.

Review of "Where The Crawdads Sing" by Delia Owens

I really enjoyed the movie a few years ago, and reading the book I see that it was really faithful to the text. I enjoyed the book too - the nature writing is lovely, the plot carried me along - shame that I couldn't enjoy the ending twist, having seen the film.

Review of Love, Divided

Spanish rom-com about two introverted people living in adjoining apartments who develop a relationship without actually meeting- he's an extremely introverted game designer, she's a wannabe classical pianist/singer. After some initial conflict about noise the film becomes about the relationship between the two, and their other relationships - she with her ex-husband and imperfect mentor, he with his business partner and friend.

It's contrived but not too bad. I was pleased that I understood a lot of the Spanish.

Watched on Netflix.

Review of Leave No Trace

Sad but nicely executed film about a young girl and her dad living rough in the woods in an effort to avoid contact with authority and bureaucracy. He's a traumatised ex-veteran, she's a bright girl who appreciates what she has with her dad, but also what she's missing. 

Watched on Netflix.

Review of Triangle of Sadness

Heavy handed buy enjoyable satire about wealth and power. Young bloke model Carl is in a relationship with model-influencer Yaya, who is narcissistic and exploits him. The depiction of this, which makes up the first part of the film along with various gruesome auditions for Carl, is skin-crawlingly awful but compelling. Then she blags a trip on a luxury cruise with rich and powerful people, all of whom are horrible in different ways...and then there's a pirate attack and a shipwreck. 

Bits of it are horrible slapstick - lots of vomit as the ship hits a storm, for example - but the film carried me along.

Watched on BBC iPlayer.

Review of Baby Girl

Well, that was quite hot. Not my kind of erotic fantasy, but still quite sexy. Nicole Kidman is the CEO of a warehouse automation company, and has an affair with a young intern who gives her what she needs, which turns out to be humiliation and domination. She has a kind, loving husband, but it's not what she needs in bed. She's already been masturbating over that kind of porn while he sleeps next to her, but the intern guy is the real thing.

There's a certain amount of exploration of the issues - nothing too clever or deep, but enough to be interesting. Lots of gloomy and seedy hotel interiors, and some glossy ones too. Nicole Kidman gets to wear some nice clothes too.

And there's a treatment of the overall nastiness of corporate politics, with several people trying to blackmail Kidman's character as they find out about the affair.

Watched at the Vue Cinema.

Review of A Complete Unknown

That Bob Dylan film, which everyone has seen and everyone has liked. Not surprising, because it's very good...the acting, the cinematography, the singing - all the actors sing the tunes themselves, and do it very well. It reminded me very strongly of the days when we all had a different relationship to music, when it felt like you had found something special to you - even if you had taped it off someone else's vinyl, it felt like you had in some sense co-created it. Whereas now it just comes out of a tap in the wall, and the issue is more about how to discover or filter what's out there. 

I had a strong sense of Dylan as a genius (even though we rarely see him actually doing any writing work, just performing or jamming with others) but also as a thoroughly selfish narcissist. It's hard to feel that the politics ever really meant anything to him except as a stepping stone to a career. On the other hand seeing this film inspired me to obtain and watch "I am a noise", the Joan Baez biopic, and that has footage of the two of them singing at the 1963 March on Washington, and it's hard not to believe that must have meant something, at least at the time.

We watched this at the cinema, and I'm glad that I did. Everyone else in the cinema was of a certain age and was a fan, and I really felt a connection with tehm.

Review of Citizen Ashe

Tennis biopic of Arthur Ashe. I've watched a few tennis films lately, and I think this was the least interesting. Although the film says that Ashe was in the forefront of the struggle for Black liberation, he mainly seems to have fulfilled this role by winning at tennis. I remember that he played in South Africa and thought that had been a bad thing, but Nelson Mandela sought Ashe out when he came to the US for the first time, so maybe not.

Watched on BBC iPlayer, eventually, after several false starts.

Review of Timestalker

Embarrassingly bad. Gave up after 40 minutes

Watched via informal distribution...at least we didn't pay money to see this.