Review of The Love Punch: Worst film I've seen in many a long year

I can handle the odd romcom, and this one sounded like it might be tolerable. It wasn't. A trip to the dentist would be more enjoyable. Avoid at all costs. Stay in, wash your hair, whatever.

IOT 14 in Cambridge

I went to this. I can't remember the last time I found a public event of this kind so interesting and so much fun. Fantastic speakers, great venue (who wants to spend a day in the dreary subterranean basement of another corporate hotel?), superb organisation, and a really nice bouncy spirit in the way the sessions were organised and chaired. Just brilliant. Other conference event organizers should watch, and probably watch out.

I hope to post another piece about what was most interesting, but didn't want to leave it another day.

Another day, another low power wireless company

Six months ago I didn't know any companies pursuing this opportunity, even though some of them have been at it for a while and have successful implementations to point at. Now I fall over them all the time, and suddenly the industry mainstream, including proper grown-equipment vendors and even network operators want to talk about this.

The company du jour is Senaptic, which has just come out of stealth mode, having been incubated within equipment vendor Plextek. The latter is precisely one of those companies that has been ploughing the low-power IoT furrow for years - 25, to be precise. Its technology is deployed in the LoJack vehicle tracking system, in a smart parking system in Moscow, and is also used by Telensa in supporting smarter street lights in British cities.

Unlike fellow low-power wireless provider Sigfox Senaptic aims to be a technology provider, not a network operator. It plans to sell systems to organisations (mainly enterprises, but also local authorities) to use for their own purposes - tracking, monitoring, controlling, whatever. So there is no need for the kind of OSS that a public network would require, to provision devices, manage their subscriptions, bill for usage etc.
But it's not 'merely' a connectivity play - it also offers a platform that does include an OSS, applications, and of course devices.

At the moment Senaptic has only six employees, though the system is still supported by staff within Plextek. In the slightly longer run it aims to have about 100 people.

Review of The Past

Not what you'd call a feelgood film but no less perfect for that. The dynamics of interlocking families in what looks to be a working-class outer suburb of Paris; an Iranian man who has left his wife to return to Iran, but is now returning to France to complete their divorce so that she can marry another immigrant man, even though his wife is still alive, albeit in a coma. The impacts of all of this on the children of the woman (not the Iranian man's, but he clearly loves them and is loved by them) and the second man's son.

Like real life - just as tragic and muddled, only even sadder.

Review of Sunshine on Leith

A feel-good film that didn't actually make me feel all that good - wooden two dimensional characters, leaden dialogue, contrived script. It aims to do for The Proclaimers' songs what Mamma Mia did for the oeuvre of Abba, but it didn't do it for me. Maybe I don't know the songs enough; the only one that I really do know and like, 'Letter from America', is thrown away. The song is about the sadness and loss of emigration, and it's turned into a family's farewell to a young woman going to work as a nurse in a fancy hospital in Florida as part of her yearning for adventure and career development.  That says it all, I think.

BTW I watched this immediately after Rio, a cartoon film about birds. The cartoon birds were more fully developed characters than the ones in Sunshine on Leith.

Review of The Zero Theorem

Another disappointment from Terry Gilliam. Visually arresting, disappointing in terms of plot, characters, emotional engagement...pretty much everything. I know that a film is bad when I find myself checking my watch to see how long it's got left.

A shame, because it's not as if he lacks imagination. The situation - an 'analyst' in some vast incomprehensible corporation gets put on to a special project to do with the meaning of life - is not uninteresting. There are lots of nice visual gags - I particularly liked the interactive billboards that greet male characters with "Hello Madam", surely a joke on the interactive signage in Minority Report. It's always better when sophisticated technology screws up in movies, though it rarely does - film-makers obviously don't use the same stuff as the rest of us.

Other stuff is a bit derivative, though. The workstations where employees have to cycle - weren't they in an episode of Charlie Brooker's Black Mirror? The interactive sex site and the virtual reality suits, the mainframe that looks like a Victorian pumping station...even the music was cheesy.

Maybe Gilliam should find some more interesting collaborators.

Review of Copenhagen performed by students at Kings College London

I really enjoyed this, even though I'd recently seen the TV production. It's a brilliant play and the students really did it justice. Especially hard for Freddie Fullerton, who is young but has to play an older, avuncular character but I think he pulled it off rather well. The script is great, of course, but so was the acting - the actors' mannerisms really conveyed the characters they were playing.

Who would have thought you could do so much with such a minimal set (though a rather good room for it with appropriate fittings and fixtures) and three actors?

And why isn't Michael Frayn as recognised as he ought to be? The way that this play addresses both the scientific and the moral issues is little short of genius. The fact that the answers to the latter aren't cut and dried, as they would be in Howard Brenton or David Hare, just adds to the brilliance.

It is still on for one more night - tonight (16th March). Go and see it if you can.

Review of "The Grand Budapest Hotel"

A really enjoyable romp of a film, with great sets and scenery, super cast, lots of good verbal and visual
jokes...what's not to like?

There is a somewhat complex nested narrative structure. It starts with a girl by the grave of a fictional famous writer. She is reading his book. Most of the story is then the story of the book, told by a younger version of the writer; but it's told to him by a now-old man who is himself, as a boy, one of the main characters of the story. From time to time we drop back to the old man telling the story to the young writer, but mainly it stays in the entirely fictional 1930s, in two entirely fictional central European countries. Neither of them are Germany or Poland, oh no, definitely not. Lots of brilliant visual details, in prison scenes, bakery scenes, etc. I loved the decor of the hotel and the writer's apartment in what must be the Communist era - just the right combination of artless cheer and drab.

Curiously the closing credits say it's based on the stories of Stephan Zweig, but if like me you are not a big Zweig fan don't let that put you off - it's much funnier than anything he wrote.

Review of "Dog Hell: Pitbull in Ramraid Horror!"

I enjoyed this book, but I'm not sure who I would want to know that I had (apart from GCHQ, of course, who know all about what I am reading).

I was uncomfortable with the dog-human sex, though. And now that I've read it, I see that people who viewed this also viewed...some really ghastly bestiality porn. Who knew that was even on Amazon?
It's a parody of those 'Skinhead' books from the 1970s that were read by boys at school who didn't read much. Lots of violence, some sex, homophobia, racism - you know the sort of thing. And it's a very good parody too, lots of witty dog/human crossover stuff. Sometimes it doesn't quite work, often it does.

I was uncomfortable with the dog-human sex, though. And now that I've read it, I see that people who viewed this also viewed...some really ghastly bestiality porn. Who knew that was even on Amazon? 

Barcelona February 2014

I went to Barcelona for Mobile World Congress 2014. Instead of rushing back at the end I stayed for the weekend and had a great time. I went to the Barcelona History Museum, and really enjoyed a special exhibition about the World of 1714 - the year in which Catalonia found itself abandoned at the tail end of the War of Spanish Succession and its independence came to an end.

I went with Ruth to the Sagrada Familia (only the outside - couldn't face the queue) and then on to the even more wonderful Modernista Hospital de la Santa Creu I Sant Pau.

We did Nick Lloyd's brilliant Civil War walking tour, which brought Orwell's Homage to Catalonia to life and almost moved me to tears. 

We walked all over Montjuic (yes, Jew Mountain) and visited the Catalan National Art Museum. I particularly liked this picture by Antoni Arissa.

And I met up with Phil Shepherd, and with Jamilla Evans-Evans, neither of whom I have seen for at least fifteen years.

Review of 'Cloud Atlas'

I loved the book, and this film is only tolerable. The structural complexities were always going to be hard to film. Watching it on a tablet as I did meant that I was going to miss out on the more impressive visual aspects - especially the scenes in Neo-Seoul.

Even taking that into account this is still a disappointment. The complex structure of the book is replaced with a more conventional set of inter-weaving narratives. Using the same actors to play different characters in these might have helped with the budget and the logistics but did nothing for the experience. And the characters make several laboured references to recurrence, and to the other 'themes', which I don't remember from the book.

At nearly three hours this is a long film but it felt longer.

Review of "A Field in England"

A muddle without form, point or aesthetic value. Five men (I think it's five - it's a bit hard to tell) blunder in to each other in a field while escaping from an unnamed battle in the English Civil War. It is in black and white, so we know that it's arty. There is a sort of narrative. One of the men seems to be a weedy fearful scholar, implausibly sent by his master to apprehend a tough and frightening Irish man who has stolen a manuscript from the master's library.

The manuscript apparently describes how to find treasure in this very field. The Irish man, who turns out to be an alchemist, makes the others his prisoners and forces them to dig for the treasure. At various times some of the men seem to kill each other, but they don't stay dead. Those who are killed re-appear in the film to no particular surprise. Is there a magical or supernatural explanation, or is it all a hallucination brought on by the mushrooms we see them eating. It's hard to know and ever harder to care.

Review of "Her"

A surprisingly moving film. From the descriptions and synopses doing the rounds I didn't expect to like this - I imagined a film about a geeky, tech-obsessed man taking refuge from real human relationships by falling in love with his computer. I might not even have gone, but Ruth and I were in Barcelona, exhausted from walking all over the city, and this was one of the few original-language films available at a cinema we could imagine walking to.

I couldn't have been more wrong. The main character, Theodore, suffers from a surfeit of empathy - his job involves working for beautifulhandwrittenletters.com, which does what it says on the tin; writes beautiful personal letters for people who are unable or unwilling to write their own. Theodore's letters are warm and charming, full of sympathy and wisdom.

And the disembodied operating system with which he falls in love is also a complex, developing character, learning what it feels like to feel, and managing the disjuncture between human emotions, the absence of a body with which to feel them, and the consequences of having non-human enormous processing power and multi-tasking capability for relationships with humans. The film works through all these complications with considerable sensitivity. Some of the time I felt a little lump in my throat. It made me think about the way that I mediate some personal relationships through technology - the Facebook friends I never meet with in real life, and so on.

The film is also visually stunning, with contemporary Shanghai standing in for a future LA - sometimes sumptuous, sometimes bleakly sterile. I rather liked the Arcade Fire soundtrack too.

Very glad I saw this.

Prologue: Mohács, August 1526

A field somewhere in Central Europe. It is early afternoon. The day has been hot, but Summer thunderstorms have been raging for the last two hours. The sky is dark with clouds, and heavy rain is falling. The ground is sodden and marshy.

Two men sit on horseback. Their uniforms are drenched. Water has pooled in the brims of their hats and is trickling thickly down their necks and faces. One of the men is agitated. He shifts in his seat, walks his horse this way and that, peers into the murk. The other is calm, unmoving, almost...bored.

“I can't see a thing,” says the agitated man. “Can you see anything? How can we make a report if we can't see anything?”

The second man says nothing, sits very still. It is as if he is sniffing the rain like a dog.

“Most important battle of our lives – maybe of the whole history of the kingdom. And we're here, and we don't know what's going on. So useless, I feel so useless...”

“S'what it's always like,” says the calm man. “Battles. They look all neat and purposeful on the maps, and in the military manuals. When you're there, in the middle of it, you never know what's going on. And don't tell me it's different for the generals. They know less than anyone.”

The two men sit on their mounts in silence for a few minutes. At last the calm one says: “There. Hear that?”

The agitated one grimaces, cups a hand behind his ear. “Marching feet? Drums?”

“Drums. And war trumpets,” says the other. “The Ottomans are bringing up their reserves. The Janissaries. They're going to attack our line right in the centre.”

“And where are ours? Our reserves? What are we doing?” says the agitated one, now more agitated than ever.

“Still waiting,” says the calm man. “Waiting for the Turks to slog their way through this damned bog. They make it through and on to the firm ground, our cavalry'll have them. What you don't hear is as important as what you do hear.”

“What's that? What do you mean? What are you talking about? What should I hear, or not hear?”

“The Turkish cannons,” says the calm man. “You don't hear any artillery. So the Turks didn't manage to get theirs here on to the battlefield. Probably stuck in the mud somewhere on account of all of this wonderful, marvellous rain. And no artillery means that our cavalry are safe. The flower of Magyar chivalry -” he paused to spit; “Safe to do the thing that they do best. A head-on charge straight into the enemy ranks. And for once, just this time, because of the rain, it's going to work.”

He stops talking, as if he is embarrassed at speaking for so long. The two men sit in silence for a while longer. The agitated one walks his horse some more. He cocks his head on one side. “More thunder?”

The other shakes his head. “The heavy cavalry. The Turks must have made it across the marsh. Their drums are louder now.”

“I wish I could see!” says the agitated man. “This is the moment that saves the kingdom from the Ottomans! And we – we are here, and yet we're missing it...”

“I won't tell anyone if you don't,” says the calm one. “It's all over now, bar the slaughter. The Turks are wedged between the bog and our knights. Infantry against cavalry, on an open field, without any cannons to back them up. I don't suppose there'll be many going home.”

He lifts his hat, tips water out onto the ground. “Come on, let's go and make that report. And get out of the rain.”

The agitated man casts one more desperate glance towards the sound of battle, then both wheel their horses around.

Smart cities partnership between Cisco and AGT

It sometimes seems that smart city alliances and consortia are even more common than smart city projects. The proliferation of these isn’t entirely surprising. Cities are  complex entities, with lots of handles, systems, components and management layers. So there are lots of opportunities, but serving them is inevitably something that needs to involve more than one supplier – and these suppliers need to bring their specific kinds of expertise but work closely together.

This latest smart city strategic alliance, announced here, and involving Cisco and AGT, has a strong focus on video solutions for urban safety.  Cisco has been involved in urban video monitoring projects with a safety and security focus before (notably in the French city of Drancy) but these have been on something of a piecemeal basis. And yet the ability to handle the huge volumes of data required by multiple video endpoints is something of a USP for Cisco.

Surveillance is a sensitive subject, especially at the moment. There are questions about whether it really does make citizens safer, and even whether it makes them feel safer – or has the opposite effect. But there can be little doubt that the technology offers capabilities that will be used, often. So the tie-up between Cisco and AGT looks like it could be really significant.

Review of "Inside Llewyn Davis"

Llewyn Davis is a not very successful folk singer in New York in the early 1960s. That's it really. He is not a terribly bad singer - not comically bad, though the songs he chooses are unremittingly miserable. If the film wanted, it could portray him as a good singer without him actually having to sing any better. He's shot sympathetically when he's singing - it's only the reactions of others (lukewarm applause, mildly negative responses by agents and promoters) that tell us that he's supposed to be not terribly good.

In fact, he's not much good at anything. He doesn't relate well to other people, and he treats them badly. But unlike say Sammy Glick in 'What Makes Sammy Run' he doesn't climb upwards on the backs of the people he has treated badly. He slides down on their backs. Even the really bad dulcimer-playing woman at the folk club who he barracks from the small audience turns out to have a tough and violent husband who beats him up Llewyn in an alleyway.

He can't look out of a window without bumping his head on the frame, he can't have sex with a woman without making her pregnant, he can't throw out a box of old stuff from his parents' house without throwing out important identity documents with it.

I could go on but it would only be recapitulating the misery of the film. It's supposed to be warm and funny, but it's not. It's about failure and the tragedy of caring about something that you're don't do very well. It reminded me of Amadeus in that respect. Not a bad film at all, and beautiful to look at, but not what you could call enjoyable.

Small side note: almost everyone in the film is white. Maybe that just reflects how separate the worlds of black and white people were in the early 1960s.

One Shoe Tale

I've written a novella. I've self-published on Kindle. It is the first piece of fiction that I am prepared to own up to. It's a straightforward Marxist hard-boiled noire fairy-tale pastiche in an alternative-history context – you know the sort of thing. Imagine “Cinderella" written by a Hungarian Dashiel Hammett in a parallel universe. 

You can find it here.

The paperback version is here.

I'd be really happy if you would download or buy a copy, read it, and leave a nice review. Anyone can publish on the new platforms, but everything there disappears without trace unless it gets reviews and recommendations. If you like it, please recommend.

I wrote it as a bit of fun with my tongue firmly in my cheek. There is some “adult” material in there, so don't read it if that sort of thing offends you.

All the things that went wrong when I flashed my Android phone to Cyanogenmod (and how it turned out all right in the end).

Yesterday I finally got round to changing the operating system of my smartphone (Samsung Galaxy Note GT7000, since you ask) from the Samsung-customized version of Android that it came with – to a more open, less bloated, and more user-controlled version. I opted for Cyanogenmod as a relatively user-friendly option; there are other versions that are more ‘outlaw’ but the instructions for installing seemed to include a lot of command line stuff. I’m not a real geek, only a wannabee, so Cyanogenmod seemed like a sensible half-way house. Cyanogenmod used to be a community-maintained project, though it has now become a start-up with a hardware partner.

The first thing I had to do was ‘root’ my phone. I had lived long enough in Australia to be slightly worried by the sound of that, but it means taking over user control. In Linux-speaker, Root is the equivalent of ‘Administrator’, so rooting your device means taking over privileges to control it that you don’t automatically have. Iphone users talking about ‘jailbreaking’.

Rooting turned out to be quite easy. The only scary bit was booting my phone into recovery mode – by powering it on while holding the Home and Volume Up buttons, and holding down the Power button until the recovery screen appeared. A funny unfamiliar picture of the Android android appeared, with a little blue matrix of stuff coming out of its tummy.

A scroll bar also appeared, which got about a quarter of the way and then stopped. There are lots of warnings about ‘bricking’ your phone in all of the instruction sets online, so I waited and waited. Nothing happened, so in the end I took the battery out and replaced it. That turned out to be what it had been waiting for, because a new screen appeared, the scroll bar shot across the screen and a system message in a funny courier-like font told me that the install had finished. It was so quick that I didn’t believe it had actually happened, so I did it a few more times. Eventually though I decided to believe. I rebooted. Of course, you can't tell if your phone has been rooted; you need an app for that. I found one, installed it, and got a lovely message of congratulations, telling me that I did indeed now have Access.

I basked in my technological prowess for a few days. It turned out that having Root Access didn’t give me much more control over the phone at all. It allowed me to install some apps that require it, like Root App Delete which is supposed to allow the user to get rid of pre-installed crap, but actually everything that I uninstalled just re-appeared. Samsung Music Hub, Samsung Push Service…all of it.

So yesterday I thought I would go the distance and install Cyanogenmod. I copied the .zip file to my SD card – it’s really important to find the right version for your hardware, but not as straightforward to this as you might imagine. It’s easy to find the versions for relatively new devices but harder for old ones, especially where the nomenclature is less than clear. What exactly is my version of the Note called? The GT7000? The Note International? The Note 1?

I launched the app that is supposed to install it – Clockwork Recovery. I made a backup of my existing operating system to the SD card. Then I tried to install the Cyanogenmod OS. It couldn’t find it. Although the app thought it was looking at my SD card, it was actually looking at the phone’s internal memory. Not to worry, I coped the .zip file to the internal memory and tried again. Still didn’t work. So I tried booting into Recovery Mode and running it from there. Here there are several options, including Wipe and Factory Reset. That didn’t feel like what I wanted to do – after all, wouldn’t that put it back into the Samsung version that I wanted to get rid of? So I went straight to ‘Install from .zip’, navigated to the right zip file, and watched it install – again, really quickly.

But not doing the Wipe was a mistake. It was lovely to see the spinning, flashing lights of the Cyanogenmod boot-up screen for the first time, and made me feel like my work was almost done. But after 25 minutes I was a bit bored with it, and wondered whether it could really take this long. Searching on the forums revealed that this wasn’t supposed to be happening, and was the result of not doing that wipe. But how to get back?  If I powered off now, would it brick the device? After another 15 minutes (during which the phone got quite hot) I decided that there was no alternative and rebooted.

But it turns out that there is a specific physical skill involved in doing the reboot. This time my screen displayed a different little android, a ‘Downloading in Progress’ message, the famous yellow triangle of death, and a strong warning not to power off.

But nothing else happened, for a very long time. I was now convinced that I had bricked the phone. But I rebooted again, being very careful not release the Volume Up key until the Recovery Mode screen reappeared. Eventually it did (it felt like a really long time though) and then I did the Wipe and Factory Reset, then reinstalled Cyanogen from zip again. Just in case, really. And then rebooted again.

This time it actually booted into Cyanogenmod, and asked me to create a Cyanogenmod account (why?) which I did. So now my phone runs Cyanogenmod  - but there aren’t many apps, and no apps store. If I was a real outlaw I wouldn’t want the Google Play Store – I’d want to use F-Droid or some other way to get completely ‘open’ apps. But I’m not, and one of the things I like about having an Android phone is the way that it syncs nicely with cloud apps that I can provision easily from a PC with a proper keyboard. So I had to install Google Apps. Another download, another zip file, another boot into recovery mode, another install from zip, another reboot.

Only now the phone is really, really cross. The Google Apps are all there, but I can’t work out how to sign in to them. In fact I can’t sign in to anything, because the soft keyboard has stopped working. In fact, I get a message telling me that the keyboard has stopped working every few seconds.

Another web search, with the exact words of the message; I learn that I have installed the wrong version of the Google Apps package. The one I have doesn’t agree with the version of Cyanogenmod that I have installed. I try to download the right one (finding out what that is takes a while) but actually a lot of the apparent download links lead to malware or try to install other crap on my PC. Eventually I find a good one, download it, copy it to the SD card, do the whole boot into recovery shuffle yet again, reboot – and hurrah! The keyboard works again, and I am immediately taken to a Google sign-in screen. I feel slightly daft – all this effort and I just back signing into Google anyway, but it has worked.

My phone now runs Cyanogenmod. It is clean and snappy – apps don’t hang anymore. I have a bit more control over what it does. And I do feel a bit more like a geek. But honestly, why would any normal person do this if they didn’t have to?

Review of Heartbreaker

Stupid French sex/rom comedy about a bloke whose business is to break young women up from their unsuitable partners, under contract from family or friends, by making the women fall in love with him. But in this one last job he...well, you know.

Cheesy, corny, cliched. Some nice locations, crisply filmed (lots of tight shots and cuts in a way that seemed a bit unusual for a French film) and Vanessa Paradis as the woman (quite like her music, but isn't she weird-looking?); but not worth the time it took to watch it.

Review of The Changeling

A relatively straightforward narrative of the Wineville Chicken Coop Murders, focusing on the experience of Christine Collins and the way that the LAPD offered her a substitute for her missing son. The actual story, as depicted in the Wikipedia article, is actually much more gruesome and unpleasant than the movie. In real life the murderer's mother was involved and actually proposed that he kill Walter Collins, because the boy could identify him. She got life because women weren't hanged.

A good film, and nice to see that Angelina Jolie can actually act. But strangely flat – given what happens in it (child abduction and murder, false accusations of insanity), one might have expected more noire.

Small historical footnote: both Jolie's character and her prostitute friend are subjected to punitive ECT in the hospital. Given that it is set in 1928-30 this is ahistorical. ECT wasn't used until 1937.

Review of American Hustle

A film about confidence tricks, so a fairly confusing plot, things that seem implausible, and a twist at the audience's expense. I'm not sure I followed every twist and turn, and most of the characters were flawed and mainly unlikeable. Not that characters have to be likeable, but it's a long time to spend in the company of quite so many sleazeballs.

The tone is set in the first few minutes with the lead character arranging his comb-over. This is at once about deception (because comb-overs are about pretending you have hair when you don't) and slightly disgusting – not sure why comb-overs provoke such disgust, but they do, and the effect is enhanced by some close-ups of an ugly pot belly.

Did the late 1970s really look this ugly, and this brown? Probably they did. The aesthetic of the film somehow made me think of a porn film – think 'Boogie Nights' but without the dirty bits - even though there was relatively little sex depicted.

Despite all this repugnance I quite enjoyed the film – it didn't feel like time wasted, anyway.

Review of 'Dial M for Murder'

Seems odd to be reviewing this sixty years after it was released, but it was the best thing on at the Bristol Watershed cinema on the weekend we happened to be there.

It is of course a great film. Somehow the Britishness stops it from being too noir - it would have been much more so if it had been American, and/or black and white. Most of the time it seems very contemporary, and then there is some glaring period detail that reminds us as to how much has changed. Grace Kelly's accent is remarkable - it seems that the register of women's voices has changed much more than the male ones. Only the Queen sounds like that now, though most upper class women in films seem to have spoken like that.

The plot itself would never work now, because Margot would never get out of bed to answer a call, and the evil Tony would never have to wait to use a phone booth.

Surprisingly the original was made in 3D and we watched it a 3D version, which worked very well. There weren't lots of 3D-specific scenes, but the near-murder itself was much enhanced by Margot's arm coming out of the screen and into our faces.

Not a feel-good film, but it nevertheless left us with a good feeling.

Review of 'A Bunch of Amateurs'

Not a great film - if I did star ratings it would probably be a four or five - but watchable. Burt Reynolds is a Hollywood actor who is rich and obnoxious but whose career is in the toilet and has the worst agent in the world. Somehow he gets sent to England to perform in an am dram village performance of King Lear, and the experience eventually ennobles him and enables him to reconnect with...yada yada yada. A cast of Brit character actors including Derek Jacobi and Imelda Staunton. Some nice situational observation, some unnecessary slapstick.

Although this is not good, it is probably the best film I have ever seen with Burt Reynolds in it.

Review of 'Dirty Wars'

A documentary presented like...er...a faux-documentary thriller, with place captions to explain where the action is coming from next, arty shots through tunnels, and so on. But the message is a serious one, about the assassination squads and drone strikes  that are the body of America's 'War on Terror'. Scahill's film, which focuses on the collateral damage  of these tactics, is impeccably liberal. He is outraged that America isn't better than this, and he wants us to be be outraged about the continuity between Bush's strategy and Obama's. In truth there was little that outraged or even surprised me, except for the incident in which Obama personally intervened to keep a Yemeni investigative journalist locked up because he was getting near to the truth about the involvement of Americans in the obliteration of a Bedouin clan with no links to Al Qaeda who just happened to be in the wrong place.

Review of Aharon Appelfeld's "Badenheim 1939"

I really didn't like this book, even though it is beautifully written and a good translation. I think that I don't like it because it is such a thoroughly Zionist perspective on the holocaust. It focuses on a group of German/Austrian Jews in a spa resort who wilfully refuse to see the increasingly obvious signs around them that something terrible is happening. While the 'Sanitation Department' fences them they continue to obsess about music and eat pastries. Even when the food starts to run out they refuse to see what is happening to them and what is so obviously going to happen.

At one level it's possible to see this as a universal fable about denial, but I think that Appelfeld, as a mainstream Israeli writer and a holocaust survivor himself is writing about more than this. His own experience of the Holocaust was nothing to do with that of German/Austrian Jews. He hid in the forests and served with a Red Army unit as a cook. But the Zionist narrative spends a lot of time on German Jews, even though they were a tiny minority of holocaust victims, because they illustrate so well the argument that assimilation is doomed to failure. Appelfeld emphasises how little the Jews in his story feel for their Jewish identity, how important German high culture is to them.

He also seems to have very little sympathy for them. They don't have any sort of inner life; we just see their increasingly obnoxious behaviour and listen to their pretentious speech.
It's hard to avoid the implication that they have brought their fate upon themselves, by their bad choices and their refusal to see what is going on. If this isn't victim-blaming I don't know what is.

[Spoiler Alert] If there is any doubt about this the final passage of the book drives the lesson home. The Jews are marched towards cattle trucks for deportation, and their 'leader' reassures himself that the filthy state of the train is surely proof that their journey will be a short one. Even as they are being deported he continues to believe the best of the Germans. It is very moving, and it moves you to where the author wants you to go. It doesn't seem to me to be an exploration of denial in general, or even about the holocaust in general, but rather a polemic against Jews who thought they were part of European civilisation.

Shame that the first Firefox OS phones are so bad

I bought a ZTE Open for my son. His cheapo Android had more or less broken and it seemed a good time to try one out, what with having written the book and all that.

It had received some bad reviews but some people are...you know, really picky. Maybe it wasn't so bad. And why not try it out on someone else?

Sadly it really was that bad. The touchscreen was unusable, the camera rubbish, and he couldn't make it sync with the contacts in his Google account.

He gave it half an hour before he put it back in the box and went back to the broken cheapo one.

This doesn't prove that all Firefox OS phones will always be bad, but it does make you wonder what ZTE - and the mobile operators who are putting some hopes behind Firefox OS as a way to counter the duopoly - are playing at. Why release something this bad?

Review of 'The Fifth Estate'

Saw this a few hours ago. I thought it was good - much better than the mainstream reviews suggested, and managing quite well to show at the same time that Wikileaks is important but Assange is a bit of a creep. Too much sympathy to the US Government in my view, because that's where all of the human interest stuff is located; no human interest in the people who are the victims of what the US government does or sponsors. The Kenyans who are victims are pretty much faceless - we don't build any emotional connection with them before they are assassinated.

But a a good film for the most part, and engrossing despite the length.

A modest proposal to help support internet privacy

Recent revelations about PRISM and TEMPORA have made people more aware about the threats to their privacy on the internet. There have also been concerns about commercially motivated data harvesting, though these have rather paled into insignificance in the light of the governments' apparently illegal data gathering practices.

Some internet users have responded by suggesting that we all ought to use better encrypted services and blocking software. There are doubts as to how effective this can be, especially since the government appears to have an armlock on the providers of these services. My modest proposal is for a different, smokescreen-like approach. I suggest it would be useful if our browsers generated masses of false data about our search terms and browsing habits.

Something similar has been suggested before, as in this article and also here. A similar approach has also been proposed in terms of generating fake GPS location data.

This could be delivered via a browser plug-in, like AdBlock. The spoofing and false search terms could be regularly updated in the plug in. On the model of the World Community Grid the plug-in could be only active when the users were not actively using their PCs. Of course, it would be of fundamental importance that those who managed this process were perceived to be completely trustworthy; otherwise the plug-ins could be manipulated for commercial purposes, or to support objectives that those who had joined this activity would not endorse.

This is particularly important because the network of participating PCs could be used in something very similar to a botnet orchestrated distributed denial of service attack, albeit one with the consent of the PC owners. In the context of full consent, though, this could be seen as a legitimate form of protest, analogous to signing petitions or sending emails of protest.

I look forward to being advised by my more code-savvy friends whether this approach would be feasible and whether it has disadvantages that I haven't thought of.

Review of "Heretic's guide to global finance: hacking the future of money" by Brett Scott

This is an important and interesting book that covers a lot of ground in a succinct and clear way. It explains a lot about how the world of finance works and suggests some ways in which activists can take it on. If you know nothing about finance and financial markets you should definitely read it.

If you are looking for a rant about the iniquities of global finance then look elsewhere. Scott has set out to do something different in this book. As well as an account of how finance works (rather than a critique of how it doesn't), it is also an exploration of the possibilities to act on the financial system – both through disruption and also through the creation of positive alternatives and exploitation of those spaces that do exist for creativity.

For me, I'd have preferred a little more of the critique, although I accept that this would have been hard in a short, focused book – and I acknowledge that there are plenty of other books that cover this ground. Scott is strong on the rationale for the whole edifice of derivatives, hedge funds and so on, and I'd have liked him to apply his strong facility for clear explanation to the irrationality – the short-termism, the way it necessarily drives projects which wreck the planet, the corruption...(I'd have preferred if he'd dropped the references to 'gonzo' engagement, which didn't really work for me).

A more serious issue is about the whole notion of 'engagement' with the world of finance. 'Engagement' has two separate, almost opposite meanings; you engage with the enemy by fighting against it, and you engage with something else as an alternative to fighting against it – 'constructive engagement', in the language of the diplomats. There is a sense in which Scott obfuscates the difference between the two meanings; are we engaging with the world of finance to educate our side as to how it works and what's wrong with it, or because we think it is actually susceptible to influence and capable of change so as to not be evil?

There is a similar issue at the heart of the alternative financial models and entities that he discusses, in what for me was easily the best and most useful part of the book. Unlike the Bolshevik tradition, which argues that nothing much useful can be done until capitalism has been overthrown, and unlike the social democratic tradition which argues that capitalism can be reformed bit by bit until it will no longer be capitalism, the anarchist and syndicalist traditions thought that it was worth creating pre-figurative institutions so as to 'build the new world within the shell of the old'. It's a lovely image, and it's hard to resist the appeal of the idea; why not make things now that are harbingers of the world we want to make, and at the same time create something that is worthwhile in itself? The book has lots of examples of projects in this spirit, and Scott's blog (Suitpossum) has even more. They are inspirations and models, and they deserve the attention he gives them.

That said, it's important to realise that this path, as much as the other two, is strewn with the corpses of failures – the co-ops that went bust through incompetence, the union-owned enterprises that turned out to be no better as employers than their capitalist counterparts, and so on. Each of these failures affects not only the people involved, but all those who were inspired and believed, and who learned that nothing can be changed. For some people – especially those who work in start-ups – failures are as valuable as successes, because you learn so much from them. But social movements are not venture capitalists, and they can't afford so many failures if they are going to keep activists and others involved. Campaigners need a string of little victories, no matter how small, to keep the troops motivated.

But this is nevertheless a great book, with a great set of references and further reading. More people on the anti-capitalist left need to involve themselves in what finance is like, if only to answer the argument that this is the only way that a complex technological and economic system can be organised.

Review of "Friends with Benefits"

Enjoyable quirky sort of anti-romcom romcom. Some plot and character implausibilities, but also some sharp dialogue and nice observations; better than average for the genre. Interesting use of contemporary technology elements to expedite elements of the plot (smartphones, voice mail)...funny though how no-one in this film seems to have heard of social media.

Review of This Thing of Darkness by Harry Thompson

This was recommended by someone that I trust, but I really didn't like it. It is overlong and the writing is not that good. Fitzroy seems to have been an interesting character who was badly treated and under-appreciated, but this book makes him about to be something like a saint. His hunches are always right, he is always on the right side of every argument, and his thoughts are almost always honourable. His main character flaw - his terrible temper and his bipolar disorder - is presented as something entirely external to him. I don't want to diminish the illness, but the way it is described means that it is nothing to do with Fitzroy's self. The book is also entirely sympathetic to Fitzroy's politics - he is a reactionary Tory paternalist. Everyone else (including other Tories) are presented as cynical and corrupt, especially the Liberals and the Radicals. The Chartists get a walk-on part as a ravening mob. Liberal factory owners are hypocrites. Only Tory landowners have the real interests of the common people at heart (I bet David Cameron would love this book). Only believing Christians who think that savages have immortal souls that can be saved for God are not racists. As a naval officer Fitzroy maintains iron discipline (including just the one flogging) but his men respect him for it.

Perhaps the worst thing about the book is the portrayal of Darwin, who comes across as vain, pompous, cowardly, unreliable, snobbish and racist (a proto-social Darwinist, looking forward to the extermination of inferior races). The book really is a hatchet job here. No petty thought of Darwin's is too trivial to be described; imagine a biography of Martin Luther King that recorded his thoughts about the footwear of the people he met. Now I am not a Darwin scholar, but I have read his account of The Voyage of the Beagle, and he comes across there as a really great guy - someone I'd happily have spent time with. Of course that's his account and necessarily biased, but even so - the things in which he takes pleasure, and the things that he hates (including racism and slavery) suggest to me that he was not much like the Darwin of this book.

I am bemused by all the people who think that this book is so great; what else do they read?

Review of 'Blue Jasmine'

As the mainstream reviews say, this is a long-awaited return to form by Woody Allen - a serious, sombre drama centred on the character flaws of Jasmine. I don't want to write a spoiler (even though approximately no-one reads these reviews), and it's difficult to write much about this without giving away the progressive of the narrative. Not that it's a plot driven film, but Jasmine's personality and history is at least partially revealed in stages, and knowing what these were going to be would spoil the film.

Suffice it to say, then, that this is a pretty much perfect film in dialogue, appearance and narration. It is about the nastiness of the rich and powerful, and the ways in they screw over the lives of those that they touch. Cate Blanchett is great as the spoiled, selfish, self-deluding Jasmine. The film manages to convey the pathos of a fall from a great height, and to engage us emotionally with it, without evoking a shred of sympathy - pretty impressive, I'd say.

Review of 'Another Year'

I am not one of those who treasures everything that Mike Leigh does, but this was great - a really touching, poignant portrayal of late middle age. The central characters are Tom and Gerri, a contentedly married middle-aged middle-class couple (he's a construction geologist, she's a counsellor in a GP surgery) and the others all are their friends or relatives; but for me the show was rather stolen by Mary, Gerri's colleague who is just not very good at life. She's a bit of a drunk without being a real problem-drinker alcoholic (that is, her drinking is not a problem for anyone else), she has a string of failed relationships, an imaginary relationship with her friend's grown-up son...and the fact that she is a failure but not a disaster makes her more sad and more believable. Can't stop thinking about her. Tom's angry, distant nephew who turns up late and swearing at his mother's funeral, and his silent, emotionally constipated brother Roger are great characters too. This is a real human tragedy, without catastrophes - just ordinary sadness.

Review of Elysium

This was enjoyable, exciting, and – most necessary on this occasion – distracting. It’s not nearly as bad as some of the really hostile reviews have made out. Its heart is in the right place. Unlike a lot of dystopian films, it is most definitely on the side of the 99%, who are portrayed as real people with hopes, fears and pains. It’s not subtle, but it manages to do this quite quickly, by engaging emotionally with a group of illegal migrants trying to bypass the border controls to break into Elysium. Its sympathies are with these people, not with the cossetted elite on whose behalf the security apparatus – managed by Jodie Foster as a chillingly efficient head of security – work to exclude them. I liked the way that even the Mexican drug gangs who seemed to dominate the Los Angeles of 2154 are portrayed with some affection; they are also real people, with hopes and dreams, and sometimes with nice eyes.

It is striking looking too. Like its predecessor District 9, it really captures the cyberpunk aesthetic, of a future already worn out and gritty. The fact that the earth-bound elements of this future actually exist – the Los Angeles scenes were filmed in an enormous Mexican rubbish dump – makes this more intense. There are a few nice jokes too – the evil CEO who runs the armaments and security conglomerate is called Carlyle, and Jodie Foster’s character is called Delacourt (after the merchant bank?).

But there is lots about the film that’s not so good. The satire on the corporate controlled world is weak. It just looks like all of the other brutal repressive dystopias, with brutal droid police. Although Matt Damon’s plastic-headed robot parole officer is a nice touch, there is little sign of soft power, consent manufacture or distraction. There is politics on Elysium but not on Earth.

The future technology is very unimaginative. People in 2154 still hold phones up to their ears, use QWERTY keyboards, connect their devices with long trailing cables. The most innovative piece of technology – apart from the clapped-out spaceships and the torus space station itself – is a transparent PC monitor that John Carlyle uses at once point, still typing on a conventional keyboard. And there seems to be only one giant corporation in the future, rather than the screaming multiplicity of brands that we live among now. Why should that be?

And the film is carried along by action (mainly violent) rather than by plot or character. Only Jodie Foster’s character, and the Afrikaner psychopath covert agent – are remotely interesting. Most of the plot elements, the politics and the scenario, are all in place within 20 minutes, and after that it all looks rather like a Playstation first person shooter, as did District 9.

Still, it’s hard not to like. I enjoyed it more for my recent discovery that Matt Damon, who I never really liked as an actor, grew up in leftist commune with favourite Marxist historian Howard Zinn, and is genuinely in sympathy with the film. See, there is a point to reading celeb interviews after all.

Reflections on William Morris

I went with friends to the William Morris Gallery on Saturday. It was a lovely day, the gallery had lots of beautiful things to look at, and items from Morris's personal and business history. Morris was for the most part a top bloke - against anti-Semitism in the left at a time when it was mainly acceptable, an opponent of authoritarian tendencies in the SDF and a genuine democrat, with awareness of the ironies of his position as a supplier of fancy furnishings to the idle rich.

So what is it about him that gives me the creeps? Partly I think it's the whole Merrie England thing. There is a long tradition on the right of celebrating a pre-industrial time of harmonious, organic community, before capitalism and industrialisation. Philip Blond, the 'red tory' and sometime advisor to David Cameron on 'big society', is one of the latest manifestations of this, but it has a long pedigree among both the mainstream right and the far right. Sometimes these people call themselves 'Tory Anarchists'. It's mixed up with a preference for Medieval art and craft alongside imagined Medieval social relations. Chesterton is a very articulate spokesman for this ideology.

The trouble is that there are those on the left who are attracted to this - they like the idea of small communities, simple life, self-sufficiency, localism, craft work rather than industrialisation. Of course there are left-wing versions of this too...and some versions that are just not too picky about who they hang out with. I don't have a problem with localism; I do have a problem with those who can't tell the difference between friends who advocate it, and enemies who affect to for entirely other reasons.

I think that my problem with Morris is that he is just too close to all this - the medievalism, the preference for craftwork over industrial production; even though he is himself a decent sort he acts as a sort of gateway drug for reactionary ideas within the left.

Review of Wadjda

This is the only Saudi film I've ever seen (well, a Saudi-German co-production) and it was thoroughly depressing. It focused on the life of a young girl in Riyadh, who is a bit of a tomboy and wants to have a bike so that she can race with a her young male friend - they are both about ten.

The depiction of the life of women - young and old - is so sad, and so oppressive, that it for once made me feel ashamed to be male. Every aspect of life is controlled and repressed; most of the repressing is done by other women - teachers, parents - and most of it is about conforming to an impossible code of modesty and honour.

Some of the posters for the film (not the one on the right, they must have used a different one in the UK) give the impression that there is a certain coming-of-age, feel-good dimension to the film; they show the girl's foot on the pedal of the bike. Actually it's nothing like that at all, just unremitting misery for most of the running time. The closest thing to it is The Handmaiden's Tale, except that this is real, not science fiction.

Good thing that the EDL are not smart enough to organise sponsored showings all over the country. It's hard to feel warm about Islam after watching this. Just as well that I know that the Wahhabism  that the Saudis are successfully spreading throughout the Muslim world is not the only kind that there is.

Review of BlancaNieves

A really enjoyable, beautiful modern black and white silent film - funny, sad, totally engaging. Loosely based on Snow White, this is a very Spanish film, with lots of heavy Catholicism and bullfighting. It's set in the 1920s (ending in 1929), that is during the proto-fascist dictatorship of Primo de Rivera - though there is no sign of this. Except for a brief glimpse of a Zeppelin over the bullfight ring, there is almost no sign of the modern world at all.

But it is really beautiful, lots of stunning composition and cinematography, great silent acting, and some really good visual gags. And the wicked stepmother Encarna (played by Maribel Verdu, and somewhat reminiscent of Joan Collins) is really, really wicked. I note in passing that she enjoys S&M sex with her lover, the family chauffeur, who she also collars like a dog in one scene. As I have written elsewhere, these days only S&M sex is transgressive enough to count as really dirty in films. Vanilla sex is just too commonplace to have any symbolic force.

Actually, they did tell me all of this when I did A level economics in the 1970s

...which is no reflection on Chang, just on how far mainstream economics has become dominated by ideology and equations. There is nothing in here which would be a surprise to any economist (or politician) from outside the Anglosphere. Neo-classical economics doesn't describe the real world very well and is a poor basis for economic policy or business strategy. Pretty much everyone seriously interested in economics knows this except the kleptocracy in whose interest the UK and USA are both run, and their lackeys who help them do the actual running. Come to think of it, they probably know this too, but it serves them well to keep the rest of us doped up on free-market fairy tales.

This is nicely written - very clear, ordinary language, not an equation or a diagram in sight. It's not by any means anti-capitalist. HJC says 'capitalist is the worst system apart from all the others', and he clearly means it. This view is not really examined, and there is no real consideration of any of the alternatives, apart from the way that the USSR tried to do socialism. There isn't even a proper evaluation of that.

Still, it does at least point out that there are other ways of doing capitalism, and that there is some theoretical justification for this within economics as well as from ethics and politics.  Perhaps some New Labour policy wonks will read on the flight over for their next fact-finding trip to America, and perhaps something will seep in and remain next time they have to write a briefing paper. Perhaps.

Review of The Company You Keep

I absolutely loved the book, and I only quite liked the film. Even though it was an independent production, it still felt Hollywood-ized. At times I felt the book was just a tad too sympathetic to the Weather Underground, but there was no such danger with the film. I haven't done a textual comparison between the book and the film's dialogue, but it felt like most of the politics had been squeezed out of it. There wasn't much sympathy for the Weather people at all - all of that was reserved for those who wanted out of it. It was much more of a conventional 'clear my name' and 'fugitive' type film. The FBI agents didn't seem menacing - the close-ups humanized them. The Osbornes didn't have the right-wing populist politics that they had in the book. And the actors were all much too old - Robert Redford looked at least 70, which made the chronology a little nonsensical.

Still pacey and enjoyable, but a missed opportunity.

Review of The Bling Ring

Bit of a disappointment. The review in the LRB (of the book, not this film) made the whole thing sound terribly post-modern (well, post-post-modern) and interesting, about the intersection of morality, celebrity and criminal justice - but it was mainly just an annoying brat-movie. Occasionally it showed the film it could have been, which somehow made it worse. Curiously, apart from the stealing thing, these kids are model teenagers; they do a little under-age drinking (it wouldn't be under-age in the UK - they are mainly 18 plus) but that's it. No drugs, no sex. Not even a snog, although they all look like models. Can they really spend all that time on the internet without ever looking at...well, you know...

A fast-moving industry

Last week I demonstrated to my colleagues how cool and down with the kids I was by knowing about the Dark Internet, and proposing that we collaborate on a report incorporating stuff like encrypted digital cash, Silk Road, and the ToR network. I had the satisfaction of discovering that they hadn't heard of most of this.

This morning the ToR network and the subject of the Dark Internet was on BBC Radio 4's utterly mainstream middle-of-the-road Today program.  Even mentioned the way that ToR was created by the US Navy. I feel very superfluous.

Review of 'Behind the Candelabra'

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Review of 'The Great Gatsby'

At times this seemed sort of empty and dragged a bit - too much sweeping footage of the beautiful houses and gardens, too many CGI aerial shots of 1920s New York. But it comes to life in the depictions of the dark side of city life - the ash dump between Long Island and Manhattan, the speakeasies, and so on.

Not sure why the party scenes had to have hip-hop tracks - to bring Fitzgerald to a new generation? Since the yoof now seems to be rather fond of 1920s music, albeit with a drum and base overlay (electroswing) that seems unnecessary.

Liked the casting - though Daisy seems a bit dull, so that it's hard to see why Gatsby is so infatuated with her.

Liked the way it actually brought the text of the book into the film, through words (typewritten and handwritten) scrolling across the screen. Loved the way that it captured the despondency of the ending - Fitzgerald's greatness is surely his ability to not succumb to the relentless optimism that seems to characterize almost all cultural output in America.

Review of Michael Lewis's "Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World"

I loved The Big Short, and I liked this a lot. Lewis has the knack of bringing complicated financial stuff to life, and making it comprehensible, through a combination of anecdote and analogy. He's really great at this. Unlike the other books, though, he's on political territory here, and I suspect his instincts are not so sound. He's also writing about people other than Americans, and I suspect he is not immune from the kinds of prejudices about other nations that make for easy shorthand. He knows this, and he makes it apparent that he knows, but even so there is a bad taste in the mouth. Are all Greeks really lazy and venal? Are all Germans really obsessed with shit, and does this explain what happened with their financial system?

I think he's particularly unfair to the Germans, as indeed so many others are. Once you get passed all the shit stuff, what the Germans really stand accused of is believing the ratings agencies. If they shouldn't have, then surely the offence is with them rather than with Germany's modest, local banking system.

And it's funny the way that the final chapter, about America, has to end on a note of optimism, even though just a few pages earlier he was lambasting the 'something will turn up' attitude that allowed so many people to indulge in so much stupidity. I don't think Americans are aware of just how ingrained this need to find a bright note to end on is part of their national character. Optimism is nice, but stupid faith that something will turn up is actually dis-empowering and in itself leads to more bad decisions.

Still a very good read though.