Review of 'Wristcutters'

A strange but not unenjoyable film set in an afterlife peopled entirely by suicides. Visually striking, apart from the naff 'miracles', in the way it evokes decay and dereliction. An interesting premise, not too badly done, it doesn't worry too much about plot mechanics or continuity - well, they're all dead, aren't they? Tom Waits is in it, so it can't be all bad. Eugene Hutz, the lead singer of Gogol Bordello, was originally supposed to play the role of...er...Eugene.

The poster and DVD cover art are a bit misleading, in that they suggest it's lighter than it really is.

Review of 'Detachment'

A really good film about a supply teacher - how often do you get to write that? I was expecting a conventional 'inspiring teacher' or even 'cynical bad teacher' film, but this was much, much better. So much insight into the pain and humiliation of ordinary life, and the ways that people armour themselves against it. Some good acting (including Lucy Liu playing against type as a burnt-out school counsellor), really interesting camera-work, haunting incidental music. Well worth watching.

Review of Frankenweenie

I enjoyed this much more than I thought I would. Sometimes Tim Burton's stuff is less than the sum of its parts. This was comic horror, a spoof on school movies and horror that worked quite well. I noticed the cinematic references to the original Frankenstein movie, and one or two to Godzilla; I've never seen 'Pet Sematery' but I suspect there were more references there, and others that I just missed. The science teacher who looked like Vincent Price was great (was his car, which was largely out of shot, a Trabant?), and I liked the way that the town meeting was so stupidly anti-science - a reversal of the original Frankenstein story, which is itself anti-science. And science mainly saves the day at the end, some of which is actually a bit scary for comic horror spoof.

Review of 'The Phantom' - really, really, don't bother with this

Tosh, and not even likeable tosh. I know it's supposed to be a comic, but does it have to be so dull? Sort of sub-Indiana Jones, but with a character so near-omnipotent, and so devoid of complexity of any sort, as to rid the film of almost all interest and suspense. Really, compared to The Phantom Indiana Jones is Hamlet. Oh, and it's casually racist in a sort of TinTin way, with a fictional 'jungle' setting that doesn't correspond to anywhere in particular though it has a British garrison and native servants in turbans.

The dullness is ameliorated somewhat by a quite young (27) Catherine Zeta-Jones as a beautiful but sinister baddie in what appears to be black silk jumpsuit, but she turns good about two thirds through, so that ruins that.

Review of ‘Still the Enemy Within’

This well-made, insightful, thoughtful documentary about the 1984-5 miners’ strike in the UK was painful to watch, because it’s impossible to forget that the story ends with a bitter defeat. Subsequent events have demonstrated that the miners’ militant leadership were absolutely correct in their assessment of what the government had planned for the industry and the communities of people who worked in it. The extent to which the government was prepared to go in subverting the very rule of law which it accused the miners of seeking to undermine has also become clearer, as has the complicity of the right-wing media in propagating utterly false smears about the miners’ union and their leaders.

That the miners were proved right, and the government shown to be nasty, doesn't make it any easier to watch. The whole awful 1980s experience came flooding back – the Wapping dispute, Rate Capping, the Falklands War triumphalism, the 1987 election, Section 28…I could literally taste it all. Much of it bound up with a particularly windy corner of Swiss Cottage where we did collections and street stalls. For me it was slightly worse because the first interviewee, to whom the film keeps returning, came from Frickley Colliery, the pit which adoped by my then constituency Labour Party, Hampstead and Highgate.

The film attempts to end with a positive note, showing some of its interviewees marching on an ant-cuts demo, with a sort of ‘the struggle goes on’ message. But this obscures rather than clarifies. In the 1980s the labour movement was actually confronting the state and its masters; traipsing through the streets on a protest march is not the same thing at all. Somehow this made it worse.

This is a great film, and anyone interested in progressive politics should watch it, but unlike "Pride"there aren't many laughs or a happy, uplifting ending. This is a lesson in defeat, the kind that you can see coming but are powerless to prevent. As I left two women behind me, who might have been comrades from that time, were talking about the possibility of a film about the Wapping dispute. A good idea, but can I be spared having to watch it?

Review of 'Stuck in Love'

Slightly genre-defying - is it a romcom, a family drama, a coming of age movie, or what? The poster seems to go for serious drama (and there are some drug overdose scenes, and some adult language and sex bits). But quite nice, and enjoyable in a slightly indulgent sort of way.

Dad Bill is a middle-ranking writer who has brought his kids up to be writers too (he pays them to keep journals instead of taking McJobs), and they appreciate this. The parents are divorced, but he's still waiting for her to come back to him. The most talented of the children, the daughter, can't forgive her for leaving him and doesn't speak to her mother, but really it's...well, you get the idea. Some teen comedy tropes, some writer comedy stuff, and lots of interesting but not laboured stuff about relationships - between adults, between teens, between adults and teens. There are worse ways to pass 100 minutes.

Review of 'Magic in the Moonlight'

Silly, pointless, a bit dull. The dialogue is hopeless, the characters uninteresting and poorly acted (were the cast moonlighting on this while they actually worked on something more substantial?), and the mildly interesting plot wasted through a series of missed moments. Only the sets, and the occasional set-piece reconstruction (mainly the jazz clubs and cabarets) are worth looking at. I fell asleep a few times but didn't seem to miss much. Just worth noticing how awful Colin Firth is in this, compared to how good he is in 'Before I go to sleep'. Is it that he didn't care, or are actors just as good as the script and the direction?

Review of "Pride"

A lovely, uplifting film. Well, it was for me, anyway. These days (not in the period it depicts) I have friends with a wider range of views, and I'm sure some of them won't find its depiction of working-class solidarity in the face of state repression, prejudice and corporate-sponsored asset stripping that uplifting. For me, though, this was beautiful, poignant, funny, and very enjoyable. I was involved in a miners' support group in North London - well, all right, in Hampstead and Highgate Labour Party - and I felt a little flicker of pride in my own small connection with this.

Super acting from all your favourite British actors, especially Bill Nighy and Imelda Staunton, and they must have had so much fun with the art direction.

I wasn't expecting a surprise ending - after all, we all know that the miners lost. But I really didn't know about the NUM contingent at the front of the Gay Pride march in 1985. A big lump in my throat for that, and actual tears for the singing in the working men's club.

A small final observation, which is hinted at near the end, when the Pride organisers try to take banners with political slogans out of the 1985 march; support for gay rights is now pretty mainstream,  and 'apolitical', whereas in the 1980s the Tories thought that opposition to gays was a vote-winner; Section 28 of the Local Government Act prohibiting the 'promotion' of homosexuality wasn't introduced until 1988, three years after the film's setting. On the other hand, solidarity with workers on strike now feels like it belongs to the age of chivalry. The two movements passed each other along the way, and this film captures that moment.

Review of 'Before I Go to Sleep'

Easily the scariest film I have seen in a while - well, I don't really do scary. This is a tense psychological thriller about a woman with a memory disorder who can't remember anything that has happened to her since her early twenties, and wakes up every morning with all subsequent memories (including those of the previous day) wiped clean. Anything else I say will be a plot spoiler, but I can say that the acting is great (I don't know if emotions really look like what Nicole Kidman performs, but there is no doubt that she is communicating them powerfully), the casting superb (you'll know what I mean when you've seen it), and the plot full of twists that I didn't see coming. Woke up in the night thinking about it.

Review of 'Snowpiercer'

An interesting science fiction film with a strong political message, about inequality, hierarchy, resistance - and also a warning about geo-engineering as a solution to climate change as part of the backstory. Some good actors (especially Tilda Swinton channelling the ghost of Thora Hird, and John Hurt doing a sort of Alex Guiness), great art design, a slightly plodding script (did the dialogue have to be so lacklustre).

And really very violent - lots of blood and gore, horrible fight scenes that go on and on. I don't mind a bit of gore in a film, but this really felt over the top and surely means that fewer people will see it. Actually, to the best of my knowledge no-one has watched it after it was 'released' in 2013 - has it ever been shown in cinemas anywhere?

Time to hang up that skull and crossbones flag...?

Here’s a funny thing. A few years ago, in a piece for Ovum about the long-term future of telecoms and all that, I segmented the consumer market into three categories: Digital Citizens, the mainstream consumers of media content and applications; Digital Metics, those largely excluded from the digital world by reason of poverty, transience, lack of skills, or even choice; and Digital Outlaws, who rejected the mainstream world for a DIY ethic and an interest in encryption, open source, free content, and so on.

I thought of myself as belonging in the latter category, even though I’m not that much of a hacker. I used Linux (Ubuntu) on my personal laptop. I used a G-Box for my smart TV. I got my content through BitTorrent kind of on principle. I even used an alternative version of Android on my Samsung smartphone.

In the space of about a week I’ve ended up turning my back on almost all that. My new laptop, an Asus X550C, won’t play nicely with Ubuntu (it won’t recognise the wireless connection, or even install properly). We despaired of the G-Box, which needed to be rebooted almost every time we used it, and made it fiendishly difficult to add a new channel ever, and we bought a Chromecast instead, which has turned out to be rather brilliant and really simple to use. Ruth got herself a Netflix subscription. And I got a new Samsung phone, and I can’t face going through the tortuous process of installing Cyanogenmod on it when it’s working quite well at the moment and I can’t think what the actual benefits would be.

Right now I don’t think this is a permanent change of mindset, but perhaps the mindset will follow where the behaviour has led. I’ll keep an eye on it.

Review of 'Hannah Arendt'

Watching this film reminded me of all the things that I liked, and hated, about reading 'Eichmann in Jerusalem'. The film focuses on the critical response, especially by New York Jews and Israelis, to the book; Arendt has to deal with the fact that lots of people, including some of her close friends, hated the book and thought that she was making excuses for Eichmann.

In that regard, the point she was making seems itself to be a bit banal nowadays. We understand that racism does not require that individual racists hate with a passion; we can conceive of a system that is racist without the necessity for personal hatred. Arendt made the same point about Eichmann; he wasn't a personal anti-semite. Lots of people seem to have misinterpreted this, some of them wilfully.

We also see her making the point about the complicity of some Jewish leaders in helping to facilitate the organisation of the holocaust. In the film this is presented as a personal accusation that she has made; in reality it was observation of what happened at the trial. The book makes unhappy reading for those that want the story of the Holocaust to be a straightforward morality play with evil persecutors and wholly innocent victims. But the historical facts and not really in dispute, only how they should be thought about.

Indeed, much of this had already been raised by the 1954 Kastner trial, which revealed how much Jewish leaders, including Zionist leaders, had been compromised by the decisions they made about who lived and who died. This is very uncomfortable reading for many (if not most) Jews, who would rather just not think about this. Part of the negative reaction to Arendt, and then to the various anti-Zionists writers like Jim Allen who brought this up as part of a critique of Zionism, is down to this.

Not all, mind; there is a degree of moral sadism in the way that anti-Zionists raise the issue in the wilful absence of an understanding of the context, as if the Jewish or Zionist leaders in question made these awful decisions in comfort. It is almost as if they want to make some sort of equivalence between the responsibility of the Jewish leaders and the responsibility of the Nazis.

Arendt, to her credit, never did that, and the film makes this point very eloquently, not least in the set-piece lecture at the university, where a young female student asks her about this. But what is doesn't do is to highlight the tone of the book, especially the earlier parts, where Arendt writes with distaste about the histrionics of the trial; why are the Israelis allowing witnesses to testify about their experiences of the Holocaust when this can have no bearing on the guilt or innocence of Eichmann as an individual? That bit of the book really stank for me, and the film doesn't seem to notice that it happened.

The film does convey that Arendt was part of a small elite of very German Jews, who felt themselves to be part of the great sweep of German culture. It doesn't explain that most Jews in the West, and in Israel, are not part of that small band.

Review of 'Boyhood'

A nice-ish coming of age sort of film...a bit shapeless, and sort of long, really, like real life. The remarkable thing is that the film-makers managed to get the actors, including the main actor (the eponymous boy) to stay with the project while the character aged from 8 to 18. Other than that nothing very exciting happens; the mom gets divorced a few times, moves in with some crap men and then moves out again, the boy does some alcohol and some weed. Normal life. Watchable, but not especially moving; it ends with the boy just going off to college and meeting his room-mate and next girlfriend.

Review of 'The Wind Rises'

A film that is both beautiful and a bit vacuous, like the central character – the real-life aeronautical engineer Jiro Horikoshi, who spent his life designing military aircraft even though, at least in the film, he is portrayed as unenthusiastic about the military aspects of aviation. But this doesn't translate into much of a conflict; he just gets on with it, though he is occasionally wistful about making weapons of mass destruction.

It's a pleasure to look at, and to listen to – I really enjoyed the music. It's Miyazaki's last film, apparently, and is also based on a manga book that he created on the same subject. But it is a bit flat emotionally, and even a bit boring sometimes.

Review of "Rushmore"

This is obviously pulling out all the stops in an effort to be 'quirky', and not quite achieving it. Well, it's Wes Anderson, that's what he is for.

The central character, the 15-year old Max Fisher, is a remarkable young man with many extraordinary and frankly implausible achievements; but he is also a fantasist with a propensity to self-delusion (not least in the belief that he has a romantic relationship with a young female teacher at the school); and the film doesn't want to decide how much it is about the self-delusion and how much about the remarkable achievements. The fact that the first sequence, about young Max solving a very difficult problem in geometry, is quickly shown to be a fantasy/dream, but that almost none of the other equally implausible things in the film are meant to be taken as fantasy, adds to the confusion. 

Incidentally, there is almost no politics in the film at all, and nothing about revolution, despite the poster. This looks like a poster for the subsequent and slightly better film 'The Trotsky', which does feature a high-school kid who believes himself to be a revolutionary, and is also quirky but...well, you know.

It's got good actors and characters, an interesting scenario, but the premise doesn't quite work.

Review of Mood Indigo

Well, that's 90 minutes of my life I'm never going to get back. Actually not quite that much, because I slept through some of it, so that time wasn't entirely wasted. The time spent watching the film was, though – pretentious self-indulgent rubbish. A number of people walked out, and I might have, but I didn't want to wake up the two people with whom I'd gone to see it.

The fact that it was so bad was made worse by the fact that every so often there was a genuinely striking visual element. I liked the rows of people typing at moving typewriters as an image of the Fates, and the insect-like doorbell.

I really liked Gondry's “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”, which I thought was genuinely clever and enjoyable. But I should have remembered that he also made 'The Science of Sleep', which was as dire as this.

I am beginning to suspect that Audrey Tatou is a film indicator; if she's in it then it won't be any good. Not an entirely reliable one, mind, because Amelie was enjoyable and A Very Long Engagement was really good.

Review of “The Gatekeepers"

I watched this last night. I'd been avoiding it for a long time, as I avoid most things to do with the Israel-Palestine conflict. Why put yourself through the misery of engagement when it has so little chance of achieving anything positive? I haven't taken part in any of the discussions on Facebook or elsewhere, I haven't attended any of the demonstrations or shown solidarity with anyone, aware that I am censoring myself because I no longer have the energy to confront or even discuss.

The film reinforced me in my views, as I am sure it reinforces others, even with different views. The interviews with the six former heads of Shin Bet (the Israeli internal security service) are very candid – much more so than their British counterparts would be. They talk about operations they have planned and been involved in, the briefs they were given, and most of all their opinions about the politicians who should have been directing them – but mainly weren't.

Like most real people, their views are a mess of contradictions. At some point they condemn their own actions and those of others as unethical, at other times they despise the idea that ethics or morality could ever enter into counter-terrorism. They all view their political masters as weak, duplicitous and devoid of ideas – except for Yitzhak Rabin, who nobody seemed to have a bad word for.

The treatment of the Rabin years was the most unbearable part of the film to watch, because it reinforced my view that the Oslo Process could have worked. For a short window there was real will among the Israeli and Palestinian leaderships to achieve a way that their respective peoples could live together; maybe not Justice, but Peace. Many of my friends think that Oslo was always doomed because it didn't address the fundamentals, but I have never agreed with this. I think the film backs me up. It might have been possible to get Israelis and Palestinians living together, and invested in the absence of war, without addressing the really hard issues straight away.

Oslo was destroyed by the Israeli religious and nationalist right, and by Hamas and Islamic Jihad, very deliberately, because both believed that time was on their side and war would bring them a better outcome than peace.

And both war parties had the ideological high ground in their communities. The vicious murderers of the 'Jewish Underground', whom the Shin Bet initially targeted and neutralized, were pardoned and released as 'our own flesh and blood' by the mainstream Israeli establishment. Hamas – equally murderous, and equally committed to destroying the Oslo agreements -- were able to present themselves as the continuation of the Palestinian resistance, when Fatah and the PLO had 'sold out' to Zionism. By targeting buses in Tel Aviv, Hamas were striking directly at those most likely to be the Israeli supporters of Oslo – not at the settlers, or the military, or the nationalist right. When Hamas and its supporters talk about civilian casualties in Gaza, it's worth remembering that this was their chosen tactic to destroy Oslo.

It was truly unbearable to watch this film now, as Israeli bombs and missiles fall on Gaza, and my friends and family in Israel for the most part fall over themselves in their efforts to line up behind a strategy that is as cruel as it is stupid. The worst part is the missed opportunity, which all the heads of Shin Bet seemed to have appreciated. As John Cleese said in a rather different film, “I can take the despair. It's the hope I can't stand.”

Review of "The Saragossa Manuscript"

Watched this yesterday, as part of the 'research' for the sequel to One Shoe Tale – last saw it at Sussex University in 1976, when it was shown by the Film Society. Then, I thought it was magical, and I was not disappointed this time.

Mystical, surreal, beautiful, and still a good yarn – or rather an increasingly complex sequence of nested good yarns. Not terribly PC; Edward Said would doubtless take offence at the orientalism, and I'm sure that some viewers might not enjoy the rather charged eroticism.

But it is just great, and I feel validated that in the time since I last watched it Martin Scorsese and others have funded the creation of a new print. They obviously like it too.

Oddly, the book on which it is based is really short, and the film does not cover everything that is in the book, and yet it's a really long film. And also oddly, though most of the nested stories are resolved so that we go back to the story in which they are told, the film ends inside the first level of nesting; we don't go back to the original frame tale, in which the manuscript is found. Does the fact that I find this mildly annoying say more about me than it does about the film?

Why I take pictures of war memorials

Why I post pictures of war memorials

I find war memorials really poignant. I take pictures of every one that I come across; it's become a bit of a tic. It's my tiny way of honouring the people – usually young men – who died, like leaving a little stone on the grave; but it's also a way of making a statement about war and the pity of war.

Most memorials are about the First World War – WW1 or the Great War, if you prefer. There are few hamlets in Europe so small as to not have a memorial to soldiers who died in this war. Since I've tuned in to them I am struck by just how many memorials there are – in schools, colleges, workplaces, railway stations, gardens. Part of the point of taking and posting the pictures is to mark the sheer volume of the memorials. By taking pictures of every one that I encounter I try to convey some sort of comment on the sheer volume of the slaughter. Like the end scene in 'Oh What a Lovely War'; one memorial might glorify war, but hundreds or thousands can't.

Most Western European monuments have a little add-on for WW2, and sometimes for subsequent wars; for Britain and France, the casualties of WW1 far outstrip those who died in WW2. But I've also found memorials for the Crimean War and the Boer War, with great columns of names of young men who died. In Italy I've found Risorgimento memorials, and in Milan railway station there is a Fascist memorial to the young men who died subduing Ethiopia; it is right next to a memorial to young Italian anti-fascist partisans, concretizing the way that Italy manages to have it both ways.

I've seen some unusual ones – there's a memorial to Portuguese soliders who died on the Western Front in Brussels, and I didn't even know that Portugal had been in the First World War. In one small town in Italy I found town with a plaque commemorating the fact that all the young men who had gone off to the war had returned safely.

I take the pictures because they help me to resolve something of a contradiction in the way I feel about the wars. I am, for the most part, against war – though not all wars. I have little sympathy or admiration for the politicians who send young people off to fight and kill. I don't much like the institutions of the military. But I respect the soldiers, and their bravery and their comradeship, even if I don't always think much of the purpose for which they were sacrificed. What can we feel about the Crimean War now, except sorrow for the young men who died in it?

Taking pictures and posting them helps me to resolve this. Partly I think it's because the memorials inevitably subvert their own purpose. The point of the memorials is to commemorate the sacrifice of the soldiers who died in the memorialized war, and thus to make that sacrifice – and future sacrifices – seem glorious.

But the permanence of the memorials, and the long list of names of dead boys which outlast any personal commemoration can't help but remind the onlooker that their names don't live for evermore. The world goes on, the war dead are for the most part forgotten. Those who survive get on with their lives, apart from ritualized remembrance. The first picture I ever took, of a war memorial on a small church in Elsworthy Road, Swiss Cottage, summed it up perfectly; the head of the surmounting angel had come off, and it bore the motto 'Their names liveth for evermore', but the names themselves had been eroded by pollution and were unreadable. It has since been restored, but it was the unrestored one that had the most poignancy and meaning for me.

So the war memorials actually constitute – for me, anyway – a statement against war. So I'll keep taking and posting the pictures.

Review of Les Chansons d'Amour

Mild and slightly pointless French romcom with a pretty young man in a three-way relationship with two pretty young women, who has to endure the death of one of the women and then subsequently discovers he's gay and ends up in a relationship with a pretty young Finnish boy. Lots of musical interludes that don't really fit. Liberal, affectionate, but a bit boring.

Review of Spy Game

Came to this one a bit late, watched it on DVD, but really hated it - a spew of American cultural superiority, with Robert Redford as someone rejecting the values of the institution to which he has devoted his life - the CIA - and sacrificing everything including his pension - to save a younger man who he has recruited and manipulated, and to whom he now feels he owes some sort of debt of honour.

Just horrible, especially the faux-liberal concern about the having to kill lots of "rag-heads" in the pursuit of the greater good. Not much angst about the people who get killed in the implausible raid on a Chinese prison that our hero organises for the movie's finale.

Review of Maps to the Stars

I watched 'Maps to the Stars' at a little cinema in Perpignan and was stunned. This is a really good film that seems to have made very little impact – perhaps it hasn't even been released in the UK yet, though why an english-language film should be released first in France escapes me.

It is a very dark account of celebrity culture, with horrible Hollywood folk managing their careers and each other against a background of incest, self-mutilation, drug abuse and recovery. There is a bit of consolation misery going on – the rich and famous have such miserable lives, all that wealth and fame doesn't make them happy after all. But it does bring out the weirdness of a world in which one's fortune really can be at the same time huge but also dependent on a very fragile kind of reputation capital – and one that's reproduced by a process that is both very much about personal relationships and also complex and mysterious to the participants.

The acting is great, the script and the filming really good too.

On bereavement

My dad, Norman Green, died on 23rd June 2014. We were on holiday in France when my mum phoned to tell me the news, and we were home within about eight hours. I didn't say much, or feel much, during the journey home. Ruth did most of the practical stuff – dealing with Ryanair, for example, who were surprisingly decent. The nuts and bolts of getting home seemed to consume most of my mental energy, of which there wasn't much.

I hadn't had much preparation for bereavement. No-one close to me had died since my grandmother in the early 1980s. Then, I'd not felt anything until the funeral and the final sight of her coffin, at which I had cried and cried and been unable to stop. I didn't cry at my dad's funeral, though I came close the night before, sleeping on the floor of what I must now learn to call my mum's flat. From time to time I have felt ashamed that I haven't felt more sad. Some people say that this is normal and that it will hit me later; we have talked about whether it was because in some sense the progress of dad's dementia meant that we had already adjusted to the fact that he was no longer with us. I don't know.

Leon and I had a discussion about whether it was acceptable to post a message about dad's death on Facebook. In the end I decided that it was OK, and I am extremely glad that I did. The messages of condolence and support that I received were very welcome. I was really grateful for them, and will try to do the same for others in the future. I never realised how important they could be, and how little it matters what the actual words are.

We all felt very well looked after by my mum and dad's synagogue. I've been to funerals where a rabbi has delivered a lame and impersonal eulogy to someone that they self-confessedly didn't know, but nothing like that happened here. The officials at the ceremony were really kind and supportive – it helped that the main functionary was Scottish and  looked and sounded like a Jewish version of Sean Connery.

The rabbi was happy for Leon and I to say a few words ourselves. There had been something of a comedy moment the night before the funeral, when he counselled us that there were some things to which our eulogies could not refer; any enjoyment that dad had taken from eating non-kosher food, or any pleasure he had derived from mixed dancing. Although these  had indeed been among dad's favourite things we managed not to mention then, though the rabbi had looked distinctly nervous when Leon began the lead-in to a joke about a rabbi and a Catholic priest on a train.

Although I do a lot of talking for a living I wasn't at all prepared to give a eulogy for my dad, even though I had imagined myself doing exactly that from time to time. But I managed to say how much of what I considered important in myself had been formed in early conversations with my dad. He brought me up to be against racism from a very early age.

He was a visceral, tribal socialist, and would have cut his hand off before he allowed it to vote anything except Labour. The basics, he explained, were that the Tories wanted high unemployment and low wages, and Labour wanted the opposite. When I was still really little he enjoyed telling me how Nye Bevan had called the Tories vermin. And when I rather mindlessly repeated what the TV news had said about trade unions, dad had told me that working people needed unions to defend themselves against bad and unreasonable employers. Although he had put himself through night school to qualify as an optician, and was therefore both a professional and a businessman, he continued to think of himself as a working class person who done well, not as someone who had risen out of his class.

Like everyone, he was a man of his time. He had liberal views on homosexuality – I can remember him telling me that it was wrong to discriminate against or punish people for how they were born. He never really got feminism or women's rights, though Ruth and her mother schlapped him to Greenham for a CND demonstration. I can remember his bewildered expression as a group of protesters chanted 'no men' at us, who had come there to support them. He couldn't understand  why they would do that, and as I tried to explain it to him realised that I couldn't either.

Dad was not a bloke-ish man. He was mainly uninterested in sport, though he liked to watch boxing and took me to watch “professional wrestling” at the Metropole in Brighton when I was small. He didn't care much about cars, though he'd been proud to own a Jaguar for a few years, as a sign that he had done well for himself. He resolutely refused to do DIY, insisting on his inability to do anything with his hands, even change a light bulb or a plug. Of course, as a man of his time he never did any housework at all – it would be wrong to say he refused to do it, because my mum has been a woman of her time and would never have asked him. In his later years he often asked if there was anything he could do to help her, but he wouldn't have been capable of finding the dishwasher, much less loading or unloading it.

His non-blokeishness extended to his love of children. He was really, really happy to play with little children, to make funny faces and noises for them, play peek-a-boo, and so on. He loved all of his five grandchildren – Louis, Lexei, Juliana, Raquel and Selin. He was proud to have been present for the birth of his own children at a time when the expectation was that 'expectant fathers' paced up and down outside the delivery room.

First and foremost dad was an anti-fascist, of the physical force kind. Of everything that he done in his life he was most proud of his time in the 43 Group. I don't think he was a physical brave man, despite his long participation in various kinds of martial arts training, which makes his involvement in street-fighting all the more special. He loved that he had been part of the group, constantly read and re-read Morris Beckman's book about it, and was always happy when he had the opportunity to talk about it with a new audience.

As he got older our views diverged, and we disagreed about Israel and Zionism in particular. But I loved him all the same, now as much as ever, even though I will never hear his voice again.

Review of "Two Faces of January"

Much better than I'd been led to expect - a nice, taut thriller with plenty of tension and suspense without implausible plotting or ridiculous stunts. Just good characters involved in a plot that could almost happen to anyone (apart from the defrauding big-time gamblers in New York - that couldn't happen to most people).

Review of "Search for Sugar Man"

Watched this remarkable film on iPlayer (from BBC4) last night. The story of a hispanic-american musician and songwriter whose career fails, and then discovers years later that he had had a massive following in South Africa, a country he had never visited, where his records circulated in bootlegs but also legal copies from which he received no royalties.

A couple of fans wonder what ever happened to him, amid rumours that he committed suicide live on stage. But they track him down and find him live and impoverished in Detroit, where he works as a day-labourer doing demolition for construction firms.

That would be amazing enough. It's made more remarkable because:

• the guy - Sixto Rodriguez - was important to several generations of young white South Africans as part of the process by which they distanced themselves from the prevailing repressive White culture and political system
• and he seems to have been utterly at peace with his lack of musical success - to have become a worker-poet with a degree of engagement in local politics
• and when, at the film's conclusion, they bring him to South Africa to perform a series of concerts to his huge fan base, he is every inch a rock star - not cowed or hesitant at all, and totally on top of his material and his performance.

Figs, haemorrhoids and Israelites

I went to this rather interesting set of talks at the Royal College of Physicians,
which included a tour round the garden. One of the highlights was an explication of the Doctrine of Signatures - the idea that the Almighty had cleverly signposted what plants might cure particular conditions by making them look like they would. So figs are good for haemorrhoids, and haemorrhoids look like figs. At least they did to people in the C16th - so much so that the word 'fig' meant a haemorrhoid. When Shakespeare makes characters say "I care not a fig" he was being just a bit ruder than I suspected, though this post makes it all a bit more complicated.

It did rather make me wonder about the golden haemorrhoids which the Philistines apparently placed in the Ark of the Covenant when they sent it back to the Israelites via express oxen-post, as described in 1 Samuel 6:4. The King James version gives this as emerods, but it is clearly meant to be haemorrhoids, as the more recent translations indicate. Perhaps the King James translators just mistook the text's figs for haemorrhoids, and the Philistines were putting golden figs in the ark. Any thoughts, anyone? I asked the speaker (Dr Henry Oakley, a Garden Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians) but he didn't even know about the haemorrhoids in the Ark, much less whether they were really figs. Is this an example of the dumbing down of medical education?

Using a Globastar phone in Wales

More than fifteen years ago I worked in the mobile satellite services industry, helping to develop a handheld satellite phone business. ICO Global Communications, the company that I worked for never made it to service launch; but part of my role was competitor intelligence, so I had the opportunity to use an Iridium phone during a holiday in Morocco. Then, the phone was huge and vaguely weapon-like, the service was dreadful even on a beach with a huge sky, and I also found cellular coverage wherever I went – even in the Atlas Mountains.

Still, I was a bit thrilled to have the chance to try out a Globalstar handheld last week. The Pembrokeshire coastal path turns out to be much less well covered by cellular signal in 2014 than the Atlas Mountains were in 1998, and I badly needed to keep in touch with my parents because my father was unwell.

The Globalstar phone, a GSP-1700, was much cuter. It still had the solid, rotatable aerial, but extending it no longer looked like I was deploying a ground-to-air missile. The phone itself was about the size and shape of a mid-1990s cellular phone with a similar monochrome look and feel. It was lighter, though, and with a pleasant hand-feel.

It was really easy to use – I never looked at the manual or documentation – and worked very well once I'd got used to the fact that it did take a little longer to acquire a signal. It didn't work in the shadow of buildings or under wet trees, but other than that it was reliable and straightforward.

And the voice quality was great – clear and with no perceptible delay or echo. Much better than the voice quality that I got when I did occasionally pick up cellular signal, and actually better than much of my experience with cellular even in urban areas. The phone really did help me to 'connect with family even when my adventures took me out of coverage', just like it says in the PR material.

Nice to know that the mobile satellite service industry came right in the end, even without the benefit of my contribution.

Interesting website about multi-generational cooperative housing in Germany

Here - and there is an associated page (in German!) about financing cooperative housing, which looks worth a read too.

Revew of Adaptation

A really weird one, this. Focusing on the process of adapting a book for a film, and illustrating the difficulties of this rather well, it also details the miseries of introversion (indecision, fear of humiliation), and sibling rivalry (Nick Cage plays the screenwriter and his twin brother). Bits of it are really uncomfortable to watch, but it's oddly compelling. It's well made, and the acting is good. It changes pace and tone towards the end, but that's part of the point and the frame-joke.

I suspect that there are lots of Hollywood in-jokes in it, and could imagine watching it again with someone more knowledgeable explaining them all to me.

Review of Tracks

Robyn Davidson wants to walk across the central Australian desert from Alice Springs to the Indian Ocean with camels. She does. The end.

This is a surprisingly straightforward narrative. We don't get much insight into what the journey meant to Davidson (there is a bit of exorcising inner demons from her mother's death, but not much). Early on she says she is drawn to the beauty of the desert, but most of the time she just scowls at it and wipes her sweaty brow with the back of her hand.

There aren't many characters, and there isn't much tension. The romantic relationship promised by the poster on this page (not used in the UK, I think) is not delivered; she has the odd shag with the photographer appointed by her sponsor, but it's a bit perfunctory.

We know she's going to make it, and that sense of certainty is never undermined. Quite how she manages this while apparently walking naked, without a hat or even sunscreen, and in the most inappropriate footwear you could imagine, is the only real mystery.

The music is nice but the desert looks horrible for the most part.

Review of "Free Men/Les Hommes Libres"

A good, serious film about a subject that I'd never heard about - the way that the Muslim community of Paris helped Jews escape from Vichy and Nazi round--ups by supplying them with false certification "proving" that they were Muslims. It's a true story; some of the characters in the film are historical people, others (including the main character) are composites of several people.

Moving, tense, well shot - though some of the dialogue seems a bit clunky; perhaps it's the subtitles rather than the original script. Interesting that the relationship between Younes and Salim, which is so central to the plot, is  so little explored. Salim is gay, and Younes is clearly surprised and upset to discover this, yet there seems to be a dimension to their mutual attraction that goes beyond friendship.

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.