Review of 'The Imitation Game'

Two weeks since I saw this, and still no review - probably because there's so little to say. It focuses on Alan Turing as played by Cumberbatch, thereby making him out to be a near-autistic geek. I understand that the real Turing was charming and sociable, but films like to represent people who are good at science and maths as awkward as a sort of consolation prize for the rest of us. You know, they understand maths but we can talk to people normally, so yah boo.

Most of the story, including the possibility of Soviet spies, was already told by Enigma, which I think was a better film.

A few things to note, though. MI6 are the goodies, and their desire to intercept and read everyone's communications completely justified by the lives saved - I don't think the real MI6 was nearly as interested and involved in this. And the decrypt, and Colossus, are presented entirely as the result of the genius of Turing and his very small team - though actually Bletchley was an industrial-scale code-breaking installation, and Colossus was built by lots of people, and not just a bunch of posh boys.

Review of 'Inherent Vice'

I really love Pynchon’s books, but I haven’t read the one that this film is based on (yet). If I had the film might have been a disappointment, though the reviews are mainly so bad that my expectations had already been managed sharply downwards.

In fact it turned out to be pretty good – I didn't find the voice-over narrative at all annoying, as some critics have suggested it would be – it was an opportunity to enjoy some Pynchon-esque language, though that is also well represented in the dialogue.

It’s a bit of an art director’s film, in that it looks great – you can almost smell the grease on the hippie characters’ hair and the dirt on their feet. The textures are all there too, and the film is suffused with sex even though not much of it actually happens on the screen.

There were times when I literally lost the plot, as I've done in the novels too. I think that’s partly because it sits somewhere between a detective story and a parody of one, so that the plot is deliberately over-complex with lots of telegraphed twists and turns – and I'm not sure it actually makes sense as a whole. I must read the book.

Great soundtrack, somewhat spoiled by the fact that the North Finchley Vue Cinema insisted on playing it through a speaker slightly smaller than the one on my phone, and stuck in the bottom left hand corner of the screen. And while we’re on the subject of the venue, why whack the air-conditioning up to max on what must have been one of the coldest nights of the year? Just saying.

Review of Selma

This is a great film to introduce people with no previous knowledge of the story of the US Civil Rights Movement. It captures the drama, the deep-seatedness of racism in the US South, the violence of the white backlash, the dignity and the near-miraculous self-restraint of the non-violent Black Civil Rights campaigners. It doesn’t cover the whole history of the movement but focuses on a specific moment – the campaign leading up to the Voting Rights Act, including the eponymous march from Selma, Alabama to state capital Montgomery.

It’s a drama not a documentary, and even though it’s not short it manages to touch on or hint at many of the issues. There is a brief reference to the divisions within the SNCC and between Martin Luther King’s SCLC and the SNCC – but we don’t really find out what this was about. We see that President LBJ is ostensibly sympathetic to King but keeps urging him to wait for voting rights – but we don’t see the extent to which LBJ was a prisoner of the pro-segregation Dixiecrats. In general LBJ seems to be vested with rather more dignity than he deserves. There is some stuff about MLK’s affairs and how the FBI tried to use illegally gathered surveillance of them to try to break up his marriage and thus harm the movement, but there is no attempt at any contemporary relevance – J Edgar Hoover just appears from time to time. 

Tim Roth plays a menacing Governor George Wallace brilliantly, though the epilogue doesn’t mention that Wallace had a late-in-life reconversion to anti-racism (remarkably, Wallace had started out something of a liberal, unsuccessfully running in a Democratic Primary with NAACP backing against a KKK-endorsed candidate).

It’s a really good film with lots of great acting and direction (though occasional slushy music jars) and despite the length does not drag. But I’ve got two issues.

Firstly, it’s American, so it wants a happy ending. Therefore we have to see the Civil Rights Movement as a successful struggle. I saw this as part of a Journey to Justice event, preceded by rather good speeches by among others Chi Onwurah MP, Baroness Helena Kennedy and Baron Herman Ousely, the point of which is about learning from the experience of the movement.

But I’m not at all sure that movement did produce a happy ending, in the Hollywood sense. It seems mean and nasty to say that it delivered for a small education minority of the African-American community but left most of them behind.  The quotation from Dorothy Zellner (a white radical SNCC staffer) "What they want is to let the Negro into the existing society, not to change it..."  seems apposite to me. It’s not that nothing changed, but it didn’t get all fixed in the way that Hollywood wants to imply. This of course has implications for Journey to Justice, because co-option is one of the lessons that future radical movements need to learn about.

The other issue is even trickier, about the tactics and strategy of non-violence. The film doesn’t pull any punches about this. Some of the less pleasant characters in the film point out to King that he while he requires non-violence of his followers, he is relying on a violent response for his enemies. Later on in discussions with the SNCC activists he says much the same himself – when there was no violent backlash, the cameras went away and the tactic failed. King is shown as shocked and pained by the brutality meted out to his followers, but we can’t quite shake the feeling that at some level he must have been relieved and even pleased.

So how to process this? Whether  or not the movement succeeded even according to its own measures, the tactic was clearly successful. It put pressure on the US Federal Government, which needed world public opinion on its side for its wars in Asia. But I can’t help thinking about how those marches have evolved into our own, sanctioned-route police-approved traipses, and whether we have fixated on the form of the public protest while losing all sight of way it is supposed to work. And also the opposite thought – what is the ethics of deliberately putting your supporters in harm’s way for the greater good? Under what circumstances is this permissible – when they know what you are doing? When they knowingly accept the risk? Or when?

Review of 'Wild'

A film about the healing power of nature. Cheryl goes off the rails after her mother dies unexpectedly and suddenly of spine cancer. She sleeps around, she snorts and then shoots up heroin, she gets in with a bad crowd. A nice man rescues her, they get married, but she cheats on him, so they get divorced even though they are still friends. Then she decides to walk herself better by doing the Pacific Crest Trail, a 1100 mile hike from the Mexican to the Canadian border.

 The film is about the walk, the physical endurance it requires, and how it does end up healing her. It’s very beautiful, and occasionally scary – not the nature (as in the film 'Into the Wild', where it's the nature that ultimately kills the person who has sought it out), but the men she meets along the way. Sometimes they are overtly threatening, sometimes it’s just the sheer fact of her being alone and vulnerable. We see the men as she would see them, so even those who turn out to be OK in the end are quite frightening.

Two thoughts: one, the film was made much more poignant and moving for me because I watched it with my Mum, who herself had cancer of the spine when she was about 45 – the same age as Cheryl’s mum. But my Mum survived and has had all those extra years that Cheryl and her mother didn’t.
 Two, I was reminded of an observation that I think was by Oliver Burkeman in The Guardian – that we think of nature as healing because being in it removes us from the dense world of signs and context that we are working so hard to interpret all the time. In the forest, things are what they seem to be – a tree just is a tree. Of course, that’s not true in films, because everything is only there because it carries some meaning; the fox that visits Cheryl represents her mother who went away and left her, the fast-flowing stream is a challenge to be overcome, and so on.

Still, a nice gentle, often funny, and thoughtful film.

The Dark Web at Cybersalon

To Cybersalon and this event, held in the delightfully grungy premises of advertising agency Digitalis in achingly cool Brick Lane. A young, educated audience – almost half women, and with a woman (Wendy Grossman) chairing, though very high beard density among the male members of the audience and no women on the panel. A strong contrast with the IoT event that I had attended in the morning, where almost everyone in the mainly government and corporate audience was over 40 and the 50 people in the room did not include a single woman.

Four presenters spoke briefly and clearly about internet privacy issues. Jamie Bartlett, Director of the Centre for the Analysis of Social Media at Demos spoke about his new book The Dark Net, mainly about the sort of stuff that you can buy on The Silk Road 2.0 and how similar to conventional e-commerce sites the ‘dark’ stuff is. Sadly Dr Elena Martellozzo, a Criminologist at Middlesex University and specialist in sex offenders’ use of the internet and online child safety wasn’t able to make it, but Dr Gareth Owen, a cybersecurity and digital forensics researcher at University of Portsmouth spoke about his headline grabbing Dark Net study, mainly about how much Tor traffic (counted in a highly specific way) is to child-porn sites. There were two other speakers, both privacy geeks (in the nicest possible sense) and I’ll update their names later.

The general tenor of the comments from the latter two, and from Wendy Grossman, was that the right to privacy was absolute, that security services should be given no rights to surveillance, and that back doors into communications services would always be exploited by people even worse than the security services. The audience was much more evenly divided, and there were several comments to the effect that people would quite pleased for there to be surveillance of genuine terrorists. Jamie Bartlett argued for a sort of hopeless centrist position, saying on the one hand that the security services were giving the public what they wanted (without much reflection on why they wanted it) and on the other that electronic surveillance would become increasingly ineffective so that much more direct human intelligence (infiltration etc.) would be called for – he did rather call that ‘good police work’. There was also some good well-informed comment on the idea that it was OK to collect all this data, and to analyse it, as long as no human looked at it without proper legal sanction.

My problem with the whole discussion is this. I accept that there is a need for surveillance of real terrorists. I am pleased that the police eventually caught the neo-Nazi nail bomber, and if reading his emails or his Facebook posts would have caught him quicker then I’d be even more pleased, and some people would be more alive than they are.

But I don’t trust the actual agencies. I think they are as likely to consider people like me and my friends as a threat to the state, and they often don’t pay much attention to right-wing conspirators and terrorists. I don’t trust the people who are supposed to monitor and manage them either, who as we have seen have really funny ideas about human rights and national security. Me encrypting my emails and using a VPN doesn’t do anything to solve this fundamental political problem of how to have a secret security service in a democratic state. What to do about the ‘deep state’ has been a perennial problem for reformist or social democratic governments whenever they are elected, and I wish the newly elected Syriza government the best of luck with this.

Review of 'Whiplash'

This is one of those films about triumph over adversity through persistence and determination. A young man goes to a top music school and wants to become one of the best Jazz drummers. An instructor at the school, in the manner celebrated in a thousand drill-sergeant movies, treats all of the young students very harshly to toughen them up and provide them with paradoxical motivation.

In the formulaic versions of this story some students fall by the wayside but our hero only becomes more determined, until at last he (or occasionally she) proves themselves, at which point the apparently harsh drill-sergeant reveals his heart of gold.

‘Whiplash’ pushes the scenario to and then beyond the limits. The instructor is not just harsh; he is a sadist, who heaps personal humiliation on the students. He sets them against each other, plays with their emotions, and sets impossible standards that have everything to do with power and nothing to do with the imparting of technical skill or theoretical knowledge. 

And our hero does become more determined, to an extent which is frankly pathological. Not only does he practice until his hands bleed, but he is involved in a near-fatal car crash and then crawls from the wreckage to make his way onto a stage for a chance to play ‘his’ part in a performance. He is a damaged, unpleasant monomaniac, who treats with derision everyone who is not also a monomaniac. He appears to have no human feeling except ambition to succeed as a drummer. He is nasty to his girlfriend (of brief duration), his kind and loving father, and everyone else he runs into.

This is the personality that the harsh instructor sets out to create, though he does not identify or empathise with our hero; he just carries on tormenting him. The instructor gets to make the occasional speech justifying this as demanding excellence, and this view is not really challenged in or by the film.

There is a beautifully filmed final set-piece in which the young hero, and therefore the cruel instructor’s philosophy, is vindicated by a superior performance. This performance is delivered in the context of an especially cruel and destructive (and frankly implausible) trap set for the hero; but he triumphs, and thereby finally earns the respect of the cruel instructor, as we always knew he would. This does demonstrate that the philosophy is actually sound – it got the desired result. This is a hymn to elitism that at least acknowledges, if only tacitly, the cost. For everyone who makes it to the promised land of excellence there are a hundred, or a thousand, people who might have been quite good players, and had some fun making music, who have been fatally discouraged because they could never be excellent.

I note in passing that none of the music students ever appear to enjoy music or have any fun playing; I know that 'Fame' was made-up and light entertainment, but there were moments when the students at the Fame Academy gave some indication that they were enjoying themselves. Not this lot. It reminded me of Andre Agassi's comment that he hated playing tennis. 

This is a brilliantly made, powerful film, with some amazing photography and exploration of human relationships, but it is also horrible - a sort of 'Triumph of the Will' for Jazz.

Review of 'Birdman'

A successful Hollywood actor in late middle age, best known for his performance in a super-hero franchise (the Birdman of the title) wants to put on a serious literary play on Broadway, doing the adaption and the directing and appearing as one of the main characters. He’s a bit troubled (drug addict teenage daughter, ongoing relationship with ex-wife, relationship with younger woman member of the cast), and he may be actually delusional – the film shows him as having super-powers, but only when no-one else is around, so he may be imagining this. He also hears a voice in his head, which turns out to come from the Birdman character. Oh, and he really doesn’t understand social media, which is presented as a near-disability.

Making the play turns out to be difficult – theatre people (especially an important reviewer) sneer at him, he doesn’t understand social media, the bankable actor they get to play the other male lead is not only arrogant but a bit of a fuck-up, and there are some amusing slapstick scenes as well as some dark ones with hints of suicide.

The delusions and the voices, play games with what we thing is real in the story. Most of the time this is pretty obvious (we know he can’t really fly or move objects with his thoughts), though sometimes it isn’t. What really distinguishes this film, though, is the cinematography – the use of colour, and the almost total absence of jump cuts. I am only certain about one; apart from that it’s all pans and zooms. There really aren’t any cuts, which give the film a really eerie quality.

It also made me think about ‘Maps to the Stars’. Actors, and film people, really do exist in a series of tightly interlocking personal networks. Their reputation, and their personal contacts, are their capital – so who snubs and blanks who really is of fundamental financial significance to them. Of course, this is the human social world that we all live in, and it’s these pecking orders that make us both happy and miserable. But for ‘arts’ people it is literally their livelihood and their material well-being as well as their social relations that are at stake, which is why they seem to have so much capacity for unhappiness despite their material wealth. Just saying…

Review of 'Short Term 12'

Another thoughtful, quiet film - this one is about abused kids and the people who help them put themselves back together. Lots of character stuff, nicely observed. Very little violence or threat, and no focus on the abusers; the only one who is depicted appears very briefly, and while he is asleep - vulnerable and innocent.

This isn't a world I have any real insight into, but this struck me as a decent well-made film, dealing with hard stuff in a way that wasn't exploitative or melodramatic.

Review of 'The Lunchbox'

Disappointingly not a film about the bulge in someone's trousers...no, actually a really nice Indian film, somewhat slow and under-stated, but nice and enjoyable for all that. It's a sort of romcom, but almost a sad, wistful one - the poster does it no justice.

An ageing account gets mis-delivered a tiffin tin. The tin has been sent by a much younger, unhappily-married woman who meant it to go to her uncaring husband. It's a really nice observed film about character, relationships (seen and unseen), chance, loss...if it had been Hollywood or even Bollywood it would have had an implausible big finish happy ending. Instead...well, watch it yourself, it's worth it.

Review of 'Philomena'

I watched this last night – the first film I've watched on an actual, physical-form DVD in ages. It was really good, with more dimensions than I would have guessed from the trailer. It’s not just a follow-up to all those nasty-nun lost children films like ‘The Magdalene Sisters’, though it is that as well. 

It’s also a comment on our media, and on how toxic and corroded the people who work in it have become. Steve Coogan, who I don’t like all that much as a comedian, is absolutely brilliant in this, and manages to convey something of the contempt that he and his class feel for working people and their ‘naff’ tastes, while at the same time also showing some recognition that this isn't right or even human.

Judy Dench is of course also wonderful, and her character manages to pose some interesting questions about atheism; I am myself both an atheist and a secularist, but the dynamic between Martin Sixsmith and Philomena does make me aware that there is a ‘taste’ element to the way in which ‘educated’ people look down on the beliefs of religious people. He is angrier with the nuns, on her behalf, than she herself is angry with them. Mind you, I felt just as angry as he did.

Review of 'Ida'

The other intelligent, sensitive, thoughtful film in which I dozed off - this time at a crucial moment. This film both looks and sounds as if it were made in the 1950s - even the screen size is deliberately retro, as is the sound production. It depicts a dreary, depressing Poland which has not come to terms with its wartime past. The main character is a young novitiate in a nunnery, who - just before she takes her vows - is introduced to an aunt that she hadn't previously known about. She soon learns that she is Jewish, her aunt a former Communist partisan who became a judge and has now fallen from favour. The aunt takes her on a trip to find out what became of her family, and they discover that the peasants who were hiding them from the Nazis had murdered them.

The film recalled my own trips to Poland - for work, not a concentration-camp pilgrimage - in which I nevertheless kept bumping into the ghosts of the Jewish past of Warsaw. The city had been one-third Jewish, and the "disappearance" of the Jews must have left an enormous hole in its social, cultural and culinary life; but my attempts to discuss this with a Polish colleague were really not welcome. It was also striking the way in which most Poles looked like each other, and how every so often I would see a face that was obviously Jewish.

The novitiate experiences life outside the nunnery, smokes, drinks, has sex with a jazz musician, and then consciously decides to replace her wimple and shows every sign of heading back to the nunnery as the film closes. Yet the cloistered life is not at all presented as ideal. A really complex, nuanced film - I'm really sorry about the bit I missed.

Review of 'The Theory of Everything'

One of two intelligent, thoughtful, sensitive films in which I have fallen into a deep sleep. I am, of course, ashamed to admit this, but confession is good for the soul or something like that.

This is mainly about Hawking's relationships - with his wife, and then with his carer - and how they fit with what we must call his 'disability', which seems much too mild a word. There is not much about his career, or his science, apart from a few set pieces - defending his PhD thesis, presenting his ideas for the first time at a conference, a TV appearance.

None the worse for that, and it is pretty explicit about his atheism and his rejection of the knighthood, though not some other gong that he did accept - the film implies to please his wife.

The bit I missed was the early, 'glittering prizes' scenes of Cambridge life; I don't think they were that important, though perhaps someone else will tell me otherwise.

Review of 'Jeff, who lives at home'

A quiet, small film about two brothers, each failures in their own way, coming to terms with the destiny that seems to have passed them by. I think it's supposed to be a 'screwball' comedy with lots of unlikely events conspiring to force the brothers together in difficult situations, but it mainly strikes me as sad. Susan Sarandon is good as the mother and owner of the home where one brother lives in the basement; she, and the two sons, have not got over the death of their father, and life is passing her by too.

Review of 'Where the Heart is'

This is what Natalie Portman was doing 14 years ago, though her career survived.

It's the cinematic equivalent of eating toffee popcorn sprinkled with hundreds and thousands. It's unbearably sweet, and dull. All the poor white people are beautiful and thin. All the alcoholics (of which there are several in the film) have good complexions and teeth. There are occasional funny lines, and lots of product placement. I can't guess how much Wal-Mart must have paid to be featured so centrally and sympathetically. Also Kodak, for all the good it did the company; and I would say that the lingering shots of La Portman's bum are to show off the red tag on her jeans.

Also too long - two hours.

Review of "Safety Not Guaranteed"

Cute, quirky, independent film - almost self-consciously independent, since it's set in and around Seattle and the central character girl is a sort of scrubbed-up skater type.

The self-made geek who is the other central character is supposed to be making his own time machine, but this is (thankfully) not a time-travel film. It's about eccentricity, self-delusion, and small towns.

Some material about internships, magazine journalism, a hint towards conspiracy films, some coming-of-age and 'revisiting your ex' stuff, but a fun film. And short too, which was a pleasure. So many bad films are also too long; presumably editing them down would cost too much.

This won't change the world but it's a bearable way to spend 83 minutes.

Review of 'Gone Girl'

Funny how there is so much less to write about with a good film than a bad one. This is a closely plotted psychological thriller with a possible murder and a missing person. There are two major plot twists, neither of which I saw coming, so good value there. It’s plot driven, but the characters are good and there are lots of nice details, like the media satire and the celebrity murder lawyer. I’ve always liked Rosamund Pike, so that’s another plus. I can’t see how I can say much else without this being a spoiler; this is good and worth watching.

OK, that said, now a SPOILER ALERT; don’t read further if you want to see this and enjoy it properly.

There is one plot/character hole that bothers me. It seems that Amy plans to complete her frame-up of her husband by killing herself. We ‘see’ her minds-eye view of the body drifting in the Mississippi, and she has a note on her meticulous planning calendar that says ‘Kill Self’. But this does seem rather out of character for her. She is a self-centred psychopathic bitch, and she has everything else worked out. So does she have a scenario where she lives on after her husband is executed for her murder? If so, I didn’t catch it. When she goes into hiding she takes a wodge of cash, but it’s not that much. But when she is forced to change her plan because she is robbed, she doesn’t bring forward the self-topping but instead looks up old flame/victim Collings. Also, the note on the calendar to kill herself doesn't appear to be the last item.

Maybe this is much clearer in the book. Can anyone who has read it, or watched the film more carefully, please explain?

Review of 'The Hobbit': Zionism in Middle Earth

“I understand how. I do not understand why.” That’s what Winston Smith says in 1984, and that’s pretty much how I feel about this film. Why expend so much effort and technical expertise to turn a little kids’ book into a mega-epic that bores as much as it is impresses?

There are some good things about it – the scenery, the sets, and sometimes the music. The actors try to do their best with it – the occasional glance that suggest they know this is codswallop but they and we are in it together. The scenes with Gollum in it are well done – the combination of pathos and malice in the character really is remarkable.

But the dialogue is mainly awful. The narrative is padded so as to allow nine hours of epic out of a quite small book, and things have been crowbarred in so as to suggest that Bilbo’s journey is, like the Lord of the Rings trilogy, part of some titanic struggle against evil – lots of portentous dialogue between Gandalf and various elves, and some scenes with a very Osama-like Saruman obviously being deceitful.

The action scenes, which make up so much of the film, are terrible and stupid. Repeatedly the band of dwarves get stuck in an unwinnable battle, in which they fight bravely but from which they are rescued by an outside agency – Gandalf turns up, or elves on horseback, or rescue eagles. Despite being involved in lots of fighting against overwhelming odds no dwarf is every killed or even injured; and the set-pieces in which they fall thousands of feet  down caverns on collapsing wooden structures, and then pick themselves up and rush into another fight, are not even laughable.

Perhaps there is scope for a “film-goers’ cut”, with all the scenery, sets and arch glances, but none of the dialogue or plot. It could be about 20 minutes long. I’d be up for that.

One more thought, on the representation of race and class. In Lord of the Rings the orcs spoke with cockney accents; here they speak orcish, with sub-titles. I know Tolkien actually made up languages for everyone, but are the orcs speaking his orcish? It does sound rather Slavic. Here it’s only the trolls who speak with working-class British accents, with extra comedy provided by the fact that they are talking about the finer points of cooking – it’s obviously funny when working-class people do that, as is proved by ‘Come Dine with Me’.

But are the Dwarves Jews? Of course they are – don’t take my word for it, Tolkien said so.

Leaving aside the reputation for being fearsome fighters for a moment, they live underground, they are good with making things, they love and hoard gold, and – as Bilbo explains – they are a people without a home, living in permanent exile since they were driven out of their ancestral land. In fact, it is his recognition of this, and his wish to help the dwarves recover their homeland, which persuades Bilbo to go on with his quest, making him a sort of Middle Earth Christian Zionist. It’s a good thing that the dwarves’ Zion is only occupied by a dragon rather than say Goblins, isn’t it? Otherwise just think how many bloody sequels there would have to be.

So the answer to the 'why' question might be that this film was made to serve Zionist interests. Or to expose them. Whatever, really.

Review of 'The Interview'

Well, we had to watch this, even though we didn’t think it would be much good. Our expectations were not disappointed; it really isn’t much good. I laughed at this ‘comedy’ maybe two or three times. Although it has an ostensibly political theme, the laughs are supposed to come from the usual gross-out subjects – farts, vomiting, things being shoved up arses…

For once, it’s possible to say that this film wasn’t released, it escaped. Those of a conspiratorial bent might be tempted to consider whether Sony manufactured the controversy to avoid releasing such an awful film, or even to ensure that some people would watch ‘in defence of free speech’. If it had been released in the normal way it would certainly have bombed.

It doesn’t really deserve a detailed review. The talk show host and his producer go to North Korea intending to follow through on the CIA’s request to assassinate Kim Jong-Un; then the host finds that Kim isn’t so bad after all and doesn’t want to kill him, then he finds out that he is, after all, really bad and does want to kill him. Then they decide not to kill him but to ask him difficult questions on air, rather than the prepared ones, so as to humiliate him before his people. But he ends up getting killed anyway, and we see his body burning as the plucky duo shoot his helicopter down from a stolen tank.

Once again, this film has lots of gay themes. Early on we see Eminem come out as gay on air. Kim Jong-Un is worried that his liking for margheritas and Katy Perry might be taken as proof that he is gay. The producer and talk show host are not in a gay relationship, but they are very affectionate buddies.  The producer has to insert what is in effect a very large butt plug into his anus to hide a second delivery of ricin poison from the North Koreans. I suspect that sympathetic depictions of gayness are now an important signifier of ‘civilised values’ – by including some nice stuff about gay people this film proves that it is not merely patriotic warmongering trash like ‘Red Dawn’. 

It’s been a not-entirely-great year

Maybe the Facebook robots are even cleverer than we know. Most of my friends seem to have had those “It’s been a great year” posts created for them, but the robots seem to have left me out. I’m grateful. It’s not been a great year.

This time last year I posted a picture of a hospital corridor with a pathetic bit of tinsel hanging from a fluorescent light fitting, or something similar. It caught my eye while I was visiting my dad in the Acute Unit at Whipps Cross Hospital, and it seemed to sum up perfectly the contradictory feelings that I had about me, and him, and all the other people including the staff, being there. And part of this not-great year is that he died, in June, after more than a year of dementia and degeneration, so that by the end he was more in hospital than out of it, even though there was not usually anything that could reasonably be called a treatable illness afflicting him.

I dream about him often, not as he was at the end, but more like the way he was about fifteen years ago, when he was an active and engaged grandparent to my two boys, as well as to my brother’s two daughters.

This time last year I also compiled a list of all the things I’d done during the year – trips, work reports, blog posts and book reviews. It seemed worth doing, to confirm that something had actually happened. It rather felt that I’d been in stasis for years, and the log proved that I’d actually done something.

There doesn’t seem much point in doing the same this year, which has been eventful enough. I was made redundant from Ovum, after 14 years there, in April. I’d been imagining that happening for years, from the first time the company was acquired, so it didn’t come as a surprise but it was still a shock. The process was followed to the letter, and I can’t complain that I was treated unfairly. I was offered a much bigger redundancy sum than the statutory entitlement. I was given the chance to interview for a role a bit like my own. And there were some comedy moments in the whole thing, because both I and the other interviewee didn’t want to stay anymore, so we both had to compete to be allowed to leave with the redundancy money.

I didn’t do any more work for Ovum after the beginning of April. In principle I was on a 30-day consultation period, but the outcome was pretty obvious. Then I had three months ‘notice period’, during which I was strictly prohibited from doing any other money-earning work, but not debarred from making contacts for future freelance work. In the end that proved a bit pointless, because I was offered a position by M2M/IoT specialist analyst firm Machina Research, which has proved to be rather exciting and even a bit fun.

All that free time allowed me to spend some time with my dad as his condition deteriorated. I didn’t really know that he was on the final stretch of his life, though, because the slide was so gradual it was hard to notice the progress. Ruth and I went on holiday to France in mid-June. Dad had seemed a little better of late, and was out of hospital when we went. He died while we were still away in the Pyrenees, and we travelled back within the day.

Part of the run-up to the holiday had been the death of our cat, Beauty, who had been with us for nine years or so. It feels odd comparing the death of a pet to the death of my dad, but it all seemed to part of the same thing, a series of blows that life had become. This was how it was going to be from now on.

Of course, it wasn’t. The not-great year has had some great moments too. I’m very proud of my sons’ achievements this year – Louis got a Distinction in his degree, Lexei won a scholarship to help support his studies.

I am closer than ever to Ruth, who has been a partner and best friend through all of this, and who has helped me dealing with some stuff that has hung about in my life for – well, all of it, really. Together we’ve had a year without the twists and turns of the cohousing group that we left at the end of 2013, and we’ve had the pleasure of living in the Springhill cohousing community for the month of November, and discovering that we liked cohousing in practice as well as in theory.

I published a novel, One Shoe Tale, which has had some nice reviews. We got some new cats, who have turned out to be fine animals, funny and affectionate and full of life.

So screw you, Facebook robots. It’s been some good and some bad, because that’s what life is. I might have done without some of it, but that’s not what life is.

Review of 'Dangerous Beauty'

A historical costume romp, with some feminist overtones about the lack of choices available to women in sixteenth-century Venice, and the hypocrisy of men in blaming them for the choices they were forced in to. Veronica Franco (a real historical figure and published poet) becomes a courtesan because she doesn't have a big enough dowry to marry the nobleman she loves. She is inducted into the profession by her mother, a retired courtesan, which is a cue for some scenes of a sexual nature, though nothing particularly shocking. There's lots of beautiful footage of Venice and Renaissance parties. There's a plague, some religious persecution, some scenes in an Inquisition court - what's not to like?

Nothing very heavy or intellectually demanding, but good fun.

Review of ‘Kill Your Darlings’

A film about the origins of the Beat Generation, with adolescent Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg getting up to all sorts of naughty pranks in 1940s New York. Lots of drugs and booze, some vandalism and sneaking into the library at night to substitute rude books like Ulysses and Tropic of Cancer for the university’s recognised canon in glass cabinets. Oh what fun they had!

It all goes a bit wrong when a gay love triangle ends in a brutal stabbing murder, but it works out OK 

for our three hipster heroes, who are bailed out by their parents (or in Kerouac’s case, his fiancée), and even for the murderer himself who gets off on the hilarious defence that his victim was a homosexual predator, and so the stabbing was in “self-defence”.

I’m being a bit unfair, but this wasn't all that good. Daniel Radcliffe is sort of all right as a moody Ginsberg, and there are lots of smouldering looks between him and his not-quite-gay lover, but it’s hard to take a rebellion against metre and rhyme, and based on cutting up books, very seriously.

Review of 'Along Came Polly'

This film never stood a chance. It has Jennifer Aniston in it, and it has Ben Stiller. Either of these are efficient indicators that a film is going to be rubbish; taken together they are a lot more reliable than a triple A rating on a bond that this will be terrible.

And yet, somewhere in here was a good film struggling, and failing, to escape. It has Philip Seymour Hoffman, the opposite of a crap indicator; if he’s in it, it’s usually good. Sure, his character is mainly played for the kind of cheap laughs you’d expect from a romcom/frat-buddy film, but underneath there is a kind of tragic story about someone who never recovered from early success, and who has zero insight into himself. When Hoffman and Stiller’s characters play basketball there is a running gag whereby Hoffman makes all the right noises and calls to indicate that he is about to make a winning shot, but always misses. This underlines the lack of insight thing; Hoffman continues to not notice that he is doing this and is very bad at basketball.

Stiller’s character has too much insight into himself – he understands himself as a man scared of life, with a too well developed sense of statistical risk. Of course this is played for laughs, but there is some sense of the underlying tragedy. Bad things really do happen to him (his new wife shags a scuba instructor on his honeymoon, for example) but those aren’t the things for which he has calculated a probability.

And much of the film is about relationships between men – between Stiller and his buddy Hoffman, Stiller and his new girlfriend’s gay best friend, Stiller and his obnoxious boss, Stiller and the Australian CEO who’s risky life he is supposed to be assessing for insurance purposes, Stiller and his silent father…without the cheap laughs this could actually have been a thoughtful and sensitive film. The Australian CEO makes for a bit of a sub-plot that could have been funny and interesting; the way that Stiller’s new wife humiliates him with the scuba instructor and later tries to resume the relationship as if nothing has happened has genuine tragic potential.

Interestingly, for a romcom, it’s the men’s bodies that are really examined; it’s almost a gay film dressed up as a man-woman romcom. There is very little chemistry between Stiller and Aniston, or between Stiller and his soon-to-be-ex-wife. There’s a bit more between Stiller and his mother, naturally. She manages to unfailingly give him the wrong advice, including the suggestion that he should get back together with the cheating wife.

Despite all this, the film is not worth watching, except perhaps on a plane when the alternative is back-to-back Stallone movies. But it’s interesting to muse on how this could have been made differently, so that it actually was worth watching.

Review of 'The Invisible Woman'

Nice, slow but worthwhile adaptation of Claire Tomalin's book about Dickens's affair. Dickens is rather well played by Ralph Fiennes (who also directed) as a charming and sentimental man who is also a bit of a shit - he humiliates his wife and treats his mistress very badly too. Some good insights into the Victorian world of celebrity, and lots of good performances, including one by Kirstin Scott Thomas as the mistress's mother.

Review of "Jimmy's Hall"

A solid Ken Loach film about Jimmy Gralton, an Irish Communist in the post-Independence period, who opened a little tin-roofed hall for cultural and educational activities in a rural area and thus aroused the enmity of the church and local reactionaries. Good because it recovers from obscurity the story of Gralton, the only Irishman to be deported from Ireland, and because it avoids the usual nationalist cliches about Ireland's troubles all being due to the British. The thugs who close down Jimmy's hall are Free State policemen and soldiers; the rascally landlords who evict tenants are all Irish, not cardboard Anglo aristocrats. The IRA are a useless bunch of ditherers and fence-sitters, not the bold nationalist heroes that they usually are in Hollywood films.

Review of 'The Railway Man'

A good enough film about the life of Eric Lomax, who was a prisoner of the Japanese during WW2 and worked on the notorious Burma railway, where he was tortured. The film depicts his time as a prisoner, and his later life as one of several war veterans horrendously damaged by their experience. Lomax (Colin Firth) is encouraged by his wife (Nicole Kidman playing against type as a rather mumsy middle-aged woman) to deal with his pain rather than push it under the carpet, and he eventually finds and confronts the Japanese man who translated during his sessions of torture.

It's a good film rather than a great one. Firth is rather good as a slightly nerdy 'railway enthusiast'.

A cunning wheeze: make the public pay for culinary excellence

I have a cunning wheeze. I am going to open a very expensive restaurant. The food is going to be absolutely top quality, and it will serve the best wines. The prices will be such that only the very rich will be able to afford to eat there. I will talk a lot though about how it benefits the whole of society by raising the standards of cuisine and setting a benchmark for cooking. Wouldn't it be nice if other restaurants could be as good, by ‘levelling up’ to be as good as this expensive one?

The cunning bit is that you lot are going to help to pay for my restaurant, in which only rich people can afford to eat. That’s because my restaurant is going to be a charity. It won’t make any profit, though it will pay me a handsome salary for overseeing it. I will call the charity the Foundation for Excellence in Culinary Knowledge, just to show what I think of plebs like you. Because the restaurant is a charity it will get all sorts of tax exemptions – unlike the restaurants where the hoi polloi eat.

If anyone really makes a fuss I’ll offer to let some pleb chefs train in the kitchen once a month, or even send some of my chefs over to pleb restaurants once a month to show them how we make really good food and serve excellent wine. That should keep the Labour Party sweet, right? I mean, if it works in education, why shouldn't it work for restaurants?

Review of ‘Interstellar’

Was really looking forward to this one, and just a tiny bit disappointed; not entirely sure it’s OK to say so, since so many others have such strong opinions, and lots of people really like it.

It’s visually arresting, though not as much so as other Nolan films. The audio was murky, though this might be my declining ears (I find myself saying that more and more) or even the crappy sound system at Muswell Hill Odeon. Whatever the reason, I missed some of the dialogue, though this didn’t seem to matter all that much. It’s a film of images and themes. The images are striking enough, and they function as visual cues to call up reserves of associations and feelings.

The dust bowl is one. The film begins with documentary-style talking heads, people talking about the wind-blown dust. Actually, they are real documentary talking heads, from another film about the 1930s dust bowl. There are shots of American climate refugees who look just like the Oakies of the 1930s, down to the trucks – explained by the fact that the climate crisis, and a population crash, means that everyone is making do with retro technology.

And maybe it’s just me, but I thought that the space suits – particularly the helmets – looked more like the ones worn by Soviet cosmonauts than American astronauts. That wouldn’t fit with the overall story line, which is about the ultimate triumph of the American way of life – Old Glory on the surface of planets in other galaxies – but it does help to give the space effort a sort of battered retro look.

Another visual cue is the film 2001 A Space Odyssey, to which this has sometimes been compared. I saw 2001 when it was already old, and I don’t have the feeling of reverence for it that some people seem to have. I can still recognise the scenes which evoke the earlier film, though – some of the shots of the ring-shaped array of docked spacecraft, the sequence when they pass through the wormhole – and the overall theme of humans being curated by a benevolent external intelligence.

It’s more about the themes than anything else. The plot and the narrative drags a bit. The dialogue is not important, and the characters are mainly uninteresting – apart from Matt Damon’s character. But there really are lots of big themes. Ecological crisis, climate change, and future food shortages. The relationships between parents and children, and what each owes to the other. The role of science and technology. General and special relativity, and the way that the physics of space travel would impact on the relations between the generations.

Others have commented on the underlying politics of the film – the message that it doesn’t entirely matter that we’ve fucked up the planet, because science and technology will be able to build us an escape route to other worlds, and that anyone who says we need to fix this planet because it’s the only one we have is a misguided liberal – and a dishonest conspiracy nut too, prepared to spread the lie that the moon landings were faked if it serves a purpose. 

Review of Northern Soul

I've never been a member of a music-based subculture, so I don’t know what it feels to define oneself as a member of an in-group based on clothes and music. That’s what this film is about, though. The main character is a slightly geeky, introverted boy whose parents bully him into trying the local youth club, and who – by taking sides in a fight on the spur of the moment – finds himself fallen in among soul boys. He becomes an enthusiastic participant and thereby finds shape and meaning for his life. There are lots of amphetamines, some of them dodgy.

The film is dark and dirty-looking, and the sound is sometimes a bit muffled – funny for a film about music. There is no sense that the palaces of Northern Soul were wonderlands for the people who went to them; they look dismal. The dancing about which so much has been said is energetic but graceless and not at all beautiful. It’s a sort of male competitive display, the boys dancing to impress each other. They certainly don’t seem very interested in the girls, who bob up and down discreetly in the background.

It did remind me a bit about how awful it was being a teenager in the 1970s, even though my suburban London Grammar School wasn’t even close to this world. Fountain pens and ink bottles, uncomfortable school uniforms, the underlying threat of violence between boys, the sarcastic teachers, the horrible dangerous cars…

Funny to recall a time when any kind of recorded music was a rare and precious commodity that you had to seek out, and where finding and owning the right recordings was worth both money and cudos. 

Review of 'Kiss Kiss Bang Bang'

A comedy thriller – not always a good hybrid, but this one works well. Robert Downey Jnr is good as the rather hapless recent arrival in Hollywood who stumbles into a complex plot involving incest, swapped bodies, frame-ups and murder, while failing to get it together with his teenage unrequited love. A few ‘alienation of the audience’ devices as RDJ speaks directly to camera, pauses the action and so on, which also work quite well. The detective to whom RDJ is assigned to ‘learn about the detective business’ for his putative movie role is gay, played by Val Wilmer, and I thought the gay jokes were sympathetic, not nasty, and quite funny; not really for me to say, though.

Is it of any consequence that I had seen it before and forgotten it? I don't think so.

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.