Review of 'The New Girlfriend'

An unusual French film about the relationship between a young French woman and the cross-dressing widower of her lifelong best friend. He reveals his secret to her, and they develop a friendship that starts with her taking him shopping and then deepens into something more.

An element that isn't explicit, but nevertheless felt very strong to me, is the extent to which the man's behaviour and desire is narcissistic. He isn't gay - he doesn't want to be a woman. He loves his deceased wife's friend as a woman, and wants to have heterosexual sex with her while dressed as a woman. I think he is really in love with himself as a woman - while she is in love with him as a woman, though a sort of acceptable man-woman, because she's not really gay either, though she's sort of thought about it. She has dreams about loving her dead friend (while she's asleep in her childhood bed in the family's country house), and she flirts with a young lesbian at the gay club to which she takes her cross-dressing friend.

Beautifully shot, with lots of lovely clothes and interiors, and nice stuff. The woman and her blank husband, who barely notices what's going on, are French yuppies. The dead woman, and her family, seem to be Catholic provincial haute bourgeoisie, though I  suspect there are other markers that would situate them more precisely to a French viewer.

It's based on a Ruth Rendell short story, which I must read.

Watched at the Landsdowne Film Club in Stroud - sparsely attended, with everyone giving each other odd looks when it finished.

Review of 'The Fundamentals of Caring'

Unusual quirky film about the relationship between a  young man with something like motor neurone disease (sorry, I missed the very beginning) and his slightly disengaged ex-writer carer. They go on a road trip, pick up waifs and strays along the way, and are sort of redeemed, but without mawkishness and with a lot of humour. Better than I was expecting - particularly great acting by Craig Roberts.

Another Netflix, smartphone and Chromecast viewing.

Review of 'Full Out'

Apparently true story about a girl gymnast who is injured and told she'll never compete again but pushes herself, with the help of a crew of hip-hop dancers, to get her strength and abilities back. Worthy but predictable and dull. Very little to say about it.

Watched on Netflix via smartphone and Chromecast.

Review of 'Jack of the Red Hearts'

A teenage girl living on the skids fakes an ID to get a job as a live-in carer for a family with an autistic little girl...and despite no training or credentials manages to develop enough rapport with the girl to help her. The teenage is doing it so she can be together with her orphaned sister, so she's trying to go straight, clean up her drug habit and put her life of minor criminality behind her.

It's a bit soppy and the anticipated (and telegraphed) disasters implied by leaving a vulnerable child in the sole car of...well, another vulnerable child...don't really materialize, even though the autistic girl wanders off, gets lost, climbs on roofs and so on. The ending is a bit fairy-tale. But its heart is in the right place - the social services aren't the bad guys, the family is more understanding than they ought to be, and I think it's quite a nuanced perspective on autism and what it means for parents to have an autistic child.

Watched on Netflix via smartphone and Chromecast.

Review of 'Sicko'

A Michael Moore documentary, relentlessly polemical but enjoyable and funny too. About how shit the US health care system is, with illustrations as to how much it makes ordinary people suffer and some explanation as to why, and how it got that way. Comparisons with the health care systems of other places (including the UK) that make them seem better than they are - but compared to what people experience in the US the NHS in Britain really does feel like a product of a socialist paradise, even after so many years of battering.

A funny ending in which the little group of victims that he's gathered are taken to Cuba - first to Guantanamo, in an effort to break in to the prison so that they can enjoy the free health care provided to the prisoners there, and then to Havana, where they are given free treatment and treated like heroes. It's a staged stunt, but it's still moving.

A thought - does this convince anyone not already on Moore's side? And if not, does that matter? Is it sufficient to produce polemics that only serve to keep people on our side reassured that we're not all mad, and that there really is a better way?

For the record, watched at a free showing in the Baptist Church in Stroud as part of a 'Stroud Against the Cuts' NHS weekend. There was a discussion afterwards but we didn't stay.

Review of Lady Susan

A fun, enjoyable piece of C18th chick-lit, with lots of nicely observed bitchiness; I'm not sure why this isn't part of the regular Jane Austen canon, because it's beautifully written. It took me about ten minutes to get used to the language. I particularly liked the way Austen manages to progress the story without any third person narrator. The epistolary novel may be very dated form, but it seems bang up to date, sharp and contemporary, here. I'm only sorry that she seems to have given up at the end, so that the denouement comes from the perspective of an omniscient third-party narrator. Actually, I'm also sorry that I couldn't work out what was going on with Lucy Manwairing at the end - I can tell that she is humiliated, but I'm not sure exactly how.

Which leads me to another observation - the characters in this seem like C18th versions of us, but they aren't. They are as foreign as women in ancient Athens or contemporary Saudi Arabia, an idle rich 'leisure class' who live off the labour of others and spend their lives managing the consolidation of property through marriages.

Review of 'Love and Friendship'

A bit of a meringue of a film - too sweet and light, not quite sour and sharp enough for the content. It's a movie treatment of a Jane Austen epistolary novel, Lady Susan, not published in the author's lifetime - and recently 'novelised' by the film's writer. The book is bitchily great, and the film isn't quite good enough. It's clear the cast of luvvies had a lot of fun making it, especially the dressing up and the hair and the sets - Kate Beckinsale alone seems to have three different hair artists working on her. Despite this, though, she's just not mean enough - the Lady Susan in the book is really rather darker.

I note in passing that the best friend character has been turned in to an American - she isn't in the book. Haven't we grown out of that yet?

It's watchable enough though, and there are quite a few laughs, and it did persuade me to read the book (free for kindle, unlike the re-novelisation), so not a complete loss.

Watched at the Everyman Cinema in Muswell Hill, in one of the newly refitted screens - a bigger screen than previously, sofa seats with little tables on the arms for drinks and snacks. It's clear where the cinema business model is going.

Review of Operation Basalt

A well-written and gripping account of a little-known incident in WW2, this book also raises interesting questions about the nature of historical memory and the purpose of writing history.

In October 1942 with the Axis powers still in the ascendant the British launched a small-scale raid on the German-occupied island of Sark, one of the smallest of the Channel Islands. It was a tiny pinprick against the Nazis, yet it had significant consequences, not only of the people whose lives it touched but also for others far away – civilian and military prisoners who were caught up in the cycle of repression and counter-repression that it triggered, and all those Allied soldiers engaged in commando and partisan warfare, who were henceforth to be summarily executed if captured.

Eric Lee conveys the military and political context of the raid with a deft touch, setting out the background without labouring it. He also describes the raid itself with all the skills of a thriller writer, and it’s easy to imagine oneself there with the commandos, stumbling about in the dark and finding that things aren’t the way they look on maps or aerial photographs. I couldn’t help thinking how we have become used to our present surfeit of information – I can look up any of the unfamiliar terms in the book in a second (even when I’m on a train, as I did yesterday), or check out a Google map or street view of the places mentions. Then, the commandos and their leaders back in Britain had little idea what was going on in the islands – almost impossible to contemplate now.

On the other hand, the extent to which the raid unleashed a round of information warfare seems very modern. It’s hard to believe that the Nazis claimed to be the injured party in breaches of the ‘rules of war’, but they did.

One other thought struck me. This event was relatively recent, and well-defined. It took place within the context of military bureaucracies that tried to keep accurate and detailed records, and several of the participants left eye-witness accounts.

Yet it’s already impossible to dis-entangle some of the details – how many prisoners did the commandos take, and how many casualties were there? What happened to one of the civilians who played a key role? It’s to the author’s credit that he manages to solve some mysteries, shed some light on others, and admit where he is unable to do either.

This is a great and enjoyable book, and I look forward to reading more history by this author.

Review of The Portable Veblen

I picked this up because I rather like the odd economist-anthropologist Thorsten Veblen; I’d used terms like ‘conspicuous consumption’ and ‘leisure class’ loosely for ages until I actually read him, and found him to be brilliant and insightful, and rather relevant to our emerging post-capitalist civilisation.

But while the main protagonist of this novel is named for and keen on the original Veblen, it’s not really about him at all. Instead, it’s about relationships – between lovers, between parents and children, between siblings, old friends and everyone else. Oh, and trauma-induced brain damage, and medical experiments, and the regulation of medical trials, and the treatment of the mentally ill.

A few pages in I decided that this was not my sort of book at all, but I am so glad that I stayed. McKenzie is a very good writer, with a superb eye for details. There’s a good and well-structured plot for those that need that sort of thing (me), and sometimes the interplay between parents and children, and between siblings and parents, was so good it seemed that she’d been listening in on my sessions with my therapist.

So just read this. And then go read some Veblen too – I went and got myself a new copy of the Theory of the Leisure Class when I finished this book.

Review of Florence Foster Jenkins

Much lighter than the recent French film ‘Marguerite’, which was a more fictionalised version of the same story but dwelled more on the tragic aspects of the story. The acting is more camp and over-done, though it’s interesting to see Hugh Grant actually acting. It still has some poignancy, especially in terms of the relationships that MFJ develops with the men around her, who come to care about her feelings enough to protect her from realising how dreadful she is. It also doesn’t shrink from the fact that she had syphilis, which is surely a first in a film designated as suitable for general viewing. And it manages to imply that her pianist is gay without over-doing it.

Also beautiful to look at, in the interiors, the lighting, the costumes, and even the long shots down New York avenues – how did they manage to get the city back to the 1940s? I noticed in the credits that some of it was shot in Liverpool and Glasgow – I wonder which scenes. And a lovely scene with 'Sing Sing Sing' on a gramophone at a party.

Watched at Woodford Odeon, with my mum, in a surprisingly full cinema for a Wednesday night.

Review of Sing Street

Disappointing Irish teen band film – so transparently a wish-fulfilment fantasy that it didn’t really hold my attention. Nice premise – posh kid gets sent to tough school because his parents are broke, survives and attracts cute (slightly older) girl by forming a band with his mates. But if we are expecting a teen version of The Commitments, that’s not what we get. The band are brilliant from the very start. He writes brilliant songs with no apparent effort. There’s no conflict within the band, they all practice regularly at one of the band member’s house while his mum bring them tea and snacks, the pretty girl is snaffled straight away – even the lead’s violent school-bully nemesis is won over and becomes the band’s roadie. Too good be true, and too good to be an interesting film.

Review of Mustang

A beautiful, sad film about five young girls growing up in a rural community in North Eastern Turkey. Though the reviews seem to present this as a ‘coming of age’ story, it’s something rather nastier than that implies. The girls are brought up by their conservative grandmother and their patriarchal uncle, both of whom are very conservative and apply increasingly strict controls over their lives. The house is gradually turned into a prison from which a family-arranged marriage is the only sanctioned escape, and the girls respond to this in different ways. There are a few light moments when they occasionally break out, but it becomes increasingly dark and claustrophobic. A good advert for mainstream feminism and modern liberal urban life; almost the only decent man in the film is the gay truck delivery man befriended by the girls (they do refer to him as ‘queer’, but it’s only the slightly unusual facial hair that marks him out).

It's a Turkish-German co-production, with great music. It also has a sort of German look to it, which set me to wondering whether that was measurable. Are there national (or personal) styles in film making that would be revealed by statistical analysis – length of static or panning or zooming shots, length and angle of close-ups, time between cuts, etc? I wonder whether there has been any work on this. It seems so obvious that I can’t help thinking someone must have done it.

Anyway Mustang (I don’t know why it’s called that – a Turkish cultural reference that is lost on me?) is a good but sombre film.

Review of Dr Strangelove

Somehow I've never got round to seeing this, so I was grateful for the chance to watch it in the Middle Floor at Springhill.

It's horrible, though not in a bad way. Although it's billed as a black comedy there aren't many laughs. It's mainly a believable story about how a rogue air force general goes nuts and starts the slide towards a nuclear war, which then can't be stopped by any human agency.

It's very anti-military, and also quite anti-American. The Russians are largely invisible - the Soviet premier is on the end of a phone line but we don't hear his voice, and the Russian ambassador is mainly decent, though he does take pictures of everything in the secret war room. The Americans are bureaucratic, at least slightly mad, and sex-crazed. I don't think a film like this could be made now, though I suppose 'In the Loop' wasn't all that far off, particularly in the way it portrayed the relationship between the sensible but ineffectual Brits and the crazy but powerful Americans.

Review of Electricity

I didn’t know anything about this – just found it on BBC iPlayer while looking for something to do, but it was really rather good. It’s about a Lancashire girl with severe epilepsy searching for her lost brother in the London underclass, and it’s beautifully shot and very well acted, with lots of emotional depth. 

There are a few implausible plot developments (everyone she meets is really nice to her), and she seems to have an enormous cool wardrobe contained within her small wheelie suitcase; in fact she dresses rather too well for the character she is supposed to be playing.

But it’s quality British drama all the same. Lots of stuff about how people can manage their conditions, and about how they are treated as they do so - something I hadn't thought about much for years, but this made me think about it again.

I was sort of puzzled why it appears to be set in the North East when it’s not in London, even though she’s from Lancashire. Maybe that was explained somewhere and I missed it.

Review of 'Miles Ahead'

Not a terrible film, but not a great one either, and Miles deserves better. This is not a full musician biopic, so it misses out on lots of the familiar ‘struggle to be excellent’ themes. Instead it focuses on the fallow period of five years when Miles wasn’t recording or performing; the earlier years are done by flashback. We see some of his early performances, and so on, as recollections. The present – the time when the film’s main narrative is taking place – is more about guns, shoot-outs, car chases and drug deals. 

This means that there isn’t enough about the music; for me the best bits were where Don Cheadle is playing Miles working with other musicians. There’s nothing wrong with the acting – Cheadle acts well, and if he can’t actually play the trumpet (maybe he can?) he can certainly act trumpet playing.Ewan McGregor's fictional Rolling Stone journalist is quite good too.

Just as Miles makes his comeback and starts playing again the film ends – not before time, because it’s quite long, and the car chases got on my nerves. But I’m sorry it ended where it did, and that there wasn’t more about the creativity rather than about the tortured-ness of it all.

Watched on the cinema screen in a nearly empty Holloway Odeon.

Review of 'I Married a Communist' by Philip Roth

This is one of the good Roth books (I really hate some of them) – well written, and with several important subjects addressed; McCarthyism, the failure of the American Left, and relationships between people with…um…issues.

Still, it’s a mixed bag. It has a weird structure, with a youngish narrator being told most of the events by an older man recalling them…only the narrator was there for some of the narrative so can provide his own perspective – and sometimes it becomes hard to remember who is talking or what they are saying. It’s a bit muddled and confusing, and not strictly necessary.

It starts out exploring the impact of the blacklist on people’s lives, and the impulses that drove good people into first the Henry Wallace Progressive movement and then to the Communist Party. It covers well the fine impulses that drove people there, and also the sheer misery of the CP’s twists and turns and what they meant for those people. It explains how the New Dealers and liberals were the real target of the red-baiters, and how much nasty score-settling went on.

But two thirds of the way it seems to change tack and sentiment; the liberal and communist characters are suddenly driven not by personal or political conviction but by their own emotional flaws. Some of this is revelation of the plot, and some of it feels like Roth changed his mind and started to write a different book.

And the portrayal of the mutually destructive relationship between the main protagonist and his wife, and her previous destructive relationships with men and with her daughter, are really horrible. It’s put into the mouths of those characters who are generally reliable and insightful witnesses, so we are supposed to take it as a true and honest account.

This is just misogyny, spiced up with some racial and class awkwardness. The knowledge that this is really about Roth’s relationship with Claire Bloom, and that many of the facts map on to the real story, makes it skin-crawling.

At the end Roth brings it back to the historical events covered in American Pastoral – the failure of liberalism in the face of Black-led riots and urban degeneration. It’s all hopeless and depressing, and the moral is that those who pursue political or civil goals based on the possibility of change are fools who waste their own time and put themselves and those they care about in harm’s way. There is some ‘bracketing’ of the view, but the argument against it which is offered doesn’t feel strong or deeply felt.

Very painful to read much of the time, although it is a mostly good book.

Review of 'The Wolf of Wall Street'

Hard to know how to review this. It's much too long, for a start. Jordan Belfort is too disgusting a person with whom to spend three hours - doesn't Scorsese know how to indicate that time passes without...it actually having to pass? The film does show how nasty the crowd around him and his brokerage company was, but it's mostly in terms of their moral depravity - drugs and hookers. There isn't much sense that what they in business terms was wrong, and had victims - just that it was against the rules. And Belfort is portrayed as someone with his own moral code, that he stuck too - he never ratted on his real friends, the guys from his neighbourhood that he recruited to run the company with him. (In this he is rather like the Mafia types in Scorsese's Goodfellas; maybe that's the best way to think about Wall Street, as just another organised crime gang.) Even when he's wearing a wire because he has become a cooperative witness, he takes risks to indicate to them that he is doing so - though inexplicably that doesn't seem to have any consequences. He still only serves three years, in a nice prison with tennis courts.

That's the message of the whole film, really, that this stuff doesn't have consequences. His marriage is wrecked, mainly by his drug and hookers habits - but he didn't seem to care much about any of that anyway. After his imprisonment he's still giving motivational lectures on selling. Of course, it would be wrong for this to have a happy ending, with justice being served and the evil-doers getting their just desserts. That isn't what happens in real life, and it would be implausible to tell a financial story that ended that way. There is a touch of consolation in the familiar Hollywood theme that the rich and powerful aren't any more happy than the rest of us, but even that is not really carried through. A certain kind of young man seeing this film would think of it as a recruiting commercial for the financial services industry.

Review of 'Frozen'

My kids were grown up by the time this came out, and they are possibly of the wrong gender too, so I never got to see this. This weekend we decided that since so many little girls have grown up with it, it must be a cultural reference point, and we ought to see it anyway. So we watched it from a DVD in the Middle Floor at Springhill Cohousing.

It was much, much better than I was expecting. The merchandise from the film is of course aimed at providing stuff to buy for the little-girl fans. But the film itself is quite dark, and touches on some quite heavy issues - the things that are never talked about in families, what it feels like to have an older sibling grow away from you, having powers (feelings) that you can't control. The love between sisters is a major theme and well handled. Even the silly snowman character, who is unaware that his enjoyment of warmth will bring about his own demise, brings up some stuff about mortality.

It's also worth noting that it comprehensively trashes the idea that you will know true love when you find it - and I was pleased to see that the worst baddie doesn't look or sound like a villain at all, at least for most of the film. We are as taken in as the characters in the film.

It's great the way it engages with Norse and Sami mythology, and the look of it is really great - though there are goofy comic characters, and the marshmallow monster was lame and not frightening, some of the others are well drawn and wouldn't look out of place in Studio Ghibli steampunk. I particularly liked the way that the ships looked, and the vision of frozen Oslo. The ice storm effects, and the way that the ships crash about towards the end, are very effective.

Interesting that some of those who watched it with us, and who had seen it several times before, felt the need to disparage it as soppy, even though they clearly wanted to watch it again.

The poster above is the soppiest version - there were others which looked darker, and which emphasise the relationship between the film and the Hans Christian Andersen story, 'The Snow Queen', on which it is based.

Review of 'Burlesque'

Unbelievably, Netflix gave this 4.5 stars. Execrable dialogue, lame and predictable plot, squeaky-clean burlesque club where the healthy and apparently wealthy dancers are all one big happy family...mainly an opportunity for Christina Aguilera to sing and dance with few clothes on.

I have a soft spot for Cher, though I can no longer remember why. Has she actually ever been in any good films?

Almost embarrassed to post this review because it means I'm admitting that I watched the film.

Review of 'Marguerite'

Watched at a cinema in Bath, on a rainy Easter Saturday, partly to get out of the rain.

This is a rather long but very good period drama, loosely based on the life of the American woman Florence Fletcher Jenkins, who thought she was a great singer but wasn't. Curiously, there is another film about her life about to be released, starring Meryl Streep, more closely based on her actual life and apparently much more obviously comic.

The reviews of this one were rather misleading, in that they describe it as a rather light period comedy, but it's actually very painful to watch - about self-delusion, deceit, and the corrupting power of money. The Baroness Marguerite has never been told that she has a dreadful singing voice and appalling technique, and hasn't worked it out for herself. Everyone in her life has an interest in deceiving her about this, including some young blades who think her lack of talent is both powerfully symbolic of something-or-other and screamingly funny.

It builds to a humiliating public performance and then worse for Marguerite, who it's impossible not to like despite everything. It's impossible to like almost everyone else in the film.

It's odd that you wait half a lifetime for a film about such a woman and then two come along at once. For me the film evoked the feelings I associate with impostor syndrome, even though it depicts what seems to be the opposite. Marguerite thinks she has talent even though she doesn't, whereas impostor syndrome is about the feeling that you don't have competence but have thus far fooled everyone - a bit like feeling that you are a Marguerite. Not exactly the same, because impostor-syndrome sufferers don't think that everyone is conspiring to deceive them, but rather that no-one else has realised...

A really good film - looking forward to seeing the other one.

Review of 'The Guard'

A brilliant dark comedy drama centred on a policeman in rural Ireland caught up in a flawed operation to intercept a major drug shipment through his patch. The cop (Brendan Gleeson) is only a bit corrupt, but he's sarcastic and magnificently unambitious, so he's not afraid to offend either his bosses or metropolitan sensitivities, liberal or otherwise.

The plot involves a preppy Black FBI man, IRA arms caches, a terminally ill mother, philosophically inclined drug smugglers...and plenty more that can't really be discussed without drifting into spoilers. Lots of the cinematography is beautiful, and much of the rest is effectively claustrophobic. The dialogue is so sharp I wanted to hear it all again, or see it written down - but there are lots of really good visual jokes too. A great film - I wish there were more like this.

Review of "The Fracking Cult Murders: A Steampunk Novel"

I'm sorry I didn't like this more, because I recognise that it's a bit like my own book - alternative history, a lot of humour, and self published (though unlike me the author has made a good job of that - a proper name for his publisher, and I like the cover).

I liked the version of the modern world that has evolved without electricity or the internal combustion engine, but is nevertheless recognisably modern. It's not a cod-Victorian world. I think that's clever.

On the other hand, I really couldn't be bothered with the plot, and I didn't find most of the characters engaging enough. There were also too many plot elements - the late introduction of the S&M brothel is particularly irritating in that respect. I'm not adverse to a bit of S&M sex, but it's either part of the story or it isn't. And there's an awful lot of food descriptions, particularly cake. It's funny at first, but it began to get on my nerves.

Nevertheless, I'm not sorry I spent the time with this book, and hope to read some others by the author.

Review of 'Parrot and Olivier in America'

A very well-written, cleverly structured, thoughtful historical novel. Lots of insight into character, but also into big issues like the meaning and values of democracy. It’s a sort of fictionalised account of De Tocqueville’s visit to America, but with more fun and adventures, and tension between the two very different narrators. I usually enjoy Peter Carey’s work, and this one makes up for the awful ‘True History of the Kelly Gang’.

I found the last few pages particularly poignant, especially since it’s the insights of the anti-democratic aristocrat that turn out to be the more astute and prophetic.

Review of 'Solar'

A comic novel of sorts, with a rather nasty after-taste. It's well written, because McEwan  is a brilliant writer, and he has engaged with science (both the content and the organisational aspects) in some depth. But the main character is quite horrible, and it's impossible to ignore that the author has tried to make him more horrible by making him short and fat. Most of the other characters are horrible too, apart from the protagonists' long string of long-suffering wives and lovers.

There are great descriptions of the kinds of magical thinking and self-bargaining that goes on when anyone fails to resist temptation. Science Studies comes off rather badly - although McEwan isn't a physicist he does seem to have bought into the physicists' view of their own perceived place in the intellectual hierarchy. On the other hand, he does engage properly with climate change, even if he puts the arguments in the mouths of some horrid people.

Review of "The Way of the Cross (The Cathar Wars Book 1)"

This is a well-written historical novel with a focus on the military aspects of the Albigensian Crusade. Although the political issues and the social significance of Catharism are not ignored, that’s not what this is about. The central character is Simon de Monfort, and it’s more or less told from his point of view. This rather obscures some of the real nastiness, though it’s not glossed over – we do have heretics burned alive and showing real courage, but it’s not from their point of view – they are more or less ciphers. Lots of detail about medieval siege-craft, which was interesting but not really what I was after.

Review of Danny Dorling's "Inequality and the 1%'

A very good, passionate but closely argued book about inequality with a focus on Britain. As another reviewer has written, the anger comes through, but so does the unassailable empirical evidence. Well organised and unarguable...though a short pamphlet-style one like some of his other books would be great too. It's a sign of how dominant the neo-liberal ideology is that I found myself wondering whether the fact that 1% have so much has anything to do with why others have so little...can it be as simple as that? Yes, it can.

Also worth noting that I found it hard to read, not because there's anything hard about the writing but because it made me so angry and miserable, because so powerless. I was strongly tempted to give up, which provides some insight into why so many people would rather read trash about celebs than engage with reality and power.

There are those (like Thomas Piketty?) who argue that this kind of capitalism is flawed and unsustainable, and that it contains the seeds of its own self-destruction. I am not sure about this. As James Meek writes in the LRB, one reason why we don't spend more time angry about the hyper-rich is that they already seem to exist in a different reality from the rest of us - it's easier to be angry about the 'benefit scrounger' next door.

A rather long review of ‘Inventing the Future’ by Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek

There’s much to like in this interesting and somewhat unusual book of left-wing political theory, and quite a bit to dislike too. It’s thoughtful, reflective, and critical, and at the same time optimistic and positive. However, it’s also deliberately written in the language of the academic philosophy department (or maybe the critical studies department), which makes it obscure and difficult in places. I’m aware that there’s a strong anti-intellectual current in British cultural life and the British Left, and that there are people who will react badly to any attempt to use specialist language to describe complex phenomena. But there are words in this book that I don’t recognise, much less understand; the dictionary on my Kindle didn’t recognise them either. ‘Hyperstitial’ must mean something, but none of the definitions I could find were at all helpful in understanding the way the authors used it. In fact, there were whole sentences and paragraphs that meant nothing to me.

I’m also OK with intellectual name-dropping, if it’s done in a way that’s sympathetic to a non-specialist reader. I think Paul Mason is really good at that, so that the non-specialist reader ends up feeling like they’ve been introduced to something new and interesting, rather than feeling stupid for never previously having heard of the person cited. Unfortunately, there was more of the latter than the former here. This is particularly unfortunate because it is in part a call for ‘organic intellectuals’ a la Gramsci, and also because it elsewhere condemns impenetrable academic language. For the most part I can’t see how the wealth of academic citations enhances the authors’ argument, though I do see how demonstrating familiarity with this burnishes their academic credentials.

This is particularly annoying because there is so much about this book that is great. I was thrilled to read the demolition of what the authors call ‘folk-politics’, by which they mean the unquestioned conventional wisdom and practices of the left. There is a really well thought through critique of the way the left prioritises direct action (stunts and marches), localism and the absence of leadership and power. It makes a lot of useful distinctions between vanguards and representation, acknowledges that transparency and clandestinity both have their places, and recognises the differences between all sorts of activities as useful tactics and elevating them to a principle. It recognises, too, the need for a division of labour, between movement and party and campaign groups and think tanks. It’s not an organisational manual, but it’s not a bad place from which to start writing one.

I also liked the emphasis on the need to confront the future of work, and the impending destruction of those ‘jobs’ that have survived globalisation and flexible labour markets by automation. I rather suspect the authors under-estimate the challenge that is involved here – I can’t help thinking about the way that attempts to introduce a shorter working week and longer holidays have not gone well in, say, France. But the argument for doing this, and the way that they raise it, is very strong. There is a strong account of why we can’t just go back to the days of good old social democracy with male breadwinners and family wages, and an argument in favour universal basic income/citizen’s income that is closely intertwined with this.

It’s positive and future-centric too, arguing that the left needs to reclaim the optimism and association with modernity that it once had, and which it has largely ceded to the ‘modernising’ right. It calls for more utopias, and more learning from utopian communal living experiments about alternative ways to organise everyday life, even though it’s not very excited about local initiatives and temporary autonomous zones – seeing them as a part of the problem of the left’s inability to countenance the need to develop power strong enough to combat that of capital. In this it must surely be right – it’s hard to avoid the way that it’s much easier to write and sell dystopian visions on the left. If we can’t even dare to dream, how can we dare to win?

The third theme – about embracing technology and its ability to re-shape what it means to be human – left me somewhat colder. Firstly, because it was the section of the book most shrouded in difficult language (synthetic freedom is something we ought to aspire to, apparently), but also because there’s just something uncomfortable about the prospect of using technology to simply escape the human condition. I know that this is confused, confusing and difficult ground. I know that there is a strand of ‘conservative’ thinking on the left, and particularly in the greener stretches of it, that privileges the ‘natural’, sometimes in a way that is a bit unthinking. But equally, I’m aware that most of the remaking of the self that has taken place to date has been under the influence of capital, and I think a certain wariness about that kind of remaking is warranted. There is quotation from Trotsky somewhere (which I admit I am unable to find) about how when we've solved the material problems of human existence we’ll be able to confront the essentially tragic dimensions of the human condition. I'm in sympathy with this; I think that a left-wing version of ‘transhumanism’ that seeks to overcome ageing and death, or do away with the process of childbirth in favour of something cleaner and less troublesome, would make us something different to humans. This isn't part of my personal political objectives, and I don’t see any reason why it should form part of the objectives of a renewed, vigorous, successful, left.

There’s lots more to say about this book. It mentions lots of ideas and concepts that deserve further exploration, and it does act as a gateway to important discussions and material elsewhere. There are some great references to the ‘cybernetic engine’ deployed in the Allende government’s planned economy, and to the participatory economy. Not many leftist texts will have a reference to the Blockchain, not even now. It ignores some work that I think it shouldn't – Polanyi’s stuff about the way that capitalism not only created ‘economic man’ in theory but also in reality is important, as is his discussion about motivation in pre-capitalist societies.

But this is definitely a worthwhile read. I just wish – hope, perhaps – that the authors will write it again in a way that makes it accessible to those to whom it ought to be addressed; the new generation of activists who may not find a place in Sociology Departments or Critical Studies courses, but will nevertheless be engaging with capitalism at the sharp end. They certainly need a new, thoughtful perspective on what they are trying to do and how they might do it better and more effectively.

Review of 'Arven (Inheritance)'

A gloomy Danish film about a man who gives up his dream life with beautiful wife in Stockholm to come back to Copenhagen to run the family business from which he’s earlier walked away  – because his father has committed suicide. Lots of nastiness within the family because the brother-in-law who has been helping to run the business is aggrieved and tries to undermine him with sly fraud rumours, the gorgeous wife has to abandon her own successful career as a serious actress, and so on. 

In a period setting it would be a great illustration of the role of deferred gratification in the process of capitalist accumulation and the rise of the bourgeoisie. In modern Denmark it’s relentlessly miserable – our protagonist does his duty and becomes absolutely committed to the firm at the expense of his own happiness, breaking the promise he made to the gorgeous wife to limit his involvement to two years, shafting his loyal friends and family members. He has a drink-fuelled meltdown, tries to rape the chambermaid at the villa where his wife and new son go for a recovery holiday, and finally lets his wife (and son) go and replaces them with the woman his dominant mother prefers.

Well acted, some  good cinematography (especially the steelworks, but also the claustrophobic bourgeois house interiors).

Review of 'Far From The Madding Crowd'

Perfectly acceptable adaptation of the Hardy novel - was it really necessary given the earlier one with Julie Christie? I dunno...this was watchable and engaging enough, though didn't leave me with any profound thoughts. Except...what's the law if you do remarry after your husband has been declared dead, and then he turns up? And why was the rascally Frank, who is apparently high-born, a sergeant? Did I miss something?

Watched on a laptop propped up on a coffee table - didn't trust the HDMI cable to display properly from Windows...

Review of 'The Princess Bride'

Watched again after a long break, and having read the book in the meantime. A fun film, a fairy-tale with its tongue in its cheek. Some good jokes, lots of enjoyable dialogue, quite nice to look at. Fun too to spot the actors – Mel Smith, Peter Cook, Billy Crystal…

For the record the mechanics of watching were interesting and complex. We watched this on the screen via the projector in the Middle Floor at Springhill Cohousing. We started watching on a laptop connected to the projector, using a copy obtained via informal distribution. The visuals started to stutter so we switched to watching a DVD on the built-in player of the projector. But that gave up half-way through – apparently it does often. So we switched to a VHS cassette (poor reproduction, and no sound) and then to another DVD player that was also connected to the projector. Ho hum.

Review of 'How I stopped being a Jew' by Shlomo Sand

A hard one to review, because it arouses such mixed feelings. Shlomo Sand is a clever, sharp thinker and writer who says a lot of sense about Jewish history and Zionism. He’s got an honest perspective on where Zionism came from and how it has turned out. He understands what Israel has done to the Palestinians, and what Zionism means for both Israelis and for diaspora Jews – which is not the same, but related. In this very short book he gives a potted history of the Jews that isn’t bad, though sometimes the language is over-complex and academic. For the record I entirely agree with it, and with his disappointed hope that Israel would recognise an Israeli nationality and build its own identity around a civic nationalism that wasn't explicitly Jewish. I think he argues some of this with a great deal of sensitivity, and it’s hard to find fault with it.

He’s left out some of the personal anecdotes that he sprinkled through the ‘Invention of the Jewish People’ that I rather liked, though there are some new ones that also help to build sympathy with what might otherwise seem a somewhat unsympathetic position.

Which is, that there isn't really any such thing as a ‘secular Jew’, and that those of us who want to define ourselves that way are both deluding ourselves and also giving tacit support to an ethnocentric and even racist ideological perspective on Jewish history – and one that might once have been just a harmless fantasy but is now intrinsically linked with a racist political system in Israel. And my problem is that I can see some validity in what he says but I don’t want to agree. He rather makes fun of people who disagree with him, and tells the story of a meeting at the London Review of Books bookshop (which I attended) where he presented his views and where the liberal Jewish audience appeared to be arguing that he was wrong because they were allowed to define themselves however they wanted to.

Having spent more than half of my life feeling like a non-religious, non-Zionist Jew it’s not nice to be made fun of, or to be told that one’s self-chosen identity is (like all identities, but more so) a fiction. If I felt confident enough to argue with him (which I don’t, because he’s a sharp debater with lots of good examples at his fingertips) I’d say that he persuades himself with a certain sleight-of-hand. He seems to accept that even if there never was a ‘Jewish People’ there was a Yiddish People, created in the same way and at much the same time as the Polish or Lithuanian People. I think he’s a bit flaky with his chronology but we can let that go. He says that Yiddish people has ceased to exist as a result of the holocaust and Zionism and successful assimilation, which I can accept.

But I'm very clearly the grandchild of that people that were part of that people, or at least its tail end. I can accept that there isn't a successful self-sustaining secular Jewish culture that has a creativity of its own. I've tried to be part of passing on the remains of its legacy to my kids (and other people’s kids), and though we had fun I don’t believe the exercise was particularly fruitful. And still I don’t see why I need to repudiate my personal history to gratify the need that others (Israel, the Orthodox, Shlomo Sand) have for sharp and clearly defined boundaries. If others want to say that being a Jew is a religious identity, or a national one that requires loyalty to the ethnos, then I'm going to differ, out of loyalty to myself and my personal history, but also because it’s useful politically to do so. So I won’t stop being a Jew just now, thanks Shlomo. You be what you like, and so will I.

Review of 'Wedding Belles'

A made-for-TV film, watched via the All4 app and Chromecast - actually the first thing I've watched in exactly that way, as until recently All4 didn't support Chromecast and playing it via TV and an HDMI cable from a laptop was a really miserable experience.

This is billed as it's a comedy, and it just about is, but it's very dark - child abuse, drunkeness, drug abuse, other forms of addiction, violence, suicide, murder...it's got the lot. It opens with a dockside execution by the four women and goes on in much that vein. There are scenes in a mental institutions, a nurse dressed as a nun jerking off an elderly patient...if that's the sort of thing that bothers you then you won't like this.

But it's also got four very strong women characters, played by really good actors (Michelle Gomez has been a favourite since Green Wing), and a sharp script written by Irvine Welsh. For an English viewer it was sometimes hard to understand (I had to turn up the sound to quite loud and listen to a few sections more than once).

Well worth watching.

Review of 'Alice in the Cities'

Watched on the Middle Floor screen at Springhill Cohousing, on a DVD from the private collection of the incomparable George Platts. A really slow black and white film, in which nothing much seems to happen for a lot of the time, and yet is really engaging and moving.

A young German writer has been engaged to write a story about his travels across America, but has not managed to actually write anything. Instead he meanders aimlessly from motel to diner, taking pictures without people on a Polaroid camera. In New York he helps a young woman and her nine-year old daughter book a flight back to Amsterdam (the ground crews at German airports are on strike) and somehow ends up with the daughter but without the mother back in Europe. The mother doesn't turn up, and he ends up travelling around Germany trying to find the girl's grandmother, even though the girl doesn't seem to know her family name or any addresses.

It's very clear that the early 1970s were a very different time (lots of smoking, and no-one seems to think it's odd that a young man is looking after a little girl who is not a relative), but I'm not sure if the film is entirely realistic in this depiction. There's lots of stuff about alienation through technology - horrible television programs, tinny transistor radios, juke boxes - and about the penetration of American culture into Europe, which is clearly not a good thing. But looking after the girl redeems the young man, who seems to reconnect with people again, something he has unlearned in America.

After the film we discussed it for almost an hour, and everyone seemed to have noticed something different. Well worth watching.

Review of 'Johanna'

Watched on a laptop from a library-rented DVD, this is one of the strangest cinematic experiences I've had for a while. Although none of the blurb and reviews say so, this is an opera, sort of. It's entirely sung, though there aren't what you'd call songs - just like an opera, then. The actors' voices are actually performed by others who presumably can sing better.

It's Hungarian, with all the melancholia that I would expect - I know there are a number of Magyar humourists, but somehow comedy doesn't seem to pervade the national culture. It's loosely based on Joan of Arc, apparently, though the eponymous Johanna is as much a martyred Jesus-figure as a Joan-figure. It's shot in murky colour in the tunnels underneath a hospital - there don't seem to be any windows or daylight in this place. A few of the scenes reminded me of the tunnels under the St George hospital in Barcelona, recently reopened as a monument. It looks pretty much like a nightmare - some scenes are redolent of the early episodes of 'Being Human', with blood and darkness.

Not a waste of time, but not what you'd call enjoyable either.

Review of 'Ride'

I watched this on Netflix last night (via Android phone and Chromecast) and ought to write a review, except that this one from The Guardian is so spot-on it leaves with little more to say. This is a film about privileged people who do think there's nowhere in the world to live except Greenwich Village or Santa Monica, and that the existential choices one faces are about whether to give up one's college place/fabulous editing job on the 'New Yorker' to be a surfer. Still, there are some good moments, and the underlying tension, about how the death of a child affects the relationship between parents and surviving children, is well handled. Better than the descriptions of it suggest.

Review of 'Joy'

Not much joy in this one. It's a rather long, remorseless account of life in what Americans call the middle class (and is really the working class), among people who are for the most part not very good at life. But Joy herself is smart and has (mostly abandoned) aspirations to greatness. She invents things, even though she's never been able to capitalise on those inventions.

At last she invents something that she wants to turn into a business - a new kind of mop. She encounters lots of obstacles, some from people who are just sceptical or unhelpful, and some from genuine crooks. In some ways this film could be a business school case study - it's just rather miserable to watch for most of the way, though there a few laughs here and there.

Because it's American it has an upbeat ending; a realistic ending would have seen Joy falling back into the morass of debt-ridden poverty that she fears all the way through.

Not without merit, but on balance one to avoid.

For the record, watched at the new Everyman cinema in Muswell Hill; comfortable but over-priced for experience. The cinema was more or less empty.

Review of 'The Danish Girl'

A much more emotionally engaging film than any I've seen lately. This deals with the relationship in the 1920s between two young Danish artists, one of whom decides that he wants to be a woman, not a man. Unsurprisingly it wasn't comfortable to watch - either in terms of what that character goes through or how it effects the relationship between the couple. I've no direct experience of this, but it seemed to me that the direction and the acting were excellent and treated the narrative with the sincerity and dignity that it deserved.

Of course it brought up lots of stuff, about the relationship between 'straight' and transgender people, and how to process that sort of transition. And naturally, about what kind of thing it is when people want to change their gender. In the film most of the doctors treat the character as insane. Mainly we don't do that now in this country, though I'm not sure how far popular attitudes have kept up with psychiatric and psychological procedure.

My own feelings are mixed up and muddled. I don't wish trans people any ill will, I don't want to stand in their way and I don't think they are 'insane'. But I do sort of think, in an amateur and not very focused way, that a more nuanced view of the nature of gender identity and sexual preferences than the 'woman trapped in a man's body' is possible.

Nevertheless this is a good, well-made film - watched at the Vue cinema in Stroud on a rainy Sunday night with few others there, BTW.

Review of 'Skyfall'

Watched as broadcast on ITV2, with lots and lots of breaks for adverts. I've not been a James Bond fan for years, but I recently found myself watching Spectre so I thought I'd see what this was like. Spectre is James Bond for Guardian readers (see earlier review) and this is a transitional form - some distinctly modern elements that don't fit with the earlier James Bond (M is a woman - Judy Dench, the locations are not so glamorous, Bond's relationships with women are less casual and more caring, etc).

But the politics are still more Daily Mail/Telegraph than Guardian; the baddie is a rogue agent turned against MI6 because the service sold him out to please the Chinese government and thereby ensure a peaceful transition in Hong Kong. In fact given that he's a lone rogue his power and influence, and the resources he can command, seem implausible - not that anyone cares about that sort of thing in a Bond film.

It also sets up the scenario for the next film, with Bond's upbringing in a remote house in Scotland, and a bit of a 'bureaucrats want to close down the field agents and replace them with technology' story line.

More watchable than I expected, and the filming in Scotland was quite beautiful, at least until it gets all shooty.

Review of “The Jane Austen Book Club”

Pleasant romcom with some nice characters and a few good jokes – or rather one good one, developed to the full. A group of women set up a book group to read the works of Jane Austen, and find themselves slipping into Austen-esque roles and situations – the more so since they have recruited a young cool dude to join the group and read Austen with them, even though he’s a science fiction fan. If you can swallow that the film is nice.

Review of Brasslands

I've been meaning to watch this for ages, as compensation for deciding not to go to the Guca festival itself (Ruth decidedly lukewarm, and the idea of trying to take trains to the migrant crisis frontline somehow seems both unkind and potential uncomfortable).

Watching the film I feel better about the decision. Guca looks like a pissed-up version of the nastiest English funfair you can imagine, with lots of beer tents, burger vans and hog roasts, only with a huge arena and main stage for some of the best music on the planet. Serbian culture, at least as represented here, is not all that attractive to an outsider – it’s about ethnic nationalism, Orthodox religion, and the consumption of vast quantities of pork and booze. There are pictures of saints and military heroes, including Radovan Karadzic. Not much sign of Yugo-nostalgia, lots of flags with double-headed eagles.

And yet the music is so, so wonderful – a bit like klezmer but with more dynamic and tonal variation, and with fabulous infectious percussion rhythms. The film follows a New York group that plays Serbian music even though none of them are of Serbian or Slavic extraction – quite a few are obviously Jewish; they are captivated by the music but not unreflective about the culture from which it comes, including the fact they are the only band with women musicians. It also follows two Serbian bands vying for the ‘best band’ prize; these are characterized by the Serbs as a ‘black’ band – meaning it’s from the South and seems to mainly include Roma players, and a ‘white’ band – paler, beefier crop-haired men. There’s a bit of discussion about how the music of the two streams differs. The ‘black’ band also needs to play at the tables of the beer tents for money.

A good, thoughtful music documentary – I'm only sorry there wasn't more concert footage.

Review of Pitch Perfect

A better than average American college movie, with some romcom and some buddy-movie elements. Too-cool girl goes to college (she wants to move to LA and pursue her career as a DJ/music producer, but college-professor dad gets free tuition for his kids and won’t let her waste it), is too cool to join the girls’ a capella singing group but is forced to give everything a go by the dad, ends up liking it and finding true love with the slightly nerdy boy from the rival boys’ singing group. Quite a few good visual and verbal jokes – I especially liked Rebel Wilson as Fat Amy. Also some barf jokes, and some implausible singing scenes, but overall much more enjoyable than I expected.

I watched this as it was broadcast on Film4; looking it up I was mildly pleased to discover that there’s a sequel.

Review of "Star Wars: the force awaken"

Went to see this yesterday, with my sons, their friend, and my nephew - all in their twenties. We watched it at an Imax cinema in 3D, and we were seated in row B - almost at the front, and too close to the screen for comfort really. The 3D effects were occasionally interesting (mainly in the opening graphics) but were often just a bit uncomfortable - most of the close-up head-shots looked out of focus.

The film itself had all the qualities of a pantomime; familiar characters doing familiar things, in exactly the way that the audience expected. Perhaps the predictability is part of the charm, though it didn't do much for me. Lots of it looked very much like the first film, and their were reprises from some of the others too - what is it with this franchise and Oedipal conflicts?

Funny how the bad guys keep re-inventing themselves with new evil names, but don't do anything about their design - the stormtroopers still look the same, the uniforms on the bridge of the death star are the same - oh, and they don't even bother to fix the design flaws on the death star that makes it so vulnerable to attack by silly lighter X-wing fighters with minuscule bombs.

We had the bar scene, the fight on the high gantry, the bit were the goodies are taken prisoner on the death star (they escaped so quickly I missed the whole prisoner episode while rooting around for some popcorn).

The action was diverting, but the plot was laughable and the characters not very interesting. The locations were more interesting than the special effects. I'm glad I went because it's a cultural phenomenon, and I miss out on most of those, but it was, in the words of Adam Leach, "a bit shit".

Review of 'Mary Poppins'

Watched for the first time in many years, via a laptop, VGA cable, and projector, on the big screen in the Common House at Springhill Cohousing; the film was obtained via an informal distribution system.

I don't think I ever watched this with my own kids (not the sort of thing that they would have liked at any point, I think) so it was the first time I'd seen it since I was about six. I remembered being really scared at the part where the children run away in the City of London, and seeing it again I still understood why. Remarkable to see the depiction of alleyways and courts, all done - like the roofscape scenes - without CGI.

I'm sure someone has done a critical analysis of the film, which I think is about the emergence of new models of family - the father and mother are depicted as wrongly directed towards the outside world (he to his career, her to her involvement in the Suffragette movement), and must learn that they should be focused instead on the inner life of the family and the care of their children. The happy ending is the father being happy to be sacked from his job at the bank, and the mother giving up her Suffragette sash so that it can be used as a tail for the children's kite. And then the father gets made a partner at the bank (which comes to him because he doesn't care about it any more), though the mother doesn't achieve women's suffrage as part of the same happy ending.

Review of 'Still Alice"

I watched this on our TV, via Chromecast and Netflix. It's a very well made film, but I found it really upsetting. It's about a case of early onset Alzheimer's in an intelligent, ambitious, driven 50-year old woman academic. Seeing her too-rapid degeneration, of which she is only too aware, is very painful to watch. Julianne Moore plays the part very well. The confusion, the repetition - especially of questions - reminded me of my dad's degeneration, and reminded me too that I was not as kind as I should have been. The film depicts the impact on the family too, who all try to do their best but also want to get on with their own lives, even as Alice realizes that her life as the person she is, is coming to an end. Unbearable.

Review of 'The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry'

I didn't like this very much. Rather like Harold, I felt compelled to finish what I'd started, but it was really a hard slog. There were parts that I liked, and I didn't feel able to give up, but I couldn't say the experience was enjoyable.

That's partly because it touches on subjects that are uncomfortable. I'm aware that as a bloke I am inclined to avoid books that are emotionally difficult in favour of those with intellectually interesting subject matter, evocative atmospheres or complex plots that are like puzzles. I don't often read things that deal with difficult feelings, particularly feelings about stuff that is difficult for me personally - and this has lots of that. Death of loved ones, ageing and dementia, relationships between fathers and sons, love between partners, suppressed anger at work...so some of my discomfort in reading the book might have been about that.

But it's uncomfortable in another way too. Like lots of 'walking across England' books (mainly non-fiction) this is a state of the nation book, and Rachel Joyce looks and England and doesn't much like what she sees. A lot of the time it felt like sneering to me. Part of the point of the main character is that he is emotionally constipated, that he feels much but does not express it or deal with it. But that's overlaid with the idea that this is function of his lower-middle-class outlook and tastes. It seems to me to come from the same place that once found ceramic flying ducks on a sitting-room wall to be screamingly funny, before they became ironic and thus a signifier of good (i.e. metropolitan) taste. The author is mainly sympathetic to 'ordinary' people, but I can't help thinking that she finds their tastes both sad and funny, and that we are meant to do the same.

And some of the plot devices are frankly clunky. I might have let them go if I was enjoying it anyway but I wasn't, so they were annoying. Half the time Harold is emotionally illiterate, and then he sits down and writes a long and heartfelt letter to a virtual stranger (the girl in the garage) that ties up the various loose plot ends that haven't been explicitly revealed. And the girl then takes the letter to show it to Harold's wife. I know it's fiction, but still.

Review of 'The Crusades: a very short introduction'

Very disappointed with this, and I think it is part of a general trend with the 'very short introduction' series - they are often not introductions at all. The language of this is tortured and unsuitable for a general reader who isn't used to the funny way academics write for each other. It assumes a lot of knowledge. I think it's partial too. That might seem odd in the context of a book about the Crusades, but as the author himself points out, they are a live issue now. The book 'The Crusades through Arab Eyes' doesn't make it into the bibliography, and neither does that perspective, though we hear that the Outremer lords weren't any worse than their Turkish equivalents. There is some interesting stuff about the doctrine of Holy War and Just War, and its origins in the Old Testament and Roman Law.

I note in passing that he thinks the Crusades left no permanent legacy in the region apart from the monumental - the various castles. I'm no expert but I wonder if that is true in terms of the genetics of the Palestinian population (quite a few blue-eyed Palestinians) or the practices of the local Christians.

Review of 'Death at the Blue Elephant'

Janeen Webb is a good writer with a wild imagination. That's my conclusion after reading the whole collection - but I was tempted to give up after the first few stories, which I didn't really enjoy. But I pressed on, and the later ones are really, really good. I especially liked 'Niagra Falling', which is set in a future Japan-dominated world, and 'The Fire Eater's Tale', both co-written with Jack Dann. I'll look out for more by the author, and also seek out some of the collections in which these stories appeared.

Review of 'Bridge of Spies'

A suspense thriller without much suspense or thrills, this was nevertheless enjoyable to watch, if only for the way that the environment of the early 1960s in the US and Berlin has been so lovingly recreated. The politics are pretty liberal - Tom Hanks respects the spy he is defending as an honourable soldier, Mark Rylance is brilliant as the self-effacing but self-disciplined spy, the morals about personal loyalty and decency under conditions of adversity. The Soviets behave well within the rules of the Cold War (though it seems that their interrogation techniques are much less gentle than those of the Americans - I wonder whether there are any proper studies on this?), virtue is rewarded, and so on.

The plot bowls along so that it doesn't drag, but as I said there isn't much tension. We don't know for sure whether the spy swap will go through, or what will happen to the Soviet spy afterwards, but I have to say by that point I didn't care all that much.