Review of "Death in Ecstasy" by Ngaio Marsh

I'd never read any Ngaio Marsh before - I didn't even know who she was, or even that she was a woman. I picked this up from a book drop somewhere. I started off not liking it much. Its cast of posh Londoners put me in mind of Raymond Chandler's comment about country house murder mysteries. There are some gay (should that be "homosexual"?) characters who are depicted with contempt and revulsion. 

But it sort of grew on me. The setting - a weird neo-pagan cult in London, with a grifter "priest" and gullible toff congregation - was interesting, and the place descriptions were evocative. And though the few working-class characters are dreary stereotypes, the toffs are not at all sympathetic - they are stupid, duplicitous, drug addicts and drug pushers. It's sort of interesting to see the slightly impoverished lives that even moderately well-off people lived in London at that time, despite the presence of either personal or shared "service flat" servants.

Anyway, I ended up enjoying it more than I'd expected.

Review of "If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution" by Vincent Bevins

This is almost a great book - a survey of what actually happened in the mass protests of the 2010s, from Brazil to Hong Kong to Turkey to Chile to the Middle East.

Among the things that is great about it is the honesty, and the willingness to face the truth - that those protests achieved very little of what the organisers intended, and that the fallout from them often achieved the very opposite. For example, in Brazil the mass protests against transport fare increases, organised by libertarian socialists and anarchists, ended up creating an opportunity for the far right through which Bolsanaro marched to victory.

The last two chapters are analytical, in which Bevins attempts some synthesis and reflection of all that went wrong. This is mostly great, except that there's not enough of it. He's rightly critical of "leaderless" and "horizontal" forms of organisation, and comes across as a reluctant convert to Leninism - though those aren't the only options, are they? 

He's also very good on the limits of "protest" as a strategy for opposition movements, and how muddle-headed it is to expect serious change to come from protest. 

I hope he writes another book soon, with more learnings, and maybe a bit less grinding detail about who turned up where.

Review of The Commitments

Watched this again last night (via BBC iPlayer) in the middle floor at Springhill,  and enjoyed it every bit as much as all the other times. Just a lovely, clever, film - not too cloyingly sweet, but really feel-good. 

This time round I noticed that although Joey "Lips" Fagan is one of the main characters, you can barely hear his trumpet on any of the performances. Just saying...

Review of "London Rules" by Mick Herron

I hadn't read any of these before. I liked the two TV series, so I thought I might like the books too. 

I was a bit disappointed. It's a bit formulaic, which is not great. But I just couldn't believe in a plot that was based on the North Koreans activating a sleeper cell in the UK intended to embarrass the UK government by reviving one of its old plans to destabilise a third world country. There are lots of plausible terrorist groups that might attack the UK, but I don't think that the North Koreans are included. So I was carried along by the narrative but unconvinced by the basic premise.

Not sure if I will read any of the others; Le Carre is better.

Review of easy A

A teen sex comedy, starring Emma Stone, and quite funny after the first twenty minutes. Subversive of the the genre, in that there's no actual sex (Emma Stone's character builds - somewhat unintentionally - a reputation as a "super slut" while remaining a virgin, and then uses that reputation to do good around the school. Emma Stone (then 22, playing a 17 year old) is great, and her parents (one of whom is played by Stanley Tucci) are pretty good too. And Lisa Kudrow as the school counsellor. 

Watched on BBC iPlayer.

Review of "The Book of Trespass" by Nick Hayes

A beautiful book in every since; beautifully written, with clarity on the political and historical parts and lovely lyrical prose on the nature writing - and shifting seamlessly between the two without any jarring. And lovely illustrations, because the author also creates graphic novels. 

I couldn't help but get angry when I read it, about the process whereby the aristocracy and their late additions (like the thug Hoogstraten) have seized the whole country for themselves, and locked us out, and how it doesn't have to be that way and isn't in other countries quite nearby - nearby geographically but also economically. 

Review of "It's All Greek To Me" by Charlotte Higgins

I didn't have high expectations of this book - another privileged person with a Classics degree, telling us why what they had learned was really important for the modern world, I thought (see her bio on Wikipedia). And it was mostly like that, though it got a bit better towards the end with some consideration of gay sex in the ancient Greek world. 

My enjoyment was further limited by the terrible physical production of the book, which literally fell to pieces as I read it. Did they save on glue or something like that?

Review of Seaside Special

An interesting, sad film. It's organised around the end-of-the-pier show at Cromer, focusing on the performers and staff, but also some of the other people in the town, including a Tory fisherman. The film is set over the Spring and Summer of 2019, so it's post Brexit referendum, but during the period when it seemed that the political system was coming apart - when the government couldn't get its Brexit arrangements through Parliament. It wraps up with the end of the show and the lead-up to the 2019 election, and I think the chronology of some of that is necessarily a bit tangled.

The subject matter - Brexit, and Englishness - was going to be a bit sad anyway, and it's made worse by some interviews with people who were pro-Remain and didn't bother to vote. But it's sad too because of the characters from the show. They're middling talented, and even that level of non-superstar talent is way better than anything I could aspire to, and their life is precarious and ill-rewarded. The lead singer of the show in particular made me feel sad, because I thought she had a lovely voice and on-stage presence, and it wasn't going to take her anywhere.

And I was made even more sad because one of the performers - a comedian - reminded me very much of a friend of mine, and at the closing credits we learned that he had died since the film was shot. And I walked home in the rain thinking about all that.

I walked home in the rain from the Lansdown Film Club, where I'd watched the film,

Review of "Israelism"

A very good film about how American Jews are socialised into support for Israel and Zionism, and how some young Jews are increasingly taking a stand against the occupation and Israeli racism. 

The politics and personal relations of Jewish critics and opponents of Israel are always very fraught. There's not much trust between tendencies that ought to be allies. Most of us have been called a "self-hating Jew" by someone, and some of us have also been called a "Zionist lackey" by someone else.

Some Jewish critics of Israel think that everything was fine until the Netanyahu government, or the occupation, or...something...and all that is needed is to get back to the good old days of good old Israel, before it unaccountably turned a bit nasty. Others are convinced that Zionism was always not only bad but evil, and that colonialism and racism were baked in from the beginning.

This film somehow manages to avoid all of this, not least by the technique of not having a narrator voice. Its perspective on Jewish angst, on those who support Israel whatever, and those who have shifted from supporters to critics, is to let them speak for themselves, and it works really well.

The film was made before the events of October 2023 and the long Israeli retaliation that followed, and that somehow makes it all the more powerful. I was really taken with the way some of the American Jews talked about their journeys, and the not unsympathetic depiction of just how central identification with Israel is in Jewish communities.

I was particularly pleased (if that's the right word) that the film didn't soft-pedal the existence of real, fascist-inspired Jew-hatred in America. For many Jewish and other antagonists of Israel, the question of antisemitism begins and ends with the false accusations aimed at themselves, so there is little recognition that conspiracy theories about Jews are still very very important to the far right. That's definitely not the case here, though there is some consideration to the way in focusing on criticism of Israel has led American Jewish organisations to take their eye off the real threat from real antisemites.

I was also very moved by Sami Awad's spot in the film, where he talked about his visit to Auschwitz and his understanding that Jewish trauma and fear underlies support for Israel's racism. I've rarely heard Palestinians talk about the Holocaust, except in terms of "why should we have to pay for it?". 

Watched in the Middle Floor at Springhill, via informal distribution.

Review of Killers of the Flower Moon

A gruelling, long but worthwhile film, based on the true story of murders of Osage native Americans in Oklahoma in the 1920 - who became wealthy when oil was discovered on their tribal land. The film is very hard to understand at the beginning - maybe some audiences understand the way that the mineral rights were allocated and valued for the Osage, but I didn't and couldn't follow what was going on for a while. 

The film makes a good job of depicting racist white Americans, who are sometimes engaged with the Osage to various degrees; the chief villain, brilliantly played by Robert De Niro, speaks their language and seems to have some genuine personal relationships alongside deeply racist attitudes about how the Osage must die out and yield their mineral rights to whites. There's a newsreel depiction of the Tulsa race riots of 1921, which will be new to many Americans and others, and there's an affable chapter of the KKK taking part in what looks like the 4th of July parade in the town of Fairfax, where the story is mainly set.

The pace and tone of the film changes throughout, but especially in the final third, with the arrival of FBI agents in the town. The acting, especially by Leonardo DiCaprio, is really good.

We watched this in the Middle Floor at Springhill having obtained it via informal distribution.

Review of "The Lincoln Highway" by Amor Towles

A beautiful gem of a book, with great characters, a clever narrative with twists, and a real feel for the era. It touches on a lot of the issues of the period, but not in a heavy-handed way. Race, traumatised and abandoned veterans, class...

Really lots of characters, all of who get turns at being either a first-person or close-third narrator (and it really matters which, as becomes clear), and that's clever too.

I was actually sad that the end had come, even though it's not a short book.

Review of Good Luck to You, Leo Grande

A surprisingly interesting and thoughtful sex "comedy", though there were few actual laughs. Daryl McCormack plays a suave, cool, kind sex worker who is contracted by a frumpy widow played by Emma Thompson to give her some intimacy and sexual experience - she's not expecting an actual orgasm as she's never had one, not even by herself.

We see their four sessions together, and the development of their relationships with each other and with themselves. It feels a bit like a stage play transferred to the cinema (mainly just the two characters, almost all of it in the same hotel room setting) but is none the worse for that.

Watched on Netflix, natively on our new TV, so no Chromecast.

Review of Blow Up

I had good memories of watching this film, but it doesn't seem to have aged well (though it was probably old by the time I watched it first, I was only eight years old when it came out). London in the Swinging Sixties, a wealthy and successful photographer takes pictures of attractive models and has other wannabee-models throw themselves at him, and then he almost-witnesses a murder in a park; he doesn't see it when he's there taking pictures but it reveals itself when he develops them. And then he tries to find out what happened, and doesn't succeed.

There's a lot of stuff about appearance vs reality, and whether there is reality, which seemed important the first time but now comes across as pretentious rather than interesting. It made me think of The Society of The Spectacle, an anarchist/situationist pamphlet that appeared the year after the film, which also seemed to me to profound and important at one point, and now doesn't. There are some ghastly sex scenes with the implication of coercion (see the poster), and another scene in a London club that is both exploiting and poking fun at the tawdry glamour of the emerging rock scene.

Watched in the Middle Floor at Springhill Common House - I think from an actual DVD, which felt very old-school.

Review of Los Amantes Pasajeros

Dire Almodovar sex comedy, a return to his earlier slapstick form, without much merit. I dozed off almost immediately - despite some sexually explicit scenes which ought to have been at least arousing if not interesting. But they weren't enough to keep me awake, which means it's not easy to summarise the convoluted narrative. 

Basically there's a flight with faulty landing gear, and the passengers in business class are drugged by the camp gay stewards so that they end up having a lot of sex with each other - the passengers in economy are just drugged into a stupor. There's more, but you can read the Wikipedia article if you want a summary.

Watched at Jane's shop in Horns Road, Stroud, as part of an ongoing project to watch all of Almodovar's films. This was the worst one for a while. 

Review of "97 Orchard: An Edible History of Five Immigrant Families in One New York Tenement" by Jane Ziegelman

A nice idea - a history of immigration to the US (and New York's Lower East Side in particular) told through the stories of five families who had all lived in one building at different times; made easier by the fact that the building in question has become the Tenement Museum. 

To my surprise I learned quite a lot, about the different waves of immigrants...I'd thought that I knew most of it, but I was wrong. In particular, I learned how much more assimilation-oriented the German Jews who came in the 1850s were - Jewish cookbooks with recipes for ham, pork and shellfish, and justifications for why oysters were kosher; and I learned about how poor and despised the second wave of Italian immigrants had been, and how they had done the dirtiest jobs and lived in the worst places, and still believed themselves to be culturally superior (or at least superior in terms of food) to the "native" US population.

And lots more too. I read this on kindle, but I think it's going to be bought as a present for various friends. 

Review of "In the Skin of a Lion" by Michael Ondaatje

Beautifully written historical novel about the immigrants who built Toronto, with good characters, a slightly confusing plot, but fantastic descriptions of buildings and places - well, it is about construction and infrastructure. Definitely worth a read.

Review of "Occult America: The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped our Nation" by Mitch Horowitz

A nice, readable ramble through the undergrowth of the American mind, with lots of stuff about weird sects, cults, communities and religions. 

The author is more than a little sympathetic to the claims of alternative religious movements, and while he's critical of the worst excesses of some exploitative leaders I think he tries hard - perhaps too hard - to be fair to most of them.

There's some bonkers stuff towards the end that might be categorised as metaphysics, but it's mainly readable and enjoyable.

Review of "The Solutions are Already Here Strategies for Ecological Revolution from Below" by Peter Gelderloos

It seems a bit unfair for me to write a review of this, because I didn't read all of it - just the first and the last chapters. The first was a decent run through of a lot (though not everything) that's wrong with our current technical-economic system, though without much new, and in the manner of books already a bit out of date. 

The last bit, that was supposed to be a vision of how things could be better, seemed disappointing. I don't want a catalogue of techno-fixes that promise a continuation of our present way of life without the environmental costs, but this seemed to be mainly a repetition of "we won't want all that stuff once the miseries of capitalism have been abolished", and I didn't find it satisfying or convincing.

I want to like anarchist approaches to strategies for system change, and to the future organisation of society, but I rarely find much likeable. This wasn't an exception. 

Review of "Fight Club" by Chuck Palahniuk

A distillation of the toxic masculinity in the world, with all the violence and resentment that implies. I'm not entirely sure whether it's supposed to be a satirical critique of all that or a paean to it - in the manner of such things, it seems to want to have it both ways. I watched the film a long time ago, and so I remembered the images of that as I read the text - I couldn't imagine Marla except as Helena Bonham Carter, for example. 

I think that in some ways the film was more subtle, and more ambiguous about the apparent merging of the two main characters - was Tyler Durden always a version, or a personality disorder, of the first-person narrator? 

One major difference, at least as far as a remember the film, was the prominence of a castration theme - more than one character is threatened with castration in the book, though it doesn't seem to actually happen. All part of the ugh factor.

Review of "Trouble is my business" by Raymond Chandler

I'm a big fan of Chandler, and while I was reading this Ruth and I were listening to an audio version of "The Black-Eyed Blonde", which is a sort of sequel to The Long Goodbye. That felt a lot like a pastiche, but after reading a succession of Chandler short stories I am more aware of how formulaic Chandler's writing for the pulps was. 

His heroes are always mopping their sweaty necks, and they get hit over the head with monotonous regularity - leaving them with similar wounds on the back of their heads. And they drink all the time from similar sized bottles, and the women are all ciphers rather than proper characters. There are two flavours of cop, corrupt and repulsive or decent and career-blocked. Once or twice I'm pretty sure that the same descriptions popped up in more than story.

I was a bit surprised, though I shouldn't have been, by the casual racism. Some characters - not fully drawn ones - are "heebs", and when there are stereotypical black people they are referred to with a series of racist epithets that I hadn't even heard before - "shine" was one. This isn't to say that race is important in Chandler's fiction (as it is say in Sax Rohmer or John Buchan), but he's certainly not better than the time he lived in.

Review of The Noel Diary

Slightly soppy but enjoyable romantic drama, a bit self-knowing (characters say things like "If this was a rom-com"). A best-selling author goes to clear up the house of his recently-deceased mother from whom he has been estranged for years, and there meets a young woman searching for her own mother, who gave up for adoption and had been a nanny in the parents' house.

It was a nice 90 minutes, and I did have a lump in my throat from time to time.

Watched on Netflix, which seems to have finally got some half-decent films on board.

Review of Poor Things

Amazing film - every time I watch a Yorgos Lanthimos film I think "that's the weirdest film I am ever likely to see", and this one was no exception. Visually stunning, with some fabulous real sets in Hungary and elsewhere, and some CGI creations too. The scenes on a cruise ship were particularly attractive, the more so because we got on a dreary Brittany Ferries ship the following day, which was comfortable enough but might as well have been an airport lounge.

The plot was implausible (is the book different?) but that didn't really matter - it felt much like a fable or a dream. There have been some nasty comments online that it's a "male gaze" film, but it didn't feel like that to me (or to Ruth, thankfully). 

Some great acting, especially by Emma Stone, who manages to make the intellectual and physical development of her character from baby-brain in an adult body to fully grown ersatz human seem entirely believable.

We watched this at a cinema and you should too.

Review of The Monuments Men

Ruth stopped watching after ten minutes, but as a completist I had to see whether it got any better. It didn't. Lots of good actors, great sets and locations, and what looks like a big budget, totally wasted. Boring, bad dialogue, plot without suspense or interest. 

Watched via BBC iPlayer I think - I have mainly suppressed the memory.

Review of "Bleeding Edge" by Thomas Pynchon

I loved this, though a week after finishing it I'm not entirely able to express why. It's Pynchonesqe in its plotting, and its language, and there are some great characters - perhaps too many characters, because I did begin to feel like I was losing track.

It's very Jewish, and though there are some Israeli characters it's mainly a paean to New York diaspora Jewish culture, though I don't think Pynchon is Jewish. He's got it down really well, though, the language, the preoccupations. 

The plot takes place against the background of the dot.com crash, and the Twin Towers attack, and a complex financial fraud (the main character Maxine is a fraud investigator, working freelance and on her own time for most of the book), so it's sometimes hard to follow. I suspect I missed some of it, but it doesn't seem to have detracted from my enjoyment. It even made me want to visit New York again, which probably isn't going to happen.

Review of Dolly Parton: Here I am

Slightly dull but informative documentary about Dolly Parton and her career. Almost nothing about her private life, which she keeps private; she's been married to the same bloke for fifty years, after they met at a laundromat at her first day in Nashville. She's unashamed about her working-class rural roots, and connects with a variety of very different audiences - rednecks, gay men, drag queens...to some extent because she's careful not to say or do anything to offend any of them.

Which makes for a somewhat boring film. She's clever, talented (she's written some great songs), and opaque - a wise decision in an industry that eats people up and spits them out. But she's not great documentary material. We don't even learn anything about her friendships, outside of work relationships.

Watched on BBC iPlayer via Chromecast.

Review of Millie Lies Low

Sad New Zealand comedy about a young woman who's about to go to New York for a prestigious architecture internship, but panics on the plane and then sneaks back into her home town (Wellington) but doesn't want anyone to know. It's occasionally funny, but mainly painful - her relationships with her mum, her boyfriend and her best friend are challenged and exposed, and don't emerge well. There's some stuff about the nature of talent, and about the relentless pressure to post positive stuff on social media. 

The film was just over 90 minutes but felt longer, though it wasn't bad - just painful.

Well worth watching - we watched on Channel 4 via Chromecast.

Review of Anatomy of a Fall

Atmospheric tense French drama about an accidental (or is it?) death in an alpine chalet, where a key witness is a blind ten-year-old boy. Hard to say much more about it without spoiling, but it's really good, and manages to get to the end of the story without definitively resolving all of the unknowns. In that sense it rather reminded me of The Night of The Twelfth, another French drama (though that's more a police procedural), which also tells a story of death without resolving the question of who did it. Strangely both films are set in Grenoble. 

Watched via informal distribution - our new TV has a slot for USB drives, which makes that rather easier.

Review of Rustin

Enjoyable biopic about Bayard Rustin, black gay socialist pacifist who did most of the organising for the 1963 March on Washington, at which Martin Luther King spoke and made his "I have a dream" speech. This film is for all the people who do the organising but don't get to make the big speak. Rustin was clearly a wonderful leader who inspired people to give their all, despite the movement's disapproval of his sexuality. The film shows lots of behind the scenes manoeuvring in the Civil Rights movement, as well as giving a quite good potted history of the actual political processes and outcomes.

It (probably rightly) doesn't reveal that Rustin in his older years remained committed to workers' rights but became a neoconservative and was praised by Reagan after his death. 

Watched on Netflix.

Review of "Cole Porter" by William McBrien

I gave up on this.  I kept going to page 150, which I think is absolutely giving it a fair chance, but it was so boring that I could only read a few pages at a time without falling asleep. Cole Porter is an absolute genius, and I love his work - his songs and his lyrics. But his early life is so dull - doting mother, rich grandfather, nonentity dad who barely features in the story; good at school, athletic and popular, nothing goes wrong...and then he's gadding about with other rich Americans in Paris, and cruising backwards and forwards across the Atlantic. And I just could be bothered anymore.

Maybe it's just what reading biographies is like, and I should remember not to read them.

Review of "The Honourable Schoolboy" by John le Carre

Another good one from le Carre, though it took me a while to get into it. Whereas "The Spy Who Came in From the Cold" is taut and economical, this is a bit flabby, and some episodes seem to take forever, to no really obvious purpose. I won't attempt to summarise the plot, which is really convoluted and defies a quick description.

Eventually I was hooked, though, and engaged with most of the characters (though there were some that were a bit fuzzy for me, so that I had trouble remembering who they were). There's a lot of stuff about the nastier aspects of the Cold War, and no punches pulled about the bad things that "our side" did - in particular involvement in the opium trade. The parts set in Hong Kong, and Indochina, are really evocative - I can actually smell the places he describes.

Review of Leave the World Behind

An unsatisfying dystopian end-of-the-world film, in which a family of white liberals travel to a holiday home in upstate New York for a short break just as there's a cyber attack and associated real attack on the US by unnamed and unspecified enemies. The film illustrates well how fragile our civilisation is and how dependent on a few pieces of technology we've become, and there's some interesting dynamics between the white family and the prosperous black family who own the luxurious holiday-home and turn up to reclaim it as the catastrophe unfolds. 

But there's lots that doesn't make any particular sense and seems just added in for pointless menace...the house is surrounded by oddly courageous deer, for example. And the underlying narrative seems like something from the Qanon playbook - secretive powerful elites, leaflets dropped from planes that are written in Farsi and Korean, and so on.

I was sucked in rather after the fashion of "Lost" (now our reference points for initially intriguing and mysterious narratives that ultimately turn out to be load of meaningless crap), but ended up really disliking this film, despite some good acting and interesting cinematography.

Watched on Netflix.

Review of Go!

Surprisingly good crime/drug film that manages to be both gripping and funny, about young adults blundering into club scene drug dealing. It's structurally quite complex - we see the same events several times over through the eyes of different characters, so it takes a while to work out what is going on. Nice dialogue, editing, acting...not short but it felt really tight.

Watched this one on a USB stick via informal distribution.

Review of Marry Me!

Absurd rom-com with Owen Wilson and Jennifer Lopez, which was nevertheless quite enjoyable on an over-full Xmas stomach. She's going to marry another Latino singer during a big concert at which they will sing their joint hit "Marry Me!", but just as she's about to she sees a shared video of him carrying on with her assistant, so she impulsively decides to marry Wilson's character instead - he's a maths teacher who has been dragged to the concert by a friend because his teen daughter likes Lopez's character.

Yeah, it's that stupid. But it wasn't as bad as it sounds, and there were a few nice moments. And Wilson's character isn't as stupid as some he has played.

Watched on Netflix.

Review of The Courier

Straightforward cold war spy thriller about the KGB double agent Oleg Penkovsky, who was giving Soviet secrets to the west, especially during the Cuban missile crisis. The film focuses on the relationship between Penkovsky and the British businessman Greville Wynne, who acted as courier for his drops of material. It doesn't address any of the complexities of the affair, including who betrayed Penkovsky, how long the Soviets knew that he was providing material to the west (some say that it was within two weeks of his defection), or even whether he might have been a fake defector, as Peter Wright suggested in his book Spycatcher.

Some interesting filming and camera angles, but not much narrative complexity.

I note in passing that at the end there's some footage of the real Greville Wynne, and that he (unlike his portrayal in the film) spoke in a cut-glass upper class accent that absolutely no-one uses any more...though Queen Elizabeth continued to talk like that until her death. What does it mean that a way of speaking can die out so thoroughly?

Watched on BBC iPlayer.

Review of Resistance

Very straightforward biopic about Marcel Marceau's time in the French resistance, about which I had known absolutely nothing. The Nazis are very nasty, especially Klaus Barbie, who is depicted in some detail. There's some suspenseful moments, and it held our attention, but it's not a great film. 

The Jewish children are in some sort of scout uniform, though this is never explained or even referred to - are they scouts, or is a Jewish (even Zionist) youth movement? 

Watched on Channel4 online - I don't think it's called All4 any more.

Review of Outside In

Nice thoughtful film about a young man out on parole after twenty years in prison for his minor part in a crime - as a result of a mandatory minimum sentence. There's relatively little excitement, but lots of examination of relationships, particularly the one between the man and the older woman teacher who supports his case while he's inside - he seems very confused as to whether there is a romantic dimension to this, though she's insistent that there isn't. That brief summary doesn't really do it justice - it's worth watching...on Netflix.

Review of "Burial Rites" by Hannah Kent

Gloomy but very well written first novel about a murder and subsequent execution in early C19th Iceland. That's not a very promising summary, but the book was really compelling...though I can't say it was enjoyable, it did hold me the whole time, even though I knew how it would end. The life depicted is almost impossibly grim - not much good old days here, with filth, freezing to death, miserable food, back-breaking work. 

The book is very modern, with multiple narrators and time periods, and inserts of official documents and other found material. There's some background material about how it came to be written...but why was a woman from Adelaide studying Icelandic in the first place? We're not told that.

Review of Napoleon

I'm afraid this lived down to expectations. Very long, a bit boring. No good acting, no good dialogue, and no insights into the history depicted. Nothing useful about the French revolution, and nothing in the depiction of the battles that actually explains how they went and how Napoleon's generalship contributed to the French victories. The depiction of Waterloo is mainly just a mess, unlike the 1970 film with Rod Steiger as Napoleon.

Review of Maestro

Long and not entirely satisfactory biopic about Leonard Bernstein. It doesn't mention any of his political engagement or activism, but that's not my main gripe. It was quite boring (had a little doze) despite really good actors. It was boring in a rather special way, in that it didn't feel as if the dialogue mattered at all. It was often quite hard to hear, and the narrative was mainly carried by facial expressions. It didn't really feel like there was a story or a script. Stuff just happened, as if what we saw on screen were the linking shots between the real (somehow excised) scenes that were supposed to make up the film.

I'm sure that this was deliberate - this is a work of one man's passion, with lots of other big names (Scorsese, Spielberg) behind it, so it can't have been omission. So I just don't get it.

Watched at the cinema - Crouch End Art house - and beautiful to look at on a big screen, and yet that still wasn't enough.

BTW the 'Jewface' thing didn't bother me at all, the nose prosthetic was really good, though Cooper's whiny voice was annoying.

Review of Nuovo Olimpo

Unexpectedly good Italian gay romantic drama, about two guys who meet in a cinema that's used for casual gay sex hook-ups, develop an intense connection that's not just about sex, and then lose contact because of a protest broken up by violent riot police...and the rest of the film is about the loss that affects both of their lives, and the lives of others that they touch. It's beautiful and well done (unlike a lot of Italian films that I've watched lately) and I didn't even mind that one of the two men is a film-maker...films about film-makers often piss me off.

Long but I still had a feeling that something had been cut from it without quite enough care...there were some character developments that didn't quite add up. Still, well worth watching...we watched on Netflix.

Review of Polite Society

Lots of promise, largely not delivered. Written by the woman behind "We Are Ladyparts", which was brilliant, but this isn't. It's like someone thought that they should do a toned-down version of Ladyparts, so it's still set in a British-Muslim family context, but it's less harsh about the constricting nature of that family life for those who don't fit in - here the young heroine isn't a lesbian, she just aspires to do martial arts and be a stuntwoman. So non-normative, but more in a silly way than a threatening one.

And it is mainly just silly. It's knockabout in a way that makes it seem like it was intended to be a kids' film, but with enough sexual content to make it inappropriate for that. Maybe there's an Asian martial arts movie genre that I am not familiar with, so I'm missing some of of the parody references. Some occasional funny bits, but mainly not all that funny.

Review of "Non-Jewish Zionism: its Roots in Western History" by Regina Sharifa

There's lots of good stuff in this book, and much that I wasn't really aware of. I was aware that Protestant Christianity was a lot keener on "the Old Testament" than the other flavours, and that consequently there has often been a weird kind of philosemitism about it. Protestants, especially the English Puritans, often identified themselves with the Israelites. And that led to a kind of romantic notion of restoring the Jews to the Holy Land, either in fulfilment of millenarian prophecies or as a good thing in its own right. This made some Protestants proto-Zionists before there was any Jewish Zionist movement, and made politicians steeped in that kind of Christianity particularly receptive to both philosemitic ideas and plans for the appropriation of Palestine from the Ottomans.

Lots of this was going on before there was any kind of Jewish Zionism, but it did make British and American politicians in particular receptive to the Zionist movement when it emerged. The same romantic notions of Jews meant that the same politicians who were proto-Zionists didn't like actual Jews very much; they failed to live up to the image of ancient Israelites, and they wanted emancipation and equal rights rather than national restoration.

Where I think the book falls down is that its picture of Jewish Zionism, when it emerges, is utterly divorced from the context in which Zionism grew among Jews. There's no account of the upsurge of antisemitism in the Russian Empire, and then in its Polish successor state. The word "pogrom" does not appear in the index, and there's no reference to the May Laws of 1882. The Nazis mainly appear in terms of the Ha'avara agreement with German Zionists, and this is - as is so often the case - represented as if it were a convergence of equals. We learn that the British initially promoted and encouraged Jewish immigration to Palestine, and that they later put up quotas to stop too many Jews arriving; but although the book talks about other western countries refusing to take Jewish refugees, there's not much recognition that the Jews who were trying to migrate to Palestine were desperate refugees too, not pith-helmeted colonists.

I note in passing that there's nothing about the Communist honeymoon with Zionism either, though there is a discussion about the influence of Zionists (again via Christians) on the American labour movement.

Review of "Wagons West: The Epic Story of America's Overland Trails" by Frank McLynn

A long and grindingly detailed account of the wagon-driving pioneers who colonised California and Oregon in the years before the Gold Rush. The book had its merits - it was great for reading last thing at night, because it invariably put me (and Ruth, if I read it out loud to her) to sleep very quickly. 

For the most part the stories of the individual wagon trains seem to follow a common pattern. Lots about what provisions the pioneers took. Stories about how they got into trouble, mainly through stupidity. The miserable privations that the pioneer women experienced, with huge amounts of women's labour needed to keep the men in the style to which they quickly became accustomed. Mainly good relations with the native Americans, who were kind and helpful to the pioneers, and who received little recognition or kindness in recompense. "Attack by Indians" was what the pioneers worried about most, but in so far as some of them died it was a result of stupid behaviour (children sitting on wagon yokes and so on). The book isn't really in line with anti colonial sensibilities; it details how the pioneers were motivated by the possibility of cheap land, but doesn't reflect much on how it came about that there was all that land that "didn't belong to anyone" there.

I skipped some of the middle of the book, coming back to the final chapter about the Mormon wagon trains, which was weirdly fascinating. The book ends just before the gold rush, which transformed California, its population and the trail. I hadn't really been aware that both California and Oregon, the destination of the land-hungry pioneers, were both outside the control of the United States at the time of the trails - Oregon was not really under anyone's control but was part of a dispute with the British, and California was part of Mexico until after 1848.

Review of Love at First Sight

Nice enough romcom about two young people that meet at an airport, both on their way to London, who fall in love and (predictably) end up together. But there's enough suspense about whether or how they will, and London looks nice, and there are some good cameos, especially Jameela Jamil as the multi-person narrator and Sally Phillips as the young man's dying mother.

Watched on Netflix via Chromecast.

Review of A Week With Rebecca

A short film, from the Dust series of short science fiction films, about a man's brief loving relationship with an android. Really good, and says everything that longer and more expensive films do, in 28 minutes. 

You can watch it yourself here .

Review of The Night of The Twelfth

A French police procedural, but not a conventional one. Set in the beautiful alpine town of Grenoble, where a young woman is murdered (horribly) by an unknown assailant. Turns out she had multiple relationships with some quite nasty men, all of whom were perhaps capable of killing her. Hard to say more without spoiling, but it's a good well-made film with several surprises.

Watched at Lansdown Film Club in Stroud, and I know how good it was because I barely noticed the uncomfortable chairs.

Review of "The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity" by David Graeber and David Wengrow

A broad-sweep history of early humanity to challenge all of the other broad-sweep narratives about the emergence of what might loosely be called civilisation. So no one-way trip from smaller loosely organised bands into tribes and then into nations, with state formation accompanying. No one-way trip from hunter-gathering into agricultural society, with concomitant evolution of coercive forms of government. No hydraulic imperative driving the rise of absolute rulers and associated bureaucracies. Instead we get a myriad of different forms, huge stone age cities and monuments for different purposes including ritual, sport, and drug-taking, and lots of examples of agriculture and state formation attempted and abandoned.

It's hard to keep on top of all the examples, and a bit hard to keep on top of the argument too - I will for once look for an online talk that might make the structure of that a bit clearer. But it's a brilliant and enjoyable read, and more hopeful and optimistic than the dreary certainties of Sapiens.

I note in passing that David Graeber keeps knocking books out...he's not going to let a little thing like dying affect his output.

Review of "Old Gods, New Enigmas; Marx's Lost Theory" by Mike Davis

Four essays, collected together and published posthumously. The first and longest, from which the title is taken, is great - a long, thoughtful history of socialist and working-class politics. I could take issue with a few assertions, but it's a magnificent piece of work, if not always accessible in style. I've been immersed in this stuff for years but I still learned lots.

The other three essays were not so great - a bit old, a bit rambling, they didn't do much for me. The last one, about climate change and the potential for cities to be agents of good change, had its heart and brain in the right place but didn't seem to say very much, at least not now - it was written 13 years ago.

But worth it just for the first essay.

Review of The Young Karl Marx

Another biopic, as much about Engels as about Marx, during the period 1843-8, and leading up to the foundation of the Communist League and the publication of the Communist Manifesto.

Mainly faithful to the history, and some nice depictions of meetings and characters...a walk-on part for Bakunin, a bit more of Proudhon, and so on.

I particularly liked the portrayal of Mary Burns, Engels's long term partner, and the hint about the oddness of his relationship with her sister Lizzie. The woman playing Jenny von Westphalen is good too.

Considering it's two hours long and mainly consists of besuited men talking in German it didn't drag at all.

Watched in the Common House at Springhill, via informal distribution. A minor problem was that the file was too big to transfer to a USB stick, even one big enough to hold it, so I had to bring my whole PC down to the Common House and connect that to the projector.

Review of The Real Charlie Chaplin

A documentary biopic, with lots of old footage. I've pretty much never found Chaplin funny, but he is a really interesting character, and was a powerful force in Hollywood - he created United Artists, he had his own studio, he was an absolute perfectionist about his films.

This is a bit on the long side, but worth watching. I really didn't know about Chaplin and HUAC, and how his career and presence were destroyed by the anti-Communist witch-hunt...I'd just assumed that he had faded away as his kind of comedy became out of date. That wasn't the case, and he was effectively exiled from the US because the State Department wouldn't let him and his family return from a trip to Europe.

Watched on All4 via Chromecast and mobile.