Review of 'The Death of Stalin'

A well-made British 'comedy', with all of your favourite character actors, about the last days of Stalin and the aftermath. Ought to be required watching for anyone still a bit soppy about the USSR. Not many laughs, though the couple next to us seemed to find lots of it very funny; even the absurdities of the dictatorship and the bureaucracy can't be very funny against a background of so many juidicial and extra-judicial murders.

A few odd things; what seems to take a few days in the film (death of Stalin to fall of Beria) actually took a year. Almost no mention of anti-semitism, though of course it pervaded everything - even the references to the Doctors' Plot are without a mention of Jews, though that's what it was about.  And I didn't much like the depiction of Nikita Kruschev as a wise-cracking New Yorker - I much preferred the way Bob Hoskins played him in Enemy at the Gates, as a rather coarse USSR native.

But these are quibbles, and it's a really good film. Ruth and I couldn't help but think about our grandfathers who had so loved Stalin.

Watched at the Everyman Cinema in Muswell Hill.

Review of 'The Other Side of Hope'

Pleasantly quirky and uplifiting film about a Syrian refugee who ends up in Helsinki. We see the wheels of bureaucracy preparing to deport him to a situation it deems safe even as the news reports the massacres, some Fascists who try to kill him, but also lots of nice ordinary decent Finns (and some desperate down-and-outs too) who rally to his support. It's a lot like Le Havre, but in Finland.

Some visual jokes, notably that though it's contemporary everything looks like it's in the 1950s or some other recent-history period. The restaurant where the refugee ends up working is stuck in a time-warp in terms of decor and cuisine (a reminder of the time when Finnish food was considered the worst in the world), the restaurant owner drives a 1950s car, and the truck driver who smuggles in the sister has a vintage mobile transportable from the early 1980s - which wouldn't even work now, the network on which it ran having long been closed down. Not entirely sure why any of this - I've noticed it in other Kaurismäki films, notably the noire Hamlet that we saw at the Sydney Film festival in the early 1990s, which was all Soviet-style plumbing and industrial locations.

Watched in the Middle Floor at Springhill via laptop and projector, having been obtained via informal distribution.

Review of 'Weiner'

A rather sad political fly-on-the-wall documentary about the unsuccessful run for New York mayor of Democratic congressman Anthony Weiner. Why people allow fly-on-the-wall documentaries I'll never understand; perhaps the answer is that although he's not too bad for an American politician, with decent enough views and policies, and a focus on the interests of what he calls the 'middle class' (by which he means the working class), he is still a narcissist. He can sit on the phone making call after call to rich friends and acquaintances, asking for money, without flinching. There are several Bulworth-type moments in the film, where he repeats the same speech over and over again, to camera or to an empty room, practicing. Normal people can't do that without being self-concious, but politicians can.

The thing about Weiner is that he's disgraced and fails because of a character flaw, and by the standards of American political life it's a small one. He 'sexts' pictures of his bulging underwear to a young woman that he's never met, and she senses the opportunity for celebrity and feeds him to the media. He didn't touch her, he didn't hurt anyone - they never even met, except online. He didn't embezzle, he didn't cheat on his wife, who by the way is a bigger political operator than him and close to Hillary. At one point in the film she's apparently faced with the choice of dumping him or losing her own political career, and it's not clear which way she is going to go.

Ultimately he's a big loser, the more so because his insight into his situation is lost in the face of innappropriately dogged resolution to go on no matter what. It's an over-used metaphor, but it is a bit like watching a car crash in slow motion. As the audience we know how this is going to go, but he can't or won't.

Watched via Chromestream and Chromecast, shortly before a Windows 10 update trashed my laptop.

Review of 'Paddington'

A very liberal film which makes much of Paddington's status as an immigrant...he's not really a refugee or an asylum seeker, but parallels are drawn between him and Mr Gruber's experience as a Kindertransport kid, and there's a lot about the need for people to be generous to the displaced and homeless. There's not much about what actually happens to people (or presumably bears) who enter the country illegally; the Brown family just adopts him, and that's that.

Pretty much every British comedy or character actor you can think of is in it, and seem to be having fun. There are lots of cinematic jokes and parodies of other films. I rather thought that Nicole Kidman as the wicked museum curator was reprising her role as Mrs Coulter in The Golden Compass, though she's not quite as menacing here.

Watched in two halves: in the Middle Floor at Springhill via legitimate iTunes download on someone else's laptop and the Springhill projector, and then at home via informally obtained download and Chromestream from my Linux laptop to the Chromecast in our TV. The second of these turned out to be much easier than the first - it took about 40 minutes to get the legitimate version working...first two DVDs didn't work in any of the available DVD players, and then there were issues with getting the mac laptop to talk to the projector.

Review of 'The Corruption of Capitalism'

A bit of a disappointment, in that the ideas in the book are better than the book itself.  I've heard Guy Standing talking about the ideas on the radio, and he was very good. It rather feels like the publisher told him to make it longer, so he crow barred in some other stuff about how shit everything is - how the political system is broken, how platform capitalism is turning lots of people into pure labour-for-hire...I don't disagree with any of it, and he makes his points well with lots of examples; but it distracts from the main argument, which is about how 'free' markets are anything but.

Capital isn't interested in free markets or competition, and does everything it can to structure and seek out markets where competition is weak or non-existent - through licensed monopolies from the state and/or through patents and copyright. Indeed, I think too many people on the left believe the neo-Liberalism is about rolling back the state, as it pretends to be, when actually the state is crucial for assembling the markets (think the NHS or benefits system) so that they can be exploited, and for enforcing and protecting the monopolies.

There is also a sense in which the relentless barrage of numbers become a bit wearing - an infographic or two to break up the page might have been nice.

Overall this is a good and important book, buried inside a slightly less good one.

Review of 'Blade Runner 2049'

Except not really a review, just a note about my personal impressions. Other people have done so much reviewing, and I think I couldn't do this properly unless I read all their reviews, and I don't have the time or the energy.

I quite liked it, or at least I quite liked the way it looked. It was a visual treat, and continued the combination of science fiction and noir that the first film pioneered. Others have said that the plot was flimsy, and I rather think the opposite - there was too much plot, including some elements that felt crowbarred in for the next sequel. I suspect the plot had holes or inconsistencies in it (like, either replicants can have children or they can't, but either way it's not a religious miracle, it's a designed-in feature that ought to be in the documentation), but again I can't be bothered to list or work them out...it wasn't really about the plot. Some others have commented on Ryan Gosling's acting - not much too say here; he has one fewer expression than Harrison Ford, I'd say. I liked the performances of the other actors, particularly the women.

I noted a few bits of product placement...we had a corporate logo for Diageo, and Deckart is drinking Johnnie Walker whisky; Black Label, which presumably he's been drinking for thirty years while holed up in the decaying hotel in Vegas. And Sony, and some others.

Oh, and the baddie who makes the robots that go wrong is called Wallace - wouldn't it be great if this was a homage to the Wallace who hangs out with Gromit? He also made robots that went wrong, more than once.

I noted that the urban dystopia is now aligned to a rural dystopia - we see a truly horrendous 'farm' early on the film. Hating cities (except perhaps New York) is a mainstream trope of American cinema, and often nature and rurality is counterposed to this. Not here.

I also noted some cyrillic writing early on, and also an add that seemed to feature 'Product of CCCP' - has the USSR been revived by 2049? In any case this made me realise that for Americans, part of what was dystopian about the original Blade Runner was the presence of so many different nationalities in the future LA, especially Asians - Neo LA looks a lot like Neo-Tokyo. Well, by 2017 the presence of Russian script is further evidence that everything has gone to the dogs.

Finally, the ruined Vegas hotel where Deckart is hiding out looked a lot like some of the actual derelict hotels featured in some 'ruin porn' movies about Detroit.

Ultimately a good experience, though 'enjoyable' doesn't seem quite right.

Watched at the Vue Cinema in Stroud...worth doing for the volume and depth of the sound!

Review of 'Paterson'

A strong candidate for the most boring film I have ever seen. Very little happens. There are few 'quirky' touches but mainly it's just everyday life, work, breakfast, walking the not-very-nice dog. Everybody in the film is quite nice, from girlfriend who imagines herself to be talented and turns out to be quite talented, and co-workers, and guys down at the bar...

The central character is a bus-driver poet, quirkily called Paterson which is the same name as the town. We see him writing some poems, all of which seemed so awful to me that I thought his lack of talent was the point of the film...but it wasn't, they are actual poems written by an actual poet. The one good poem in the film, attributed to a little girl that the bus driver meets, was actually written by director Jim Jarmusch.

Watched at Landsdown film club in Stroud.

Review of Blade Runner (Final Cut)

I watched this again after a long interval in preparation for the new sequel. Surprised to find how little I remembered, though some of this may have been due to the fact that I'd previously watched a different 'cut' - at least that's what I kept telling myself as unfamiliar scenes unfolded, but I may have just forgotten.

The plot turned out to be much simpler than I remembered, despite the subtleties about androids who may not know that they are (possibly including Deckard himself), but I don't recall it being quite so violent. I later watched the 'deleted scenes' available on YouTube, and found that most of it was voiceover explaining what was going on to presumed dopier US cinema audiences.

Anyway, it was still enjoyable, though much slower than a comparable film would be nowadays. Made in 1982, the future still looks credible, despite the Prestel-like screens (no web in 1982) and phone booths. Very atmospheric, largely delivered via constant drizzle, a largely Asian Los Angeles and lots of derelict and deserted buildings, including some that look like they were straight from the actually-derelict Detroit.

Watched in the Midde Floor at Springhill via laptop and informal distribution.

Review of 'Y tu Mama Tambien'

An odd mixture of frat/fart movie and social-political critique...is this the way to get a political movie made in Mexico, or is it an attempt to add a layer of 'quality' content on to what's essentially a film about two teenage boys fucking their girlfriends, an older woman, and each other?

I'm not sure. Some of the bolted on social critique is heavy handed - the voice-overs that tell us how the poor family the boys encounter will have a dire future - but in other places it's done with a good deal of subtlety - the checkpoints on the road that the relatively affluent boys just cruise through but where poorer Mexicans are being given a hard time. And the illustration of the class differences between the boys, despite their friendship and common interests (fucking, drugs, and masturbation) is very well done.

One scene puzzled me...eventually the boys have a gay experience, when the older woman takes them both to bed and then sort of slips away. In the morning they awake to find themselves entwined and are shocked. Soon after their friendship ends. But is this homosexual dimension to their friendship hinted at in the scene in which they wank together from the diving board at a deserted luxurious swimming pool? I have read that teenage boys of all sexual orientations, not just gay ones, engage in collective wanking, but it never formed part of my experience.

Watched in the Common House at Springhill via laptop and cable to projector, having obtained the film via informal distribution.

Review of 'Carrie Pilby'

A film that turned out to be better than expected...about a young woman living alone in New York who is extremely intelligent (and a bit of a prig about other people's morals) and therefore finds life difficult and unhappy. Her therapist gives her tasks to complete (acquire a pet, etc) and she resists then complies, and so ends up engaging with life and people. Reconciliation with absent dad, closure on near-abusive episode with college professor, etc.

I note in passing that in this film, as in most others, that it depicts everyone living in apartments that they could only afford if they were millionaires. I also note that the lead, Bel Powley, reminds me very much of the way Alexandra Shulman looked when she was the flatmate of a friend at Sussex University in the late 1970s.

Watched via Netflix and Chromecast - the first almost good film I've watched on Netflix for ages.

Review of 'Arrival'

A rather good science fiction movie, with most of the emphasis on plot and character rather than special effects. It's about the difficulties posed by first contact with a clearly superior species...and there is a time-travel/time-perception dimension to it that is really rather well done. Some of the early parts linger a bit on the military preparations, which are supposed to be tense but I found a bit slow, but this is more than made up for by an intellectual female lead who doesn't have to do some special 'female' version of clever - she is just cleverer than most of the male characters around her. Extra points too for an internationalist dimension (humans need to overcome their national differences to solve a big problem) and for acknowledging the value of expertise rather than celebrating some ordinary guy who just happens to...

And extra points too for at least mentioning, and even trying to explain, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which actually becomes an important plot element. Don't remember hearing about that since my undergraduate days, so hooray.

Watched on TV via Chromecast, having been obtained via informal distribution network.

Review of 'The Invention of the Land of Israel'

An interesting meander through some of the back alleys of Jewish, Zionist, and of course Palestine history. Of course it's political in content and intent, and Sand makes what seems to me to be a good case that the Zionist movement took the Jews' vague, spiritual and liturgical affinity for a distant land and turned it into a political instrument. I suspect that his selection of evidence (like everyone's) is partial, and that there will be pro-Zionist scholars who will point to other examples that appear to contradict his argument. I'm inclined to be convinced, so I find his argument persuasive and well documented; and his opposition to Zionism is nuanced and intelligent, and doesn't call for a return to some earlier day 'before the Zionist invasion'.

Nevertheless, as with his other book 'The Invention of the Jewish People', there are some things I didn't much like. Here I think he over-emphasises the ethical and humanist dimension of religious Jews' opposition to Zionism. Yes, the ultra-orthodox of various stripes were opposed to Zionism, just as they were opposed to emancipation and the ending of ghettos, and every other aspect of modern life. And they were opposed to a modern, political variant of Jewish nationalism, but they were most still believers in various ghastly ideas about Jewish superiority.

And I think his characterisation of Zionism as a Jewish nationalism could have been different. Apologists for Zionism are fond of saying that it's a nationalism like others, but it's always been a weird nationalism. I can't think of many other variants that were so uninterested in the folk-culture of the people which they intended to make into a national entity. In that sense perhaps Zionism's 'affinity' for an idealised 'ur-nation' of Hebrews as distinct from actually existing Jews is like the religious Jews' affinity for an idealised, spiritualized 'Land of Israel' that can be a focus of longing devoid of any geographical or practical reality.

Review of 'Man Up'

A surprisingly enjoyable rom-com, with lots of good British character actors. Some visual and physical comedy, and also great dialogue. Nothing special to look at but witty and fun, with nice details that confirm this is twenty-first century London. Simon Pegg acts and is involved with the production - not always a good sign, but this is one of his best. Rory Kinnear is great as the creepy old school friend, and Olivia Williams is good as the ex-wife too. A really good laugh, I thought.

Watched on BBC iPlayer via Chromecast.

Review of The Intern

A gentle comedy about...well, work, really. Robert de Niro plays retired Ben, whose life is meaningless without something useful to do, so he applies for and gets a role in Anne Hathaway's company, which has decided to advertise for senior interns (yes, seniors as interns) as a sort of community outreach thing. The film avoids the obvious jokes about old people not being able to understand technology or the new world of work - Ben is superbly adaptable - and instead mainly focuses on Anne Hathaway as the CEO neglecting her home life to pursue her business goals. Which, the film says, is more or less the right thing to do, because the business is her dream.

Quite fun to watch, and some nice jokes about the old guy giving the young dudes good advice about life, relationships and grooming. Not sure about the overall message, but it's only a film.

Watched on DVD at my mum's flat, my mother-in-law having burned it on to a disc from a TV showing. That's old school.

Review of 'Hidden Figures'

A nice anti-racist film, about three black women mathematicians who contributed to the space program despite all the obstacles put in their way. Very big on the patriotic dimension - so how it emphasises racism and sexism detracted from achieving the national objective of beating the Commies in space, and how the realisation of this gradually dawns on the buzzcut types running NASA. But very good on the little observations about how racism (and to a lesser extent sexism) are embodied in multiple experiences of everyday life, from segregated bathrooms and coffee pots to forms of address. Of course, black people know this already.

I rather thought Jim Parsons (Sheldon from The Big Bang Theory) stole the show as the obnoxious,  condescending racist chief engineer Paul Stafford - perhaps because he is able to draw on all of the awkwardness and snarkiness of the Sheldon character.

Watched via Chromestream and Chromecast from my Ubuntu laptop - I think the first time that I made this work - having first obtained the film via an informal distribution network.

Review of 'The Duke of Burgundy'

A sad film about sex and sexuality. It's a story about two middle-aged lesbians, one of whom is  obsessed by sadomasochistic fantasies and requires the other to act out a highly specified script (literally, a script) of humiliation and degradation. The irony, which is the essential irony of all BDSM relationships, is that it's the submissive who is in control. The apparently dominant one just wants to wear warm, cozy flannel pyjamas and have a nice cuddle, but instead has to put on fantasy clothing (lots of expensive lingerie, credited in the film) and high heels to gratify the submissive one. The film illustrates this much better than any other discussion of the same point that I have seen.

They genuinely love each other, but the love is eaten up and destroyed by the 'submissive'partner's need to turn every act of intimacy into theatre. She more or less forces the 'dominant' partner to perform acts that she clearly finds horrible, including pissing in the other's mouth and locking her into a trunk at night. There is a strange, symbolic sub-text in that both the women, and many others in the neighbourhood, are lepidopterists, and there is a lot of footage of butterflies and moths. The Duke of Burgundy of the title is a butterfly.

The film looks beautiful, though not at all sexually arousing; it's filmed in Hungary, and the countryside is at once ravishing and unfamiliar. There are some weird  scenes in the local butterfly collectors institute (one of which features some panning shots where some members of the audience are manikins), and the credits include one for perfume.

Watched via Chromestream from my linux laptop and Chromecast, the film having been sourced from an informal distribution network.

Review of 'The Big Sick'

Not as bad as Hadley Freeman made it out to be (I really didn't get those romance of the shiksa vibes that she detected in this), but not a brilliant film either. The first third seems hurried and badly edited, the middle third is strongly reminiscent of 'While You Were Sleeping', and the last third is mainstream rom-com breaking-up/making-up stuff.

One personal note, though. When the hero is leaving home to move to New York, near the end, he hugs his dad, and suddenly I had the most powerful recollection of hugging my own dad (who looked a bit like the dad in the film) and the way that he smelled, like I was actually smelling him. I've had a few more smell-recollections since, one of the smell of my dad's shop, which was mainly of Bakelite and old kinds of plastic. Go figure,  as they say.

Watched at the Everyman in Muswell Hill.

"Into the Unknown" at the Barbiican

I went to this exhibition. Some of the exhibits were a bit dull - some old books in glass cases. And quite a lot were editions that I'd actually owned at some point. Displays of old futures, on cigarette cards and advertisements and posters...the sort of thing that would be 'retro-futurist', except that at the time it was made it was just...futurist; it has to be knowing to be retro-futurist, doesn't it?

There were some physical objects...models of Jules Verne things like a Nautilus and a balloon, some maquettes and props from films, none of which really grabbed me, though I rather liked some of the things from eXistenZ, which I've always though was rather under-rated.

The best bit was really the screens displaying clips from films...the mainstream ones like 'Close Encounters' and 'Back to the Future' and 'The Day after Tomorrow', but also some that I'd never heard of, like Afronauts, and Pumzi, the Invisible Cities series...and High Rise and Dark City...and Astro Black. All of these looked really interesting, and some are short and available on YouTube or somewhere else online.

The last item in the exhibition is a showing of 'In the Future they ate from the finest porcelain'. This was striking, but left me feeling uncomfortable. It's a film by a Palestinian woman about archaeology and politics. It doesn't mention Israel or Palestine or Zionism, but it's clearly about the way that Israel uses archaeology as part of an ideological justification for the its version of essentialist Jewish nationalism. It's cleverly made, and beautiful to watch and listen to. But it does explicitly argue that the people it refers to as 'our rulers' have invented their own historic connection to the land, so as to deny that of the suffering indigenous people. There is a school of thought in Palestinian nationalism, and sometimes its supporters, that really does deny that there ever was a Jewish temple in Jerusalem, and so on.

And I think that's unnecessary, and offensive. I'm not an expert on the status of the archaeological evidence one way or another, but it strikes me as a stupid and destructive line of argument, like the dreary debates I remember as to whether Jews constituted a nation - in which Stalin's definition usually cropped up.

I'm quite sympathetic to Shlomo Sand's arguments that the 'Jewish People' and 'The Land of Israel' are historical constructions, as long it's understood that the Jewish people is 'invented' in the same sense that other peoples are. Similarly, it's one thing to refer to the Holocaust as part of the founding 'myth' of the State of Israel, and another to suggest that the Holocaust is a myth in the sense of not being part of actual history. The concept of 'fake news', somehow counterposed to 'real news', belongs here too.

There is a bigger issue here, which someone else is probably thinking about even now. Liberal and progressive intellectuals have spent years picking away at what we might think of as 'realist' epistemology, pointing out the way that all kinds of knowledge - science, history, medicine - are not simply revealed but are constructed. And we've ended up not with a population that engages critically and wisely with knowledge, but with Trump and Farage and Gove, and the climate change deniers...and the Moon landing deniers...Where does this go? It's not sustainable to say that non-realist epistemology is only for us clever people, and the rest have to just trust in the experts.

More to follow about this, I think.

Review of 'The Circle'

Not time well spent, this one. I really liked the book, which seemed to be a rather good satire on life at Google but also on the implications of social media for our civilisation. It came at a rather significant time for me; I read it just before I 'joined' Gartner, and the fictional culture of The Circle went some way towards preparing me for the highly metric-driven culture of my new employer.

But the film is a bit lame. In the book Mae's naivety is sort of picaresque, and sort of believable. In the film, seeing it performed by an actual human, it's not - she's too stupid to live, or at least to thrive as she does. Some of the elements that I most liked in the book (like the importance of her time away kayaking by herself, which is here turned into just a sucker's lesson about the value of 24-hour 'safety' surveillance) are not really included. And the denouement is different from the book, and it's ambiguous but not in a good way. Are we, the audience, still supposed to believe in the redeeming power of technology to make the world a better place, once it's in the right hands and the evil bad guys are exposed to the same transparency they want to impose on everyone else? I think we are.

Watched via Netflix and Chromecast. Can't remember the last time I watched a good film from Netflix.

Connected bikes shed new light on the smart city

Just over a year ago I wrote about See.Sense, a Northern Ireland-based start-up making and selling smart connected bicycle lights. The lights were pretty cool in themselves (the cyclists in my family tried one) but the really clever thing was the way in which the company was planning to make use of the data from sensors in the lights, recognising that it was now in the urban data business.

I’m pleased to be able to say that the company is still progressing along this track. This week it announced two new trials with smart city programmes – one in Dublin, where it’s one of four smart cycling pilots rolled out in the run-up to the city’s hosting the global cycling congress Velo City in 2019, and one in Manchester, where the data is being delivered to the CityVerve smart city hub so that it can be accessed and exploited by the wider community of developers.

Both pilots involve the cities’ cycling communities, and both offer the See.Sense ICON light at a highly subsidised price in return for users agreeing to share their sensor data.

These are still early days. Various use cases are being discussed (including one of my favourites, using the lights to gather crowdsourced data on surface quality) but none have been definitively adopted. There’s no commercial model either, so no sign of how See.Sense might move towards a business that isn’t just based on hardware sales. But it’s promising, and a coupe of visible signs that the value of the company’s approach is being recognised more widely.