Review of 'Going Underground' by Phil Brett

A worthy successor to 'Comrades Come Rally', Phil Brett's sequel is set in the same post-revolutionary Britain. Our hero Pete Kalder is recovering from trauma in a sort of therapeutic community, but is soon pulled out of convalescence to help unravel another plot to reverse the gains of the revolution. It's tightly plotted, with lots of twists, good characters and vivid descriptions of locations and settings - plenty of long meetings, which made it all feel sadly rather true to life...that's probably what a post-revolutionary Britain would be like. Kalder is a great wise-cracking, sharp-dressing lead, with an encyclopedic knowledge of mid-C20th music and a trust-nobody attitude that gets him into trouble with the party and the remnants of the police. An enjoyable read, and I hope there's more to come.

Review of 'I, Tonya'

I enjoyed this way more than I expected to...I'm not very interested in sport, and less so in figure skating. I have only the dimmest recollection of the events it describes.

But this was very much the antithesis of the conventional sport film in which an underprivileged outsider triumphs over adversity through will power and determination. Here adversity triumphs over the underprivileged outsider, who very obviously has plenty of talent but nothing else - no contacts, no network, no social graces, and none of the insight that she might have needed to work out how to get by without those things.

It's well acted and shot in a way that seems to recall the nastier, shinier period it depicts.

From the film's narrative Tonya Harding actually got a rough deal - she doesn't seem to have done all that much wrong apart from choosing the wrong mother, and then the wrong husband who chose the wrong friends and associates. She seems to have been punished harder than she deserved for not dobbing her vile husband in, while others got off more lightly.

Watched on Amazon Prime.

Review of 'The Road Home' by Rose Tremain

Another beautifully written book by Rose Tremain, with a great portrait of the central character - Lev, a middle-aged Polish man who leaves his village to come to England so as to be able to support his mother and daughter - and lots of great secondary characters too. Despite the miseries that befall Lev, and some of the awful people that he encounters, it's basically positive and hopeful...probably more so than real life would be, but that's sometimes what we need books for.

Review of 'The City of Lost Children'

Re-watched this after attending some events at the Stroud Steampunk Weekend. I remembered the film as being visually arresting but couldn't recall much about the story line...and now, ten minutes after it ended, I understand why; the plot is basically incomprehensible, a mish-mash of images and cliches that doesn't add up to anything. There is a summary on Wikipedia which suggests that it's an anti-capitalist film...

Another film where there is a strong argument for a twenty-minute "extended trailer" or "art director's cut", so that we can enjoy the visuals and not have to worry about narrative.

Watched on the Middle Floor at Springhill, all by myself because no-one else wanted to sit through it.

Review of 'The Three Body Problem' by Cixin Liu

The "hardest" hard science fiction I have read for ages, with lots of theoretical physics in it. Lots of ideas and weirdness too, including a virtual reality game that rather recalled to me the 'Second Life' thing that was going on in Snow Crash.

There's lots to like in this - especially the earlier parts, set during the Cultural Revolution, which is as hard to understand for us as the alien civilisation depicted later. And the early sections about SETI.

But other aspects were sort of clunking, and I did get a bit bored by the very long section on unfolding a proton in n-dimensional space...at least that's what I think it was about.  And I find the suggestion that advances in civilisation depend on increasing theoretical knowledge in subatomic physics (the aliens intend to stymie all progress on Earth by muddling up experiements in particle acceleration) very problematic...it's one way to think about the relationship between science and technology, but not the only way.

Review of Tolkien

Rather plodding biopic about Tolkien, who didn't have a very interesting life (student then professor at Oxford). Some interest from the cutting backwards and forwards to awful experiences in the Great War, into which fantasy sequences have been inserted (dragons, monsters). I note in passing that depictions of WW1 in films tend to emphasise the slaughter and the horror, but depictions of WW2 do so less consistently.

Without the intercollated WW1 scenes it would be a dull biopic about a quite dull bloke and his dull posh friends (and nice kind wife). They drink a lot of tea and eat cake. Once he and his girlfriend are thrown out of a hotel tea room for mucking about with sugar cubes.

The more interesting bits of the story really happened before the film starts and aren't covered at all in the film...the family's move to South Africa, his mother's conversion to Catholicism and her Baptist family's decision to cut her off from all support as a result, the extraordinary education she must have given her two children at home...

Watched at the Vue in Stroud in a nearly-empty cinema, with annoying subtitles.

Review of The Post

Liberal film about the days when the mainstream media were the good guys, exposing the crimes and lies of the government, and focusing on the Washington Post's decision to publish The Pentagon Papers. Hard to believe that there was time when it was considered significant when the government was caught out lying or deliberately misleading the public, or that people believed that there would be consequences if this was revealed.

Bits of the films dragged for me, but it came to life towards the end with the decision to publish despite the fear of doing the wrong thing (endangering American lives by revealing details of war plans) or being prosecuted. It's about this point in the film that the pre-digital process of producing and distributing newspapers begins to dominate the imagery - typewriters, sub-editing by hand, vacuum capsules to take copy from editorial to typesetting, hot metal type...again, hard to believe that this was something in my lifetime.

Watched on Amazon Prime.

Review of The Children Act

Another slow emotional film, with Emma Thompson as the judge who must decide whether to force a blood transfusion on an unwilling 17-year-old Jehovah's Witness boy who will otherwise die. Nice depiction of the dilemma, and great acting from all the cast. Screenplay by Ian McEwan who wrote the book, but very cinematic...lots of powerful close-ups.

Two really trivial thoughts. Firstly, we see the judge distracted and disengaged from her marriage, but she mainly does this by working late on her laptop. She has a smartphone but the only thing she does with it is make and receive phone calls...which is not the way that modern people really are disengaged and distracted; they spend all their time checking their phones and browsing social media, and so on. I know she's a bit old that for that but the taking phone calls thing felt wrong.

Secondly, there is a good supporting performance from Jason Watkins as the devoted and self-effacing judge's clerk. But I was really aware of the other actors' eyes in the film - Thompson's eyes, and the eyes of Fionn Whitehead who plays the boy, in particular. Jason Watkins has very distinctive dark eyes, that seem to be all black pupil, and I couldn't help noticing them and remembering his performance as the vampire policeman William Herrick in Being Human.

Watched on Amazon Prime.

Review of Lucky

Slow film about an old guy in a small town in Arizona (I think) contemplating the closing stages of his life. He is remarkably well and mentally fit, though he smokes and drinks and lives alone. His life is pared down to the bare essentials, but he is content and positive about it all. He's never had a family, but he has his buddies and seems on good terms with lots of others in his community. He has no expectations of an afterlife or religious sentiments of any kind; there are a lot of shots of him walking around the fairly bleak little town, and in one of them he walks past a church...that's it, the only appearance of anything church-related in the film.

It's described as heart-warming and uplifting, and I can see why someone might think that, but my heart wasn't that much warmed or my spirit that much uplifted. If you've got to grow old and die alone, then this is a great depiction of the best way to do it, but I'm not sure that I want to think too much about the possibility that I will.

Watched at the Lansdown Film Club.

Review of 'The Art of Flying' by Antonio Altarriba

A clever, beautiful graphic novel about the Spanish Civil War and its aftermath, told through the eyes of an anarchist fighter who has a miserable middle age as an exile and then a returnee to Fascist Spain, and then a miserable old age in a home in newly 'democratic' Spain.

As that suggests there are not a lot of laughs and no happy ending. Even the part that describes the brief exhileration of the revolutionary period in Catalunya are pretty bleak - the revolution seems to be betrayed and corrupted even in its best moment.  And after the defeat the ex-comrades fall into criminality and backstabbing, first in France and then back in Spain.

I'm also not really sure how much I like graphic novels as a way of telling a story. I don't read them very often, and I think it's because although they can be beautiful, they don't allow me to use my own imagination - it all feels very prescriptive. I'm not sure exactly why that's different from say film, but it is.

Review of 'Made in Belfast'

Quite a nice film, set in post-troubles (is that a bit premature) Belfast, about a writer who comes back for his unloved Dad's funeral and needs to reconcile with all of his old friends who's lives he ruined by putting them in his first book.

No fabulous cinematography, but nicely scripted and acted. The tone gradually lifts as the film progresses, though it beats me why Amazon has this categorised as a comedy. The poster doesn't capture the feeling of the film at all.

Watched on Amazon Prime, on the smart TV.

Review of 'The Uninhabitable Earth: A Story of the Future' by David Wallace-Wells

Great if bleak survey of current thinking and perspectives on climate change, this works well as a gateway to the literature. It's well-written and readable, even if - I understand - some critics think it's too gloomy and takes worse-case scenarios as central ones. Lots of links to other material, and to literature about others' reflections on the implications of climate change for politics, ethics and human history.

A great, awful, book...it has left me rather despondent. Most of the fixes proposed for climate change are much too little, too late - and most seem socially implausible even if they are technically possible. Were we to go for carbon capture and storage, for example, then building the machines to do it at the levels required for the Earth would seem to occupy most of the economic resources of civilisation. Sort of do-able in principle, but probably not in practice.

He doesn't make the link, but it rather reminded me of the Wittfogel stuff about 'hydraulic societies'...only a kind of bureaucratic despotism will be capable of re-organising society and the economy towards the permanent management of the atmosphere that we will be needed to ensure our survival as a civilisation. So whichever way you look at it the party - including not just consumerism but also a market economy and liberal democracy - is over.

Review of Moon Dogs

Quite decent Scottish road trip/coming of age story, with some beautiful scenery and decent acting. Nice music too, and good characters, well acted. Some scary violence scenes.

Note in passing: this was part funded by the Irish Film Board. Why? No Irish content or actors, as far as I could tell. What is it with Film Boards?

Watched via BBC iPlayer and Chromecast.

Review of Papadopoulos and Sons

Family saga comdedy drama, with some decent acting and cinematography, rather let down by a script that looks like it was rushed through and never even read properly. Lots of the dialogue is creaky, the characters behave in ways that is inconsistent and implausible - even the timeline is ropey. Sort of whatchable but not memorable.

Watched via BBC iPlayer and Chromecast.

Review of 'Mary Shelley'

I'm not sure this straightforward biopic of Mary Shelley/Wollstoncraft-Godwin is really necessary. It's not terrible, but I'm pretty sure I've seen most of this before - in Ken Russell's Gothic, but also elsewhere. Shelley is a bit of a shit, Byron is louche and predatory, Mary is a proto-feminist...

Watched via informal distribution and Chromecast.

Review of 'Mortal Engines'

I saw the trailer for this while standing in the foyer of the O2 cinema in Finchley Road on some sort of kiosk display thing, and wanted to see the film...I expected it would be a bit overblown but - from the trailer - visually exciting. I'd read the first book to Louis when he was little and was interested to see how they'd been realised.

Well, the film never seemed to turn up. It was released, flopped, and never seen again. Last week I wondered about what had happened, obtained a copy via informal distribution (with Korean subtitles, hardcoded) and watched it.

It was actually much better than expected - the look was great, and the acting and dialogue wasn't all that dire. Curiously I couldn't recall the plot at all from the book, but I read a synopsis later and it was quite faithful. A bit on the long side, and one or two rather Star-Wars moments, but quite watchable. Too bad there won't be a sequel.

Review of Hector and The Search for Happiness

Quite enjoyable film with Simon Pegg and Rosamund Pike. Some nice graphics and occasionally quite thoughtful - though at other times really a bit stupid (the Pegg character goes to 'Africa', and it matters so little that the country he is in doesn't even have a name, as if Africa is enough to locate and characterise it). Nice to see Toni Collette - I had no idea she was Australian, she seemed so British in Wanderlust.

It's based on a French novel, and I'm sort of wondering if that's worth reading.

Watched on Amazon Prime...don't think this saw the light of day anywhere else.

Review of Shoplifters

A really good but hard to watch Japanese film about a family of people at the bottom - making do through a mixture of petty theft, sex work, grifting, etc. There's child and other abuse going on too, though we don't actually see it; and lots of twists as the truth about the family and their relations to each other gradually become apparent.

I suspect that the film would have been much more shocking to a Japanese audience than it was to us - I think Japanese people are more law-abiding.

Watching this made me realise actually how ambivalent Western (well, UK and US) attitudes to petty crime are - although we like to think of ourselves as law-abiding and moral, we also tend to find petty crime (especially when the victim is an institution rather than a person) amusing rather than nasty...scammers and spivs are so often the 'heroes' of our comedies. Several recent American films (The Florida Project, Lean on Pete, etc) have also focused on people at the bottom, so that we're kind of familiar with the existence of this world, but I wonder whether a Japanese audience prefers not to think about it at all?

Watched at Lansdown Film Club in Stroud.

Review of "The Case for Working with Your Hands: Or Why Office Work is Bad for Us and Fixing Things Feels Good"

I mainly enjoyed this - though as with a lot of popular non-fiction books, it's a bit bloated. I enjoyed especially the bits about office work and how awful and degrading it is, both for those who do it and those who have to manage it...rather reminiscent of David Graeber at his best, though not so analytical. His description of working in the abstracting business were unpleasantly familiar.

I could relate to that in a way that I couldn't to the bits about cleaning crankshafts and grinding manifolds, because I have never done such a thing in my life and probably won't ever now. I think his insights on employment and wages/renumeration are pretty good, and I'd urge young people thinking about going to uni to read this and think about what it says.

I didn't so much enjoy the author's thoughts on nationalism, globalisation and so on...it felt to me a bit like he was heading in a Trumpian direction, even though at the time he'd written it the rise of the populist right was still only a dark cloud on a distant horizon.  Some of his cultural preferences seem a bit that way too - was it really necessary to read 'Soldier of Fortune' to rebel against his liberal upbringing?

Time well spent, though.

Review of 'The Black Eyed Blonde: A Philip Marlowe Novel' by Benjamin Black

Finally got round to reading this - I'd been looking forward to it for a while, and I wasn't disappointed. Very well written, enjoyable - not a pastiche, just a continuation of the Marlowe character in his natural setting. That said, it's not Chandler; in some ways it's better - the plot is much tighter and makes more sense than The Big Sleep, for example. On the other hand, the style is a bit less gothic than Chandler's - there isn't the same strength of feeling or atmosphere in the places that there is in his writing.

There's a slightly more modern sensibility - while one of the gay characters is sleazy and unpleasant, there's another minor character who is probably gay and nice with it. I think Marlowe is rather more intellectual here than he was in Chandler's novels.