December 2014 book and film review

Welcome to my final media review of the year. A diverse collection once again awaits. In the New Year I intend to write a "review of the year in media"; meanwhile here are my final offerings for 2014.


BOOKS


A THOUSAND SPLENDID SUNS, by Khaled Hosseini. A young girl is born out of wedlock in Afghan and finds herself a social outcast without understanding why. Then her mum dies and her dad marries her off to a bloke who lives in Kabul, far from the tiny mountain village which was her home. All seems to go well with her new husband until she finds herself unable to carry a pregnancy...


Khaled Hosseini's first book, The Kite Runner was a huge hit world wide, with its basic message of "The Afghan people are good, the Taliban are bad", a message the West was only too keen to adopt in a post 911 world. That story was a relatively simple tale, but here Hosseini sets his narrative against a backdrop of 30 years of turbulent times from 1974 to 2004. And most interestingly, his two main protagonists are both women- women whose characters are drawn with considerable skill and remarkable empathy. But once again, his message shines brightly: lives full of hope threatened by brutish, murderous thugs who wish to impose their will on the world. Notable.


THE BOOKSHOP, THE GATE OF ANGELS and THE BLUE FLOWER, by Penelope Fitzgerald.
Three short books by one of Britain's most skilful and subtle writers. I had never heard of Fitzgerald and her most famous book, The Blue Flower until I heard a discussion on Radio 4's A Good Read when two contributors named it when asked to cite their favourite novel of all time. Better give it a try, I thought, and I shall be forever grateful to that programme for the tip. The edition I purchased contained two other novellas which also turned out to be perfect little gems of writing, indeed, minor masterpieces is not too strong a phrase to describe them.


In The Bookshop,  a middle aged widow decides to set up a bookshop in a small town on the East Anglian coast in the late 1950s. Business is anything but brisk until she hears of a publishing sensation that has books racing off the shelves around the country: Lolita. Suddenly she is turning a healthy profit, but reactionary forces in the town disapprove of her and would seek to bring her down.


A deceptively simple tale where very little appears to happen, but in which a marvellous spell is cast by an author of supreme narrative powers.


The Gate of Angels is set in the Cambridge of 1912, where a junior fellow of an ancient college meets a girl under rather strange circumstances and immediately falls head over heels in love. Slight problem? His college does not allow its fellows to marry. Worse, the girl disappears before he can get a chance to become acquainted. Undaunted, our hero sets out to track her down and snag her before someone else does.


The Blue Flower concerns the early, and tragically brief life of the German poet Friedrich von Hardenberg, who adopted the pseudonym of Novalis and established himself as the first great romantic novelist. Barely out of his teens, Fritz, as he is known throughout, who has been recognised from childhood as possessing a prodigious intellect, dismays his friends and family by falling for a twelve year old girl who is not very bright and not even especially pretty. He announces he will wait for her majority and then marry her. As he is from an ancient noble family and she is less high-born her parents approve. No one else does though. Not that Fritz cares. He is in love, and that's the end of it. Then she falls ill...


All these stories seem very simple on the surface and are remarkably easy to read: funny, thrilling, spooky sometimes. But they all have the same touch of greatness about them. Simply wonderful.


FILMS


FROZEN (2013) D- Chris Buck and Jennifer Lee. (animation) A beautiful young princess inherits the throne when her parents are lost at sea. Grieving over, all seems set for a great future for her and her ditzy kid sister Anna. Except for one thing. The new queen Elsa (Idina Menzel) is an "ice genius": she has the ability, sometimes at her command, sometimes involuntarily, to turn everything to ice. And her strange gift/curse is getting worse. After a row with her sister she disappears; meanwhile her entire realm is plunged into eternal winter. Some elements would wish to find her and kill her; her sister however wants to find and rehabilitate her. Somehow...


This Disney/Pixar movie has become in less than a year the most popular animation feature of all time and the fifth most popular movie of any kind. Based loosely on Hans Christian Anderson's The Snow Queen, the film looks great and the characters are exquisitely drawn. The two female leads both have that innocent/foxy appearance which is highly alluring (my wife has forbidden me from buying the dolls as terrible things might happen to them at my hands) and the dialogue is amusing and sometimes very knowing. In summary, what's not to like about Frozen? The answer is, practically nothing, a verdict apparently shared by the entire nation, and indeed the whole world.


THE LEGO MOVIE (2014) W/D- Philip Lord and Christopher Miller. (animation). In a Lego world threatened by evil president Business, only everyman construction worker Emmet, armed with the legendary Piece of Resistance can save the day from mindless conformity and create a brave new world of diversity and individualism. In this seemingly impossible task he is assisted by "Wild Style" (think Melanie Griffith in Something Wild) and Morgan Freeman playing his spiritual advisor (think a kind of Lego Obi Wan Kenobi).


Got all that? It doesn't really matter if you don't. This movie races along at breakneck speed with its assortment of zany characters delivering one-liners with lightning speed before plunging to its life-affirming conclusion: the world is a better place if we are allowed to be ourselves. Visually it is quite unique. The screen is constantly busy, perhaps too busy for the small screen- in common with films like Paris, Texas or Laurence of Arabia, this is one you really need to see in a cinema. And you will need to set aside your misgivings about any movie which is essentially a 95 minute commercial. Lego has seen its already healthy profits soar since this movie came out, and like Frozen this film has clearly tapped into the zeitgeist with unerring accuracy: it was Britain's most popular movie of 2014. And it's hard to begrudge its success.


SINBAD THE SAILOR (1947) D- Richard Wallace. Sinbad, everyone's favourite lovable rogue, engages in a search for the lost treasure of Alexander the Great, ably assisted by Maureen O'Hara. Oh, the japes and scrapes they get themselves into!


Maureen O'Hara, I am ready to reveal. is the main reason I obtained this movie but I fear it was an error. Certainly her luminous loveliness shines in every scene she is in, and her costumes are sumptuous, but really this is a terrible movie, slow, leaden, uninspired and featuring a Douglas Fairbanks who had not modified his acting style one jot from his days as an icon of the world of the silent movie. See it only if you are a seriously committed O'Hara fan.


BAGDAD (sic) (1949) D- Charles Lamont. A beautiful Bedouin princess (Maureen O'Hara) enlists the help of the military governor of Bagdad (Vincent Price) to track down her father's murderer, but he'd rather get inside her panties than assist her in her quest, which maybe even leads back to himself. But she has an ally in the form of a local potentate who also finds her somewhat appealing. Appealing? Yes. Arab? I think nottle. With the gorgeous peaches and cream complexion of a coleen born and raised in the Emerald Isle Maureen O'Hara is the least likely Bedouin you could ever imagine. No matter. O'Hara herself said later about these films (see Sinbad the Sailor) that the producers called them "tits and sand" (you could also call them "lust in the dust" I suppose)  movies, they being principally vehicles to dress the divine one in a series of lavish and low cut gowns. They have no argument from me on that score, but as we have seen, cinematically they were not of the best. This one wins out slightly over Sinbad in that it is more tightly paced and saved to some extent by a gloriously evil Vincent Price. Passable, but barely.


ELYSIUM (2013) D- Neill Blomkamp. In a world destroyed by environmental catastrophe, the elite have decamped to a vast orbiting space station and live lives of unbridled luxury. They even have some sort of scanner which can cure any disease. Enter Matt Damon, whose GF's daughter is dying of leukaemia, to hatch a plan to take the girl through the elaborate security net surrounding the space station and procure a cure before she succumbs.


Neill Blomkamp received a lot of praise for District Nine, a film which used the device of aliens arriving on Planet Earth only to be herded into compounds and abused as a means of highlighting the evils of apartheid. Here the gulf between the poor and the rich is his starting point, though for me it doesn't work half as well as District Nine.


For me the biggest problem is the space station. As Neil deGrasse Tyson might have observed, why didn't the wealthy elite simply requisition Hawaii or somewhere and build their exclusive paradise there? You could say for security, but as we soon find out, it seems perfectly easy to penetrate the net surrounding the space station anyway, thereby kind of negating the whole idea of putting an exclusive paradise in space. Having said that, Matt turns in his usual effective performance, as does Jodie Foster, who makes an excellent job of the autocratic director of the space station. Not bad.


THE IMITATION GAME (2014) D- Morten Tyldum. At the time of Britain's darkest hour in World War II, a team of cryptographers is assembled to attempt to crack the "unbreakable" German ENIGMA code. Its unlikely leader is an eccentric Oxford don by the name of Alan Turing, a man of whom the Americans might say "does not work well with others". Can this motley collection of crossword buffs and theoretical mathematicians pull of the impossible?


The story of Alan Turing is now well known to the wider public. His contribution to the war effort, his perhaps even greater contribution to the world of computing is well known, as is his homosexuality, which cost him his freedom when it was uncovered by an over-zealous police force in the early fifties. And here, in a film which despite its high production values still feels more like a television play than a mainstream movie, we see the man in full played superbly by Benedict Cumberbatch in a role which could have been created for him (for all I know it was). I also liked Charles Dance as his C.O and Keira Knightly as his somewhat improbable love interest. Superior stuff.


THE MONUMENTS MEN (2014) D- George Clooney. At the close of World War II a crack team of art experts, under the command of George Clooney (who also wrote the script, so we certainly know who to blame for it), is put together to retrieve at least some of the vast haul of art purloined by the Nazis.


There you have it. All the elements, you would have thought (huge star in the lead, brilliant plot outline, all the money in the world to make it look good), to make an outstanding movie. Wrong. This movie sucks. There's no drama, no death or glory, no real love interest (despite the presence of Cate Blanchett in the cast) and, most importantly, no emotional engagement.
When the North Koreans hacked into Sony's emails, one emerged showing how George was truly devastated by the poor reviews for his film, believing he had really given it his best shot. Poor old George. We can only hope he has sought, and found, solace in the arms of his lovely new wife. He won't get any from reading this. Or the box office takings. It bombed


AMOUR (2012) D- Michael Hanake. An elderly couple are enjoying the autumn of their lives together in Paris when she has a stroke. She is paralysed down the right side but can still speak, but soon she is descending a slow arc towards oblivion and death. Her husband promises he will never send her to hospital or a care home, but he is over eighty and becoming disabled with arthritis. How will he manage?


This marvellous film justifiably carried all before it in 2012, winning the highly sought after Palme D'Or and securing for Emanuelle Riva the best actress BAFTA, at 85 the oldest ever winner of that award. Jean-Louis Trintignant too shines as the husband, crowning a career that goes back over fifty years, while Isabelle Huppert is terrific as the daughter who is crushed by her mothers decline. Brilliant.


THE POLAR EXPRESS (2004) (animation) D- Robert Zemekis. A child is woken by the sound of a train outside his house. Funny, he lives nowhere near the railroad tracks... He gets on regardless and is taken, along with a group of other wide-eyed kids, on an epic journey to the North Pole to meet Santa Claus.
Now what could possibly be wrong with that? You start with one of Hollywood's most successful directors adapting an enormously popular children's book. Then you book Tom Hanks to voice not one, but six characters and finish off by spending no less than 165 million dollars on it, still the most money anyone has ever laid out on an animated picture. And what do you end up with? I'm sorry Bob, but with something ultimately unsatisfying. True, some of the set-pieces, like when the train has to traverse a frozen lake and comes off its tracks, or where it is roaring through vertiginous mountain passes, are really stunning. But you never get inside any of the characters; you almost don't care if they get to the North Pole or not. I also had a problem with the animation. The style was hyper-realistic, so realistic in fact that I wondered why they didn't use real actors and just animate the other stuff, just like Zemekis did so brilliantly with Who Framed Roger Rabbit?
 I imagine if you'd hacked Zemekis's emails you'd have seen the same sort of "I just don't get it, why didn't the public go for it?" laments. In the event it did make its money back, but only just. Disappointing.


WE OWN THE NIGHT (2007) D- James Gray. "We Own the Night" is the catchy little epigram carried on the badges of night cops in New York City, but there's a gang of ne'er-do-wells out there who would seek to own the night for themselves. Police chief Robert Duvall is there to prevent that. His son  happens to be the manager of a night club where the bad guys like to congregate. So Phoenix is recruited, albeit a little reluctantly, into the service and goes undercover with a wire. But these bad guys aren't stupid...


Tough, realistic cops and robbers thriller which held my attention well, even if parts of it are a little predictable. Enjoyable.


THE BIG STEAL (1949) D- Don Siegel. An army lieutenant (Robert Mitchum) is robbed of a $300,000 payroll he is guarding and army detective William Bendix is convinced he's walked off with it himself and goes in search of him. But Mitchum is himself trying to track down the real perp, whose girlfriend is the extremely attractive Jane Greer. He finds her alone and soon strikes up a friendship, made easier as it emerges she has been left in the lurch. All this is going down in a lawless Mexico where other miscreants hear of the loot and would wish to obtain it for themselves. All is winding up to a pretty thrilling climax...


The world had already seen the on-screen chemistry between Mitchum and Greer in Out of the Past (also known as Build my Gallows High) two years earlier, and this film only cements it. Here we find what The Polar Express and The Monuments Men  lacked: belief in the characters. We love Mitchum; we'd like to be him if we could, we're certainly on his side, we want him to get the girl; why, we even like William Bendix even though he's trying to bring down our hero. This is film noir close to its best.


THE BEAST OF THE CITY (1932) D- Charles Brabin. Police captain Fitzgerald (Walter Huston) is determined to clean up the mean streets of Chicago but the gangsters are extremely well organised and will stop at nothing to maintain their power base. As usual, they have the best looking molls too, in this case a twenty-year old Jean Harlow, already fizzing with the sexuality that would make her a legend..


Famous for the extreme violence of its final, climactic scene, shocking even today, eighty years later and also for its first featuring role for the blonde bombshell herself, this shows what Hollywood could do before it got de-balled by the Hays code. Stirring stuff...

Did you see Santa on Christmas Eve? We did!

That's right. At 6.20 PM on Christmas Eve, having been alerted by the internet, we stood in our garden and watched a bright star pass overhead from west to east. With night glasses it was just possible to resolve two rectangular structures, presumably panniers filled with prezzies attached to Santa's sleigh. My binoculars were not strong enough to make out the reindeer, but there can be no doubting they were there all right.


Some cynics say it was actually a sighting of the International Space Station, orbiting some 350 miles above the Earth at a speed of 17,000 miles an hour, and that those two tiny rectangles were the vast twin solar cell arrays, but that didn't stop thousands of parents across southern England taking their kids outside and pointing out Santa's progress across the firmament. As agent Mulder used to say, I want to believe. He also said The truth is out there, but clearly, as we witnessed three nights ago, the truth is up there.


How was Christmas for you? For us it was rather more successful than of late despite occasional (and inevitable) minor disasters, like my brother's much vaunted Brussels sprouts au gratin which by the time they reached the plate were as hard as gobstoppers. Never mind. His mulled wine was terrific.


Hope yours was good. I'm off to watch about seven Carry On  movies I've recorded over the last couple of days. What's wrong? They represent a phenomenon that is the distilled pure essence of Britishnesss in the 60s and 70s, before we lost our innocence and punk, and Margaret Thatcher, changed everything forever.

OMG I'm liking Christmas now! Whatever next?

Normally, as followers of this blog may have perceived, I hate Christmas and everything to do with it. The commercialism, the stress that pervades everyone's life until well after Boxing Day- leave it out I say. Go and spend Christmas in Morocco, or skiing somewhere (that's worked for me in the past; try Austria, where they have their big meal and presents on Christmas Eve and the Big Day is almost like a normal day, especially on the pistes).


But, courtesy of a number of Christmas movies I have found myself watching in the past couple of weeks, it somehow feels different this year. It started with a mega production called The Nativity Story, made in 2008 and approved by no lesser authority than the Vatican itself. They were mortified, perhaps understandably, when it emerged later that the 17 year-old actress playing the virgin was in fact in the early stages of pregnancy during the filming. Apparently this affected the box office in devout Italy, though for me it was a pretty serviceable re-telling of the old story, non-immaculate conception notwithstanding.


Then there was the 2009 British film Nativity, a generally awful movie saved by the excellence of Martin Freeman as the schoolteacher who wants to mount the best goddam nativity play ever produced. Next came Elf, a film every bit as good as Nativity was bad, so good in fact that in its transcendent happiness and life affirming qualities it has perhaps become the It's a Wonderful Life of the Millennium.


Finally the two versions of Miracle on 34th Street. The first, made in 1947 and featuring the estimable Edmund Gwenn as the Santa nobody can bring themselves to believe in until it is made obvious to everyone that he is indeed the real deal, is one of the greatest Christmas movies of all time. It didn't need to suffer the ignominy of a remake, but they did it anyway in 1994, with Dickie ("darling") Attenborough as Santa. To be fair, he did make a pretty fair fist of it in the event, but, as I say, it wasn't really necessary. How do you improve on perfection? Answer: you can't, stupid, so don't even try.


And there we have it. Through the medium of cinema I have made myself believe again- in the fun, the family and even the underlying meaning of it all. I'm ready for you Xmas! Bring it on!
And while I'm still in a good mood (my wife pointed out one unerring truth: I'm feeling good because Christmas Eve is definitely better than Christmas Day)- may I wish a very happy Christmas to all my readers! And may all your Christmases be relatively stress free...

We don't know what's going on. Seriously

One of the best things about New Year's Eve is the publication of papers hitherto considered not fit for public consumption for thirty years. By this means we get a glimpse of what really happened- though even then the information is strictly limited. Some more sensitive information is kept secret for fifty years, like the cracking of the ENIGMA code in World War II. Some are kept under wraps for 100 years, and we have to assume that some extremely embarrassing stuff has the word "NEVER" scrawled across the top.


Hence we may never know what is really going on at the highest levels of government. Occasionally, however, we get unexpected insights well before the thirty years papers emerge, like the Snowden revelations,or, just the other day, the leaked email trails from Sony. On that one, by the way, President Obama expressed his disquiet over Sony pulling their film The Interview, but I wonder if one day it could emerge that he actually insisted on it, not wishing to see a chain of cinemas bombed by the North Koreans. We don't know.


Also the other day it emerged that the Saudis are secretly backing the ISIS fighters in their struggle to convert Syria and Iraq into a unified Islamic Caliphate- not wholly unlike the system that currently operates in the KSA. So the story goes, the oil-rich sheiks are funding ISIS partly out of a guilty conscience over their own profligate activities: adultery, gambling, drinking and drug taking, all proscribed the Koran but widely practised behind closed doors in cities up and down the Arabian peninsula. I note there appears to be no guilt over their disgraceful treatment of women in many parts of the Islamic world- that's cool apparently.


I think what I'm saying is, by all means watch the news on TV and read your newspapers, but remember: it's not even half the picture. To get the other half is much more difficult, though not impossible.

Viva Cuba! Viva!

Like a lot of people I have been a little disappointed with the results of Barack Obama's presidency. His "Obama-care" health policy changes were strangled at birth by an implacable Republican party, sentencing millions of indigent Americans to third class medical care or, in many cases, no care at all. But in areas where he could have made a difference he has been depressingly silent- like the Israel/Palestine question, where he has been no more effective than his predecessor, who as we recall was no help at all beyond coining that catchy phrase "the road map to peace" Now there's a road less travelled...


However, in the last couple of weeks we have seen two significant pronouncements coming out of the White House. First, nearly seven years after saying he would do something about the detainees at Guantanamo Bay, he has at last released some of the prisoners. Good work, though I understand there are still many people still held there without charge for more than ten years. But it's a start.


Then yesterday he announced a thawing of relations with their old enemy, Cuba. America loved Cuba under Baptista. He was their kind of leader: ultra-right wing, putting the interests of big business (especially American big business) before the concerns of the ordinary citizen. And naturally they were horrified when Castro and co. ousted that hated dictatorship and began to build roads, schools and hospitals that even the poorest could benefit from. Indeed, so horrified were they that JFK authorised a highly speculative counter revolution to take things back to the good old feudal days. The attempt was an embarrassing failure, and ever since in an attack of pique that has lasted nearly fifty years, they have slapped a trade embargo on that already impoverished country, thereby depriving it of the enormous market that lay only ninety miles to the north.


Now it seems all this hatred and paranoia is going to come to an end, with normal diplomatic relations being resumed and perhaps a lifting of the embargo only just around the corner. Nice one Mr President! I was beginning to wonder if you were ever going to do anything to justify the huge wave of optimism that surrounded your election way back in 2008.

Edinburgh dispatch

I have visited Scotland nine times in my life: to Orkney (twice) the outer Hebrides, the west coast, the east coast, skiing at Aviemore (twice), the highlands and the lowlands. For some reason, however, I have never visited its splendid capital city. Last weekend I finally put that right. And my goodness, am I ever glad I did.


It had snowed in the days before our visit, and there was still quite a bit around when we arrived in temperatures hovering around zero degrees. We were at least appropriately dressed, and attacked its major sights with some gusto: the elegant shopping district which is Princes Street, with a large Christmas fair situated right next to it in the shadow of the great Scott Monument. Innumerable stalls could be found selling everything from genuine German bratwurst (manned by genuine Germans) to outlets featuring cashmire scarves (almost impossible to avoid in Edinburgh), again staffed either by Germans or Chinese with broad Scottish accents. It was cold, but great fun and we parted with much of our cash but securing what we felt to be bargains (that, by the way, is the definition of a bargain: if you think it's a bargain, it is).


Next door to the Christmas market lies the Scottish National Gallery, featuring a sumptuous collection of works by masters both old and new. Perhaps the highlight for me was a room housing seven large pictures by Nicolas Poussin, depicting the Seven Sacraments. The atmosphere created was so powerful you almost felt as though you were standing on holy ground. There were other marvels too: the largest known picture by Vermeer, two wonderful Van Goghs painted during his sojourn at the insane asylum at Arles, and, especially poignant, a self portrait by Rembrandt painted towards the end of his life when he had suffered the disgrace of bankruptcy and was forced to sell his art collection and most of his other possessions. You can see the tiredness of life, the ennui coming from his eyes which, it seems, can only see the way forward to dusty death...


The following day we trudged up another glacial dunlin along the Royal Mile to the dark, imposing mass of Edinburgh castle, standing proudly atop a volcanic remnant, much restored in recent times but retaining enough of its ancient past to preserve its atmosphere redolent of the grim march of history. My highlights were the Scottish Crown Jewels, where, sharing the same bullet-proof glass case as golden crowns and necklaces with pearls the size of your thumbnail, was the celebrated Stone of Destiny- just a three hundred block of rough sandstone- or is it? It isn't hard to see it as imbued with some magical, animistic power.




Picking a day of reasonably clement weather we decided to make the walk up Arthur's Seat, a 252 metre high volcanic peg which actually lies within the city limits, a little enclave of wildness surrounded by the hubbub of modern city life. The walk proved much more of a challenge than we anticipated. Here the snow and ice had not melted as it dad done on the city streets, making the steep paths extremely hazardous, especially on the descent, which seemed, reassuringly, to present a formidable challenge to nearly everyone attempting the journey. I saw one Japanese girl simply sit down on the sheet ice at one point and burst into tears. As we slithered past, her boyfriend was doing his best to encourage her, putting his arm round her and whispering encouraging words into her ear (in English, oddly).


My own wife was not dressed quite appropriately for the occasion. She wasn't exactly wearing a cocktail dress and high heels, but her apparel might have been more suited to, say, shopping in a city during the winter. Nonetheless, we both made it up and down without major catastrophe, an achievement of which we were both justifiably proud.


On our last day, back in the relative safety of the city again, we spent a couple of hours wandering in Edinburgh's "New Town". In 1766 the architect James Craig was given the task of gentrifying the area of the city north of Princes Street to attract "men of rank" to the city. And over the course of the next twenty years he created a Georgian enclave that rivals anything to be found in Bath, Buxton or Harrogate. In an area of 500 rolling acres he built a network of streets, squares and circles with a panache rivalling anything achieved by Hausmann or L'Enfant. Magnificent rows of town houses look out over a series of delightful little parks (most of which,  as in Mayfair, are locked against the general public). I presume most of these huge houses are now divided into apartments, though the atmosphere remains extremely gentile. At a small café in the heart of New Town I overheard a trendy young man ordering his breakfast: "I'll have the veggie breakfast please."  Then an afterthought: "With bacon."
Why not?
Edinburgh. I have heard it described as the Athens of the North, and while I am usually suspicious of anywhere being described as the something of somewhere else, on this occasion I believe it to be justified. Edinburgh is not the Athens of the North: it is entirely its own entity: one of the most beautiful cities in the world.

Run away! The robots are coming! Aargh!

No lesser personage than Steven Hawking has announced the end of humanity as we know it if it pursues its desire for ever more intelligent machines. Once they reach the level of human insight and analysis, he claims, they will start to communicate with one another without our even knowing it and eventually, as did the computer Hal in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, conclude that humans are no longer necessary for them to carry out their mission, whatever that is. This view exactly mirrors the plotline in The Terminator movies, where computers from the future have actually declared war on the human race.


Now I would normally be slightly reluctant to take issue with one of the most intelligent people alive on this planet. Steven Hawking is said to have an IQ of 215; hence it would probably be unwise to argue with him about anything. However, reckless as it may be, I do choose to take issue with him on this point.


Alan Turing is hot right now, with Benedict Cumberbatch (who is even hotter) playing him in the new film The Imitation Game. I haven't seen it yet, but I wonder if, along with the struggle to crack the Enigma code of which Turing was a critical part, there is any discussion of one of his most famous concepts: "The Turing Test". Trying to answer the question "Can computers think, or could they ever think?" he proposed this acid test: if by communicating with a computer, by whatever means, their response is indistinguishable from how an intelligent human being behind a screen might respond, then to all intents and purposes that computer is thinking.


No computer has yet passed the Turing test, but around the world the race is on to design software that could do it, and when it is finally achieved, it will be one of the greatest scientific breakthroughs of all time. That great futurologist Arthur C Clarke imagined his computer Hal could pass the Turing test with ease, and that by the year 2001. Thirteen years past that date it still hasn't happened, but I am told that the computer world is finally closing on this holy grail. In some ways there are already signs we are approaching it, like when you mis-type something into google and it helpfully asks if you meant something else, which is usually exactly what you did mean.


I might live long enough to see this historic milestone passed, and it will certainly change the world irrevocably. Apart from anything else, it could end loneliness once and for all, as we could purchase a sentient companion we could talk to, even have a meaningful and caring relationship with. Indeed, there is perhaps no limit to what could be achieved. Obviously safeguards would need to be built in (see Asimov's three rules of robotics)- but wouldn't it be nice if we could build similar safeguards into our relationships with other human beings? It's a brave new world I'm talking about here, and I for one can't wait for it to arrive.

The banality of evil in Britain today

Normally I am very cautious about sounding morally censorious in this blog. Let he who is without sin etc. And when I use the term evil, I more cautious still. The leadership in North Korea, the gun lobby in the United States, those followers of ISIL who are happy to behead people when they don't subscribe to their own brand of Islam- these are examples of evil at its rawest.


But you can find it right here in Britain today, as was revealed today when it emerged that the giant food company Premier Foods charge their suppliers simply for the right to supply to them. Remember, a lot of these suppliers are small family concerns who survive on razor-thin profit margins. Does Premier Foods give a toss about this? Do they fuck. They know there is intense competition among small suppliers to be taken up by PF, and therefore they can get away with keeping their boots on people's necks when they do business with them.


It is known that the big retailers, Tesco et al, operate a cutthroat policy regarding the deals they offer to their smaller suppliers and that they in turn have no option but to be as competitive as possible in order to avoid losing their contracts and thereby their livelihoods. But at least they don't charge them just for the privilege of supplying them in the first place.


Business secretary Vince Cable (Vince for PM! I say, and if not him then Peter Hain, though I guess both prospects are equally unlikely) has vowed to put a stop to this iniquitous practice- let's hope he is able to, and that the arch-capitalists in the cabinet (George Osborne and his buddies) don't slap him down. I'm sure nothing makes them happier than doing that...

November 2014 book and film review

BOOKS


FRAMLEY PARSONAGE, by Anthony Trollope. A young vicar is favoured by the local dowager baroness, but he is tempted to join the fast set surrounding the Duke of Omnium (whom the baroness hates). While staying at the Duke's ancestral home he is prevailed upon by an unscrupulous M.P. to lend money- more than he can afford to say good-bye to- which naturally, as always seems to happen in Trollope novels, he does. Faced with public disgrace when he cannot honour the loan (which has been sold on) he is forced to rely on the good graces of the baroness's eldest son- but then falls out with him. What a to do!


Cited by John Major as his favourite book, this is a characteristic romp through the mores and sensibilities of the middle and upper classes of rural England in the middle of the 19th century. All human life is here as usual: the fast-living M.P. who has to sell his ancient seat to pay mounting debts, a battle of wills between opposing members of the aristocracy, charming, unsophisticated girls coming up from the country and wood by the scion of the manner (who may or may not be a bad egg) and a censorious priest who would rather he and his children starve than accept charity from anyone, because people of means must be evil by definition. My wife has read Trollope's entire canon of over 20 books and pronounced this one of her favourites, hence my decision to go for number 4 in the series of 6 "Barchester chronicles". Truth to tell, I had so much fun with it I'm wishing I had started at number 1. Never mind, there's still time to put that right...


  


TEN DAYS THAT SHOOK THE WORLD, by John Reed. In Russia during the momentous days of early November 1917 and the birth of the Russian Revolution, an American writer and committed socialist is there to record the events for posterity. What emerges is one of the greatest pieces of journalism ever written; equal in stature say, to William Russell's dispatches to the Times on the Crimean War or Bernstein and Woodward's famous coverage of the Watergate scandal.


The detail is meticulously recorded, the personalities of the big players dissected minutely. Two giant figures emerge: Lenin, not a figure of great personal charisma but with an incredible ability to explain complex political theory in a way that even the most illiterate peasant could relate to, and Trotsky, a man with truly huge personal character who with a few words could galvanise an exhausted, demoralised mob to grab their weapons and run to man the barricades. Interestingly, Uncle Joe Stalin is mentioned just twice and then only briefly. It wasn't until 1924 and the death of Lenin that he began to come to the fore.


The rest is history, and not very pleasant history at that. But John Reed would not live to see all that. He was dead from typhus within a year of the great revolution. But his book remains as his sublime legacy, a book full of tiny but telling detail, like the day when the first snow of Winter begins to fall, lightening everyone's mood considerably. Reed doesn't understand at first, but soon realises: ice and snow are a lot better than mud and rain...  Then there is the time during a crowded meeting in a literally smoke-filled room when one delegate stands up and declares:
"Comrades! No one can breathe in here because of the smoke!".  A quick vote is taken, and a motion to ban smoking during meetings is passed unanimously. But within minutes everyone is smoking again, and just as frantically as ever...


THE HEART OF MIDLOTHIAN, by Sir Walter Scott. In mid-18th century Edinburgh, a young girl is sentenced to death for child murder- this despite the fact no child's body has been found. No matter, the law of the time did not require one. Her older sister decides to travel to London to petition the King for clemency- an extremely hazardous journey in those days. But she has two pieces of paper in her pocket which may assist her. The first is written by no lesser figure than the late Duke of Argyle, who wrote a testimonial for the girl's grandfather after he had saved the duke's life during a pitched battle some fifty years before. The other is a safe conduct pass penned by one of Scotland's most notorious felons. Even so, it seems an almost impossible mission. However in Jeannie we have a heroine of unsurpassed determination. If anyone can do it, she can...


We are off to spend four days in Edinburgh shortly, so it seemed only fitting to explore for the first time Scotland's most famous writer, and to read one that is actually set in that great city. Scott was fabulously successful in his day, not just in the United Kingdom but in Europe and America too. A kind of forerunner to Dickens, his character studies are full of wit and insight, and his plots race along like a horse and carriage at full speed. Much of the dialogue in Heart of Midlothian is in what is called "lowland Scots" a dialect which is difficult to understand at first, though one soon gets to grips with it. Fascinating stuff.


THE WASTE LAND, by T.S. Eliot. First published in 1922, this poem of just 434 lines (it covers just seventeen pages of text in my edition of Eliot's poems) was almost immediately accepted as one of the greatest poems ever written in the English language. The poem draws on sacred Hindu and Buddhist texts, as well as the writings of figures like St Augustine of Hippo, and, critically, as Eliot himself acknowledges in the first of his explanatory notes, Sir  Charles Frazer's seminal book  The Golden Bough, which attempts, apparently for the first time, to take an anthropological view of religion and spirituality. Frazer's view is that cultures proceed from magic, to religion, and finally to science as they attempt to understand the world around them, and Eliot's poem likewise might be understood as a majestic attempt to shake some sense out of an infinitely confusing and mysterious world


The poem has spawned countless PhDs as people have picked over its bones to find its hidden meanings, but perhaps the most important question is: what's it like to read? The answer for me is: quite extraordinary. Other words I could use might include: strange, mystical, obscure, magical, and deeply confusing. Above all though, is a sense of mysterious grandeur which is unique in my reading experience. My first resolution on completing was: I need to read this again, and again. And so I shall...


FILMS


INTERSTELLAR (2014) D- Christopher Nolan. In a world dying from environmental neglect, a freelance group resurrects a Saturn V launcher to send an astronaut (Matthew McConnaughey) to look into a worm hole in space which has been discovered in the vicinity of Saturn. Maybe on the other side of the worm hole there will be a world fit for humanity to live on...


Since I first saw 2001: A Space Odyssey in 1968 in Cinerama I've been waiting for a science fiction movie to match up to it. I'm still waiting. Apparently feeling the same way, Christopher Nolan decided to do the job himself. Unfortunately, despite some great production values and some very interesting ideas, he hasn't done it either. But he has managed to pay tribute to a number of other notable science fiction movies along the way. For instance:
a) an astronaut encounters predictable problems when he attempts to transfer from one space craft to another without functioning airlocks (2001)
b) another astronaut becomes emotionally attached to a robot (Silent Running)
c) a female astronaut gets in a bit of a tizz while experiencing problems in orbit (Gravity)
d) Benevolent super-intelligent aliens take a man on an unimaginable journey beyond the infinite (2001 again)


There are a number of plot devices which don't work for me in this film, best summed up by the American cosmologist Neil deGrasse Tyson, who asked why they didn't just try to fix the problems on Earth rather than going an improbable journey to find worlds which didn't seem too appetising either once they finally got there. However, as a modern piece of cinema I suppose this does work. Perhaps what I'm really saying is they don't make sci-fi movies like they used to. Maybe they never will...


GONE GIRL (2014) D- David Fincher. A middle class couple appear to be enjoying the perfect life when the wife (Rosamund Pyke) goes missing. Naturally the husband (Ben Affleck) is suspected of murdering her, but in the absence of a body or any evidence of an abduction, the police let him go. However they continue to harbour their suspicions; meanwhile the press has a field day...


With a highly articulate screenplay adapted from her own novel by Gillian Flynn and some highly skilled directing this is a pretty good film. The plot is almost byzantine in its complexity however, and I do not recommend going out to the loo or even so much as ceasing your concentration for a second. The players are just fine and the analysis of the press handling of the story is masterful. I do have some minor issues with the plotting, though when I voiced them to my brother he pointed out that you see the same sort of thing in every other Agatha Christie novel, so perhaps I shouldn't complain...


MANDELA: LONG WALK TO FREEDOM (2014) D- Justin Chadwick. A man grows up in the injustice that is Apartheid South Africa and decides to dedicate his life to bringing the evil regime down. Soon he is imprisoned for 27 years for violent rebellion, but even that fails to dampen his ardour. In fact if anything it strengthens it...


Idris Elba's finest hour you might say. What an honour it must be to play the greatest man of his generation, and perhaps the greatest black man who ever lived. And he certainly does a fine job of playing the father of a nation. I do have some problems with this film despite that: in trying to portray his whole life in 2 1/2 hours, we are forced to watch an almost madcap romp through his exploits leaving little time for reflection and real insight into the mind of a man who doubtless had his contradictions and existential struggles, just like the rest of us. On the whole though, I did enjoy it and found it intensely moving at times. Remember, I was there, in spirit at least, through much of his struggle, going on many anti- apartheid demos (on one of which I was beaten by the police, the British police) and following the story as it developed from Reagan and Thatcher saying they were happy to do business with an apartheid government to Mandela's assumption of power as the nation's first black president. Amazing days...


THE PATIENCE STONE (2012) D- Atiq Rahimi. In a desert village in an unspecified middle Eastern country, a woman's husband is shot in the neck leaving him in a vegetative state. He is completely unresponsive, so she begins to use him as a "patience stone", a kind of receptacle into which she can pour out her innermost thoughts, hopes and fears. In Arab tradition the stone is then buried, though she can't do that 'cause he's still alive. Still, he'll do...


There are other problems too. Her husband was the bread winner, and now she has no way to make a living. Except one...


A deeply moving and beautiful film of great sensitivity and insight, demonstrating that the world of Arab film making has most definitely come of age. Brilliant.


THE ROAD TO CORINTH (1967) D- Claude Chabrol. An international arms dealer is killed, and his beautiful wife is followed in the hope she will lead his enemies to his haul of weapons. A really rather silly offering in the style of a post-Bond spoof which was quite popular in the late sixties, especially in France. The film is most notable for the performance of its female lead, Jean Seberg, who shines in every scene. Poor Jean Seberg! Hounded out of America for her left wing views by J Edgar Hoover and his FBI, they continued their harassment even after she moved to France, making up stories that her baby was not fathered by her husband. Finally she ended her life in 1981- a great career blighted by intimidation, prejudice and senseless hatred.


STANDARD OPERATING PROCEDURE (2008) D- Errol Morris. Speaking of intimidation and senselss hatred, here it is updated to the Millennium. This is the story of Abu Graib prison in Iraq, where the CIA interrogated its detainees in any way they thought fit in their bid to keep the homeland safe. What happened there is now a matter of record, with prisoners being humiliated in all sorts of ways (you will recall the photographs of prisoners posed naked in bizarre human heaps). The title of the film refers to what was allowed (degradation, water boarding, "stress poses" and so on) and what was not (murder, breaking bones and, critically, photographing their activities) Hence the resulting prison terms handed down to a few of the guards, who in a living version of the famous Milgram experiments, simply did what their bosses told them to do without ever thinking to challenge the morality of their orders. Sobering stuff.


LA CEREMONIE (1995) D- Claude Chabrol. A young woman is taken on as housekeeper to a wealthy family; she makes a good first impression even though she harbours a dark secret. Well, it's not that dark: she can't read. She knows enough, however, to realise she must hide her illiteracy if she is to keep her job. Then she finds a kindred spirit in the shape of a local post office employee (a terrific Isobel Huppert) who has one or two secrets of her own. As their bond strengthens they begin to feed on each other's resentment of how society has treated them. And they plot their revenge...


Chabrol sank into something of a low during the sixties (see above) but here we see him back at his best with a riveting story loosely based on real events in Paris of the 1930s, where a pair of twins taken into service exacted lethal retribution against their employers. The case became a cause celebre for left wing intellectuals at the time including Jean Genet and Jean-Paul Sartre, who cited the case as an example of the evils of the capitalist system. Here Chabrol has adapted and altered the story for his own ends and come up with a minor masterpiece. Excellent.


THE GLASS KEY (1942) D- Stuart Heisler. A big-wheel political fixer (Brian Donlevy) claims he has the governor's ear to the point where he can twist him around his little finger. But his minder (Alan Ladd) warns him that his "key" to the governor's mansion could be made of glass- and snap off one day leaving him in the shit. Then the governor's son is found murdered and the police suspect the fixer of doing the deed. The kid was a loser, and interfering with the governor's chance of being re-elected. But is it as simple as that?


Of course it isn't. Nothing is as it first appears in this intriguing piece of film noir,  based on the Dashiel Hammett book of the same name. The plot twists come thick and fast, but what shines is the strength of the characters, particularly Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake, who had already shown how strong their on-screen chemistry was in This Gun for Hire, which had come out the previous year.
Definitive noir.


PANTANI:THE ACCIDENTAL DEATH OF A CYCLIST. (2014) D- James Erskine. Marco Pantani started winning road races when still a child, and by the age of 24 was the world's best. In 1998 he won both the Tour de France and the Giro D'Italia in the same year, an almost unprecedented feat. Then Lance Armstrong came on the scene. From then on it wasn't just a case of being a better cyclist, it was a case of who does the most drugs without being caught. And no one was better at that than Armstrong. Desperate to keep up with the American, Pantani resorted to pharmaceuticals too, but unlike his American nemesis was soon caught, and this marked a tragic downhill spiral which could only end one way...
Powerful piece of documentary film making.


MISTER TURNER (2014) D- Mike Leigh. Being the life and times of Britain's greatest painter, shown in all his artisan perfection. Here is the man in full, a man with little time for his fellow human beings, obsessed with light and colour as he was to the exclusion of almost everything else. Accepted by the establishment even though he was never really part of it, in this film Turner grunts and prumps his way through the early part of 19th century England with one burning desire: to be known as her greatest ever artist. That this ambition was achieved, and so magnificently, scarcely seems real . Yet everything in this film is real. I have taken an interest in Turner since my teens and confirm all the details depicted in Leigh's film are completely authentic.
As we were leaving the cinema I heard an elderly lady in front of me say:
"It was a good film, but I didn't enjoy it"
Perhaps she found Timothy Spall's enthralling performance a bit hard to swallow, with all his grunts and monosyllables. All I can say is that it was a good film and I did enjoy it. In fact this could be my film of the year. If you only see one film this year, see this one. Hrrumph.


LONE SURVIVOR (2014) D- Peter Berg. In Afghan a squad of American soldiers are tasked with taking out a Taliban commander and are assured he will only have a few men with him. But their intel is faulty- he has a whole company of heavily armed men at his side. They decide on a tactical withdrawal but are soon spotted and pursued. One by one the men are shot or blown to pieces with grenade launchers. Soon only Mark Wahlberg is left. His only hope is rescue, but helicopters are extremely vulnerable to attack with RPGs. With shrapnel wounds in his leg he can barely walk- but his survival instinct is still strong. But how can he get out of this alive?


Based apparently on a real incident in 2009, Peter Berg's film is one of the more gritty and realistic war movies I have seen in quite a while. The viewer thoroughly identifies with our hero's grim plight- we so want him to get out alive but how is it possible? (we suspend for the moment any question as to why he is there in the first place- that's not for now)
This movie was one of the weekly series of "Sky Premier" movies, which show movies seen for the first time on British television. Usually they are absolute dogs, straight to DVD fodder, but this (and to be fair, Mandela: long Walk to Freedom, which was also part of this series) is actually superior movie making. Recommended.