February 2016 book and film review

BOOKS

COMMAND AND CONTROL, by Arthur Schlosser.
In 1980, at a Titan nuclear missile silo in Arkansas, a simple act of clumsiness causes a fire which threatens to destroy the silo and the hydrogen bomb inside. While attempts are made to evacuate the nearby civilian population, a team from the US Air Force struggles to contain the fire. Highly toxic missile fuel has already escaped, and if the bomb goes off...
"This is the way non-fiction should be written!" gushes one quoted reviewer, and I can only agree. From the author that ripped the lid off the dubious practices of the convenience food industry in his book Fast Food Nation, Sclosser now takes us on a crazy ride through the Cold War and America's preparations for the hot one they thought was imminent. He reveals some horrifying truths, particularly about the handling of the thermonuclear devices themselves, many of which were dropped while loading them on aircraft, or fell from planes in flight, sometimes over the sea, sometimes over land. They caught fire, were destroyed when the conventional explosives around them blew up and sometimes, incredibly, lost. The miracle is that Americans never had a nuclear weapon go off by accident. That this was more down to luck than judgement is made terrifyingly clear in this remarkable book. And yet, as Schlosser points out, all this, all the trillions of dollars spent by either side for over 50 years, was about weapons that could never be used in anger.
Not long ago Jeremy Corbyn got himself in hot water by saying he would never under any circumstances press the red button, yet his only crime was saying out loud what world leaders for half a century had acknowledged behind closed doors. And I say, if you can't use a weapon it kind of makes it obsolete, so isn't it time we phased it out and consigned the whole concept of nuclear warfare to the dustbin of history? Discuss.

THE LOCKED ROOM, by Maj Stowell and Per Waloo. It's the classic murder mystery scenario: a man is found murdered in a room locked from the inside and there is no sign of the murder weapon. This is the conundrum faced by Martin Beck when he returns to work after taking nearly a year out to recover from being shot in the chest (in the last book).
But at the office there are other crimes to solve, particularly a series of bank raids which have netted over a million, and in the most recent a bank customer is killed.

This is book number 8 in the 10 book series created by husband and wife team Stowell and Waloo which has the overall title of "The Story of a Crime" and has been widely acclaimed as one of the finest examples of the "police procedural" ever written. But the writers, both committed socialists, also use their plots and characters to produce a devastating critique of the new Sweden, exposing the myth of a progressive and permissive society and revealing at its heart a heartless bureaucracy which overlooks poverty, homelessness and the highest suicide rate in Europe. If you like a crime thriller and haven't tried the Martin Beck series yet, I say go for it.

THE PILGRIM'S PROGRESS, by John Bunyan. A man falls asleep and dreams a fantastical tale of struggle and redemption as his hero "Christian" journeys from his home in the City of Destruction via the Slough of Despond and Vanity Fair before arriving at the gates of Paradise. Later, his wife, who at first refused to travel with him, herself undertakes the perilous journey accompanied by her two sons and a maid.

My wife told me she read a children's version of the book as an eight-year-old, yet somehow I have avoided reading one of the most famous books in the English language until now. I didn't even know that terms like "Slough of Despond" and "Vanity Fair" came from this extraordinary book.

Bunyan was a puritan preacher whose ideas lost favour after the restoration, and when he refused to stop preaching he was imprisoned in Bedford Gaol for 12 years. He turned to the pen to spread the word, and when The Pilgrim's Progress was eventually published it became a bestseller both here and around the world, and has never been out of print since. Moreover, it has a unique style and presence which makes it a fascinating and intriguing read even today, though some might say Christian should get a life and stop going on so. But here I travel dangerously close to blasphemy...

FILMS

BEHIND THE CANDELABRA (2013) D- Steven Soderberg. In the Hollywood of the 1970s, a young man (Matt Damon) goes to a concert by Liberace and is blown away by the glamour, the glitz and prodigious talent of the sequined one. He takes a job as his assistant, but soon finds there is more to his duties than is stated in his job description...

Before the dawn of AIDS, this is a world of drug fueled anonymous sex where Liberace was king, and Michael Douglas turns in one of his strongest performances to date portraying this bizarre genius. "Some say Rubenstein is a better pianist than me", he says at one point, "But no one says he's better looking!" Matt too does brilliantly with his part as the real-life Scott Thorson, as does Rob Lowe, who plays a plastic surgeon commissioned to make Thorson  resemble Liberace himself.
Weird...
This film, too close to the bone for some Hollywood insiders, never received the acclaim it deserved and only had a limited release over here. Which is strange because it is one of the best films I've seen in a long time...

THE DANISH GIRL (2015) D- Tom Hooper. In 1920s Copenhagen, a married man slowly comes to realise he is living in the wrong skin. He becomes an occasional cross-dresser, but that doesn't satisfy his longings to be... someone else. Then he meets a surgeon who is willing to carry out an experimental procedure to transform him into the woman he really wants to be. All the while he is supported by a loving, but uncomprehending wife.

Eddie Redmayne is carrying all before him at the moment, though even he couldn't really expect to win two Oscars in a row. But on sheer talent alone he perhaps should have. In this beautiful film, shot around a series of stunning Art Nouveau locations, his presence shines, as does the performance of his wife played by Alicia Vikander, who deservedly did win the Academy Award for best supporting actress. Highly recommended.

THE SWEET HEREAFTER (1997) D- Atom Egoyan. In a remote Canadian township, a school bus veers off the road into a lake. Many children perish, and lawyer Ian Holm goes to the town in search of grieving parents to enroll in his scheme to launch a class action against the school, the bus manufacturers, whoever they think they can beat in court. His task is a daunting one, not made any easier by a group of people anxious to leave the past behind and get on with the life-long process of adjusting to their loss.

All this takes place in the vast, unforgiving landscape of central Canada, which almost assumes a central role in this bleak, heart-rending film about grief and guilt.
Excellent.

FAST AND FURIOUS SEVEN, aka FURIOUS 7 (2015) D- James Wan. Vin Diesl, Paul Walker and the gang now familiar to us through six prequels take on supervillain Jason Statham and his plans to... you know I've actually forgotten what, but never mind. The F and F franchise isn't about plot, it's about tough, absurdly good looking men and their improbably gorgeous GFs driving nitro fueled muscle cars and sometimes crashing them spectacularly.
In this film, which turned out to be one of the most successful films ever made, there is the added piquancy of having one of its stars being already dead by time it was released, and that in a high speed car crash in which no other vehicle was involved. Is this why so many people around the world flocked to see it? I wouldn't be surprised. Hats off to the directors though, who insisted on completing the film anyway, using stunt doubles, Walker's own brother and some highly creative use of previously unused footage, so that you hardly notice that your main star seems to vanish two thirds of the way into the movie...
For petrol heads only.

MAD MAX: FURY ROAD (2015) D- George Miller. In a mean, post-apocalyptic world, Max teams up with a group of women designated as baby factories to escape the vicious tyrants who rule the roost.

Many of the people who raved about this movie, and it is certainly a triumph of design and cinematography, were probably not even born when the three original Mad Max movies appeared in the 70s and 80s. In those far-off days they were a breath of fresh air in a movie scene which was flagging, especially in Australia. We loved Mel as the leather clad loner with a mission to destroy, and we loved the way the movies looked. Now, thirty years on it is still the look of the film which attracts. The cars look like some Autogeddon nightmare, the people (including an excellent Charlise Theron as leader of the baby mamas) look great too, and the whole thing is filmed with a sense of originality that the F and F  franchise could only dream of. Like Furious 7 I have forgotten much of the specific details of the plot, which is odd because I only saw it three days ago, though in this film too it doesn't really matter. It's how it looks and sounds that counts, and it deservedly won several Oscars in the technical sections.
Definitely worth a look.