Book and film review, January 2018.

Only one book to review this month, and 3 films. Why so?
          This has been a month like no other in my life. Today, the 29th of January, is the day my trial on 13 counts of serious sexual offences against a young girl was due to begin. I might have been standing in the dock, rather than writing this, and listening to a woman describing the frightful outrages she claims I, and others, perpetrated on her. Hence you will forgive me if my media blog is rather briefer than usual. I’ve been a bit distracted, you see. Oh, and I’ve been busy putting the finishing touches on a book I have been writing about the whole sorry affair.

BOOK

A DRAGON APPARENT, by Norman Lewis
A roving reporter flies into the Saigon of 1951, with a view to checking out south-east Asia generally.  His journeys take him through Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, much of it under French colonial rule at the time. He is enchanted by the traditions of these countries, but disturbed by the predations of the French, whose behavior in the region is not unlike that of the Nazis when they occupied France only a few years before.

I came to love Norman Lewis’s writing when I read Naples 44, his account of the British military occupation of Naples during WW2. And I was in no way disappointed by this piece, a beautifully written, carefully researched voyage through “French Indo-China” before they were dislodged by the Viet Minh at Dien Bien Phu in 1955, and long before the Americans did their best to bomb it into the Stone Age. Hence Lewis describes a lost world. Marvelous, but heart-breaking.

FILMS

MACHETE (2010) D- Roberto Rodriguez.
Danny ‘pizza face’ Trejo (though I wouldn’t call him that to his face) plays a rather unlikely fed committed to taking down an evil drug lord (Steven Seagal, who, by this time was looking as if he had undergone a series of poorly executed cosmetic surgeries) in Mexico. His favored weapon is guess what, and he uses it to dreadful effect throughout this blood-fest which is strictly for those with strong stomachs.
          Roberto Rodriguez is best known for the stylish Sin City, and this is in a similar, comic-book vein. Notable.

THREE BILLBOARDS OUTSIDE EBBING, MISSOURI (2017) D- Martin McDonagh.
A young girl is raped and murdered in a small Bible-Belt town. Her body is burnt, leaving no forensic clues. The police give up on the case. But that isn’t good enough for the girl’s mother (a fantastic Frances McDormand), who hires 3 old billboards and uses them to berate the town sheriff (an excellent Woody Harrelson) for his failure to make an arrest. But he is dying of cancer, and the townspeople are with him, not her. But this lady don’t give up easy...
          Martin McDonagh established his rep with his very superior In Bruges, and here he goes one better, creating a modern masterpiece of cinema; funny, heart-rending and beautifully observed from first frame to last. The best film I’ve seen since Manchester by the Sea.

THE POST (2017) D- Steven Spielberg.
A reporter gets hold of some secret government files which show how the State has been lying to the American public about the situation in Vietnam for 30 years. The files find their way to The Washington Post, whose editor, Ben Bradlee (Tom Hanks) would publish and be damned. Only thing, Nixon’s White House says such a thing would be tantamount to treason, and Bradlee, the other journalists involved and even the paper’s owner, Catherine Graham (Meryl Streep, perfection as always) could all go to jail.

I’m so old I remember all this going down in ‘real time’. The ‘Pentagon Papers’, as they were called, were eventually responsible for bringing down a President. Spielberg tells the tale with his customary elan, and I have to say this is his best offering in years. I was actually moved to tears more than once, as we learned how powerful men were willing to send young men to their deaths in a war they knew couldn’t be won. Brilliant.