HACKSAW RIDGE (2016) D- Mel Gibson
Being the (more or less) true account of one Private Desmond Doss, an American soldier in WW2 who refuses to take up arms against the enemy, but does agree to put himself in harm’s way by acting as a paramedic.
The principle action of this extremely violent film (think of the first 20 minutes of Saving Private Ryan: this is even more horrific) takes place during the Battle of Okinawa, a battle which for some reason is given less attention than other less terrible conflicts, but was in fact the biggest air/sea/land battle in history.
American troops must ascend a steep escarpment to get at the enemy, who have plenty of opportunity to prepare for them. The result is a protracted carnage of almost unprecedented magnitude, shown in loving detail by director Gibson. I have a pretty strong stomach, but some of this was hard to watch, even for me. But the story still shines through, with PFC Doss showing the most incredible bravery in his attempts to rescue his comrades, bravery that won him the Congressional Medal of Honour despite his non-combatant status.
DARKEST HOUR (2017) D- Joe Wright
Summer 1940. France has fallen, the British Expeditionary Force has been forced onto the beaches at Dunkirk, awaiting its fate, while at home, Neville Chamberlain has been forced from office and replaced by the wild card that is Winston Churchill. Decisions made now will affect Britain, and perhaps the whole world, for hundreds of years to come. Better get them right then...
Gary Oldman’s performance as Churchill has become the stuff of legend, and rightly so, but is this film really any good? I fear not. It doesn’t really add much to the wealth of material we already have on the subject, and some of it is palpably untrue. The writers simply made stuff up to make it look good on screen, and that is a dangerous policy, I suggest...
GAME PLAN (2017) D- John Francis Daly and Jonathan Goldstein
In suburban Atlanta, a couple attempt to spice up their lives by playing a realistic “murder weekend” game. Turns out it’s a bit more realistic than they anticipated, as real bad guys become mixed up with the fake ones, causing confusion and terror to all involved, with often hilarious results for us, the viewers. People keep getting blown away by high-calibre weapons - or do they? Nothing is as it seems in this crazy caper, which is very well directed (though it took 2 guys to do it, apparently) and acted with great style by all the players, particularly the leads Rachel McAdams and Jason Bateman.
The best line, among many top class zingers, comes from Rachel when she is being threatened by gunmen:
“Please don’t kill me. I have children at home.”
Gunman: “Not with that ass you don’t.”
PETERLOO (2018) D- Mike Leigh
In 1819, disquiet grows throughout the land as the price of staples (bread especially) goes through the roof and the government, the one for whom the term laissez faire might have been invented, doesn’t appear to give a damn. And when the authorities learn that certain parties are agitating for reform, fearing some sort of revolution akin to the one across the Channel only a few years before, they begin to work out how to nip it in the bud. But the people don’t want revolution, they just want a bit of food on their table and a wage that will enable them to secure it.
Mike Leigh’s film dissects out the events of one of the most notorious events in British history with his characteristic skill and subtlety. It has been criticised for being a bit heavy on rhetoric and short on narrative pace, but rhetoric was what it was all about - winning the hearts and minds of ordinary people in their struggle to win a few basic human rights. Highly watchable, for me at any rate.
Thursday, 29 November 2018
November 2018 book review
THE INHERITORS, by William Golding
Being an everyday story of country folk, living in the Home Counties, circa 40,000 BC. An extended family ekes out a precarious existence, never far from starvation or the predations of larger, more dangerous animals than them. Then another band of people, very different from them, kills one of the group and kidnaps a child.
Golding leaves it to us to work out what is going on in this strange, troubling tale of Neanderthals encountering Homo Sapiens. And that isn’t always easy, for we are placed inside the minds of the former, whose brains seem to have hypertrophied right, or instinctual brains, strong on emotion, imaginative powers and even a touch of SEP, but tiny left brains, leaving them short on logical deductive ability and problem solving. No wonder they had to give way to the more aggressive, inventive and resourceful sub-species of Man. Us.
Golding sets down a challenge for the reader in this book, which requires patience and application, but the result, as with all his works, is immensely satisfying.
THE EMERALD PLANET, by David Beerling.
When we think about evolution, our attention is naturally caught first by the animals, dinosaurs, whale-eating aquatic monsters and other equally sexy creatures. Hardly surprising really: plants don’t move around much (except, as Marge Simpson famously pointed out, those Mexican fighting trees - sorry) But as David Beerling explains in this fascinating book, understanding the evolution of plants is key to understanding the evolution of the Earth as a whole. It is plants, remember, that have made huge contributions to the composition of the atmosphere, enriching it with life-giving oxygen, so much so in the Permian Period (300-250 million years ago) that oxygen levels were 50% higher than today, enabling the appearance of giant insects; metre long centipedes, scorpions as big as labradors and dragonflys the size of buzzards.
To be fair, without the basic scientific background I have had this book may have been hard to follow, but it is well written and designed for the well-informed layperson. Intriguing stuff.
THE SUSPICIONS OF MR. WHICHER, by Kate Summerscale
In a small Wiltshire village, a well-to-do family is stunned when their five-year-old son is abducted in the night, and later, found with his throat cut. With no clues apparent, the local constabulary calls in Inspector Whicher of Scotland Yard, noted thief-taker and model for detectives fashioned by such luminaries as Wilkie Collins (Inspector Cuff in The Moonstone) and Charles Dickens (Inspector Bucket in Bleak House). After interviewing all the main players, Whicher comes to the disturbing conclusion that a family member is responsible for this dastardly deed; worse she is a 15 year-old girl. How can this be? A young girl capable of such a terrible crime?
And Inspector Whicher doesn’t just have universal incredulity to contend with: soon class sensibility rears its ugly head. There are rumblings that a working class artisan, albeit a talented and successful one, is hardly the right person to delve into the dirty linen (literally in this case) of an upper middle class family. Will the truth ever come out? Read on...
A tremendous success when it came out in 2008, Kate Summerscale’s book is now seen as one of the finest ‘true crime’ books in English, and in this reviewer’s opinion, one of the best pieces of ‘creative nonfiction’ I have read in a long time. Highly recommended.
A LEGACY OF SPIES, by John le Carre
A retired MI6 agent is disturbed in his reverie on a farm in Brittany by the news that he is about to be sued over an operation that went wrong nearly 50 years before.
Like everybody else, I read Le Carre’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold a very long time ago, but it is the action of that book which forms the backdrop to this latest foray into the mysterious lives of George Smiley’s people. The main protagonist of this tale being a former spy who as part of his job is used to lying all the time, so will lying his way through this see him in the clear? Not if the new guard at MI6 have anything to do with it, because they need someone to throw under the bus, and our man seems tailor-made for the fall-guy.
If you like Le Carre, and let’s face it nearly everyone does, you will savour this tale of the past entwining itself with the present. Give it a try.
Being an everyday story of country folk, living in the Home Counties, circa 40,000 BC. An extended family ekes out a precarious existence, never far from starvation or the predations of larger, more dangerous animals than them. Then another band of people, very different from them, kills one of the group and kidnaps a child.
Golding leaves it to us to work out what is going on in this strange, troubling tale of Neanderthals encountering Homo Sapiens. And that isn’t always easy, for we are placed inside the minds of the former, whose brains seem to have hypertrophied right, or instinctual brains, strong on emotion, imaginative powers and even a touch of SEP, but tiny left brains, leaving them short on logical deductive ability and problem solving. No wonder they had to give way to the more aggressive, inventive and resourceful sub-species of Man. Us.
Golding sets down a challenge for the reader in this book, which requires patience and application, but the result, as with all his works, is immensely satisfying.
THE EMERALD PLANET, by David Beerling.
When we think about evolution, our attention is naturally caught first by the animals, dinosaurs, whale-eating aquatic monsters and other equally sexy creatures. Hardly surprising really: plants don’t move around much (except, as Marge Simpson famously pointed out, those Mexican fighting trees - sorry) But as David Beerling explains in this fascinating book, understanding the evolution of plants is key to understanding the evolution of the Earth as a whole. It is plants, remember, that have made huge contributions to the composition of the atmosphere, enriching it with life-giving oxygen, so much so in the Permian Period (300-250 million years ago) that oxygen levels were 50% higher than today, enabling the appearance of giant insects; metre long centipedes, scorpions as big as labradors and dragonflys the size of buzzards.
To be fair, without the basic scientific background I have had this book may have been hard to follow, but it is well written and designed for the well-informed layperson. Intriguing stuff.
THE SUSPICIONS OF MR. WHICHER, by Kate Summerscale
In a small Wiltshire village, a well-to-do family is stunned when their five-year-old son is abducted in the night, and later, found with his throat cut. With no clues apparent, the local constabulary calls in Inspector Whicher of Scotland Yard, noted thief-taker and model for detectives fashioned by such luminaries as Wilkie Collins (Inspector Cuff in The Moonstone) and Charles Dickens (Inspector Bucket in Bleak House). After interviewing all the main players, Whicher comes to the disturbing conclusion that a family member is responsible for this dastardly deed; worse she is a 15 year-old girl. How can this be? A young girl capable of such a terrible crime?
And Inspector Whicher doesn’t just have universal incredulity to contend with: soon class sensibility rears its ugly head. There are rumblings that a working class artisan, albeit a talented and successful one, is hardly the right person to delve into the dirty linen (literally in this case) of an upper middle class family. Will the truth ever come out? Read on...
A tremendous success when it came out in 2008, Kate Summerscale’s book is now seen as one of the finest ‘true crime’ books in English, and in this reviewer’s opinion, one of the best pieces of ‘creative nonfiction’ I have read in a long time. Highly recommended.
A LEGACY OF SPIES, by John le Carre
A retired MI6 agent is disturbed in his reverie on a farm in Brittany by the news that he is about to be sued over an operation that went wrong nearly 50 years before.
Like everybody else, I read Le Carre’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold a very long time ago, but it is the action of that book which forms the backdrop to this latest foray into the mysterious lives of George Smiley’s people. The main protagonist of this tale being a former spy who as part of his job is used to lying all the time, so will lying his way through this see him in the clear? Not if the new guard at MI6 have anything to do with it, because they need someone to throw under the bus, and our man seems tailor-made for the fall-guy.
If you like Le Carre, and let’s face it nearly everyone does, you will savour this tale of the past entwining itself with the present. Give it a try.
Monday, 26 November 2018
Chapeau to Air BandB
Air Band B recently decided not to extend their operations to the Jewish settlements in the West Bank of the occupied territories of Palestine. In doing so they were simply taking note of the fact that in international law these settlements are illegal.
Palestinians are second class citizens in the land of Israel, almost aliens in their own country. They are denied the right to free travel, to live where they wish and even to set up manufacturing in order to survive economically. They are corralled behind 8 meter high concrete walls, which often deny them access to their own land. The situation has been described by no lesser personage than Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who, let’s face it, is in a position to speak on the subject, as “akin to Apartheid”.
Naturally Air BandB’s decision has been greeted by a hail of protest from Zionist groups around the world, who have labeled their decision, as they label anything critical of the Zionist state of Israel, as “anti-Semitic”. But I say, congratulations to them, for having the courage of their convictions in refusing to buttress an illegal state of affairs in Palestine.
Palestinians are second class citizens in the land of Israel, almost aliens in their own country. They are denied the right to free travel, to live where they wish and even to set up manufacturing in order to survive economically. They are corralled behind 8 meter high concrete walls, which often deny them access to their own land. The situation has been described by no lesser personage than Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who, let’s face it, is in a position to speak on the subject, as “akin to Apartheid”.
Naturally Air BandB’s decision has been greeted by a hail of protest from Zionist groups around the world, who have labeled their decision, as they label anything critical of the Zionist state of Israel, as “anti-Semitic”. But I say, congratulations to them, for having the courage of their convictions in refusing to buttress an illegal state of affairs in Palestine.
Monday, 5 November 2018
Now that’s what I call reading...
If asked about my hobbies, I will reply that I love reading; am an ‘avid’ reader in fact. I read 30, 40, sometimes 50 books a year and have been doing so since about the age of 10. Hence I may have read about 2000 books in my life, and should I live another twenty years, which is doubtful though not impossible, I may have read 3000, which I consider an excellent figure. It does not really qualify me as ‘well read’ in the classical meaning of that term, but it isn’t bad.
William Ewart Gladstone, the celebrated Victorian liberal politician who served 4 terms as Prime Minister, also described himself as an ‘avid’ reader, though with somewhat greater justification. In his life (he lived to the great age, at that time, of 89) he read over 22,000 books; that represents about 1 book a day throughout his adult life. And he didn’t just skip-read either. He kept most of the books he read, which are now collected into an impressive library, and they are filled with annotations which show he was reading every word, and paying close attention. Considering how busy he must have been (he served a near record 12 years as PM, held several cabinet minister posts and spent several decades as an MP), and also considering he had only candlelight to assist him in the night hours, it has to be an astonishing achievement.
I met a bloke once who was a member of a book-crossing club who reckoned he read 8 books a week. I wasn’t sure if I could believe him, though maybe I am being unfair. He is only half my age, in which case he must have surpassed my score years ago. Whether he will reach the prodigious proportions of Gladstone only time will tell. But how much does he (or did Gladstone, for that matter) retain of the books he reads? An Italian literature professor has said that if you have read a book but can remember nothing about it, then to all practical purposes you haven’t read it at all. Now that’s going to bring your score down a bit, I would have thought. But Gladstone sounds like he could have written a lengthy review of pretty much every book he ever read. Which is why in the realm of intellectual achievement. I would place his very high indeed. Keep reading guys...
William Ewart Gladstone, the celebrated Victorian liberal politician who served 4 terms as Prime Minister, also described himself as an ‘avid’ reader, though with somewhat greater justification. In his life (he lived to the great age, at that time, of 89) he read over 22,000 books; that represents about 1 book a day throughout his adult life. And he didn’t just skip-read either. He kept most of the books he read, which are now collected into an impressive library, and they are filled with annotations which show he was reading every word, and paying close attention. Considering how busy he must have been (he served a near record 12 years as PM, held several cabinet minister posts and spent several decades as an MP), and also considering he had only candlelight to assist him in the night hours, it has to be an astonishing achievement.
I met a bloke once who was a member of a book-crossing club who reckoned he read 8 books a week. I wasn’t sure if I could believe him, though maybe I am being unfair. He is only half my age, in which case he must have surpassed my score years ago. Whether he will reach the prodigious proportions of Gladstone only time will tell. But how much does he (or did Gladstone, for that matter) retain of the books he reads? An Italian literature professor has said that if you have read a book but can remember nothing about it, then to all practical purposes you haven’t read it at all. Now that’s going to bring your score down a bit, I would have thought. But Gladstone sounds like he could have written a lengthy review of pretty much every book he ever read. Which is why in the realm of intellectual achievement. I would place his very high indeed. Keep reading guys...
Thursday, 1 November 2018
Shock horror! Simpsons not politically correct!
In the home of free speech, a comedian of Indian origin (Hari Kondabolu) has spoken up for his 1 billion country folk and called Apu as being a travesty of their character; worse, he is voiced, not by an Indian but a Caucasian, namely Hank Azaria. So, people, stand up for your ethnic/social group and change the Simpsons for the better.
Come on, billionaires club, are you going to stand for Mr Burns portraying you as cynical money-grabbers who care only to increase their money mountains? And Frenchies, will you allow them to get away with calling you cheese eating surrender monkeys? Come to that, what about the originator of that calumny, Groundskeeper Willie? Surely he traduces the whole Scottish nation by his ridiculous accent and questionable practices of saving up grease for his retirement. Come to that, we must rid ourselves of the main character, Homer himself. A man who regularly binge drinks and physically abuses his son should be an affront to fathers everywhere.
George Bush snr once said he wanted American families to be more like the Waltons and less like the Simpsons. I have often found myself differing from the Bush family in their views, but here we can say he definitely got it right. We don’t want anyone other than Indians portraying Indians, we only want gays playing gays, trans-genders playing trans-genders, and cockneys playing cockneys. No more Americans pretending to be Brits, or the other way round. And let’s never, ever say anything that might offend anybody at all. That would be wrong.
Come on, billionaires club, are you going to stand for Mr Burns portraying you as cynical money-grabbers who care only to increase their money mountains? And Frenchies, will you allow them to get away with calling you cheese eating surrender monkeys? Come to that, what about the originator of that calumny, Groundskeeper Willie? Surely he traduces the whole Scottish nation by his ridiculous accent and questionable practices of saving up grease for his retirement. Come to that, we must rid ourselves of the main character, Homer himself. A man who regularly binge drinks and physically abuses his son should be an affront to fathers everywhere.
George Bush snr once said he wanted American families to be more like the Waltons and less like the Simpsons. I have often found myself differing from the Bush family in their views, but here we can say he definitely got it right. We don’t want anyone other than Indians portraying Indians, we only want gays playing gays, trans-genders playing trans-genders, and cockneys playing cockneys. No more Americans pretending to be Brits, or the other way round. And let’s never, ever say anything that might offend anybody at all. That would be wrong.
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