YIELD TO THE NIGHT (1956) D- J. Lee Thompson
A pretty young thing (Diana Dors) falls for a smooth-talking git, but then he snags an heiress. In her mind, there’s only one thing to do: shoot the heiress. Immediately apprehended, she admits her guilt and is sentenced to hang. End of. Pretty much. But no. Because actually the strength of this film, and what proves that Diana Dors was much more than a pneumatic British version of Jayne Mansfield, are the scenes inside her cell on Death Row, as she struggles to come to terms with the terrible fate that awaits her. Here we find that Diana Dors can really act, as we are totally persuaded by her reaction to her terrible plight.
The screenplay was apparently written before the story of Ruth Ellis broke, though the parallels are obvious. She, as you will recall, was the last woman in England to hang, following the murder of her errant boyfriend. The case hurried the long overdue removal of the death penalty in Britain. The death penalty didn’t deter her reckless act of pure emotion, just as it doesn’t deter the thousands of murderers every year in the U.S. But there they still hang on to the deterrence principle, just as they hang on to other outdated concepts of social policy, like allowing anyone to own AR15s or AK47s. But I digress...
AQUAMAN (2018) D- James Wan
In a hypothetical world, Aquaman (played by an excessively gorgeous Jason Momoa), a kind of well-toned merman, is the leader of the Ocean people in their struggle against the evil ones of the land (that’s us). In his quest for justice and freedom for starfish and so on, he is ably assisted by other equally gorgeous mermaids (Amber Heard, Nicole Kidman etc) and 143 minutes and a hell of a lot of CGI later the aqua-people emerge... well you wouldn’t want me to spoil it for you, so I won’t. Suffice it to say I was slightly underwhelmed by this effort, despite facing the opprobrium of millions who did, voting it 66% on Rotten Tomatoes and making it a profit of a cool quarter of a billion dollars.
But I will say the players look great on screen, and you can certainly see where the money went, when it wasn’t paying the salaries of the leads. If you like this sort of thing, you know, Avengers type stuff, then I guess this is for you. Enjoy.
LITTLE MAN TATE (1991) D- Jodie Foster
A trailer-trash girl in the boondocks has a son who has an IQ of 180 or so, making him one of the cleverest children in America. But she (Jodie Foster, for whom this film marked her directorial debut) isn’t really that interested. She’s more concerned about making an honest buck, and even when teacher Dianne Wiest implores her to take the proper steps to nurture his massive brain, she takes a bit of persuading. Finally she relents and allows him to go to a school for gifted children. Even there it isn’t that easy for our kid, who finds that a having a high IQ doesn’t mean you won’t get bullied by someone just as bright as you, only bigger.
I have to say I got a lot out of this movie, which demonstrated that Foster could direct as well as act. The difficulties of being brilliant are skilfully illustrated, and I loved the closing moment, when our hero, Fred, voices over:
“I was a bit overawed by all the attention at school, but then a six-year old kid joined us who’s going to law school and now nobody’s really interested in me anymore.”
Priceless.
HOTEL MUMBAI (2019) D- Anthony Maras
In 2008, trained and financed by a particularly evil jihadi group in Pakistan, a group of killers select various luxury locations in Mumbai, India, to carry out their dread mission: to wipe out as many rich people as they can.
Recording events in an almost drama-doc style, this film takes us very close to feeling the kind of fear the people exposed to it must have experienced. Although I know what happened, I still felt my knuckles going white as I watched to see who would escape the bombs and bullets, and who would not. And although the film has received some criticism for lack of character development, I found the whole package pretty worthwhile. There was a nasty Russian mafia type guy (played rather well by Jason Isaacs) who they could have done more with, and others they dwelled on a bit too much, but as I say, in the end it was a gripping, and, at times, extremely harrowing movie. This film was a ‘Sky Original’, which is something of a departure for them, because they tend to focus more on TV series, but it isn’t a bad attempt to break into the streaming platform movie production realm. Let’s see what they do next.
Monday, 30 September 2019
September 2019 book review part 2
UNDERLAND, by Robert McFarlane
In his latest book, McFarlane takes us on a dizzying journey into the depths of the Earth. He rightly points out how little we think about what lies beneath our feet, yet there is a whole world down there- or in fact many worlds. He shows us round a few of them: a dark matter detector in a salt mine half a mile under the Yorkshire dales, the labyrinthine corridors of now disused limestone quarries beneath the streets of central Paris, into a moulin, or sinkhole, in a Greenland glacier that leads hundred of metres down to the bedrock, and many, many others.
What struck me most vividly about this book, as with David Attenborough’s latest TV series Our Planet, is the way Mcfarlane drums into us, page after page, the jeopardy we have placed the Earth in, and how something MUST be done, and done NOW, to avoid an unprecedented catastrophe. There is a wonderful section on what has been called the ‘Wood-Wide-Web’, the underground connection between trees which is mediated through fungal networks, which benefits the trees as well as the fungi. Apparently trees are actually capable of helping each other by transferring nutrients to diseased trees through the network. Incredible, but true, yet all is under threat from ignorant and cynical exploitation of the Earth’s resources.
This is a wonderful book, beautifully written as always with McFarlane, but deeply disturbing too.
I for one will never look at a tree, at a copse, or a forest, in quite the same way again.
PALM BEACH FINLAND, by Antti Tuomainen
A developer has the brilliant idea of creating a Florida-style beach resort on the southern coast of Finland. Only two things stand in his way: the fact that, as he admits, there are only 7.5 hot days in Finland per year, and a recalcitrant homeowner who won’t sell her beachfront house so he can expand. He gets two loser employees to put the frighteners on her, but that goes wrong and someone ends up dead. An undercover cop is brought in to investigate on the QT, but things get a bit complicated when he falls for the rather attractive homeowner. Later things get a lot more complicated than that...
With his quirky, jokey style overlaying some very dark events, Tuomainen has created a cracking little thriller, good character building and plot development being his great strengths. I charged through this book at great speed, and enjoyed every minute. Strongly recommended if you like a bit of Nordic noir.
September 2019 book review part 1
THE NARROW ROAD TO THE DEEP NORTH, by Richard Flanagan
A young Australian man does well at school, qualifies as a doctor and is about to carve a successful career for himself when two things happen: first he falls in love with a married woman, then, war breaks out and he is called up to serve in the Far East. Taking a lot of emotional baggage with him, he soon finds plenty of things to distract him, most notably that he is almost immediately taken prisoner by the Japanese, who regard P.O.Ws as cowards and therefore not worthy of any of the human rights guaranteed them by the Geneva Convention. As senior officer as well as the only doctor, he has to stand by as his men fall prey to beri-beri, pellagra, cholera and, worst of all, the cynical and extreme cruelty of their captors.
Finally he is released at the end of the war, irretrievably scarred by his experiences, he resumes his medical career, but there is always something missing in his life. Like love, for example...
This book is stunning. Full of beauty as well as horror, I found it quite the most powerful piece of writing I have encountered in some years. The reader is completely immersed in the lives of the characters, feels the heat and humidity of the jungle, suffers with the prisoners through their terrible ordeal. Carries my highest recommendation.
THE NARROW ROAD TO THE DEEP NORTH, AND OTHER TRAVEL PIECES, by Matsuo Basho
Basho was a poet who lived in Japan in the latter part of the 17th century, and is now regarded as the greatest exponent of Haiku, the 3 line, 17 syllable format by which poets express some special insight about the natural world, and sometimes themselves. And this story, which mixes prose with haiku, takes us on a journey the poet took to visit important Buddhist shrines, other poets and ascetics, like himself, and generally undertake a journey of the mind and spirit as much as the body.
It’s a very human story. On one occasion, for instance, he takes a long detour to see the full moon rise over a Buddhist temple, only for it to remain cloudy all night, thus denying him the experience he has dreamed of for so long. Or when he returns from one trip, and writes:
Shed of everything else,
I still have some lice
I picked up on the road-
Crawling on my summer robes.
Note this does not conform to the format I mentioned above. The translator, Nobyuki Yuasa, has made a decision that in order to bring the full character and beauty of Basho’s haikus to life in English, he needs to use this format of his own design. But it’s not “wrong” to do this. The Japanese poets themselves used a variety of different formats when it suited them. Finally, I cannot resist quoting one more haiku for you, this one being regarded as possibly the ultimate flowering of his skill:
Breaking the silence
Of an ancient pond,
A frog jumped into water -
A deep resonance.
Obviously Flanagan borrowed the title of his book from Basho, and I believe we are meant to take from this the fact that the protagonist of the novel is himself on a spiritual journey of his own- which in a way, he is. But what I found as I read Basho’s account of his travels, his gentleness, his love of beauty and peace, his supreme insight into the human condition that all the greatest poets have, that fast forward three centuries, his own countrymen, no different in essence from Basho himself, would be committing some of the grossest atrocities against their fellow human beings the world has ever seen.
A young Australian man does well at school, qualifies as a doctor and is about to carve a successful career for himself when two things happen: first he falls in love with a married woman, then, war breaks out and he is called up to serve in the Far East. Taking a lot of emotional baggage with him, he soon finds plenty of things to distract him, most notably that he is almost immediately taken prisoner by the Japanese, who regard P.O.Ws as cowards and therefore not worthy of any of the human rights guaranteed them by the Geneva Convention. As senior officer as well as the only doctor, he has to stand by as his men fall prey to beri-beri, pellagra, cholera and, worst of all, the cynical and extreme cruelty of their captors.
Finally he is released at the end of the war, irretrievably scarred by his experiences, he resumes his medical career, but there is always something missing in his life. Like love, for example...
This book is stunning. Full of beauty as well as horror, I found it quite the most powerful piece of writing I have encountered in some years. The reader is completely immersed in the lives of the characters, feels the heat and humidity of the jungle, suffers with the prisoners through their terrible ordeal. Carries my highest recommendation.
THE NARROW ROAD TO THE DEEP NORTH, AND OTHER TRAVEL PIECES, by Matsuo Basho
Basho was a poet who lived in Japan in the latter part of the 17th century, and is now regarded as the greatest exponent of Haiku, the 3 line, 17 syllable format by which poets express some special insight about the natural world, and sometimes themselves. And this story, which mixes prose with haiku, takes us on a journey the poet took to visit important Buddhist shrines, other poets and ascetics, like himself, and generally undertake a journey of the mind and spirit as much as the body.
It’s a very human story. On one occasion, for instance, he takes a long detour to see the full moon rise over a Buddhist temple, only for it to remain cloudy all night, thus denying him the experience he has dreamed of for so long. Or when he returns from one trip, and writes:
Shed of everything else,
I still have some lice
I picked up on the road-
Crawling on my summer robes.
Note this does not conform to the format I mentioned above. The translator, Nobyuki Yuasa, has made a decision that in order to bring the full character and beauty of Basho’s haikus to life in English, he needs to use this format of his own design. But it’s not “wrong” to do this. The Japanese poets themselves used a variety of different formats when it suited them. Finally, I cannot resist quoting one more haiku for you, this one being regarded as possibly the ultimate flowering of his skill:
Breaking the silence
Of an ancient pond,
A frog jumped into water -
A deep resonance.
Obviously Flanagan borrowed the title of his book from Basho, and I believe we are meant to take from this the fact that the protagonist of the novel is himself on a spiritual journey of his own- which in a way, he is. But what I found as I read Basho’s account of his travels, his gentleness, his love of beauty and peace, his supreme insight into the human condition that all the greatest poets have, that fast forward three centuries, his own countrymen, no different in essence from Basho himself, would be committing some of the grossest atrocities against their fellow human beings the world has ever seen.
Tuesday, 24 September 2019
Bolsonaro: the new Trump
We all worried when we heard Trump got elected, with his disregard of any environmental concerns and his love of big money (these, of course, go together like beans on toast). But unfortunately, and just as some of us feared, the politics of the whole world took a lurch to the right, nowhere better personified than in Brazil, with the election of arch-populist Bolsonaro, who early on in his rule said he would be happy to pave over the Amazon if that would aid ‘progress’.
We thought he was joking, but unfortunately for the indigenous peoples of the Amazon rainforest, he wasn’t. He has allowed legal logging and development of this unique and precious place to proceed apace, and turned a blind eye to the even more pernicious practices of illegal mining projects. In their frantic greed for gold, these people are pouring toxins such as mercury into the watercourses, an agent which is poisonous to all forms of life. Mercury is part of the process of the extraction of gold, and gold fever has gripped Brazil. Who cares, as long as a profit is made? Not the mine owners certainly, and not Senor Bolsonaro either.
I was thinking yesterday that normally we like to think of the world moving gradually forward to a better, more enlightened place. But recent evidence, in Brazil and in a Trump administration that refuses to admit the reality of climate change and human involvement in it, we are actually moving backwards into a new dark age. Don’t say I didn’t warn you...
We thought he was joking, but unfortunately for the indigenous peoples of the Amazon rainforest, he wasn’t. He has allowed legal logging and development of this unique and precious place to proceed apace, and turned a blind eye to the even more pernicious practices of illegal mining projects. In their frantic greed for gold, these people are pouring toxins such as mercury into the watercourses, an agent which is poisonous to all forms of life. Mercury is part of the process of the extraction of gold, and gold fever has gripped Brazil. Who cares, as long as a profit is made? Not the mine owners certainly, and not Senor Bolsonaro either.
I was thinking yesterday that normally we like to think of the world moving gradually forward to a better, more enlightened place. But recent evidence, in Brazil and in a Trump administration that refuses to admit the reality of climate change and human involvement in it, we are actually moving backwards into a new dark age. Don’t say I didn’t warn you...
Monday, 16 September 2019
Jo takes a step too far
When Jo Swinson, leader of the LibDems, announced that should they win the next election they would cancel Brexit without even the recourse to a second referendum, I felt she made a serious error.
The LibDems have made major strides in recent months, constituting as they do one of the major bulwarks against the arch-right-wingers of the Brexit party. Many people voted for them rather than their usual fall-back position of Labour or Tory because of their ambiguous posture on Brexit. And they would, I believe, have made a terrific showing in the next election on that strength alone. Now, though, I’m not so sure.
I wish we’d never held a referendum in the first place. I wish David Cameron had held out against the Brexiteer ‘bastards’ in his own party in the same way as John Major did - basically by telling them to go and fuck themselves. But he didn’t, and 17 million people, 52% of the voters, voted leave. Certainly I would like to see a second vote- what’s wrong with testing public opinion again after a 3-4 year gap in a decision as important as this? But defying the wishes of those 17 million people altogether, ignoring them in fact, could have terrible consequences, for the nation, which might see not only the worst civil disorder this country has seen since the Civil War should such a thing come to pass, but to the LibDems themselves for even suggesting such a thing.
I foresee a dramatic downturn in their fortunes now because of it. Change your mind on this one, Jo, and do it quick, before you run your party onto the rocks.
The LibDems have made major strides in recent months, constituting as they do one of the major bulwarks against the arch-right-wingers of the Brexit party. Many people voted for them rather than their usual fall-back position of Labour or Tory because of their ambiguous posture on Brexit. And they would, I believe, have made a terrific showing in the next election on that strength alone. Now, though, I’m not so sure.
I wish we’d never held a referendum in the first place. I wish David Cameron had held out against the Brexiteer ‘bastards’ in his own party in the same way as John Major did - basically by telling them to go and fuck themselves. But he didn’t, and 17 million people, 52% of the voters, voted leave. Certainly I would like to see a second vote- what’s wrong with testing public opinion again after a 3-4 year gap in a decision as important as this? But defying the wishes of those 17 million people altogether, ignoring them in fact, could have terrible consequences, for the nation, which might see not only the worst civil disorder this country has seen since the Civil War should such a thing come to pass, but to the LibDems themselves for even suggesting such a thing.
I foresee a dramatic downturn in their fortunes now because of it. Change your mind on this one, Jo, and do it quick, before you run your party onto the rocks.
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