Review of the Year

For the last six months I've been posting a weekly Facebook link to my highlights of the week in popular culture. Or maybe unpopular culture would be better? You know me.

On balance it is worth doing this as well though. I like trying to work out what was the best of the year, especially last year which didn't have many bests in it.

Music

My favourite individual tunes of 2020 are on this link to Spotify. It seems to have been a year when my spirits were raised by three chords and jangly guitars. Nowt wrong with that.

For album of the year I often struggle. New music is simply music you haven't heard before. As I do not listen to much radio I quite often 'discover' music that's been around a bit. Which meant it was great to find the Billy Franks' back catalogue and Man Alive by The 4 of Us (which I had on cassette in the car in the 1990s) make their way onto Spotify. But that said I enjoyed:

EOB - Earth

Foals - Collected Remixes

HAIM - Women in Music Pt. III 

Khruangbin - Mordecai

Surprise Chef - All News is Good News

Westerman - Your Hero is Not Dead

Zapatilla - Zapatilla

Reading

I read more books in 2020 than any year since records began (1988). But how many were written in 2020? Not many. Plaudits to:

Fiction

Andrew Hunter Murray - The Last Day

Daisy Johnson - Sisters

Catherine Lacey - Pew

Fact

Adam Rutherford - How to Argue with a Racist

Screen

In TV/Film I caught up with many box-sets during lock-down using a Prime subscription and latterly Netflix. Like many others our favourite film of the year was Armando Iannucci's spirit-lifting The Personal History of David Copperfield.

But I found the year much-improved by Better Call Saul, Peaky Blinders, Bones (plots become increasingly improbable by Season 5), The Good Fight and Brokenwood.

Food

Wapping Wharf

I only had three or four meals out all year but all were nice. My usual haunt of WB at Wapping Wharf is always good but Gambas Tapas just along from there is also excellent.

I missed my couple of times a year at the Pony and Trap at Chew but found the yurt version at Breaking Bread on the Downs very acceptable for a wedding anniversary. In April the Pony and Trap at Chew is changing its focus to a foraging and training centre with meals for volunteers on the estate. But they are opening a restaurant in Bedminster. Hooray.

Clifton Downs Yurts

On a north Wales holiday I discovered that Cadwaladers ice-cream in Criccieth was as good as ever. Also that Grasmere Gingerbread can be mail-ordered.

Here's to better things to review away from home in 2021.

Arrival

I have caught up with a few sci-fi films recently such as Interstellar and The Martian, but Arrival was the best of the bunch. Why?

Well let me ask you a question. Have you ever met someone so unaware of world geography that they might say something such as, 'I wouldn't want to go to Africa because I don't speak African.'

So the premise of this film is that when life forms from another world arrive they may not come in a single craft to explore, or as an invasion fleet to attack. They might come in a small fleet and all distribute themselves around the earth.

The 'arrival' happens in the opening scenes after a brief back-story concerning the lead character, a linguist called Loiuse Banks, which we need to know. And the different nations that are visited engage in various ways and are reluctant to share their learning.

It occurs to me that I hope someone, somewhere has drawn the conclusion that if we are ever visited by another world the only response possible and sensible is a peaceful one. Any life form that has worked out how to do space travel will, we must assume, have vastly superior weapons technology.

Note also, in passing, that we should discard old ideas very slowly. On entering an alien space craft the team need to know if the atmosphere, which appears OK, will harm them at all. So they take a budgie.

And if we ever get to a planet with intelligent life on it we might bear in mind that more than one race might live there and some of them may be welcoming and some not.

Made I think.

Jurassic World

There's a moment in this film where the owners of the Jurassic World attraction discuss the motivation they had to genetically modify a dinosaur. They lament the fact that the visitor numbers had reduced and the boffin reminds the owner what he had said 'We need more teeth.'

Jurassic Park was a new genre of disaster movie but pretty much the only disaster that could occur was escaping creatures. It was well done but the premise was established. I never went to the sequel.

So one can well guess that the teeth conversation also happened in script meetings, in re-imagining the franchise. Numbers are down. How can we get every school kid in the world to see this in the summer holidays?

This latest effort is film-making by numbers. We pretty much know that the new big baddie is going to get out. We know the kids will be in trouble. We try to guess which of the supporting cast will be dinofood.

There are some questions to ponder. The creationists are nailed in scene one as it is made clear to the audience that this team reckons birds are descended from dinosaurs. As most scientists do. We are invited to wonder if genetic-modification should be controlled by ethical limits rather than money.

But it didn't need a film to do that. Take a movie-cliché bingo card with you and tick off everything from Mum telling the kids to be careful to the happy couple walking off into the sunset.

If you like escapism and have never seen screaming crowds running backwards and forwards in panic, go now.

Empire (4/5) and Roger Ebert (3/4). Usually reliable guides. They can't have been paid off? Maybe the 3D is better.

Locke

I wrote down the name of this little film a few months ago having read a review somewhere which obviously intrigued me. Then I forgot all about it until I saw the DVD for sale. I commend this particular practice for this particular film. It would be good to watch this film without knowing how it is going to work. It is better if it dawns on you after a while.

It has a very unusual premise. About ten minutes in I remembered what it was. Trust me when I say that this film is worth watching. It is a suspense film. It is a thriller. And in case anyone has ever said to you that something is about as exciting as watching concrete dry then they are wrong. This is about laying concrete and it is exciting.

We meet Project Manager Ivan Locke (Tom Hardy in a brilliant performance) as he drives away from a deserted site. We learn very early on that he is going to be missing on the most important day of his working life (tomorrow) because something more important, personally, has come up.

Can he talk other people calmly through the necessary complexities of a massive concrete-pour whilst battling the inner voice of a father who deserted him and explaining the circumstances of his absence to his family?

The answer takes eighty-two minutes. Locke is in every scene. Gripping. And breaks a lot of the rules of movies to be so.

Short Term 12

This is a lovely little film directed and written by Destin Cretton (new to me) from the autumn of 2013.

It is set in a centre / care home for troubled children and young people. None of the cast were particularly familiar to me.

As Nate is introduced to his new co-workers over the opening credits we are led to suspect this will be about a fish-out-of-water posh kid learning to understand deprivation for the first time. In fact Nate isn't the star of the show; the whole cast is.

We visit a team of caring care-workers - sometimes working with the therapists who offer more directed interventions into the young lives and sometimes kicking against them - and we observe day-to-day interactions. We are left to marvel at the patience shown by thousands of such employees around the world day-by-day. This film is a counter to the bad stories about abuse in such establishments.

Sometimes a barrier is broken by shared artwork; sometimes by rhythm and rap. It is about being incarnational and looking for connections.

That said, all is not well. Even the carers have their demons and through gentle dialogue and a number of scenes where 'show' is used much better than 'tell' we learn more.

This is a tough place to work, a tough place to grow up and yet, because the problems are real, the redemption, when it comes, is too. So a troubled young girl can help a worker, who has buried her own past, to deal with it.

The book-ending of two, almost identical, scenes is a lovely framing device to start and finish. That they mean different things is all to do with context.

Great performances. Only 96 minutes of your life needed and I rented my copy from Amazon for 99p. Best use of money this year.

Noah

Not too much plot spoiling here because the story is well-known.

Russell Crowe scowls through almost every scene of this re-imagined biblical myth. He is a dark, brooding character, haunted by the feeling of a mission from his god but never fully clear what it will be. Each step of the way is revealed to him in dreams, symbolic moments, miracles and developing perception. His grandfather Methuselah has the power of vision and healing at his command and touch and is the patriarchal consultant for the whole family.

In that way it is more in keeping with the way people feel they hear God today. No voice from heaven but a need to act on hunches, consult the wise, and interpret these in terms of obedience/disobedience afterwards. Although Noah gets a good dose of God's special effects with very good CGI.

This Noah does not expect to repopulate the earth. Indeed he feels compelled to make sure this will not happen, leading to conflict with his own family.

It is a classic battle between good and evil. In order to provide some narrative tension we have a stowaway on the ark and much made of Ham and Japheth's concern that they have no wives. The biblical narrative simply describes the occupants of the ark as Noah and his wife, his sons and their wives (unnamed). By the end we see how the film thinks this might happen. It is a bit awkward for us. All the pre-genesis 12 stories take liberties with the table of kindred and affinity (if you take them literally).

Andreas Whittam Smith, writing in The Independent last week, said he was disappointed that it was not 'a literal reading of the ancient accounts'. He was looking for ark design tips, survival techniques and final-resting-place solutions. None of these questions are answered by the Bible so how a literal reading could have helped him is beyond me. Furthermore, in using the existence of fallen angels - the film calls them 'Watchers' - director Darren Aronofsky has solved the problem of how the ark's occupants manage to hold back the crowds of potential boat-crashers. He also invents a sleeping gas which solves the many questions about animal behaviour on board.

Myths and legends raise many questions of detail; we are not meant to worry about their precise answers. We are meant to be concerned about questions of selfish human behaviour where every inclination of the thoughts of our hearts might be only evil all the time. And if there is a god how such selfishness might be perceived.

The Bible wants us to be fruitful and multiply in peaceful co-operation. And this early agenda is strictly vegetarian. This film asks serious questions of those whose industrial behaviour robs the land of its non-renewables. We watch three endings in effect. The rainbow is there but we are not given its biblical meaning. Ham marches off but we are not told he is to be the father of the Canaanites, or how. Noah is seen by his sons, drunk and naked but we are not told how offensive this is in such a culture.

Our lovely friends at Damaris have made some fantastic resources to go along with the film and use it to explore the truth.

Enjoyable escapism with a lot to ponder.

American Hustle

Lots of conversation about this one in the media. And it's a good conversation starter.

Don't think that the word 'hustle' in the title sets up a scam movie with special effects like the TV programme of the same name. This is a late seventies period piece, perfectly costumed and cast, and is at its heart a character driven thing.

Consequently the beginning is a little slow and overlong but it couldn't be too much shorter without failing to introduce these characters properly. For everyone in this movie is a bit dodgy and thus it is not obvious, until the pay-off, who is conning who. No-one controls their temper, keeps their demons closeted or goes bravely into action.

Christian Bale's con artist Irving Rosenfeld works as a bottom feeder in the scam game, until he meets Sydney Prosser (Amy Adams) who encourages him to raise the stakes. Doing this he comes to the interest of the Feds who recruit him to catch bigger fish.

And so the big con starts as all the palm-greasers and health-threateners in public life, including some from the corridors of political power, are attracted to the idea of investing in the regeneration of Atlantic City. Who will they bribe to get the investment and work?

The audience I shared this with laughed aloud many times, possibly recalling their own failure to grasp new technology such as a microwave 'science oven'.

I loved it. Had a brief wonder as to why a soundtrack from 1978 was early 70s soft rock (plus Elton John) and a bit of disco. No punk at all although I think the Ramones would have injected a certain something.

Lincoln

Politics, it has often been remarked, is the art of the possible. Entering politics with a things-to-achieve list one has to assess realistically how much can actually be done and not allow over-reaching to jeopardise the lot. It follows that progress made in politics over the years has always been a matter of falling short of doing the full, what we now know as, good. It is often the opposition taunt at an inadequate bill. But under-reaching can even cause a whole bill to fall so it is important not to attempt too little. How do you pitch it right?

So for me the big star of Lincoln is Tommy Lee-Jones' life-scarred, limping Thaddeus Stevens. Here is a man who has spoken all his political life about equality in all things, who clearly envisions a day when those now slaves are not only free, but have a vote and can stand for office. Will he settle for less than that? Will he pitch it right?

Much of the movie is set in the House of Representatives. Discussions are lively, loud and a little uncontrolled.

Behind the scenes wheeling and dealing is taking place. To get the Thirteenth Amendment to the US Constitution through and abolish slavery requires bribery or promise of future preferment. No Democrat will be persuaded to vote for the measure to end the Civil War if they think the war will end anyway. And the war is limping towards a conclusion. As are its participants, a wheel-barrow of body-parts making as big a point as a twenty minute battlefield scene might. We know Spielberg can do that.

Lincoln needs to work closely with his Commander-in-Chief, Ulysses S. Grant, to make sure, somehow, that the war doesn't end before the amendment vote. When Lincoln sends a note to the House of Representatives assuring them there is no peace-meeting planned in Washington it is dismissed, in a heckle, as 'a lawyer's truth'. Which is true. It is.

Lincoln is a dialogue-based movie. It is The West Wing set in 1865. The President, Jed Bartlet like, has a story for every occasion and his team grunt their disapproval when he starts on one. They've heard it before. Tables are piled with papers and packages, messages take ages to get through and morse-coded wire transmissions are cutting edge.

I don't know if Day-Lewis' character is well-drawn - my history is too poor - but I do know that the mask he wears never drops, or even droops. Awards deserved.

A bit late on the scenes for a full review of this movie so I'll stop short, the Oscars already having been distributed, but a great film.

And how strange for us liberal lefties to watch a film where the Republicans are the good guys.

Life of Pi

I loved Yann Martel's award-wining novel and feared the movie would spoil it. It didn't. I should have been comfortable that the story would be safe in Ang Lee's hands.

Pi Patel, a bright young Indian grows up in an enquiring, liberal family, his father a zoo-owner, where his desire to believe in as many gods as there are drives his parents mad. They wish he would promote a spirit of scientific curiosity and not worry so much about faith. 'I want to be baptised' he states, spoiling a meal, although we can guess he will consider himself a Hinduislamochristian so syncretistic has his searching been to date.

He tells his story, looking back, to a young Canadian novelist, Martel, who has just given up on a long-term project, a novel set in Portugal which he has been in India writing. There he has met a member of Patel's family who suggest they meet. Over a meal and a walk Patel tells Martel the tale of what happened when his father decided to sell his zoo and emigrate but the ship was wrecked and he was left in a lifeboat. You only need to view the movie posters to learn there is also a Bengal tiger in the lifeboat with Patel so this is not a plot spoiler.

Patel explains the story in wonderful colour and depth, remarking as he does on the amazing relationship between humans and animals and the gods he prayed to as he came to the conclusion that he must accept the likelihood of his own death. Martel finds it hard to believe the story. 'As did the insurance investigators' says Patel and proceeds to tell the story he told the insurance people to satisfy them.

At the end of the second tale Martel is asked which he prefers and makes his judgement. He has a story to write. It is a good narrative device. We are asked to judge which of two fictions is the most believable.

In passing it is a delight to see meerkats treated as fast food, a tasty snack for a tiger, a lovely display of a starry night at sea and the comparative sizes of large fish and mammals. And the 3D experience, rather than doing the obvious thing of making animals jump at you, makes the whole thing come to life.

Lovely film.

Go to Damaris to get resources to aid group discussion.

The Dark Knight Rises

Bit late for a film review of this but I missed it at the cinema and just bought the box set of all three Nolan Batman films. I really liked the first two and love Christopher Nolan's work so had high hopes. Also, the reviews were good - Roger Ebert 3/4, Empire Magazine 5/5 for instance.

I thought it sucked. It was too long, I didn't engage with many of the characters and I felt the villain Bane's mask made him look like Darth Vadar but with a silly voice. Batman has the Vadar voice in this trilogy.

The whole story failed to grab me or convince me and I longed for it to end.

I think I am too old for endless CGI sequences that seem more like computer gaming than a movie.

Horrid, apart from Michael Caine's Alfred and a good opening plane hijack sequence.

Skyfall

Nowhere do you suspend reality more than at the movies. Nowhere more do you suspend reality at the movies than at a Bond movie. Born in around 1921 Commander James Bond, were it not for same reality suspension, would be fighting on top of trains, ducking the bridges the while, in his early 90s. What we love about the reinvented hero is his eternal middle age.

Bond films have always had boxes to tick and Sam Mendes' take on the theme puts all the boxes on show. There are chases, girls, pre-credit action sequences, meet-ups with villain, torture, stakes-raised, end-of-world threatened and day saved eventually.

Thing is he puts the boxes on show but doesn't tick them all. In the pre-credit action sequence Bond dies. OK he doesn't. You knew that. But he fails and falls and falls. Bond goes to a casino but doesn't gamble. He doesn't take on his arch-enemy at a chosen sport in which henchmen lengthen his odds. There is no exploding pen and the response to Q's supply of gadgets is 'It's not exactly Christmas is it?' A car to show off? Well no. He has to get the old Goldfinger Aston Martin out (and threaten M with the ejector seat). He drinks his martini but appears on the verge of alcoholism. The torture is psychological. Are you really gay Mr Bond?

Yes the other Bond films get a tick too. Jumps on the back of scary animals which eat one of their handlers? Of course. Gets it on with expendable girl. Why yes. Demonstrates his knowledge of technology to spot something the greatest geek in the world has missed. Absolutely.

What is interesting is Mendes' nod at other action films too. He likes us to know what he has watched in preparation.

Hero apparently dead under the water - Bourne ticked. Opposed by nemesis with hideous deformity which is blamed on the forces of law and order. Batman ticked. Revisiting the graves of his deceased parents one of whom has the second name Delacroix. Harry Potter ticked. Taking the villains back to home territory to fight them on familiar, technology-free ground. Yeah, Crocodile Dundee gets a tick.

It's a good film and would have been even if it wasn't a Bond film. It's more about acting than action this time. Those wanting their viewing to stumble from set-piece to set-piece will have had to pay attention. M is in the spotlight. Someone wants revenge. She is being compromised, hacked and, worst of all, grilled by a Select Committee although the Committee gets more interesting when guns are involved. This is a bad guy versus Bond film. No secret lairs full of gizmos and monorails. Cats aren't stroked (they haven't been for a long time) and Bond isn't left anywhere to die slowly and imaginatively. He doesn't do too well at the fitness tests after his injury and the psychiatrist gets the better of him at interview, although we don't find out the significance of how until later.

But. The plot is resolved, the end is satisfying and, perhaps unlike the way we felt at the end of Quantum of Solace, we look forward to more. Bond will be back, we are told over the final credits, reminding us that Arnie's franchise is over.

Mendes showed in American Beauty that he is the go-to guy to make a plastic bag blowing in the wind look attractive. His Bond cinematography is sensational from the moment at the beginning when an alienesque silhouette walks towards us, the light eventually revealing it is a man. Half of Daniel Craig's rugged face appears at the last minute. From the grey wash of a dusty chapel floor to the statuesque pose on a dragon boat the images are amazing. We'll forgive an early continuity weirdness where M doesn't appear to pick up her handbag but it mysteriously leaves the room too.

The pre-show adverts had a remarkable list of Bond tie-ins. You could even smell of 007 this Christmas. 'You never see Bond detergents or irons' said one of my companions.

Loved it.

Looper

I loved Rian Johnson's Brick and so the reviews his time-travelling hit-men story have been getting didn't surprise me. What did please me was that the film is emotionally sustaining throughout - the characters are well-drawn and, as an action film, it has satisfying dialogue and plot in between the shooty bits. It is more than simply sci-fi.

Set in the future, twice, we are in a world where murders are impossible (because the bodies can't be hidden anymore) so victims from 2074 are sent back in time to be rubbed out by specialists in 2044. That both are in our future allows Johnson to imagine the progress the world might make in 30 and 60 years. It's not good. Joe (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) plays the 2044 hit-man. He waits in a field. A bound and hooded victim materialises. He blows them away, incinerates the body, and gets paid. Eventually, to close the loop (of the title) the assassin's older-self will be sent back. For this dispatch the murderer will discover what he has done when he finds a double payment. Then he will know he has thirty years to live.

In 2044 a mutant gene has left a small percentage of the population with telekinetic ability. Most just use this skill to pull, but watch out for a master.

Should, through blunder or circumstance, someone escape the loop, then finding the younger one and killing them ends it all. But it is much more satisfying to etch a sketch on the younger one or cut off a finger or two. Torture is presaged but not delivered to our eyes. Old Joe escapes the loop.

Of course there are questions begged. But mainly they strike you afterwards. During the actual two hours it is quite easy to roll with it. There was one short scene I didn't get - it may have been supposed to take place in someone's head.

Inception set the bar quite high for this sort of thing with the special effects dominating in that case. Here we have good action sequences and Brucie (Willis, playing Old Joe) gets to shoot an awful lot of people. But he also gets faced with the old question 'Would you kill a child if you knew how unpleasantly s(he) was going to turn out?' One for the post-movie drinks discussion.

The end doesn't suck. Often the resolution of the time-changing conundrums causes such movies to disappear up their own portal. This one doesn't. In fact a couple of late introductions (ideas and characters) make for a satisfying final act. And lots to talk about.

There is a murder suggested in 2074. It isn't a plot-hole so much as a review-generator. What would they have done with the body if that person died. The conclusion of the film makes this irrelevant. Or does it?

Go spin your head. Recommended.

Moneyball

Here's a nice little film that crept under the wire last year. Brad Pitt plays Billy Beane, the manager of a going-nowhere baseball team. We open as he tries to negotiate new contracts for next season and discovers that the big teams are buying all his best players. Or are they?

As his coaching staff implore him to hire charismatic under-achievers he encounters, on a visit to another club, a statistician, Peter Brand (Jonah Hill), a recent economics graduate, who has to get someone else to speak for him because when he speaks for himself he is ignored.

Rather than hiring players Beane hires the statistician and discovers soon that many players with good averages are over-looked because they have family problems, appearance issues, are too old or have a penchant for night-clubs, drugs and alcohol.

The team he assembles, against the will of his coaching staff, bombs to begin with, but mainly because his chief coach Art Howe (Philip Seymour-Hoffman being his usual brilliant gruff) plays them out of position. Beane sells the preferred players until Howe has no choice. Then the winning streak starts.

It's a film about statistics over intuition and its brilliance is in the dialogue not the sport (which is brief, done in clips and uses much newsreel footage). And a peek behind the scenes at the reality of what it is to be traded without a chance to respond. No surprise that Aaron Sorkin (The West Wing; The Social Network) turned out to be a writer.

Maths and sport - almost perfect entertainment.

Four Lions

You can pretty much guarantee that if a film has Chris Morris' name amongst the credits it will be a movie with a target. In Four Lions the radicalised Muslims, with the exception of Omah their leader, are all special needs cases. Lest we feel complacent, and laugh at these too much, the police are portrayed as trigger-happy and unconcerned they may have killed an innocent victim as long as they can resolve whether a Wookie is a bear or not. Innocent witnesses are too easily fobbed off and a next-door neighbour fails to notice the bomb-making equipment on the table. Yupp. We're laughing at our own inadequacies as potential witnesses of an atrocity.

It's very funny but, as ever with Morris, it makes a point . Even a stupid suicide bomber can get lucky. And there is something really creepy about the way Omah's culturally-western family accept the fate to which he has committed himself.

Satire. It's complicated. Laugh and learn.

Up

The 2009 animated Disney film Up is a delightful way to spend 90 minutes. Beginning with a child seeking adventure it follows Carl (for it is he) and, in one of the most moving opening sequences to any film I have ever seen, catalogues the reasons why it is never quite the right time to head off to South America to see the much-anticipated Paradise Falls.

Eventually, old, crippled, grey and frustrated at the encroachment of the city to his front garden Carl, a retired balloon salesman, attaches helium balloons to his house and heads off in the direction the film title suggests.

Are you having a mid-life crisis? Are you old and grey and feel you've never chased your dreams? Is there something that holds a call over your life which you haven't yet done? Are you Abram in disguise?

You will laugh and cry (if I'm anything to go by) but it's terrific family entertainment. And if you do decide to fly your house away just watch for the fat kid hiding under the veranda. You don't always get to choose who you share your adventures with.

Watch the trailer here.

Following

I've had the movie Following in my in-tray of films to watch for a while now. It's only 70 minutes long and was Christopher Nolan's (Memento, Insomnia) directorial debut back in 1999. It is a black and white thriller about a writer, Bill, who researches a story by following people but ends up following someone who notices. Many scenes appear out of sequence - Bill begins sporting a black eye long before we see the scene in which he gets it. It is well constructed, tightly plotted, brilliantly acted and not easy to guess. Recommended.

The Social Network

Anyone who ever tried to follow a member of the cast down a corridor in The West Wing knows that concentration is everything when Aaron Sorkin is responsible for the words. He distilled American politics down into a thousand penetrative conversations. So we could get it.

Since The Social Network is a movie about a computer programmer it is a good job Sorkin is on the scene again. From the opening moments as Mark Zuckerberg spars with a girlfriend in a bar, trying to outwit her into staying with him (like, that ever worked), we discover that this movie is about geeks and nerds but told through witty banter.

The film is the story of Facebook, the brainchild of Zuckerberg when a student at Harvard, the account of the world's youngest billionaire and the court cases with those who felt he had stolen their intellectual property.

It's a great film. Roger Ebert has, as ever, written a cracking review and so those who want to know about actors, directors and the like go there. I just loved the fact that it is an intelligent movie which asks its viewers to be smart and keep up too.

You'll be exhausted by dialogue and delighted that the last few moments are told in text boxes of the 'what happened next' variety to wind it up. And you'll wonder if the outcome of those court cases (which never got to court) were fair. And you might even put a link to your review on Facebook. Let the synergy commence.

The Ghost

Saw this movie last week. It has been hyped a bit what with the whole combo of Roman Polanksi directing and it being about contemporary British politics. I hadn't read the Robert Harris book before seeing the movie so I had no plot expectations. Friends tell me there have been some changes.

Usually I love hyped films and find them as good as the blurb. I have to confess to being disappointed here. I didn't find the characters convincing, found Ewan McGregor surprisingly wooden, especially in a scene where he interviews a local (to the ex PMs home) about a recent murder and speedily extracts more information than a police investigation had.

It bobbed along quickly enough but I couldn't bring myself to believe that the British press, who are very good at digging out scandal, could have missed something as massive as the concealed truth here.

If you had bumped off a ghost writer of your biography because he had found out too much, and if you treated his manuscript with such care it could not be removed from one room in a secure house, would you really not have searched that writer's bedroom thoroughly before inviting the replacement in?

Fun way to pass a couple of hours. Only two stars from me though.

Up in the Air

What's the job no-one likes? Firing people. So Ryan Bingham, (George Clooney) in this smart movie, plays a nation-circling businessmen who has the job of doing the job no-one likes. And he does it well. He fires people for a living, telling them just the right words to calm them down but never getting emotionally involved. He is aiming for an award from the airline he frequents for miles travelled. On one plane journey he is asked where he comes from and he looks around and says, 'Here.' He spends over 300 days a year away from home. His flat looks emptier than a hotel room. His family don't really know him.

Natalie (Anna Kendrick), a young, female employee straight from business school, joins his company and comes up with a plan for Skype-firing people. This puts Bingham's job on the line but he persuades his boss that she needs to go on the road with him to learn the ropes. She appears more emotionally detached even than Bingham but is looking for love in her private life and has followed a boyfriend to her current home town. Bingham falls for another globe-trotting executive, Alex (Vera Farmiqa), as a casual relationship turns serious.

This is a serious movie (from Jason Reitman, the Director of Juno) with great observation about life, some funny moments and many ponderable quotes. Bingham's firm does well in a recession but we see lots of interviews with those who have lost their jobs, wondering what they are going to do, how they will tell the kids etc. Some of the more poignant moments are simply shots of rooms full of unwanted desks and chairs, or open plan offices where work stations have been removed.

At a time of crisis everything can go up in the air. Bingham asks his interviewees, not particularly sincerely, 'Are you going to make this the start of your dreams?' He promises support and follow-up but then disappears as quickly as possible. He knows it's a hollow promise.

All he wants is their desks cleared and their passes handed back.

One interview leads to disaster. When Bingham is asked if he can remember anything unusual about it (we can) he says no. Is this his genuine memory? Has he so distanced himself that nothing strikes him as extraordinary as he delivers the news that wrecks lives? Or is he covering?

What is the value of a human being?
Where do you come from?
How do you handle crisis moments and turning points?
If you are to be made redundant, how would you like it to happen?
From what do you emotionally detach in order to do your job?

Five star first act; four star the rest. See it.

Star Trek

Went to see the new Star Trek (the prequel) yesterday. I'm not a trekkie but people I trust recommended it highly. They were right. Two hours plus shot past. Go.