Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category
A review of the 2016 political thriller “Miss Sloane”
August 19th, 2021 by Roger Darlington
This film is a terrific reminder of a lesson too often forgotten in the world of movies: a really good film has to start with a really good script. Amazingly, the scriptwriter in this case, the British Jonathan Perera, had never written a film before this one which won him Best Screenplay from the Writers’ […]
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Happy 200th birthday to the “Guardian” newspaper
May 5th, 2021 by Roger Darlington
For half a century now, I’ve read the “Guardian” newspaper and, even today, I regularly spend between one and two hours a day devouring its unique curation of stories from the UK and around the world. Its coverage of the coronavirus global pandemic has been outstanding. Most of the time, it reflects – more than […]
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A review of the new film “Judas And The Black Messiah”
March 21st, 2021 by Roger Darlington
This is a true story set in Chicago in the late 1960s. This was an especially terrible time to be a protestor – particularly a black protestor – in the United States as previously set out in films like “Detroit” and “The Trial Of The Chicago 7”. In this case, the messiah is the Chairman […]
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Always look on the bright side of life
March 8th, 2021 by Roger Darlington
Sometime ago, I wrote a rather tongue-in-cheek piece about “Why It’s Fun To Be In One’s Sixties Or Seventies In Britain”. Today England started the 15-week process of lifting the restrictions imposed for the third lockdown of the coronavirus pandemic. The main change is the return to school of children. This made me think about […]
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Word of the day: comity
February 11th, 2021 by Roger Darlington
In legal language, there is a term comity of nations which is the friendly recognition accorded by one nation to the laws and and usages of another. More generally, the word comity means mutual civility or courtesy. I came across the word in a profile of the new US President Joe Biden which suggested that […]
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Word of the day: meliorism
February 8th, 2021 by Roger Darlington
Meliorism is the doctrine that the world tends to become better or may be made better by human effort. It comes from the Latin word melior which means better. I first came across the term meliorism today when reading a new book: a biography of the new US president Joe Biden by Evan Osnos. Osnos […]
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“A Promised Land” by Barack Obama (5)
January 25th, 2021 by Roger Darlington
Obama campaigned for the White House as an anti-war candidate: he had opposed the invasion of Iraq and, in the presidential election campaign, he argued that the war in Afghanistan had been neglected as a result of the focus on Iraq. Once in the White House, however, he quickly found himself having to back the […]
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A review of the film “On The Basis Of Sex”
October 1st, 2020 by Roger Darlington
When veteran US Supreme Court member Ruth Bader Ginsberg died last month aged 87, I quickly accessed and viewed the two films about her released in 2018. First, I saw “RBG”, a fine documentary covering the whole of her life. Then I caught up with “On The Basis Of Sex”, a feature film written by […]
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A review of a book on the Texel Uprising of 1945
August 3rd, 2020 by Roger Darlington
Like his earlier book “Operation Basalt”, historian Eric Lee has managed to take a little-known and – in the grand scheme of the Second World War – small-scale incident and turn it in to a fascinating story by putting the events into a wider context with a variety of points of view. Both “Operation Basalt” […]
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A review of the film “A Good Day To Die Hard”
July 21st, 2020 by Roger Darlington
After the considerable success of “Die Hard” (1988) and “Die Hard 2” (1990) and the more restrained reception for “Die Hard With A Vengeance” (1995) and “Die Hard 4.0” (2007), it must have been just too tempting to milk the franchise a bit more with this fifth (and surely final) outing in 2013 by independent-minded […]
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