Archive for the ‘Cultural issues’ Category
What does it take to stop a US President going rogue?
September 16th, 2021 by Roger Darlington
So now we learn that the United States Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff had to reassure the Chinese that America was not about to launch a pre-emptive attack on them. This is an astonishing story to emerge about the last days of the presidency of Donald Trump. It reminds me a a novel […]
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A review of the 2019 Luc Besson movie “Anna”
September 15th, 2021 by Roger Darlington
No film written and directed by the French master Luc Besson is going to be dull – or ordinary. In some senses, this is Besson’s English-language revisiting of his French-language movie “La Femme Nikita” (1990) which gave rise to a Hollywood version “The Assassin” (1993) plus different television series in Canada and the United States. […]
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A review of the new blockbuster movie “Shang-Chi And The Legend Of The Ten Rings”
September 6th, 2021 by Roger Darlington
This is a movie which has to be seen on the big screen and I saw it on the biggest screen in Britain (the BFI IMAX). It is the first work in the now huge Marvel Cinematic Universe with an Asian lead: Chinese-Canadian actor Simu Liu in his first film role. Indeed almost all the […]
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A review of the novel “The Motion Of The Body Through Space” by Lionel Shriver
September 1st, 2021 by Roger Darlington
Lionel Shriver is actually a female American novelist who, as a tomboy aged 15, informally changed her name from Margaret Ann to Lionel. She is best known for her eighth novel “We Need To Talk About Kevin” but the only previous novel of hers that I’ve read is “The Post-Birthday World” (which was I was […]
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A review of the 2018 film “Destroyer”
August 30th, 2021 by Roger Darlington
This is a police thriller with a difference: the protagonist, a detective with the Los Angeles Police Department, is a woman – brilliantly played by Nicole Kidman – and the director is also a woman – Karyn Kusama whose partner Phil Hay is co-writer. The narrative centres around two bank robberies with many of the […]
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A review of the new movie “Free Guy”
August 23rd, 2021 by Roger Darlington
If you’ve never played a video game (I haven’t), you might struggle to work out what’s going on in the beginning of this movie. So it helps to know that it opens inside a video game where the human players are represented by characters with sunglasses and all the other figures are what are called […]
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A review of the 2018 film “All Is True”
August 20th, 2021 by Roger Darlington
It was a brave man who thought that a commercially successful film – as opposed to a reasonably appealing play – could be made about the last three years of the life of English playwright William Shakespeare during which time he retired to his home in Stratford-upon-Avon, wrote nothing, and further ruminated on the death […]
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Word of the day: larking
August 19th, 2021 by Roger Darlington
Larking is the art of looking for the little treasures that are all around us, on beaches (beachlarking), in fields (fieldlarking), at home (houselarking and gardenlarking) and of course mudlarking in rivers, especially on the River Thames, next to which I live.
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Ever heard of Sobibor?
August 16th, 2021 by Roger Darlington
Sobibor was a Nazi concentration camp in German-occupied Poland where, on 14 October 1943, there was a mass break-out of the 600 prisoners, some 300 managing to escape but only around 60 succeeding in avoiding recapture. This remarkable story is told in a 1987 film with a cast including Alan Arkin and Rutger Hauer which […]
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How can one possibly understand the complex and tragic history of Afghanistan?
August 16th, 2021 by Roger Darlington
One way is to read these three magnificent novels by Afghan-American author Khaled Hosseini: “The Kite Runner” – my review here “A Thousand Splendid Suns” – my review here “And The Mountains Echoed” – my review here
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