Peter Bradshaw’s top ten films of 2017
December 12th, 2017 by Roger Darlington
I have previously done a blog posting on the top 20 films of 2017 as chosen by “Empire” magazine. Now I offer you the top 10 movies of the past year as chosen by the “Guardian” film critic Peter Bradshaw. I’ve seen five of the 10.
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20 of the best films of 2017
December 10th, 2017 by Roger Darlington
I’m a big movie fan and see quite a lot of films, but I find it hard to select a set of best works for a list. However, the latest issue of “Empire” magazine – to which I subscribe – has offered this list of the top 20 of 2017 (I’ve seen 13):
- “Get Out” – my review here
- “Blade Runner 2049” – my review here
- “La La Land” – my review here
- “Moonlight” – my review here
- “The Death Of Stalin” – my review here
- “Dunkirk” – my review here
- “God’s Own Country”
- “Logan” – my review here
- “The Handmaiden”
- “Call Me By Your Name”
- “The Big Sick” – my review here
- “Thor: Ragnarok” – my review here
- “Paddington 2” – my review here
- “War For Planet Of The Apes” – my review here
- “Manchester By The Sea” – my review here
- “Baby Driver” – my review here
- “Raw”
- “The Florida Project”
- “The Lost City Of Z”
- “Mother!”
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The centenary of the largest man-made non-nuclear explosion
December 6th, 2017 by Roger Darlington
The Halifax Explosion was a maritime disaster in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, on the morning of 6 December 1917.
SS Mont-Blanc, a French cargo ship laden with high explosives, collided with the Norwegian vessel SS Imo in the Narrows, a strait connecting the upper Halifax Harbour to Bedford Basin. A fire on board the French ship ignited her cargo, causing a large explosion that devastated the Richmond district of Halifax.
Approximately 2,000 people were killed by the blast, debris, fires or collapsed buildings, and an estimated 9,000 others were injured. The blast was the largest man-made explosion before the development of nuclear weapons, releasing the equivalent energy of roughly 2.9 kilotons of TNT.
I know. You’ve never heard of it, have you? But check it out here.
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A remarkable story about an amazing young woman
December 5th, 2017 by Roger Darlington
I recently attended a conference held at the BT Centre and organised by the Good Things Foundation (on whose board I have sat for six years – I step down tomorrow). The event was all about the power of the Internet to change lives for the better.
The most inspirational address came from a young woman called Molly Watt. At first, she looked unremarkable, although she sounded unbelievably confident for one so young (she is 23). But then she told her story.
Molly explained that she was born severely deaf and introduced to IT at the age of just 18 months (only then did I notice her hearing aids). She went on to tell us that, at the age of 14, she was registered as blind (only then did I notice her guide dog at the corner of the stage). The cause of her deaf blindness is a condition called Usher Syndrome.
Today she has an app which enables her to download software from anywhere in the world to make necessary adjustments to her hearing aids and she makes good use of the iPhone, the iPad and the Apple watch.
Molly has created a company to advocate and advise on assistive technology and describes herself as an inclusive technology evangelist. Certainly she took the conference by storm and illustrated powerfully how the right technology and a positive personality can profoundly change the life of even an individual with severe disabilities.
You can check out her web site here.
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A review of the new film “Film Stars Don’t Die In Liverpool”
December 3rd, 2017 by Roger Darlington
In the late 1970s, Academy Award-winning American actress Gloria Grahame – four times married and deeply troubled – struck up an unusual relationship with an actor from Liverpool called Peter Turner who was some three decades younger than her. This British film is based on Turner’s account of their life together and is ably directed by Scottish Paul McGuigan. The director eschews the classic jump flash-back in favour of a series of more subtle slides from one period to another. However, the American scenes are clearly staged in the studio in the interests of a small budget.
The role of GG (Glo to her beau) is terrific for Annette Bening who brings real star quality and a nuanced performance to the part. Jamie Bell – who has come a long way since “Billy Elliot” 17 years ago – does well in the company of such star power and, among the well-cast minor roles, we have the inestimable Julie Walters who guided Billy Elliot all those years ago.
There are some memorable scenes: Grahame and Turner dancing together when they first meet, a recital of “Romeo And Juliet” in an empty theatre (where the real Turner has a tiny role), a clever repeat of the same scene viewed from the different perspectives of the two principals, and of course the farewell departure. Also the attention to period detail is noticeable: that terrible flowered wallpaper, the dial telephone in the hallway, and Elton John’s “Song For Guy” (I remember it all).
Link: Wikipedia page on Gloria Grahame click here
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“Song For Guy” by Elton John
December 2nd, 2017 by Roger Darlington
This week, I saw the film “Film Stars Don’t Die In Liverpool” which features the “Song For Guy” by Elton John. The music took me right back …
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So apparently we’ve all evolved from the sister of the humble sponge (some more than others, Mr President)
December 1st, 2017 by Roger Darlington
“A longstanding row in animal evolution has come to a head, with a team of scientists claiming they have ended the debate over which type of creature is the sister of all other animals.
Researchers have been torn for years over whether sponges or marine invertebrates known as comb jellies were the first type of creature to branch off the evolutionary tree from the common ancestor of all animals.
Now researchers say the debate is over: the sponges have won.”
This is the opening of a fascinating piece in today’s “Guardian” newspaper. Of course, not everyone believes in evolution, so I’ve summarised the evidence for it here.
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A review of the remarkable documentary “Naples ’44”
November 29th, 2017 by Roger Darlington
On Sunday evening, BBC Four broadcast an 80-minute documentary entitled “Naples ’44: A Wartime Diary” [if you’re in Britain, you can find it on iPlayer]. I recorded it and watched it last night and I’m still haunted by it.
The documentary has a powerful personal resonance for me because my Italian mother was born in Naples in 1920 and lived there until she met and married my father – who was then serving with Britain’s Royal Air Force – in 1946 and soon after left Italy for the first time to start a totally new life in the UK. She was the oldest of four children living with a widowed mother; her sister married a member of the British Army; while her two brothers remained in Italy.
The documentary is based on the memoirs of a British intelligence officer named Norman Lewis and uses his words, narrated by the British actor Benedict Cumberbatch, together with amazing archive footage. It tells a harrowing tale.
Following the Allied invasion at Salerno and the capture of Naples from the Germans, the local citizens faced an immediate crisis of no water followed by chronic shortage of food and clothing, a huge black market, rampant prostitution, and casual violence. The Wehrmacht left delayed-action bombs; then there was an outbreak of typhus; then Vesuvius exploded.
I don’t know how much of this my mother experienced personally. She barely spoke of her wartime in Naples and I was too young to ask. But it must have been an immensely challenging time for her, her family and all Neapolitans. She always insisted that we never waste food.
Many, many years later (when she was dead), I wrote a short story very loosely inspired by my mother. It was less about the life I think she led and more about the life I would have liked her to live. She had a very tough time and I owe her so much.
You can read the story here.
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The rules for being human
November 27th, 2017 by Roger Darlington
1. You will receive a body.
You may like it or hate it but it will be yours for the entire period this time around.
2. You will learn lessons.
You’re enrolled in a full-time informal school called life. Each day in this school you will have the opportunity to learn lessons. You may like the lessons or think them irrelevant or stupid.
3. There are no mistakes, only lessons.
Growth is a process of trial and error: experimentation. The “failed” experiments are as much a part of the process as the experiment that ultimately “works.”
4. A lesson is repeated until learned.
A lesson will be presented to you in various forms until you have learned it. When you have learned it, you can then go on to the next lesson.
5. Learning lessons does not end.
There is no part of life that does not contain its lessons. If you are alive, there are lessons to be learned.
6. “There” is no better than “here.”
When your “there” has become a “here” you will simply obtain anther “there” that will, again look better than “here.”
7. Others are merely mirrors of you.
You cannot love or hate something about another person unless it reflects to you something you love or hate in yourself.
8. What you make of your life is up to you.
You have all the tools and resources you need. What you do with them is up to you. The choice is yours.
9. Your answers lie inside you.
The answers to life’s questions lie inside you. All you need to do is look, listen, and trust.
10. You will forget all this!!
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A review of the novel “Nutshell” by Ian McEwan
November 26th, 2017 by Roger Darlington
“Nutshell” (2016) is McEwan’s latest and 14th novel in a distinguished writing career and it is the sixth that I have read (“Atonement” was the most impressive). The word of the title never appears in the text but only in a preliminary quote from Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” which makes it clear that this story is a kind of reworking of that of the Prince of Denmark. While Hamlet’s mother was called Gertrude and his uncle was Claudius, the narrator of “Nutshell” has a mother called Trudy and an uncle Claude, so the allusions are obvious.
The big difference between Hamlet and this narrator is that the latter is a male foetus in third tremester. This might seem rather limiting for the point of view of a novel, but Ewan enables his unborn child to hear everything his mother hears including a lot of radio and an extensive range of podcasts. Now this is a device I have myself used for a short story, but McEwan takes the notion much further by enabling his foetus not only to understand and remember all he hears but to talk about it with literary style and vocabulary that would exceed the talents of a university graduate in any subject except English Literature (phrases like “his banality as finely wrought as the arabesques of the Blue Mosque” and “a poem of four stanzas of trochaic tetrameters catalectic” and words such as “aubade” and exequy”). Most notably, the author shows off his erudition regarding wine and poetry.
If one can forgive McEwan this literary conceit and accept the limited confines of the narrator (always in the womb of a mother who is always in a £ 8M north London house), this is a beautifully-written and entertaining read with not just the outline of a crime but expositions on the state of the modern world. The narrator may inhabit a “nutshell’ but,as Shakespeare would put it, he is “king of infinite space”.
Link: my own short story using the same kind of narrator click here
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