A review of the new film “The Aftermath”
March 15th, 2019 by Roger Darlington
The cinema is replete with stories of wartime romances – including the sub-theme of fraternisation with the enemy – but this film is different with a setting just after the Second World War in a Hamburg devastated by British bombing.
Rachael Morgan (Keira Knightley) is a young woman joining her husband Lewis (Jason Clarke), an officer in the British zone of occupation, who finds unexpectedly that they are sharing their requisitioned stately home with the original German occupant Stefan Lubert (Alexander Skargård). Each of these three has suffered the death of a dear one and, in very different ways, is struggling to come to terms with it in a manner which will have fateful consequences for the other two.
Based on a novel by Rhidian Brook, this is a truly moving tale of love and loss, beautifully shot in the Czech Republic. At first, it might seem that the treatment of the German population is overly understanding and compassionate but soon we find Nazi sympathies run deep with serious consequences for the main character.
The film is all the more compelling for having a largely unknown cast. Knightley, in the central role, is the exception in being familar and possible just now over-familiar and it may be that one’s reaction her will colour your judgement of the work either way. For my part, I rate Knightley who I think is growing as an actress as evidenced in such recent work as “Colette”.
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The making of American power (3): the war in Vietnam
March 14th, 2019 by Roger Darlington
Last week, I attended week 3 of an eight-week evening class at London”s City Literary Institute. The title is “The making of American power: US foreign policy from the Cold War to Trump” and our lecturer is Jack Gain.
Week 3 of the course was on the war in Vietnam. I was reminded of my visit to Vietnam in 2006 and these are a couple of extracts from my record of that trip.
‘We were keen to see the War Remnants Museum which did not appear to be on the official programme, so this was the focus of our free afternoon. Professionally the museum is not impressive, but then there is little money for such things. Politically it is utterly one-sided (it used to be called the Museum of American War Atrocities), but that is to be expected in the country that won the war and remains communist-controlled. However, it is a fascinating, if disturbing, venue with images from the infamous My Lai massacre and gruesome pictures of victims of torture, nepalm and Agent Orange including two deformed foetuses in glass jars. In the small grounds, there are a few samples of military hardware including a F5A jet, a Huey helicopter, an M48 tank, and a BLU 82 seismic bomb.’
“Sunday morning at 8 am and the official part of the programme commenced. The VJV group travelled 40 miles (65 km) north-west of HCM City to Cu Chi, site of the underground tunnel network used by the Vietminh (the League for Vietnamese Independence of the north) and the Vietcong (the National Liberation Front in the south) during the conflict with both the French and the Americans. Constructed between 1948-1973, this is a complex of 217 miles (350 km) of tunnels on three levels – respectively 3 metres, 6 metres and 10 metres deep – in an area of 162 sq miles (420 sq km). All around are dips in the ground which are the remnants of bomb craters.
In an article by Tom Mangold and John Penycate, they wrote: “The district of Cu Chi was the most bombed, shelled, gassed, defoliated, and generally devastated area in the history of warfare.” Today two sections of the tunnels are open to the public. The Ben Binh tunnels remain unlit and unreconstructed, making it difficult for larger westerners to negotiate. The Ben Duoc tunnels, however, are renovated and open to tourists.
Our journey to Cu Chi was broken by short stops to see local rice paper making and rubber collecting and then, once at Cu Chi tself, we spent two hours looking over the site and the exhibits. First, in a thatched shed, we were shown a 15-minute black and while film about the role of the tunnels in the war. This was a very amateurish and propagandist work in which the American soldiers were described as “a crazy bunch of devils” and the best of the Vietnamese soldiers were said to be proclaimed “American killer hero”. Then we saw demonstrations of the fiendish and fearsome booby traps and mines used to block access to the tunnels by American forces. Around the site, there are various model tableaux of soldiers in authentic uniform and so-called ‘Uncle Ho’ sandels (made out of old tyres).
We were shown how easy it was to disguise an entrance to the tunnel network – a small, flat cover and a few old leaves did the trick. The entrances were incredibly small, since Vietnamese are tiny and slim. Finally we were given the opportunity – taken by Vee & Roger – to enter one small section of the tunnels which has been widened to accommodate westerners. It was unbelieveably tight and dark down there and Vee suddenly felt claustrophobic, but Roger made good use of a small torch that he had taken with him and helped her continue the crawl. There was simply no way that one could go back.”
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A review of the new superhero movie”Captain Marvel”
March 12th, 2019 by Roger Darlington
Following the great success of the first female titular role for a super-hero movie (“Wonder Woman”), thanks to the owners of of DC Comics franchise, it was inevitable that we would have a female super-hero fronting a work from the Marvel Cinematic Universe – another first – and it’s a pity that the two will never appear together.
“Captain Marvel” is both directed and co-written by a female/male team – Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck – who come to this blockbuster from an indie background but stick largely to the conventions of the genre although with fewer special effects. It is a double origin movie, both explaining how a one-time occupant of Earth (known here as C53) and the planet Hala of the technically-advanced Kree came to acquire her extraordinary powers and how the special law enforcement agency SHIELD recruited the first of a team that was to become the Avengers.
Brie Larsen – who won an Academy Award for “Room” – is excellent in the eponymous role, having built up her physical strength for the part and being equally capable of martial arts and sharp quips before discovering that she can both fling energy bolts from her hands and fly in the sky and through space. With powers so great, she is set to have a special role in the next Avengers movie.
Meanwhile we see Nick Fury as we’ve not seen him before, with both eyes intact, and the actor who plays him, Samuel L Jackson, digitally de-aged to fit the setting in 1995 (the cue for some nice visual jokes). Something special in this superhero movie – perhaps inspired by characters in “Guardians Of The Galaxy” – is that we even have a cat with special powers. It’s called Goose and is played by no fewer than four feline stars.
Sadly this is the last movie in which the recently-deceased Stan Lee will have a cameo and the film opens with a quick recap of his earlier appearances in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
The plot is rather convoluted but that’s nothing new in a super-hero movie and it’s best just to go with the flow. Be sure to wait for the mid-credits and end-credits scenes. This is going to be a big success which is good both for the enhancement of women in movie roles and for the forthcoming climax in the Avengers storyline.
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A review of “A Short History Of Europe” by Simon Jenkins
March 10th, 2019 by Roger Darlington
“My young granddaughter did not think that this book looked ‘short’ but, at around 300 pages to tell the story of some two and half millennia, this can truly be termed a concise history and Jenkins has done a splendid job in making it very accessible and immensely readable. The alliterative subtitle of the work is “From Pericles To Putin” which neatly advertises the breadth of the subject. There is no escaping it, however, the history of Europe is one bloody war after another.
Starting with the Greco-Persian Wars (499–449 BC – “among the deciding events in Europe’s evolution”) and the three Punic Wars (264-146 BC), following the fall of Rome and waves of invasions from Huns, Vikings and Normans, we had no less than nine Crusader Wars (1095–1291) and the interminable Hundred Years War between England and France (1337-1453). There were also the Hussite Wars (1419-1434), the Thirty Years War (1618-1648 – “regarded as Europe’s bloodiest before the twentieth century”), the Nine Years War (1688–97), and the Seven Years War (1756-1763) before we had the Napoleonic Wars (1803–1815), the Crimean War (1853-1856), and the Franco-Prussian War (1870-1871 – “as pointless as that over Crimea”).
Then, after the peaceful period known as the belle époque (1871-1914), Europe was the starting place for two truly huge and devastating conflicts that consumed the globe: the First World War (1914-1918), including the nighmare of the trenches, and the Second World War (1939-1945), including the unique horror of the Holocaust. Jenkins gives figures of 17M and 40M as approximations for the respective European death tolls of these worldwide conflicts.
Wars often lead to treaties and Jenkins highlights the most important in term of the evolution of modern Europe, including Verdun (843) – “No treaty was more significant in the early history of Europe”) – Augsburg (1555), and Westphalia (1648 – “often awarded credit for fathering the concept of the nation state”). Other important settlements were at Utrecht (1713), Vienna (1815) and Versailles (1919).
This history includes many awful experiences such as the Black Death (a peak of 1347-1351), when “As much as a third of the world’s population died and, in Europe already weakend by famine, possibly more” and Communist terror, when “Stalin’s rule in the [nineteen] thirties and forties brought more death and misery to the people of just one European country than any government in history”. But there have been magnificent triumphs, most notably the Renaissance (14th-17th centuries) and the Reformation (16th century) – “processes as well as periods” – and of course the Enlightment (late 17th-early 18th century). Meanwhile, the history of Europe is permeated with the role of the Catholic Church with the shenanigans of a succession of venal popes (sometimes two or even three at a time).
In his epilogue (written in 2018), Jenkins talks of “the violent conflicts that have been Europe’s default setting”. And yet, with the horrible exception of the wars around the break-up of post-Communist Yugoslavia, Europe has enjoyed over 70 years of peace and – at a time when Brexit is consuming political debates in Britain – one has to acknowledge the role of the European Union in this. Jenkins himself asserts: “For all their flaws, the EU’s treaties of Rome, Maastricht and Lisbon have presided over over half a centry of not just of peace but also of prosperity”.
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Ever heard of the Thucydides gap?
March 5th, 2019 by Roger Darlington
In foreign policy discussions, this is a deadly trap first identified by the ancient Greek historian Thucydides.
As he explained, “It was the rise of Athens and the fear that this instilled in Sparta that made war inevitable.” The past 500 years have seen 16 cases in which a rising power threatened to displace a ruling one. Twelve of these ended in war.
Currently the most worrying danger of the Thucydides gap is the rise of Chinese power in opposition to that of the United States, You can read more about this development here.
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The shameful history of Vichy France
March 4th, 2019 by Roger Darlington
This weekend, together with 36 others, I attended a one-day course on Vichy France delivered by Sebastien Ardouin at London’s City Literary Institute. It was an immensely informative course backed up with a handout of 24 pages.
Vichy France was the so-called Free Zone of the country which operated from 1940 to 1944 under the increasingly dictatorial leadership of Marshal Phillipe Petain, the hero of Verdun in the First World War. Ardouin’s overall assessment of this period was as follows:
“State collaboration was a complete failure. In spite of what Vichy men declared (that they were playing a double game in order to protect the French population), collaboration did not spare France from economic exploitation, political repression, or other forms of sufferings. In relation to its population and resources, France was the occupied country that supplied Germany with the greatest amount of foodstuffs, commodities, and labour.
Racial persecutions developed, not only without any opposition from Vichy, but then went beyond what the Nazis demanded. In spite of concessions made by Vichy to the Nazis, Vichy could not preserve its independence and the French people were not treated better that populations in other occupied countries. Ultimately Vicy became an accomplice of the Reich and dishonoured France with its racial policy.”
More information on Vichy France here.
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A review of the remarkable Lebanese film “Capernaum”
March 3rd, 2019 by Roger Darlington
As well as being a town where Jesus performed miracles, Capernaum is the Arabic word for chaos and it is a kind of miracle that comes out of the chaos of a young boy’s life on the streets of Beirut in this remarkable work by Lebanese director Nadine Labaki.
Twelve year old Zain (played by Zain Al Rafeea) dotes on his 11 year old sister but, when she is forced to become a child bride, his outrage against his parents is so great that he leaves home, only to find himself responsible for a one year old infant called Rahil, the son of an undocumented Ethiopean mother who suddenly disappears. At a time when immigrants are so much in the news, this work brings home powerfully how precarious and indeed dangerous is the predicament of so many of them.
Rafeea is a non-professional actor and Syrian refugee who gives an utterly astonishing performance as the lead character in this immensely moving story, while somehow the baby demonstrates a range of emotions. The film was nominated for Academy Award for Best Foreign Picture and, in any other year when it was not up against the magnificent Roma”, it might well have won.
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The making of American power (2): the Cold War
March 1st, 2019 by Roger Darlington
This week, I attended week 2 of an eight-week evening class at London”s City Literary Institute. The title is “The making of American power: US foreign policy from the Cold War to Trump” and our lecturer is Jack Gain.
Week 2 of the course addressed Cold War power politics with the Soviet Union.
We talked a lot about the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962. I was 14 years old at the time and really scared. At the time, it looked as if John Kennedy had faced down Nikita Khrushchev decisively, but it was only years later that it was revealed that the Soviet leader agreed to remove his missiles from Cuba in return for the Americans agreeing to remove (outdated) Jupiter missiles from Turkey at a later date.
The Cuban missile crisis showed that the weapons themselves are the problem. Britain is now in pole position to lead a “nuclear disarmament race”. In a 2009 letter to the Times, Field Marshal Lord Bramall and Generals Lord Ramsbotham and Sir Hugh Beach denounced Trident as “completely useless”.
Ditching the system may be a no-brainer for the generals, but not for politicians afraid of a public opinion that equates nuclear weapons with vague notions of “being strong”. And yet getting rid of Trident would gift the Treasury a windfall of more than £25bn – enough to finance a million affordable homes.
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ABSOLUTELY FREE: A WONDERFUL COLLECTION OF FILM MAGAZINES & BROCHURES
February 28th, 2019 by Roger Darlington
Owing to the owner moving from a large house to a small flat, the following items are looking for a loving home:
- 474 film magazines: “Film Review” from January 1978 to December 2008 and “Empire” from July 2009 to December 2018
- 281 film brochures: popular movies of the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s
These magazines and brochures are available free of charge if you can collect them from an address in north-west London. If you are interested, please e-mail me:
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The song “Shallow” from “A Star Is Born”
February 27th, 2019 by Roger Darlington
Looking at this week’s Academy Awards, I thought that “Green Book” and “Bohemian Rhapsody”, while good films, received too many awards, while I was sorry that “A Star Is Born” did not do better. The Lady Gaga song “Shallow” did deservedly win an award and you might like to listen to it below. If you’re not sure about the lyrics, here is an explanation of the words.
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