While you’re waiting for the “Top Gun’ sequel, here’s 63 other aviation films to watch
August 6th, 2020 by Roger Darlington
Two of my many interests are aviation and cinema. I really loved the movie “Top Gun” which was released as long ago as 1986 and I can’t wait to see the sequel “Top Gun: Maverick” which is now not due to be released until summer 2021.
Fortunately there are many other aviation films around if you search for them and I’ve reviewed 63 of them here.
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Today my heart is with the people of Beirut
August 5th, 2020 by Roger Darlington
Like so many others around the world, I was horrified to hear the news about, and see the pictures of, the huge explosion in Beirut. This is a country, and especially a city, that has already suffered so much in recent decades. Fortunately the people I know in Beirut are safe but shocked.
In 2011, just after the Arab Spring and just before the start of the Syrian civil war, I spent a few days in Lebanon, staying in Beirut. This is such an historic part of the world and it was such a marvellous experience.
You can read my account here.
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A review of the 2017 film “The Shape Of Water”
August 4th, 2020 by Roger Darlington
Somehow I didn’t manage to see this fantasy horror movie at the cinema and, by the time I viewed it on the television, it had collected a whole host of nominations and awards, including 13 nominations at the 90th Academy Awards where it won for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Production Design, and Best Original Score. I was not surprised, therefore, that I loved it.
The work is a particular triumph for Mexico’s Guillermo del Toro, who wrote and directed “Pan’s Labyrinth” (which I really admired), since he imagined the story and co-wrote and directed the movie. But it is also a remarkable performance by Britain’s Sally Hawkins who plays a mute cleaning woman in a secret American government laboratory in 1962 where she befriends a humanoid amphibian who has been found in a South American river and held for Cold War experimentation.
The ending is pure magic.
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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” and “Night Of The Bayonets” are set on a Nazi-occupied island but, whereas the first was located on a tiny member of the British-owned Channel Islands and involved only a handful of deaths, the second took place on the much larger Dutch island of Texel off the west coast of the Netherlands and the death toll was more than 3,000 with probably three-quarters of them being Germans.
What makes the uprising between 6 April – 20 May 1945 truly astonishing is that it lasted more than two weeks after the surrender of German forces in the Netherlands and the attack on the occupying Wehrmacht was conducted by men wearing the same uniform: the Georgian members of the 822nd Eastern Battalion who had been taken prisoner from the Soviet Army and effectively forced to switch sides or instead to be killed or starved to death.
Commenting on the Georgians’ change of sides on two occasions, Lee states: They were young men who were simply trying to survive the war and get home”.
Lee only devotes some 45 pages of a main text of 190 pages to the Texel Uprising itself, what he calls “the final battle of the Second World War in Europe”, but cleverly and fascinatingly he goes back and forward in time to set the incident into a wider contect and to provide the reader with not just a story from history but an exercise in historiography.
So, drawing on another of his books (“The Experiment”), Lee takes us back to 1783 when Georgia lost its independence and became a protectorate of the powerful Russian Empire. He explains how, during the First World War, there was a Georgian Legion on the German side of the conflict and then, when there was an independent Georgia with a social democratic government from 1919-1921, the new state had the support of the Germans.
Therefore, by the time of the Second World War, relations between the Georgians on the one hand and the Russians and Germans on the other was not a simple matter.
Then, looking at how the Texel Uprising has been commemorated and memorialised from immediately after the war (when the returning Georgians were treated by the Soviet Union as heroes rather than as traitors) through successive decades leading to present-day independent Georgia, Lee revals how different parties at different times have interpreted and presented those weeks of battle on Texel in ways which have offered a self-serving narrative.
History may be in the past but it is never dead as this book illustrates all too well.
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A review of the new French film “The Truth”
August 2nd, 2020 by Roger Darlington
In the 1960s, I was a tiny bit in love with French actress Catherine Deneuve (“Repulsion”, “Belle De Jour”, “Mayerling”). For decades, I’ve been more than a little bit in love with French actress Juliette Binoche (“The English Patient”, “Chocolat”, “Clouds Of Sils Maria”). So the opportunity to see both in this (largely) French-language film, in which they play mother (actress Fabrienne) and daughter (screenwriter Lumir) respectively was a real attraction.
They are eminently watchable – as are the support actors including Ethan Hawke – but the movie lacks cohesion and spark, probably because Japanese writer and director Hirokazu Kore-eda, so accomplished as writer and director of the Japanese film “Shoplifters”, is operating outside his milieu and over-complicates the narrative with the emphasis on the making of another film within this film.
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What excuse can any American possibly have for voting for Donald Trump?
August 1st, 2020 by Roger Darlington
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We know that there is lots of life on Earth, but is there any lyfe on Mars?
July 30th, 2020 by Roger Darlington
For centuries, there has been speculation about whether there is any life on our nearest planet Mars. After all, there are those ‘canals’ and there is some kind of atmosphere.
Of course, it depends how you define “life” and, believe it or not, there is no absolutely agreed definition, but the American space agency NASA has a good working description: “a self sustaining chemical system capable of Darwinian evolution”.
On this basis, there may be no life on Mars – but maybe we should have a broader definition.
Stuart Bartlett, a complexity scientist at Caltech, and Michael L Wong, an astrobiologist at the University of Washington, have developed a new hypothetical concept: lyfe.
They define a “lyving” organism as satisfying four criteria: dissipation (the ability to harness and convert free energy sources); autocatalysis (the ability to grow or expand exponentially); homeostasis (the ability to limit change internally when things change externally); and learning (the ability to record, process and carry out actions based on information).
With this definition, life is just one specific instance of lyfe and there could be a higher probability of finding lyfe – rather than life – on Mars.
You can find a fuller exposition of this fascination idea here.
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A review of the NEW film “Clemency”
July 25th, 2020 by Roger Darlington
After four months of the coronavirus lockdown, I was desperate to visit a theatre and see a new movie on the big screen. So I went to view whatever was showing on the first evening of the first cinema to open in central London. “Clemency” is hardly the most uplifting choice for such an occasion, since it is a serious and slow-moving work dealing with capital punishment in the United States and the impending execution of a black prisoner innocent of the murder for which he was convicted.
But this is an important film. both for its provenance and its subject. The writer/director is Nigerian-American Chinonye Chukwu; the lead actor and excutive producer is African-American Alfre Woodard who is the prison warden; and most of the leading roles are black characters including Aldis Hodge as the prisoner awaiting death. We see how the death sentence can not only be a terrible misjustice but a corruption of all who find themselves part of the process.
The film was released at an inauspicous time but should garner an Academy Award nomination for Woodard’s wonderful performance and stimulate further debate on this horrific practice.
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A review of the 1944 movie classic “Gaslight”
July 23rd, 2020 by Roger Darlington
This is the film which gave rise to the term ‘to gaslight’, meaning to cause someone to doubt his or her sanity through psychological manipulation. In the film itself, a husband played by Charles Boyer seeks to undermine the sanity of his wife portrayed by Ingrid Bergman through – among other things – repeatedly dimming and brightening the gaslights in their 19th century London home.
Based on a play called “Angel Street” and the subject of an earlier British cinematic version in 1940, this American-made movie was directed by George Cukor. It is somewhat static in location, but finely acted with plenty of atmosphere, and it won an Academy Award for Bergman.
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What did you do in the coronavirus lockdown, granddad? Well, one of the things I did was deliver over 30 online history lessons.
July 22nd, 2020 by Roger Darlington
When the country was suddenly plunged into lockdown and schools had to close their doors to most of their students, I was asked if I would help out with my nine year old granddaughter by doing an online history lesson with her once a week. When a young friend heard about this, she asked if I would do the same with her son who is the same age as my granddaughter.
It was suggested that I cover Victorian history, so we looked at the life of Queen Victoria, the development of canals, railways and the factory system, and the lives of famous Victorians such as Florence Nightingale, Charles Darwin and Isambard Kingdom Brunel. But, after four weeks lockdown was still in place …
So, at the request of my granddaughter, we went back to Tudor times and we explored such monarchs as Henry VIII (and each of his six wives) and Elizabeth I, such characters as Thomas Cromwell and Francis Drake, and the importance of the Reformation. But, after another four weeks, we were still in lockdown …
So we moved on to Stuart history and discussed the English Civil War, the execution of Charles I, the Interregnum with Oliver Cromwell, and the Restoration with Charles II. But, after yet another four weeks, the kids could still not go back to school and we felt that we’d had enough of British kings and queens.
So, for the last four weeks, we’ve been talking about world history as it illuminates current events. Starting with the first humans in Africa and the earliest civilisations in the ‘lucky latitudes’, we moved on to European colonisation and the slave trade, before focusing on recent American history including the abolition of slavery, the civil rights movement, and the Black Lives Matter movement.
So, here we are: most of the lockdown restrictions have been eased, the school holidays have arrived, and we’ve ended our online history lessons.
At first, I was tasked to teach one child but then it became two. I had thought we might do three or four lessons but it turned out to be 16. Therefore, in the end, I delivered 32 lessons. Each was about one hour but, as any teacher will tell you, the preparation took twice as long. I was pleased to have YouTube as a resource because we broke up each lesson with a couple of short videos.
I don’t know how much my little friends learned from all this, but I learned a lot – and I hope that it gave the parents a bit of a break. I can’t imagine how tough it was for parents to do home schooling and my admiration for teachers is higher than ever.
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