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 and bloody-vested and seemingly indestructible Bruce Willis (now in his late 50s) as New York cop John McClane.
I was never going to visit the cinema to this limp offering but, during the coronavirus lockdown, it turned up on television and I thought that I might as well complete the franchise.
This film has two differences fron the other four: all the action is set outside the United States (Russia – represented by Hungary) and Willis has to share the billing with (Australian) actor Jai Courtney who plays John McClane’s estranged son Jack. But we have the typical deployment of heavy vehicles and military helicopters plus a simply massive bullet-count.
The plot is simply risible, most notably when the two McClanes purport to drive overnight from Moscow to Chernobyl (the road distance between these locations is almost 1,000 kms or over 600 miles and they are actually now in different countries!). However, there is one consolation – this is shortest of the “Die Hard” movies (97 minutes).
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Was it right to have a local lockdown in Leicester?
July 20th, 2020 by Roger Darlington
Here, in the UK, we have been easing lockdown restrictions for weeks now and, for most parts of the country, life is easier, although the coronavirus threat is still very real. However, for the people of Leicester, many restrictions have been reimposed rather than lifted.
This local lockdown – the first of its kind in this country – was imposed nationally without proper local consultation and agreement. We will almost certainly need to have further instances of local measures, so it is important that we learn lessons from Leicester.
The Labour City Mayor, Peter Soulsby, has told local citizens:
“Locking down Leicester was a political decision. The data didn’t justify it and Public Health England didn’t recommend it. The Tory Home Secretary announced they were ‘locking-down’ Leicester and the Health Secretary backed her. At this point PHE hadn’t even completed their report and, when they did, made very different recommendations to the Government.
It seems the Tories needed a City to make an example of – and picked on us. Now, Tory MP’s, the Tory County leader and the Government have agreed to draw yet another contrived boundary around Leicester. This one excludes the Tory-voting districts from lock-down – even though there’s no difference in Covid numbers inside and outside that boundary.
The Secretary of State has accused me of turning down his invitation to draw a line around an inner-city lock-down area. I refuse to draw a line that just stigmatises communities. Instead we need to focus work with our communities, neighbourhoods and families – especially the most deprived areas of the city – to fight the infection. The Government is still not handing over all the testing data we need to focus our work effectively.”
This report from Independent Sage sets out how badly the Tory Government has treated Leicester. It states:
“The lockdown in Leicester constitutes a foreseeable crisis of the Government’s own making. It has come too late and, by being imposed on the locality, rather than being developed and implemented with the locality, it risks creating uncertainty, dissent, and even disorder.
In the case of Leicester, and for future such cases, we advocate a response that is led by local government, supported by agencies such as PHE Health Protection Teams, the NHS and the Police and with additional funding from central government. The imposition of local restrictions should only be considered in the context of such an overall package of support, they should only be a last resort and used as a temporary measure.
Such an approach will maximise both the efficacy of infection control measures and public support for these measures.”
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A review of the new film “Radioactive”
July 16th, 2020 by Roger Darlington
When was the last time that you saw a film devoted to the life of a distinguished female scientist? Exactly. And how many movies do you see directed by a woman? Far too few.
We need more stories about women told by women, so this bio-pic of Polish-French physicist/chemist Marie Curie, directed by the Iranian Marjane Satrapi (best known for “Perspolis”), is welcome and worthy but, as a piece of cinema, does not really work.
Curie was a remarkable person: the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, the first person and the only woman to win the Nobel Prize twice, and the only person to win the Nobel Prize in two different scientific fields. She is portrayed by one-time Bond girl and “Gone Girl” British actress Rosamund Pike in feisty style.
The main problem is the script from Jack Thorne who normally writes for television. The narrative is rather dull and there are odd flashforwards to incidents such as the bombing of Hiroshoma and the explosion at Chernobyl which – while related to radioactivity, a word coined by Curie incidentally – have nothing to do with her.
In fact, “Radioactive” never made it to the cinema. Its release was caught by the coronavirus lockdown. But, of course, you can access it online.
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What happens when the world’s population stops growing?
July 15th, 2020 by Roger Darlington
Most adults around the globe – me included – have contributed to the relentless rise in the world’s population which has devastated the planet. Today the world population stands at 7.8 billion and it is still growing – but this will not always be the case with huge consequences.
You can find a good estimate of the current population and observe the growth in real time here. But fertility rates are falling dramatically. As a result, researchers expect the number of people on the planet to peak at 9.7 billion around 2064, before falling down to 8.8 billion by the end of the century – as explained in this article.
Which countries will be most affected?
Japan’s population is projected to fall from a peak of 128 million in 2017 to less than 53 million by the end of the century.
Italy is expected to see an equally dramatic population crash from 61 million to 28 million over the same timeframe.
Some 23 countries – including Spain, Portugal, Thailand and South Korea – are expected to see their population more than halve.
For humankind as a whole, this fall in the world’s population will have major environmental benefits. But it will change geo-politics where often population size equates to political and market power. And it will change social structures because it will mean an ageing population with all sorts of implications from tax revenues to social care costs to voting patterns.
We need to start preparing now.
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A review of “Girl, Woman, Other” by Bernardine Evaristo
July 12th, 2020 by Roger Darlington
As a white, straight male, I might not be considered as an obvious reader for a polyphonic novel in which almost all the 12 voices are women of colour, several are lesbian, and one is trans gender. But this work by a Nigerian-British female author was (joint) winner of the Booker Prize in 2019 and it was clear to me that this was an important book.
I found it a wonderful read that presented a multilayered account of the black experience in Britain today. The women are of different ages and occupations with a variety of ethnic composition, occupational achievement, and sexual history over a period of decades and every story has its own fascination and illumination.
The style is interesting: there is limited capitalisation and, except for minimal use of commas, there is no punctuation, but instead a layout that isolates sentences, phrases, and even words and works very well. The dozen voices are grouped into four chapters, each of three characters who are connected, with looser links between all the women brought together in a fifth chapter featuring the after-party of a radical play by the first of the characters, with a striking epilogue which binds two of the personages. It might sound complicated but it is splendidly executed and enables a richly textured exposition of black (female) lives (that) matter.
In such an ambitious novel, there are many messages, but one powerful conclusion is: “we should celebrate that many more women are reconfiguring feminism and that grassroots activism is spreading like wildfire and millions of women are waking up to the possibility of taking ownership of our world as fully-entitled human beings”. But: ‘feminism needs tectonic plates to shift, not a trendy make-over”.
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Should Istanbul’s Hagia Sophia be a church, a mosque or a museum?
July 11th, 2020 by Roger Darlington
There are some locations which are so special that, although they are in a particular country, the world is concerned about them. Examples which I might suggest would include Stonehenge in Britain, St Mark’s Square in Italy, Auschwitz in Poland, Machu Picchu in Peru, the Giza pyramids in Egypt, the Taj Mahal in India, Uluru in Australia.
So I think that many people outside Turkey will have a view about the future of the Hagia Sophia (Divine Wisdom) in Istanbul. The building is around one and a half millennia old. It was originally a cathedral, completed in 537 by the Emperor Justinian in what was then known as Constantinople . Then, after the Ottoman conquest of the city, it was covered into an imperial mosque in 1453.
Five and half centuries later, in 1934 the founder of the Turkish Republic Mustafa Kemal Ataturk had the building turned into a museum as part of his extensive process of secularisation of the new state. I visited the place during a holiday in Istanbul in 2003 and you can read my account of that time here.
Now the populist president of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has decided that the building should be converted from a museum back into a mosque. This is seen as a political decision that has excited international criticism.
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A review of the 2017 movie “American Assassin”
July 9th, 2020 by Roger Darlington
For decades, the James Bond films defined the spy genre with a hard-edged hero chasing his foe from one exotic location to another. Then the Jason Bourne trology refined the genre with kinetic fight scenes and bad guys inside the hero’s camp as well as outside it.
“American Assassin” is an attempt to create a new spy franchise with elements of both Bond and Bourne but, while there is plenty of action and some twists, this is not of the same quality, primarily because the titular role of CIA agent Mitch Rapp (really?) is played by young Dylan O’Brien of the “Maze Runner” movies who does not yet have the gravitas for such a character.
Also there are scenes of gratuitous violence, especially in a gruesome torture sequence, and a fantastical ending that make this work somewhat second-rate.
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A review of the 2015 movie “McFarland, USA”
July 8th, 2020 by Roger Darlington
We all love a feel-good movie. And the Americans especially have made a sub-genre of a sporting feel-good film in which the underdog overcomes adversity and makes it big, whether the sport is boxing (the “Rocky” franchise) or football (“The Blind Side”) or baseball (“A League Of Their Own”) or – in the case of “McFarland” – cross country running.
Of course, as well as the underdog, the sub-genre requires a mentor or coach and, following his memorable performance in “Field Of Dreams”, Kevin Costner seems like perfect casting in this ‘based on a true story’ movie in which he plays real-life Jim White who took a bunch of underprivileged Latino youngsters in McFarland, California and turned them into unlikely but repeated winners.
In a delightful coda, we see each of the runners as they were in 2015 with a note on what has happened to them since the events featured in the movie. Interestingly, this very American tale in which all the leading roles are male is directed by female New Zealander Niko Caro who first came to fame with her film “Whale Rider”.
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The world understands so little of the history of Persia and Iran
July 7th, 2020 by Roger Darlington
I’ve very much enjoyed watching the three-part BBC Four documentary series “Art Of Persia” presented by Samira Ahmed. I learned so much. For instance, I knew nothing about the lost city of Merv where an estimated 700,000 were slaughted.
However, I do know something about the history of Persia/Iran from my reading of a couple of books on the subject and my visit to the country in 2009.
It is a fascinating country with such a long history and fabulous architecture. I wish that everyone could and would visit the nation – but, failing that, I recommend the television series.
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Word of the day: agnotology
July 6th, 2020 by Roger Darlington
The word was coined over 10 years ago by Stanford University professor Robert N. Proctor, but has new resonance with the advent of Brexit in the UK and Trumpism in the USA.
Proctor defines agnotology as: Culturally constructed ignorance, purposefully created by special interest groups working hard to create confusion and suppress the truth.
You can find more examples in this short article. I’m sure you can think of more.
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