A review of the 2012 film “The Company You Keep”
May 8th, 2020 by Roger Darlington
The Weather Underground was a radical left militant organisation active in the United States in the late 1960s and 1970s. It was a revolutionary body that was responsible for a series of riots, bombings and jailbreaks. As a subject for a mainstream film, therefore, it is not obvious that this is a sympathetic proposition for American audiences and it is an essentially unknown topic for non-American viewers.
So it is something of an oddity that Robert Redford in his mid 70s should choose to produce and direct this work and take the lead role as a former Weatherman exposed many decades later by an ambitious local reporter. Another surprise is to see Julie Christie (in her early 70s) coming out of retirement to play a co-conspirator.
It is an amazing cast list which includes four Oscar winners – Redford and Christie plus Susan Sarandon and Chris Cooper – and five Oscar nominees – Anna Kendrick, Richard Jenkins, Nick Nolte, Terrence Howard, and Stanley Tucci. Add Shia LaBeouf, Sam Elliot and Brendan Gleeson and you have almost as many stars as the Milky Way.
So it is disappointing that the film, though workmanlike and watchable, is not more exciting. It probably worked better as the novel on which it is based.
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Who should presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden choose as his running mate? (1)
May 7th, 2020 by Roger Darlington
Assuming that Joe Biden survives the allegations of sexual harassment – which is not certain – he will be the nominee of the Democratic Party in the election for the next President of the United States. His first big decision is to choose a running mate.
Traditionally this decision – somewhat particular to US politics – has involved ‘balancing the ticket’. Balancing it ideologically means that, if the candidate is moderate, he might want to elect more a radical running mate. Balancing it geographically would mean choosing a partner from a different part of the country.
In the Democratic Party, recent times have favoured balancing the ticket in gender and ethnic terms. In the particular case of Biden – who would be the oldest ever person to assume the office for the first time – balancing would strongly suggest a significantly younger vice-presidential candidate and someone with sufficient talent and experience to become president in a heart beat.
So there is a lot to consider. Biden has already declared that he will choose a female running mate so that is one factor settled.
Black Democrats have joined in a concerted effort to urge him to pick a black woman as his vice-presidential nominee. Also some liberal groups and activists, who have long had an antagonistic relationship with the presumptive nominee, are pressing Biden to select a liberal woman.
Former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams has been extraordinarily blunt in saying she would accept the job. By contrast, Kamala Harris of California has taken the opposite tack, remaining low-key while others advocate for her.
Some liberals are backing Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, who ranks far above others on the left as a potential running mate. But rancour from the primaries has led to schisms on the left: Senator Bernie Sanders, the final competitor to cede to Biden and the liberal figure best positioned to push for concessions, has declined to support Warren despite their ideological alliance. Also many regard Warren as too old as well as coming from the same region of the country as Biden.
Other names in the frame are Amy Klobuchar, a senator from Minnesota, who performed creditably in the primaries plus Tammy Baldwin, a senator for Wisconsin, and Tammy Duckworth, a senator for Illinois.
There is even speculation about former First Lady Michelle Obama, but she has made it very clear that she would never want political office.
My personal preference would be Kamala Harris. She is aged 55 with six years experience as Attorney-General of California and three years membership of the Senate. She is a woman of colour: her father is from Jamaica and her mother is a Tamil Indian. She is progressive, fluent and confident.
By the way, it is by no means certain that Donald Trump will keep Mike Pence as his running mate. Trump likes to shake things up and could well pick a new partner.
Posted in American current affairs | Comments (0)
How often are British general elections?
May 5th, 2020 by Roger Darlington
In theory, they are held every five years but, in practice, they tend to be held after about four years. The longest interval was occasioned by the Second World War: 1935-1945. Sometimes, however, general elections have been held with surprising frequency.
I was reminded of this from my current lockdown reading of the 900 page biography of Winston Churchill by Roy Jenkins. I have reached the point in which there were two general elections in the same calendar year: January/February 1910 and December 1910. Churchill was a Liberal at this time.
Only on one other occasion in British political history have we had two general elections in the same calendar year and the interval of time between the two was even shorter: February 1974 and October 1974. I was a Labour candidate in both these elections.
But there have been other occasions when general elections were held in close proximity: 1806 and 1807; 1830, 1831, and 1832; 1885 and 1886; 1922, 1923 and 1924; and 1950 and 1951.
You can find a full list of United Kingdom general elections here.
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A review of the 2018 film “The Guernsey Literary And Potato Peel Pie Society”
May 4th, 2020 by Roger Darlington
I literally knew nothing about this film except its quirky title when I sat down to watch it during the lockdown period of the coronavirus crisis. I imagined that it was some sort of romantic comedy, but found that, while there was romance, it was a much more substantive story about life on the Channel island during the wartime German occupation.
The narrative is set immediately after the Second World War in 1946 and involves a writer, Juliet Ashton (delightfully played by Lily James), visiting the island to meet members of the titular society and gradually discovering information – illustrated through flash-backs to the war – about the dreadful conditions and choices faced by the island’s occupants during rule by the Wehrmacht.
Surprisingly, the film is based on a novel written by the American Mary Ann Shaffer together with her niece Annie Barrows. Shaffer was an author, editor, librarian, and bookshop worker and books are a recurrent theme of the story. Also surprisingly, none of the work was shot on Guernsey itself, a beautiful island which I have visited.
But the English locations are splendidly used and the attention to wartime clothing, hairstyles and artefacts provide real authenticity. An impressive support cast includes faces which will be well-known to British viewers such as Tom Courtenay, Penelope Wilton and Katherine Parkinson. So, all in all, a little-known film that is a joy to discover.
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A review of the 2006 movie “The Departed”
May 1st, 2020 by Roger Darlington
In 2002, Hong Kong had a hit with a Catonese-language stylish crime drama called “Infernal Affairs” which I enjoyed at the time and which soon spawned two sequels. In 2006, Hollywood remade the film as “The Departed” and it was so successful that it won four Academy Awards (Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Film Editing).
Somehow, I missed the remake until the lockdown of the coronavirus crisis, but it sure took my mind off the global pandemic for two and a half hours.
Truly “The Departed” is cinema gold. First, it is directed by the top-flight Martin Scorsese, he of “Good Fellas” and “Casino” as well as other classics. Next, it has three excellent lead actors: Leonardo DiCaprio, Matt Damon and Jack Nicholson. Then it has a classy support cast including Martin Sheen, Mark Wahlberg, Alec Baldwin, Ray Winstone and Vera Farmiga.
Critically, it has a cracking script from Boston-born William Monahan. The tension is sustained throughout, gradually ratcheting up to almost unbearable levels, before concluding with more twists than a corkscrew. Along the way, there is a good deal of violence and many men join the departed.
Set in Boston, like the original the basic premise is a double infiltration: young undercover cop Billy Costigan (DiCaprio) manages to get inside a mob syndicate run by gangland chief Frank Costello (Nicholson) while, at the same time, Costello has tough and unscrupulous Colin Sullivan (Damon) rising rapidly inside the South Boston state police force. When each becomes aware of the existence of the other, the stakes – already high – become as scary as hell.
While inspired by the Hong Kong movie, this American version is losely based on two real-life characters: the gangster Whitey Bulger and the corrupt FBI agent John Connolly.
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Who were King Henry VIII’s six wives and what happened to them?
April 29th, 2020 by Roger Darlington
During this lockdown when children cannot be at school. I’ve been doing online history lessons for two youngsters aged nine years old – one is granddaughter no 1 and the other the son of a good friend.
We started with Victorian Britain and I did four sessions on this period. To keep things fresh, we’ve moved to Tudor Britain which included King Henry VIII. He is known for his marriage to six women and the creation of the Church of England – very much related matters.
But can you remember the six wives in order? And how did each marriage end?
- The Spanish Catherine of Aragon who had a daughter, the future Queen Mary I, before being divorced.
- The English Anne Boleyn who also had a daughter, the future Queen Elizabeth I, but was executed.
- The English Jane Seymour who finally gave Henry a son, the future King Edward VI, but died shortly after the birth.
- The German Anne of Cleves with whom there were no children and a quick divorce.
- The English Catherine Howard – again no children and another execution.
- The English Catherine Parr – once more no children and this time still married to the King when he died.
To help children remember the fortunes of these six women, we have this little rhyme:
“Divorced, beheaded, died;
divorced, beheaded, survived.”
If you would like more information, click here.
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A review of the 2017 film “Wonder”
April 28th, 2020 by Roger Darlington
American schoolboy August ‘Auggie’ Pullman (Jacob Tremblay) is well-supported by his mother (Julia Roberts) – who calls him a “wonder” – and father (Owen Wilson) and he needs all the support he can find since he was born with a serious facial deformity called Mandibulofacial Dysostosis or Treacher Collins Syndrome
Based on a novel by Raquel Jaramillo (better known by her pen name R.J. Palacio), this tells the story through the voices of several youngsters, notably Auggie himself, and provides a moving and ultimately heart-warming tale. It is a remarkable performance by young Canadian actor Tremblay, whom I saw in the earlier film “Room” (also an adapatation of a novel), and for this role he wore prosthetic make-up which took an hour and half to apply.
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Think coronavirus is the worst thing that could happen to the world? Think again. It could be worse, much much worse. Feeling better now?
April 26th, 2020 by Roger Darlington
Things are tough just now, right? You want to be cheered up, don’t you? Well, consider this: things could be much worse. The existence of humankind is not a given. There are a variety of existential threats out there and, put is this way, the odds could be better.
I was reminded of this by an article in today’s “Observer” newspaper which contains this comment:
[Toby Ord] has tried to present his modelling in as calm and rational a fashion as possible, making sure to take into account all the evidence that suggests the risks are not large. One in six is his best estimate, factoring in that we make a “decent stab” at dealing with the threat of our destruction.
If we really put our minds to it and mount a response equal to the threat, the odds, he says, come down to something more like 100-1 for our extinction. But, equally, if we carry on ignoring the threat represented by advances in areas like biotech and artificial intelligence, then the risk, he says, “would be more like one in three”.
This newspaper article reminded me of a book I once read: “Our Final Century” by Martin Rees (2003). In my review of this book, I noted:
Martin Rees is a research scientist of international repute and so one has to listen when he opines that: “humanity is more at risk than at any earlier phase in its history” and “I think the odds are no better than fifty-fifty that our present civilisation on Earth will survive to the end of the present century without a serious setback”.
The risks are growing for three reasons: small groups and even individuals now have the capacity to unleash threats such as a biological or computer virus; society is now critically dependent on networks and systems that are vulnerable to attack or damage; and instant global communications will magnify the perceptions and repercussions of any such disaster.
There now: aren’t you feeling better about the current crisis?
Posted in Environment, Science & technology, World current affairs | Comments (2)
A review of “The Mirror And The Light” by Hilary Mantel
April 25th, 2020 by Roger Darlington
I owe a special debt of gratitude to award-winning author Hilary Mantel for her superb trilogy of novels providing a fictional account of the life of Thomas Cromwell, chief counsellor to England’s 16th century King Henry VIII.
I read the first part, the 650 page “Wolf Hall”, during a trip to China; I consumed the second section, the 400 page “Bring Up The Bodies”, on a holiday in Australia & New Zealand; and I devoured the third and final component, all 900 pages of “The Mirror And The Light”, during this lockdown period of the coronavirus crisis.
“Wolf Hall” covered the period 1527-1534 when Henry failed to acquire a male heir with Catherine of Aragon; “Bring Up The Bodies” accounted for just a year in 1535-1536 when the King’s second wife Anne Boleyn proved even less pleasing to him; while “The Mirror And The Light” has a four-year span (May 1536-July 1540) during which Henry’s third wife Jane Seymour finally gives him the son he covets but at the expense of her life and fourth wife Anne of Cleves is such a royal disappointment that Cromwell finally falls from power and loses his head (the title of the last work is a description of the capricious King).
In some ways, none of the three novels is an easy read.
Each has a cast list of more than a hundred characters, many with the same first name and many referred to by title and nick-name as well as proper name, while Cromwell himself is frequently identified only as ‘he’. But each work has a cast of characters and royal and claimants’ family trees before the text. Also Mantel’s writing style is elaborate and her vocabulary extensive, but she is a wonderful novelist and, for this trilogy, exhibits a formidable knowledge of the history, politics, personalities, clothing, food, traditions and beliefs of the period.
Mantel’s three novels present a sympathetic portrait of Thomas Cromwell, a poor, originally uneducated, boy from Putney who rises to be Henry’s VIII’s Lord Privy Seal and eventually Earl of Essex, while managing the departure of England from the Church of Rome.
His talent can be summarised in his advice to two colleagues: “I urge you both, undertake no course without deep thought: but learn to think very fast.” But the author does not present him as an innocent, ascribing to him the thought: “My list of sins is so extensive that the recording angel has run out of tablets, and sits in the corner with his quill blunted, wailing and ripping out his curls.”
Mantel’s near 2,000 page trilogy is a literary tour de force. The first two segments won the Man Booker Prize and it would be splendid if “The Mirror And The Light” made it a hat trick.
Posted in Cultural issues | Comments (0)
How do we decide who will live and who will die in this global pandemic?
April 24th, 2020 by Roger Darlington
Three years ago, I did a blog posting which posed an ethical dilemma.
There is a runaway trolley barreling down the railway tracks. Ahead, on the tracks, there are five people tied up and unable to move. The trolley is headed straight for them. You are standing some distance off in the train yard, next to a lever. If you pull this lever, the trolley will switch to a different set of tracks. However, you notice that there is one person on the side track. You have two options:
Do nothing, and the trolley kills the five people on the main track.
Pull the lever, diverting the trolley onto the side track where it will kill one person. What would you do? Which is the most ethical choice?
I don’t want to overdo the analogy, but there is a real sense in which governments around the world are facing a similar dilemma in relation to the coronavirus crisis. For the sake of simplification, let’s assume that the objective of public policy is to minimise the number of lives lost and that somehow we forget about all the other social, economic and environmental issues. As with the thought experiment that I quoted, there are no options in which nobody dies. The issue is how many, who and how.
If governments do nothing and just let the virus rip – the equivalent to letting the trolley run its course – we know that there will be deaths and we can quantify those deaths fairly accurately. We can collate the number of deaths in hospitals within days of them occurring and we can collect the number of deaths in care homes and the community within weeks. And we know, more or less in real time, not just how many are dying but who they are.
Now suppose the government actively introduces lockdown measures – the equivalent to pulling the lever and diverting the trolly – we know that fewer will die of the actual virus – that is, on our hypothetical railway system – but if this action requires closure of the economy – in our model the closure of the railway system – we can only guess at the additional deaths and the causes and identity of the people dying and that information will only become available months or even years in the future.
This is where we are now. We do not know how many of those dying from Covid-19 would have died anyway in the next few months or years and we want to maximise longevity and not simply balance the number of deaths in the long run. We do not know how many extra deaths will occur as a result of ill people not going to doctors or hospital plus loss of life caused by unemployment, poverty, suicide and abuse.
It will be many deaths – maybe more than Covid-19 deaths – but those will not occur now and they will not be broadcast by the media each day, so they will be much less visible to the public but just as tragic for the individuals concerned and for their families and friends.
I don’t know the answer to this dilemma. I just know that we have to balance the knowledge of very visible virus deaths now against the assumption of less visible non-virus deaths now and in the coming months and years. Striking the ‘right’ balance – a decision that will change over time – is a tough call and we should be as transparent as possible about how these complicated decisions are made.
Posted in World current affairs | Comments (0)