A review of the new film “The Great Wall”
February 22nd, 2017 by Roger Darlington
Chinese director Zhang Yimou is a huge talent. I was enormously impressed by his films “House Of Flying Daggers” [my review here] and “Hero” [my review here] and, of course, this is the man who was responsible for the opening ceremony of the 2008 Beijing Olympics. So expectations were high for “The Great Wall”. his first film in the English language and the biggest-ever US/China project with a budget of some £120M.
Sadly the result is a limited success. The best features for me were those which echoed Zhang’s earlier films: visually sumptuous shots, wonderful landscapes, bright colours, drum music, massed ranks of armoured men (and this time women), and great fighting sequences.
What I was not keen on was the emphasis on CGI-generated creatures – the mythical Tao-Tie monsters – and the concessions to a western audience: a weak script with ill-fitting attempts at humour and the inclusion of western stars who seem out of place (Matt Damon and Pedro Tovar who appear to be channeling Butch Cassidy and the Sudance Kid and Willem Dafoe whose character seems irrelevant to the plot).
It’s not a disaster, just a diasappointment.
As for the Great Wall of China itself – a structure I’ve visited at two sections – it ultimately failed to do what it was designed to do and President Donald Trump would do well to take note.
Posted in Cultural issues | Comments (0)
What’s happening to our post office network?
February 21st, 2017 by Roger Darlington
You may have noticed changes in the look or operation or even location of your local post office. Why is this happening? It’s because fewer people are using post offices than in the past and many of the transactions conducted generate low income for Post Office Limited, but customers value having a local post office and the government is keen to maintain the current size – if not the exact shape – of the current network of outlets.
I have been interested in post offices since I joined the Post Office Engineering Union as a researcher in 1978 and worked through mergers creating the National Communications Union and the Communications Workers Union before I took early retirement in 2002. But my support for post offices did not stop: I continued to promote the network through my Board membership of Postwatch and Consumer Focus and through my chairing of the Post Offices Advisory Group which is now hosted by Citizens Advice, the consumer watchdog for post offices.
My Citizens Advice colleague Annabel Barnett has just produced an informative blog posting, explaining how the network is being transformed and examining research which assesses the impact on customers. You can check out her blog here and, if you look closely, you’ll see me in the chair in a photograph of the Post Offices Advisory Network in session.
Posted in Consumer matters | Comments (0)
A review of the novel “Tightrope”
February 19th, 2017 by Roger Darlington
“The Girl Who Fell From The Sky” [my review here] was a very well-written work that introduced us to a fascinating character, newly-recruited wartime SOE agent Marian Sutro. The novel ended dramatically and the sequel “Tightrope” explains what happened to Marian and what she did next. It is an excellent work which I have reviewed here.
Posted in Cultural issues | Comments (0)
A review of the film “Maggie’s Plan”
February 18th, 2017 by Roger Darlington
I bet you missed this film which was released last year. It came in under the radar and disappeared too quickly for me to catch it at the cinema.
But now I’ve seen it on the small screen and I feel that, as well as being under-known, it’s under-rated. You can read my review here.
Posted in Cultural issues | Comments (0)
American politics: now fact is stranger than fiction
February 17th, 2017 by Roger Darlington
I’m a bit of a political junkie and I love political dramas in the movies or on television. “The West Wing” was my all-time favourite TV series – I watched all 155 episodes as they were broadcast and every episode again when it was out in a box set.
So, a while back, I thought that I would give a go to a new political series on American television called “Madam Secretary” which is about a female Secretary of State played by Téa Leoni. It’s not “The West Wing”, but the acting is good and the scenarios are very contemporary. I enjoyed series one and two and this week I started to view series three which has just begun broadcasting in the UK.
The whole project is focused on a calm and competent woman at the highest reaches of power in the United States. It makes you yearn for what might have happened three months ago. This week’s episode revolves around the issue of climate change and represents a scenario in which a previously sceptical President is persuaded by his Secretary of State to accept the science and act in the best interests of the nation and the world. How unlikely is that?
Well, probably not as unlikely as a week in which the National Security Adviser Michael Flynn is forced to resign after just three weeks in the role following inappropriate contacts with the Russian Embassy and lying about this to the Vice-President. Or in which Trump’s nominee for the post of Secretary of Labor Andrew Puzder pulls out even before his nomination hearing. Or in which the President, with no prior consultation or warning, decides to up-end fundamentally US foreign policy on the Arab/Israeli conflict by calling into question the case for a two-state solution.
Gosh, fact is now stranger than fiction and I much prefer the fiction.
Each weekday, I watch the American comedy programme “The Daily Show” with Trevor Noah. Trump is dream material for satirists like Noah who have endless wonderful material to make us laugh – but often one just wants to cry. This week “The Daily Show” characterised the present US administration as “Lie Lie Land”. Sad.
Posted in American current affairs | Comments (0)
“Love Actually” revisited – love it! (1)
February 16th, 2017 by Roger Darlington
We loved the characters in the the 2013 Christmas film classic “Love Actually”. But what has actually happened to them in the intervening 13 years?
Well, it seems that we are about to find out in a 10-minute special catch-up being produced to boost charity appeals in Britain and America.
Titled “Red Nose Day Actually”, it will be broadcast on BBC1 on Red Nose Day 24 March in the UK, and on NBC to coincide with the US equivalent on 25 May.
We can look forward to many of the film’s cast, including Hugh Grant, Martine McCutcheon, Keira Knightley, Colin Firth, Lucia Moniz, Liam Neeson, Thomas Brodie-Sangster, Olivia Olson, Bill Nighy, and Rowan Atkinson.
You can learn more about the programme here and you can read my review of the original film here.
Posted in Cultural issues | Comments (0)
Bring back bottle deposits to stop plastic pollution in our oceans
February 15th, 2017 by Roger Darlington
In the UK, we use a staggering 38.5 million single-use plastic bottles and a further 58 million cans every day. Only half of these are recycled, so it’s no surprise that many of these end up on our beaches and in our oceans.
Plastic bottles take 450 years to break down, killing marine life, harming the coastal ecosystem, and ruining our beaches. Placing a small deposit on plastic bottles and cans would dramatically increase recycling and reduce marine plastic pollution.
Right now, the Government is finalising a plan to tackle Britain’s litter problem. But they’re wavering about a bottle deposit scheme, where 10p is added to the price of a drink and if you return the bottle you get the money back.
If you want to sign a petition supporting a deposit scheme – as I have done – you can access the 38 Degrees site here.
Posted in Environment | Comments (1)
Who will save America’s Democratic Party? (1) There’s Elizabeth Warren in the Senate
February 14th, 2017 by Roger Darlington
In the United States, the Republicans now control the White House and the two houses of Congress, the Senate and the House of Representatives. If President Trump has his way, the vacant position on the Supreme Court will be filled by a conservative. In these circumstances, the Democratic Party has to fight back urgently and strongly with the mid-term elections in 2018 a particular focus of attention.
The fight-back will require leaders of courage, compassion and eloquence. In the Senate, a leading member of the struggle will be 67 year old Elizabeth Warren who, since 2012, has been a senator from Massachusetts.
In this profile in last weekend’s “Observer” newspaper, Warren is described as follows:
“Elizabeth Warren … is a politician who does not value propriety and hierarchy over the lives of the people she represents. Unlike Hillary Clinton, Warren did not take a long, slow, rule-abiding route to the Senate. Like Obama, she’s a freshman senator with big talent and big dreams. Will the first woman president be one who plays by her own rules, but persists?”
The piece calls Warren “a woman who is a bit left of Hillary, a little less socialist than Bernie, brilliant, articulate and indisputably tough” and asks: ” Will Elizabeth Warren persist all the way to the White House?”
Posted in American current affairs | Comments (0)
Who will save America’s Democratic Party? (2) There’s Keith Ellison in the House
February 14th, 2017 by Roger Darlington
In the United States, the Republicans now control the White House and the two houses of Congress, the Senate and the House of Representatives. If President Trump has his way, the vacant position on the Supreme Court will be filled by a conservative. In these circumstances, the Democratic Party has to fight back urgently and strongly with the mid-term elections in 2018 a particular focus of attention.
The fight-back will require leaders of courage, compassion and eloquence. In the House of Representatives, a leading member of the struggle will be 53 year old Keith Ellison who, since 2007, has been a Representative from Minnesota.
As this profile on the Mother Jones website reminds us, Ellison warned of a Trump victory long before others saw the possibility. The article also highlights that Ellison is now a strong contender for this weekend’s election of a new Chair for the Democratic National Committee (DNC). The piece notes:
“The role of the DNC chairman is to run a political machine that helps to elect Democrats throughout the country, not to dictate the party’s policy priorities. But Ellison’s blueprint for defeating Trumpism is nonetheless rooted in the anti-establishment politics of Sanders.
The DNC has become the “Democratic Presidential Committee,” he argues; short-sighted focus on big-dollar fundraising and swing states has weakened the party on a county-by-county level. Change starts with shifting the party apparatus toward assembling a multicultural army of organizers, focused on the communities likely to bear the full brunt of the new president’s policies.
Ellison says the proof that this can work is in his district. Emphasizing door-to-door engagement over TV advertising, Ellison boasts he’s juiced turnout in his safe Democratic seat to some of the highest levels in the country. Even as the Upper Midwest goes red, Minnesota Democrats have scored victories at the state level, bolstered by Ellison’s Minneapolis machine.”
Posted in American current affairs | Comments (0)
Ever heard of the Internet of Wings?
February 13th, 2017 by Roger Darlington
You may have heard of the Internet of Things – the connection of millions and millions of devices through the Net. Now let me introduce you to a project sometimes dubbed the Internet of Wings but properly called ICARUS.
ICARUS is short for ‘International Cooperation for Animal Research Using Space’ and it is a global collaboration of animal scientists to establish a satellite based infrastructure for earth observation of small objects such as migratory birds, bats, or sea turtles.
ICARUS will help solve two major enigmas in biology: we need to understand
- the development history of behavioural and movement traits of animals in the wild, and
- the selection acting on individuals in the wild (i.e., where, why and when do individuals die).
You can learn more here.
Posted in Environment, Internet | Comments (0)