A review of the 2010 film “Letters To Juliet”
January 6th, 2021 by Roger Darlington
I once made a day trip to Verona in Italy and visited the courtyard where there is a balcony and statue of Juliet as an evocation of the play by Shakespeare. At the time, I didn’t realise that people left letters to Juliet pressed into the walls and that a volunteer group answered any of these communications which carries an address.
This charming film concerns a young American woman Sophie (Amanda Siegfried) who finds a letter written by a British woman called Claire (Vanessa Redgrave) which has laid hidden for 50 years. Sophie writes to Claire, encouraging her to search out the Italian she loved and left so long ago. Will Claire find her Lorenzo and, in helping Claire with her search, will Sophie find her own happiness? Well, what do you think?
Although predictable and sentimental, the movie is amusing and romantic, while the location shooting in Verona and Siena is a delightful bonus.
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A review of the 2016 film “The Promise”
January 6th, 2021 by Roger Darlington
Set in in the collapsing Ottoman Empire during the First World War, “The Promise” is both a love-triangle and an historical drama. Brilliant Armenian medical student Mikael Boghosian (Oscar Isaac) and intrepid American war reporter Chris Meyers (Christian Bale) both fall for the beautiful Armenian-born but French-raised Ana Khesarian (Charlotte Le Bon) in a part of the world where the Turks are turning on the local Armenians in what will soon become a genocide.
The film has been controversial for two reasons.
First, Turkey still denies that there was a genocide in 1915-1923 resulting in the death of over a million Christian Armenians at the hands of local Muslim forces. The Turks lobbied against the making of the film, the $90M budget for which was totally funded by Armenian-American billionaire Kirk Kerkorian who died at 98 two years before the film’s release. However, over 30 countries, including the United States, France and Germany but not Britain, have recognised the systematic killings as constituting genocide.
Second, some critics and viewers have criticised the work for its fore-fronting of the love triangle – at the heart of which is the promise of the title – rather than the genocide itself. Yet “The Promise” is hardly the first movie to tell a big political and military story through the eyes of a small number of individuals who are romantically entwined (think, for instance, of “Dr Zhivago”) and, without this story, it is likely that even fewer people would have viewed the movie than actually did.
The three leading characters in the film are fictional, but a couple of minor characters – such as the American ambassador and the French admiral – are real and the historic framework is accurate if one-sided. British director and co-writer Terry George – who made the political drama “Hotel Rwanda” – can be proud of this work and I wish that more people would see it and think about the events it portrays.
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How to name your man of action
January 5th, 2021 by Roger Darlington
James Bond, Jack Bauer, Jason Bourne, Jack Reacher, Jack Ryan, John Wick – notice anything?
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“A Promised Land” by Barack Obama (1)
January 4th, 2021 by Roger Darlington
Long before Barack Obama became President of the United States, I read his two books: “Dreams From My Father” [my review here] and “The Audacity Of Hope” [my review here]. Then, the summer before last, I read Michelle Obama’s work “Becoming” [my review here].
I’m a huge fan of the Obamas and looked forward immensely to Barack Obama’s memoirs of his time in the White House. “A Promised Land” has recently been published and makes ideal reading for yet another pandemic lockdown.
In a preface, Obama tells us that he drafted the work with pen and pad rather than a computer. He explains that he envisaged the project would take a year and cover maybe 500 pages. In fact, he found that his memoirs will take two volumes and the first part alone is some 700 pages .
Conventionally, one might have expected a presidential memoir to start with a high note of his time in office: in Obama’s case, perhaps the passage of the Affordable Care Act or the killing of Osama bin Laden. Then the text would jump back in time to his arrival at the White House or perhaps even further to the start of his presidential election campaign.
But Obama is different. The opening pages are not about him but about the White House groundskeepers. Then the flash-back is all the way to his childhood in Hawaii. He reminds us that he only met his Kenyan father once. So many driven individuals seem to have had a father absent from the home and I guess that includes me. Obama found his refuge in books – as I did.
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A new year means a new diary
December 31st, 2020 by Roger Darlington
I have now kept a diary for 59 years and the total number of daily entries currently stands at 21,548. I have never missed a day.
I have always enjoyed the routine of writing a journal, but this last year has been so challenging that it has been a part of my survival mechanism to record what is happening to me and the wider world.
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A review of the 2013 film “The Invisible Woman”
December 31st, 2020 by Roger Darlington
You could call this the invisible film since it has made little impact since its release and I only caught up with it during the latest lockdown of the 2020 pandemic.
Unlike “The Invisible Man”, this is not a science fiction movie, but allegedly a true story of how the famous English writer Charles Dickens (played by Ralph Fiennes who also directed) falls in love with the much younger Nelly Ternan (Felicity Jones whose break-out role was a year later with “The Theory Of Everything”) who becomes his mistress and muse. It was a relationship which had to be hidden from the public, making Nelly ‘invisible’.
The account is presented from Nelly’s point of view because the film is based on the (somewhat controversial) biography penned by Claire Tomalin. The British do like period dramas and the film looks good, but I found the framing device – Nelly’s forlorn walks on Margate beach years after the death of Dickens – rather contrived and there is too little narrative to excite one’s interest or stir the emotions.
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Bernardine Evaristo and Reni Eddo-Lodge: first black British women to top bestseller charts
December 30th, 2020 by Roger Darlington
This year, in twin firsts, black British women topped both the fiction and nonfiction charts. Both successes were a long time coming, but sparked a ray of hope that the Black Lives Matter movement may be creating space for new voices and stories.
The novelist, playwright and poet Bernadine Evaristo, who made history with “Girl, Woman, Other” [my review here], and Reni Eddo-Lodge, the groundbreaking author of “Why I’m No Longer Talking To White People About Race” [my review here], talk about this unprecedented moment in this “Guardian” piece.
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A review of the novel “Identity” by Milan Kundera
December 30th, 2020 by Roger Darlington
The only other work that I’ve read by this Czech novelist – who now writes in French – was “The Unbearable Lightness Of Being”. But that was over 30 years ago and I confess that I did not understand much of the imagery in that work. Three lockdowns into the covid crisis of 2020, I was looking for something short and “Identity” is only 150 pages, so i gave Kundera another chance.
Narratively the novella is simple: a short period of time in the relationship between a middle-aged French couple called Chantal and Jean-Marc. But things are never straightforward with Kundera. There is a lot of dreaming here, some of it signalled, but most of it uncertain. There are some interesting ideas but overall I found the opaqueness irritating.
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Do you miss real life meetings, seminars and conferences?
December 29th, 2020 by Roger Darlington
Nine months before the pandemic hit the UK, at the age of 71 I finally retired. The last 17 years of my working life had been as a portfolio worker sitting on, and usually chairing, a variety of consumer bodies. So, every couple of days, I would attend a meeting or seminar or conference. I met a lot of people and I liked that.
As well as the business of these events, I would enjoy the opportunities of the pre-meeting arrivals , tea/coffee/comfort breaks, and post-meeting dispersement to catch up with individuals. At seminars and conferences. I would check the attendance list to see who I knew and which organisations were represented. I welcomed the chance to catch up with colleagues and to make new contacts.
That all ended for me 18 months ago, but of course it all ended for most office workers nine months ago and it’s going to be many more months before most office workers are back regularly in that office.
I know that working from home has many advantages and, for 17 years, my office was my home, but online events miss out on so much social interaction. I realise that I’m something of an extrovert; I like meeting people including new people. But do you miss real life meetings, seminars and conferences?
I think that, when we have control of the coronavirus, we will move towards a variety of blended work patterns that enable people to combine the benefits of working from home and in the office .
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A review of the new Netflix movie “The Midnight Sky”
December 26th, 2020 by Roger Darlington
Set largely in 2049, when a cataclysmic event has wiped out most of the Earth’s population, this sci-fi movie is located partly in the Arctic, where Augustine Lofthouse (George Clooney who also directs) is working as a scientist, and partly in space, where the craft Aether is returning from the discovery of a habitable moon of Jupiter with a crew of five including pregnant astronaut Sully (Felicity Jones) and her partner commander Adewole (David Oyelowo).
Both climates are hostile but in utterly different ways and, only towards the end of the narrative, do we learn how the two situations and the main characters are so connected. The pacing is often quite slow, but the film explores the most fundamental question for humankind – its very existence – and, if you’re not expecting anything too exciting or original, you’ll be quietly satisfied.
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