A review of the new film “Passing”
March 21st, 2022 by Roger Darlington
The title of this film refers to the practice of a light-skinned African-Americans passing themselves off as white, a situation which apparently was quite common in the 1920s when this story is set. The central characters are Irene (Tessa Thompson) and Clare (Ruth Negga), former New York City school friends who meet after a long interval with life-changing consequences for both of them.
Based on a novel of the same name published as long ago as 1929, the movie was written, produced and directed by the actress Rebecca Hall in her first venture behind the camera. While one might think of Hall as classically British and white, it transpires that her mother was part African-American, so that this is a very personal venture for her. At some level, however, this has a message for us all. As one of the characters states: “We’re all passing for something or other, aren’t we?”
“Passing” is an unusual-looking film. It is shot in black & white in 5:4 ratio and often the picture is blurred and the dialogue is muffled. The pacing is slow until a dramatic and ambiguous ending. I doubt that many would have gone to the cinema to see it, but Netflix bought it and the film is an accomplished and moving work to view on the small screen.
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A review of the new film “Ali & Ava”
March 19th, 2022 by Roger Darlington
This British film, both written and directed by Yorkshire-born Clio Barnard, is a tender love story – but an unconventional one in many respects.
First, the setting: the work was shot entirely on location in Bradford with its terraced houses and grim vistas. Then the structure: while it follows the classic three-part narrative of friendship, division, reconciliation, almost the entire film is devoted to the first slow-burning segment of this traditional triptych.
Next the music: both principals love their music but have very different tastes which gradually converge, so we hear a lot of (loud) music of an amazingly eclectic nature: Hindi to Czech, Dylan to Rachmaninoff, Buzzcocks to The Specials.
Above all, this is a different tale of affection because of the characters. Both are middle-aged Northerners with their own ethnic heritage; both have had troubled marriages which have left them damaged; both have close extended families; both are gentle and caring.
Ali is a British-Pakistani who is a small-scale local landlord with aspirations to be a DJ, while Ava has Irish roots and works as a school assistant having obtained a degree as an adult. Barnard gives us a portrait of each before bringing them together in a car ride in the rain and exploring the growing attraction over a lunar month.
Adeel Akhtar and Claire Rushbrook are simply wonderful as the eponymous couple and we ache for them to be together.
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Who was responsible for those famous Odessa Steps?
March 18th, 2022 by Roger Darlington
As the Russian invaders of Ukraine pose to attack the port of Odessa, a film enthusiast like me cannot help recalling the dramatic Odessa Steps sequence in the 1925 film “The Battleship Potemkin” famously directed by Sergei Eisenstein. Indeed this sequence inspired a similar conflict on long steps in the final scenes of the 1987 film “Untouchables” directed by Brian De Palma.
Meanwhile I am reading a history of Ukraine: “Borderland” by Anna Reid. From this work, I learned that the Odessa Steps were constructed by a British civil engineer named John Upton between 1837 and 1841. Who would have thought?
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What Arnold Schwarzenegger has to say about the Russian invasion of Ukraine
March 18th, 2022 by Roger Darlington
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A review of the horror movie “Bird Box”
March 17th, 2022 by Roger Darlington
In 2018, two films were issued with remarkably similar storylines. In both “A Quiet Place” and “Bird Box”, the world was taken over by an alien force that very quickly and very largely wiped out the human population. Both works involved a feisty woman leading a local fight-back and endeavouring to locate other survivors and both women had babies in the mayhem.
In “A Quiet Place”, the creatures had acute hearing but poor sight, so humans could move around but not make a sound and resorted to communicating by sign language. In “Bird Box”, the invaders could be sensed by birds – hence the title – but, if a person looked at them, they immediately became suicidal or psychotic, so people could only move around outside if they wore blindfolds. Pretty similar, huh?
You might have heard of “A Quiet Place – which stars Emily Blunt – because it did well at the box office and spawned a sequel. You may well not have heard of “Bird Box” – which stars Sandra Bullock – because the critics were not keen although it did well on Netflix.
“Bird Box” has its gory moments with elements of a zombie movie and even a touch of ghost story, but it is well-constructed and worth seeing for Bullock’s performance plus those of a range of support actors headed by the redoubtable John Malkovich.
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When did Ukraine come under Russian control and who was responsible for this?
March 16th, 2022 by Roger Darlington
The short answers are January 1654 and Bordan Khmelnytsky.
Khmelnytsky was the leader of the Hetmanate Cossacks who led a successful uprising against the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth of which Ukraine was then a part. At the small town of Pereiaslav, he signed an agreement that, in return for allegiance to the Russian Tsar, the Cossack Hetmanate would receive the military protection of Russia.
For the next three and a quarter centuries, Kiev (now Kviv) would be ruled from Moscow.
This is a fundamental part of the historical background to why Putin wants to take over Ukraine and why the Poles are so welcoming to Ukrainian refugees. Of course, there are many contemporary factors but history casts a long shadow.
For more detail, follow the links.
For my part, I first learned this information through my reading of “Borderland” by Anna Reid.
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Why did Putin order the Russian invasion of Ukraine?
March 15th, 2022 by Roger Darlington
“This war was not inevitable, but we have been moving toward it for years: the west, and Russia, and Ukraine. The war itself is not new – it began, as Ukrainians have frequently reminded us in the past two weeks, with the Russian incursion in 2014. But the roots go back even further. We are still experiencing the death throes of the Soviet empire. We are reaping, too, in the west, the fruits of our failed policies in the region after the Soviet collapse.”
This is a quote from an article in today’s “Guardian” newspaper by American academic Keith Gessen. It is one of the most informative pieces on the Ukraine war that I’ve read so far. It is quite long but worth your time if you want to understand what is going on.
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A review of the Italian novel “The Lost Daughter” by Elena Ferrante
March 14th, 2022 by Roger Darlington
Although I had previously read four novels by Ferrante (the Neapolitan Quartet), I did not read this earlier and shorter work until after I saw the film version.
Told in the first person, this is the story of Leda, an Italian teacher of English literature who is a middle-aged divorcée and mother of two grown daughters. When she takes a seaside holiday in southern Italy, she meets young mother Nina and her daughter Elena and her interactions with them trigger painful recollections of her own experience of womanhood and motherhood.
The novel explores an immensely sensitive subject: the rarely acknowledged truth that many women find parenthood hard, sometimes so crushingly hard that they have to escape from it in order to find their own identity and fulfil their own aspirations. The consequences of such maternal ambivalence casts a shadow that lasts a lifetime.
But, in Leda’s words: “Sometimes you have to escape in order not to die”.
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A review of the new blockbuster movie “The Batman”
March 12th, 2022 by Roger Darlington
This is the ninth Batman movie since 1989 and I’ve enjoyed them all, but such a regular rebooting needs something new each time and, in that respect, “The Batman” delivers with a very respectable addition to the canon, although the three Christopher Nolan films (2005, 2008, 2012) were the best in my book.
The director (and co-writer) this time is Matt Reeves who made the latest couple of “Planet Of The Apes” movies. He has given us a very, very dark work – both visually and narratively – with lots of close-up and blurry shots. Gotham City has never been lashed with so much heavy rain (I suppose some of the location shooting was in Liverpool and Glasgow – but really). And it is very, very long at a bottom-aching, bladder-straining three hours (even if you don’t sit through the credits which conclude with a short message from the villain).
These nine Batman movies have featured six actors in the leading role and the latest to don the cape is Robert Pattison who has come a long way since the “Twilight” saga. I think he is better as the dark knight than he is as Bruce Wayne and, as the former, he has a great costume and makes sure that he has ‘the voice’. More than other manifestations of this super-hero, he is presented as anguished about whether he is really making a difference. Thankfully his aid in arms is not Robin but Selina Kyle aka Catwoman (a confident Zoë Kravitz).
On this occasion, the psychopathic foe is The Riddler’. I confess that I’ve never liked riddles but they don’t seem to present too much difficulty to Batman (I wonder if he is as good at Wordle). It’s a long time before we see Paul Dano’s face and then he just looks like a sad nerd. Nothing like as scary as The Joker (glimpsed at the end) or as weird as The Penguin (who makes a significant appearance).
Overall the film comes over as more of a kind of film noir detective story than as a classic super-hero actioner but, when the action does come, it’s thrilling and, since I saw it in IMAX on Britain’s biggest screen, enveloping.
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As the Covid-19 pandemic runs on, how bad is it looking?
March 11th, 2022 by Roger Darlington
An article in today’s “Guardian” newspaper reports a new estimate of the Covid-19 global death toll:
“The Covid-19 pandemic may have claimed 18.2 million lives around the world, more than three times the official death toll, a new study suggests.
The higher figure is a better estimate of the true global casualty figure to the end of 2021, according to an analysis by a consortium of health researchers published in the Lancet.
They have based their calculation on the number of “excess deaths” which they believe were caused directly or indirectly by the pandemic. These are calculated by looking at the difference between the number of deaths recorded from all causes and the number of expected based on previous patterns.”
We don’t know the death toll from the so-called Spanish flu of 1918-1920. It is usually estimated as between 20 – 50 million, but the lowest estimate is 17 million and the highest is 100 million. So we have now reached the situation with Covid-19 when the latest estimate for the global death toll is similar to the lowest estimate for the toll of Spanish flu.,
The situation for Britain is interesting. The death toll from Spanish flu was 228,000. So far, the official death toll for Covid-19 is about 173,000. So again the death toll is similar to that of Spanish flu.
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