A review of the novel “To Kill The President”
August 26th, 2017 by Roger Darlington
Although I read the “Guardian” newspaper every day, I hadn’t realised that its political columnist Jonathan Freedland wrote political thrillers under the pseudonym Sam Bourne but, as I browsed in a bookshop, I read the blurb on the back of this novel and was seized by the ‘torn from the news headlines’ nature of the plot: a volatile demagogue who has just been elected to the Oval Office has ordered a nuclear strike on North Korea.
Of course, Bourne’s president is nameless but the ‘fictional’ commander-in-chief is so scarily recognisable that Donald Trump could probably sue for libel in a British court if he was not so busy up-ending every convention in the political playbook – including warning Pyongyang of American “fire and fury”.
Following this cracking opening scenario, the rest of the novel does not have quite the same sense of acute drama and the plot gradually becomes less credible, but it is a fast-paced story with some well-researched political, geographical and technological detail and the book is a genuine page-turner with teasing lines at the end of each of the short chapters.
And, instead of a male protagonist shooting his way through every obstacle, we have a female White House counsel, Irish-born Maggie Costello, who uses her intellect and insight to discover the awful truth.
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A review of the recent Portman film “Jackie”
August 25th, 2017 by Roger Darlington
Israeli-born actress Natalie Portman has come a long way since her amazing performance as a young girl in the thriller “Leon”, winning an Academy Award for Best Actress for her role in “Black Swan”.
In this film, she portrays Jacqueline Kennedy in the days between the assassination and funeral of her husband, US President John F Kennedy, in 1963. It is an exceptional representation, affecting the unusual voice of her subject and communicating the horror and pain of the First Lady’s experience and her determination to have the funeral she thought appropriate.
This is the first English-language film from Chilean director Pablo Larrain and it is a respectful if, ultimately (and perhaps inevitably), cold work with Mica Levi’s discordant score adding to the sense of alienation.
As Jackie tells the reporter whose interview is the framing device for the film: “Don’t let it be forgot, that for one brief, shining moment there was a Camelot.”
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Ever heard of the Suwalki Gap?
August 24th, 2017 by Roger Darlington
I doubt that you have – but many people in the Baltic States and in the Russian military are well aware that this is a short stretch of land which is the only connection between the Baltic States and the rest of the European Union. On one side is Lithuania and on the other side is Poland, but to the west is the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad.
As this article on the tensions with Russia explains:
“Such is the anxiety, that when Russian military personnel take the military train from Kaliningrad to Moscow, a Lithuanian air force helicopter hovers overhead to ensure that no one illegally hops off en route. Earlier this year NATO deployed four battalion-sized battle-groups to Poland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.Those with the darkest imaginations suggest Russia could one day choose to close the so-called Suwałki Gap, a 60-mile-long stretch of the Polish-Lithuanian border stretching from Kaliningrad to Russia’s close ally, Belarus, and cut off the Baltic states from the rest of Europe.”
I have been on a trip to the three Baltic States and I understand their anxieties.
Posted in World current affairs | Comments (0)
A review of the documentary “An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth To Power”
August 23rd, 2017 by Roger Darlington
When the documentary “An Inconvenient Truth” was issued in 2006, it took me three years before I caught up with it at home but, this summer, I made a point of viewing the sequel straightaway at the cinema. The issue of climate change has become so much more urgent and the stakes so much higher now that we have a climate change denier in the White House.
Directors Bonni Cohen and Jon Shenk have done a fine job in knitting together extracts from fluent presentations by former US Vice-President Al Gore, his visits to sights illustrating both the growing instances of disaster and successful initiatives to cut carbon emissions, and his role at the UN Climate Change Conference in 2016. The sequel may not have quite the shock impact of the original work, but it makes a compelling case and offers a sense of hope that was lacking 10 years ago as new technologies transform our options for effective action.
As an American politician, Gore rightly points out: “In order to address the environmental crisis, we’re going to have to spend some time fixing the democracy crisis.”
Posted in Cultural issues, Environment | Comments (0)
The 15 funniest jokes of this year’s Edinburgh fringe
August 22nd, 2017 by Roger Darlington
Here in Britain, we’ve been having a miserable summer with lots of cool, overcast and wet days, so we need some humour to keep us smiling.
In this list, you’ll find the best jokes from this year’s Edinburgh fringe festival.
And, if you want more jokes, you’ll find tons on my website here:
Posted in Miscellaneous | Comments (0)
Are some operations only effective because of the placebo effect?
August 20th, 2017 by Roger Darlington
The effectiveness of alternative or homeopathic medicine is simply down to the placebo effect, but it may be that a number of routine operations only achieve their efficacy through the same process. In a fascinating article in today’s “Observer” newspaper, one surgeon comes clean on what is going on:
“Nobody is suggesting that a liver transplant, cancer surgery or a cataract operation is ineffective or down to placebo,” says Andy Carr, a professor of surgery at the University of Oxford. “But for more routine surgeries, where outcomes are subjective things, such as pain or stiffness, there’s good evidence that many are little more than placebo. Given that these operations cause risk to patients and cost to hospitals, that is good evidence that we should stop doing them.”
Posted in Science & technology | Comments (0)
A review of the 2016 movie “The Accountant”
August 19th, 2017 by Roger Darlington
This is an action thriller with an unusual central character – a kind of cross between Raymond Babbitt from “Rain Man”, since he has acute autism with phenomenal mathematical skills, and the eponymous hit man in the “John Wick” series, since he has the kind of martial and shooting skills of a small army.
Christian Wolff (played in a necessarily downbeat fashion by Ben Affleck) is the accountant, but he is much more of a wolf than an Christian. Indeed he is a morally complex figure indeed, assisting crime syndicates to clean up their ill-gotten gains while running a host of front companies himself to enable the funding of a meritorious endeavour and, along the way, killing as callously as efficiently and yet sparing a couple of his potential victims.
A slow burner with some initially complex plotting but sufficiently different certainly to merit viewing.
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“House Of Cards” or “Games Of Thrones” Trump-style
August 18th, 2017 by Roger Darlington
Who has now left Trump’s White House team?
- Steve Bannon, chief strategist – 18 August
- Anthony Scaramucci, communications director – 31 July
- Reince Priebus, chief of staff – 28 July
- Sean Spicer, press secretary – 21 July
- Mike Dubke, communications director – 30 May
- James Comey, FBI director – 9 May
- Michael Flynn, national security adviser – 14 February
Who needs fictional television? There’s more blood on the walls of the White House. It would be comical if it was not so serious. But we’re still awaiting one most important departure.
Posted in American current affairs | Comments (0)
A review of the new film “Atomic Blonde”
August 18th, 2017 by Roger Darlington
This espionage thriller is adapted from a graphic novel called “The Coldest City” and is the directorial debut of David Leitch, formerly a stunt coordinator and second unit director in work such as “John Wick” (and it certainly shows).
The eponymous MI6 agent is Lorraine Broughton, played with panache by the tall, once South African once model who rather stole the show in “Mad Max: Fury Road”. Set in Berlin as the wall is about to fall in 1989, like the recent “Baby Driver” we have a loud soundtrack of contemporary music.
If all this suggests more style than substance, that would be a fair inference. The convoluted plot – set out in a series of flashbacks – revolves, as so often in spy movies (think “Mission: Impossible”), in the hunt for a list of agents but, again as so frequently is the case, the object of the search is really irrelevant (what cinema critics call a MacGuffin).
But, if the substance of the movie is thin, the style is terrific with flashy camerawork and tons of gritty action, involving not just guns and cars but any domestic object that comes to hand, just as long as it can be smashed into someone’s face. A ten-minute fight scene on a set of stairs is set to become something of a classic.
This is not a film that would stand up to any serious feminist critique, but it’s an all-too-rare guilty pleasure to see a confident and capable woman kicking male ass.
There has been too little of it since “The Long Kiss Goodnight” (1996), although this summer we’ve had the delights of “The Ghost In The Shell” and “Wonder Women”. If the Blonde were to become a franchise like Bond or Bourne, I for one would not complain.
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“The How Of Happiness” – my review of the book
August 17th, 2017 by Roger Darlington
I have recently finished reading a book called “The How Of Happiness” by Sonja Lyubomirsky.
The main section of the work is a description of 12 happiness-enhancing activities and, over the past three days, I’ve blogged about these techniques.
If you’d like to see a recap of all the activities and my review of the book as a whole, you’ll find that here.
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