Archive for August, 2022
A review of the 2017 film “The Killing Of A Sacred Deer”
August 29th, 2022 by Roger Darlington
This is a very odd film in so many respects. Above all, the storyline is so unusual: inspired by an ancient Greek tragedy (which is mentioned once very briefly), it is a psychological thriller in which lives are threatened and one is lost (the titular reference to an animal is a metaphor). Although it is […]
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A review of the 1995 film “La Haine”
August 24th, 2022 by Roger Darlington
A French-language film shot in black and white with the title “Hate” might not immediately appeal, but it won the Best Director prize at the Cannes Film Festival and it has become a major classic of recent French cinema. Written and directed by Mattieu Kassovitz, amazingly this was his screen debut and he was only […]
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A review of “The Long Game” by Rush Doshi (2021)
August 21st, 2022 by Roger Darlington
Important and informative though “The Long Game” is, it is not an easy read. There are 400 pages of small and dense text with a good deal of repetition and almost 1,500 notes. But Rush Doshi knows what he is writing about and what he is writing about is of huge geopolitical significance. Doshi is […]
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Would you fly with Ethiopian Airlines?
August 19th, 2022 by Roger Darlington
There is an amazing story that two pilots with Ethiopian Airlines fell asleep at 37,000ft (11,000m), missing an airport runway before waking to land the aircraft safely. The news raises the question would you fly with this airline? Well, I did – six times in two weeks as you will see from this account of […]
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A review of the film “Donnie Brasco”
August 19th, 2022 by Roger Darlington
For some reason, it took me two and a half decades to catch up with this excellent movie from 1997. By then, Johnny Depp – who takes the titular role – had been through the increasing madness of the “Pirates Of The Caribbean” series and endured two highly-publicised court cases with former partner Amber Heard. […]
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The death of a talented pilot and the end of an historic aircraft
August 17th, 2022 by Roger Darlington
A few days ago, there was a tragic accident at an air display in Cheb in the Czech Republic. The pilot was Petr Paces who was a very experienced MiG 21 fighter pilot and captain of the Boeing 737 airliner. Nothing is more important that the death of this man, but I have to record […]
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On the 75th anniversary of independence for India, how much is there to celebrate?
August 16th, 2022 by Roger Darlington
Politics in India is much rougher and much more corrupt that in the democracies of Europe and North America. Assassination is not uncommon: the revered Mahatma Gandhi in 1948, the Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in 1984, and the Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi in 1991 were all murdered, although it has to be noted that these […]
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A review of the recent French film “Who You Think I Am”
August 15th, 2022 by Roger Darlington
Juliette Binoche is a talented and beautiful actress who has now appeared in over 60 French-language and English-language films. I really admire her work and must have seen over a dozen of her roles. In this French-language work from 2019, she plays Claire, a 50 year old professor of French literature, who uses Facebook to […]
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Aircraft carriers: how many of them are there and who has them?
August 14th, 2022 by Roger Darlington
Currently I’m reading a book by American researcher Rush Doshi entitled “The Long Game” and subtitled “China’s grand strategy to displace American order”. Recently I read the section on China’s development of aircraft carriers which led me to wonder: how many aircraft carriers are there in the world and which nations have them? As usual, […]
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Because it’s the weekend: k d lang sings “Hallelujah”
August 12th, 2022 by Roger Darlington
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