Archive for October, 2022
A review of the controversial new movie “Blonde”
October 15th, 2022 by Roger Darlington
Both written and directed by Australian Andrew Dominik, he must have known that this would be a controversial work and probably wanted it to be so. Based on Joyce Carol Oates’s fictional biography of American actress and icon Marilyn Monroe, it has been described as a pseudo-biographical psychological drama because, while the film captures many […]
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World poverty reduction has come to a stop
October 14th, 2022 by Roger Darlington
The UN has identified 54 developing economies with severe debt problems. While accounting for little more than 3% of the global economy, they represent 18% of the world’s population, and more than 50% of people living in extreme poverty. Some countries are spending more on debt interest payments than on health, education and social protection combined, and […]
Posted in World current affairs | Comments (0)
The global cost of covid in lives and illness
October 13th, 2022 by Roger Darlington
Covid has killed almost 6.5 million people and infected more than 600 million. The WHO estimates that 10% to 20% of survivors have been left with mid- and long-term symptoms such as fatigue, breathlessness and cognitive dysfunction. Women are more likely to suffer from the condition.
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A review of the new action film “The Woman King”
October 12th, 2022 by Roger Darlington
Imagine a mainstream movie both written and directed by women: respectively American Dana Stevens and African-American Gina Prince-Bythewood. Unusual but not unknown. Imagine a film in which all the leading roles are taken by black women: outstanding African-American Viola Davis in the titular role plus young South African Thuso Mbedu, black British Lashana Lynch and […]
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Why do so many migrants wish to reach Britain?
October 9th, 2022 by Roger Darlington
As I regularly do, I spent the day in Milton Keynes entertaining my two granddaughters. Now the local taxi company that I use in the city is staffed by drivers who normally hail from Pakistan. But not today. This time my driver was from Afghanistan. There are many ethnic groups in Afghanistan and I was […]
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A review of the important book of world history: “Guns, Germs And Steel” by Jared Diamond
October 8th, 2022 by Roger Darlington
Diamond is professor of geography at the University of California Los Angeles and he is a noted polymath who won a Pulitzer Prize for this outstanding work first published in 1997. I read a 20th anniversary edition with a new afterword and by then the book was an established classic. It is a hugely ambitious […]
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A review of the 1961 classic French film “Last Year In Marienbad”
October 5th, 2022 by Roger Darlington
Marienbad is a spa town in the Czech Republic, but no filming was done there for this thoroughly enigmatic work. The locations used for most of the interiors and gardens were the palaces of Schleissheim and Nymphenburg and other locations in and around Munich. But this is the least of the deceits, or at least […]
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