A review of the new musical movie “The Prom”
December 14th, 2020 by Roger Darlington
I confess that musicals are not my thing, whether on the stage or in the movies, but the year of the global pandemic has meant that there have been so few new films released that I was ready to give this a go. I further confess that I’d never heard of the Broadway musical of which this is an adaptation by Ryan Murphy, the creative brains behind the television series “Glee”.
But I rather enjoyed the film and, if musicals are your thing, you’ll probably love it. I say probably because the movie has had its critics.
It’s a simple, if uplifting and liberal, story of the efforts of four out-of-work actors in New York who decide to intervene to reverse the decision of a bigoted PTA at a school in Indiana to ban the annual prom because one girl wants to bring along another girl as her partner for the night. They plan to “change the world one lesbian at a time”.
Some commentators have been hard on Britain’s James Corden for his American accent and for playing a gay character when he is actually straight. But I enjoyed his performance and Meryl Streep is brilliant as a fellow thespian, while Nicole Kidman is always value and newcomer Jo Ellen Pellman is delightful as the girl at the centre of the storm. Of the four main gay roles, three are played by actors who are out as queer, including Pellman and her co-star Ariana DeBose which is commendably inclusive casting.
It’s big, it’s brash and, if you want two hours of forgetting about the coronavirus, go for it.
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The case for a wealth tax has never been stronger
December 11th, 2020 by Roger Darlington
One of the most defining characteristics of my political philosophy is that we need to create a society with a fairer distribution of income, wealth and power because current levels of inequality are so damaging to life chances and social outcomes. There is a great deal of evidence to support this position in the book “The Spirit Level” which I have reviewed here.
The global pandemic occasioned by the coronavirus has massively increased the inequalities in many societies – especially the UK and the US – and the measures that have had to be taken to combat the virus have resulted in dramatically reduced economic growth and huge increases in national debt.
These are unprecedented times with unprecedented challenges and we need radical new policies to build back better. One of these policies should be a wealth tax.
Here in the UK, the Wealth Tax Commission – a group of leading tax experts and economists brought together by the London School of Economics and Warwick University to examine the case for a levy on assets – has proposed a wealth tax which could raise £260bn over five years if the threshold was set at £1m per household, with a levy of 1% payable on the value of their assets above this level. You can read more about this sensible and practical idea here.
This is not a crazy idea. It is already happening in Argentina and has the support of experts and newspapers in the UK as you can read here.
Of course, the establishment elite would campaign against a wealth tax and I once wrote a short story about a Labour Prime Minister who backed such an idea, You can read that story here.
Posted in British current affairs, World current affairs | Comments (0)
I am in mourning. Chuck Yeager has died.
December 9th, 2020 by Roger Darlington
American test pilot Chuck Yeager, who was the first man to break the sound barrier, has died aged 97. He was one of my heroes.
Yeager was a fighter ace in World War Two, flying Mustangs with the United States Army Air Force when he became a double ace with 11 ‘kills’. But my admiration for him relates to his bravery as a test pilot.
This is the man who first flew faster than the speed of sound in 1947. He managed the feat in the Bell X-1 which he named “Glamorous Glennis” (after his wife) and which I have seen many times hanging from the ceiling of the National Air & Space Museum in Washington [for an account of the breaking of the sound barrier click here].
This is the conqueror of the X-1A after a fall of 51,000 feet. the burnt and battered survivor of a bale out from an F-104, and the veteran of 127 missions flown over Vietnam.
Part of his story was told in Tom Wolfe’s wonderful book “The Right Stuff” and, in the film of the same name [for my review click here], Yeager was played by Sam Shepard. The full account can be found in the engaging biography which Yeager wrote with Leo Janos.
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A review of the new movie “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom”
December 6th, 2020 by Roger Darlington
This is a superb Netflix movie that I was fortunate enough to see at the cinema – such a visit being a rare occurrence in the year of the coronavirus.
It tells the story of a recording session in Chicago in 1927 of the legendary African-American Gertrude “Ma’ Rainey who sang from 1899–1933 and was known as the “mother of the blues”. There was a dance at the time called the black bottom and hence the title of the film is the name of one of her songs.
Viola Davis put on 20lb and donned heavy make-up to play Rainey in a blistering career-best performance. Her backing group of four includes the trumpeter Levee which was the final cinematic role of Chadwick Boseman before his premature death. The role is a million miles from his casting as “Black Panther” and his virtuoso performance makes his loss all the more poignant. The film is dedicated to him.
In this narrative, Rainey is an uncompromising artist who knows exactly what she wants and always gets it, knowing just how far to weld her power over both the white recording engineers and her own black entourage. By contrast, Levee is the young, fiercely ambitious performer and songwriter who wants to form his own band, but overreaches with ultimately terrible consequences. There are some powerful set-pieces about race, power and God.
The film was originally a 1982 play by the late Pulitzer Prize-winning African-American playwright August Wilson, one of ten entrusted to Denzil Washinton to bring to the screen. The first to be shot was “Fences” for which Washington was both director and star (and which featured Davis). Here he is simply a producer, handing direction to George C Wolfe, an award-winning theatre director.
Like most plays turned into films, the dialogue is terrific, if sometimes grandstanding, but the location is static, although there are a couple of efforts to open out the stage. In this particular case, the wonderful music is almost a character in itself, representing both an explanation and an expression of the black condition.
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A review of the recent independent film “Monsoon”
December 5th, 2020 by Roger Darlington
The story in this film – a search for a sense of cultural identity – is loosely inspired by the experience of writer and director Hong Khaou whose family was forced to flee Cambodia so that he was brought up in Britain.
Kit – played by Henry Golding in a more mature role than in “Crazy Rich Asians” – is a British-Vietnamese who had to leave Vietnam when he was six as his parents made a new life in Britain. He returns to the country of his birth over three decades later to visit where his parents lived (Ho Chi Minn City which was then Saigon) and where they were brought up (Hanoi).
The film was short entirely on location in Vietnam (I’ve visited both cities) and it is beautifully photographed from the opening scene of traffic at a busy crossroads. But the pace of the narrative is slow, even languid, and the dialogue is spare with little explanation of motivation, so ultimately this is a work in which style triumphs over substance.
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A review of “Ten Lessons For a Post-Pandemic World” by Fareed Zakaria
December 3rd, 2020 by Roger Darlington
Zakaria is an Indian-American political scientist who hosts CNN’s flagship international affairs show. His book – published in October 2020 with information as recent as July 2020 – is immensely topical, informative and thought-provoking, even if there is nothing terribly original or radical in it and too few proposals for practical change. My effort at summarising the 10 lessons is as follows:
- Global capitalism is so open and so fast that it is inherently unstable, promoting a clash between people and nature that has caused zoonotic diseases like Covid-19, and we need to build in some security and resilience through measures like better regulation of markets, stronger public health systems and a new carbon tax.
- In the United States, the weakness of the federal government and the multiplicity of state and local units has made a concerted effort to tackle issues like coronavirus almost impossibe, so that the country needs not so much larger government as better government with more professional expertise and better learning.
- Reliance on free markets to provide comprehensive health, access to education & training, and social mobility – the Reagan-Thatcher model – is not working and a better approach is the ‘flexicurity’ model of Northern European economies (classically Denmark) based on high taxation, substantial welfare provision, and social cohesion.
- The pandemic has revealed how the less educated and less wealthy feel alienated from the elite, but people should listen to the experts who know best how to respond to such a crisis and, for their part, the experts should show empathy and listen to the people.
- New technologies – most notably artificial intelligence – will utterly transform the world of work, so that we will have to consider ideas like a universal basic income or topping up the wages of low-income workers.
- Covid-19 will not lead to a decline in urban living because people thrive on real life contact, but it could encourage a reimagining of cities with more walking and cycling and ideas like ‘the 15 minute city’.
- Coronavirus has highlighted and worsened the inequalities in societies and economies with poor and (in the US especially) black citizens suffering the most, but meanwhile countries with less inequality and higher levels of trust seem to have handled the crisis best.
- In spite of what some commentators may think, the pandemic will not result in the death or even the decline (except perhaps a small and temporary one) in globalisation because the forces are too great and the benefits too large.
- The world is becoming bipolar as the historic ascendancy of the United States is increasingly being challenged by the growing economic and military power of China but, while bipolarity is inevitable, a new cold war is a choice.
- The ‘liberal international order’ created by the United States after the Second World War has brought unprecedented peace and prosperity, but is now under threat from America’s abdication and China’s expansionism, yet there are strong practical reasons why it can survive.
If one had to reduce this book to one sentence, it would be: “the pandemic will not reshape history so much as accelerate it”. Overall it is a profoundly positive work but, Zakaria does warn, especially in the relation to climate change, that “the next crisis could be the last”.
Posted in World current affairs | Comments (0)
A review of the new film “Hillbilly Elegy”
November 30th, 2020 by Roger Darlington
‘Hillbilly’ is a term (often derogatory) for people who live in rural, mountainous areas in the United States, primarily in southern Appalachia and the Ozarks and this film is set in such a community in Kentucky.
It does not examine why such Americans are so poor and disadvantaged but tells the (true life) story of how one young man (J D Vance) managed to escape such contraints to get to an ivy league university and become a venture capitalist and the movie is based on his best-selling book of the same title.
J D survived and surmounted the tough love of his mother Bev (played by Amy Adams) and grandmother Mamaw (Glenn Close). It is a world of physical and substance abuse which, on occasions, makes for some uncomfortable viewing.
More than most, this film has divided opinion. Once one accepts that this is a personal story and not an insight into a whole community, the movie has a powerful and ultimately uplifting tale to tell. I thought the acting by Adams and Close – both of whom wear facial prosthetics and wigs – convincing and impressive.
For me, the problem is in the direction, although this is work of the acclaimed Ron Howard. There are simply too many flash-backs (or flash-forwards depending on your perspective) so that the narrative is excessively disjointed and at time unclear.
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Word of the day: semiquincentennial
November 25th, 2020 by Roger Darlington
Semiquincentennial (also called sestercentennial or quarter millennial) is the 250th anniversary of an event.
I find it really difficult these days to find semiquincentennial birthday cards.
On the other hand, I’m looking forward to the semiquincentennial or 250th anniversary of the 1776 establishment of the United States of America which will fall on 4 July 2026.
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A review of the novel “Winter In Madrid” by C J Sansom
November 21st, 2020 by Roger Darlington
Christopher John Sansom is a British writer of historical crime novels best-known for his Matthew Shardlake series set in Tudor England. He has written two standalone novels: “Dominion” (2012) which I read first and “Winter In Madrid” (2006) which I read rather later.
While “Dominion” is set in a fictional Britain of winter 1952 when Britain has made peace with Nazi Germany, “Winter In Madrid” is largely set in 1940 just after the conclusion of the Spanish Civil War when Britain was concerned that Franco might take take his country into the Second World War on the side of Hitler and Mussolini who had assisted him during the civil war.
There are a limited number of characters, primarily three former students of Rookwood boarding school: Harry Brett who is recruited by the British secret service to establish the details of a suspected source of gold in Franco’s Spain, Sandy Forsyth who is believed to be a key player in the development of a gold mine in the country, and Bernie Piper who was a member of the International Brigades in the civil war and long missing presumed dead.
The devastated city of Madrid, with its appalling poverty and blatant corruption, is almost a character in itself and there is much mention of cigarette smoking and coffee drinking. As with “Dominion”, Sansom does not hide his political stance which, in this case, is anti-fascist and pro-republican but critical of the revolutionary Left.
It has to be said that the historical portrayal of post-civil war Spain in this novel is more convincing than the plot which is very slow-burning with a rather downbeat ending. Sansom – who has both a BA and PhD in history – really does his research but his literary style is quite plain and his narrative is too thin. However, at over 500 pages, it was a satisfying enough read for the second lockdown of the coronavirus pandemic.
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A review of the 2019 film “Dark Waters”
November 20th, 2020 by Roger Darlington
There is a sub-genre of drama movies that tell true-life stories of how powerful private corporations produced products that seriously harmed consumers and/or citizens, covering up the information and denying responsibility in the face of brave and tenacious individuals who sought to reveal the truth and hold them accountable. I think, for instance, of “Silkwood” (radiation in a plutonium processing plant), “Erin Brockovich” (chromium 6 in water) and “The Insider” (nicotine in cigarettes).
This film is an account of how a corporate defence laywer Robert Bilott used his legal skills to expose the mighty DuPont corporation for its use of a carcinogenic chemical called perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) in the manufacture of Teflon. After a twenty-year legal battle, Bilott won three multimillion-dollar settlements against DuPont, forcing the company to settle the remaining more than 3,500 disease cases for $671 million.
It is a wonderful cast headed by Mark Ruffalo as Bilott, a role a million miles away from his casting as the Incredible Hulk in the Avengers series, with supporting roles filled by Anne Hathaway as Bilott’s wife and Tim Robbins as his boss. Furthermore it tells an enormously important story because PFOA and similar compounds are forever chemicals (chemicals that do not leave the blood stream and slowly accumulate) and everyone on the planet has been exposed to them in some way.
The problem is that cases of this kind typically take many years to research and prosecute and the evidence is voluminous and complex. This means that it is hard to make the narrative exciting but not all movies can be action-packed blockbusters.
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