The Importance of Being Eton by Nick Fraser. Curious book, part reminiscences of the author’s time at Eton, part interviews with other Old Etonians and past and present staff, but despite his occasional attempts at analysis I’m not sure what it all adds up to. Surprisingly, one theme which emerges is that of failure: “I realise that I must… accomplish an ancient Eton ritual, by undermining, not necessarily with fatal results, my own promise. In order to truly succeed, it now seems to me that I need to fail.” And again: “Clearly, I must begin to fail at what I did - even if only as a compensation for all that Eton success. I could do what I wanted so long as I allowed myself to spoil whatever I was doing.” I think it’s really his attempt to work out the place of Eton in his life and the effect of having gone there, so only intermittently interesting to the rest of us.
Bournville by Jonathan Coe. Another topical (though also historical) novel from Coe, well-rooted in English place – this one in the eponymous village suburb of Birmingham where the Cadburys built their chocolate factory – with Coe’s wonderfully compassionate writing being kind even to unlikeable characters. Beautiful and satisfying to read.
Barnaby Smith: Bach. Tremendous solo concert (supported by Illyria Consort) from the male alto and director of Voces8, presenting the same programme as his new album.
Magpie Murders (not THE Magpie Murders, the difference is important). Really sparkling detective show, adapted for the BBC by Anthony Horowitz from his own novel. The clever concept is that there are TWO murder mysteries: one in the present, where a publishing editor (played to perfection by the wonderful Lesley Manville) investigates the suspicious death of her best-selling author; the other is the story of his latest novel, set in the 1950s, of which the last chapter is missing from the manuscript. Beautifully, the editor and the fictional detective often traverse the same landscape, then start to appear in the same shot, then – in the editor’s imagination – start to have conversations as they try to solve their respective mysteries. A class act.
A Grief Observed. C S Lewis’s very fine reflective account of his thoughts and feelings after the death of his wife. Of course everyone’s experience is different, but it’s always comforting to know that other people have gone through something comparable and to be reassured that the peculiar turns one's mind takes are in fact normal.
Hidden Figures. Interesting film, bringing to light the unfamiliar story of black women in the US space programme during the 1960s. Teams of black women mathematicians worked as computers - this being when a computer was a person, not a machine; in fact, it’s during the period covered by the film that one of IBM’s machines is installed, and the women, realising that it is going to make them redundant, retrain themselves as coders. A powerful civil rights story too; Kevin Costner’s character has been criticised as being a “white saviour”, which is valid, but the film does also show the women powerfully and forcefully making their grievances known, and movement towards equality usually requires action from the (white) people in power.
The Red Turtle. Beautiful and powerful wordless animated film. A shipwrecked sailor’s efforts to escape from his island on a raft are repeatedly frustrated by a mysterious red turtle, which in anger he flips onto its back on the beach so that it dies in the sun. The dead turtle, however metamorphoses into a woman, who becomes his wife and mother of their child for the rest of his life on the island.
The Shape of Water. Striking fantasy film by Guillermo del Toro, with something of the feel of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil. Sally Hawkins is a cleaner in a research laboratory which holds an aquatic humanoid alien. Developing a relationship with him, she determines to set the alien free before he is destroyed by the scientists’ experiments.
A Beautiful Day in the Neighbourhood. Lovely film about a journalist writing a profile piece on the (real) legendary Mr Rogers, whose television programme Mr Rogers’ Neighbourhood was part of childhood of several generations of Americans – something like Blue Peter in the UK, maybe, only more so because Mr Rogers dealt in what we would now call emotional intelligence, how to recognise and manage feelings. The journalist goes in full of cynicism, and to his discomfort discovers that Mr Rogers is just as nice as he seems to be, in the process doing some work on his own wounded inner child. Tom Hanks, as Mr Rogers, is of course excellent, and so is Matthew Rhys as the journalist, especially in the bits where you can see that he wants to cry but is determinedly not doing so. The film is based on a real journalist’s article ‘Can you say … hero?’ for Esquire magazine.
The Uncertain: Light at the End. Adventure game, sequel to The Uncertain: Last Quiet Day. An okay game, with a decent review: you guide a small group of humans scavangeing to stay alive in a post-apocalyptic world in which robots have taken over. But the characters are stereotypes and the dialogue is stilted, and I couldn’t really care about any of them, even the principal. If there are more sequels (the story clearly sets up for a long sequence), I won’t be playing them.
Blue Steel. An early (1980) film from director Kathryn Bigelow, with Jamie Lee Curtis as a rookie cop, being stalked by a man who becomes obsessed with her after seeing her gun down an armed robber. Curtis is great, and nice to see Ron Silver in a different role (knowing him first as Bruno Gianelli in The West Wing). But I found it very intense and had to watch it in two instalments. I was also irritated that they never settled on what Ron Silver’s psychiatric condition was. They seemed to be setting him up as a psychopath: he was charming, which psychopaths often are, and his day job was a city trader, the kind of job at which psychopaths excel. But then they gave him schizophrenic voices too and a kind of religious mania as well. Too much, guys, pick a psychopathology and stick to it.
Bridge to Terabithia. Not the film I was expecting from the publicity summaries: children discover a magical fantastic world. It sounded like sub-Narnia. In fact, the film is thoroughly rooted in this world: a misfit boy (loner, artistic, bullied at school) has his life transformed by friendship with a misfit girl (literary, imaginative, rebellious), and yes they invent the world of Terabithia together but it’s an overlay onto the real world. It’s not a fantasy story any more than Swallows and Amazons, in which the children role-play their Lake District sailing and camping as adventures on the high seas and in unexplored territories. Also unexpected is that at the end the girl dies in an accident, so it’s also about the boy coming to terms with loss. Apparently the book on which this film was based is well-known and well-loved in the USA, inspired by the actual death of a child friend of the author’s young son; in a nice real life twist, the grown-up son, now a screenwriter, co-authored the screenplay of the film. Courageous of him to revisit it all again, one more time.
Steeltown Murders. Interesting BBC dramatisation of the real life investigation and re-investigation of the murders of three young women around Port Talbot. The narrative swings between the two time frames: one immediately after the bodies were discovered in 1973, and the other in 2002 when DNA technology raised the possibility of at last identifying the killer. By cop drama standards, the pace is slow and it seems unreasonable that the story can be dragged out for three episodes. But that's the point, I think: this is street level, shoe leather policing, where the investigation depends on pains-taking interviewing and collating of hundreds of potential witnesses, suspects and people of interest, every step of the way dependent on consent and goodwill on the part of the community.
The Hobbit: An unexpected journey. Well. I remember when it first came out asking my sister, who'd seen it, what she thought of it, and she replied: "It's long." And I thought then that if that was the best thing she could say, I wouldn't bother to see it. And I now rather wished I'd not bothered to watch it on television. There’s nothing actually bad about it; it just feels long, and most of the additions to increase the tie-in with The Lord of the Rings (whose events it precedes) weaken the story rather than strengthening it. The best thing, also the best thing in The Lord of the Rings films, was Gollum / Smeagol, who in his obsessive insanity is truly piteous and pitiable and not simply monstrous. I kept on till the end out of curiosity to see where in the story they finished the episode, but I’m definitely not spending my time on the second and third instalments.
Soul. Now here’s a proper film, of the quality we expect from Pixar: unexpectedly profound, being not only about jazz but about life and what it means to be alive. The principal character Joe (voiced by Jamie Foxx) is an aspiring jazz musician, who enters a limbo state after a nearly fatal accident, in which he rebels against his fate, being convinced that jazz is his purpose in life, because his accident happened as he was just about to get his big break. In the limbo state, he’s called on to mentor an as-yet-unborn soul (Soul 22, voiced by Tina Fey) who sees no point in embarking on life; he helps her find her “spark” which means she is ready for life. And so is Joe: he thought jazz was his purpose, but perhaps it’s really his spark; he’s been like a fish swimming around, looking for the ocean, unaware that he’s already in it. That’s a great deal better than the self-actualisation just-be-yourself pap which is all so many films, for adults as well as children, have to offer. And the music is pretty good too.
Torchlight (see review). My current guilty pleasure: an action RPG with cartoon-simple but elegant graphics and a reassuringly easy ride on the Normal level of difficulty. The amount and variety of weaponry and armour available is breath-taking. I'm playing as a Vanquisher (specialist in ranged weapons), presently at Level 21, equipped with hardened plate tunic, the Indigo Plate Sash of the Winds (which provides protection against ice and a 15% change of reflecting 50% of missile damage), gorgon boots and the Fury of the Hunted gloves. She also wears the Shadow Guise, because athough I've found helmets which offer a better armour class I rather like the way this one steals health points from every hit. Until recently, she fought with the Brighteye's Sonic pistol in one hand and an Icy Brand wand in the other, but I've changed her over to a two-handed crossbow called the Arcuballista of the Bear, which despite being slow can usually dispatch weaker enemies in a single shot – very handy in the boss battle she's just survived, where I had her pick off the minions one by one to avoid being overwhelmed before she took on the big boss itself.
The Gallows Pole. Strange but compelling BBC drama, telling the story (based on real events, apparently) of a Yorkshire village community in the late 18th century, on the edge of destitution because of industrialising cloth production, which a returning prodigal determines to save by using his big city skills to strike illegal gold sovereigns from the clippings of real ones. The characters, especially the principals David and Grace, are very vivid, helped by director Shane Meadow’s encouragement of colloquial (though not obviously anachronistic) dialogue, and it’s a real insight into the class and economic conflict of the times.
Breathing Room. Rather lovely sculpture by Anna Berry: a twisting corridor composed of paper cones, of which the walls flex gently in and out as though you are inside a room that is breathing. From outside, you can see the mechanism which drives it: a large set of cogs and levers, made from recycled bike parts. The effect of being inside is calming and soothing, especially on a hot day, and encourages staying still to listen to the room breathe. It reminded me of Doctor Who (which in my book is a good thing), 'The Claws of Axos' from the Jon Pertwee era, which featured a spacecraft which was actually alive; the humanoid aliens inside it turned out to be part of the same single organism. In travelling to see the installation in Docklands, I learned the important lesson NOT to trust Apple Maps, which confidently placed me in the wrong location and guided me in the wrong direction.
Digital Storytelling. Exhibition at the British Library, featuring some notable recent games / stories, including 80 Days, Zombies! Run!, Breathe, Clockwork Watch, Astrologastor and Seed. Nice video interviews with the authors / designers with a few artefacts and playable extracts, but nothing which couldn’t have been displayed just as effectively and conveniently on a website. (The Guardian reviewer was also a bit sceptical.) But perhaps there is some added value in seeing the material in an exhibition space, in a prestigious institution.
Double Indemnity. Classic Billy Wilder film, with Barbara Stanwyck as a great femme fatale, a very good performance by Fred MacMurray, of whom I’d never heard, as the leading man, and tremendous presence from Edward G. Robinson in the third role. Great storytelling, with not a screen second wasted.
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