twenty-seven words following the river of death downstream - and some other films i've watched recently

Cosh Boy; also known as The Slasher in USA (1953, dir.  Lewis Gilbert, starring James Kenney, Joan Collins; feat. Hermione Gingold as Queenie). Bomb damage; table tennis; youth crime; postwar masculinity crisis. You wonder at first whether charismatic anti-hero will win but actually – spoilers – the implied denouement is brutally old-school.

Village of the Damned (1960, dir. Wolf Rilla; starring George Sanders, Barbara Shelley, Michael Gwynn, Laurence Naismith). Stoicism, pluck, mental reserve; when headteacher Mr K. summarised this for us in 1982, what was he thinking? Glad I finally caught up with his mid-life crisis.

Night Caller from Outer Space, also known as Blood Beast from Outer Space (1965, dir. John Gilling; starring John Saxon, Maurice Denham, Patricia Haines; feat. Warren Mitchell, Audley Morris). Not Britain’s best ‘interplanetary sex tourism’ movie – that’s Devil Girl From Mars - still, Audley ‘Wicker Man landlord’ Morris as creepy Soho shopkeeper’s superb; deserves own film.

The Chairman (1969, dir. J. Lee 'Guns of Navarone' Thompson, starring Gregory Peck, Anne Heywood; feat. Conrad Yama as Chairman Mao, Burt Kwouk as Chang Shou). British, American and Soviet deep states jointly consider but decide against assassinating Mao Tse-Tung using an explosive device implanted in Gregory Peck’s head... oh, surely you remember?

The Final Programme (1973, dir. Robert Fuest, adapted from Michael Moorcock's 'Jerry Cornelius' novel; starring Jon Finch, Jenny Runacre; hair by Leonard's of London). Studied amoralism does date, rather. Intermittently watchable (sadly Hawkwind-less) curiosity, referencing 2001, Alice in Wonderland, lifestyle supplements. If only they'd filmed (the equally unfilmable) 'An Alien Heat'.

*Watership Down (1978, dir. Martin Rosen; starring John Hurt, Richard Briers, Ralph Richardson, Denham Elliott, Zero Mostel). Comparative theology: trickster species-hero tussles with interventionist God (freedom and authenticity), or a captive, fatalistic theology/ poetics (sometimes ‘high culture’= not knowing where your food comes from)?

The Commanding Heights: The Battle for the World Economy (TV series, 2002- ; dir. William Cran, Greg Barker, from the 1998 book by Daniel Yergin, Joseph Stanislaw). Thatcher, Solidarnosc, Bolivian hyperinflation, USSR’s fall; details (Keynes, von Hayek share WWII air raid duty). Corporate sponsored; unashamedly neoliberal, this DVD box-set’s a historical artefact in itself.

Moana (2016, dir. Ron Clements, John Musker, Don Hall, Chris Williams; starring Auli'l Cravalho, Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson, Rachel House). Plucky heroine (born to rule) pursues pantheistic quest narrative with hero’s journey detailing, only for Flight-of-Concords Jemaine to steal show with best Bowie pastiche since Velvet Goldmine. 

A Wrinkle in Time (2018, dir. Ava DuVernay, starring Storm Reid, Oprah Winfrey, Reese Witherspoon). Daughter and I’ve both loved Madeleine L’Engle’s classic. This looks beautiful, great casting, a film we need maybe - but I was willing it to be better.

Ready Player One (2018, dir. Steven Spielberg, starring Tye Sheridan, Olivia Cooke,  Lena Waithe, Simon Pegg, Mark Rylance). A sugar-rush of a film with a 1970s/ 1980s mix-tape soundtrack, blink-and-you’d-miss-it in-jokes and plenty to say about our virtual-reality-addicted near future. 

*Pub quiz fact: Art Garfunkel’s Bright Eyes, the song from Watership Down, was the UK no. 1 as Margaret Thatcher first took office as Prime Minister (4th May 1979); once you learn that, it becomes hard not to hear it as a kind of elegy for the postwar consensus. “A fog along the horizon, a strange glow in the sky-y…”

  

twenty-seven words about lawns, putin, the lake district, computronium etc

Did you arrive here through my suggestion on twitter that you take Yuval Noah Harari away with you on holiday (so to speak)? If so, welcome - I read him while on holiday with S. near Slanchev Bryag, the Blackpool of the Black Sea (if Blackpool had been built by the communist authorities during the 1960s); also near Nesebar, of course - don't think we were just there for the sun and the cheap booze, it was an educational trip too, I learned the Bulgarian word for ashtray (it's пепелник = pepelnik, sounds more like a small bird that sings in the forest, no?).

Talking of holiday reads, I read Sarah Bakewell's superb group biography of the Sartre/ de Beauvoir circle while staying (for the third time) at the Three Cliffs Bay campsite near Swansea a couple of years ago; this led to me meeting the elderly Jean-Paul Sartre in a dream. I took my wife and daughter along as well but they weren't that into it.

Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow. Amazed me twenty years back. Would this Jesuit adventure story stand a re-read? Yes: so much I missed first time around. Sex, spirit, language, calling, redemption, jokes.

Kurt Vonnegut's Player Piano. Read opinion piece (forget whose) suggesting literary league tables down-rank intentionally comic writers (“yeah? try also being female,” you interject). This rise-of-robots novel outclasses Asimov and 1984.

Yuval Noah Harari's Homo Deus. It’s about the past and future of humanity; inter alia, lawns, pigs, the Black Death, animism etc. The relaxed, conversational style belies this book’s depth, breadth, originality.

Max Tegmark's Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. AI futures. Same-but-different teleology as readable climate-"sceptic", peer Matt Ridley.  This tour-de-force talks about turning all the universe’s matter into computronium like that'd be a good thing.

Peter Pomerantsev's Nothing is True and Everything is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia. How Putinism operates, propagandises; not your grandparents’ Soviet propaganda (as today’s Republican moment isn’t William Buckley’s). Prostitution (overt, covert, metaphorical); gangster sentimentality, bad faith. Funny, horrible, sinister. (See also 'To Russia With Love')

Cyril Connolly's Enemies of Promise. Author remembered, if remembered for writing about what does/ doesn’t last (paradox); cites contemporaries we still read (Orwell, Woolf), others. Lucid investigation of mandarin versus demotic prose. [See also.]

Petruska Clarkson's Gestalt Counselling in Action (updated by Simon Cavicchia). Thought I had her on Fritjof Capra- then, aha, intellectualisation= modification to contact (“lose your mind and…” – Perls). Reading= gestalt process; more/ less than; professional recap, recalibration.

William Wordsworth's The Prelude. Milton looks over Wordsworth’s shoulder, I overlook my own, re-engaging with canonical text I failed to read properly at uni (because older then than now). Multivalent; fluid; illuminative.

John Betjeman's Summoned By Bells. ‘Anxiety of Influence’ again; verse autobiography inevitably recalls Wordsworth, though Betjeman explicitly disdains thought, commitment, preferring sensibility, music (bathos-music of suburban placenames). Betjeman is ‘catchy’ (ambiguous praise).