michael portillo’s gastric juices

While you can say something in 27 words, you can’t even begin to try saying everything – to strive for the achievement of such a balance may inculcate a wholesome discipline. 

(Doesn't William Empson, in Seven Types of Ambiguity, throw out the observation that, logarithmically speaking, an afternoon is about midway between a moment and a lifetime?).

So let’s do this (one more time, aiming for similar quarterly updates in future if only as aides-memoire): here are some twenty-seven word reviews of films and television I’ve watched and books I've listened to or read recently. 

(This blog also has an index: click here)

Films

Rollerball (1975, dir. Norman Jewison, screenplay by William Harrison adapting his short story 'Rollerball Murder' first published in 1973 in Esquire, starring James Caan) – post-Watergate corporate dystopia about (i) an eponymous futuresport which combines roller disco, pinball, baseball, boxing, motorcycling etc and (ii) anomie (use of Albinoni’s Adagio quoting Orson Welles’‘The Trial’).

Death Race 2000 (1975, dir. Paul Bartel, produced by Roger Corman, screenplay by Robert Thom and Charles B. Griffiths based by Ib Melchior's 1956 short story 'The Racer', starring David Carradine) – cheap, tasteless, intermittently fun self-parodying knock-off of the above: corporate dystopia and murderous sports again, cartoon-ish or sketch show aesthetic (Wacky Races meets Sam Peckinpah’s Salad Days)  

The History Boys (2006, dir. Nicholas Hytner, written by Alan Bennett, starring Richard Griffiths, Frances de la Tour) – Strangely likeable, tonally odd (Hector’s surely a predatory paedophile, however one slices it?) set simultaneously in Leeds, Sheffield, the eighties, and the fifties. Reworks ‘Forty Years On’?

Beatriz at Dinner (2017, dir. Miguel Arteta, written by Mike White, starring Salma Hayek) - A heartfelt parable of a movie, about so much that matters: race, gender, class, money, entitlement, extractive capitalism, healing, revenge, and the lies that we tell ourselves.

Klaus (2019, co-written, co-produced and directed by Sergio Pablos, featuring the voice of J.K. Simmons as Santa) – Beautifully animated film charting its protagonist’s journey from privileged idleness to something more grounded; also Santa’s origin story and a disquisition on myth creation and enlightened self-interest.

Playground (Un Monde) (2021, dir. Laura Wandel) – Unsparing, extraordinarily well-acted portrayal of (one experience of) primary school, small moments of joy amidst an overall culture of fear, brutality and bullying, adults powerless to help.

Red One (2024, dir. Jake Kasdan, starring Dwayne 'the Rock' Johnson of course, Lucy Liu, and again J.K. 'at risk of typecasting' Simmons as Santa) – Undemanding ‘action-comedy to wrap presents to’. Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson - playing Santa’s long-serving security detail – utters the words ‘Level Four Naughty Lister’ with a straight face.

Books

C.S. Lewis, The Magician’s Nephew – as Milton re-narrated Genesis, deploying scientific knowledge & terminology (Paradise Lost as proto-SF?), so Lewis re-inscribes Christian theodicy within a quasi-Wellsian temporal schema (multiverse, not linear timeline)

C.S. Lewis, The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe – superlative storytelling (is Aslan Jesus, do you reckon?), and a worthwhile experience (bearing in mind the dedication) to re-encounter this in the second half of one’s life.

C.S. Lewis's dediction to LWW: "My Dear Lucy, I wrote this story for you, but when I began it I had not realised that girls grow quicker than books. As a result you are already too old for fairy tales, and by the time it is printed and bound you will be older still. But some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again. You can then take it down from some upper shelf, dust it, and tell me what you think of it. I shall probably be too deaf to hear, and too old to understand, a word you say, but I shall still be - your affectionate Godfather, C.S. Lewis"

Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism – Intelligent, aphoristic account of the genesis and development of ‘the nation state’ (a recent formation which claims antiquity), conducted in dialogue with, inter alia, Hobsbawm, Tom Nairn.

Andy Beckett, The Searchers: Five Rebels, Their Dream of a Different Britain, and Their Many Enemies  -  a cheering group biography of Benn, Livingstone, Corbyn, McDonnell and Abbott; an exposition of how much good they (and the 1980s Labour left) were able to do

(is Tony Benn Jesus, do you reckon?)

(Andy Beckett talks about his book and 'how movements succeed or fail' here). 

Jarvis Cocker, Good Pop, Bad Pop: An Inventory – colourful (literally and metaphorically), full of pictures and conversations, a life re-told more or less chronologically (to the cusp of fame) through the medium of ‘found objects’

(is Jarvis Cocker Jesus, do you reckon?)

Raphael Samuel, The Lost World of British Communism– auto-ethnographic account – readable, aphoristic, humane – of CPGB membership and all that it meant (cf Gornick/ CPUSA), with wider observations about sociopolitical belonging and the British 1950s more generally 

(was Harry Pollitt Jesus?)

Iris Murdoch’s Bruno’s Dream – the title references Bruno’s specific dreamlife and the dreamlike quality of any life remembered in bed-bound old age and infirmity; we’re midway between Beckett and naturalism here 

(was Iris Murdoch Jesus?)

(is Meryl Streep going to be Jesus?)

Now reading/ watching

I'm currently reading Andrew M Butler's detailed, intelligent, compendious Solar Flares: Science Fiction in the 1970s (and I like the well-chosen cover image, a contemporary publicity photo for the original Star Wars movie in which those other 1970s icons, an Angus Steak House and a pair of flared trousers somehow contrive to be in the background). This may shape some of my reading and viewing in future months. 

I'm on, and still loving, Season 3 of The Expanse – a good old-fashioned lived-in future, with Earth Mars and the Belt (roughly) parallelling the USA, the Soviet Union and the non-aligned states/ ‘Third World’ in the 1960s or so, with sufficiently good characterisation and plotting to hold the attention over many seasons.

And I loved Stranger Things until I suddenly didn’t.

(There’s something here about plotting, format, and a sufficiently rigorous internal logic, physics even – and about consistently delivering well-plotted 45 minute episodes versus doing whatever the money people will allow. So while I found a lot to enjoy and even love about Stranger Things – likeable characters! arcades! spot the 1970s and 1980s cinema referencing! think of Mark Fisher and wonder middle-agedly how we inadvertently lost the future! - that Series 4 finale was the final straw for me.)

(First: the length, 2h20m, a feature length episode and then some. Fine if you’re doing something with it – or if you’re Lynch, or Tarkovsky - setting the bar high there, I know - but this was just peril, comic relief, peril, comic relief, rinse and repeat, there was no special reason for the runtime, it was too long, I got bored. I hate being bored when the world's in such peril. Did anyone else get bored? Or AITA?).  
 
I've been watching Michael Portillo’s Channel 5 series about Portugal, because I plan to visit Portugal and it’s fun to look at it. I wouldn’t watch any television in which Michael Portillo wears red chinos as though born to them or references his own ‘gastric juices’ (yes, he utters this phrase) for any other reason. Fun fact: he was a politician once, during the last decades of the former century. 

Audio books for coach journeys and skiving off work pretending to have the flu (joke: my work ethic is just fine, thank you) have included Mere Christianity, Andrew Roberts’ long biography of Winston Churchill - NB (i) I’m becoming or always was Mark Corrigan from Peep Show, and (ii) Tariq Ali tells the same story differently - and Tallis’s Mortal Secrets: Freud, Vienna and the Discovery of the Modern Mind which, situating Freud as the product of early twentieth century Vienna as much as he was ‘of all time and for all time’, consciously steers a middle-way between hagiography and hatchet-job.

Podcast-wise, there’s Our Opinions Are Correct as always, the Iris Murdoch Podcast as usual, and Assaad Razzouk a.k.a. Angry Clean Energy Guy for a change.

Musically, there’s been Peggy Lee’s rendition of Is That All There Is? (Leiber/Stoller) - having experienced a major bereavement during the past several months (during any bereavement, we also grieve for ourselves I think – or, again, AITA?), not that there has to be a special reason for this extraordinary song - plus clipping.'s Dead Channel Sky (see also band interview in recent Our Opinions episode) and also Bad Indian by Dead Pioneers because it’s the most righteously angry thing I’ve heard in years and these are those times.

During this past several few months (mindful of Timothy Synder’s helpful checklist), I have practised corporeal politics and subsidised investigative journalism by subscribing to print media. I even made small talk.