The history of Europe.

This is so thrilling,

 

Eighth Grade: Movie Review.

I don’t imagine many 13 year olds have been nominated for a Golden Globe, although some brief research reveals that Jodie Foster won  an Academy Award at the age of 13 for Taxi Driver.

Jodie Foster had an important role in the aforementioned movie but she was playing opposite De Niro at his best so she didn’t have to OWN the movie.

Elsie Fisher OWNS Eighth Grade in a remarkable way and that’s why she was nominated this year.  Such a shame she didn’t win because she deserved to.

It opens on an extreme close up monologue of her talking into her laptop’s Photo Booth as she records a self help YouTube film that nobody will ever watch. It closes on the same but with the camera on her face.

In between we experience her life, not her story; her being, her existence.

What’s unusual about the opening is that we see Fisher, warts (well zits) and all, nothing hidden. All her blemishes exposed to the world.  Later in an uncomfortable scene we see her at a pool party with a similar degree of intensity.

It’s not pervy, it’s just honest.

This film steers an excruciating course through everything that we all went through, as a thirteen year old.  When I say ‘all’ I exclude prom queens from the list because they, in their bubbles of popularity, are immune to the absolute horror show that is being 13, shy and free of attraction from (but not for) the opposite sex.

Add to this the fact that Fisher (playing Kayla Day) is a single child with a single, male, parent (played sympathetically by Josh Hamilton – he has one moment that’s so laugh out loud in a mall that I nearly choked), and the spots, and the puppy fat, and the panic attacks all add up to one hell of an eighth grade (the end of middle school) for Kayla.

Fisher’s performance is mind-blowingly good.

The direction by first time director (and stand up comedian ) Bo Burnham looks like the work of a seasoned pro.  It’s stunning.

But the reason I wanted to see the movie, in the first place, was because it was scored by Anna Meredith and the pool party scene I referred to earlier is presented on top of her epic tuba piece called Nautilus.  It’s like a cross between Jaws and National Lampoon’s Vacation.  The music which BURSTS onto the soundtrack is cranked up to the max and does not disappoint.  Bravo Anna.

At one or two points the movie drops into slightly too low a gear, but when it is performing at its most efficient it is at turns hilarious, toe curling, deeply moving, cruel, redemptory and hopeful.

It’s a truly beautiful work of art and I urge you to see it, preferably in the cinema on its very limited UK release.

 

 

 

 

The Maybot goes all giggly, chummy like.

Quite the funniest thing you will see this week.

Insincerity on a monolithic scale.

The Maybot says she’s got to compromise and agree on things that Labour and she agree on (always have it seems).

Perhaps this video should have really been an apology for not doing what she claims she is doing now and not three years ago. (Although if Labour is to be believed, and why should we, all this compromise is a figment of the Maybot’s imagination.)

The Establishment (And how they get Away With it) by Owen Jones: Book Review

I began this, now slightly out of date, polemic by Owen Jones slightly half-heartedly.  I was expecting a tirade of Trotskyite abuse that would provide some titilation before quickly descending into irritation.

I was wrong.

This is a monumental anti-Establishment treatise that is outstandingly researched, compellingly argued and carefully structured so that his observations steadily underpin each other and make the whole extremely robust as a result.

It takes us on a journey from 1979 – 2016, but he underpins it with important historical footnotes from the 19th and 20th centuries that shed important light on his views.

(One that stopped me in my tracks was that the political classes were an elite – you had to have property to vote and you had to have money to ‘serve your country’ – in fact politicians, until Victorian times, were unpaid.  Once that had changed and the Labour movement had begun, bringing working class men into the house they were paid minimal salaries so that a political career was not an aspiration, rather it was a vocation and a duty.  However, with rocketing salaries becoming an MP is now an extremely well paid job – £79,468 at the time of writing.  This has begun to attract the Establishment as a career for those who may have opted for journalism (essentially broken) or the City previously – the much despised career politician with absolutely no experience in the ‘real world’.   This is a very bad thing and results in Establishment politicians being helicoptered into seats that they care not a jot for.)

Jones’ book is essentially a deconstruction of the Free Market Capitalism that rose in popularity by a group of economic outriders in the 1970’s when socialism in the UK was at a low ebb; principally as a result of unmanageable and extremely strident trade unions and appallingly badly run nationalised industries, managed by bureaucrats.

This paved the way for Thatcher’s Free Market Capitalism policies, denationalisation of almost anything that moved, the crushing of the unions, indeed their complete vilification (and in some cases murder of their members – Orgreave anybody?) and the fuelling of an unhealthy reliance on the UK’s financial sector as its engine of economic growth, despite appalling regulation.

The book takes the key pillars of the Establishment and systematically challenges their morality, efficacy and value.  It clearly makes the point that this country serves a small and wealthy elite at the expense of fair societal sharing of opportunity.  In turn he deconstructs:

• The political outriders of the 70’s, and later, who espoused free market economics
• The Westminster Cartel (now bubble), and not purely the Conservatives.  The entire thing is roundly criticised with New Labour coming in for particular vilification and Nick Clegg’s selling out of the Lib Dems – indeed the whole rise of neo-Liberalism is roundly attacked
• The police with their endemic racism, (stop and search gets a right good kicking and rightly so), bullying, the harassment and occasional death of protestors – including trade unions, the forming of undercover sexual relationships and so on
• The oligarch-driven media ownership of the UK and their cosying in with Blair, Brown and Osborne in particular
• The appalling abuse of corporate tax laws, including the, again, cosying up of the ‘Big Four’ to create tax laws for government that only they understand and can quickly exploit through the loopholes they know for their corporate clients
• The finger pointing at state-‘scroungers’ whose collective abuse is but a grain of sand compared to the tax avoidance of the wealthy Establishment elite
• The destruction of the NHS and the outrageous funding of corporations through lucrative private sector deals and the ongoing scandal that is PFI
• The lining of politicians’ pockets by private industry in non-exec or other paid roles that seem wholly a conflict of interest – particularly in healthcare and defence
• The Banks – he calls the City ‘Masters of the Universe’.  Here’s a fact for you.  The bonuses of London City bankers (even after the crash) far exceed the combined bonuses of all of Europe’s banks put together.  The post-crash regulation is limp-wristed and ineffective and it was The State that took the toll, not the banks through completely unjustified ‘Austerity’.

Throughout he argues how Free Market Capitalism despises the state yet uses it as its mop to clean up the failures of the banks through the public purse.

But it’s not just a rant, indeed it’s not EVEN a rant.  At all times Jones is calm in presenting what is essentially a one-sided argument; but of course it is.

In his brilliant conclusion he posits clear and compelling arguments for media control, police control, re-nationalisation with employee and customer boards, a re-empowerment of the Unions – or at least reasonable rights for them and an impassioned plea to support left wing Outriders.  Right wing policy was not popular (even on the right before the 70’s) and he argues that everything is cyclical.

We need not give up.

This is a powerful polemic and is a superbly enjoyable read.  I only wish it was up to date and included the whole Brexit catastrophe that the Establishment and The Westminster Cartel has created.

The Kindergarten Teacher: Movie Review.

Of course any production starring Maggie Gyllenhaal is worthy of consideration because she is a great actor and has been since her breakout performance in Secretary.

Her Deuce (which she produced) was one of the great TV series of recent years and she really goes for it in whatever she does.  That invariably includes getting naked and she doesn’t let us down in that respect here either.

It’s a star vehicle for Gyllenhaal who plays Lisa, a Kindergarten teacher who has a growing up family that are typical millennials; caught up in their own teenage angst and disengaged from Mom.  Her husband is a good soul (a nice performance by Michael Chernus), but he’s become a comfortable home bird who’s get up and go has got up and gone.

So the highlight of her week is her Tuesday night poetry class in which her hunky Spanish tutor likes her, but not her poetry.

It’s a drab life, although clearly Lisa is a good and dedicated teacher.

So imagine her surprise when a five year old pupil, Jimmy, (a pretty wooden, frankly pretty rubbish, performance by Parker Sevak – this is no McCualey Culkin in the making) recites a poem he has created.  She is transfixed and appropriates it for herself and reads it at her poetry class.

Her fellow students and tutor are impressed with the complexity and quality of her creation and so begins a process where she nurtures Jimmy’s talent and champions his talent. She does it for him, not for her despite her initial subterfuge at poetry class.

It’s lovingly directed (female director Sara Colangelo) and is achingly slowly developed as a story.

I didn’t see the twist coming in Act Three.  A twist that draws your breath and makes for a truly epic (although quietly so) denouement.  It takes us into areas of such taboo that escalates the story from a delightful study in teacher/student connection into something way more challenging but it is handled deftly and sympathetically despite the horror of what is unfolding in front of us.

This is an intelligent movie with a commanding performance by Gyllenhaal.  She copes effortlessly with the ‘wooden’ Jimmy and creates a character that you are deeply sympathetic with, and that makes the denouement all the more shocking and sad.

Highly recommended.

Us: Movie Review

The ‘tethered’ family who come to terrorise their human (or are they) doppelgängers.

The Us of the title are Jordan Peele’s ‘tethered’ doppelgängers of North Americans (pictured) who live underground. After many years underground the Rapture has arrived  as predicted in Jeremiah 11:11 and the human race faces a challenge that it will struggle to overcome.

Peele’s second horror is every bit as intellectually challenging as Get Out And like that debut features a fine central performance; this time in the form of Lupita Nyong’o, her family and their ‘tethers’.  For quite long sequences of the movie Nyong’o shares the screen with herself in absolutely seamless editing and post production that takes your breath away. In fact much of this film does that with its incredible design and vivid photography.

The main cast is almost exclusively black, but a fine cameo by Elizabeth Moss and her family is the exception.

A starting point may have been Michael Jackson’s Thriller.

Nyong’o, as a young child in 1986, is drawn into this sinister underworld in a beach-side fairground show on Santa Cruz promenade. Wearing the Thriller T shirt her dad has won in a coconut shy she is taken from this world to a backdrop of Hands Across America, which was supported by Jackson.

It’s not the scariest horror you will ever see (although it has enough jumps to keep your heart going) but it’s one of the creepiest.  It sits neatly in the latest greats of the genre (Get Out, It follows) that treats its viewer with respect and keeps you guessing right to the end.

I won’t say much more as it will only lead me to spoilers but, put it this way, we are in the hands of a master craftsman here – his next movie project is a rewrite of Candyman by the way.