A YEAR of PLEASURES

I thought I’d join the bandwagon of top ten lists (partly so I can remind myself as to what I saw, experienced and did this year other than movies).
Feel free to offer up your own versions of this hit list.

Books.
This has been a year of a massive amount of reading. And listening. Since I’m a wannabe 10,000 steps/day person, there’s a lot of early morning crack of dawn hours spent listening to stuff. I usually give books I can’t stand about two hours.

So category number one: Books I Really Couldn’t Finish.

The Seven Moons of Mali Almeida by Shernan Karunatilaka. It’s set in Sri Lanka; narrated by a dead guy searching for his murderer. Sounds great. It won the Booker as well. Sounds important. The political background of the story would have been superb for a Guardian three page read. But for a 300 page book, I simply couldn’t sustain the interest. None of the characters engaged me.

Some of My -recent- personal Best:
The Fourty Rules of Love by Elif Shafa. (See main image) This weaves two stories told by multiple storytellers. Elif, the author is the overall storyteller. One story is of a depressed married mother of three whose husband is a serial philanderer and whose family mainly take her for granted. When she takes on a job as a reader for a small publishing house, she becomes engaged in the story of Rumi, the thirteenth century Persian Sufi poet whose story, written by a nomadic Scottish photographer, is told through the stories of the people who interact with a nomadic dervish, himself a teller of stories and who may be a version of the photographer. Her life is changed. That’s what stories can do.

The Exhibitionist. Charlotte Mendelson.

He is a fading, once revered artist, who has run out of ideas. She – his wife- is the up and coming new darling of the art world. A commission for the Venice biennale is in the offing, But with every success, he grows more envious, nastier, more overbearing…seeking to mansplain his resentments across their family, forcing them to make absurd choices. It’s a stunning profile of two embattled persons

Act of Oblivion. Robert Harris.

Set in the seventeenth century, this thoroughly exciting (true) story is of the obsessed Richard Nayler, secretary of the regicide committee of the Privy Council. He’s hot on the trail of two of Oliver Cromwell’s men, Edward Whaley and William Goffe. Nayler’s mission is to capture or kill all those who contributed to the execution of Charles I. Whaley and Goff have left their families and have fled to the Puritan areas of the US, seeking like-minded souls for protection. But the relentless Nayler drives them deeper and deeper into Indian territory and further and further away from civilisation. Compelling.

I’d also recommend The Lost Man of Bombay by Vaseem Khan.

Set in India, 1950, this is the latest in the series of murder mysteries (the Malabar House Mysteries) that focus on the unlikeliest of detectives: a -young- woman. Women in the post colonial Indian police department were rare and sneered at. But when a dead, almost naked white man turns up at the entrance of a tunnel in the Himalayas, you know something’s afoot. They send this young woman, assuming she’ll fail to find the killer and therefore be their handy scapegoat. They were wrong.

And definitely worth reading: My Last Supper by Jay Rayner. Food, restaurants and his autobiography. Taste by Stanley Tucci. See Jay Rayner. Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus. Eccentric Female chemist takes on misogyny. Bad Actors by Mick Herron. Jackson Lamb and bunch bunch of misfits take down spies. The Every by David Eggers. Facebook on steroids. Behind the Scenes at the Museum by Kate Atkinson (her first). Six generations of an English family. The Anomaly by Herve le Tellier. A flight both arrives and also disappears only to reappear six months later. Doppelgängers abound. Piranesi by Susanna Clarke. Dystopia in a world submerged (that’s not Waterworld)

For non-fiction: I’m presently writing a book. So I’m reading a ton of books (and source material) on West Indian history (and its food). Which kinda takes up all the time. But I did enjoy What We Owe the Future by Scottish philosopher and ethicist William MacAskill.

It’s a fascinating probe into how our acts in the present shape us and the futures we create, both at the personal/micro and at the macro levels. The most fundamental act we owe the future is our care for the planet. Well, we sure screwed that one up.
I tried very hard (because it was recommended to me by someone who’s truly, deeply clever) but couldn’t be arsed to plough through Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism

I discovered two tremendous poets: Trinidadian Roger Robinson (A Portable Paradise).

Here’s his short haiku that summarizes so much. It’s called Beware

When police place knees
at your throat, you may not live
to tell of choking

And there’s a young, Jamaican, Ishion Hutchinson. Here from Far District, his tale of survivor’s guilt.

The haunting beginning to Bones Be Still:

I see murmuring bones in still water,
awaiting the final rites to rest
O undead, father’s bones,
make the Atlantic your home,
but they wail and curse
We were sacrificed
to give you life

The outstanding art exhibition for me was that of Guyanese sculptor, Hew Locke, entitled The Procession and staged in the vast atrium of Tate Britain. The exhibit brings together about two hundred slightly larger than life figures from an imagined carnival band. They carry vast banners, they ride imperiously on horses, many wear masks, some of skulls; a bacchanal of ghosts in a procession through a history of slavery and colonialism. Awesome

At Sadlers Wells (dance), Jasmin Vardimon’s Alice blended dance with projections and what felt like pure magic. Not so much the story of Alice, but definitely a step into the looking glass

AVATAR: THE WAY OF WATER****Pure Escapist Magic

WE’VE COME TO expect such high standards of CGI that – connoisseurs all – anything less than perfect we dismiss with contempt. Alas, what all these so very believable dinosaurs and flying superheroes and exploding worlds have done, is to deaden that old fashioned sense of wonder…that eyes open, mouth agape, aw shucks, how did they do that? feeling of awe. The MCU-spearheaded need to create bigger bangs and scarier shocks has neutralised real creative imagination; the Magic has gone awol from Industrial Light.

Not any more. Avatar: The Way of Water is wondrous.

James Cameron (once again, pissed on by “serious movie critics”) has created two worlds – one of the land, Pandora, and one of the sea – that are immersively enchanting. Here filaments of spinning light float down to swaying leaves of grass that seem to breathe as the earth exhales; vast iridescent winged creatures rise up out of the waves and plunge deep underwater, bearing their avatar riders. And under the clear, crystalline sea, strange forms of aquatic life undulate past.

It’s a visual spectacle that’s not to be missed.

The overriding idea is, once again, a parable about man’s war on nature, the mindless destruction of life to secure small nuggets of profit. The story is centred on revenge. Jake Scully (Sam Worthington) in the first Avatar, became the hero of Pandora when he turned against his fellow – human – army invaders, shed his mortal body to evolve into this large blue avatar entity and drove his ex-army invaders out. Many years later, Jake’s a happy and well-respected member of his new Na’vi community, fathering his small nuclear family and still married to Neytiri, the real action hero of the entire proceedings (Zoe Salanda).

And all this time, a grudge has been building in the breast of Scoresby (Brendan Cowell) one of his past officers. He, and his team have also morphed into avatars with the express intent of killing Jake (and anything or anyone else that gets in the way). Their pursuit, Jake’s flight to the sanctuary of the sea people (whose ways his family must learn) and the cathartic battle royale at the end, is the plot.

Cameron’s conversion of human faces into striped, blue avatar visages doesn’t allow for too much facial nuance. This is a movie of larger gestures. It is, after all, a sci-fi action movie, not a tale of deep emotional drama.

No matter, it’s thoroughly engrossing. Cameron’s world is seductively immersive. And the action, especially at the denouement, when the family must escape a twisting, turning, sinking ship (Titanic 2?) and big men with murderous intents, is breathtaking.
It’s long (three hours plus). But the time simply zapps along. I’d be surprised if this doesn’t win at least all the technical Oscars

Can’t wait on the follow up movie.

AVATAR: THE WAY OF WATER. Writer/Director: James Cameron. Co- Writers: Rick Jaffa (Mulan), Amanda Silver (War for the Planet of the Apes). With: Sam Worthington, Zoe Salanda, Sigourney Weaver, Stephen Lang, Kate Winslet. Cinematographer: Russel Carpenter (Ant-Man). Production Designer: Dylan Cole (visual effects for Game of Thrones) and Ben Procter (Avatar, Prometheus)

SHE SAID**** …Powerfully

THIS SUPERB MOVIE is the story of the two journalists, Megan Twohey (Carey Mulligan) and Jodi Kantor (Zoe Kazan from The Plot Against America) who were able to penetrate the wall of lawyers, threats and terrified women, to take down the serial rapist, Harvey Weinstein; all through their doggedness, fearlessness and deep sense of empathy with his victims.

Movies about journalists in their battle against the abuse of power, be that political (All the President’s Men) or religious (Spotlight) have almost always been about men as fearless knights charging against the dragons of abuse. Unlike them Megan and Jodi are women. And unlike them, this means they face a dual challenge, both as journalists (ferreting out the truth in a storm of lawsuits, threats and counter-narratives) and – as this movie makes so emphatically clear- as mothers. They need to overcome barriers… of pregnancy, post-partum depression, sleepless nights, babies, child care when the days turn into nights and husbands who also have day jobs and late nights.

Director Maria Schrader’s decision to make the story one about the lives of her protagonists and of the women whose lives were ruined, and not about Weinstein per se (There, only as a threatening voice and fleetingly seen, entirely through Megan’s eyes, as an object of scorn and contempt) ensures that the criminal, his abusiveness and his dirty tricks, are never allowed to steal the limelight (Hence there’s no “he said” to She Said)

The limelight remains centered on the quality of the relationships. At its heart, this is a movie about the power of relationships: the relationship between the two women, between them and their spouses, their children, their colleagues, their sources and mainly about the relationship between them and the abused women. It is the quality of these relationships that enabled their success.

Megan and Jodi forge a deep symbiotic bond, each aware of and dependent on the other’s strengths, both effortlessly able to allow their empathies with Weinstein’s abused women (traumatised, broken, near suicidal, terrified into silence) to enable relationships built on respect and trust, to do the heavy lifting. And, in direct contrast with the rapist’s phalanx of enablers (amoral corporate money men and lawyers and ‘heavies’), their enablers are -sleep deprived- husbands and the unwavering commitment of their editorial teams and bosses (led by the always compelling Patricia Clarkson).

The story also offers a more nuanced narrative than a clichéd “truth will out” storyline. It also points to the reality of conscience worming its way into corporate indifference and self-preservation (dramatised in a short, compelling performance, of a cynical enabler turned ‘whistleblower’, of Zach Grenier from The Good Fight). Conscience (when its finally aroused) has the power to enable people to do the right thing.

In the end, it took more than conscience; it took the collective power of group solidarity to make the difference and turn the tide.

So far, the end titles remind us, over 84 women have testified against him. More lawsuits are still pending.

These two women started that tide which has swollen into the #metoo movement that has unearthed those many more Weinsteins among us.

And yet, there is a sad coda. The movie begins with the other serial rapist, Trump. One went on to become President and own the Republican Party, the other went to jail.

The battle has just begun

SHE SAID. Dir: Maria Schrader. Based on the book by Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey. Screenplay: Rebecca Lenkiewicz (Small Axe, Disobedience). With: Carey Mulligan. Zoe Kazan. Patricia Clarkson. Andre Braugher (Brooklyn Nine Nine). Jennifer Ehie. Zach Grenier. Cinematographer: Natasha Braier.

AFTERSUN ** zzzzzzzzz

THE MOVIE BEGINS with the sound of a whirring. This turns out to be that of a Handycam. It is a story about how stories are crafted to either hide, reframe or bare truths. Calum (Paul Mescal), recently estranged from his partner, is on holiday in Turkey with his daughter, Sophie (newcomer Frankie Corio). They clearly enjoy a close, loving relationship.

But for dad, there’s a private grief, a feeling of loss, a fantasy of suicide. This is a reality that won’t make his ‘cut’. His recording of the holiday, one that includes all the ‘arty’ off-takes, those humdrum images that add texture, seems to be more than holiday snaps, but his means of constructing a narrative of What a Wonderful Time He’s Shared with his Daughter…just as Aftersun, the movie itself, is a constructed narrative of a time the protagonist and Handycam user has shared with his daughter. The movie’s record of the holiday is however a more honest one than Calum’s Handycam version. The movie, as art, tells a more rounded story than the home made video version (with the inclusion of images of him sobbing etc) which, by avoiding the painful realities. offers up an artful deceit, a lie.

It’s an interesting conceit; and the acting of the two principals (Paul Mescal and Frankie Corio) is superb…acting without affectation.

The problem is that the movie is deathly dull. There are long stretches (probably just a few seconds, but they feel like weeks) of looking at a balcony rail or a wave in the sea or a roof top, all shot from jaunty angles. No amount of intellectual richness can compensate for such longeurs.

It’s a dull, tiresome movie that really does challenge one’s ability to stay awake. At times, it was so boring I tried to will myself to nod off. But, dammit, the nods simply wouldn’t come.

Perhaps if one night, insomnia comes knocking at your door, you can eschew the Ambien and fight its entry with a few minutes of this (critically acclaimed) snorefest.

AFTERSUN: Dir/Writer: Charlotte West. With: Paul Mescal (The Lost Daughter; Normal People), Frakie Corio. Cinematographer: Gregory Oke