Amsterdam – a movie for anti-fascists with humour

Amsterdam has tanked at the box office thus far, but that’s a massive shame, because it’s actually a very good film – and a very timely one.

With a story based around the Business Plot – a 1933 pro-fascist conspiracy in the US – it follows three friends who find themselves accidentally caught up in those events, with two of them accused of the murder of a young woman who had hired them to investigate the death of her father, a respected American general.

The three are Burt, a half Catholic/half Jewish doctor, effectively ordered to WWI France by his bigoted in-laws who rather hope he’ll just conveniently die there; African-American soldier Harold, who has been at the forefront of fighting back against the racist abuse of white officers leading the regiment; and Valerie, a nurse who makes art out of the shrapnel that she digs out of the bodies of soldiers while saving them.

Burt and Harold are both seriously injured and nursed back to health by Valerie, before the trio decamps to Amsterdam with the war over, where Valerie knows people who can help fund their further recuperation and relevant help (Burt needs a false eye, for instance).

The group finds an energising sense of life in the Dutch city, but Burt decides to return to the States to help other returning veterans there. Back in New York and finding ways to deal with his own trauma, he’s imprisoned for being drunk – medication, in effect, for his physical and mental pain. On hearing the news back in the Dutch city, Valerie says she can get him out of prison – but it means her leaving Harold in Amsterdam, with no real explanation.

When they eventually unite, it is when Burt and Harold are accused of murder.

Can they find a way to clear themselves against dark forces?

My main criticism is that Amsterdam is, at 134 minutes, very long. Yet counterintuitively, it’s also difficult to see what one would cut – it never really feels likes there’s any obvious lag. So, good pacing.

What the time taken does allow is serious character and relationship building. We get to know a lot about this central trio – enough to make us care about them. That’s a compliment to David O Russell, both for his script and his direction.

It’s also a compliment to the cast.

Christian Bale (Bert), John David Washington (Harold) and Margot Robie (Valerie) are excellent as the central trio. There is also outstanding ensemble support from Chris Rock, Anya Taylor-Joy, Zoe Saldña, Mike Myers, Taylor Swift, Timothy Olyphant, Rami Malek, Michael Shannon and Robert de Niro.

Looking back at this – and having just watched the trailer again to check – I wonder if the lack of a suggestion in the trailer of what this is about is why this film hasn’t performed well thus far? The trailer gives no indication of the political nature of the film – The Other Half and I had both assumed the trouble was around gangs, prohibition etc.

Yet the reality is that this is political enough that it almost makes me think of Brecht. I can think of no other recent films that have highlighted Eisenhower’s “military industrial complex”, for instance.

In many ways, it also feels like a far more like a 'European' movie than a US one.

But coming in the wake of the storming of the Capitol and what we see right now in GB politics – the unaccountable, unelected forces (Tufton Street) fighting to be the rulers of the UK – and elsewhere, where the ‘populist’ rule or where dictators such as Putin wage war, this is a warning from the past, for the future.

 

When will we ever learn?

 

Amsterdam is quietly funny – in a very, very delicate human way. It’s not a LOL experience, but it is a very humane film. With very good politics. 

 

All in all – a bleedin’ good watch. 

 

 

 

 

Viloa Davis is momentous in The Woman King

It’s 1823 in Dahomey (now Benin), Africa. Having just usurped his brother, King Ghezo is king. He is protected by the Agojie – a regiment of ‘amazon’ women – but all is not well, as the neighbouring Oyo empire threatens everything.

Both rely on the slave trade with Europeans to gain arms and wealth, which sees the Oyo raiding villages in Dahomey to capture people in order to trade them with white slavers.

In the patriarchal society of Dahomey, Nawi (Thuso Mbedu) refuses to be abused by the prospective husband her father wants for her, and the marriage plans fail. As a result, she is taken to the palace and handed as a ‘gift’ to the king, for the Agojie.

In such a context, the Agojie offers a life where, though members are supposed to remain as virgins, they have many freedoms that other women in the kingdom do not.

Nawi accepts this, but also rebels against the strict discipline required of the regiment – and finds herself rubbing up against its general, Nanisca (Viola Davis) and her immediate commander, Izogie (Lashana Lynch).

However, the situation facing Dahomey from the larger and stronger Oyo becomes worse and the women warriors need to work together.

Director Gina Prince-Bythwood’s film is based on fact. Some of the characters here (the king, for instance) are real, as are the Agojie.

Some commentators are comparing this film to Gladiator. In my opinion, this film is vastly superior.

The script by Maria Bello and Dana Stevens is acutely aware of African involvement in slavery and doesn’t avoid it. Indeed, it’s a central part of the story.

Polly Morgan’s cinematography is beautiful without ever getting in the way of the story.

The performances are universally better than ‘good’. It is a superbly acted film. But, oh my … Viola Davis …

If she doesn’t have, at the very least, an Oscar nom come next year, I’ll be raging. It is an astonishing performance of massive depth, massive emotion and massive intellectual heft.

And frankly, if that isn’t enough of a recommendation, then I’m sorry, you’re lost to me!

                              

 

Mrs Harris charms Paris – and us

In 1957 London, cleaning lady Ada Harris becomes obsessed by a client’s haute couture Dior dress and decides to start saving to visit Paris and buy one for herself.

Her efforts receive a major setback, but when an RAF officer turns up to tell her that it is now known that her missing husband actually died when an RAF plane came down in Poland in the lates stages of WW2, she receives enough backdated widow’s pension to make the trip.

 

However, it turns out that buying a Dior dress isn’t really quite as simple as Ada had expected.

 

This is the fourth screen adaptation of Paul Gallico’s 1957 novella. The first was for US TV in 1958 and starred Gracie Fields.

The second saw Inge Meysel in a German TV version, while Angela Lansbury played the titular character in another small-screen version in 1992.

 

Here, then, in the story’s first big-screen outing, with Lesley Manville centre stage.

 

Written by director Anthony Fabian, together with Carroll Cartwright, Keith Thompson and Olivia Hetreed, Mrs Harris Goes to Paris is a film of total charm that avoids being overly sentimental and is careful to avoid obvious stereotypes in its portrayal of London working-class life (hence changing the title from the Mrs ’Arris of the original) or of romantic Paris.

It does, however touch – quite neatly – on aspects of class and sexism.

 

But there are other things to think about if you want to – not least, as The Other Half pointed out, how much of it is akin to a 20^th century take on a fairy tale. That started me on a trip.

There is the evil character who gets their comeuppance; a king who only needs the right advice to make the right decisions; a princess and a lovelorn, would-be suitor and, of course, a fairy godmother.

Perhaps I'm just a geek, but thinking about these things increases my personal pleasure – and  indeed, at the time of posting, I'm reading Stephen King's new novel, FairyTale, which tips into the same idea.

 

The cast is universally a delight. Manville is superb, but she has sterling support – not least from Isabelle Huppert as Dior’s director, Jason Isaacs as a London bookie, Ellen Thomas as Ada’s neighbour and fellow cleaner Vi, Alba Baptista as the face of Dior who prefers Sartre and Lambert Wilson as a French marquis.

 

Rael Jones’s original score manages the feat of being delightful and utterly apt for the period – and still sounding fresh and light.

 

The research on Dior dresses must have been something else – a fashion show for an elite audience is an extraordinary scene. 

 

Over on Twitter, where Universal has been promoting the film, someone complained that, given the state of the world, it was somehow ‘wrong’ to be making a film about a dress.

 

Aside from saying that the film is not ‘about’ a dress – but about dreams and stepping out of your own personal box – given the times we are living through, I personally don’t want misery porn when I’m not working.

 

I want to be entertained. And Mrs Harris Goes to Paris does that by the bucketload.

The best football book ever?

I spent a lot of years as the sports editor at The Morning Star, learning a number of lessons. While I might have been the editor – I decided what went on the pages, what we covered, commissioned where possible etc – I had a staff of, err, me, plus some willing volunteers who did reports and took photos at sporting events because they wanted to for the fun of it and I could get them access.

I like to think that I made a small impact: when I left, I received a £10 M&S gift token from one reader to thank me, so I can’t have been all bad. Note – I spent the token on a chunky, green sweater, which did me very good service for many years.

But before that, I used to pen a regular column at the end of each week – Kendal’s Korner– which was essentially a 1,500-word analysis of whatever big sports story had dominated the week just ending. I even got a commendation as best newcomer in the UK Sports Journalism Awards one year (the framed certificate is now so faded I can’t make out the date) for exactly these columns. Which given the lack of resources I had, is amazing.

 

Indeed, that led directly to freelance shifts at the Sunday Indpendent, inputting the football results on Saturdays, living off the Indy canteen’s chips and editor Simon Kellner telling me (occasionally) “she’s back!” when I'd call out the correct answer to one of his shouted sports questions to the room.

 

It also means that I was the first and, as far as I know, the most recent Morning Starjournalist to receive any accolade for writing. The Other Half won one for his football tips. We still have the glass trophy, and he still mourns not trusting himself enough to actual take a punt.

 

But one thing I got no shortage of in those times was sports books to review.

 

I interviewed 400m hurdles Olympic champion Sally Gunnell shortly after her 1994 autobiography, Running Tall, came out. She was rather grumpily offended that her views – not least on the drug testing regime in athletics – had been censored into utter blandness. She had more than a point.

 

But setting that aside, there was a widespread problem … blandness. Few sports books were allowed to shatterany sort of illusion. Most ‘autobiographies’ were ghosted and bland beyond belief (as well as not being very well written). Ghosted is not, of itself, bad, but combined with blandness … well, I’m sure you get the gist.

 

I haven’t voluntarily read a sports book in years.

 

And then, a few weeks ago, I picked up Pirates, Punks and Politics by Nick Davidson, from Stanchion Books, which now has a regular stall on my local Saturday market.

The book in question is about second-tier Bundesliga ‘kult’ club St Pauli. It’s part personal memoir of a disillusioned English fan rediscovering the ‘real’ football experience again in Hamburg, but it’s also a history of the club itself.

 

The history is fascinating. I already knew that St Pauli has a big following in Hamburg among the local sex workers; that it has a reputation for fans being anarchist in terms of political ideology, of being deeply anti-racist, anti-fascist, anti-misogynist and pro-LGBT+ people.

 

Davidson is not a professional writer and, while I’d still recommend it as a read, it isn’t the best written book you’ll engage with.

 

However, it led me to Uli Hesse’s Tor: The Story of German Football. The fourth, fully revised edition, was released earlier this year.

Now, I’ve read Mike Brearley’s The Art of Captaincy (I still have my treasured copy of a book both sporting and intellectual) so I do quite like my sports books to be grown up.

 

But Tor! is absolutely superb. Written in English by a writer for whom that is not his first language, Hesse aimed absolutely at the English language market to tell a story not generally known over here.

 

Speaking to 'here' (Hackney, east London) – The Other Half is not really a fan of Association Football, but of Rugby League, but I found myself laughing out loud and then having to quote to him in explanation, usually, for him to then laugh out loud too.

 

In case you didn’t know, Germans really do have a sense of humour!

 

It is an extraordinary story – and told in an absolutely, pitch-perfect and wonderful way. I can’t think of a better book about football that I have ever read. I probably haven’t enjoyed one as much since reading Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch. Such an informative read, combined with such fun.

 

Hesse never ducks the big questions – ie football in the Nazi and DDR eras – but so much else is just a hoot, often told in a wonderfully deadpan fashion.

 

Best football book in years? Absolutely!

Best sports book in years? Absolutely!

 

It’s worth noting that Davidson has waived all monies from Pirates, Punks and Politics to go to St Pauli fan projects.

 

So y’know what? Buy and read them both! And y’know what … do it from a tiny, indy bookseller like Stanchion.

 

 

Thousands of years of stories – wonderfully told

Hardly 3,000 years in the making, but it took The Other Half and I three attempts to finally get to see George Miller’s latest film, after an encounter with a bad egg and then, a wait for a plumber.

But third time lucky, we made it to the cinema today – and thank goodness we did.

 

Based on a 1994 short story by AS Byatt, The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Ey, this is about British scholar Alithea Binnie (Tilda Swinton), an apparently happy loner who ‘suffers’ from an overactive imagination.

 

In Istanbul to address a conference on mythology and storytelling, she buys a small glass bottle from an old store. Back in her hotel room, it breaks and lets free a djinn – an invisible being with magical powers originating in early Islamic Arabian religious systems – who says he can grant her three wishes.

 

Indeed, if she does that, it will free him too; in his case, to return to the realm of his own kind.

 

However, there are conditions attached – one cannot, for instance, ask for immortality.

 

But Binnie is well enough versed in stories to know that the ‘grant-you-X-wishes’ trope is one of warning. Because wishes and desires have a nasty habit of having consequences – almost all initially unseen.

 

And as she refuses to make a wish, so she begins a conversation with Djinn (Idris Elba) about his own life experiences that will have a profound impact on both of them.

 

It’s not the sort of film you might expect from Mr Mad Max himself … although then again, Miller has also made the utterly charming Babe pig movies and the spikey The Witches of Eastwick, so what, precisely, would one expect?

 

The result is many, many things, with many, many threads. It touches on colonialism – including the colonialism of bodies – and on English exceptionalism. These are linked. It doesn’t shy from the embarrassment of earlier ages seeing children as sexually available through marriage – ie child abuse.

And of course, there is the nature of story and mythology. It’s never entirely clarified that Binnie’s experiences are real and not simply her own, self-declared, overactive imagination.

It is also good to see a work of art that doesn't play to the current prescriptions that everyone should have X friends and, if they don't, that's not 'Normal' or healthy. 

 

It is beautiful to watch – Miller’s evocation of an ancient, mythological Middle Eastern world is simply sumptuous. There’s also a very, very cute take on gender privilege, in Djinn’s retelling of the first encounter between Solomon and Sheba.

 

This is beautiful film; a very thoughtful film that inspires thought. A wonderfully acted one too.

 

Not quite a two-hander – but almost – Swinton and Elba are both superb in roles that one might not usually expect of either. Miller’s direction is wonderful. It’s provocative – but in a good way. Simply put, I cannot recommend this highly enough. If it’s available locally, do go and see it.

 

See how they murder – a masterclass

It’s late 1952 and the cast and creatives of Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap are celebrating reaching an incredible 100 performances. 

But behind the scenes, there is conflict about a contracted Hollywood film version – the author having decreed that not even filming should occur until at least six months after the original stage production has closed.

Then one of those involved is murdered and the game is afoot.

Enter, stage left (but not pursued by a bear), come world weary Inspector Stoppard and policing ingenue Constable Stalker to take on this celebrity murder case, shorn of other resources as a serial killer stalks London.

 

See How They Run is, on one level, a very clever conceit in terms of bringing the play to the screen – even while it still runs in London’s West End, given that Christie really did decree that that could never happen until it had closed its initial run, but it is also much more than that.

 

It's a gloriously arch look at the tropes of a certain type of crime entertainment. Incredibly clever – but not smugly so – there are countless little puzzles and references for the audience to solve and spot.

 

It won’t detract if you don’t get them, but as an example, Inspector Stoppard’s name might well reference playwright Tom Stoppard – not least when one character describes the murder victim as a woman-chasing “hound, Inspector”: see Stoppard’s one-act play, The Real Inspector Hound.

 

Equally, is Constable Stalker a reference to John Stalker, the late deputy chief constable of Greater Manchester? The film takes pot shots at what could, in effect, be called ‘policing for honours’ and, thereby, The Establishment as a whole.

 

All this pretty much guarantees that I will watch this again. And again. And possibly even again. A few hours after seeing it, my brain is on a kind of churn with all this and I suggest that it’s not simply a bit of ‘light entertainment’ to be dismissed easily.

 

It’s beautifully paced. Mark (My Life in Film and Flaked on TV) Chappell’s first film is witty, intelligent and very enjoyably twisty. Jamie D Ramsey’s cinematography is great and the editing – including the use of split screens – is so clever given the context.

 

All this should tell you  automatically that Tom George’s direction is pretty much nailed on.

 

In terms of performances, Sam Rockwell as Stoppard and Saoirse Ronan as Stalker are great – and their pairing works really well in creating a clumsy relationship. Adrien Brody is in top-notch form as the film producer. But the cast is good from top to bottom.

 

There are no weak links – and I commend Charlie Cooper for so wonderfully channelling Bill Nighy in one scene in particular.

 

See this if you can – it’s a joy on oh, so many levels.

Outrageous! Section 28 as a warning from history

Outrageous! The story of Section 28 and Britain’s battle for LGBT education by Paul Baker manages to be both a detailed history of the notorious, homophobic legislation and a memoir that is often very funny, recounting how the author grew up under what, before being passed into law, was Clause 28.

It was a badly drafted clause in the Local Government Act in 1988, banning local authorities – which have responsibility for local state schools – from ‘promoting’ homosexuality and the “acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship”.

That ‘promoting’ bit was a major difficulty – did acknowledging homosexuality exists equate with ‘promotion’? If you played pupils a bit of Tchaikovsky, would that amount to ‘promotion’?

In the House of Commons, Labour MP Tony Benn put it like this: “... if the sense of the word “promote” can be read across from “describe”, every murder play promotes murder, every war play promotes war, every drama involving the eternal triangle promotes adultery; and Mr Richard Branson’s condom campaign promotes fornication. The House had better be very careful before it gives to judges, who come from a narrow section of society, the power to interpret ‘promote’.”

Then of course, there was the whole idea that an LGBT relationship was a ‘pretend’ one. Baker points out that the pace of social change since the 1960s – decriminalisation of homosexuality (albeit with strictures in place) only came in 1967 – had left many older people struggling in such a rapidly shifting landscape and in what many saw as ‘the permissive society’.

The process of how something comes to be on the statue book is explained in a good bit of civics showing how the Westminster Parliament works in terms of both houses.

Baker uses interviews with key figures, including Sir Ian McKellen, Angela Mason and Lord Chris Smith, to recount what happened, together with many quotes from speakers in both the House of Commons and the Lords when the subject was being debated.

Many of those quotes still have the power to shock now, with their brazen and even violent hatred. The usual names come up – Mary Whitehouse, Lord Longford, Malcolm Muggeridge … together with ones that will be less well known to the wider audience, such as Dame Elaine Kellett-Bowman, who was Baker’s MP when he went to work at Lancaster University, and mine too when I lived in that area.

She was a sort of handbagging Margaret Thatcher clone on ’roids – a deeply unpleasant woman that I personally had contact with when writing to her in the 1980s about Campaign for the Arts. It might have been a non-party campaign, but that didn’t stop her snotty reply effectively accusing me of being a ‘loony lefty’. I was barely getting over having started my political life, courtesy of my background, as a Tory, but she helped me further along that road.

Baker takes great care to be as understanding as possible of the motives of many who so strongly backed Section 28 and never falls into the easy trap of simply lambasting him, though is less obviously forgiving of their friends in the media who peddled a diet of hate to their readers.

But central to the book are the stories of those whose lives were negatively affected by Section 28 and the homophobia that it enabled. It had a lasting impact for many.

However, brought together disparate parts of the LGBT community to fight back against and, in the process, build the case – and support for – greater equality, with a campaign including some incredibly inventive, non-violent protests.

Following the repeal of the clause in devolved Scotland in 2000, it finally came off the books elsewhere in 2003.

Reading this today feels like having a premonition.

Toward the end of Outrageous! Baker says that “Tristan Garel-Jones, the deputy chief whip for the Conservatives, apparently called it [Section 28], a piece of meat thrown by Mrs Thatcher to her right-wing wolves”.

I finished the book the same day on which reports leaked out that Tory Party leadership frontrunner Liz Truss had said – according to her supporter and former party leader Iain Duncan Smith – that she regretted her involvement in the Bill to ban conversion ‘therapy’.

Duncan Smith – a Catholic convert who once used the word “sin” in a discussion on unemployment – suggested that she would like to bin the legislation altogether.

This was subsequently denied by her team, according to North London Tory MP Mike Freer, who told his local newspaper that he had asked.

Other reports have suggested that, if elected as Tory leader (and thus prime minister), Truss would also elevate the culture war loving, LGBT+ despising Kemi Badenoch to her front bench.

This is, of course, precisely the sort of raw red meat that Garel-Jones mentioned. The Conservative Party had a maximum membership of 180,000 as of 2019 (the party is not open about its membership) as opposed to 47.6 million Parliamentary electoral registrations in the following year.

Those who will select the new Tory leader/PM are a tiny minority of the electorate as a whole and, on the basis of their likely preferred news reading being the Telegraph, the Mail and the Express, they are still being fed a toxic diet of homophobic – and particularly transphobic – bile.

 

The first two of those, together with the Sun, have been cited as the biggest new media defenders of Section 28.

In the last couple of days, Suella Braverman, the attorney general, has stated that schools that talk about gender change could face Ofsted sanctions. Nothing like Section 28 at all, then.

Yet even within this constituency of the Conservative Party membership, YouGov polling has shown that just 8% of those members want “combatting the woke agenda” prioritised, so it’s difficult to see who is being appealed to here. A wider constituency of far-right voters that switched from the likes of UKIP and helped the Conservatives to a massive majority in 2019? Religious fundamentalists from across faiths who hate anything that isn’t heterosexual marriage? Groups that might vote for the Conservatives at the next general election?

 

It’s difficult not to feel deeply concerned about what the coming period will bring in terms of equality and for the LGBT+ community. Or not to feel that, once again, campaigns and protests might need to be organised.

 

Baker’s book is a salutary reminder of the harm of such intolerance – but also of how the fight back can succeed. It is very much worth a read.

• Outrageous! The story of Section 28 and Britain’s battle for LGBT education by Paul Baker is published by Reaktion Books