Monday 28 January 2019

Review: The Sum of All Fears

The Sum of All Fears is one of the few Jack Ryan thrillers I hadn't seen previously. This time it's the turn of Ben Affleck to don the analyst's mantle. He does a respectable job in a slick thriller which manages to convincingly ramp up the stakes with some surprisingly powerful although constrained special effects.

The plot is a little meandering, but is anchored by a bunch of recognisable, but hard to name actors. Hinds as the Russian President and Freeman as the Director of the CIA standout in particular.

Verdict: Serviceable Clancy thriller. 


Sunday 27 January 2019

Review: Five Forget Mother's Day

Phew. I've finally reached the end of my reading of the adult Famous Five book series. Five Forget Mother's Day is a respectful entry in the series, even if it's perhaps the most insular.  Of note, is its attempt to give Aunt Fanny a voice and greater depth of character than the background cipher she is in the original series.  Vincent does a good job of getting us to see her from various viewpoints including her own - neatly labelled Aunterior monologue - and how they can shift depending on context.

Would I recommend this series overall? I'm honestly not sure. It certainly has its moments of amusement and I've enjoyed seeing the Five develop into plausible modern adults with moments of self reflection that would never have been found in Blyton's books. But by the end of book thirteen I feel I've had enough of the deliberately parochial nature of their newer adventures.

Verdict: The one with Aunt Fanny. 




Review: RBG

I noticed this documentary had crept onto the Oscars list and knowing little about its subject I thought it would be worth a spin. RBG turns out to be US Supreme Court Justice Ruth Baden Ginsburg - someone I admit I knew next to nothing about.

No matter, Ginsburg turns out to be an extremely tenacious pioneer of women's rights and representation in the US through a series of landmark cases - even earning the monicker: Notorious RBG - in recent years.

As at documentary, it's well made and perfectly serviceable - managing to surface voices as diverse as childhood friends and President Bill Clinton in its well paced story of her life.   It is slightly repetitious at times, particularly in observing her small physical stature, keen intelligence and quiet reserved nature.

As its subject,  RBG remains somewhat enigmatic with only hints at what drove such discipline and dedication - but never less than inspirational.  Perhaps that's not surprising given she is still serving.

Verdict: Celebratory, rather than examining, but still deftly told. 


Saturday 26 January 2019

Review: Dealt

Dealt is the fascinating story of Richard Turner, a card mechanic and sleight of hand magician with a truly extraordinary ability. It's a talent which is doubly impressive for reasons I'll let the documentary itself outline.

Surprisingly, Dealt doesn't cover many of Turner's tricks - but more the journey his life has taken and the role personal acceptance and discipline has played.  I also liked his self-deprecating humour and obvious warmth.

Verdict: Profound, inspiring and moving. 


Wednesday 23 January 2019

Review: Five Escape Brexit Island

The sequel to Five on Brexit Island sees the plucky Famous Five ensnared by the dastardly cousin Rupert in a cunning plan to take advantage of some maritime ambiguity resulting from Brexit. 

This is perhaps the closest the twenty something Five (including four hundred something Timmy in dog years) have come to recreating one of their daring childhood adventures making it one of the most satisfying entries in the series.

It's still spiced with smile- rather than laugh-worthy humour making this riff appealing on more than one level.

Verdict: Enjoyable escapism.

Review: Five on Brexit Island

Five on Brexit Island is one of the earlier spoofs on the Famous Five featuring adult and modern versions of the beloved children's books characters.   I admit I wasn't looking forward to this one as I feel I've probably read as much as I want to about Brexit.

The characterisations aren't quite as well developed as later books, but it's still a mildly diverting read.  But for those of you who want to find political analogies in the characters then I'll leave you to uncover them. Certainly, Julian resembles a former PM...

Verdict: Not the best in the series, but not the worst either. 




Sunday 20 January 2019

Review: Five lose Dad in the Garden Centre

While still funny, Five lose Dad in the Garden Centre turns out to be a surprisingly poignant meditation on fatherhood and life as insular old bloke.  There's not a huge amount of jokes in this one, but I certainly shuddered at the horror of the sprawling Mobius strip like garden centre as it brought back memories of being dragged around them as a child.

Verdict: Vincent gets under the skin of shy grumpy old blokes everywhere. 


Review: Five Go Bump in the Night

Another in the adult Famous Five series, and this is the weakest entry I've read so far. Essentially, it's a set of short and fictional to the Five universe ghost stories.

Each story is an obvious pastiche of more well known stories such as The Picture of Dorian Gray or even Alien. This spoof within a spoof could have worked, but for some poor characterisation and one note jokes.  Only the not quite sure if true creepy meta-explanation for the Five's reappearance in this series of books worked for me.

Verdict: How do I pastiche thee? Let me count the ways...


Friday 18 January 2019

Review: Five Get Gran Online

This book should come with a trigger warning. Anyone has tried to help out an elderly or even incompetent friend or family member with their computer will get PTSD flashbacks from reading this.

Here, the Five try to sort out their previously unmentioned, but plausibly back-storied Northern Gran's tech while harbouring the secret suspicion they are actually making things worse (and that she has a much darker secret).

Verdict: Memories of misspent youth aplenty. 


Review: Five go Gluten-Free

In Five Go Gluten-Free, Anne is sucked into all things Paltrow and persuades the Five to try clean eating.  Even poor Timmy has to forego his beloved sausages in favour of organic dried dog food.

While funny in places (a reference to a smoothie looking like a stain on a tramp's trousers had me giggling), it feels like the author isn't on as familiar territory as some of the other books in the series.

Verdict: Good clean eating fun. 


Wednesday 16 January 2019

Review: The 100-Year Life: Living and Working in an Age of Longevity

This book is a bit of an oddity. The core premise is an interesting one ie we are living longer and that the old approach of a three stage life ie education/work/retirement if it ever worked at all will no longer do so. The authors suggest various adaptions featuring periods of renewal, building a portfolio career etc.

As I read it though, it becomes clear that the insights of the book really only apply to the well-educated professional who has the time, resources and mindset to examine and direct their life. Such a person likely has already spotted the these trends, elephants in the room etc. As someone somewhat in that position there was not much here that was new. I did find the sections on building intangible assets a useful nudge - not least because it gives me a name to put to a process I began last year ie finding more social activities and doing more community work.  In other areas, like modifying corporations to take into account the coming changes, it's very thin.

Another mildly annoying element is the assumption of good health and fitness. Super agers are rare and while everyone can do more to reduce lifestyle factors, genetics and luck plays a significant part.

Lastly, if I'm being brutal - the prose is a little dull and even feels repetitious. The fictional case studies liven it up a bit and I mentally settled down for a good story with some flashes of colour. But said case studies turn out to be largely functional after their initial introduction.

Verdict: A little disappointing but there was the occasional nugget which kept me reading in the hope of uncovering more. 

Tuesday 15 January 2019

Review: Five get on the property ladder

The Famous Five are in danger of being thrown out of their London flat because of Aunt Fanny and Uncle Quentin's financial troubles.  What follows will be instantly recognisable to any Londoner as they desperately seek alternative accommodation and it turns out that dodgy cousin Rupert is an estate agent.

Various child inappropriate adventures and mishaps ensure.  Once again, Vincent provides a fast paced and refreshingly boringly grown-up adventure for the Five.

Verdict: Mishaps and painful recognition of the Five's situation made this worth a read. 


Sunday 13 January 2019

Review: Five at the Office Christmas Party

My library copy unusually has "This is not a children's book" handwritten in it as a dire warning to youngsters and perhaps adults who are feeling faint of heart - and it's perhaps warranted. The adult Five series while clearly a parody remains a respectful one. None of the characters behave beyond reasonable extrapolations of their younger selves. But this entry in the series does have a couple of hints of racier office assignations.

Here, the Five end up working for their dodgy relative, Rupert's current enterprise and are assigned the task of organising the office Christmas Party against a backdrop of rumoured redundancies.  Having been in something like the same position before myself, I had a few unwelcome flashbacks as well as nods of recognition and admiration at the creativity.

The baffling epilogue brings this amusing book to a slightly unsatisfying end.

Verdict:  Captures all of the agony and the ecstasy of the office Christmas party. 


Review: Five get beach body ready

After some promising early chapters including one describing Dick's desperate attempts to book a holiday on the internet, this entry in the twenty something adult Famous Five series falls a little flat.  Or perhaps the joke is wearing a little thin now.

One interesting direction is in the Five's increasingly woke nature. In attempt to counter his position of privilege, Julian begins to take himself less seriously and shares more of the burden of leadership. Others in the team resolutely refuse to be body shamed - and they make for an interesting contrast to the Smug (and bodily fascistic) Secret Seven.  After all, we all know what SS stands for.  Beyond some slapstick at the end though, the jokes are a little on the thin side.

Verdict: Not one of the stronger entries. 




Review: Vice

Darkly amusing biopic about the former vice-president of the US, Dick Cheney.  Bale's pulls off yet another astonishing, but surely unhealthy, physical transformation in a part where he manages to completely convince as the puppet master behind the W. Bush presidency.  Adams is also excellent as the encourager behind the throne.  Also of note, are Carell and Rockwell as Rumsfeld and W. Bush

The film itself has a number of directorial and narrative quirks as it flip flops between voices, points of view, flashbacks, breaks the fourth wall and even plays with false endings.  I didn't dislike these - but occasionally it did feel like the director was throwing everything the wall to see what sticks. Or perhaps they were simply trying to confuse with feints and red herrings much in the same manner as the Cheney operating system.

There's almost no light to this portrayal and I doubt it'll change anyone's minds about Cheney's politics or methods.  As someone with an interest, but little knowledge of behind the scenes during the Bush era, I found it illuminating.

Verdict: Fascinating takedown of an unsympathetic character. 


Saturday 12 January 2019

Review: Brexit: The Uncivil War

I normally give made-for-TV political movies the swerve because they often come across as the middle-brow equivalent of those cash-in movies around Royal Weddings ie a bunch of faintly teak-like actors chewing their way through a dreadful script.  Make no mistake this definitely has a whiff of that at times and the opening montage of news clips - including an extended and unwelcome reminder of the Thatcher years - did nothing to help dispel that feeling.

 But I was attracted by the focus on the Leave camp's use of analytics and digital advertising to identify and target voters with personalised messages in Obama-on-steriods style campaign as well as the Cassandra like personality behind it all.  It didn't disappoint as I recognised much of myself in Cumberbatch's Dominic Cummings. While sharing his lack of dress sense - I'm hopefully not as borderline sociopathic as him and certainly not as clever. But I've had similar if less well-formed visions of the future of digital campaigning and heard the same scepticism from others who don't get it. There was a lot of mental table thumping while watching this.

I also appreciated Cummings' man in the pub approach to gathering insights. It was from similar experiences while living in the frozen North of Watford tendency that I became aware of a massive gap between it and London in particular. The social-cultural-economic divide is massive and there are a lot of disenfranchised people out there who neither like the direction their life is going in, have no particular attachment to the status quo and are up for giving the establishment a bloody nose because they feel they have nothing to lose. Successive politicians and the media in their attempt to scapegoat the EU for the various ills of the world has hardly helped.   The Remain camp's focus group scenes in the movie give wonderful and at times desperate life to the differences.

Finally, tip of the hat to Cumberbatch. It's by far the strongest performance and together with the occasional bit of sparkling dialogue and canny direction lifts it well above the average Hallmark movie.

Verdict: It's no Sorkin, but still worth a watch as an introduction to data driven digital campaigning.  



Sunday 6 January 2019

Review: Five go parenting

Following the shock reveal and arrest of one of their relatives as an international iPhone smuggler, the adult Five are literally left holding the baby in this latest spoof adventure.

As a non-parent myself, what follows sounds truly horrifying as they run the gauntlet of social services and snotty mums while dodging projectile diarrhoea and small plastic toys.

This is a coming of age book in more ways than one. I particularly enjoyed the lack of response by the police in their role in the aforementioned arrest.

Verdict: Another fantastic outing for the Famous Five!


Review: Five go on a strategy awayday

Anyone who's ever been on a corporate retreat will likely find much they can recognise as the Famous Five learn just how dysfunctional they are as a team through a series of cohesion building exercises.  There's a particularly caustic and on-the-nose conversation where they give feedback to each other

Charmingly, the book also includes a minor mystery they have to resolve - a plausibly adult version of their childish adventures.  Also of note is their rivalry with the Secret Seven, who no-one can quite remember the names of.

Verdict: Amusing and terrifyingly relevant.

Saturday 5 January 2019

Review: Five give up the booze

Vincent has reimagined the Famous Five as a group of twenty(?) something adults whose adventures have become rather more prosaic exercises in navigating modern life. Coupled with cunningly repurposed illustrations from the original books, the result varies in success from pillow bitingly funny to merely amusing.

Five give up the booze deals with their realisation that at least one of them is a borderline alcoholic and the new year offers the chance to try a dry January. But with a stag do and wedding in the offing, will they succeed?

The author has captured what are plausible adult extrapolations of the original characters really well.

Verdict: Enough fun to make me seek out others in the series. 

A review of 2018

2018 saw a lot of changes in my life and mostly for the better.

Still nursing my recovering broken ankle, I started the year with one resolution (actually made in early December of the previous year). Always have something to look forward in the calendar.   That's an adaptation of what I think I read in Happy Money ie you can increase the happiness value of an experience by introducing some anticipation.

That started with trying out circus skills - and it developed into a hobby proper as I quickly found it was the right balance of encouraging mind-body connection, building upper body strength, flexibility of body and mind and finding a new community. I started attending a weekly class in aerial hoop and slowly progressed to advanced level, participated in a workshop with a world champion and took part in a group performance as part of the studio's Xmas showcase.  Gymnastics had always appealed as a kid, but lacking the upper body strength to climb a rope as well as coordination more generally meant my teachers lost interest very quickly.

Speaking of world champions, I also hassled Olympic cyclist Chris Hoy at a conference where he was speaking and came away with a signed copy of his autobiography for a colleague's secret Santa.

Writing wise, I managed to blog a review about every book and film I'd read/watched in 2018. I didn't manage to write too many inspirational blog posts.

On the work front, I changed jobs and departments while remaining at the same organisation. The new role - focussing on innovation - is a good fit for my skillset and experience. I also went part-time and did less work-related travel.  Sadly, I didn't spend as much time in the Fab Lab. Hopefully, I'll come up with a project for 2019.

More sadly, I lost a good friend in Jeff.  Jeff was an inspirational yoga teacher and while I was a pretty terrible pupil (only occasionally attending his classes on the lawn at the local castle), I always admired his gentle self-deprecating approach to life.  I was grateful to work with him on his last building project - what I teasingly called his yoga shed in his back garden. I learned a lot about facing death and wood working in those months.

There was a trip abroad to the Netherlands to catch up with an old friend as well as take the missus to see the tulip fields.

Community was another strong theme in 2018. Having become distinctly middle aged, I felt like I needed a wider variety of acquaintances and friends to bring differing perspectives and challenges. I took up mountain biking with a local group of middle aged plus mostly chaps and have slowly got better at downhills and enjoyed many evenings in various North Wales pub talking shit. I also joined a newly formed book group. They are a great bunch with a diverse range of perspectives of what makes a good read.  Lastly special mention to the women of my aerial hoop classes who've advanced my understanding of modern feminism and social justice considerably.

Insomnia remained a problem, but having acquired many tools, seems to be slowly fixing itself.  Perhaps related to this, I tweaked my diet to improve the amounts of fresh fruit and veg being consumed as well focussed on a couple of key supplements.

I bought a woodland. Admittedly, it is a tiny one but it should provide lots of opportunities. Not least to wield my new battery powered chainsaw.

Wrapping up, I tried learning Welsh via Duolingo but lost momentum about midway through the year. Something to return to in 2019. Similarly, my project to read a children's classic a week somewhat slowed too as I got bogged down in the still unfinished Robinson Crusoe.  Ditto the non-fiction book a day project and learning to build a mind palace.

 Mediation via Headspace continued to help maintain my mental health as did continuing to reduce my news diet, culling various websites and apps from my phone.

Looking back, 2018 seems to have been a good year with plenty of interesting experiments.




Review: A Handful of Dust

This 1998 film version of the Waugh novel is peculiarly grim on a number of levels. There's hardly a likeable character in this bunch of social climbers and those they look up to.  On a more prosaic level, the copy on Amazon Prime has dreadful picture quality.

On the plus side, the acting and story perfectly captures a particular kind of Englishman/woman which seems to have largely disappeared. I also enjoyed spotting actors in their much more youthful incarnations. Guinness, in what is one of his last parts, gets to play an extremely odd character - a biracial illiterate king of a south American tribe with a fondness for Dickens. It's the kind of part which would likely attract considerable debate nowadays.

Verdict: Well made but uninvolving adaptation of what was probably a biting satire once upon a time. 


Friday 4 January 2019

Review: Pollyanna

I recently came across a mention of Pollyanna on the podcast By the Book and was intrigued enough by the Glad game to read the original source.   The glad game is very simple to play - you simply list all of the things you are glad for and ideally play it with another. What you are glad for can vary from the obvious to the ludicrous.

Like Anna of Green Gables before it, you really get a sense of Pollyanna's character almost wholly through her dialogue and using a child's voice to deliver the lesson is a canny way of reducing resistance. No Pollyanna adult would be so easily welcomed in either the village or onto our bookshelves.

It has a few sentimental moments, but overall I really enjoyed this book. Pollyanna's optimistic outlook on life is something of a joy to read.

Verdict: Pollyanna is a breath of fresh summer air for cold dark January mornings. 


Wednesday 2 January 2019

Review: Be More Pirate or How to Take on the World and Win

Bit of an oddity this book. By rights it should be the kind of book I love - but it has taken me months of dipping into it to complete it. I suspect it's because I don't really like breathlessly written manifesto books anymore.

On the plus side, this did change my mind about the impact of pirates on the world. It seems they really were game changers and very socially progressive for the times including rights for women, equal voting rights, a limited form of welfare state for injured pirates etc.

There are some good points made about how modern technology can and should result in better working practices.

Where it falls down is giving you yet another template to workshop your life - although it did give me plenty of food for thought on how to further adapt my working life to maximise productivity and happiness.

Verdict: Wanted to love this, but somehow it was a struggle.


Tuesday 1 January 2019

Review: Get Santa

Broadbent is well cast as the titular character in this enjoyably daft festive fare. The rest of the characters feel peculiarly British and kitchen sink like in their dysfunction and concerns making this a good antidote to the US domination of Christmas films.  It also forgoes almost any attempt to make it a white snowbound Christmas or otherwise stretch our sense of disbelief too much.

Verdict: You'll believe a reindeer can "communicate". 

Review: Company of Liars

Maitland's debut novel owes more than nod or two to Agatha Christie as a diverse cast of characters - all with secrets to hide - are gradually assembled, and then equally slowly bumped off again.  What makes it unusual though is the setting - a gruesome grind through the English countryside of 1348 (which just happens to be a particularly bad summer and heralding the Black Death).

Having previously read The Time traveller's guide to Medieval England, I felt Maitland did an excellent job of capturing the medieval mind with its leaning towards the supernatural, fear of the dark and open countryside.  The brutal reality of everyday life as well as a sense of the world collapsing feels authentic too.

It's a good read although the final twists had me slapping my forehead and felt out of character with the rest of the book.  I'd also felt some of the group felt too modern in their outlook and even that some of the slang felt out of place (eg Molly is 17th/18th century rather than 14th). Lastly, the author clearly has her favourite characters, and they are mostly male with the women of the group getting little in the way of dialogue or depth. Given the first person point of view - you may decide this is deliberate and reflects the bias of the narrator.

The unreliable narrator element leaves the book's closing chapters open to multiple interpretations meaning I can imagine continue to mull it over.

Verdict: Grimly compelling medieval road trip