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. 

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. 

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.  

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.