What to Watch, What to Read and What to Listen to in June 2024
After the Flood is a new series on Britbox. Though it starts off well with good production values, decent acting it falls into an abyss in the last two episodes. A small picturesque town in Yorkshire (like Halifax, West Yorkshire where I’ve actually visited) is hit by flooding due to climate change—or is it caused by a developer who ransacks higher ground to build a new subdivision? We don’t know at the start but we find out. The trainee detective cop is a woman, six months pregnant, who is married to another cop who is terribly sexist and controlling. What starts off as rescuing people from a flood ends as a murder investigation with a few twists and turns along the way. Not bad. The trailer is here.
Don’t watch the series Griselda on Netflix. Griselda is a glamorous Colombian woman who takes her hulking teenage sons to Miami to escape her violent husband, their father. Both parents are involved in the Medellin drug trade (of course!) and it’s the only life Griselda knows. She tries to sell imported and “pure” drugs to druglords in the US and gets into a lot of hot water. The whole series is unbelievable, and a waste of time. If you like a “kick ass” woman star, her weak henchmen, her expressed yearning to build a “good life” (in the drug trade) for her and her sons, and you like gratuitous violence, Griselda is for you. Here’s the trailer
How to Rob a Bank is excellent. It’s a feature-length documentary on Netflix. In the ‘90s a talented young man builds himself an amazing six-storey treehouse not far from Seattle. There he plays music, entertains friends, and lives with nature. How this guy becomes a notorious (yet nonviolent) bank robber is shocking. Some call him Robin Hood, but of course the FBI thinks he’s nothing but a common and very smart criminal. As usual, Netflix has produced a nuanced and fascinating documentary –this one about Scott Scurlock, a man who collected more than $2.3 million from 14 bank robberies—without shooting or wounding anyone — for five years until 1997. Excellent. Trailer’s here.
The Sympathizer- A better book than a series
The Sympathizer. Since I liked the best-selling and Pulitzer-prize winning novel by Viet Thanh Nguyen (2015) I looked forward to this Crave series about a young Vietnamese Communist, “The Captain” who was an agent for the NLF throughout the Vietnam. His assignment was to befriend a rabidly anti-Communist South Vietnamese, “The General” who left on one of the last planes out of Saigon in 1975, after the south (basically the US) lost its war against the Communists. The Captain accompanied The General to Los Angeles as his aide-de-camp. The General had some money, some contacts, opened a restaurant, a liquor store and bribed other exiles from South Vietnam to be part of a new army that would return and wrest it from the Communists. The first half of the series is good and rather believable; a CIA agent dips in and out of the scenes as a reminder that the US has a big stake in The General’s crazy plan. The CIA agent is played by Robert Downey Jr –who also plays 3 other roles –and chews up the scenery. Unfortunately, the film’s director and writer seem to have abandoned the last two episodes to fate. But just to refresh us all about what did happen in Vietnam and the complete failure of the US in its quest for domination – that’s worth celebrating – and watching. See the trailer.
The Outfit (2022) on Netflix is very good. I recommend it strongly. It’s a snowy December night in 1956. Mobsters in “the Outfit” (similar to the Mafia) use a tailor’s storefront in Chicago as a dropbox and safe meeting place. The conscientious tailor, a 60-year-old British immigrant Leonard Burling, works day and night making suits, sewing cuffs and buttons on shirts and running a legitimate business. All the action takes place in the two-room shop – which makes the film fascinating. The mobsters call Burling “English” and demand his silence and loyalty – often at gunpoint — about illicit activities that take place in the shop. This is a psychological thriller that “moves” as I call it – it doesn’t miss a beat or take a rest. The start of it is as crystal clear as is the ending. A must-see. The only hitch is that The Outfit fails the Bechdel Test – but don’t let that stop you from watching. Here’s the trailer.
Below: Marge, Dickie and Tom in Ripley (Netflix); tailor in The Outfit; Leon and Nadja in Afire (Sideshow/Janus Films); Frankie and her son; The Captain in The Sympathizer (Hopper Stone/HBO)
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The 8-part series Ripley on Netflix is fantastic. It may be a remake of an earlier version, but this 2023 series shot in Italy – in Rome, Atrani (on the Amalfi coast) and in Sicily – is a real “film noir” shot in black and white. It is 1961 in New York City and Tom Ripley (actor Andrew Scott) is a small time crook and con man. A wealthy industrialist discovers his son Dickie Greenleaf and Tom went to school together. Greenleaf senior pays Tom to travel to Italy to persuade Dickie to return to the US from his years’ long European sojourn. Tom easily finds Dickie and his girlfriend Marge in the town of Atrani where Dickie lives the high life from money in his trust fund. He has no interest in returning to New York. The 1955 book, The Talented Mr Ripley by author Patricia Highsmith, on which this series is based must be brilliant. Add the script, the timing and the acting it means this murder mystery-thriller is worth watching. Here is the trailer.
Heavy Heart: Back to Israel’s war on Gaza…
Antisemitism: Weaponised. This nine minute video by British Youtuber and professional orthodontist (!) Nizar Mhani exposes the propaganda and false narrative that exists around the Palestinian story. It’s definitely worth a 9 minute watch here. It’s clever and right on.
You will want to watch an excellent interview with filmmaker Richard Sanders who made the film October 7 (for Al Jazeera). Sanders is a well respected British documentary maker with more than 50 films to his credit. October 7 is about exactly what took place that day and the few days after. This video on Youtube features a 40 minute interview that Peter Oborne did with Sanders. Oborne is a British journalist and broadcaster, who quit working for The Telegraph, and now works for the Middle East Eye. I highly recommend the interview here.
And on Kanopy… three excellent films
Kanopy streams Who You Think I Am (2021) starring Juliette Binoche. This is an excellent French film. Binoche plays Claire, an attractive divorcée, a 50-something year old university professor in Paris. She shares raising her two teenage sons with her ex. Her current lover is half her age. When he suddenly ends the relationship, she is devastated. She’s attracted to his friend and roommate, also about age 24. So not to alert her ex-boyfriend, her relationship with his friend is strictly on-line. The young man wants to get closer to her, but Claire resorts to subterfuge and won’t allow it. When he goes abroad on a two month backpacking trip, Claire thinks the relationship is over. Anxious and needy, she seeks the help of a woman therapist who is relentless in questioning Claire and finding out her rather bitter backstory. You won’t take your eyes off the screen, this is part love story and part thriller. Here is the trailer. And, if you’d like a cheat sheet, read The Guardian’s review here.
Kanopy also streams Afire (2023) by German director Christian Petzold. I like Petzold’s work. My favourite is The State I’m In (2000) which I borrowed from the library on DVD; I think it’s on a number of streaming platforms. Afire takes place in a beautiful country setting near a beach in Germany. A young writer, Leon, goes for a week-long getaway with his friend Felix whose mother owns the cottage. Leon is a published author but is unsure of himself, angry, bitter and self-consumed. He’s desperate to make a success of his second novel and invites his book publisher to the cottage to go over corrections of his draft. At the same time, there is already a tenant, Nadja, renting the house for the season. So Leon and Felix have to share cramped quarters. Nadja is a free spirited woman that Leon secretly loves. She is beautiful, sexy and earns money selling ice-cream to tourists. This film is about how writers and academics can’t see what’s in front of them, how they disparage others to build themselves up and they see themselves as the centre of the universe. It’s a slow film but very much worth watching. Of course as the plot runs on, we become aware of the fires raging in the area due to unusual heat and dryness of the summer. Fire plays a role in what finally happens. It’s well done. Here is the trailer.
Here is the trailer for The State I’m In. Sorry it’s only in German, but the film has English subtitles for sure.
Tim Hardin’s 1966 song ‘How Can We Hang On to a Dream’ is particularly evocative as the opening music to the film, as you will know if you see the film. You can listen here.
Frankie (2019) on Kanopy is also worth watching. A very attractive middle-aged woman, a former model and actress, asks her two grown children and their spouses to accompany her and her husband to Portugal for a vacation. When the real purpose of the vacation becomes clear, each family member can’t take the news and goes haywire and drops their defences. Here’s the trailer.
What to Read…
Are you insulting your doctor if you ask for a second opinion? How much does it cost to call an ambulance to go to the hospital? How do you get a family doctor and how do you get by without one? How do you make sense out of a pathology report – such as a biopsy? What’s long term care, and what it isn’t? The brand new book Health Hacks: How You Can Get Good Health Care in Nova Scotia by Mary Jane Hampton is a great resource. Hampton, who is a health care planner, consultant and CBC radio health care columnist, shows the reader how to negotiate the health care system in this province. The system is already sagging under the weight of possibly the least healthy, and certainly one of the oldest populations in Canada. For example, 22% of Atlantic Canadians are over 65 years old, compared to 15% in other provinces.
The book has 73 different chapters, each only a couple of pages long for easy reference. The table of contents allows you to read about your specific concerns with the health system – not merely general issues. I got the book as a gift and it is a welcome one! The softcover costs $27.95– and mine came from Atlantic News on Morris St. Halifax. (Below right: Cover for Health Hacks)
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Again another John Grisham. He claims this is his favourite book – it is one of his first books– published back in 1989. A Time to Kill is about two murders and a murderer in a small town in northern Mississippi. Two young white men rape and torture a ten-year-old black girl. She barely hangs onto her life. Days later, the girl’s father shoots the two men to death, when they were unarmed and defenceless. What starts out as a morality tale includes some fascinating tidbits including how the KKK (Ku Klux Clan) really operated, how even the “liberal” lawyers distrusted the NAACP (the organization that was founded to put Black America first); and how segregation continued 25 years after the US government ordered an end to it. The girl’s father is defended by a young white lawyer, Jake Brigance, himself a cipher. Born and raised near the small town where this takes place, he studied law at the “good old boy” Ole Miss (the University of Mississippi) – which remained segregated until 1962. Jake seldom ventures out of the state. He is neither a civil libertarian, nor an anti-racist. He goes to church every Sunday with his wife and daughter, likes to binge on beer and seems to care only about establishing a lucrative legal practice – even when the personal and political costs go sky high.
I noticed the “new” 2009 introduction to the book written by Grisham my e-book version of A Time to Kill. I also took note of his use of the “n” word and the overuse of other insults and slurs (especially about women) throughout the legal thriller. I would have thought since John Grisham had had the chance to redo, and update aspects of his 35-year-old novel—he would have corrected it using a less overtly racist and sexist lens. This is a major failing of the book. That aside, I can tell you it’s super-long, but not a bad read.
“Reason over Passion”
Heather Mallick’s column in the Toronto Star Reason Over Passion is worth reading. She’s a great and usually humorous columnist. Here’s her column.
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The Best Way to Secure LGBTQ Rights: Unions is a great article by Joanna Wuest republished from Jacobin in Portside here. She notes:
“Now is an appropriate time to assess why queer advocacy seems commonsense to many of today’s unionized workers. One answer is that unions promoting LGBTQ issues can deliver — through negotiations — often more readily than civil rights law or supposedly progressive corporations can. However, inspiring as an unabashedly queer working-class politics might be — that is, an approach to labor struggle that centers specific LGBTQ reforms such as antidiscrimination contract provisions and trans-inclusive health care plans — organized labor’s ability to improve queer workers’ lives stems ultimately from its power to raise standards for all workers. This is in no small part because the basic union contract gains that positively impact LGBTQ workers are essentially the same ones that address the health, income, and housing needs of all workers.”
Something truly funny… taking my dog to the vet’s – by Chris Martin
What to Listen to…
The Invitation is an on-air play produced by the BBC Drama of the Week and it’s worth hearing. An eight-year-old girl is having a birthday party; she invited everyone in her class except for one girl. The birthday girl’s mother Jo, who works as a paralegal, told her daughter she had the right to invite whom she liked. But the fallout from that decision is what every mother fears and most mothers have had to deal with – when your child’s not invited, how far will you go to have her included on a party list? This is a comedic and also hair-pulling situation. One I recommend you—even if you’re not a parent — listen to. 40 minutes, while driving, busing or pedalling the exercise cycle —listen here.
In 1984, a 21-year-old Irish clerk refused to serve a customer who was buying two grapefruits from South Africa. When Mary Manning was suspended from the Dublin grocery store where she worked, her co-workers walked out in protest. They were part of the Irish workers’ union, IDATU, which had asked its members not to sell goods from South Africa. This is a great ten minute listen, The Irish Shopworkers Strike Against Apartheid, one of the BBC’s Witness History series. Here it is.
Bridget Brownlow, who teaches history at various Halifax universities, has been awarded an Honorary Doctor of Laws (LLD) by the Justice Institute of BC. Here’s a very good interview with Portia Clark (CBC’s Information Morning) with Brownlow about her work, “Halifax professor recognized for peacebuilding work in Northern Ireland”. Hats off to Bridget and her great accomplishments. I went with Bridget’s student peace building group to Belfast about a decade ago and it was a great and humbling experience. Listen to the interview here.
Below: cartoon by Mark Fishburne (@marketoonist.com); child’s birthday party (BBC Good Food Podcast); classroom activity with Saint Mary’s University students in Belfast for Peaceful Schools (2022); Bridget Brownlow (right) receiving her Hon. LLB; photo of shop workers striking over apartheid South Africa, Dublin 1984 (BBC World Service).
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The Big Story podcast host Jordan Heath Rawlings has a good interview with restaurant chef and critic Corey Mintz called Welcome to the era of “tip creep”. Mintz, a Winnipeg-based food writer, explains why most restaurants now prompt customers for tips of 18, 25 and even 30%. I’ve read Mintz’s “tell all” book The Next Supper: The End of Restaurants as We Knew Them, and What Comes After (2021) and it’s fascinating. It is also critical of restaurant owners underpaying their staff consistently – which downloads the responsibility for making up the low wages to the patrons.
Mintz doesn’t take on another major hurdle: the fact that in all but two Canadian provinces, tips are the property of the restaurant or bar owner – not the wait staff. So the boss is perfectly entitled to collect the tips, pay part or none to the staff and pocket the rest. The two provinces where this practice is illegal are Québec and Newfoundland and Labrador. In these provinces tips are the exclusive property of the servers—not the bosses. Listen to the 20 min podcast.
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Al Jazeera’s The Take revisits a podcast from 2023, Another Take: Native American Activist Leonard Peltier. Peltier has spent 47 years in maximum security prisons in the US for a crime he didn’t commit. There are serious concerns about false evidence and coerced testimony which discredit the notion that he killed two FBI agents. What might be his final parole hearing was on 10 June – a decision will be made by 1 July. For a good roundup on the case read the Minneapolis StarTribune’s article. The podcast can be heard here.
Painting at the top: Before the Rain (1993) by Dorothy Knowles (Canadian). For more on this Saskatchewan artist, read this.
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Judy Haiven is a writer and activist living in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Formerly, she was a professor in the Management Department of the Sobey School of Business at Saint Mary’s University and is a specialist in Industrial Relations. Judy Haiven is a founder of Equity Watch, a human rights organization dedicated to fighting bullying and discrimination in the workplace.
Contact: jhaiven [at] gmail.com
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