I’m not into cars. I once owned a PlayStation 2, but I’ve never played the racing simulator game after which this film is named. I’m patently not the target audience for this recently released Neill Blomkamp film. If it weren’t for my ‘new approach’ to going to the cinema, there’s no way on Earth that I’d have seen this.

The film is based on a true story. The main character is Jann Mardenborough, a young lad who is very skilled at the Gran Turismo computer game and is thereby recruited and trained up to drive real racing cars. The tension in the film comes from whether someone from outside can make it in the highly competitive world of racing… though, of course, the existence of the film is its own spoiler.

I sort of enjoyed this. It was too long—two hours and 14 minutes—and I could have done without all the extended racing sequences. I’ll confess that I had a bit of a micro-snooze in many of them. They didn’t seem to be doing anything particularly cinematically clever, and they didn’t really advance the plot, as the outcome was often plain from the start. Yet, I was captivated by Archie Madekwe’s performance as Mardenborough, and did find myself rooting for him.

But there were issues.

Firstly, some of the characterisation was awful. Orlando Bloom could not have been less convincing as PR man Danny Moore if his dialogue had been replaced by silent-film-style interstitials. It was awful. His character had essentially no narrative arc, his drive appeared to come entirely from wanting to promote Nissan, and his whole schtick was morally questionable given the life-and-death stakes for other characters. The character was poorly written, and Bloom wasn’t able to overcome that.

I didn’t recognise Ginger Spice Geri Horner as Lesley Mardenborough—I’m not good with celebrities—but did find myself wondering what had gone wrong in the film-making process. The delivery of her lines was so detached from the situations in which they took place that I found myself wondering if there had been a sickness-driven last-minute substitution or similar. This didn’t interfere with my enjoyment in any major way, though, as the character was so minor.

Which brings us to… the almost total absence of substantive roles for women in this film. Of the first twenty credited actors, only two are women. I don’t understand why you’d make that creative choice. Sure, if this was intended to be biographically accurate, then you’re limited, but it has been widely criticised for straying quite far from the facts. So why not make the creative choice to re-cast Bloom’s character as female? That could even supply a nice narrative arc as a female PR agent battles stereotypes to establish her credentials in a male-dominated industry. It’d be more satisfying than the main motivation being to sell more Nissans. I should acknowledge Maeve Courtier-Lilley, who managed to give some depth to her role despite only being given, like, five lines.

This is also a film that patronises. There are many scenes which begin with establishing shots of well-known skylines, overlaid with both the city and the country in large letters. For example: here’s the Eiffel Tower, let’s just overlay this shot with “PARIS, FRANCE” to make sure the audience really gets it. I’m afraid this really hit my funny bone, and I found myself audibly sniggering each time it happened. Plot points are also telegraphed: there’s a section of the film where Mardenborough must come in fourth place or better to progress, and this point is hammered home so many times for the audience that it begins to hurt.

But mostly… I don’t understand why the team decided to make the racing the main point of tension in the film when the outcome is obvious. It strikes me as a really odd creative decision, but maybe that’s because I’m under-appreciating the popular appeal of the racing sequences. There’s an underplayed subplot about Mardenborough’s relationship with his dad, and I think that’s where I would have located the heart of the film. There are interesting stages to their relationship: frustration at Jaan’s preference for computer games over physical sport; a feeling of exclusion driven by the expensive, elite nature of the sport; fatherly concern at the dangers involved; and, ultimately, reflection on the lack of support he provided. There’s a lot in there that could have been unpacked through the racing, with reconciliation perhaps serving as a more rewarding ending.

Perhaps what this whole review really says is: I don’t particularly warm to racing movies, and would have liked this to be an entirely different kind of film. Who knows? This is a film I would never, under normal circumstances, have seen or had any opinion on. I’m glad I saw it, and feel like I learned a little more about my own film preferences as a result.

Says Becky Hughes, in the New York Times:

Stereotypes may be fading, but bartenders say many male customers are still uneasy with fancy glassware.

I can honestly say that I’ve never, in my entire life, given a second’s thought as to whether the cocktail I have been served is in a ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’ glass. Even as I glanced through the images in the article, I wasn’t really sure how to gender each of the featured containers.

It seems to have something to do with stems:

Jake Webster, a 24-year-old working in finance, used to succumb to the desire for a stemless glass. When he first started going to bars, he would order a beer or a whiskey on the rocks. Eventually, he grew tired of ordering drinks he didn’t like.

Yes, some people, it seems, order drinks they don’t enjoy because they consider the glassware to match their gender. For some people, the choice of drink is driven not even by their own preference for a particular type of glass, but by the preference of a fictional character they happen to like:

“It’s just a matter of what you see in TV and movies,” said Mr. [Max] Klymenko, who added, “I vividly remember Harvey Specter on ‘Suits’ always drinking from a short glass. To me, that seemed like something I should emulate.”

I recently bought some very short-stemmed wine glasses for use at home, as our longer-stemmed ones don’t fit in the dishwasher very easily. I’m now worried that this was an unintended imposition of my masculinity.

I have never ordered a cocktail based on a glass. I always order one of two things. One option is a cocktail I know I’ll enjoy (most often a negroni; a negroni sbagliato if you really insist on bubbles; maybe something with Aperol if you’ve got no Campari). The other is to order something different, something experimental: typically the house speciality. The glass isn’t a consideration.

But… I can’t get too high and mighty about this.

If ever I find myself in Starbucks, I do tend to order a flat white because they serve it in a nice cup and saucer rather than one of their unredeemably awful 3-inch-thick mugs. It’s nothing to do with gender, it’s just a preference for drinking out a vessel that seems designed for humans rather than animals.

The image at the top of this post was generated by Midjourney.

Like most people, sometimes I happen to read two unrelated things in succession and thereby draw unexpected conclusions.

Dan Cullum recently posted the widely accepted reason for the relative lack of success of the Segway:

The Segway is a great piece of technology. When it was announced, it was meant to change the way humanity moved.

The problem was the Segway wasn’t designed to handle stairs.

And stairs, well, they’re everywhere.

And then Andrew Mueller’s breathless excitement at Paris banning e-scooters:

E-scooters were always an answer to a question that presumably nobody had asked: “What would be an efficient way of making life for pedestrians miserable at best, dangerous at worst?” They have been a blight upon every city on which they have descended. In use, they are a nuisance and a menace. When stationary, they’re ugly and obstructive litter.

By declaring a stop to this nonsense, Paris has set what will hopefully be a resonant example.

Segways and e-scooters are driving at the same goal: moving pedestrians more quickly with less effort. The latter was leagues more successful than the former, yet didn’t solve the alleged ’killer problem’. You can’t ride an e-scooter upstairs, either.

It reminded me not to take the commonly accepted explanation for an enterprise’s failure at face value. It’s probably a lot more complicated than it seems.

The image at the top of this post was generated by Midjourney.

I recently made a resolution to see more films in cinemas. It’s a bizarre coincidence that the first film I’ve subsequently seen has an over-the-credits speech by the lead actor about the impact of seeing films in cinemas, and hubristically underlining the importance of this particular film. The fact that I spent much of that speech racking my brain to remember the product name of the IKEA floor-lamp he was sat next to—it’s an Årstid, if you’re wondering—gives some idea of the impact of the speech.

I went into this blind. I had no idea of the whole Trump / QAnon controversy associated with the film. If you’ve no idea what I’m talking about, it’s a US culture war rabbit hole that you’re better off ignoring, as I will for the remainder of this post.

This was a really odd film. It is apparently based on the life of Tim Ballard, who is played by Jim Caviezel, and his work with Operation Underground Railroad. The film’s expressed mission is to raise awareness of child sex trafficking. This seems to be ’raise awareness’ in the sense of ‘make people aware that it exists’, not in the sense of ‘make people aware of their own agency in influencing the situation’. This is fine, if we accept that there are people unaware of child sex trafficking, which is surely a small group.

Oddly, for a film raising awareness, the victims’ narratives are mostly skimmed over. Once children are rescued, they are portrayed as immediately happy, as though their experiences might not leave lifelong psychological and physical scars. Instead, the film follows a sort of ‘rogue US agent saves the world from evil foreigners’ script, concentrating on the rescuer’s narrative.

There’s a troubling undertone of religion as a driving force for the action, with the lead character gravely intoning that ‘God’s children are not for sale’ in a moment that, I’m afraid, caused me to audibly snort. Women in the film aren’t really given much opportunity to offer thoughts on the wider issue of trafficking, and there’s a fundamental assumption that everyone involved is plainly evil: there’s no moral complexity or challenge to be found.

There was a brief promise of some interesting moral questions, like how we should support those who are forced to watch images of child abuse for investigation and evidential purposes… but it turns out that the film’s answer was, well, not very satisfactory.

Perhaps weirdest of all, in a film that is reputedly trying to convince its audience to care about a huge problem, not a single one of the characters is motivated by it. Indeed, several actively demur from tackling trafficking in general, and will only consent to becoming involved when a specific child is on the line. That’s a peculiar narrative choice given the message.

Basically, this film gets a ‘no’ from me, with the sole exception of the child actor Lucas Avila, who steals every scene he is in, and is completely heart-melting.

The stage is set for the Great North Run, which remains the world’s largest half-marathon. Starting in Newcastle, the participants run down to the coast at South Shields.

It’s the first ‘proper’ Great North Run weekend in several years: 2020 was cancelled due to the pandemic, 2021 took a ‘modified’ pandemic-friendly route, 2022 saw a sombre event with the associated smaller runs cancelled due to Elizabeth II’s death.

Sir Mo Farah has also chosen this year’s race to be the finale of his career as a professional athlete. He’s won the Great North Run six times to date, and the Metro has changed the cubic sign en route at Heworth to feature his silhouette. Local radio wags have called it the Metmo.

The Red Arrows will fly past at 1135, and shake our house as they do so.

I don’t think there’s been a year in the decades I’ve lived in the North East when I haven’t known and sponsored at least one person in the run. I’ve never taken part myself… obviously… but Wendy has done one of the shorter runs before. Perhaps more shockingly, despite living within spitting distance of the route, neither of us has ventured out to spectate at the main Great North Run.

Will that change today? We’ll see…

In the two decades over which I’ve been writing this blog, I’ve covered—at least in passing—five general elections. In the intervening times, I’ve written more than even I would care to read about UK politics.

And yet, it is only today that I’ve realised that we use the word ‘majority’ in UK politics to mean two entirely different things.

The first, and to me, the most intuitive, is defined by the OED as

The greater number or part; a number which is more than half the total number, esp. of votes; spec. (in a deliberative assembly or electoral body) the group or party whose votes amount to more than half the total number, or which has the largest share of votes; the fact of having such a share.

The outcome of the general election held in 2019 was that the Conservative Party won a majority of 80 seats in the House of Commons. That is, they had 80 more seats than all the other parties combined: the Conservatives had 365 of the 650 seats, while all other parties together had 285. The excess number of seats—the majority—was 80 seats.

But—set your phasers to ‘stun’—we use the word ‘majority’ to mean something completely different at the individual constituency level. We use this, more recent, OED definition:

The number by which the votes cast for one party, etc., exceed those for the next in rank.

To take a topical example, Nadine Dorries won her Mid Bedfordshire seat with a reported majority of 24,664. Dorries garnered 38,692 votes, her nearest competitor won 14,028 votes, and the difference is reported as the majority. We ignore the rest of the votes.

This leads to some oddities. For example, in the 2005 election, Dorries won 23,345 votes—that was 11,355 more votes than her nearest competitor. She therefore won a ‘majority’ of 11,355. Yet, a much larger number of votes—27,075—were for other candidates. Like many candidates, Dorries therefore simultaneously won a minority of the votes, yet secured a stonking five-figure majority.

This weird convention makes sense in terms of the numbers it prioritises. A government with a healthy majority can command increased confidence in its ability to pass legislation. Similarly, a legislator with a health majority can command increased confidence in their re-election prospects. It makes little difference how far ahead the government is compared to the official opposition, and it makes little difference how far ahead (or not) the legislator is versus the entire field of opponents.

But, blimey, how have I lived for thirty-eight years without noticing this quirk?

The image at the top of this post was generated by Midjourney.

This is a newly published book, but not a newly published story: it was published in The New Yorker last year, and even translated into French and published as a hardback. For Faber, this feels a bit like a cash-in on Keegan’s Booker shortlisting, like money for old rope, admittedly with the odd word changed. It’s 6,000 words or thereabouts: it would be hard not to read it in a single sitting.

None of which says anything at all about the work itself, which happens to be brilliant. I’ve previously enjoyed Foster and Small Things Like These by the same author, though was left unmoved by The Forester’s Daughter, so my praise for Keegan hasn’t been universal. But I thought So Late in the Day was exceptional. The tone reminded me a bit of the pervasive regret of Kazuo Ishiguro’s novels.

It’s hard to write anything meaningful about such a slight novel without giving everything away. Its French title was Misogynie. Our narrator is Cathal, an Irish Civil Servant, and we find him contemplating the history of his relationship with his ex-fiancee. The prose is understated and precisely written.

I would highly recommend it.

There are many, many things in this world that I know very little about, a fair proportion of which are things that you probably know quite a lot about. One area in which I’m woefully lacking in even rudimentary knowledge is cinema… as you may have noticed over the last two decades of this blog.

I can’t remember the last year when I read less than 52 books (averaging one a week). Yet, in my thirty-eight years, I suspect I’ve seen fewer than 52 films at the cinema in total. In 2023 to date, I’ve seen three. I wrote ropey reviews for each of them: Tár, The Laureate and Barbie. If watching a film while a live orchestra performs the score counts, I can add City Lights to this list too… but I expect that cinema purists would cringe at the very notion.

My knowledge of film stars is essentially non-existent. I’m one of those irritating people who exclaims “who?!” as Graham Norton lists his guests of the week… or I would be, if I ever watched his chat show, which I don’t, because I don’t know who anyone on it is. I stream films a little, but probably not substantially more than I see in the cinema, and I entirely understand the argument that productions made for the big screen are best seen there.

I’m not anti-cinema. I’m essentially ambivalent: I don’t think I’ve seen enough of it to have a well-formed opinion. I’m not even sure why I’ve seen so little. I might plead a lack of time if, nine years ago, I hadn’t made a big thing about no-one ever having time to do anything.

As there’s little as satisfying in life as filling a knowledge gap, I’ve decided to take drastic action. I’m going to follow the Stephen Bush mantra:

I think in general, beyond screening out some genres that aren’t for you — I never watch horror or anything involving fixing or racing cars — just going to whatever’s on is a pretty good way of having, at the least, a not-terrible time.

I’m going to make an effort to go to the cinema more often, and just see whatever. This might be a terrible idea, and I might give up on it after about a fortnight. Alternatively, if I’m not bored out of my skull or finding ways to avoid the flicks, then trying to see 52 films in a year might become a ‘thing’ for 2024.

This post is really my way of saying… there might be some unexpected film reviews coming up.

Watch this space.

The image at the top of this post was generated by Midjourney.

When flicking through Apple’s iOS App Store on my iPhone this morning, I noticed that of the ‘top ten’ free apps, I have only two installed. Of the ‘top twenty’, I have only six installed. And of the ‘top twenty’ paid apps, I have none installed.

Digging deeper into the lists, I have 22 of the ‘top fifty’ free apps installed, and one of the ‘top fifty’ paid apps.

In the early days of the App Store, I would typically have a high proportion of the most popular apps installed.

I’ve been pondering what this might mean. Perhaps I am an outlier who doesn’t use the things most people use? Or perhaps the explosion of apps over the years now means that the variety people install tends to be broader, and the most popular apps are installed on a much smaller proportion of devices.

A lot of the apps on the ‘paid’ list strike me as fairly niche: three of the ‘top ten’ are apps for those learning to drive, which surely makes up only a small proportion of iPhone users. This supports the hypothesis that installations have become more varied, and that the ‘top ten’ has less pull. But that observation doesn’t carry over to the ‘free’ list, with the most popular apps seemingly having broad appeal.

Or maybe, just maybe, it’s not a good idea to try to draw conclusions based on a sample size of one.

The image at the top of this post was generated by Midjourney.