All the President’s Men 🎥 was a rewatch for me. And as I said in 2022, ‘Why did they end it there?’
Woodward and Bernstein break the Watergate story, and ‘follow the money’ all the way to the top of the US political establishment, and it’s great. But then the last bit, the guilty pleas, convictions, and sentencing, is laid out in a few seconds on a newsroom teleprinter.
That last point, as a device, is good, and perfectly valid as a way of summarising the fates of the perpetrators. My problem is that just before that we’ve seen the investigative duo at their lowest point, the Washington Post itself in danger, and everything seems to be falling apart. Then we switch to Nixon’s second inauguration playing on the newsroom TV while the work still goes on in the background, and then that teleprinter.
It wouldn’t be necessary, and could have appeared triumphalist, if the film had shown the entire story to the fall of Nixon. But ending it at that exact point seems odd. True, there is some pleasing irony in the juxtaposition between inauguration and the work going on that leads to the fall. But it just feels kind of thin to me.
But Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman manage to be compelling, even exciting, in a couple of hours of making phone calls and driving around ill-lit streets. So it’s still a great movie.
La Bola Negra 🎥 is a Spanish movie based on, or inspired by, an unfinished play by Gabriel Garcia Lorca. Across three strands and three times we have a completed version of the play; the civil war experiences of a young man in Franco’s army who has Lorca’s lover as a prisoner; and a present-day would-be playwright who is the grandson of the soldier.
In reality only four pages of of the play exist. The film is the story of the play in multiple senses, therefore: the story told in the play itself, and also of how the play script survived.
I enjoyed it a great deal, but do feel it’s overlong. There were several places toward the end where I both expected it to end and thought, ‘They should have stopped it there.’ But as the Best Director Award winner at Cannes, I daresay we’ll be hearing about it when the Oscars come round.
Fatherland 🎥 is the based-on truth story of Thomas Mann and his daughter Erika, visiting his homeland of Germany in 1949. He’s there to receive the Goethe Prize — in both West and East Germany, oddly. We see something of the differences between the two sides, and the suggestion that his now-home in America may be threatened by his visiting the East. But the true pressure on Mann comes from the contemporaneous death of his son, Klaus. Or it should, but this a very cold film, emotionally. Mann himself seems largely unaffected by his son’s death, though Erika mourns her brother.
It’s very watchable, beautifully shot in black and white, and no longer than it needs to be. Though I have a hard time understanding what exactly the purpose in making it was.
Moulin Rouge! 🎥 is another one in the ‘seen/read before, remember next to nothing about’ set of cultural artifacts.
It’s a fabulous film, with so many musical quotes and references, as well as the out-and-out explicitly sung ones, that I doubt I’ve got them all yet. A jukebox ton of fun.
📚 Books 2026, 24: The Catcher in the Rye, by J. D. Salinger
I read The Catcher in the Rye, not in my teens as many do, but I think probably in my twenties. And I recently went to a live podcast recording of The Booking Club, with Jack Aldane, where he and his guests were discussing it.
I realised I remembered little about it, but was interested, and decided to reread it. Doing so, I realised I remembered nothing at all about it.
Well, that’s not quite true. I remembered one scene, about how when you meet new people — other kids at a new boarding school, in this case — Catholics always manage to let you know they are, by asking if you know where the local Catholic church is. That stuck with me because of my Catholic background, I dare say.
But nothing else, other than a vague sense of Manhattan.
Which is a shame, I guess. Or maybe not. After all, it means I got to read it as effectively a new book. Except that I knew where it ends, if not from memory, then from hearing the podcast people talking about it.
Anyway. Holden Caulfield is a slightly annoying character at times — or rather an annoying narrator, as what most annoyed me was his repeated use of ‘old’ when talking about people. ‘Old Phoebe’ for his younger sister, for example. Nothing wrong with that occasionally, but it was so frequent. We must assume, then, that Salinger was trying to create that effect. Or some effect, maybe to represent Holden’s limited vocabulary? But then he mostly comes across as quite literate.
Unreliable, though, he’s definitely that. And somewhat hypocritical. But above all, I felt sorry for him. He’s been through a lot of shit, and it’s only getting worse, and he’s adrift in the world.
Looking at it now, and thinking of a key point that was made in the podcast — it’s about a teenager, but it’s not written for teenagers — I wonder why it — or he, Holden — became such an icon of the counterculture.
Sad to hear about the death of Patrick Stewart. I think my favourite of his performances might have been as a weird, sleazy version of himself in Extras. Here’s a YouTub link.
This list of his best roles doesn’t even mention that he was in I Claudius (with a full head of hair).
📚 Books 2026, 23: The Identity Trap, by Yascha Mounk
I first read about The Identity Trap in a piece by Nick Cohen called ‘The Weird Roots of Wokeness’. It was reviewed by Zoe Williams in The Guardian in considerably more negative terms. I was drawn to it in part because of my thoughts about ‘identity politics’.
Mounk analyses how identity politics broadly, in collaboration with postmodernism and ideas like critical race theory, has taken over many aspects of society. Or maybe that’s too strong. Has gained an astonishing amount of influence in quite a short time, let’s say.
I feel I have a lot more I want to say about it, about its themes and conclusions; but I’m not quite ready to write about all that yet, and it doesn’t belong in a books post anyway. Let me just say that at its heart the book is a defence of, and almost a call to arms for, liberalism and free speech. Which these days, I am increasingly realising, are at the heart of my own political and social beliefs.
Dave Winer (@dave on Micro.blog) has been extolling the virtues of AI agents to help with coding for months now. So when he writes:
I would like to have one day when Claude Code doesn’t fuck everything up by doing things it is explicitly prohibited from doing. I find things that were changed in critical parts of the program, that were indefensible.
I can’t help but wonder if some sort of tide is beginning to turn.
That said, at my work we’re about to start a trial of using AI agents, with Codex rather than Claude. So something to be cautious about.
📚 Books 2026, 22: All That We See or Seem, by Ken Liu
Ken Liu is best known (to me at least) as the translator of the first and third volumes of Liu Cixin’s ‘Three-Body Trilogy’. But he’s an accomplished SF author in his own right.
All That We See or Seem (described as the first of a series, because of course) is a cyberpunk story, in the sense that it’s set in the near future and concerns hacking. The lead character, who goes by ‘Julia Z’, was a member of hacking group as a teenager, and after it got broken up and the leaders arrested, she is trying to live on the right side of the law.
But that’s all backstory, with details revealed to us gradually as the main story needs them. In the book’s present, she is approached by a man whose wife has gone missing and is seemingly being held to ransom by a criminal gang. Piers wants Julia to use her skills to find his wife, Elli. Elli is an ‘onierofex’, or dreamweaver: a talent in a new form of entertainment where people enter shared dreams. The mechanism for this is not entirely clear, but it involves scanning the participants brains in some form.
There are gangsters after them, of course, and we’re off. One thing that struck me about this is, you recall the ‘capable man’ stories of the so-called Golden Age of SF? The heroes of Heinlein, John W Campbell, or Doc Smith stories, who could turn their hand to just about anything the plot required?
Well Julia is very much a ‘capable young woman’, in what feels like a surprisingly similar vein. As a hacker, she can do smart things with computers, of course. But she also turns her hand to smart-drone design; counter-surveillance (OK, that’s kind of computer/hacker-related); and ultimately intrusion, in the form of breaking into an enemy base.
It’s all convincingly done, don’t get me wrong. While you’re reading it, you’ll mostly believe it’s all plausible, she’s convincingly drawn. But looking back, wow: that’s quite some capability.
It’s good, though. I recommend it.
Former Environmental Party Changes Shirt Colour from Green to Black
On the anniversary of Cable Street, Britain’s Green Party votes in favour of antisemitism.
Watched: Ocean's Eleven (2001) 🎥
We watched Ocean’s Eleven.
It’s a surprising five-plus years since we watched Ocean’s Eight, noting that you didn’t have to have watched any of the other ‘Ocean’s’ films first. Also somewhere in the last few years we watched the original Ocean’s Eleven, the 1960 version. I appear to have forgotten to make a note of that, either here or in Letterboxd. Probably within the last two years, but these things have a habit of being longer ago than I think.
Anyway, I see I gave Eight three-and-a-half stars on Letterboxd. I’m now using Micro.blog’s ‘Movies’ feature, which doesn’t have a star-rating element built in, but if were to give this version of Eleven such a rating, it would probably be two-and-half. It’s fine, but really not all that good.
I don’t really understand why it’s so well thought of, to the point that two or three sequels got made. It’s like the broad outline of a heist movie without much of the tension and drama, and possibly some lapses of logic. How did they get the fake money they blew up, into the real vault, for example?
And the eleven characters: several of them just seemed superfluous, or so poorly defined that they might as well not have been there.
Curiously, all of that makes me want to watch the sequels, if only to see if they get better.
📚 Books 2026, 21: Hum, by Helen Phillips
A story set in a dystopian near-future, where everything is much the same as today but just that bit worse. And there are humanoid robots everywhere (in the US city in which it’s set, at least). For reasons that are never explained they are called ‘Hums’. I’m guessing it’s because ‘hum’ is nearly ‘human’.
They operate autonomously and are helpful, but it’s not clear who owns or controls them. They advertise products both in conversation and by displaying things on screens on their chests.
The main character, May, has lost her job to AI, and the family is struggling to get by on her husband’s gig-work. May volunteers for experimental facial surgery which make changes that are minor, but noticeable by people, and crucially, which prevent facial recognition systems from picking her up. Which causes problems, as well as providing a windfall which she uses to take the family to the ‘Botanical Gardens’, which are a recreation of unspoilt countryside in the middle of the city.
Problems ensue, and stuff happens. Mostly interpersonal conflict between May and her kids. The message it’s sending is ambiguous. The hums seem to be antagonistic, or at least annoying for much of it, but one of them might be their saviour by the end.
The cover boasts ‘Winner of the Climate Fiction prize’, which is odd, because while the climate and damage to it is there as background — not least in the fact that the only way they can experience nature is to go to an artificial zone — it’s not really about that. It’s more about the surveillance state and the ubiquity of advertising, as well as the difficulty of life under late-stage capitalism.
Which are all interlinked, of course. It makes this kind of a depressing read, though the characters are engaging enough.
Good piece by Robin Sloan on using ‘AI’ to create personalised apps:
'Ask for what you want' is a key skill for the 21st century robinsloan.com
it does seem a powerful use case, if you have a matching need.
Later he says:
Most of life doesn’t happen in here. If, indeed, none of your needs or desires are app-shaped … well, that’s not unusual! I have chatted about this with several friends who pondered a while, then declared: “I don’t have any problems that software can solve.”
If that’s you, close this tab and proceed with your day.
Maybe that’s me; that’s the answer to my post the other day, about not having anything to ask the bots.
At work, though, I could have such questions, and the idea still makes me uncomfortable.
Yesterday I wrote the end of draft zero of a novel. I call it ‘The Edinburgh Novel’, as that’s where it’s set, and I don’t have a title yet. Now I have a load of rewriting to do and many comments from my novel-writing group to incorporate.
First though, what next, while I let that stew?
It remains confusing to me about ‘AI’ that so many people ever started using it. I never used it, aside from a few odd things at work, and I could never think of anything I wanted to ask it.
No other software I can recall got adopted by so many, so quickly. What happened?
Reform continues to cast doubt on climate science. Do its supporters agree?
For fuck’s sake, The Guardian, learn to write an accurate headline. Whatever shite Reform talks about climate science, it doesn’t cast doubt on it. It lies about the evidence for global heating, is probably what you should say.
Started reading: The Revolutionists: The Story of the Extremists Who Hijacked the 1970s, by Jason Burke. 📚