What to Watch, and What to Read in January 2025
I hope you all survived the holidays which seem to have taken place months ago — not two weeks ago. Just to give you a heads up, I’ll be on Off the Hill: Election Year in Canada, Rabble’s first political panel of 2025. It’s on Wed. 15 Jan. at 7.30 EST. Register for free here. Also on the panel will be Niki Ashton MP, Jim Stanford, Stuart Trew and Karl Nerenberg.
 |
Now: What to Watch…
Black Sands, is a police procedural from Iceland. The series is a little light in emotion and nuance—but late at night without any focus left for Wordle, or online puzzles (I’m only up to doing 64 pieces) – Black Sands isn’t bad. But not thrilling. It’s eight episodes and it’s on CBC-GEM. Trailer is here.
Doubt (2008) features Meryl Streep and is worth watching. Streep, plays Sister Aloysius, a dedicated nun and the principal of St Nicholas school in a poor Irish area of Boston. The year is 1964, and Father Flynn, played by the late Philip Seymour Hoffman, is the school’s priest. The principal is very demanding of her staff and students. The priest is more open and jovial. He befriends the kids, and tries to move the school into the more modernized and revitalized era of the church, the result of decisions made in 1962 by Vatican II. A young nun and teacher reports she’s seen private conversations between Father Flynn and a couple of the boys. Sister Aloysius suspects Flynn of sexual misconduct. What happens is believable, unfair and vengeful. Worth watching. It’s on Netflix, or Prime Video. Trailer is here.
 |
Never Forget Palestine…
If you get a chance to see a brand new feature film, The Palestine Exception, see it. We see the effects on faculty and students who dare to speak up against the genocide in Gaza on campuses across the US. It is a well done documentary by two women, one a retired psychology prof and filmmaker Jan Haakan and Jennifer Ruth, a prof at the film school at Portland State University. Trailer is here There is a longer discussion about the film with the filmmakers here.
 |
More Good Streaming…
The Teachers’ Lounge is a 2023 feature film from Germany. It’s excellent. Your eyes won’t leave the screen. A young enthusiastic teacher, Ms Nowak, is a delight to watch in her Grade 7 classroom. However, in the teachers’ lounge, there have been a number of thefts. Nowak does not stand up for her students when the school administration heavy-handedly demands the boys turn out their pockets to prove no one is the thief. However, a boy of Turkish heritage stands accused, and it’s clear that racial profiling has played a role. Ms Nowak notices evidence that the thief may be the school secretary, not a student. The woman’s son is a top student in Nowak’s classroom. This is spell-binding. I watched it free on Kanopy. Here’s the trailer.
Museo is a good feature film also on Kanopy. Two veterinary students and best friends, Juan from a wealthy family and Ben from a not so well off home, decide to steal hundreds of artworks, Mayan and Zapotec figures and more from the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City. Their meticulous planning allows them to get away with it, but the question of who will ‘fence’ the artwork becomes the problem. A delight, fast paced and well written. Trailer’s here.
Below: still from Doubt; photo of Frederick Forsyth; book jacket; Patrick Fealey writes on a cardboard box lid in his car.
The Gold is an excellent six-episode series on CBC-GEM (it’s free). This recent BBC series showcases a true heist – which enriched several prominent thieves in several parts of England. The Brink’s-Mat robbery was a heist that took place in November 1983, when six armed men stole hundreds of pounds of gold bullion and diamonds from a warehouse near London’s Heathrow Airport. The acting is great, it’s fast-paced, and the dogged Met police detective and his two young detectives are like dogs with a bone. Here’s the trailer.
On Netflix, you can watch The Breakthrough. A new Swedish series, it reveals a haunting 2004 double murder case in the small city of Linkoping in southern Sweden. An 8 year old boy, Mohammed Ammouri, was knifed to death on his way to school by a masked man. The same man turned on a 55-year-old social worker, Anna-Lena Svensson who was a witness to the attack on the boy, called out for help — and whom the assailant also stabbed to death seconds later. This is one of the first films that examine forensic geneaology – tracing a suspect’s DNA through samples of a relatives of a suspect’s family tree. Culprits can be traced, or narrowed down, thru DNA samples others have sent – such as samples that go to 23 and Me. Maybe people can think about whether they want their DNA in bank that the police and others can possibly access. This is a good series, even if the acting seems a bit wooden, the script’s good. The trailer is here. It’s on Netflix.
The Inside Man is a British-American series which I liked. It’s got humour, pathos, decent characters and a clever script. A small town English vicar is presented with a flash drive full of kiddy porn by one of his down-and-out flock. Frantic, the vicar wants nothing to do with it, but is reluctant to take the matter to the police, for fear of charges levelled at his mentally unstable parishioner. But each time the vicar tries to get rid of the flash drive, or silence the people who know about it, he digs himself deeper and deeper into trouble. Sometimes scary and sometimes incredibly funny – that’s The Inside Man– here’s the trailer. It’s on Netflix.
Film Find of the Month
Tokyo vice
Tokyo Vice is a fantastic 2022 series on Kanopy. Jake Adelstein is from the mid-west US who decides to become a crime journalist. Incredibly, he takes a degree in Japanese literature at Sophia University in Tokyo and learns (nearly flawless Japanese). He passes the written test to be a reporter in Japan (there’s a test! And hundreds compete); he is hired by a top newspaper—not without their misgivings and dislike of his being an American and a Jew (this part is revealing). He becomes close to the police, and hangs out with some corrupt officials. He also decides to play cat and mouse between the two major Yakuza gangs. The acting by newcomer Ansel Algort as Jake is excellent – the mores and insight of the Japanese is dealt with well. A must see. Adelstein is a real person who wrote a book, Tokyo Vice: an American Rporter on the Police Beat in Japan published in 2010. Series Trailer’s here
What to Read…
Late at night, when I can’t sleep, I open the Halifax Library site to download a mystery or thriller or something easy to read and easier to digest. Last week, I found the autobiography of thriller novelist Frederick Forsyth – the man who wrote the international bestseller Day of the Jackal, a 1971 novel of spies and intrigue. Forsyth’s 2015 book The Outsider is like a boy’s own adventure. Growing up in a middle class home in the south of England Forsyth senior, who had served in WWII and with his wife ran a grocery store after the war. Forsyth, as their only child, was allowed– pretty well –anything he wanted. His father sent him for several summers to live with a German family; a couple of years later he was sent to France to live with a family. Forsyth learned to read and write both languages fluently – an invaluable skill as it turned out. He also learned several other languages. He wanted to fly planes – any and all planes. His parents made it possible. When he left school at age 16 he had no qualifications. He wanted to see the world. Forsyth decided that being a foreign correspondent would mean he could travel anywhere. In the late 60s, the BBC sent him to Nigeria where he covered the Biafran War: the book reveals a lot about the imperial interests of the UK and crushing the breakaway region of Biafra. Forsyth was in many other hotspots, the Middle East, north Africa, among them. In The Outsider, he wrote that the only reason he penned his first book, The Day of the Jackal, was because at the age of thirty, he was living poor in London, without a job and in need of money. He sat down for twelve weeks and wrote the book, then flogged it to a publisher who took it on. Of course it became an international bestseller as were many of his 20 other published novels.
Jack of Spades, by Joyce Carol Oates (2016) is a clever thriller. A well-known US east coast writer, Andrew J. Rush, has published 28 mystery novels that have sold millions of copies in nearly all over the world. He’s very well off, lives in a town in New Jersey with an adoring wife; they have three grown children. But Rush is hiding a secret. Under the pseudonym “Jack of Spades,” he writes other novels, dark, violent and worse. One day both of his literary lives crash together in a series surprising- even deadly — events. I’m a fan of Joyce Carol Oates – and liked this book.
 |
Highlight of the Month
What You Have Heard is True: A memoir of witness and resistance by Carolyn Forché (Audible)
Interestingly my son Max and I just happened to read this book, actually listen to it on Audible, at the same time. Forché is an American poet and her love of language and excitement for social change or foreboding of fascist politics comes through clearly in this amazing and wonderful book. In the late 70s, Forché was invited to witness the fall of El Salvador to a murderous right wing military. The first page will grab you: Forché opens her front door in California one spring morning to an attractive 40-year old Latino man with his two little daughters. Because Forché had a trusting nature, she asked them in. Leonel Gomez Vides had driven all the way from El Salvador to ask her to help progressive forces in his country, and to be a witness to the incipient takeover by a right-wing junta. The rest of the memoir is brilliant – exposing the role of the US presidents of the day (including Jimmy Carter), the CIA, the Junta and the Catholic church in the rein of terror that gripped the country for more than a decade. More than 75,000 were killed and 8,000 were “disappeared.” I can’t recommend this book highly enough– in paperback or on Audible.
Don’t bother reading John Grisham’s Sparring Partners. In the US, two lazy, nasty brothers from the South hate each other, yet manage to dislike their 70-year-old father even more. All three were law partners in the family firm. When the father went to prison for a decade (for murdering his wife!), the sons scheme to take over the firm, and steal money the father had secretly amassed in off-shore accounts. The sons’ conniving and legal tricks seem routine. The only woman who stands out is a lawyer in high heels who takes her family skiing in Switzerland. Predictable and guaranteed a soporific.
I have to thank the Halifax Examiner for drawing my attention to an article “The Invisible Man” in Esquire magazine by writer and essayist Patrick Fealey. The long-read article begins “A.D. 2024: The United States” which sets the stage for understanding Fealey’s homelessness and desperate poverty. Fealey had been a reporter with the Boston Globe and Reuters until he quit journalism in the late 1990s; he’s also written books and essays. He fell on hard times as he suffered a psychological breakdown. His job as a journalist was over. He slept on friends’ couches, in hostels and in cheap hotels and shelters in Rhode Island. He lost half his teeth (though barely age 50), his health went downhill, and he was stopped for parking his car in banned parking areas several times most days. He adopted a dog which saved him from attacks and from taking his own life. At the start of the article, Fealey notes,
“We see right through the unshowered soul living in a car by the beach, or by the Walmart, or by the side of the road. But he’s there, and he used to be somebody. He still is. A firsthand account of homelessness in America.”
From an Upstairs Window, Winter by LL Fitzgerald (1950-51). National Gallery of Canada.
First Walmart to get unionized — in Canada!
Finally, a bit of good news. The Walmart warehouse in Mississauga, Ont. is the first one to be unionized in Canada or the US. More than 800 workers, members of UNIFOR are now fighting for a first collective agreement. Walmart has 400 stores across Canada, and more than 100,000 employees. This article from Labor Notes explains that management actually hung a banner that told workers they could still vote no even if they had signed a union card requesting the election. In truth three Walmarts in Quebec were unionized — in 2014 one shut down to avoid a union and the workers at the other two could not bargain a first agreement.
Featured image at the top: Ice Harvest by Maurice Cullen, c. 1913. National Gallery of Canada.
Thanks for reading Judy Haiven’s Newsletter! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
Subscribed
| ||||
