Sunday media roundup, week three

With the onset of Spring I spent a lot of time outside this week, and didn't mindlessly consume as much media as I thought I would, hence this post might be a bit shorter.

Les Misérables: Not the insufferable musical, but sort of a French Top Boy with themes similar to those of Hugo but its own original plot. I saw other reviews calling this pro-cop but I don't get that at all? It's from the viewpoint of a rookie cop joining two cowboys who've set themselves up as power brokers in a rough community, but by the end of the film we see that approach break down completely, because neither the police nor the community leaders they ally with can cut deals with kids who have nothing but their anger and frustration.

The characters are all a little bit simplistic, but the film does a great job of weaving them together to create a complex picture of a city, so in that sense it certainly earns its place as an heir to Victor Hugo (and Zola and Dickens and any number of 19th century writers).

Sadly though the reason we're all here--those amazing landscape drone shots of any modern crime movie--have become part of the plot, and they end up kind of clunky, reflecting the fact that, narratively at least, it's a kid working the camera.

You can watch a trailer for Les Misérables here.

Charlemagne by Johannes Fried: Not much to say about this biography of the 8th century king and emperor because I'm still only halfway through it. Oh, except the author says it's not a biography. There's a lot of that popular history writing where they go, 'well, we don't know what his boyhood consisted of, but here's roughly what's known about childhood in general at that time.' There's also a lot of more specific suppositions, including one early on that I'd known to be false based on something else I'd read, but for the life of me I can't remember what it was. 

Overall the book does a good job of creating a sense of what the atmosphere must've been like at Charlemagne's itinerant court (at about 2,000 people it had a tendency to use up whatever resources were available in any one town, which combined with the wars Charlemagne fought kept the court on the move, in a sort of circuit between the royal palaces). Currently I'm on a section about his church reforms which is pretty boring. I guess before he came along everyone agreed incest was bad, but all the bishops had their own ideas of what degree was the cutoff. With a small (20 million people across the territory) and rustic population, certain marriages became illegal if you moved, so they had to straighten this all out in a big church synod. It's pretty ridiculous but at the same time it was stuff like this that built up the Carolingian renaissance. The simple work of teaching reading and copying out manuscripts lead to huge advances that are still felt today. 

The Goodreads page for Charlemagne is here.

From Unterwegs - The Lady Machine B2B Tasha / March 16 / 9pm-10pm

HÖR Berlin: Part of my efforts to branch out musically. I started listening to these DJ sets almost exactly a year ago. Something about them being broadcast live from that small room in Berlin gave me something to cling onto, proof that the outside world still existed. Admittedly it's mostly background music for me as I work on a few personal writing projects in my room, using the music to block out distractions and focus on what I'm doing.

You can read a feature article on HÖR here and check out their youtube channel here.