Tom Jennings
Radical cultural critic analysing different elements within popular culture.
Gone, Baby, Gone: novel by Dennis Lehane (1999); film directed by Ben Affleck (2007)
Essay on contemporary US crime fiction comparing Dennis Lehane’s 1999 novel Gone, Baby, Gone with Ben Affleck’s 2007 film adaptaion.
Public Service Denouncement. Book and film review – Tom Jennings
The 3rd World, by Immortal Technique and DJ Green Lantern (Viper Records 2008)
The new release from Immortal Technique, hip-hop’s most implacable class warrior, thoroughly links local and global struggles. Tom Jennings nods his head enthusiastically
Globalising Ghettocentricity. Music review – Tom Jennings
Couscous, directed by Abdellatif Kechiche (France 2007)
Tom Jennings is captivated by Couscous and its sympathetic but unflinchingly honest portrait of an extended family struggling to make various ends meet.
The Fine-Grain of Community. Film review – Tom Jennings
The Ghost, by Robert Harris (2008)
Tom Jennings chuckles at a recent New Labour rat leaving the sinking ship.
A Groupie’s Revenge.
Happy-Go-Lucky, directed by Mike Leigh (2008)
Belying his miserabilist reputation, Mike Leigh’s new film Happy-Go-Lucky celebrates incorrigible optimism – but with the usual twists, finds Tom Jennings
Prozac Attitude.
Immigration: The Inconvenient Truth (Channel 4) and the White season, BBC 2 (2008)
A rash of TV documentaries explain away tense British resident-immigrant relations with typical middle-class prejudice in reproducing forty years of media and state-managed mystifications of the ravages of capitalism, according to Tom Jennings.
Great White Hopeless
Gone, Baby, Gone, directed by Ben Affleck (2007)
Tom Jennings is relieved that Ben Affleck’s first film as director, the thought-provoking Gone, Baby, Gone, avoids the ham sentimentality of much of his acting
In The Best Interests of the Child
Craven New World. Film review - Tom Jennings
A comparison of UK near-future nightmares, including Taking Liberties, Faceless, Children Of Men, The Last Enemy, Exodus and Polly II: A Plan For Revolution in Docklands.
Craven New World, by Tom Jennings
Lust, Caution, directed by Ang Lee, 2007. Film review – Tom Jennings
Review of Ang Lee’s Chinese wartime espionage drama, the follow-up to Brokeback Mountain.
Sex, War by Tom Jennings
Britz, dir. Peter Kosminsky, Channel 4, 2007. Television review – Tom Jennings
Juggling simplistic stereotypes, Channel 4’s Britz illuminates neither the attitudes of UK Muslims nor the motivations of homegrown jihadists, concludes Tom Jennings.
A Bipolar Exposition by Tom Jennings
