Season of Life (Jeff Janoda, 2022)
"Hancock at Gettysburg" by Thure de Thulstrup, showing Pickett's Charge
Jeff Janoda is a Canadian teacher, historian and writer whose ability to research and vitalise historical events disparate in time and space is admirable. His terrific 2005 novel Saga takes us into the world of old Nordic stories. Sundog (2019) is a gripping yarn set in the last days of World War Two. His third novel, Season of Life pulls the reader into the Battle of Gettysburg in July 1863. The American Civil War was known to The Varnished Culture through that historical textbook, Gone With the Wind and a few episodes of an interminable, sepia-coloured documentary tv series. Now…
Continue Reading →The Brutalist
(Directed by Brady Corbet, 2024) The Brutalist has some fine scenes, some interesting set pieces, but it is all tip and no iceberg. Deadly at 3.4 hours, it makes Last Year at Marienbad look like an action film. We didn’t believe anything in it, which is a pity, as the film attempts to weave fact with fiction. The actors all act like clown statues and the ending is as pointless as the dénoûment to There Will be Blood. Even the architecture, bastardising the ‘F.U.’ style of Charles-Édouard Jeanneret or Marcel Breuer, is excessively repulsive, the “Community Centre” Adrien Brody glumly…
Continue Reading →107 Days
(By Kamala Harris, 2025) Prologue On 15 November, 2022, former President Donald Trump announced his intention to run for the Presidential election in November 2024. In April 2023, indictments on Trump started revving-up, and in the same month, President Biden announced that he would run for re-election. On 5 February 2024, the Robert Hur report was released, effectively concluding that Joe Biden broke the law on classified documents but that there was no point in charging him because he was, effectively, off his rocker. By 12 March 2024, both Biden and Trump had become the presumptive nominees for President by…
Continue Reading →Robert Redford
(18 August 1936 to 16 September 2025) In the wake of a violent death in Utah, another quietly slipped away in the Beehive State; Robert Redford, one of the last of the old school movie stars. He was not a particularly good natural actor but in the right role he could shine, and his directorial work was outstanding. On screen, he projected clean calm integrity – a look that Variety described as “strawberry blond California-born sun god”. He also campaigned for environmental causes and in the 1980s created the Sundance Film Festival that fostered a whole generation of interesting filmmakers….
Continue Reading →Charlie Kirk
14 October, 1993 – 10 September, 2025 Charlie Kirk was called a lot of nasty names during his life as a political activist, and that continued after he was shot and killed at an outdoor event on the campus of Utah Valley University on 10/9/2025. The New York Times reported that “it was easy to find left-wing posters reveling in Mr. Kirk’s death and suggesting he got what he deserved.” He was a Christian conservative, a supporter of Donald Trump’s re-election, and argued against abortion, overreaching gun-controls, open borders and trans-gender irrationality. He did not cancel or mock those with…
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