What to Watch

The Wasp: this 2024 British film will keep you on the edge of your couch.  Carla, a pregnant mother of four works as a cashier in a supermarket. Heather, a well-to-do homemaker, entraps Carla into committing a bizarre murder for hire. Carla reluctantly agrees to kill Heather’s philandering husband, and Carla even outsmarts Heather by driving  up the price for the hit from £50,00 to £75,000. Heather insists she has a better idea about plotting the murder, and how to get away with it.  Chilling and disagreeable.  You can watch it on Netflix. Here’s the teaser

Little Boy Blue, (2017) is another series of a British police procedural.  This one is taken from a true crime. An 11-year-old boy is shot in the neck while playing soccer; he  later dies in hospital.  Was it a gangland murder? Did someone shoot him by accident? This series is routine, but good enough to watch. Here’s the trailer

Blue Murder, don’t confuse this with the one I listed above!  This too is a British police procedural but the key character is a mother of three (soon to be mother of four) who is the DCI of a friendly bunch of detectives in Liverpool.  This is a series where “all’s well that ends well” and you will certainly not have to check under your bed before going to sleep after you watch an episode. The trailer is here.

Amal is a must see.  Amal is a high school teacher in Brussels.  She admits to the class that the poet they are reading is gay.  This starts a storm among students and their parents.  On the one hand the film shows us how a tight knit community can ostracize anyone who will not conform.  On the other hand, the teacher’s struggle to fight exclusion and religious taboos are also at play.   This 2023 film is on Kanopy; it is modelled on the 2020 true story of what happened to a teacher in France, you can read about it here. And the film’s teaser is here.

I’m Leaving Now (2018) is an excellent movie on both Netflix and Kanopy.  Felipe, from Mexico, has lived in New York City for the last 16 years— with no official papers.  He works for cash, collecting recyclables and removing garbage from restaurants and bars.  He has a wife and three sons back home, yet hasn’t seen them in years.  On the phone, his wife tells him the family’s news and asks for money to keep them going.  Given his own low income and precarious situation, Felipe has been sending as much as he can afford every couple of weeks.  But his wife says it’s not enough.  Though two of his sons have grown up, they don’t contribute to the family. The youngest was a child when Felipe left.  He dreams of returning to Mexico, and building a relationship with his son, now about age 20.  This film is a sensitive and thought-provoking look at a father suspended between his home and a familiar place in a foreign land – before Trump. Here’s the trailer.

The Asset (a 2025 Danish series)  on Netflix is also very good.  Tea Lind is a cop who has run into trouble and is desperate to stay in the police force. The lead detective insists she will make a perfect undercover agent operative, since she herself has a “checkered past”.   A violent and highly secretive drug cartel is operating, and the detective asks Tea to befriend the drug king-pin’s wife. Then Tea can pass along important  details.  The series is inventive, deep and the Tea character is finely drawn; the other people are also well-sketched.  The trailer is here.

A House of Dynamite is the latest film from US filmmaker Kathryn Bigelow, whose earlier film The Hurt Locker was a runaway success.  Dynamite puts us in the situation room somewhere in the White House or Pentagon (fat chance of that). A “bad actor” (Russia? China? North Korea?) has targeted Chicago for destruction in mere minutes.  I know the film is supposed to be serious, but the doomsday aspect of it made me laugh actually.  And I guess I’m not a fan of American “war” films that take themselves too seriously.  If you are – watch this one.  Here’s the trailer.

What to Read

Let Them by Mel Robbins is worth reading. When you do the slow burn because you don’t get the recognition for a good idea or for doing a great job and others get praise heaped on them – the author tells you to “Let them” do it their way.  We are responsible for ensuring our positive (or negative) actions and our good intentions and our friendships according this book—but when we are overlooked or things don’t work out in our favour, Robbins says we should say “let them”.  Dr Sophie Mort, a psychologist synthesizes the book this way:

“It means letting people do what they will do, without trying to control them—deciding instead to shift our focus to our own lives, and what we can take charge of, such as our own actions and emotions.

The author explores the antidote to “let them” – it’s “let me” – let me run things, let me do my own work or organizing, let me take initiative.  In a way that’s the best part of the book.

Don’t get too excited about John Grisham’s latest book The Widow.  Published in the last few weeks, I needed to read it – as most of you know, I’m a fan.  Well, file this book under a  list of mediocre Grisham novels. It’s certainly not one of his best; I’d rank it five out of ten.  Simon is a 45-year-old lawyer who does wills, trivial property disputes and minor criminal work in a small Virginia town near the beltway.  At an appointment at his law office, an 85-year-old widow tells Simon she wants a new will drawn up.  Simon sees no problem until she drops the tantalizing detail –that her estate will be worth about $5 million because her late husband had socked away stocks and bonds in blue-chip companies.  Simon gets interested; he doesn’t want to take advantage, but he can see the financial payoff for him to handle her estate after her death—especially since she has no children or close relatives to whom to leave the money.  I won’t say more here.  The plot isn’t bad, but the characters are about the level of cardboard cutouts, and we never can fully accept our hero Simon’s greed.  If you want to read a good Grisham book, read The Rooster Bar, The Guardians or Rogue Lawyer. I think they are his best.

1979 by Val McDermid is worth reading.  It is about two young journalists in a newsroom in Edinburgh in the late 1970s who discover some serious corruption and scandal.  McDermid is a great writer, a feminist and a socialist and can write a thriller/mystery. 

How did Quebec get cultural nationalism mostly right?

“After all these years, Quebec can still teach Canada a lot about pushing against a tide of hegemony from a proximate cultural majority” – a very nice article in the Globe by Andrew-Gee right here.

Never Stop Talking about Gaza

The Tea, an interview program on Youtube, features Dr Myriam François discussing trauma in Palestine and outside it with activist, writer and counsellor Ashira Darwish.  Darwish notes at the outset of the program,

“What people need to understand is that the trauma of the past two years, not only for the people of Gaza, but for the entire world, is unlike anything we’ve experienced in our lifetimes.”

Excellent, worth it to watch and/or listen.

On the Line: Toronto-based journalist and news hound Samira Mohyeddin has a very good 14-minute briefing about a story that has disappeared from the media like a dropped call– it’s called the Cut and Cry Case.  It was barely two weeks ago that at least a dozen student protesters were arrested in downtown Toronto after they tried to picket Students Supporting Israel (SSI) an off-campus event that featured IDF soldier Jonathan Karten.  Mohyeddin slows down the videos to show us what really happened.  One clue is that it was likely Karten who broke the glass window in the office, as we see him with a blue coat wrapped around his left wrist.  We also see him attacking mainly the female student protesters and dragging them one by one out of the building.  Well worth watching here.  And subscribe to On the Line!

Perfect Victims and the Politics of Appeal by Mohammed El-Kurd is excellent.  And what a good writer he is.  He turns the trials, tribulations and massacre of the Palestinian people into an international murder inquiry.  He never minces words, but he draws our attention to the events and lives of Palestinians prior to October 2023—he is a poet and a journalist of note.   

Read this:

“I have always wanted to be human,” El-Kurd writes to open the second chapter. The severing of the Palestinian outside of humanity to a Western gaze enables the continued destruction of homes across Palestine, the murder of our families, the dispossession of land. It is not the actions of the Palestinian that disqualifies them from humanity… . It is almost simplistic to say that we are guilty by birth. Our existence is purely mechanistic; we are reminded, through policy and procedure, that we are unfortunately born to die.”

Perfect Victims is an excellent book and one we are going to discuss at the Independent Jewish Voices Book Club in the next week.

“The genocide in Gaza is not a state project, it’s a national project.”

Norman Finkelstein

Outspoken political scientist and US academic Norman Finkelstein talks about two polls taken in Israel. One asked, “When the IDF enters a city, should it kill everyone in the city?” 47% of Israelis said yes.  Another poll asked if there are any innocents in Gaza or is everyone a terrorist? 62% of all Israelis said there are no innocents in Gaza.  Finkelstein notes,

“The genocide in Gaza is not a state project it’s a national project. It’s all of Israeli Jewish society that supports it. “

Spend 2.5 minutes and have a listen.

Jonathan Cook’s message: break free of media group-think

Jonathan Cook is an award-winning journalist.  For years he used to write for The Guardian and other important UK news outlets. In 2001, he moved to an Arab-Israeli [Palestinian] community, Nazareth, which is in Israel proper.  He wrote about the Israel-Palestine situation, with an inside take on it and has published several critically-acclaimed books. Recently, he and his family returned to live in England.  This 24 -minute podcast “Breaking free of media group-think is a scary, lonely journey. I know. I was forced to do it” worth hearing if you ever wonder why and how reporters get sucked in to the pro-Israel mindset.  Here it is.  

Ars Gratia Artis

If you have all but given up on the world, there is one funny restaurant reel “How Canadians Pay for Food”  you must watch.  Delightful and it’s here, just over one minute long

Of more importance is the Miss Universe Contest! Ms Mexico won but not before she helped organize a walkout of the other contestants due to the male emcee and producer’s taunts and sexist behaviour! Way to go Fatima Bosch!! read more here.

Mores not Manners! Why men don’t talk

It turns out men fail to ask women questions in the pick-up line as much as on dates! It’s not because they don’t know how to.  Substack blogger Kate Manne writes a nice short column not so much about manners but about blinders.  It seems a lot of men wear blinders when women are nearby.  Sure they look—but they hardly respond to questions or ask any they make up.

“According to a psychologists’ dating paradigm and New York Times lore, there are thirty-six questions you can ask a person to make them fall in love with you: your dream dinner guest, what you feel most grateful for, your greatest accomplishment to date. Recently, it’s emerged that it may be less the content of these questions, or even the particular topics canvassed, that leads to this happy outcome. It might just be that, without specific prompts, straight men on dates typically fail to ask questions of their female companions whatsoever.”

Read all about it in Kate Manne’s substack article here.

Podcasts to listen to

Labor Notes Podcast has a 28 minute episode about the US Starbucks workers at 65 stores on a nationwide strike for a first contract.

The Take on Al Jazeera has a 24-minute podcast “How are Palestinians from Gaza ending up in South Africa?” worth hearing/watching here.

The CBC’s Front Burner had a great interview with journalist Murtza Hussain who writes for Drop Site News has analysed and uncovered links between Epstein, Israeli intelligence, and other major players. Fascinating, it’s here.

Image at the top: The crowning of Miss Mexico Fatima Bosch as Miss Universe, 21 Nov. 2025.