Directed by Robert Wise (The Set-Up (1949), etc.) from a script Robert Anderson derived from Richard McKenna's novel (1963). In two sittings due to length. It proved to be more engrossing than I expected.
Engineer/"Jonah" Steve McQueen caught teacher-from-Vermont Candice Bergen's eye when he disembarked in Shanghai en route to his new posting on a gunboat on the Yangtze in the 1920s. Onboard he learnt that the actual labour is performed by Chinese coolies. After initially rejecting this arrangement as a violation of the natural order he realised that the proper training of the most promising of the locals aligned perfectly well with his rebellious nature. In the meantime Richard Attenborough tried to save Marayat Andriane/Emmanuelle Arsan from the local whorehouse favoured by the U.S. Navy sailors. Their romance was not entirely convincing perhaps due to her lack of acting chops or his wavering semi-British accent in concert with her lack of self determination. Violence increased as the boat went up and down the river during the initial rumblings of the Chinese Civil War. The captain (Richard Crenna) ended up a bit loopy. There was no salvation at "China Light", the missionary terminus.
McQueen got an Oscar nom for his efforts here but really he's about the same as always, that is, not great. Overall it functions fine as an epic in the wake of Doctor Zhivago (1965) and the spirit of Heart of Darkness (1899). The cinematography is up to it. The title is derived from the name of the boat, the USS San Pablo.
Bosley Crowther: a Việt Nam allegory, and therefore clearly clearing the way for Apocalypse Now (1979). "[W]e end up [...] with a beautifully mounted film, shot by Mr. Wise in lovely colour, mostly in the area of Taiwan; a curiously turgid and uneven attempt to generate a war romance, and a finally forceful and depressing blast at getting into trouble over our heads." Wikipedia. A website that collected everything about this movie.
A Red Buttons jag from The Poseidon Adventure (1972) and some Marlon Brando completism. Directed by Joshua Logan from a script Paul Osborn (East of Eden (1955)) derived from James A. Michener's novel.
Brando finds himself playing a pilot for the Air Force during the Korean conflagration. He is reassigned to Japan so he can marry his assigned American beauty of the correct military class (Patricia Owens). There he abandons his fate and romances the unobtainable-by-mortals Miiko Taka, trailing in the wake of Buttons who has already landed domestic goddess Miyoshi Umeki. These pairings were tasked by the producers with humanising the vanquished foe to the masses of film goers back home. Throughout this heavy-duty pap Brando mumbles in a Southern accent with a certitude that belies all doubts.
The script regularly reminds us of the American views on miscegenation of the day and also has the Japanese ladies tell us what their culture apparently said, but the only Japanese male with a speaking role (played by Ricardo Montalban!) does not get to say his piece. The plotline that has Owens taking revenge on Brando and her family by getting involved with him is left to dangle.
Some of the scenery functions as a time capsule for those parts of Japan (Kobe, Kyoto, Tokyo) but too much time is spent inside. The canal put me in mind of the early street scenes in Once Upon a Time in America (1984).
A bit of Steve Buscemi completism that was on the pile for a while. Directed by Tim Burton from a script John August derived from a novel by Daniel Wallace.
The life story of a fabulist, played in earlier life by Ewan McGregor and later by Albert Finney, as prompted by his son Billy Crudup and daughter-in-law Marion Cotillard. Wife Jessica Lange's performance is somewhat amazing as, like Cotillard, she has no character to work with; Alison Lohman as her younger self is less successful. The narrative is the purest, most whimsical American hokum, along the lines of Forrest Gump (1994) and The Princess Bride (1987). It is a relief when Helena Bonham Carter appears, several times, to steady the ship. Many scenes depict an expensive and materialistic notion of romance that makes it look like too much hard work. The flashback structure attempts to deny incipient mortality.
There's not much Buscemi but he does light up a scene in a bank and another at a funeral.
Roger Ebert: two-and-a-half stars, flat and listless. Stephanie Zacharek: holiday treacle, drearily affirming, dull, preachy, just tell us a story already. McGregor brought weightless cartoonish appeal.
Kindle. I'm well past the point of diminishing returns in this series. This one is mostly heist setup in Florida then heist execution in Cuba, signalling Marlowe's shift into the spy genre. As before (as always?) our leading man does not get to keep the loot. None of the colour is in any way striking or memorable. Again well-written but very pedestrian.
Written and directed by Bassam Tariq (Mogul Mowgli (2020), Bait (2026)). IMDB trivia says this arose from the ashes of an aborted Blade reboot, which explains why lead Mahershala Ali knowingly brings a knife to a gunfight. The poster/cover has Ali with a knife and a baby and none of John Woo's humour.
Somehow Ali makes his bread as a righteous Muslim suburban assassin or perhaps lives off his retirement from military activities in the Middle East. Things get complex when his wife passes and he has three kids to take care of, one of whom requires a breast milk McGuffin hunt. Every element of the situation is so brittle that you wonder how he made it this far; he got ahead of absolutely nothing. The sacred is juxtaposed with the profane, ritual set against the quotidian exigencies, belief held without depth, scripture tritely interpreted, extraordinary moral clarity arises ex nihilo. An early, mildly amusing scene of furry curiosity by Ali's daughter Adia promised more than the rest could deliver. John Cho plays an outre preacher/televangelist in Elvis mode. The Christians use guns and mostly survived; nobody is preaching nonviolence here. I think there were two resurrections.
The cinematography is uninspired. The soundtrack is aspirational; somewhat World-y but far off the pace of, for instance, Peter Gabriel's efforts. The entirety is very derivative. It made very little sense to me.
The reviews out there are unreasonably fawning.
Kindle. The sequel of The Name of the Game is Death (1961). It reeks of being a money job. Much of it rehearsed what happened at the end of the first one. Much of the other stuff recounts our protagonist's stay in the prison wing of a hospital and the plastic surgery required for the series to continue. The first had the wit to be set post-heist but the meat of this is about the overly-familiar setup for a bank job in and around Washington DC and Philadelphia. It traded a lot of kook, specifically the incipient rise of the American pornography industry and closely-related moral panics, and tries to sideswipe the lives of the suburban middle class ala Updike and so on. What is there is well executed but none of it had the jagged edges of its predecessor.
Unfortunately it doesn't function as a time capsule for the area, unlike, for instance, Raymond Chandler's efforts.
Kindle. And yet more mid-century hard-boiled noir pulp. This one is quite good in many ways: Marlowe nailed the character of his first-person narrator with a decent backstory, plausible psychology, cold-blooded calculation and competency, and as such he functions somewhat as a prototype for James Caan's character in Thief (1981). I found him hard to hate due to his soft spot for animals. The other characters are not drawn as well, often merely archetypes or worse. The two women, one a cool and incoherent blonde who seems to cop it from everyone, the other a very forgiving keeper fond of the horses, fare poorly but have more shape than the deputy sheriff. Most of the action takes place in Hudson, Florida (on the west coast/Gulf of Mexico side of the Florida Peninsula, now the northern reaches of Tampa suburbia) which could've used a few more locals. The structure mostly works but is sometimes stitched together with explicit binaries that were not exhaustive or convincing. Marlowe is coy about the sexy bits but it works in that a-gentleman-never-tells mode of telling. I wonder why they didn't make this into a movie.
The edition I have had an introduction by Charles Kelly which was unusually valuable and worth reading ahead of the main course. Kelly wrote a biography of Marlowe; here's a grab at the L.A. Review of Books (2012).
For Florence Pugh, and hence inevitable. Her serious roles seem to be thinning out these days. Adapted by Zoe Kazan from John Steinbeck's novel (1952) which I have still not read. She's the granddaughter of Elia Kazan whose adaptation (1955, starring James Dean) I've apparently seen twice to no discernible effect. Also an improbable jag from $9.99 (2008) via Leeanna Walsman who voiced a supermodel there and plays the mother of Flo's character here.
The poster implies Flo's Cathy is central to the whole thing but the actual focus is Adam, played as an adult by Christopher Abbott (A Most Violent Year (2014), Poor Things (2023)). He's mostly inert, often a lettuce, which may have been intentional but was not very satisfying, especially when set against Flo's excellent work. Mike Faist (The Bikeriders (2023)) as his more-lively brother Charles fares better. Tracy Letts plays the boys' father in the first episode. General housebody Hoon Lee (very fine) more-or-less anchors the latter half of proceedings with some help from Ciarán Hinds (also good) as a neighbour. There was a suggestion that they'd get more philosophical than they did.
I enjoyed it for the most part. The story started brutally and promised to be less predictable than it ultimately turned out to be. Flo's arc was initially surprising (with some echoes of Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita (1955)) then became a railroad heading for an implausibly sentimental expiry. Some plot points were insufficiently motivated — why not ask your wife what she wants? why move from your ranch in the Salinas Valley to a nearby (but not the closest) town? — and I wonder if those were defects of the script or the novel. The general absence of sex from the lives of Lee's and Abbott's characters meant Flo had to shoulder more than her fair share of that burden. Garth Davis directed the first four quite ably; perhaps he just needs a decent screenplay to work from. Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre directed the last three, also fine. But every so often there were scenes that could have been elided (if we've already been shown how it ended we don't really need to be shown how it went) which may've freed up a bit more time for explication. I would have liked to spend more time with Lee in San Francisco's Chinatown.
Lucy Mangan at the Guardian. Soapy family drama over three generations. Caroline Darya Framke at the New York Times found new depths in the characterisation of Cathy. Rebecca Onion: omits most of the semi-autobiographical material on the Hamilton family, woke, doesn't work. (To me the ghost linked this Cathy to Emily Brontë's; she's haunted by the one man who's simpatico with her deviancies. And of course the whole thing harks back to Flo's bombshell feature debut Lady Macbeth (2016).) Jason Di Rosso and Wenlei Ma at the ABC. And so on and on.
The latest from Aardman Animations and as such inevitable. As referential as the previous instalments (Shaun the Sheep (2015), Farmaggedon (2019)) but this one is insufficiently inventive on its own account and is far from their best work. The Halloween theme and tropes seem explicitly targeted at a US audience with insufficient English quirk. Shaun plays a mad scientist (ala Wallace or Gene Wilder in Young Frankenstein (1974)) but the other sheep prove just as capable when they get their chance (ala Gromit). The plot has a lot of dead time as the inevitable confusions get resolved in the correct order.
Peter Bradshaw: four stars.
Kindle. The opening sentence of Dave Kim's review at the New York Times gave me expectations that were not met. Here post-apocalyptic England still seems to function despite the destruction of the City and other bits of wish fulfilment. Strangely there is no problem refuelling a car or buying food even though most of the shops and houses are empty; that so many still have intact locks and treasure to plunder conflicts with the proposition that a fair bit of time has passed since whatever happened happened. Or perhaps the whole thing was a dementia dream of an aged spinster-aunt. The characterisation is generally weak and the focus is on scenic description and colour. I got some of the allusions but missed more as I lacked the requisite patience and concern. Perhaps incoherence was the point but I can get that anywhere these days.
Goodreads, Rachel Louise Atkin: one star, "Felt like I had forgot how to read". This was exactly my experience: I'd often read a paragraph, feel I'd retained nothing, and upon a re-read realise that my mind had judged it to lack any significant meaning. Which again may've been a goal of the author. Later: won the Booker Prize for 2026.
Stop-motion. IMDB trivia suggests it was made to try out "the Israeli-Australian co-production agreement". Set in an apartment complex that is generic enough to be anywhere. The Australian voice cast is great. Heavy themes given twee treatments that avoid any real engagement. There is skill in and a unique aesthetic to the animation, albeit one that I did not enjoy much. I struggled to get through it. Directed by Tatia Rosenthal from her own magpie assembly of some of Etgar Keret's short stories.
Simon Foster saw it at the Sydney Film Festival. The characters are distinctly Aussie. "Rosenthal’s commendable but coarse characterisations are a visually unappealing collection of lost souls, their plights made all the more difficult to embrace due to the blank, shallow stare and lifeless rigidity of the faces at key moments." Margaret (four stars) and David (three-and-a-half stars). He didn't warm to it, she did. Paul Byrnes found an oddball charm that passed me by. Inevitably compared with Mary and Max (2009).
A Jane Adams jag from Kansas City (1996). She has even less to work with here. Written and directed by Paul Schrader.
Willem Dafoe led as a listless, stalled drug dealer who has been clean for a couple of years. He's in what initially looks like a three-way with boss lady Susan Sarandon and smarmy David Clennon which turns out to be less than that. Waylaid by memory and dreams of do-overs, what do you know, long-lost-love-of-his-life Dana Delany (sister of Adams) returns out of the blue. Her character in the ensuing scenes is discontinuous, which just maybe was intended to show that she wasn't functioning too well. (Sarandon's character was similarly all over the map but at an executive level.) This being NYC, there's a serial killer (I think), a sanitation strike and an accurate psychic.
Sam Rockwell is so young here. The heavy duty soundtrack by Michael Been is overwrought. Humourless.
Roger Ebert: four stars. Vincent Canby was far less convinced. IMDB trivia: "The film briefly shown on TV in Ann's home at the beginning is Kenneth Anger's cult movie Scorpio Rising (1963)."
Altman completism prompted by the realisation that he pulled a good cast. He directed and got some help from Frank Barhydt (Short Cuts (1993)) with the script.
It's early-1930s in Kansas City, where Altman was from. Jennifer Jason Leigh donned her hard-moll armour in the lead, much like she did in The Hudsucker Proxy (1994) but less effectively. Her man Dermot Mulroney (mostly inert) fell afoul of Harry Belafonte's gang and an excess of verbiage resulted. For reasons incompletely revealed she then spent most of the runtime with laudanum sniffing/swilling Miranda Richardson, dragging her from one location to another, perhaps because Julianne Moore was too busy to appear here. Steve Buscemi had a very minor role as an organiser for a get-out-the-vote Democrat machine. Jane Adams (Happiness (1998)) played a very proper steward of young women in trouble.
The whole show is sliced up with footage of a jazz concert that looks like it went for days. Ultimately it and the efforts of the cast are squandered in an underbaked neo-noir that needed more oomph than its apparently real-world antecedents could supply. The project is of the same kind as other navel-gazing self-absorbed nostalgia efforts like The Fabelmans (2022).
Roger Ebert: three stars. Stephen Holden: it's not Nashville (1975).
Glenn Kenny's review (at the New York Times) made me hope I was in for some Scottish quirk ala Bill Forsyth (That Sinking Feeling (1979), Gregory's Girl (1980), Comfort and Joy (1984)): perhaps something beautifully spooky like Andrina (1981) with maybe a mermaid or two like Local Hero (1983) and some of that ingenious muddling-forward that leaves everyone happy or at least bemused. And perhaps an era-defining soundtrack. But things aren't so original or gentle these days. In two sittings due to it being pro forma.
The setup has sister and brother Gayle Rankin and Grant O'Rourke as the last residents on remote "Auk Island" who the local council needs to move on for reasons withheld. (Apparently the film was actually shot in the Scottish Highlands and not on an island.) Domhnall Gleeson is dispatched and proves susceptible to their overtly weird charms, just as they are mesmerised by his recycling of recent popular culture. The plot goes entirely predictably and so it all comes down to how much you enjoy the colour.
The result put me most in mind of the less successful Kiwi comedies of the last decade (The Breaker Upperers (2018), Jojo Rabbit (2019)) with simplistic and not very sympathetic humour. The kooky "traditions" reminded me of Midsommar (2019). The references include The Arabian Nights, Trainspotting, Lord of the Rings, Hitchcock's The Birds. It is indeed fanfic. Harry Potter is conspicuous in its absence, presumably for legal reasons.
The soundtrack is often very obtrusive. The jittery camerawork was a chore.
Louis Paxton's highest-rated effort at IMDB is the short Neville is Dead (2020) which also stars Grant O'Rourke who co-wrote it. The novelty is that a young boy has an imaginary father who indulges his every wish. But the setup quickly devolves into a Wolverine-ish agonised invincibility that shows the boy to be a sadist. It seems that Paxton does not know how to steer his premises away from the derivative.
Adrian Horton at the Guardian: two stars. Aggressively quaint, "difficult to settle into for anyone with an aversion to twee."
Probably eventually inevitable having read the book (2008). Adapted and directed by Ramin Bahrani (2nd Chance (2022)) for Netflix.
This version struggles to convey the interiority of the main character (Balram, ably played by Adarsh Gourav) as he behaves obsequiously in most scenes; his sly scheming is confined to a very few big moves and emotional explosions. Rajkummar Rao and Priyanka Chopra Jonas as his employers/masters, freshly returned from the USA, are a coarse mix of credulity and hand wringing. Some stuff is omitted, like the details of how elections are rigged. There are many subtle self-references such as Balram not recognising his nephew/cousin. "Locusts" was apparently preferred at time over "cockroaches" as the slur for the lowborn. Having Aaron Wan play Wen Jiabao in a brief scene towards the end was a poor idea.
The acting is good, the cinematography effective, the direction works and there's still enough humour, so I conclude the faults lie in the adaptation: the characters are too shallow. But somehow the script got Bahrani an Oscar nomination. At times it reminded me of Winterbottom's Trishna (2011).
A.O. Scott drew the obvious comparisons with Slumdog Millionaire (2008). Seongyong Cho at Roger Ebert's venue.
Kindle. And yet more mid-century pulp. This one is more hard boiled, more explicitly violent (with a fair bit of man-on-woman violence) but still coy on the sexy bits. The plot is chaotic, often tending to random as the leading man tears up a Texan oil town that has grown more quickly than the law can regulate. None of the characters are deeply drawn or make a lot of sense; at least four are interchangeable Country Club stereotypes of intemperate greed, and all the ladies need men other than the ones they have. Things get a bit screwy at times but too often I felt like Davis was just circling back to the same situations. He implied there was an arrangement of wives that may've worked for everyone (at least the men) but just let that dangle.
Goodreads. Apparently did the rounds of the blogosphere after it was reprinted in 2010.
My first time around with writer/director Ingmar Bergman. #241 in the IMDB top-250, at least until the next round of comic book movies. The IMDB grab for this movie has always sounded so intriguing:
A knight returning to Sweden after the Crusades seeks answers about life, death, and the existence of God as he plays chess against the Grim Reaper during the Black Plague.
but the bulk of the runtime dances around these issues to the extent that I found this misleading. The film assumes a Christian ontology and disposition which seems at odds with a personified Death. Even allowing for that I did not understand why, if you're supreme-being curious and given sufficient reasons to suspect that your time is up, you wouldn't hurry to meet your maker. Moreover demanding sensory evidence of the transcendental reeks of category error. What is served up is a lot pontificating, mostly about women, sex and why the Creator is so elusive. It feels pre-modern in its exploration.
Structurally things start out media res and Bergman takes his time establishing most of the above quote. His knight was a very young Max von Sydow, Death Bengt Ekerot. Gunnar Björnstrand as the knight's squire opines at length. I kept waiting for it to kick into gear but all I got was distraction and evasion, an inarticulate fear of death. There is a fair bit of man looking at the world, woman looking at the man.
Roger Ebert: four stars as a "great movie" in 2000. His writeup is more about Bergman's career though. Bosley Crowther at the time.
Unrewarded curiosity about what Jean-Louis Trintignant did after Z (1969). Also an Angie Dickinson jag from Dressed to Kill (1980). She played the wife of L.A. mafioso Ted de Corsia who had more interest in his son Umberto Orsini. Outside hitman Trintignant executed his task just fine but was surprised when a mostly non-speaking and overly inert Roy Scheider tried to execute his. The former was fortunate that Ann-Margret (Carnal Knowledge (1971)) was at such a loose end that she offered to move to Paris with him.
IMDB trivia claims that the French crew — co-writer/director Jacques Deray, co-writers Jean-Claude Carrière and Ian McLellan Hunter — came to the city for another project that didn't happen, and so opportunistically dashed off a script in 12 days. It's essentially an exploitation piece, in love with yank tanks like Melville was but at least here the streets are made for them. The strong cast cannot make up for the disjointed script; there are several stretches of tedium, especially the car chases.
The daytime cinematography was fine but the street scenes at night were very poor. There was the odd inventive image, like the corpse at the funeral parlour. Talia Shire (Connie Corleone) got the Anjanette Comer role there. It does somewhat function as a time capsule for seedy L.A. at the time, much like Whore (1991) did.
A grab from this was included in Boorman and the Devil (2025) as evidence of how Hollywood took more risks during the new wave. I mostly wanted to see what Christopher Walken did early on in his career. Also for Sean Connery. It proved impossible to care about his romance with Dyan Cannon (Deathtrap (1982)) whose time ran out. Martin Balsam does some solidly fruity work. Directed by Sidney Lumet from a script Frank Pierson (Cool Hand Luke (1967), Dog Day Afternoon (1975)) derived from Lawrence Sanders's novel of the same name.
Connery apparently spent a decade in the can as a favour to the mafia (I think). He quickly gets bored with not having money and invests an excessive amount of time organising a heist: he aims to empty out an entire apartment block. The second half shows how that unwinds. But perhaps the point of it all was to observe all the surveillance (on film and audio tape) from a wide variety of interested parties, albeit to no particular end.
The mafia connection was entirely dispensable. The setting and its denizens reminded me of Rosemary's Baby (1968). In its favour was the casting of Margaret Hamilton (the Wicked Witch in The Wizard of Oz (1939)) alongside Judith Lowry as a sort of Statler and Waldorf pair who provide some very amusing commentary on proceedings. They should have built the movie around those two.
Roger Ebert: three stars. Roger Greenspun at the New York Times. Both enjoyed Alan King's mafioso.
Kindle. More mid-century pulp. Written in the style of The Catcher in the Rye (1951). A bloke from the wrong side of the tracks discovers that basketball is a path to small-time riches and dolls. Watch out for those small-time hoods! Well-executed as far as it goes but it didn't aim to go far: everything was entirely predictable, right down to his time in college where a working lady's time tracks his prospects. Or schedule, in their preferred locution. There's not a lot to recommend it.
