peteg's blog

A Victor McLaglen jag from Gunga Din. He got his Oscar for leading this. A somewhat early John Ford directorial effort. He also got Oscared. Adapted by Dudley Nichols (declined his Oscar) from a story by Liam O'Flaherty. The music also got Oscared.

The story is simple and told linearly in a tiresome, twistless manner. It's 1922 in Dublin. Poverty is rife, the revolution is incomplete, America beckons and all a bloke needs is 20 pounds to get there with the squeeze of his life. McLaglen plays Gypo Nolan as a bull of a man, absent any brains. Somehow forgiveness is not only possible but inevitable, even for Judas but not for the Black-and-Tans.

Andre Sennwald at the New York Times.

Looking for entertainment in all the wrong places. I guess this was a platform for Samuel L. Jackson to show us what he could do as a dramatic lead in a realist mode without Tarantino. He really only succeeds with the high-energy running-at-the-mouth that he's famous for; his scenes with wife Regina Taylor are generally poor. Directed by F. Gary Gray from a proforma script by James DeMonaco and Kevin Fox.

Notionally Jackson is a police negotiator in Chicago. Through some flimsy plot moves and too many scenes that make no sense he holes up in a Federal building with internal affairs investigator J.T. Walsh who does what he can. He insists on fellow negotiator Kevin Spacey helping him untangle his situation. Getting that lined up takes about an hour of runtime. Spacey is flat and declamatory here, putting me in mind of Kevin Rudd at his most fatuous. David Morse works his villainous-Englishman features just so and does not miss an opportunity to take a shot. Ron Rifkin and/or John Spencer play dicey senior cops in stereotypical fashion. Also Paul Giamatti and Dean Norris as hostages. I don't think we ever learn who the informant was; the information dumps are arbitrary. And I didn't get why the scammers didn't just find a proper patsy and point Jackson at that person.

Roger Ebert: three-and-a-half stars. He got right into it until he stopped to think, so don't ever stop to think. A pile of genre tropes, "a triumph of style over story, and of acting over characters." Janet Maslin, blandly. Stephanie Zacharek: a 2hr 20min thrill-free, humourless slog. "Gray appears to know nothing about directing actors or clarifying characters' motives." Slightly too clever to be entertainingly dumb. Die Hard. IMDB trivia: J.T. Walsh died before this was released.

Still #87 in the IMDB top-250, at least until the next round of the MCU.

Roger Ebert: four stars, some time after the full version was released on video. Vincent Canby savaged the 2hr 15min version released to American theatres but it's unclear he would have been any happier with the 3hr 47min Cannes edition.

Kindle. Prompted by Dwight Garner's review of the latter. Short shorts. Some fun, some twee. Very few memorable. I didn't have enough of a sense of Azrael to develop one from the last book; it's more about the increasing irrelevance of the Devil in any case. There's some God in the first, mostly imagined as if he incarnated as an American man. That doesn't take much imagining.

Justin Taylor on the first. Goodreads (first, second) didn't get that much into either.

I felt that this was the first of director Justin Kurzel's features I've seen but it's not; his Macbeth was solid, Assassin's Creed not so much. There was also a segment of The Turning. It's the first of his signature psychologicals for me though. The script is by Zach Baylin based loosely on a book by Kevin Flynn and Gary Gerhardt about the white supremacist group The Order which was active in 1983 and 1984 on the northwest coast of the USA.

The frame echoes Oliver Stone's version of Eric Bogosian's Talk Radio: as there Jewish talk back host Alan Berg (Marc Maron) cops blowback for his combative universalist views. From there we meet charismatic, dead-eyed leader Bob Mathews (Nicholas Hoult in his most effective non-MCU role yet) and his eventual opponents but not quite nemeses FBI agents Terry Husk (nominatively-determined Jude Law, bloated) and Joanne Carney (Jurnee Smollett). There are some bombings and robberies, the odd minor bout of ideology but nothing as challenging as some of its predecessors (e.g. The Believer, Ted K). The organisation has no interesting structure, no cells, no isolation. The movie is structurally similar to Wind River: a steady drip of arbitrarily withheld information.

Despite it being intrinsically worthless I'd say this movie is well-made except that some of the cinematography is very murky and that I got lost at times; for instance I had no idea why Tony Torres (Matias Lucas) got picked up by the cops. The climactic shootout is a mess — it's poorly shot but could’ve been awesome in its disorganisation. I did enjoy watching Law lose his shit over the incompetency of the local cops. Deputy Tye Sheridan has perhaps his best scene ever where he loses his at the FBI.

Ben Kenigsberg at the New York Times. He points to January 6. Glenn Kenny at Venice: a relief after Babygirl. John Sutherland summarised the actualities in 1997 during the trial of Timothy McVeigh.

A Jeremy Renner jag from The Hurt Locker. Written and directed by Taylor Sheridan who has form for these neo-Westerns (Sicario, Sicario 2, etc.).

It's eventually established that the Indian Reservation that Renner works on (as a hunter of wild predators) is in frosty Wyoming. We get this info after Elizabeth Olsen (not her best work) arrives from Las Vegas, representing the FBI in a pale and witless echo of Twin Peaks. The absolutely stock action sequences are cut up with excessive and predictable exposition dumps that come too late. You can see the Mexican standoff of a climax from the minute the leads discuss security blokes at a mine site; the whole thing is as unsubtle as Waco. The jittery cinematography is really trying. So many scenes just don't work. The deracination of indigenous Americans is observed, passively.

This solid endorsement of vigilantism is probably aimed at filling the hole vacated by Eastwood when he retired Dirty Harry so long ago.

A Critic's Pick by Glenn Kenny at the New York Times. The opening scene is mystifying, suggesting we in for a mystical, poetic experience. That standoff scene is nowhere close to Michael Mann's efforts.

I got it into my head that Steve Buscemi directed this but in fact he directs the movie within the movie. Tom DiCillo actually wrote and directed; apparently he worked with Jarmusch in his early days. A very NYC film shoot, a bit Season on the Line, a bit The Producers (with less overt begging), even a bit Opening Night. Buscemi's task of recording a few scenes for a low-budget feature involves every problem, from issues with his demential mother to the insecurities and backbiting of the actors and the technical staff. The structure is fun though the content of each bout/episode gets a bit too stale a bit too fast. Catherine Keener does well. Peter Dinklage is flat until he gets his dummy spit. Dermot Mulroney mostly poses. The stakes are so low except for those making this damn movie.

A Critic's Pick by Janet Maslin (?). Siskel and Ebert: thumbs down from both. Wears out its conceit well before the movie ends.

Kathryn Bigelow's big directorial splash. She got Oscared for best picture and best director. Mark Boal wrote the script and also got Oscared. The other three Oscars were for the sound and editing. Notionally because I discovered Guy Pearce was in it.

Between the setting — Baghdad in 2004 — and the heavy Oscaring I wasn't expecting more than an exercise in flag waving. The jittery handheld camerawork of the first half hour or so was also a real turnoff, but as things settled down I did get mildly interested (but not invested) in Jeremy Renner's Oscar-nom'd bomb disposal expert. Against this was Anthony Mackie's inert performance as his support and Brian Geraghty's over-egged junior, and a general lack of context about what Renner is looking to achieve at any given incident. (In the first scene he removes detonators while in later ones he's looking for controllers.) There's a scene where these three Americans show Ralph Fiennes's British contractors how things are done, which was, just maybe, historically plausible. Being a name actor does not ensure longevity here.

At some point the switch is flicked from character development to plot and the decision making becomes stupid. The japes between gigs are humourless, the whole show leaden, even more so than Black Hawk Down. And overall there's nothing much novel here; the concluding movement goes as it must, right down to plenty being incarnated as a supermarket aisle, just like Oliver Stone/Le Ly Harslip's Heaven and Earth. Just too damn serious. I won't be rushing to see Zero Dark Thirty (2012).

Roger Ebert: four stars. A Critic's Pick by A.O. Scott: Bigelow kept it tight, evading the wider (political, box-office bombing) issues of that war. Stephanie Zacharek: "feels unformed and somewhat unfinished." Paul Mazursky had the same supermarket scene in Moscow on the Hudson (1984). Loads of street cats, goats and a few donkeys.

Tim Robbins directed a script he adapted from Helen Prejean's book. He got an Oscar nom but no gong, riding his The Shawshank Redemption (1994) wave. Lead and his partner-at-the time Susan Sarandon plays a nun and got Oscared. She does work hard here. Second bean Sean Penn got a nom but no gong; does he do his best work in the penn? Fellow jailbird Clancy Brown puts in a effective cameo as a state trooper. Robert Prosky (Thief (1983), Broadcast News (1987)) does what he can as a talky lawyer. R. Lee Ermey! Jack Black! IMDB trivia suggests that the entire Robbins clan was in there somewhere.

Penn is on death row somewhere not too far from Slidell in Louisiana for the rape and murder of a young couple. For reasons I didn't perceive he writes to nun Sarandon and she responds in a witness/soul-saving sort of way. There are some auxiliary legal efforts to get his execution commuted that are shown to be ineffectual. She spends some time with the parents of the victims. It loses momentum in the final act as the redemption-in-Christ parts are interspersed with flashbacks of the crime.

Robbins is well-known to have liberal views and this made me feel that he was often trying to have it both ways; others may read this as even-handedness but his gestures at the Bible (essentially the New Testament against the Old) and the politics of capital punishment are shallow, manipulative cop outs. The music gets rough at times: Eddie Vedder over the opening credits, indecipherably, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and possibly Peter Gabriel in the middle, and an Oscar nom for Bruce Springsteen for the song over the closing credits.

For all that it is far better than Eastwood's later True Crime (1999).

Roger Ebert: four stars. Despite his denials option 3 (religious conversion) is roughly what we get. A Critic's Pick by Janet Maslin. Both were hugely impressed with Penn's performance.

A neo-noir starring William Hurt opposite Kathleen Turner on debut. She's wooden at times, perhaps intentionally, but the staginess makes for some creaky and unpersuasive moments when she's reeling him in and it's obvious any sane man would be calculating the odds. Written and directed by Lawrence Kasdan.

The setup is simple: he's a mediocre lawyer somewhere in hot-and-sticky Florida, not too far from Miami, and she's in the market for a man more satisfying than her dodgy husband. (We never get shown how dangerous or dodgy he and his associates are, or are we supposed to infer that she's the associate?) After she puts up a proforma fight his ego gets the better of him and we're off to something adjacent to The Talented Mr Ripley. Mickey Rourke does OK as an arsonist with a sound life philosophy (mostly just don't do it). All there is to know is that you should never let your co-conspirator out of your sight.

Roger Ebert: four stars as a "great movie". Double Indemnity... but original. A Critic's Pick by Janet Maslin? — her review is scathing, especially of Turner's performance. "Skillfully, though slavishly, derived" from "1940's film noir classics". The Postman Always Rings Twice. Vincent Canby was far more impressed a few months later. Witness for the Prosecution.

Kindle. Prompted by Dennis Lehane's salesmanship in the New York Times. Less "a heartbreaker" than a defanged transplant of some aspects of Trainspotting to Mayo County in the west of Ireland. Much of the text gets lost in character studies and while it floats along in the mode of fun there's not much humour in it. (Much like Preston's The Borrowed Hills (2024) one of the central characters is a powerful but inert man.) I guess the schtick is to pick at the underbelly of outwardly wholesome country towns (here Ballina) but Barrett lacks the commitment of people like Irvine Welsh and David Lynch (Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks) to go all the way or at least somewhere new or interesting. Everything suggests that you head for the exits.

Goodreads: the Booker long-listing oversold it.

Vale David Lynch. New York Times obit.

Directed by Vincent Sherman. A warning about glamorous post war consumption: go out and live, boys of San Francisco, but be wary of trading up to that nightclub singer! Ann Sheridan plays it amazingly straight to Kent Smith's incredibly square middle-aged doctor; who knew these hot-stuff types were looking for slow times with dull men! The first hour is entirely boring setup and the remainder hinges on nonsense and NYC. I thought I was getting a noir but the twist just didn't come. Something in the vein of Sirk's Written on the Wind (1956).

Bosley Crowther: dire.

Produced, co-written and directed by Michael Winterbottom. He takes us to mandate Palestine (circa 1938 to 1944) for a history lesson about one of Britain's more obviously less successful colonial projects. It seems that as the nation declines her filmmakers spend more effort burnishing those days of greatness, c.f. Steve McQueen's latest, even if they can't suppress their ruefulness.

The focus is on two colonial policemen. Thomas Wilkin (Douglas Booth) tries to support the non (or at least less) violent Jewish groups who are agitating for a state in collaboration with the (sympathetic) British forces. He does this by enforcing the arms ban only on Arabs and the Jewish groups engaged in direct action, and romancing journalist/kibbutznik Shoshana Borochov (Irina Starshenbaum). Geoffrey Morton (Harry Melling, looking like he'll be playing George Orwell some day soon) has more inflexibly universalist ideas which of course lead to monumental cockups, culminating in what might now be called the extrajudicial killing of all-methods-on-the-table Avraham Stern (Aury Alby).

As usual with Winterbottom this is fabulously shot (here by Giles Nuttgens). At some point I realised I was enjoying baby-faced Booth's performance mostly because he sounds like Richard Burton. There's the faintest of echoes of Graham Greene's A Quiet American — love and clandestine operations during wartime but without the contest for the woman — and more of Zwartboek but less sexy. The longer any scene goes on the more certain that something will explode; this terrorism stuff is not very functional film making. It could've been called many funerals and no wedding.

Peter Bradshaw: what David Lean would've done with the romance.

Prompted by Jason Di Rosso's interview with writer/director David Vincent Smith a while back. Both are Perth locals. I guess this might be Greta Scacchi doing her bit to revive the Australian film industry.

There's not a lot (not enough) to it. Mother Scacchi's actual daughter Leila George leads as a strong sister who is sick of having her life ruined by brother Sam Corlett's illicit drug use. The show starts in suburban Perth with the killing of a car and moves to the main set on what I took to be her grandparent's bush block (in Gosnells according to IMDB) where she imprisons him and us. (The location somewhat resonates with Tim Winton's stories. The house is full of cheesy childhood tchotchkes.) Later on we learn that his desire for druggy oblivion is due to mental unwellness. Her lifelong bestie Alexandra Nell is never shown to be much of a friend. Things go entirely predictably at excessive length; at its heart is the fusing of the getting-off-the-junk Trainspotting scene with the coercive control/intervention of Alexandra's Project into a sweary episode of an Australian soap opera. Surely getting off the meth has never been so humourless.

The internet suggests this might be autofiction.

Steve McQueen's latest feature, his first since Widows (2018), leaving aside the doco Occupied City (2023). A day and a night in London, 1940, where the children are evacuated to the countryside and the bombs fall. We mostly follow the adventures of the young boy Elliott Heffernan, son of Saoirse Ronan and present-day absent CJ Beckford. He'll be a ladykiller soon enough. Grandfather Paul Weller drenches him in music while we get drowned by Hans Zimmer's heavy score.

The best parts are 1940s versions of Small Axe, the scenes of extreme self-abandonment in a high-energy jazz club in particular. There's a dash of Naked in how the city is traversed, and more obviously a direct lift from Dickens on the topic of child exploitation. I enjoyed Benjamin Clémentine's robust warden the most; he's even more striking here than he was as Herald of the Change in Dune (2021). The cinematography and editing are as good as you'd expect, and the jumping around in time is handled well enough.

On the less satisfying front McQueen spends less effort exploring the schisms in class exposed by the Blitz, just showing the working class against the constabulary and gatekeepers of the BBC, than he does on his preferred topic of racial tensions. On his account there were significant numbers of people from the West Indies in London in 1940, and that made me wish he'd spent more time with that community than the generic love-in-wartime woefulness involving Harris Dickinson he does show us. I was astonished that Weller's valve radio came up instantly; mine takes a good thirty seconds for any sound to emerge. Disappointing was Stephen Graham's unmodulated performance; we know he can do that but we're even more certain that he can do better. This was not Ronan's finest outing. The CGI was off-putting.

Afterwards I remembered Francis Spufford's Light Perpetual.

Dana Stevens: a dud. Luke Goodsell.

Prompted by Jeannette Catsoulis's Critic's Pick. She's one of the few decent reviewers left at the New York Times.

People of a certain age learnt the essentials of Homer's Odyssey from the fabulous-in-memory French/Japanese space-age Ulysses 31 cartoon. Against this the opening scenes made me fear I was in for another witless, overly literal adaptation: those slow shots of the island, the boat wreckage, a heavily damaged naked man washed up on a beach, a trying realism. But after a while things settle down and the survivor's-guilt inertness of Ralph Fiennes's Odysseus is shown to be cunning circumspection and not world-weariness. Juliette Binoche lights up every scene, especially in a central one where she looses two decades of rage against the beggarly Fiennes. (She rides the ambiguity of her knowing right to the end.) Against that is the miscasting of Charlie Plummer as Telemachus which is almost fatal at times. Marwan Kenzari and Claudio Santamaria are able in support. Co-produced, co-adapted and directed by Uberto Pasolini.

The dire rating at IMDB reflects the unevenness of the production, and perhaps an expectation that this does or should treat more of the story than it does. See, for instance, Radheyan Simonpillai.

Kindle. Peasant/tenant sheep farming in the fells of Cumbria, better known as the Lake District. It starts circa 2001 during the foot-and-mouth outbreak that lead to huge animal culls and ends in the present day. Nearby village Bewrith in the Curdale Valley does not exist, but why not? Other mentioned locations like Kendal and Carlisle, the geographical limits of Cumberland Wrestling, do.

The sheep massacre leads to a depeopling and the hardy folk who remain are in need of new flocks. Our narrator abandons a promising career of lorry driving and abides on his frenemy-neighbour's property after being drafted into the slaughter when the paid help flees. They go a-rustling somewhere a bit south, liberating a large mob of purebreds from a tourist farm. The successive heists are wanton and the story degenerates into relations amongst violent men; we're shown that our boy is educated and isn't a victim but has never been one to make things happen. There's a bit of wish fulfilment in the form of a girl from school, now married to the neighbour but so obviously better than all that. The breaking point, when it comes, is both expected and completely arbitrary.

I enjoyed the writing, leaving aside an excess of 'owt' and 'nowt'. It reminded me a bit of Tim Winton: forceful and direct, capturing the place, people and patois, the occasional excess of metaphor and motif. It made me realise that Winton's done littoral zones, the outback and cities but not farming. Initially I thought I might be in for something as crystalline as Atticus Lish's first but things fall away with the seasons. Preston's handling of his characters is as brutal as anything Irvine Welsh has done. Leaving that aside there are parallels with Greenvoe: a similar sense of isolation, a place lost in and out of time, tourism a future that's killed the old human geography. I'm guessing the descriptions of animal treatment turn a lot of people off.

Colin Barrett for the New York Times. Christopher de Bellaigue: rewilding, cottages now holiday rental properties with all the modcons. A farmer not taking a government handout is unrealistic. Ah yes, there's a drove, just like there has to be. Goodreads seems to be warming to it. Clare Clark dug it for the Guardian.

More Wesley Snipes completism. He does what he can in the Tony Montana role of Mario Van Peebles's gangsta reheat of Scarface. Opposing him are NYC undercover coppers Ice-T and Judd Nelson with semi-reformed crackhead Chris Rock stuck in the middle. It's all set pieces and pitched battles in the ghetto. Nobody covers themselves in glory. The U.S. legal system is shown to be ineffective in dealing with drug kingpins; it takes a neighbourhood religious vigilante to dispense justice. Written by Thomas Lee Wright and Barry Michael Cooper.

Roger Ebert: three-and-a-half stars. More original than it looks! I wasn't overly convinced by Ice-T's acting but that may've been due to the dubious dialogue and editing. Janet Maslin. Ah yes, the plot is about the cops trying to entrap Snipes and co via their computerised financial records. And there's a mafia subplot. How could I forget. IMDB trivia: Van Peebles was enabled by Clint Eastwood. Based on real life in Detroit. Boyz n the Hood. King of New York. Goodfellas.

Sting runs a jazz nightclub in cold and rainy neo-noir Newcastle upon Tyne, England. Apparently he's from up that way. He hires down-and-out-but-still-living-OK Sean Bean (making this a jag from Ronin) notionally to clean the place but really as a motor for the plot. Bean in turn meets-cute waitress and escort (?) Melanie Griffith. She's somehow attached to generic shady American businessman Tommy Lee Jones who is in town for America week. He proves incapable of making Sting an offer he cannot refuse but they come to terms anyway. Some comic and musical relief is provided by a Polish jazz band. There's an undertow of Irish-style violence; of course the Poles cop it in the neck when the US and UK go at it.

Mike Figgis wrote and directed. Apparently this was his first feature. The first half is a bit dreamy, a bit daft and somewhat fun. The second half gets serious and violent, retaining the style but souring the mood. Some wanton sexy filler destroys momentum as things move toward the inevitable. Everyone does OK and the cinematography is sound. I liked the editing. The music is often more interesting than the images. There's some vintage make-Britain-great-again rhetoric in the middle from the blonded mayor.

Roger Ebert: three-and-a-half stars. A Critic's Pick by Janet Maslin. It's OK but their praise is over the top.