peteg's blog

Prompted by Jason Di Rosso's interview with writer/director Charles Williams. As always Guy Pearce does a solid job in the lead, here adding his shoulder to Hugo Weaving's quixotic efforts to renew Australian cinema. He plays a sort of uncharismatic hustling prisoner who knows the score and what it takes to act normal but is incapable of regulating himself. Cosmo Jarvis (Lady Macbeth (2016)) is fresh in from supermax where he discovered (a Christian) God. Again his performance is solid but I wasn't sold on his charisma. I hadn't seen Leah Vandenberg since Erskineville Kings (1999), another sausage fest. She's tasked with getting the inmates to think about their (paroled) futures, something about as futile as Weaving's project.

It's well constructed for the most part but too often events are bent to fit the narrative; for instance it is implausible that fresh-from-juvie Vincent Miller would be put in with Jarvis. Miller's character is central but underdrawn; he's a blank canvas for the others to draw on which becomes problematic when he's tasked with making the big move. Toby Wallace (The Royal Hotel (2023), The Bikeriders (2023)) plays Pearce's son in a brief scene that didn't work. Sean Millis was more memorable in Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024).

As far as prison dramas go this wasn't Ghosts... of the Civil Dead (1988) (it's not apocalyptic) or Chopper (2000) (it's humourless). There are mild redemptive themes maybe. Chiara Costanza's compositions are obtrusive.

Luke Buckmaster. Williams got the Short Film Palme d'Or at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival for All These Creatures (2018). It also has obtrusive compositions by Chiara Costanza.

John Huston completism (he directed), and for Albert Finney (Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960)) who plays a dipso erstwhile British Navy commander-turned-diplomat in Mexico on their Day of the Dead, 1938. Guy Gallo adapted Malcolm Lowry's novel.

The scene somewhat echoes, or perhaps brackets, Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises (1957): the next war is in the pipe while the previous one, still fresh in the mind, is tamed with oceans of booze. Finney's brother Anthony Andrews was reporting on the Spanish Civil War, again echoing Hemingway. For reasons incompletely presented wife Jacqueline Bisset decides to undivorce Finney despite having dallied with the brother. There is a beautiful cat that is blamed for howling all night, and a bullfight.

The plot is barely there. The themes are mostly to do with making permanent what others may try to undo. Finney is quite fine in Richard Burton mode but to no ultimate end. The Night of the Iguana (1964) it is not.

Roger Ebert: four stars. Huston mostly omitted the politics ("the political disintegration of Mexico in the face of the rising tide of Nazism"). IMDB trivia: Burton declined to appear. Janet Maslin made it a Critic's Pick. Vincent Canby.

An idle bit of David Gulpilil completism. Ozploitation! I haven't seen Jaws (1975) but by all accounts (including the IMDB trivia) this is it with a "dreaming" croc subbed in for the shark. Everything is poor: the acting, the cinematography, the beer (XXX Gold), the plot, the editing, the plausibility, the mythos, the continuity. Everything except some of the locations (who ever knew that Simpsons Gap was so close to, and connected with, the Mitchell River?) and Gulpilil's dancing and singing, which director Arch Nicholson (Fortress (1985)) often squandered by placing him just out of frame. Sonia Borg wrote the screenplay based on Grahame Webb's novel Numunwari.

All the details at Ozmovies. Lead John Jarratt reckoned it was not great!

Second time around with this pinnacle of Dogme 95.

Roger Ebert: three stars. "[The Dogme 95] style does work for this film. A similar style is at the heart of John Cassavetes' work." Janet Maslin: "A Family Making Orphanhood Look Good."

Aronofsky's latest. Not especially violent or graphic by his standards. Plugging the gap in the shaggy cat story market vacated by the Coen brothers, or was he trying to countervail Gunn's superdog? Drugs and dive bars, alcoholism and busted baseball dreams; has NYC (1998) ever looked so completely unappetising? — but what a cast! Austin Butler (The Bikeriders (2023)) did not lift his performance to match the Tonic-the-cat's (unlike Oscar Isaac). Zoë Kravitz as a paramedic girlfriend just looking for the right man to exploit her poor judgement after a long shift. Matt Smith with a mohawk! Regina King, police detective! Ethnic gangsters! — Vincent D'Onofrio (who I saw most recently in The Cell (2000)) and Liev Schreiber as Hasids. Stick around to see Laura Dern!

Charlie Huston adapted his own novel with pedestrian results. I think some of it was supposed to be comedic but everything falls on its face.

Manohla Dargis. Peter Sobczynski: a homage to After Hours (1985). Whatever attracted Aronofsky to this project? Peter Bradshaw.

Kindle. One of the few pointers provided by Pisani. Conrad's first published novel. He clearly aimed for tragedy but got very bogged in excess colour. The structure is overly complex for so simple and transparent a tale. I waited in vain for a swerve away from the generic romance and back to the mountains of gold in the interior of Borneo. Most of it was eye-glazingly boring.

Goodreads: Conrad is never an easy read.

Prompted by Hari Kunzru's review at the New York Review of Books (which I read afterwards) and a decent rating at IMDB. Co-written by Stephen Graham who featured in two of the four episodes and had a cameo in a third. He had a lot more to work with here than in Blitz (2024) and is the better for it. The direction by Philip Barantini and cinematography by Matthew Lewis are amazing: it looks like it was shot in seamless real time (right down to some improv in the second episode that seemed to paper over a timing issue) with a restless (sometimes drone-based) camera that avoided the usual drawbacks of handheld work. I wonder what Welles and Hitchcock could've done with this tech. Jack Thorne was the other co-writer.

The topic is the impact of toxic masculinity / the manosphere on young high schoolers. Kunzru spills many words on this. Owen Cooper is very good as an unregulated 13 year-old, the main focus of the plot and episodes one (a police procedural, somewhat like The Bill) and three (a two-hander psychological interview with a very game Erin Doherty). The second episode deals with present-day schooling but leaves us hanging about the goings-on in the life of Jade (Fatima Bojang) and others. Ashley Walters anchors the first two as a detective inspector who gets this new world explained to him by his son (Amari Bacchus); while Cooper and Doherty are excellent I enjoyed his performance the most.

The final episode doesn't work as well as the first three, and lays bare the limitations of a retrospective take. Graham is a bit less modulated as the father though there are some fine observations about his controlling behaviour (excused by an old-school indulgent love) of his wife (Christine Tremarco) and daughter (Amelie Pease) and his difficulty in being proud of his son who fails to express traditional masculinity but is not effeminate. I suspect parents have been bewildered by their children since at least the 1970s; these have little insight into why their boy broke bad except that maybe he spent a bit too much time on the computer in the privacy of his room. It's not at all clear why their son comes around to accepting that he did what he did, which is unfortunate as his psychological arc was likely more interesting than theirs.

Kunzru (and doubtlessly many many others) touches on the obvious issues raised here: the social Darwinism and punching-down that fuels incel culture, the irony of straight men seeking gender affirmation. He doesn't explore where the boy's violence came from (given his weediness) or the general lack of critical thinking (especially amongst those deemed intelligent or good students). It mystifies me why people feel entitled to other people; as Alvin Roth put it so well, many things you may want also have to want you.

Nandini Balial at Roger Ebert's venue: four stars. Cooper has a long career to come.

Co-written and directed by Karim Aïnouz. Prompted by Beatrice Loayza making it a Critic's Pick at the New York Times.

Well it's quite bad. The plot is very cliched: a bad boy (bad due to his lack of parenting, bad signalled by his darker skin) finds himself in the care of a couple who run a love motel. She's randy and sick of her abusive husband while he needs a handyman who can get the AC going again. It's a love triangle made in Brazil! Everything is saturated in unsexy sex, so much so that at times it could have been a comedy. The cinematography tries to be edgy. Loads of symbology for the semioticians to work out.

Ben Kenigsberg saw it at Cannes in 2024. The Postman Always Rings Twice (1981). "It is not a good movie ... But getting your eyeballs scorched for two hours counts for something."

More idle Day-Lewis completism. Written and directed by his wife Rebecca Miller (daughter of Arthur). Quite poor.

The scenario has Day-Lewis play a once-idealistic Scotsman who became an American in the 1960s and is now in declining health. He lives with facially-inert daughter Camilla Belle in a Tolkien-esque hobbit-hole, buried in the side of a hillock in an otherwise-deserted commune on an island off the east coast of the U.S.A. (It must be summer. The geography of the island is not established very well.) Catherine Keener does what she can as his mainlander girlfriend (and that isn't much). For reasons unknown she takes payment from him and herds her two boys (soft Ryan McDonald and creepy Paul Dano) into the abode. Belle doesn't take this too well as she has an unhealthy fixation on her father; it's something like Lolita with all the Vladimir Nabakov removed.

The plot goes as you'd expect: mostly rejection of one sort (other humans) or another (NIMBYism) and some teenage wild life. Day-Lewis is solid but absolutely squandered.

Roger Ebert: three stars. Manohla Dargis at length. It's 1986! Oedipal. Peter Bradshaw: "a curious, overcooked affair, composed in the indie-70s manner of Hal Ashby."

IMDB says this was Riz Ahmed's only feature for 2024. Written by Justin Piasecki. Directed by David Mackenzie (Hell or High Water (2016)).

A high-concept, deep-throat adjacent thriller (vale Robert Redford) that begins with Ahmed somewhat mysteriously monitoring the passing of documents from a worker bee to a corporate suit in a generic NYC restaurant. Soon enough we meet Lily James (Baby Driver (2017)) who is trying to evade responsibility for some seriously under-researched/written/baked agricultural blah blah. A romantic arc inevitably ensues but proves insufficient distraction from the flaws in this take on the mechanics of whistleblowing. It's just not clever enough, and the movie loses its shape well before we get to the pointy end.

Ahmed doesn't talk much; he's far more inert than in Sound of Metal (2019) which is not to say he's bad as it's a coiled-tension sort of inertia. Homage is paid to that movie in the titular TTY relay service and a beaut (but too brief) scene where he shares a laugh with a deaf identity forger, and also to The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2012) in the bio he provides to his Alcoholics Anonymous group. He presents as wooden and earnest, more on the spectrum than addicted, but I guess the former does not entail falling off the wagon.

Sam Worthington does OK as muscle. He looks so much older now.

The whistleblowing aspect reminded me a bit of Rusty Crowe's tobacco movie with Michael Mann, The Insider (1999), perhaps because so much of this is anachronistic analog in a digital world. Similarly it is not an obvious platform for action, and those parts felt as bolted on as in Hugh Jackman's misfire Swordfish (2001).

Manohla Dargis. Lily James was miscast! They should have asked for more from Worthington. Benjamin Lee saw it at TIFF. The Conversation (1974), Blow Out (1981). James was ineffective at charming us. He reckoned things go downhill after the concert on Broadway but that's leaving it a bit late. At Roger Ebert's venue: Peter Sobczynski from Tribeca, briefly, and Matt Zoller Seitz at length (two-and-a-half stars), Three Days of the Condor (1975). The latter observes that everything is too cynical now for whistleblowing to work as it once sorta maybe did, but he misses the trick of this movie: the SEC still has some very sharp teeth. It seems I am susceptible to a good paranoid thriller.

Kindle. Probably eventually inevitable after reading her The Wisdom of Whores (2008) fifteen years ago. Prompted by a recent column by Duncan Graham.

This is a polemical piece of travel writing, light on the anthropology and freed of her focus on public health though some of her professional interests do leak through. She leans into a "Bad Boyfriend" motif of about 25 years standing. The general avoidance of commentary on the more populous areas, tourist Meccas (she acknowledges leaning on the restorative powers of Bali and so forth but does not detail how) and "tourist objects" (beaches, volcanoes, etc.) makes stretches of it seem like hard and thankless slog: days on boats with barely room to sit out of the sun and rain, jaunts into degraded rainforests on motorcycles with people she doesn't know, unskilled hard yakka.

Pisani obviously has deep connections with Indonesian culture, very strong language skills and a bravery I once may have envied. I wonder how much of the ready Indonesian hospitality she encounters is due to this. Many of her experiences seem inaccessible to a man (and in counterpoint I guess she missed out on the men-only things — but it is possible that there aren't any.) She doesn't dwell too much on foody things; memorable but unenticing are the sugary drinks and the omnipresent Padang restaurants. She must have guts made of iron. Some stories just tail off.

Keeping it light, the book is thin on the literature. She updates Koch (1965/1978) on how wayang is very different now. I wanted to know more about land tenure and property rights in general, given all the upheaval and disposition of various groups over the decades; did Indonesia go through a redistribution like Việt Nam (disastrously in the 1950s)? Where are the lines drawn between personal and clan property?

Pisani recounts some great yarns but with enough cracks to make me suspect that the best bits were unpublishable.

Goodreads. Wikipedia.

Idle Daniel Day-Lewis completism. Directed by Stephen Frears (Dirty Pretty Things (2002), The Grifters (1990)) off a script by Hanif Kureishi.

A character-driven portrait of the Pakistani community of south London, some of whom are thriving in the early years of Thatcherism. The titular laundrette is next door to a "turf accountant". Main character Omar (I mostly heard "Omo", played by Gordon Warnecke) is encouraged by his leftist/intellectual/journalist/dipso father (Roshan Seth, surely a shoo-in for a subcontinental Doctor Who) to work for his entrepreneurial uncle (Saeed Jaffrey, The Man Who Would Be King (1975)) between school and university. The young man turns out to have a strong sense of business and ability to tame notionally-wild punk/fascist Johnny (Day-Lewis) which is to say he can get actual work out of a no-hope, uneducated, lower-class white boy, perhaps because they're lovers. Shaping proceedings are Derrick Branche's Salim, a greasy drug dealer who is the actual source of the family's wealth, and dissolute daughter Rita Wolf, just waiting for her life to start. Shirley Anne Field (Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960)) played the British trophy mistress. Things inevitably go all Do the Right Thing (1989).

Despite the good work of the actors this lacks the unity of vision of a Mike Leigh or social realism of a Ken Loach. Nick Cave, Rowland S. Howard, etc. would have done a stretch in those squats when they fled to the mother country in the late 1970s/early 1980s. The focus on the well-connected in the Pakistani community (poor though some relatives may be) coming into contact with people Britain could no longer deport to the colonies is well-worn; some scenes directly appealed to A Clockwork Orange (1971) and I never felt that Johnny was as dangerously, unstably violent as Stephen Graham's Combo was in This is England (2006). The racism is far more muted than in Romper Stomper (1992). Overall it lacked teeth.

The cinematography is drab, evoking the English climate of course, and countless TV soap operas.

Roger Ebert: three stars. A Critic's Pick by Vincent Canby. Complementary to Gandhi (1982), A Passage to India (1984), etc. Excess details at Wikipedia.

Director/co-writer Ethan Coen and wife/co-writer Tricia Cooke's followup to Drive Away Dolls (2024). It's worse! Far worse. So bad that even Aubrey Plaza cannot elevate the material. Margaret Qualley leads again as something like a lesbian Sam Spade; her character is made of reactionary one liners and some epic that-shit-will-get-you-killed revenge fantasising. Chris Evans is unsuccessful as an insincere sex cult leader. The dialogue is terrible, the plot irremediably defective.

Peter Sobczynski: better than the last one!

Prompted by Rosie Perez's cameo in Spike Lee's latest. Here she is, a year on from White Men Can't Jump (1992), in a performance as a bereaved mother that got her an Oscar nom. And really, how bad can anything be with Jeff Bridges in the lead?

Well, I hadn't factored in director Peter Weir or the banality of writer Rafael Yglesias. Basically Bridges survives a plane crash and loses his fear, making him into some kind of angel, and, at times, a proto-Dude. He helps fellow-survivor Perez recover while leaving wife Isabella Rossellini mystified. It's schmaltz and nobody comes out of it well.

Roger Ebert: three stars. Vincent Canby couldn't quite bring himself to say meh.

Prompted by Peter Sobczynski's positive review and Jason Di Rosso's sharp interview with writer/director Zach Cregger; I would otherwise have given it a miss as the genre generally doesn't appeal.

That American suburbia is its own special kind of horror was observed at length by David Lynch. Here young children mysteriously vanish one morning at 2:17am. We get told the story of the fallout in the community in chapters that take the perspective of about six characters whose activities intersect on a fateful couple of days a while after the event. This put me in mind of Magnolia (1999) and Brick (2005) (movies amongst my favourites). The (few) jump scares were dispensable. The gross outs were minimal (cartoonish like Tarantino) and the only egregiously violent bit could also have been omitted. The (somewhat harried) climax pays homage to Kubrick; it looks like the cast had a lot of fun shooting it. Room is left for a sequel.

The cast is quite good: Julia Garner does as well as I've seen her do, perhaps encouraged by the support of the broad shoulders of Josh Brolin, Benedict Wong and squeeze Alden Ehrenreich. Amy Madigan is fine in a more singular role.

Manohla Dargis: the AR15 in the sky evoked real-life school shootings. The structure I enjoyed was just a delaying tactic! She was not impressed. Di Rosso pointed to George Romero's zombie classics as vehicles for political criticism. Sobczynski was thoroughly grossed out. The structure is reminiscent of Altman. Sinners (2025).

First time around with this brief (56 min) effort from Wong Kar-Wai and Christopher Doyle. It's once again 1960s in Hong Kong (a setting we got to know so well in their earlier work) and Gong Li finds herself in the lead as a working woman who is in demand until she isn't. Chang Chen (who apparently led in Edward Yang's A Brighter Summer Day (1991) which I have yet to get to) is her tailor-in-training. She encourages his belief in her with the titular means and yes, the dresses he makes for her are fabulous. Things are often shot in negative space, yielding such novelties as a bed making very mechanical noises (in contrast to earlier sexy scenes). There's a dash of The Remains of the Day (1989) ruefulness in how he never gets over his first, unrequited love.

Apparently this was originally the first of three movies released as Eros (2004). A. O. Scott expressed what I think is the common opinion that this was the only one that worked. Roger Ebert appreciated it but did not give a rating (?).

Spike Lee's latest, a reheat of Kurosawa's High and Low (1963) which drew on Ed McBain's novel King's Ransom (1959). A surfeit of raw material!

Denzel Washington leads, somewhat ruefully and at times with excessive force, as a music mogul still with the best ears in the business despite his autumnal years. Notionally he had it all before losing control of his record label so we're shown a series of airless business meetings that aim to put things right. (Wendell Pierce (Superman (2025)) got a very few moments to administer an unsatisfying coup de grâce that we somehow know is not going to be consequential.) This setup had little relevance to the main thread where "Yung Felon" A$AP Rocky abducts a son and stars in a few music videos. I enjoyed Jeffrey Wright's performance (as a bottled-up but explosive older felon) far more than I usually do; a career-best effort even? Ilfenesh Hadera as Denzel's wife was static. Rosie Perez got a cameo that reminded me of White Men Can't Jump (1992) and I had to wonder what could have been.

Along those lines: the story and editing were too disjointed for me to fully grasp Lee's point. There's money versus morality but nowadays the currency is not just cash and hits on the archaic music charts (if it ever just was) but also likes on social media and avoiding the omnipresent opprobrium of the mob. (Lee misses a trick by not equating the vacuous, manufactured, soulless pop music that has historically dominated the charts with present-day influencer chic.) Doing the right thing apparently leads to more success and therefore more luxe consumption. Some parts felt like a retread of Mo' Better Blues (1990), which contends that the entirety of American culture is due to the efforts of Black people, but this lacks a Wesley Snipes to take the edge off Denzel. The cops were useless and the well-worn class distinctions were observed.

Dana Stevens. Intercutting the Puerto Rican Day Parade footage with the high-stakes train sequence did not work for me either. A glitchy screenplay. Manohla Dargis. Uneven casting. Things between men stood against the patriarchy of the family. Peter Sobczynski. But the first half is boilerplate ...

Fruit Chan's breakthrough feature. I haven't seen anything from him before. Over two nights as I found it a bit of a grind.

Sam Lee does well in the lead as a low-level triad member, or at least a debt collector for a local Hong Kong hood. He gets organised with Faye Wong-adjacent Neiky Hui-Chi Yim during a job of work but actually has a thing for suicide Ka-Chuen Tam; his life goes wonky after he recovers her two final notes. The concluding thirty minutes is trying as Chan struggles to find a moral to draw; ultimately it seems to be that everyone's life has a story for everyone else's life.

The teenage rebellion/do nothing-ism/tang ping reminded me somewhat of Rebels of the Neon God (1992) and so I was surprised to find them tied at #58 on the Golden Horse list of the 100 Greatest Chinese-Language Films. (That movie is far more engrossing than this.) Some of the cinematography is good, perhaps because it leans so heavily into Christopher Doyle and Wong Kar-Wai's style.

Kindle. Is this satire or Kaplan's best dream life?

It's the present day (any time you like from about 1950 to 2025) in a Washington D.C. where all the ladies are powerful and foxy. A minor jape threatens to ignite World War 3 and it is up to the flawed decision makers to get it right for all the wrong reasons. We are fortunate that they receive so much competent help from the ladies and our leading man, especially in spite of his business model being to speak out of both sides of his mouth. Apparently it is not yet too late to find something to believe in, especially if you're the man the moment has called forth.

Kaplan knows from his deep, lengthy research that nuclear war cannot be limited; this precludes him from sharing the delusions of Ackerman and Stavridis (and others) about the coming apocalypse. He's less interested in the global view (India does not feature, of course China is America's foe, the Russians are abidingly relevant) but similarly emphasises that personal links dominate the institutional ones. (I expect all three would concur that today's institutions are incapable of meeting our actual historical moment.)

The characters mostly speak with flattened voices, excepting a New England Defence Secretary. The occasional genuinely funny bit is interspersed with some clunky exposition, but we're not here for high literature. The best bit of didacticism comes late in the form of a warning from the Chinese back channel: if the US backs down from a conventional war then the chances of later, worse conflict increase.

Lawrence D. Freedman at Foreign Affairs: it coulda been autofic. Bill Thompson: game theory gone bonkers. Goodreads: expectations not met?

Second time around with Mike Leigh's followup to Secrets and Lies (1996). The two-track structure follows besties Katrin Cartlidge and Lynda Steadman over their time at university and six years later as thirty year olds. I doubtlessly missed all the fine class markers but it's clear that getting educated has not lead to the employment or men of their dreams; Leigh wants to push the determinism of origins, particularly family. The prospective men are all caricatures or at best shorthands, such as Andy Serkis's futures trader who is all nerve endings. There's less pain here than usual and more ruefulness. Minor by Leigh's lofty standards.

Roger Ebert: three stars. Yep, Leigh missed a trick by not getting Ewan McGregor for the real estate agent role. Janet Maslin: Cartlidge adapted David Thewlis's performance from Naked (1993) in something of a role reversal. Every character is an island.