peteg's blog

Second time around. Matthew McConaughey as a space grandpa. Still hokum; it's all about the boomers wanting to be younger than their kids.

Time travel, Seattle-style. For Aubrey Plaza who made hay with very dodgy dialogue in a perfectly deadpan performance. Some of it is very amusing though the humour falls away as the conceit — an advertisement for "someone to go back in time with me" — gives way to the needs of plot, which are of the unimaginative rom-com kind. Karan Soni's character would probably not have made it into a post-#metoo production. Jake Johnson does well as a vacuous writer for a magazine who knows what interns are for. Mark Duplass is also effective as the adwriter.

Directed by Colin Trevorrow from a script by Derek Connolly. These guys look they went on to mostly work on reboots (more's the pity).

Roger Ebert: three-and-a-half stars. "How to make a time-travel movie containing no apparent paradoxes." Dana Stevens provides context. "[A]n unconvincingly Spielbergian happy ending." Stephen Holden.

It seems likely that Mike Judge never got back to the heights of Office Space (1999) but I had to give this one a try. Luke Wilson leads. It starts out in a somewhat inspired but derivative mode but slides into dross. The epic-oversleep mechanic is identical to (one of?) the ending(s) of Army of Darkness (1992) which knew the limits of the lark. It may've worked better if it was bolted onto some other thing; the aesthetic is a somewhat less brutal Total Recall (1990), a movie that had a different idea about time travel.

... and in any case reality has now far outstripped anyone's imaginary.

nth time around with this Richard Burton / John le Carré classic. Directed by Martin Ritt (Hud (1963)) from an adaptation by Paul Dehn and Guy Trosper (One Eyed Jacks (1961), Birdman of Alcatraz (1962)).

Bosley Crowther.

Kindle. Lennon has written several articles for the New York Review of Books (and many other venues) from the uncommon perspective of a presently-incarcerated man so I wondered what he would say at book length. True crime is not a genre I read much of, excepting perhaps decision making in wars and associated lawering.

It's very New York: Lennon assumes you know the geography of NYC and the character of the localities (Hells Kitchen, etc.). He namechecks many famous prisons like Sing Sing and Attica. The book consists of portraits of himself and three others in an interlaced structure that amplifies themes at the cost of narrative. He offers a barebones sketch of his own crime (the murder of a friend/peer drug dealer, his two pleas of not guilty) but does not linger on motives beyond a desire to present as tough while living "the life" — which amounts to nothing you won't find in any number of gangsta movies and songs from long ago. (Lennon is now tough enough to be vulnerable.) Two of the others are similarly lacking in motivation, bringing environmental factors such as fatherlessness and poverty to the fore, the general decay of society. The third, Michael Shane Hale, more clearly committed a crime of passion as a result of trauma and abuse. On his take none of the four are psychotic, at least not before gaol.

Why these prisoners were selected is never made clear. Robert Chambers is so opaque (permanently high, evasive, morally incompetent) that we don't learn much beyond what's on the extensive public record; his activities in gaol (helping deaf prisoners with their paperwork, etc.) add colour but no insight. Milton E. Jones grew up in poverty in Buffalo, N.Y. and seems to have been too easily led. We're told he converted to Islam but it's unclear how this helped him; he undergoes a long slide into mental illness that nobody can arrest. Lennon asserts that as a youth he was "intellectually disabled, mental illness likely broaching" but it's difficult to square the first part with his obtaining a masters degree in theology. The accounts are all incomplete, perhaps necessarily so.

Addiction is a minor theme: AA works for Lennon, at least most of the time. He doesn't touch on his own religious beliefs or lack thereof, or spill too many words on gangs or affiliations. Clearly he hates being incarcerated. Apparently he has enough money for all the ameliorations. We're told that rape in prison is out of fashion but I wonder if the same is true of the Federal prison system. He doesn't really set out what he thinks prisons are for these days, or what the length of his own spell was intended to achieve. It feels a bit transactional. I was more hoping for more analysis, more big picture; the whiplash of changing policy (much of it arbitrary and capricious) is felt everywhere now.

The prose gets rambly at times, which is unsurprising given the restrictions imposed on the writing and editing processes. But even so it could have used another round or two of editing and thinning.

Pamela Collof for the New York Times. Marin Cogan at the Washington Post. I'm not sure these men are all that complicated. Goodreads.

Inevitable Spierig brothers completism after Daybreakers (2009). A maximalist zombie/scifi flick made for peanuts in Woodford, Queensland. I found it initially quite funny as the performances are quite arch, though that may have been due to the limitations of the cast. Soon enough it became tedious as the absence of plot becomes clear. The bodies-in-the-sky imagery is a direct lift from Magritte.

Roger Ebert: one-and-a-half stars. Ozmovies. Margaret and David: three stars each. Laura Kern for the New York Times: "it is a wonder it made it to the United States at all."

After a sneaky rewatch of the original True Detective (2014). Written and directed by Issa López. Happenings in a remote Alaska mining town over Christmas/New Year when the sun does not rise. Quite bad. I was so happy to clock Christopher Eccleston though his (minor) role is mostly explained while he is off screen. He shares an execrable sex scene with Jodie Foster. Kali Reis has her moments in valiant support as a sort of Dale Cooper (Twin Peaks) ingenue, and this points to the central flaw: it cannot make up its mind whether it is a supernatural or small-town horror. Far too many characters and jump scares, so much withheld information, malfunctioning scenes and dialogue of increasing quantity as the season drug on, so much auxiliary dross that did not further the story or characterisation. Nothing new is said. The cinematography is uninventive and flawed. I hated the soundtrack. It would have worked better as a two-hour movie, which is not to say it would have worked.

The ratings at Rotten Tomatoes show a massive divergence in opinion between the commentariat and the unwashed masses. Mike Hale at the New York Times.

Kindle. Who wants to read about Robert S. McNamara in 2025? — especially an account that focuses so myopically on the American side of the Việt Nam war when so many far superior and timely books have been available for decades now: David Halberstam's The Best and the Brightest (1972), Fred Kaplan's Wizards of Armageddon (1983), and even McNamara's own memoir In Retrospect (1995) and Errol Morris's interview with him The Fog of War (2003). And so on. This journalistic take is such a letdown after reading David G. Marr's excellent history. If the enduring lesson is that the U.S. establishment cannot learn to avoid quagmires then surely it is far more interesting to study organisations that can, such as the structure of the wartime Vietnamese forces. This probably discounts the pleasures of eternal kulturkrieg.

I was disappointed by how shallow and selective this book is as a biography of McNamara. You won't learn what he did at Ford (OK, he wasn't at war then) but not enough is said about his time with Curtis LeMay during World War II (fire bombing Tokyo) and the World Bank (at war with global poverty). Did he make any academic contributions? (Daniel Ellsberg, for instance, contributed to game theory alongside his famous interjections.) The focus is mostly on his relationships with the powerful (consigliere to the Kennedys and LBJ), his womanising, the forbearing wife, the poor parenting of his children, his domineering management style incongruous with his social ease.

There were a few things that stuck, none of any real importance. McNamara was clearly an authoritarian (Chapter 12: "'the more important the issue the fewer people who should be involved,' he had once said at the Pentagon."). He claims to have never read the Pentagon Papers (!) which is weird as he commissioned them as an input to reviewing the decision processes, a task he reckoned with himself from the late 1980s onwards. (Chapter 13 reviews the previous biographies, autobiographies, conferences in Việt Nam etc. of this period in a pile of reductive absolutionist blah.) It is insinuated that McNamara participated in the relaxed sexual (a)morality of Washington during his stint as Secretary of Defence (think JFK).

There is not enough Kissinger here, something I would have doubted was ever possible. Specifically we're told about Kissinger's attempts (?) to open peace talks from 1966/67 (dates are often vague) but not what McNamara thought about his (reputed) sabotaging of them for personal gain; sure, McNamara was gone by the 1968 election but even so.

There are some clangers. As always it is claimed that JFK would have ended the war in his second term (in direct contradiction with LBJ's expansion in 1965) but the provided evidence is thin. (Chomsky has been dismissive of these claims of dovishness for decades.) The authors do not understand mutually-assured destruction (MAD); from Chapter 13:

Neither McNamara himself, nor Kennedy, he insisted at Hawk's Cay, 'ever thought that we would launch a first-strike under any circumstances. Putting moral issues aside,' he continued, 'there was no reasonable chance that we could get away with a first strike unscathed.' To admit that publicly would destroy deterrence, so they 'didn’t tell the military,' and 'the Soviets, of course, had no way of knowing this.'

Nuclear deterrence ala MAD is about having a reliably lethal response to a nuclear attack; it has nothing to do with who shot first. I doubt there were reasonable expectations of escaping blowback since about 1949, even allowing for the famous missile gap. (As canvassed by Fred Kaplan and others, this first-strike ambiguity was US/European mitigation of the superiority in conventional forces the Soviets had at the time. Then as now it was about the resourcing and not the ethics.)

As always the Vietnamese barely exist, except to say afterwards how wronged they were.

James Santel summarised it for the New York Times. Goodreads: "Too much about Jackie."

Parts of Samuel Beckett's life. On the pile for quite a while due to the poor reviews and expectation that it would be a (possibly rewarding) slog. Directed by James Marsh (Man on Wire (2008), The Night Of (2016)) from an assembly by Neil Forsyth of raw material provided by Beckett (I think).

There are some good bits, and those are probably lifted more-or-less directly from Beckett's work. Things begin somewhat effectively with Joyce (Aidan Gillen) in Paris after a weak, symbolic start with his mother and father in Dublin. He has "less a bonding, more an unhappy welding" with Lucia Joyce (Gráinne Good) who he is charged with taking out dancing. (He doesn't dance, so presumably he's doing the "think later" aspect of the full titular pseudo-quote.) We then meet his Jewish mate Alfy (Robert Aramayo) and long-term partner/wife Suzanne (Léonie Lojkine / Sandrine Bonnaire) and mistress Barbara (Maxine Peake). Nothing suggests he was worthy of the Nobel or why he'd consider it a catastrophe; Suzanne is drawn far more clearly, and even Barbara has more character. Very little of his work is presented or contextualised.

Fionn O'Shea is good as the youthful Beckett; Gabriel Byrne less so as the elder. The rest of the cast does what they are asked to do. The cinematography is unexciting. The soundtrack is loaded up with classical themes that might have been meaningful. I wondered if anyone has drawn the comparisons with George Orwell.

Ben Kenigsberg at the New York Times: an "argu[ment] for printing the legend". Glenn Kenny at Roger Ebert's venue. Reductive, as was Marsh's The Theory of Everything (2014). Peter Bradshaw. Mark O'Connell at the New York Review of Books had so many problems with it that you wonder why he bothered to write a review. Bronagh Gallagher is indeed fine as Nora Barnacle Joyce and is probably why those early dinner scenes work so much better than the rest. It is as if modernism never happened. Is Beckett unsayable? Perhaps this demands a Wittgensteinian analysis.

Spierig brothers completism, inevitable after Predestination (2014). It's either a high-concept vampire flick or low scifi, something that Arnie may've been proud to star in back in the 1990s.

The premise is that for one reason or another most of the population are now vampires. By obvious Malthusian logic this put excess pressure on the availability of human blood leading to an expanding underclass of brainless desperadoes who look like a horde of junkies. Sam Neill heads a vast corporation that aims to produce synthetic blood (retaining the upsides of the condition) but of course there are humanists too. One such is Willem Dafoe (in the Arnie role) who undergoes a revelatory accident, leading to the only science we see: Victorian-era self experimentation by Ethan Hawke in a wine vat. Vince Colosimo is undertasked with some nonsense towards the end. Claudia Karvan does her best to ameliorate the sausagefest so typical of post-apocalyptic movies.

Some of it is very funny: an early gag is an ad for whitening toothpaste, and the science proves to be not so straightforward. It's a bit auteur-ish, like Dark City (1998) with some direct lifts from The Matrix (1999) (farming humans as blood bags, corporate brainlessness, mobs of military thugs, aesthetics). Clearly some funding came from General Motors: every vehicle is a(n electric?) Chrysler or a Chevrolet. I thought they missed a trick by not incorporating a zombie theme (may as well use the whole human) but it seems the Spierigs have been there already with Undead (2003).

Roger Ebert: two-and-a-half stars. "This vampire health plan has no public option" — was it an allegory for Obamacare? Jeannette Catsoulis made it a Critic's Pick. Wikipedia. It seems to have been thought of as a response to Twilight.

A high concept time-travel scifi from writer/director/etc. Shane Carruth, a former engineer with a microscopic budget. A pointer from Peter Sobczynski's review of Predestination (2014). All the high science happens in a suburban Texas garage and self-storage facility. I can't say I followed the details. The overlapping dialogue, sometimes mumbled and often clearly intended to be obscurantist, is sometimes frustrating. I guess the mechanism at the core of the story is one way to deal with continuity errors in films. It might pay a rewatch.

Roger Ebert: three-and-a-half stars. Peter Bradshaw got it backwards: they travel into the past, not the future. A. O. Scott knew better than to even get that concrete. Everyone could feel their neurons firing.

Idly curious about why it is so highly rated at IMDB. Co-written and directed by Matt Reeves. Peter Craig was the other co-writer. A Zoë Kravitz jag from Caught Stealing (2025), and Jeffrey Wright from Highest 2 Lowest (2025). And I guess Andy Serkis via Career Girls (1997) and Paul Dano ex The Ballad of Jack and Rose (we've seen him do exactly this before), Jayme Lawson from Sinners (2025). Robert Pattinson leads in emo mode; he was far better in Mickey 17 (2025) and even (probably) The Lighthouse (2019). Colin Farrell is unrecognisable as the Penguin. Always good to see John Turturro and the streets of Chicago.

With a cast like that how can it fail? But fail it does. The cinematography is very murky. Nobody can shoot straight. All myth-challenging plot points are swiftly reversed. So much of it seemed lifted from The Matrix movies. Too much exposition.

A. O. Scott. Dana Stevens.

David Cronenberg's latest. For Guy Pearce who essentially reprises his alpha geek role from Iron Man 3. Vincent Cassel leads as the only sexy man in this universe, and he's only available because his wife (Diane Kruger) has died; Kruger (in multi-role reprise) and Sandrine Holt each have a go. I felt something was seriously broken here, beyond all the underbaked technobabble: I did not follow the themes, plot, narrative or comprehend any of the points being made. The acting seemed arch and wooden. The big info dump in nature between the two men surely revealed how flawed the conceits were well before it got shot. Was the idea that the Chinese, Russians and Western Civ are soon going to go at it over Grave Tech? — which is the next frontier after ads and AI?

All the reviews took it seriously (as a dark comedy?) and found depths I passed over. Elisabeth Vincentelli: "some men engage with technology to disengage with reality. And that is more unsettling than any body horror." — what's with the "some" and "men"? Luke Goodsell. Peter Sobczynski got right into it: good grief.

On the pile for a very long while for reasons unknown. Still #248 on the IMDB top-250. Directed and co-written by Anurag Kashyap. I thought I was in for about three hours but that was only the first part; the second brought it up to about five-and-a-half in total. Over two nights therefore.

Dynastic gangland Bollywood that samples from everything. Loads of violence, some of it is very bloody but mostly not graphic (think John Woo, Scarface (1983), Gomorrah (2008)). This is cut up with romance and musical numbers with (according to the subtitles) raunchy prove-you're-a-man lyrics. The script is weak, a bit brainless, too repetitive: there's no escape from the cycle of life which here means finding a baby momma, killing those who killed your father, having a few kids, mindlessly thieving what you can, getting killed by the next generation. That really starts to drag in the second part. A few editing and/or continuity errors mar the presentation of the plot which is often progressed in brief dialogue between the big scenes. Some are distended, as if we're supposed to care about these shallowly-drawn characters whose motivations are either obvious or implausible. The final part is a tame recreation of John Woo's shooting up a hospital from Hardboiled (1992). The cinematography is generally quite good. The butchers turn out to be irrelevant.

Ben Kenigsberg at the New York Times. Not The Godfather, not Casino, perhaps City of God. Wikipedia.

Cillian Murphy's and director Tim Mielants's followup to Small Things Like These (2024). Adapted by Max Porter from his own novel.

Murphy is the principal of a house for boys who have run out of chances. It operates on a logic much like Will Self's The Quantity Theory of Insanity (1991). There's some tepid comedy, some The Office squirm, loads of swearing and a baseline implausibility with too much going on on this particular day. Tracey Ullman plays his straight woman (work wife). Emily Watson as a humourless shrink. The kids are sometimes interesting but mostly aren't given enough time or diverse scenarios to really express their personalities.

The structure is documentary (but not a mockumentary though there are aspects of that). Each point of view gets its own video stock. I wonder how close it was to meeting the Dogme 95 manifesto. Some of the cinematography is quite fancy but is not sustained at length as in Adolescence (2025). I think they missed a trick by not haunting the house.

Natalia Winkelman at the New York Times. Peter Bradshaw. Brian Tallerico at Roger Ebert's venue.

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) this is not.

Roger Ebert: four stars. Huston mostly omitted the politics of the book ("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.

Prompted by Jason Di Rosso's interview with writer/director Charles Williams. A prison drama. Guy Pearce added his shoulder to Hugo Weaving's quixotic efforts to renew Australian cinema by playing a sort of uncharismatic hustling prisoner who knows the score and what it takes to act normal but is incapable of regulating himself. This is not a challenging role for Pearce. 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 the genre goes 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 but (fortunately) it doesn't go all The Shawshank Redepmtion (1994). 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.

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. Even the croc is a crock! 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. Was he trying to plug the gap in the shaggy cat story market vacated by the Coen brothers or 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.