peteg's blog

Idle Daniel Day-Lewis completism. Directed by Stephen Frears 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 business drive 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. 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, perhaps encouraged by having 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.

Kindle. Somewhat better than the last thing I read from Ackerman and kinda fun. Clearly he's aiming for a Bourne- or Jack Reacher-like franchise, a series of books and maybe a movie deal, something that might interest Tom Cruise while economising on the creative labour.

The game is that two impoverished special ops veterans take on the task of repossessing an aircraft from parties unknown for parties unknown. Things go OK in a mildly mysterious and vaguely realistic manner until the midsection lays it all out for us and we hurtle to what seems to be a satisfying conclusion for the Western participants. The plot is overly-convoluted and determined, at least if the outcome was in fact the intended one, and not so twisty; most events just serve to move the cast around the world (Uganda, Pennsylvania, Colorado, Marseilles, Kyiv) so that further character development (an Amish man! a dominatrix!) can occur alongside much colour. There's not a lot of action but many cinematic touches and far too many coincidences.

The vibe is a lightweight heist, perhaps like an Oceans instalment complete with the luxe trimmings and class signifiers. A dash of the Atticus Lish post-war blues and some reluctant fundamentalism is served up without conviction. Ackerman's Waiting for Eden (2018) seems as distant now as this is from that timeless tale of wartime graft, Catch-22 (1961).

Goodreads. Rav Grewal-Kök at the New York Times: some parts are (sanitised) autofic. An interview with Celia McGee: "The book is being developed as a streaming series by Tom Hanks’s production company, and Ackerman is at work on a sequel."

Inevitable after Fury Road (2015). I wasn't interested at the time as I'm not much of a fan of Anya Taylor-Joy; she leads here but is in at most two-thirds of it. (Alyla Browne is fine as the younger version of her character and I was happy she got so much screen time.) Things are once again batshit but less relentlessly so; I feel director/co-writer George Miller and co-writer Nick Lathouris had too much plot to get through, too much to explain or retconn, which yielded an excess of dialogue and straitening. For instance we know from the start that Chris Hemsworth's Dementus (a vintage performance of principled (or at least philosophical) boganism right up there with David Wenham's) is not going to make it. That and the aimless riding around the Wasteland robs it of tension. The CGI did not do justice to the stunts.

Jason Di Rosso interviewed Miller and producer Doug Mitchell. Dana Stevens. Peter Bradshaw. Luke Goodsell had seen enough of it before. Andy Hazel on the making of. The budget was huge.

Apparently Jackie Chan's first serious dramatic role. The entirety is serious excepting a few brief comedic bits in the middle that made me wonder what could have been; perhaps those were directed by Chan rather than Kirk Wong (The Big Hit (1998)). The plot started out looking like a dry run for Infernal Affairs (2002) but shifted to something more vanilla. There's a trip to Taiwan that echoes A Better Tomorrow (1986). Some aspects dangle; police psychiatrist Ling Ling Pan has no influence over anything. Kent Cheng pays off his paramour (Christine Ng) with an abode on the Gold Coast. The cinematography and editing are mostly excellent.

Some details at Wikipedia. Claims to be derived from a real story. The (nuts) climactic scenes were shot in the soon-to-be-razed Kowloon Walled City. City on Fire.

Dreckier than the reviews suggested. Writer/director James Gunn more-or-less just leaned on recycled MCU tropes, an admission that the Superman character is now too boring to anchor an entire feature. David Corenswet led but was eclipsed in all his scenes by everyone else: Bradley Cooper as Jor-El, Nicholas Hoult as Lex Luthor, Nathan Fillion from Firefly/Serenity. Rachel Brosnahan had more to work with than she did in The Amateur (2025) but her Lois Lane is still no more than a damsel not in distress. Parker Posey did far better as Luthor's girlfriend/sidekick in Superman Returns (2006) than model Sara Sampaio here.

There's far too much exposition, most of it delivered rapidly by walk-and-talk, much of it denying the possibility of deep fakery against a backdrop of generic CGI. Perhaps the dog swung it for the susceptible.

Dana Stevens: "What if, instead of forever grittily rebooting the same stories, we let ourselves hope for something different and good?" Peter Sobczynski: "yet another misfire"; cluttered with characters who will soon get their own reboots.

More Errol Flynn completism, and for Ava Gardner too. This adapts Hemingway's take (1926) on the Americans who stayed behind in Europe, specifically Paris, after World War I, and while I did somewhat enjoy the later A Farewell to Arms (1929) and For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) I won't be seeking out the source material for this one.

There are many problems with this movie. The largest by far is that Flynn steals every scene he's in; his Scottish-gentry dipso is magnetic and graceful where leading man Tyrone Powell is leaden, declamatory, wooden. Gardner is clearly rusted on to the wrong man but that's her prerogative as the only American girl-woman in Paris and Pamplona. (She's a lot younger here than, for instance, The Night of the Iguana (1964), where she shows more determination to get what she wants.) Too many ancillary characters don't contribute to what we're shown though are perhaps necessary to illustrate the multitudes Papa Hemingway thought he contained. But his notions of manliness are variations on a very narrow theme.

The cinematography is often quite good but was just as often ruined by the editing. The street fete/carnival scenes are chopped up so poorly; Coppola did far better in The Godfather Part II (1974).

Bosley Crowther gave it the thumbs up. "[Gardner] simply doesn't, or can't, convey the lady's innate, poignant air of breeding, for all [her] promiscuity. Sorry, Miss Gardner." Details at Wikipedia. Hemingway himself: "I guess the best thing about the film was Errol Flynn." Too many bistros.

More slow cinema from director Kelly Reichardt and writer Jonathan Raymond (also jointly responsible for First Cow (2019)). Once again on the Oregon Trail. In a couple of sittings due to a lack of grip.

The script is a bit weak with the usual tropes: an encounter with a native American divides the settlers in the obvious way, disaster strikes but even before that hunger and thirst are close. The men and women are divided along gender and every other line. And then it just evaporates.

This leaves the stellar cast with not enough to do. Bruce Greenwood (Exotica (1994), The Sweet Hereafter (1997)) plays a coarse outdoorsman who is charged with leading the group to the promised land. Will Patton, in his least creepy role ever, has Michelle Williams as his second wife. She's the actual lead, or at least the most interesting. Shirley Henderson forms half of another couple, and similarly Paul Dano.

Roger Ebert: three-and-a-half stars. "More an experience than a story." A Critic's Pick by A. O. Scott. Reichardt had already spent a lot of cinematic time in Oregon. Dana Stevens: "there's something about [Williams's] character that doesn't sit quite right." I agree: she never seems to bear the risks she runs.

A sequel to Gettin' Square (2003) that nobody asked for, much like T2 Trainspotting (2017). David Wenham starred (of course) and produced. He's hard to hate. Chris Nyst wrote and Jonathan Teplitzky directed both. Timothy Spall, Freya Stafford, Sam Worthington and Richard Carter do not return; Carter's character got recast (Bob Franklin).

It's a nostalgia kick. The plot is very woolly, the jokes very stale, the confected slang trying. The retroconned backstory moved things from the zany subtropical crime scene toward Australiana soap-and-away. The reheating of scenes from the original, specifically that court scene, are cringe. Redemption! They try to reflect multiculturalism via asylum seekers, Syrians and Maori (hey that's Indira!). Sombre, elegiac: so much death. Mere TV.

Luke Buckmaster. Sandra Hall. Both indulge the local product.

Maggie Cheung completism. Released the same year as Comrades: Almost a Love Story (1996).

Mainly this critiques the sad state of French and American filmmaking both directly and via the reductive meta navel gazing mechanism of freshening up a French classic of the silent era (Les Vampires (1915)) with a foreign actress (Maggie). Auteur Olivier Assayas loved the conceit so much he remade this very movie with Alicia Vikander in 2022.

Some of it is amusing (I did enjoy Nathalie Richard’s efforts as the costumer) but there's a tad too much of the French self-referential tradition that I lacked the background for. That made it mostly about Maggie for me: she cops some stick for starring in Police Story (1985) with Jackie Chan. An interviewer lays it on thick by championing Bullet to the Head (1990) and John Woo's masculinity. Does she think Alain Delon is much chop? Even his repetition and inarticulate slagging-off of arthouse cinema is of a piece with the rest of it: heavy-handed and stale.

The best parts were Maggie notionally playing herself, unaffectedly out of her element in Paris but speaking enough French to bring into question her ignorance of the other proceedings. She made a great catwoman and perhaps Hong Kong should have paid tribute to Hollywood with a Batman remake.

Janet Maslin: sardonic. Stephanie Zacharek let her youthful exuberance run away with her.

At Alice Springs Cinema, cinema #2, front row, 18.30, almost just me. Directed and co-written by Justin Kurzel (The Order (2024), etc.). Nick Fenton is credited as the other co-writer. It seemed to take an age to get a release (on 2025-07-12?) after its premiere at MIFF 2024 last August.

There are three interleaved storylines. One has Warren Ellis engineering the soundtrack for this movie in Paris and is essentially padding. I guess it's sorta fun hearing him speak French and wondering what the sound engineer makes of his Australianisms. And hear him layering sounds, some of which reminded me of Ben Frost. Another lays out the purpose of the Ellis Park home for trafficked animals, perhaps too briefly. (The park of that name in Adelaide (where the best speed in Australia may or may not be sold) and the famous rugby field in Johannesburg do not feature. Kurzel shows that he is no David Attenborough, or Errol Morris for that matter.) The main thread tracks Ellis on a visit to Victoria, presumably in 2023 as he was recording Love Changes Everything (2024) with the Dirty Three, released after their Australian tour in 2024, through to a visit to the titular park in Sumatra and the passing of his father in December 2023.

The early camerawork during the return to Ballarat was not promising but at some point things settled down enough for me to enjoy Ellis's unaccompanied violin in spaces that had meant something to him as a young man. I'd forgotten that he'd released a memoir (Nina Simone's Chewing Gum (2021)) and therefore lacked the context that may have made that motif more significant than twee.

The homepage for Ellis Park Wildlife Sanctuary suggests that Nick Cave is also putting in some cash (personally and via their Goliath Enterprises vehicle). Cave himself appears but only in archival footage. No other musician speaks except Ellis's father; Ellis tells us that his father wrote songs by opening a book of poetry and singing it to whatever chords he was playing, a process that is clearly inapplicable to Ellis's wordless music. At some point Ellis says to the prime motive force for the Park, Femke den Haas, that he doesn't want to be "that person" (elsewhere: Bono) but it struck me that throughout the whole movie, he is that person. This indulgence is smothered by worthiness and redeemed by Ellis's ability and willingness to trust and muddle forward, and be increasingly open about himself. Even so I was looking at my watch after the first hour.

I avoided the coverage before I saw it. Luke Buckmaster saw it at MIFF 2024. He seems to get (but doesn't spell out) the Heart of Darkness aspect of the journey to Sumatra. Indigo Bailey talked with Ellis recently. He might be right that cynicism doesn't get you anywhere. Andy Hazel was on the shoot (?) and I'd've preferred to have seen what he wrote about. Andrew Dominik on Ellis: "He appears to be letting it all hang out, but he’s not really telling you anything about himself." Kirsten Krauth: the through line is trauma. It could've should've been Fitzcarraldo (1982) but Kurzel is not Herzog either. The filmmaking process was somewhat therapeutic for Ellis but did not prevent a year-long breakdown between initial shooting and completion. An incomplete portrait. Jason Di Rosso interviewed Kurzel as did many others. And so on.

Kindle. Unlike Clune's earlier non-academic output (Whiteout (2013), Gamelife (2015)) I didn't get this one, his first novel. Once again we're in the suburbs of Chicago, it's high school, and fifteen-year-old Nick-our-narrator is starting to have panic attacks after the separation of his parents. He readily falls in with a bunch of cool kids via his underdrawn best mate and new girlfriend. The putatively helpful high-culture artefacts (authored or proximate to Oscar Wilde, Giotto, Bach, etc.) aren't described in a way that helped this reader understand how they helped Nick; things are not exactly real but they're not very magical either.

Clune's technique of repeating things in the small is not so effective here; I think it was intended to evoke the process of thinking and perhaps I was spoilt by his and Catherine Lacey's mastery of a decade ago... or maybe it only works a few times. He's far better at the things between people such as the hilarious encounter Nick has with a shrink who only offers proforma treatments. Things get a bit cult-ish (Ian is transparently unhinged and dangerous). The foreshadowing made Nick's character somewhat incoherent; he often wants to just exit (a desire even more dominant these days) but sticks around for reasons unknown. The social circle falls apart for reasons unspecified.

Unsatisfying.

Goodreads. Kaveh Akbar (Martyr! (2024)).

I always enjoy listening to George Miller chatting about his life philosophy (he's regularly on the ABC) but am generally less enthused by his movies (Mad Max (1979), the premise of Lorenzo's Oil (1992), Three Thousand Years of Longing (2022), etc). Apparently I saw this one before but I don't remember.

This time around I felt like Roger Ebert must have felt when he finally understood David Lynch via Mulholland Drive (2001): the relentless action of the first movement is all too much and yet when things slowed down I felt that every moment spent on the plot was wasted. The reason is that Miller does a huge amount of character development through interaction and not dialogue. And fashion, let's not forget that. This must be Nicholas Hoult's finest performance. Shot by John Seale. #182 on the IMDB top-250 list. What a blast.