peteg's blog - noise

Kindle. I've been somewhat enjoying Sam Roggeveen's fortnightly sparring with Hugh White even though the latter always seems to come out on top. As with the recent Quarterly Essay by Michael Wesley (Roggeveen's sometime boss at the Lowy Institute) I'm sympathetic to the argument he wants to make: defend Australia, cut back on the expeditionary forces, get something workable going with Indonesia, develop resilience, all in the context of declining USA leadership/domination of Asia. But it's not clear how much of this is novel (see the Defence of Australia policy) or achievable, and the book would have been much stronger if it had presented and contested the cases for doing other things.

I did enjoy his take on nuclear weapons strategy in Chapter 6: one reasonable response for a "middle power" like Australia to a threat of that kind is to ignore it. This is because cracking the macadamia with that sledgehammer would invite epic blowback from others, and Australia developing its own deterrent would only attract aggression from major powers. I've never been sold on the nuclear umbrella concept, being born too late.

In any case Roggeveen is up against the dogma that it's better to fight elsewhere; in democracies the politicians would prefer the damage to be a long way away as we saw on 9/11 and the response to it. Those in power will spend an irrational amount of the nation's wealth to avoid being blamed. There's also a general absence of great-man glory in the book that is incongruent with the current era.

Goodreads. Much is absent, like climate change and the implications of dialing back Australia's integration with the US military; what happens to Pine Gap and North West Cape? Policing the Pacific requires some force projection. Joe Walker's notes contains some good points. Would future great-power Indonesia be interested in partnering with an echidna? Walker mostly comes down on Hugh White's side (How To Defend Australia (2019)).

Regrettable Al Pacino completism. Also for Holly Hunter who has the thankless task of going on a date with this self-absorbed geriatric misanthrope. She acquits herself just fine. Director David Gordon Green (Joe (2013)) seems to have since shifted into Halloween reboots. Written by Paul Logan. In two sittings due to the tedium.

Texan locksmith Pacino lives by himself with a cat and unfortunately the cat, while gorgeous, does not elevate proceedings. (There is a wantonly explicit scene of veterinary surgery.) He's somewhat estranged from his investment-making son in what's probably supposed to be a critique of honest toil versus fast money. He spends a lot of time pining for a lost love who we later learn found him as confusing as he is boring. Things go quirky-predictably right up to the magic of the mime at the end. The date with Hunter reaches for the classic cringe of Happiness (1998) but is so relentlessly brutal you only come away wondering what is wrong with people.

Nicolas Rapold.

A pointer from Sam Roggeveen (I think episode 11). A sketch of the Cuban missile crisis from the perspective of special assistant to JFK (and later LBJ!) Kenny O'Donnell (Kevin Costner with a shocker of a Boston Irish accent). That link suggests it is not historically accurate: it points to McNamara's take in 2001. It's not great cinema either: the chronology is often unclear and motivations murky, especially as to why the USSR moved missiles into Cuba at that time. (They must have known the blowback would be epic.) Perhaps the best observation is how the upper reaches of the command-and-control structures of the US military work; JFK's experience was apparently not so different to Trump's (for better and worse). And the lack of direct or reliable communication between the USA and the USSR. But really it's just another love letter from the Boomers to their parents, the Greatest Generation.

The huge cast mostly does OK (Bruce Greenwood as JFK, Steven Culp as RFK, Dylan Baker as McNamara). Directed by Roger Donaldson (Cocktail (1988), No Way Out (1987), Species (1995), etc.) from a script written by David Self (Road to Perdition (2002)) who drew on the book The Kennedy Tapes - Inside the White House During the Cuban Missile Crisis by Ernest R. May and Philip D. Zelikow.

Roger Ebert: three stars and a personal memoir. Elvis Mitchell, scathing at the New York Times.

And yet more Costa-Gavras completism. This was his followup to State of Siege (1972). Once again Jorge Semprún helped him the adaptation, this time of a book by Hervé Villeré.

A heavy-handed legal legal/courtroom farce. It's World War II (1941) yet again and Vichy needs some victims to placate the occupying Germans after some enterprising young French Communists assassinate a Wehrmacht naval officer. If they fail a hundred of Vichy's finest law operatives will be killed at the Place de la Concorde. People of substance! For reasons underexplained those operatives require a legal fig leaf to identify and impose capital sentences on these victims. They are most horrified when the best that could be done is a statute creating special courts with retroactive powers and framing up some petty criminals. This point gets hammered to death amongst other bits of padding.

Michael Lonsdale had the thankless task of playing "normalien" Pierre Pucheu, le ministre de l'Intérieur, apparently most responsible. His life story was probably more interesting than what Costa-Gavras showed us. Even so what he did got him the Best Director award at Cannes 1975. Pétain is heard but not seen.

Roger Ebert: three stars. Janet Maslin at the Boston Phoenix (!). The gymnasium is indeed a Meccano fan's paradise.

Costa-Gavras's second feature. He directed his own adaptation of a novel by Jean-Pierre Chabrol.

The film tracks a maquis (World War 2 French resistance rural guerilla group) as it frees some death-row inmates from a gaol, robs a bank of a million francs and is tasked with blowing up a pass in the hills which gets a bit The Wages of Fear (1953). Frisson is notionally added by them accidentally liberating a thirteenth man from the gaol (Michel Piccoli) who professes to be nonpartisan despite wearing German boots. The pace is frenetic, relentless, the opposite of The Confession (1970). We learn that Frenchman can only think and talk about war and sex, and only think about war when they have to. (What about food?)

The film concludes with a bravura shot of Piccoli hanging off a bridge that looks like a scaled-up Meccano set, Nazis overhead shooting down at him; a more eloquent expression of what Europa (1991) reached for.

The cinematography by Jean Tournier (The Train (1964), The Sleeping Car Murder (1965), The Day of the Jackal (1973)) is good.

Howard Thompson at the New York Times: frenzied vitality. Costa-Gavras "should have whittled his pacifist down to size."

More Robert Redford completism, and my first go around with Barbra Streisand. Directed by Sydney Pollack from a script credited to Arthur Laurents (author of the source novel) that IMDB tells me was bashed into shape by some heavy-duty doctors: Paddy Chayefsky, Francis Ford Coppola, Herb Gardner and Dalton Trumbo. In two sittings as I came to realise it didn't have a lot of shape.

This is something like American Doctor Zhivago (1965): a soap-operatic love letter from the Boomers to the Greatest Generation who were young once, before they were wearied by World War 2 and their kids. A difference may be that here the revolution fails, as does the romance, and there's not enough cinematic magic to distract us.

I enjoyed Barbra's performance for first half or so, up to some point when I realised that her character gets older but does not develop; she learns to swear, drink and smoke but continues to rant in cookie-cutter fashion all the way through. She's supposed to be a bit of a Jewish everywoman, strong willed, unforgiving, self absorbed, doing all the work (even rowing the boat!) while vanilla WASP demigod Redford just basks in her adulation that is rightfully his due. He has his moments, like when he realises what a prize she is, but is mostly not allowed to do much. They never seem to get married. The latter half fails to show us many of the critical events referred to. IMDB says this is James Woods's first feature and I can't remember him ever being so tame.

Roger Ebert: three stars. Vincent Canby: "looks like a 747 built around an elephant" — the latter being "the Streisand talent" which "is huge, eccentric and intractable." Redford in the thankless role as the weak-man foil to furiously-determined Streisand.

An extremely well-made French prison drama by co-writer/director Jacques Audiard. Thomas Bidegain, Abdel Raouf Dafri and Nicolas Peufaillit also got writing credits. Lead Tahar Rahim as a new inmate is mesmerising, the camera often holding his bruised, scarred and often bleeding face in tight for agonisingly long periods. The plot is straightforward: a Corsican gang led by Niels Arestrup rules the gaol but is eclipsed by a Muslim collective as our man rises. Some scenes are very amusing amongst the heavy stuff. Somehow both very graphic and not especially violent. The surrealism is served up cold alongside everything else; there is no hand holding here.

The cinematography by Stéphane Fontaine (Captain Fantastic (2016)) is excellent. The connection between Rahim and Adel Bencherif (who teaches him to read) is superbly drawn. Rahim's performance won him Césars for Best Actor (Meilleur acteur) and Most Promising Actor (Meilleur espoir masculin) and the cast is uniformly great. It won Audiard the Grand Prize of the Jury at Cannes.

Roger Ebert: four stars. A Critic's Pick by Manohla Dargis. All those little details make the movie. Peter Bradshaw: five stars. Powerful, intentional.

Kindle. Again two-years-and-a-bit on from his previous novel. So many words have already been spilt on this London-during-the-Blitz fantasy. I ploughed through it, mostly enjoyably, hoping it'd get somewhere only to find it incomplete and to be continued. What a threat that is.

Spufford returns to peak Anglo (1939/1940) with a financier heroine from Watford who may grow into one of the grotesques in Light Perpetual (2021). She gets involved with an underdrawn boffin from the Backroom Boys (2003) and finds herself madly, unhappily, in love. (He's a bit of a human computer and eventually promises to be her Denis Thatcher.) There's some class warfare, generously if shallowly observed, and some supernatural machinery that drives the plot, as if the war itself was not enough. Spufford considers the period as a sort of interregnum when the vocabulary of black magic is obsolete but science isn't far enough along for the real stories. He goes lightly with the Christianity but endorses the great-man-of-history paradigm (via Churchill) as he presumably must. Sitzfleisch is what I've been lacking all my life.

Along with the main but mostly unseen antagonist, a foxy fascist toff whose perfection is clearly due to black magic, the cast put me in mind most of Amor Towles's Rules of Civility (2011) with its similarly triangular study of manners, class and aspiration in contemporaneous NYC. Spufford does not consider the colonial view; he's endorses Keynes's take on the plenty available to (some of) the residents of the metropole and the self-serving tosh that the City was self-policing and not rapacious, or at least not as rapacious as it became. The essentially-American leading lady's wish to profit from the war and get rich is presented without judgment, as is some thievery during the Blitz. It's a strange position to take in present-day England.

Spufford hits the limits of his imagination here. For instance a woman not into men is necessarily into women; he cannot envisage self-partnering or hermitude, or really think through the implications of selecting alternative possible worlds; I mean, at least some of them have to be Pareto improvements on the one we're in, right? It seems causality transcends time and monkeying with the past has limited, non-chaotic, effect; his take on what is and is not invariant was arbitrary. I did not understand how they put an upper bound on the nodes in the Bifröst; surely the door knocker was a tell if not the quotidian blessing bestowed on statuary itself. And so on.

As always Spufford writes cinematically but much is annoyingly derivative as he owns to in an afterword that is followed by a post-credits scene. There are trivial gestures to Schindler's Arc/List (1993), Watchmen (2009), and (gulp) the MCU with its consequence-free do-overs of franchise-destroying events. On a more British front it struck me that Spufford was leaning comfortably into Tom Baker-era Doctor Who: the episode that didn't get made (Shada) and Pyramids of Mars. And doubtlessly a lot more.

The problem with any cinematic adaptation is that Steve McQueen got there already; the images in my mind of the Underground refuges were McQueen's. But of course there is no race in this book. And von Trier's wartime Christmas-in-a-church was far more effective.

Louisa Hall contextualises for the New York Times: in conversation with The Chronicles of Narnia and other works. Tiresome. The "heroine ... has figured out how to travel in time, but somehow here we all are, face to face again with history." James Bradley was deeply affected. Goodreads. And so on until this branch of existence gets pruned.

Misconceived Riz Ahmed completism. Woeful TV. The writing is very poor which is a shame as the premise — Ahmed as the next James Bond — is solid and the cast is capable of much more than they're asked to do. Pure self absorption.

On the pile for a very long time. Written and directed by Australian-from-South Africa Dee McLachlan. Hard yakka.

The topic is human trafficking/coerced prostitution in Sydney-but-mostly-Melbourne in the mid-1990s, those dying days of neon and payphones and Kings Cross. This is shown from various angles, the most effective being some very short scenes with a variety of johns. The overarching plot has the mother (Amanda Ma) of one of the trafficked women (Sun Park) come to Melbourne from Shanghai to find her, involving an insurance something-or-other office worker (Veronica Sywak) who develops a saviour complex with presumptive and oversimplifying tendencies that have fatal consequences. Emma Lung (Peaches (2004)) got lumped with the heavier coercive events. Third-wheel Saskia Burmeister did what she could. The male characters were totally ancillary: essentially corrupt or impotently inert.

The film does function as something of a time capsule, as many Australian movies do, but suffered from relentless heaviness, genericity and an inability to take any of the plausible offramps when offered. It's not Lilja 4-Ever (2002) in craft, deftness or willingness to really go there.

It later struck me that the immigration detention/deportation process Lung undergoes looked a lot like the trafficking that opened proceedings.

More a movie to read about than see, I posit. Luke Buckmaster rewatched it in 2015. David Stratton reviewed it in his Australia at the Movies (2024): Crossfire (1947). His summary is erroneous: Sunee does know people in Melbourne. Four stars from each of Margaret and David.

Vale, David Malouf. Penguin (his publisher) announcement. ABC obit. New York Times obit.

Lars von Trier completism. He directed and co-wrote it with Niels Vørsel. Somewhat gripping due to the intriguing cinematography and Max von Sydow's narration. The use of the sets pointed the way to Dogville (2003). Over two nights.

We're told that post-war Germany is in need of a little comfort. This drew ingenue deserter Jean-Marc Barr from the USA into the orbit of a railway-owning family via irresistible heiress Barbara Sukowa and his train conductor-uncle Ernst-Hugo Järegård. For some the war did not end but really the whole show boils down to the idea that not choosing a side is the biggest crime of all, a position diametrically opposed to South-East Asian values.

Roger Ebert: three stars. Stephen Holden: "[P]erhaps the eeriest is a scene in which [Barr] attends a midnight Christmas Mass in the shell of a bombed-out cathedral in the falling snow. The atmosphere of the scene suggests a a Wagnerian ceremony of zombies."

Prompted by Jason Di Rosso's interview with writer/director Hasan Hadi who won the Caméra d'Or at Cannes 2025 (for best first feature).

A young girl (Baneen Ahmed Nayyef) is required by her school to make a cake for Saddam Hussein's birthday in 1990, a task that is beyond the means of her impoverished and unwell grandmother (Waheed Thabet Khreibat). The often spectacular cinematography by Tudor Vladimir Panduru shows us her lifestyle on the fabled Mesopotamian Marshes. The MacGuffin hunt for ingredients takes them and rooster Hindi to the nearby city. There they encounter some supportive people and some exploitation and a bit too much happens.

It's a well-made film. The acting is good. I found it effective in the way The Secret Agent (2025) wasn't.

Matt Zoller Seitz at Roger Ebert's venue: three-and-a-half stars. Ben Kenigsberg made it a Critic's Pick at the New York Times.

The costs of Australia's serial distraction from its own geopolitical imperatives have been masked by the fact that maritime Southeast Asia has been peaceful, focused on economic development and benignly disposed towards Australia since 1966.

I had to wonder what I was reading when this came at the 10% mark given that the ADF was active in Việt Nam at the time, and to my mind Việt Nam is very maritime. Eventually I was told that the "strategic core" of Southeast Asia is Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia. This hierarchical take is a category error even on the terms laid out in this essay. I surmise the date is probably when it became apparent that Suharto had bedded down his coup and the largest domino was not going to fall. But the war continued anyway. Upon its conclusion the American-sponsored SEATO folded and ASEAN's indigenous consensus-driven, unaligned, non-interference model rose and has proven durable. The latter has often been a venue for expressing negative sentiment about Australia by various post-colonial states. But you won't find that kind of framing here.

Wesley's essay is annoying like this all the way along, doubly so as I am very sympathetic to the point he is trying to make, that being Keating's from the early 1990s about Australia finding its security not from Asia but in Asia. He wants a return to the policies of the period from 1975 to 2005 (he does not appear to argue for those dates) that saw a deepening of expertise in this country about our neighbours and increasingly broad engagement with them. What's mostly absent is any account of why things are as they are; the diversity, tensions and even contradictions within ASEAN are not explored. On some fronts his proposals are already archaic (the rules-based international order is a dead letter) or just not going to happen (a revision of AUKUS). There's a lot of assertion, e.g. Australia is "difficult to invade, but relatively easy to coerce if hostile forces gain access to the islands to our north" but no grappling with how we may realistically, even unilaterally ameliorate those risks.

It's unclear to me just how vulnerable the Straits of Malacca are; unlike Hormuz there is the possibility of at least some cargo taking longer routes. Wesley does not dig into the connectivity between the Indian and Pacific Oceans and who might wish to sever it.

Google suggests the author toured widely and discussed his essay on a variety of podcasts but it appears to be thinly reviewed and discussed in prose. Mark Beeson found more novelty than I did. Huiyun Feng spilt many fewer words arguing along the same lines for the incorporation of ASEAN into the G2. This sounds great but contradicts the rising spheres-of-influence/great-man-of-history model that is surely the essence of the G2. More realism about ASEAN and Australia from Lindsay R. Dodd (2025).

Directed by François Ozon who adapted Albert Camus's absurdist novel with some help with the writing from Philippe Piazzo. In lush black-and-white with many an overstuffed frame.

Colonial Algiers, 1940s. A dissolute young Pied-noir moves through his days with vast ennui. Somehow he's still buff despite that and having a desk job which he appears to execute with efficiency; no tang ping here! His mother passes and he does the customary without a flicker of emotion. A former work colleague decides he is irresistible after all even as he weirdly insists on clinging to and expressing only his personal truth. Perhaps she mistook his ennui for aloof cool. There is swimming, cinema, shagging and coming to the aid of neighbours before the pivotal capricious event that cleaves the movie in two. The ensuing court scenes got tedious and the climactic monologue with a priest overdid it.

Lead Benjamin Voisin is mostly as facially inert as Alan Delon was in Le Samouraï (1967) but lacked Delon's physical grace and hat. That he might be neurodivergent was not considered; the religious and psychological stuff seems dated now, or at least takes aim at a more rigid society than presently exists. I met his ennui mostly with disinterest.

It reminded me most of Roma (2018) both in style and staleness.

Glenn Kenny: four stars at Roger Ebert's venue. A horror movie. Peter Bradshaw: five stars. Many divergences from the source material. "Ozon shows that it is [the lead character's] martyrdom which is absurd." Jeannette Catsoulis was less impressed than the boys. "Existential ennui is not exactly fun to watch (or, one assumes, easy to perform), yet a meaningless life has rarely looked this beautiful."

Some idle Clint Eastwood completism. Also a Carrie Snodgress jag from Rabbit, Run (1970). An anachronistic venture for the time: Eastwood directed a script by Michael Butler and Dennis Shryack — the same trio who made The Gauntlet (1977). Here Clint demonstrates what he did and did not learn or recall about Westerns from his work with Sergio Leone. His own performance is not great but the rest of the cast does OK.

It's Idaho in the latter half of the nineteenth century and everyone's mining alluvial gold in the snowy Sierra. An encampment gets overrun by some local ferals on the orders of town founder Richard Dysart. Clint turns up after the fact and proves his chops by bashing the bashers as a favour to bashee Michael Moriarty. All (that is, both of) the ladies go ga ga for Clint, especially when he pulls out the dog collar and adopts the persona of "preacher". We never see him preach except when he tells the people to stick together but goes alone himself (of course). There's some fancy shooting and an anticlimax.

The characters are annoyingly underdeveloped. For instance giant Richard Kiel seems to learn the moral aspects of violence from Clint but his main opportunity to demonstrate this is interrupted (by Clint). The negative space portraits, the dynamite, the awesome shooting are all twenty years stale; the best cinematography is of the distant mountains. There is no soundtrack. At best it's a dry run for Unforgiven (1992).

Roger Ebert: four stars. "One of the subtlest things in the movie is the way it plays with the possibility that Eastwood’s character may be a ghost, or at least something other than an ordinary mortal." Vincent Canby.

Kindle. After the obscurity of the contemporary Red Birds (2018), Hanif revisited the more fertile ground (decades-ago Pakistani politics) of his first novel A Case of Exploding Mangoes (2008) by way of a strong but more acted-against-than-acting female character ala Our Lady of Alice Bhatti (2011). This one is set at the time of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto's execution in 1979 and covers the fallout on a failed revolutionary/successful English teacher, an Imam, a Field Intelligence Unit captain, the fallen angel and a few secondary characters at the pointier end of operations.

Unfortunately it's not great. We start with a bang, with a series of semi-random happenings that promise effective black humour in caper mode. But the themes are too weighty (sexual abuse, women as property/burdens, political/religious burdens/schisms, torture, so on) that soon enough we're in some kind of holding pattern, wading in treacle, as Hanif staves off anything too consequential. The ending therefore comes in an abrupt rush. It seems that women cannot be funny; the voice in her "homeworks" got flattened into the abiding third-person omniscient as the story proceeded.

The herb dealer who invents "Iron Syrup" links the book to Karan Mahajan's Complex (2026), and the haram stuff at a mosque to DJ Ahmet (2025).

Michael Gorra at the New York Times. "Often, too often, seem[s] to echo [Salman Rushdie's Shame (1983)], albeit without the fantasy." Yagnishsing Dawoor applies the Booker kiss-of-death at the Guardian. Goodreads.

Romeo and Juliet in present-day North Macedonia, facilitated by the universal solvent of EDM. It doesn't get as bogged in the scene as Sirât (2025): this is more adolescent, sweet rather than rueful. Both also involve a young woman fleeing the leash of tradition and familial binds. Written and directed by Georgi M. Unkovski. Alen Sinkauz and Nenad Sinkauz do some interesting soundtrack work.

Ahmet (Arif Jakup) gets yanked out of school by his irascible father and can see a lifetime of shepherding open up in front of him. His younger brother Naim (Agush Agushev) is mute. Gorgeous, sophisticated Aya (Dora Akan Zlatanova) returns from Germany for an arranged marriage but her temperament and/or time away has rendered her unwilling and even incapable. For further reasons underexplained the leads have a tenuous encounter at an open-air rave not too far from their parents' farms. We learn some but not enough of their backstories during other events, including a festival where some American-style dancing causes a moral panic, before things are driven off a cliff by the local villagers, I think Christian, taking out their frustrations on a mosque. The ending is unsatisfying. There's some funny stuff with a technologically inept Muezzin.

The cinematography is often beautiful. I wish they'd shown us the clothing better. It put me in mind of The Monk and the Gun (2023): a hilly, exotic location with some ethnography. If I understood the dialogue right the events took place in and near the town of Radoviš. Reference is also made to Konche and the big smoke of Strumica.

A Critic's Pick by Chris Azzopardi at the New York Times. Cath Clarke was less impressed. More details at Wikipedia.

An idle bit of James Caan completism. IMDB trivia: his first project after The Godfather (1972) and so clearly a money job. "Hot Lips" Sally Kellerman went without a bra throughout; her brand of zany clashed with Caan's unimaginative, car-thieving football hero fresh out of gaol. Notionally he's tracking down a big pile of dosh with some assistance from Swing-loving Peter Boyle (more in tune with Kellerman) and his wife/Caan fangirl Louise Lasser but that was as irrelevant as everything else. Directed by Howard Zieff from a script by W.D. Richter.

Roger Ebert: three stars. Goofy. Vincent Canby. Mountains of illogic. Caan as Candide in "a comedy-melodrama about America going to the madhouse in mobile homes."

A jag from Rabbit, Run (1970) via director Jack Smight who showed here what that could have been there: it's pretty well shot (by Jack Priestley) and assembled (by Archie Marshek). The tone wobbles (some of that is misdirection) which I put down to the adaptation by John Gay of William Goldman's dodgy source material.

The premise is not so far from The Silence of the Lambs (1991) with Rod Steiger as a strangler of women and George Segal the cop who is foisted with a relationship with him. Giving this the farcical treatment is intrinsically busted; the heavy stuff detracts from the fine domestic comedy work of Segal's mother Eileen Heckart who is by far the best thing on the screen. He hooks up with improbably single Lee Remick, a Marlboro-smoking clothes horse who is obviously going to be the last girl despite not being Steiger's type. She does OK. Murray Hamilton (Brubaker (1980)) has a minor role as a police inspector. Michael Dunn is fine in a random scene. The ending is neat and tidy and lame. Once again we visit the Pan Am building in NYC as well as the Lincoln Centre and under-construction Julliard.

I don't doubt Steiger enjoyed his performance, hamming it up to the max, but it's not so great for us. I came away thinking that Mel Brooks struck a better balance in Young Frankenstein (1974).

Vincen Canby. Oedipean. "Mr. Gay has written an exposition-free, gag-filled cartoon, which is the manner in which Jack Smight directs it."