Kindle. I'm very late to this party. I hoped to understand what it was all about after not understanding a thing back in 2013. Lengthy, overly so, and the mirrored split-narrative structure made following enough details too difficult to satisfy or enjoy; it took a fair bit of ploughing. I spent the entire first chapter wondering why Mitchell was telling me these things (about colonialism in Polynesia), and the second too (English composers in Belgium). Things clicked into gear with the Raymond Chandler-esque Luisa Rey hard-boiled noir, but the later switchbacks showed he was more invested in the character than the plot or yarn. The Somni arc in the Korean corporatocracy sequence was familiar from the Matrix sequels that predated this novel. (I wonder if he could have separated compelled consumerism from corporate hierarchy.) I didn't get into the post-apocalyptic anthropology on Hawaii.
Too much time is spent moving characters around to no real end. The variety of writing styles may amaze some but the underlying stories and characterisation are not stellar. Everyone ends up a winner.
Goodreads. Reviews were legion.
Prompted by Jason Di Rosso's interview with leads Leo Woodall and Havana Rose Liu. Liu sounded switched on and indeed nailed her role. The grab of Dustin Hoffman brokering a romance in the style of (Jewish, NYC) De Niro and Pacino also sounded fun. Daniel Roher directed a pro forma, predictable, just-roll-with-it script he wrote with Robert Ramsey (Destiny Turns on the Radio (1995), Intolerable Cruelty (2003)).
The game is to smoodge a romance and a heist together via some kooky angle (think Relay (2024) and so on), here a hearing condition that allows Woodall to tune pianos and open safes. It's so very analog. He's a broken boy who, we're told, is virtuosic but refuses to play, so we know at least one thing that's going to happen. Unfathomably single Liu is gearing up for a make-or-break performance to conclude her time at music school. Herbie Hancock and Jean Reno cameo. Lior Raz runs the criminal track. He does what's asked of him but he and other minor characters are poorly drawn. Too much happens to Woodall all at once. Too often I did not believe this movie.
Perhaps the film is trying to observe that the current generation (of young men) has to thieve to get what the previous generation earnt, or maybe that the U.S.A. is now one big heist. Women can still find the meaning in the arts now denied to these men. At no time did anyone demonstrate the cool, calm and total mastery of James Caan. So much montage. The ending left the crypto and the romance unresolved though her career seemed to be panning out.
Glenn Kenny at Roger Ebert's venue: three stars. The ending is too abrupt. A Critic's Pick by Brandon Yu at the New York Times: Good Will Hunting (1997). I too got the Brad Pitt vibes from Woodall's puckered brow. "[T]he film does buckle under the weight of its many ideas."
A David Niven jag from Ice Cold in Alex (also 1958). He got Oscared for what is eventually a very good simulation of phoney apartness, similar to Mary Tyler Moore's in Ordinary People (1980) but less frosty. Also for Deborah Kerr (Oscar nommed) who is unwatchably nervy and histrionic, and for Burt Lancaster who is wryly amused throughout, at least until Rita Hayworth (decent) made him face up to things. Wendy Hiller won an Oscar for a solid but minor effort as Lancaster's squeeze of the present day.
The topic is sexual politics and imaginary identities at a coastal Bournemouth hotel during the off season sometime after the War. It's a bit of a dry run for Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, being derived from a stage play by Terence Rattigan (who got help from John Gay with the screenplay). The various characters are stereotypes (whatever the critics of the day thought). I don't think there was much humour in the script.
Directed by Delbert Mann (Marty (1955)) who (IMDB trivia asserts) took over from Laurence Olivier after he was fired by Lancaster.
Another Rutger Hauer. Also due to being curious about what else Nicolas Roeg (Walkabout (1971), The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976)) directed. He worked off a script Paul Mayersberg (The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976), Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence (1983)) derived from Marshall Houts's book. In three sittings as it lacks continuity.
This is a rumination on what happens when a bloke (Gene Hackman) gets what he wants but has too many decades of life left to fill. In his case he marries Jane Lapotaire whose alcoholism is presumably due to her husband's vacuity. Notionally they are invested in daughter Theresa Russell (all-in, too much so) who is in turn infatuated with husband Hauer. Joe Pesci has designs on Hackman's Caribbean island, the proceeds of his gold strike in the Yukon (Alaska).
The excellent cast is too often left to spin its wheels. Hackman puts in his generic performance, absently. Pesci is very stagy, as if uncertain how to play the impatient mobster he later seemed so natural as. Similarly notionally French Hauer does not do beta male very well, especially not when styled as a Thin White Duke. Mickey Rourke, smooth, vacant and mysterious. Russell's efforts in a concluding courtroom scene (very reminiscent of The Stranger (2025)) were just too much. The occult stuff (some along the same lines as Perdita Durango (1997) but tamer, others involving witchy Helena Kallianiotes in a frontier whorehouse) felt like a waste of time.
Overall impressionistic and wears its influences heavily. In some ways presages There Will Be Blood (2007) and echoes McCabe & Mrs Miller (1971).
Roger Ebert: three stars. Walter Goodman at the New York Times.
And yet more ill-advised Rutger Hauer completism. IMDB trivia suggests it was his first American feature film and a troubled project. Directed by Bruce Malmuth from a script by David Shaber (The Warriors (1979), possibly The Hunt for Red October (1990)) with some help with the story from Paul Sylbert.
Somewhat like Clint in the NYC fleshpot-discos a decade prior, Serpico (1973) Sylvester Stallone partners Billy Dee Williams while the latter is on night leave from Cloud City. They're dragged away from their usual policing activities (mostly involving Stallone dressing up as a vulnerable female) by their boss Joe Spinell and seconded to Interpol-ish Nigel Davenport's team when Hauer arrives from Paris. The latter is at a loose end because he killed his IRA contact when the fuzz picked up his trail after doing what he does best. For reasons unexplained Persis Khambatta (Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979)) is rusted on and unmotivated international terrorism is the order of the day.
There's a baby and a boomstick and an underdrawn busted romance. All the money went on stunts. The plot is witless and most of the pressure escaped in the editing suite.
Very idle Rutger Hauer completism. His American performances took an inexplicable swan dive after Bladerunner (1982). Directed by Philippe Mora (Mad Dog Morgan (1976)). Paul Wheeler wrote the screenplay and while what we're shown is poor IMDB trivia tells me that may be due to a reel of footage being lost. In two sittings as it just does not matter.
This is a smoodgery of the themes of the day: Việt Nam PTSD, vigilante justice, manhood, broken families, ecocide, greed and of course that every movie needs romance, gratuitous nudity and some violence. Donald Pleasence phones in from another, even fruitier, movie as the Gordon Gekko of bird egg collectors. He commissions Powers Boothe, a mountain climber up there with Eastwood, to procure a couple of bald eagle eggs from Hauer's private island in North Carolina. He in turn is still suffering from the post-Việt Nam blues and is more in tune with the non-human animals. Kathleen Turner plays a marina owner and is apparently anyone's who'll have her. Brion James, stock heel.
The entirety is cracked and just maybe could have been a high-concept First Blood (1982) (Rambo) clone if there'd been more structure.
Steven Soderbergh's latest. Ed Solomon provided the script. Surprise, it's a heist. Michaela Coel led as someone once involved in the London art scene who now works in a Chinese food van. Ian McKellen has a couple of talentless kids who ask her to help with their inheritance. The first half chugs along mostly fine and sometimes fun but at some point the plot fell apart and we're left with a soggy ending. It all seems quite strange as the real estate (of unquestioned provenance) would surely be worth multiples of the artistic fix. The putdowns seemed irrelevant, crude and stale.
Peter Sobczynski. I don't think this thing says anything particularly new about the commodification of art.
I can't say I wasn't warned: this movie is based on a video game I have not played. But surely the mechanic is more than the swipe left/swipe right implied here; whatever it is does not translate to a static narrative form as we don't get to make our own observations. This felt like watching the longplay of a dissolute and not especially bright or interesting Japanese Generation Z everybloke whose main achievement in life so far has been to get his (now ex-)girlfriend up the duff. In two sittings due to the loss of propulsion over the first thirty minutes.
Things open with a first-person POV like Hardcore Henry (2015) (Sharlto Copley's in it so surely I've seen it) which evolves into a riff on the subway scene in one of the Matrix sequels: the one-set endless looper. This novelty mechanism put me in mind of Cube (1997) unimaginatively glossed up with GLADOS's testing chamber signage. Things got tediously repetitious, and on a strict interpretation of the rules ("...turn back immediately") one could opine that he should never have made it out of the innermost ring of hell. I think the point was to gesture at the great cycle of life, or to show that time is a flat circle. I doubt it will increase the fertility rate.
Directed and co-written by Genki Kawamura. Kentaro Hirase helped him adapt Kotake Create's video game.
The reviews are evidence that humans can empathise with anything. Brian Tallerico: two-and-a-half stars at Roger Ebert's venue. Liminal. Peter Sobczynski: low-key existential ("liminal") horror. A Critic's Pick by Manohla Dargis: circle of life, set in a liminal space. She seems unaware that the "thick, yellow line on the floor" is tactile paving to guide the visually impaired. I thought that was everywhere in this world.
And yet more proof I'll watch Sharlto Copley do almost anything, even a money job. I am clearly impervious to learning. This witless contraption was directed and co-written by Rupert Wyatt; Erica Beeney, Gary Ross and David Self helped with the script. Over two nights as it's clearly made for the second screen.
On paper Anthony Mackie leads in this pre-apocalyptic Saudi-Arabian-funded non-MCU/non-Mad Max fiasco as a lethal bandit but actually second bean/Queen Aiysha Hart (Mogul Mowgli (2020)) is who we're supposed to focus on. She got a lot of unvarying hard-faced/unyielding closeups. For unclear reasons (things got very wonky in the middle) she managed to corral a few tribes against Emperor Ben Kingsley's huge army led by Copley, both of whom play humourless heels. Things proceed as they must to the point of near fatal boredom. The music is very obtrusive.
Glenn Kenny saw more success than I did. Inevitably not Lawrence of Arabia (1962). Wikipedia.
Kindle. A collection of shorts. The writing is flat, very occasionally amusing. The stories are mostly straightforward: the early ones are guillotined and not satisfying but the later ones seem more fully realised. Much of it is very Melbourne. None are surprising or push the boundaries of conceptualising Australia: more nostalgic than imaginative, down in the dirt with the Paul Kelly classics. Birch reads like an urbanite (a Fitzroy boy), familiar with a variety of interpersonal violences but with a limited grasp of the countryside.
I liked what director David Mackenzie tried to do with Relay (2024) but once again the script (this time by Ben Hopkins) let the show down. The cast was good enough to deliver whatever was intended: Aaron Taylor-Johnson led, Theo James does OK as a nervy South African, Sam Worthington brought the operational chops (maybe).
There's a bit too much going on on a beaut high-summer day on the streets of London: a large World War II UXO is uncovered at a worksite and the resolution requires the "don't be shit" British Army to coordinate with the Metropolitan Police. So far so The Bill but of course this is just prologue to a heist-with-twists which seems to have been lifted straight from the 1980s: from a generator to power the tools/plot (why not jack someone's house battery or electric vehicle?) to the counters in the money transfer apps. The holey plot is competently realised but the totality is nowhere close to Thief (1981).
The ending left no ambiguity about where the creators' sympathy lies.
Glenn Kenny: three-and-a-half unfathomable stars at Roger Ebert's venue. Jeannette Catsoulis. "Amiably daffy", "programmatic, its characters bland cogs in a Rube Goldberg machine."
A Bérénice Bejo jag from The Past (2013). Written and directed by her husband Michel Hazanavicius who won an Oscar for the direction. Also Oscared as best picture. The novelty is that it's mostly silent.
A simplified Sunset Boulevard (1950): talkies killed the silent-movie star but the star-is-born actress brought him back. Much of the time Hazanavicius did not seem to know how to drive the story forward or provide enough wildly inventive scenes (somewhat like Sound of Metal (2019)). Jean Dujardin (Oscared, the first Frenchman) disappeared into the lead role: he embodied the looks, self-regard and expressiveness of golden-era Hollywood. The dogs can act. Bejo (Oscar-nommed) is far better here: she does unmitigated joy a lot better than complex emotions. John Goodman is fine but his character (a producer/studio head) is a cliche, as is James Cromwell's devoted manservant/butler. I found it less engaging than it should have been; it's more effective in showing what the American movie industry could do than being great in itself.
Universally feted. Roger Ebert: four stars. Singin' in the Rain (1952). Dana Stevens: "essentially a novelty item." Genteel alcoholism. The "plot is a deliberately unoriginal backstage melodrama." "[D]rags a bit in the last third."
Idle curiosity about what Javier Bardem did earlier in his career and a vague memory of the title from the 1990s. Brother Carlos Bardem played his cousin. Both are so young. For reasons unknown Rosie Perez starred; this is a big climb down from White Men Can't Jump (1992). Also James Gandolfini as a DEA agent and Don Stroud. So no excuses really.
This is some sort of offshoot of Wild at Heart (1990), an expansion of Isabella Rossellini's character. The plot is nonsensical (all summaries sound ridiculous): voodoo, rape, murder, bank robberies, foetuses for skin cream. Much of the production is barely B grade. Álex de la Iglesia co-wrote and directed; Jorge Guerricaechevarría and David Trueba also helped Barry Gifford adapt his novel for the screen.
Apparently none of the usual venues reviewed it at the time. Catherine Texier on the source material. References Burt Lancaster in Vera Cruz (1954).
A jag from Ice Cold in Alex (1958) via director J. Lee Thompson and Anthony Quayle. Also for Anthony Quinn who has some fun in a minor role as a Greek Cretan who cannot say no to Irene Papas (his co-star in Zorba the Greek (1964), Z (1969)). Carl Foreman (High Noon (1952), The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957)) adapted Alistair MacLean's novel.
Expert mountain-climber Gregory Peck ended up leading a small band of British Army irregulars in an assault on, well, the fictional guns of Navarone during World War II. David Niven went along as an explosives expert, Quinn as an indestructible one-man army, Papas as the daughter of the local rebel who leads them across the Aegean island. James Robertson Justice brought the tonsils to the introductory framing, Allan Cuthbertson some plummy what-ho. Richard Harris has a cameo as an Australian pilot; his accent was middling. Lengthy and things go as they must. Nobody is particularly age appropriate except perhaps the ladies (Papas and Gia Scala).
Bosley Crowther. A band of boring heroic stereotypes. IMDB trivia: the mountain-climbing bit was totally faked. Harrison Ford starred in the sequel Force 10 from Navarone (1978).
Sometimes I get a bit curious about what Guy Ritchie has been doing but usually the reviews scare me off. This one is even less fun than Operation Fortune: Ruse de guerre (2023). I wish he'd spent a bit more money/time/neurology on researching the business and legal stuff as what he served up is pure gibberish. The plot is nonsensical as his analysis of the interests and leverage of the various parties is fallacious. The first hour is pure exposition, and a lot of that is about logistics; the movie proper doesn't really get started until the last thirty minutes. (I think the idea is that we're supposed to enjoy Eiza González as a clothes horse / girlboss alongside the witless banter between male models/Arnies Henry Cavill and Jake Gyllenhaal.) It struck me that he could've just made a making-of or documented the day-to-day lives of his producers and financiers.
The one thing that made me pay some attention was a scene where Rosamund Pike tells the boys "you do the dancing, I'll do the thinking" — which, to complete the Samuel Beckett reference, is the natural order. Unfortunately her part is totally irrelevant, as is Carlos Bardem's.
Glenn Kenny at the New York Times: just winnowing the herd of less good-looking guys. The A-Team (2010): and wasn't I just wishing that Copley would phone in from somewhere.
And yet more Alejandro G. Iñárritu completism. He co-wrote and directed. Armando Bo and Nicolás Giacobone helped with the writing. The trio were more successful with Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) (2014).
Lengthy. This one wasn't for me. Javier Bardem led as a bloke in Barcelona who gets a terminal cancer diagnosis. He has two kids with his bipolar wife Maricel Álvarez who he is semi-separated from. He makes his money from various immigration-related arbitrages, specifically via a Chinese labour arrangement and by paying off the cops for a group of Senegalese street sellers. Almost all of it goes predictably and predictably wrong. Many of the secondary characters are more intriguing than the central focus but lack depth and development. There's a supernatural element that seemed tacked on.
Perhaps it functions as a time capsule for Barcelona.
Roger Ebert: three stars and a shrug. Dana Stevens: "This forced march through a chamber of personal and sociological horrors is difficult to endure but easy to forget."
Tahar Rahim completism with very diminished returns. Directed by Kevin Macdonald (Last King of Scotland (2006), State of Play (2009)) from a screenplay that Michael Bronner, Rory Haines and Sohrab Noshirvani derived from protagonist Mohamedou Ould Slahi's book Guantánamo Diary (2015).
"The Mauritanian" Slahi (Rahim) got caught up in the post-9/11 dragnet and ends up at Guantánamo. No-character players, lawyers Jodie Foster and flirty, credulous Shailene Woodley (Ferrari (2023)), took up his case. Benedict Cumberbatch played Stuart Couch, an assigned prosecutor who choked on the evidence of torture. Ultimately everyone won except the audience.
The actors did all they could; the fault is entirely in the script. I felt Rahim converged somewhat with those battered-faced sufferers Peter Mullan (Swanny) and Stephen Graham. The production seemed to be a vastly simplified, flattened and heavy-handed variant of his breakout A Prophet (2009) and perhaps he is destined to have his first role be his best.
It seems archaic to revisiting these topics in 2021, especially as we don't learn much from the torture/enhanced interrogation scenes and coarsely sketched religious bits. It was news to me that Michael Mori was not the only military lawyer to take a conscientious stand but that mostly shows I didn't think about it too hard. I did enjoy the "Do Not Harm the Iguanas — Penalty $10,000" sign.
Jeannette Catsoulis. Two stars from Brian Tallerico at Roger Ebert's venue: never "more challenging or interesting than a superficial, manipulative accounting of true events." The cinematography is sometimes effective. The real-doco outro over the credits is superior as it so often is. Dehumanising.
Written and directed by Anders Thomas Jensen (Riders of Justice (2020)). For Mads Mikkelsen.
Nikolaj Lie Kaas (The Kingdom (2022)) goes down for a bank robbery and is released a decade-and-a-half later. Brother Mikkelsen, missing or perhaps possessing a few extra mental screws, was charged with hiding the loot but now wants to present as John Lennon. Much forced humour ensues, interspersed with cliched, repressed childhood trauma in a stock, tired format. Strangely the violence against women (Sofie Gråbøl and Bodil Jørgensen) is served up cold. Søren Malling (A Hijacking (2012)) gets lumped with the straight dipso role. The framing cartoon story is better than what it bracketed. The soundtrack is ridiculously obtrusive.
Calum Marsh at the New York Times: indeed Mikkelsen may have delivered a career-best performance but the movie is a long way from the best he's been in.
For reasons I did not totally grasp Captain John Mills (Hobson's Choice (1954), Oscared for Ryan's Daughter (1971), The Big Sleep (1978), etc.) and Mechanist Sergeant-Major Harry Andrews had to drive "Katy" the ambulance with two nurses (Sylvia Syms and Diane Clare) from Tobruk to Alexandria as the Germans closed in for another round of siege-laying during World War II. Along the way they picked up Afrikaner Captain Anthony Quayle for frisson. Things got a bit The Wages of Fear (1953) but nowhere as engrossing. Directed by J. Lee Thompson from a screenplay T.J. Morrison helped Christopher Landon derive from the latter's novel.
A cinematic take on Greek-Armenian/Russian mystic Gurdjieff's (unreliable) autobiography of the same name. Adapted by chief disciple/gatekeeper Jeanne de Salzmann with director Peter Brook. There's some good material, like the ceremony shot in Afghanistan that opens proceedings, but it's poorly assembled. Prompted by having bought a copy of The Moon of Hoa Binh (1994) from New Age/explorer providors Bennett Books in 2015. Also some Terence Stamp completism: he plays Russian Prince Lubovedsky with solemn leaden gravitas. Dragan Maksimovic leads as Gurdjieff. The soundtrack is intriguing.
As always with these things it's hard to get too excited by the gnomic mysticism on show; it's unclear what was sought, what was found and what was confected. As near as we get to a philosophy is generic transcendentalism alloyed with some received wisdom about bodily movement from the possibly-existing Sarmoung Brotherhood of Sufis. (These guys are supposed to reside in Kafiristan, the same setting as Kipling's The Man Who Would Be King (1975).) But surely the journey is the point, the intriguing esotericism merely the vehicle; conspiracy theories from a more spiritually-expansive time. Notionally there's some science in there but I did not recognise any; perhaps someone meant the enneagram and associated numerology.
I won't attempt to read the source book (Goodreads) but I strongly suspect that T. E. Lawrence's roughly contemporaneous autobiography (~1922) has more worthwhile things to say. The supplemental literature (abidingly written!) appears to be similarly opaque and often plays like soap opera and yak shaving.
Janet Maslin: Brook has no interest in continuity. Lifeless until the sacred dances towards the end. (I get the impression that learning these movements is pay-to-play.) Wikipedia. The young Gurdjieff (Mikica Dimitrijevic) does radiate that spiritual thirst but it's so hard now to discern it from the omnipresent existential angst.
