peteg's blog

In 1999 Kevin Smith had the same idea as everyone else, to make a millenarianist flick based on some dodgy observations about Catholicism. He must've been happy with his ensemble — a happy-ish looking Ben Affleck and his up-for-it mate Matt Damon, game abortionist Linda Fiorentino, eye-rolling Chris Rock, stripper Salma Hayek and of course his over- or under-sexed bestie Jason Mewes. Alan Rickman plays the voice of God who is in turn played by Alanis Morissette. The plot moves everyone from the Midwest (Wisconsin, Illinois) to New Jersey for reasons I didn't quite catch. It's so scattershot it's hard to engage with and only likely to trigger those with a deeply literal take on things. I felt I was more laughing at than with, and not that often.

Roger Ebert: three-and-a-half stars. Being a Catholic probably helped; the excess exposition does not. Janet Maslin.

Once again looking for entertainment in all the wrong places. I've never seen Firefly and was insufficiently invested in the characters and scenario to get into it. (I guess that holds for all of Joss Whedon's output, leaving aside the outlier Toy Story. He wrote and directed this.) Things go all Blake's 7 (from the 1970s!) at the end but it seems like most of the cast got their contracts renewed. The dialogue and geeky awkwardness is trying. Notionally for Chiwetel Ejiofor who did what he could with not a lot.

Roger Ebert: three stars. Fan service. Manohla Dargis. Superior to the Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith. Right, OK.

A Josh Hartnett jag from Black Hawk Down and to be fair this is the best effort I can remember from him. The remainder of the cast (Bruce Willis, Morgan Freeman, Ben Kingsley, Stanley Tucci) are so-so. Directed by Paul McGuigan (The Acid House from 1996!) off a script by Jason Smilovic.

I did not get this movie. It thinks it's so clever, sorting out the horse-racing fixers and bookmakers of NYC, but even I had it figured by the two-thirds mark; by then there just weren't enough moving parts and time remaining for it to go any other way. The only thing left open was just how good Lucy Liu was in bed, and the filmmakers would have us believe she was or is the best ever. I so hoped she was from a rival outfit and in a position to make us a better offer.

Roger Ebert: two stars. An exercise in chain yanking. Stephen Holden: "a shallow, dandified grandson of Pulp Fiction." The explicit and the obfuscated in those introductory flashback scenes tell you exactly how things are going to go. It was indeed difficult to see the point of Tucci and Robert Forster's police officers; I can only think that they were needed to make the numbers add up in that initial story.

Continuing the Saturday afternoon matinee fare. Directed by John Boorman and witlessly adapted by him and Rospo Pallenberg from Thomas Malory's epic. The cast (mostly British) has many big names (Gabriel Byrne, Liam Neeson, Patrick Stewart, Ciarán Hinds) and nary a decent performance from any of them. It's hard to believe this was made so soon after Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975). Nicol Williamson's Merlin would not have been out of place in that movie.

The pacing is very poor and after some initial continuity we're just shown set piece after set piece. Nothing much is motivated beyond that initial movement: the land needs a King, and the sword knows that King. So often a character cries "X!" which is immediately followed by a scene showing X. Helen Mirren's sex scene must have been the only one in her career where she kept her clothes on.

I expected it to be a little fun, like Boorman's earlier Zardoz, but no.

Roger Ebert: two-and-a-half stars. "Maddeningly arbitrary" — but is that Boorman's fault? Vincent Canby. Pretentious. Both preferred Star Wars.

Clint Eastwood's directorial debut and therefore inevitable. Written by (ideas person) Jo Heims and Dean Riesner (Dirty Harry, also 1971). Clint produced, directed and starred. Perhaps the goal was for him to diversify away from ultraviolent roles.

This is a psychological and a bit late to that party. Somehow smoothy radio DJ Clint can afford a very swank abode in or near Carmel-By-The-Sea, California where Clint himself deigns to reside. We're given a grand tour of the urban areas, the cliffs and cliff-top drives, the beaches and redwood forests. I wonder how much is left now. Jessica Walter, sporting a haircut almost as fatal as Clint's, stalks him to Don Siegel's Sardine Factory bar after he finishes one night and the rest, as they say, is Psycho. Or perhaps Single White Female (I don't remember). Obviously it paved the way for Basic Instinct.

There's a strange loss of momentum at the two-thirds mark with some very spurious love scenes and a visit to the Monterey Jazz Festival. Clint's preferred partner in those scenes, Donna Mills, is the same shape as Sondra Locke (short and blonde) so I guess that was his type. He probably should have done something more linear as a first go.

Roger Ebert: four stars. Suspense? What suspense? The "Semi-Obligatory Lyrical Interlude" works! Geez. I felt that Eastwood's passivity/reactivity got annoying. Roger Greenspun. Recalls "other, better movies": Vertigo, maybe Laura. Fails to make sense. Siegel's character is named Murphy but Siegel is no Murphy. IMDB trivia: a precursor to Fatal Attraction.

I got suckered by the location (the Orkneys!) and Saoirse Ronan. She's done some great work with Greta Gerwig (Lady Bird, Little Women) and Wes Anderson (The Grand Budapest Hotel) but that's less true of her more recent stuff (Foe, and by all accounts, Blitz). It would've helped to know that this movie was based on a memoir by Amy Liptrot of her hard-days'-nights in London: it would've explained why the interstitial voice overs were so pretentiously literary, so incongruous with the gritty scenes of lamb birthing, partying in nightclub toilets and grim ferries. The title is mentioned by the character's father as a location in the vicinity of his farm but is mostly leant into as a motif for addiction.

The direction by Nora Fingscheidt is generally poor. The cinematography often aims for realism with the odd burst of impressionism but is mostly drab. The hand-held stuff made me feel like David Stratton. The closeups drove me nuts. The chronology is so scattershot (which I usually take to mean the story is too weak to be told straight) that I couldn't track how it fitted together despite carefully noting Ronan's hair colour in each scene; by about halfway I realised there was no payoff in the details, and that we're far from the gentle, quixotic, closely-observed and forgiving humanity of Andrina and Greenvoe. I did not enjoy the music (mostly EDM, some incidental chamber stuff, the odd bout of industrial).

The story has Ronan's character hit the booze hard in London while she studies for a PhD in some kind of biology. Why she does this is hard to discern, as is the character of her boyfriend and fellow lab rats. (We learn so much more about a self-identified crackhead father she shares a brief scene with at the drying out facility. This reinforced my sense of poor filmmaking.) After her life comes apart we're shown that her father has severe brain chemistry issues as a limp-wristed explanation alongside a mildly anachronistic and daft community life in the Orkneys.

Things proceed as they must. She spends a lot of time alone; this did not strike me as being what she needed. Her expressed sentiment "I'll never be happy when sober" shows what she's up against, and we know that her rehab is complete when she starts to smile at the closing Gyro festival, making eyes at and having a one nighter with a new young man, white this time.

This movie adds nothing to the addiction canon. The arc is almost purely solipsistic; compare with the communitarianism of My Name is Joe. It's far too earnest, too completely humourless, to go up against the big boys like Trainspotting and Michael Clune's White Out. (There's barely a sniff of a sex scene here and it is very solemn. The fact that the AA program worked for her but not always for everyone goes unacknowledged.) I guess those who dug Requiem for a Dream might endorse it.

Richard Brody was unimpressed. Entirely without risk. The source material is far superior. Dana Stevens on recent leading-lady performances. Ronan is fine but that only makes it worse.

Kindle. I was hoping to get some understanding of Penrose's big ideas but the vast bulk of this biography is about his personal life. It is annoyingly repetitive at all scales. I found it hard to track where we were in time; often a few decades slid past, content-free apart from a change of wife/muse. Apparently Penrose slid into crankdom from the late 1980s. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2020 "for the discovery that black hole formation is a robust prediction of the general theory of relativity". This work was done by 1964.

Barss was obviously the wrong person for this job as he has very little grip on most of the concepts he throws around. This is disappointing as there are a few that he provides very helpful intuition for, and there is a vast literature of engagement with Penrose's ideas from all angles. (See, for instance, John McCarthy on The Emperor's New Mind.) I was bewildered by why anyone who grasps Gödel's theorem would think that it implies machines are incapable of human-level insight and reasoning; as Alan Turing observed in 1950 we are so obviously inconsistent and so often unwilling to extend the benefits of inconsistency to machines. McCarthy also argues for non-monotonicity. This book is no help on those or any other front. I expected more imagery in a biography of a geometer.

The overly brief coverage of Penrose tiles is poor for something published this recently. Barss overstates their merits:

Two simple shapes cracked and divided the infinite plane, exploding ever outwards in unending variety. No tile set could approach their extraordinary, unexpected simplicity.

How could any science journalist/writer be oblivious to the hat and the sceptre of 2023?

Prompted by Jennifer Szalai's review in the New York Times. Their book reviews have been more miss than hit for so long now. She made it seem that there is a lot more science in it than there is. Goodreads is divided into those looking for the ideas and those who like pop psychoanalytic takes on geniuses. Peter Woit: exploitative of an elderly man with failing eyesight. Just read the Wikipedia page on Penrose.

A pointer from Roger Ebert's review of The Man Who Would Be King. Apparently based on some things by Kipling. Stock Saturday matinee fare made towards the end of the Raj when Gandhi et al were already on the march. Directed by George Stevens. Filmed in California. Not Cary Grant's finest piece of acting; Victor McLaglen does a bit better and Douglas Fairbanks Jr strikes poses just like Errol Flynn. They squandered millions of extras in a brief closing battle melee. Those poor elephants.

Bertolt Brecht at the time! B. R. Crisler (I think) for the New York Times: more violence less romance thanks. He doesn't notice that McLaglen is even more in love with his elephant than the army.

Clint Eastwood's latest and perhaps last, and what a way to go; things have generally not been great since Gran Torino back in 2008 and this continues the downward slide. He directed and co-produced a script by Jonathan A. Abrams. The vibe was that he's too sapient a filmmaker to have merely remade 12 Angry Men, and for the most part he didn't. Unfortunately it's a fair bit lamer than that.

We start with reformed alcoholic, soon-to-be-Juror #2 Nicholas Hoult homemaking with heavily-pregnant Zoey Deutch. (She doesn't move like a pregnant woman, and this lack of attention to detail is pervasive.) Soon enough we meet Toni Collette's prosecutor running for District Attorney and her bar buddy/public defender Chris Messina. Kiefer Sutherland slots in as Hoult's AA sponsor and lawyer. The plot has a bloke (Gabriel Basso) up for offing his unstable and needy girlfriend (Francesca Eastwood) on what is never very convincing evidence. The rest is in the title.

By the middle things are seriously awry. Collette is out doing police detective's work (why would she ever want to know?) and, unlike its famous predecessor, few of the twelve jurors receive any character development. There are repeated and flagrant rule violations. The motivation for the hasty let-him-hang verdict is that almost everyone wants to get it done and go home, but a few days later half are sceptical until all are not. This most interesting aspect — how opinions change — is almost entirely elided and deeply implausible. Things generally do not fit together.

I did not like the cast at all with the mild exceptions of Collette and Messina who are both far better elsewhere. Hoult is struggling to bust out of the Marvel Cinematic Universe; he is no better here than he was in The Menu.

At this point it's probably more interesting to see how Eastwood engages with Trump's manifest lack of essential Eastwood qualities.

A Critic's Pick by Manohla Dargis.

Kindle. Prompted by David Trotter's review in the London Review of Books. Indeed the review is superior to the book. I've already exhausted its movie suggestions; Bitter Victory was a bust and Black Hawk Down left little impression. Thomson expresses much childish glee in pointing to obscure things like Masaki Kobayashi's The Human Condition but he's very late to that and all other parties. I could reasonably have have expected more of him as he ably juiced Spektor's book at the same venue.

What is this? The label on the tin suggests we're going to be told about the mutualism of the various war machines and cinema. That might involve recruiting flicks (The Last Detail), spycraft and exoticism in occupied cities (Zwartboek yes, Lust, Caution no), exploring command-and-control (Dr. Strangelove, Failsafe, Wargames, Sneakers), intelligence (The Imitation Game), colonial activities (The Man Who Would Be King, Three Kings), revolutionaries (Doctor Zhivago no, The Leopard no, Reds yes, Che no, Braveheart yes), post war (Le Samouraï yes?!?, On the Beach no) and relitigating past battles (The Deer Hunter, Rambo), the militarisation of police (Sicario) or even satire (Team America, Army of Darkness, Mars Attacks!). None of these topics gets much if any attention. Some indispensable films (Das Boot, Downfall) — some of which refute the canard that only the winners make (most of the) movies of the conflict! — go entirely unmentioned. (Note to future authors: that proposition is impossible to endorse when your book has an entire chapter titled 'Nam.) How about docos like Hearts and Minds? Ah yes, "proper credit" should accrue to those.

Thomson makes it abundantly clear that he's into war movies for graphic battle scenes and considers this a moral defect in himself and all of us. Perhaps he should watch more scifi (Star Trek, Star Wars, Starship Troopers, Edge of Tomorrow, Ender's Game) with its often bloodless, victimless violence. Aliens is all he's got as Thomson is of the old school that considers scifi a lesser genre.

This means we get lengthy explorations of Saving Private Ryan, Fury and Mel Gibson with a fixation on the World Wars and (of course) Việt Nam. Thomson's Eurocentrism (and often parochial Englishness) blinkers the coverage and his repetitive hand wringing sours the deal when he could be digging into the military-cinema complex and analysing how the concerns of this genre have shifted over the period. There are too many dodgy assertions. I did not notice much discussion of the motivations, causes and objectives of war.

For all that I heartily agree with him (Chapter 30, 'Nam) that someone should make a movie based on David Marr's 1945, about the OSS, Hồ Chí Minh and everything else. It would have it all. I wonder why it hasn't happened.

Goodreads was generally unimpressed and picked it to death.

Again prompted by David Thomson's The Fatal Alliance: A Century of War on Film, and also the cast: Eric Bana's Hollywood debut, Ewan McGregor and Ewen Bremner, Tom Sizemore (less psycho than usual) and not Josh Hartnett. Sam Shepard does OK too. And so on and on. Directed by Ridley Scott.

The Americans decide to remove a warlord from Mogadishu, Somalia in 1993 (notionally as part of a humanitarian operation to reduce starvation in the greater population) but don't bother informing the United Nations mission before doing so. Things go as it says on the tin. There is something of the second half of Full Metal Jacket — the detailed and graphic reconstruction of ultraviolence in an urban warzone — but it is too often too difficult to follow who's where and why. (Scott misses a trick by not having more detailed maps in the interstitial command scenes back at base.) The dialogue often tends to pure American hokum. And like most Việt Nam flicks, a fair neutral would have to say that the makers of this movie were on the side that lost.

Roger Ebert: four stars. Elvis Mitchell: G. I. Jane but all boys. "As in Pearl Harbor, the battle [...] is an eye-catching misfire, color-coordinated down to the tracer rounds." "Top Gun on an all-protein diet." Groundhog Day. Ouch. So characterless and racially segregated it plays like a zombie movie.

Prompted by Jason Di Rosso's interview with director/animator Adam Elliot. Over a few nights due to a failure to grip, much like his earlier Mary and Max (2009) and Harvie Krumpet (2003). Again the claymation is great, as is the voice cast. On the other hand there are too many cliches (who hasn't heard the one about the bus driver who dies on the job?) and the frames are so often overstuffed and briefly held that I did not know what to look at; I paused it often to read the titles of books and so forth. The story itself is mostly a bummer with an undertow of unearnt redemption: life as one damn thing after another. The explicit invocation of norms and stereotypes felt lazy to me. What's with the religious nutters in W.A. anyway? And swingers in Canberra...

Peter Bradshaw: four stars of five. Yes, The Two Ronnies was huge in Australia.

A pointer from David Trotter's review in the London Review of Books of David Thomson's The Fatal Alliance: A Century of War on Film. I'm about two-thirds the way through the book and so far the review is far superior. Directed by Nicholas Ray (Rebel Without a Cause, In a Lonely Place) who co-adapted René Hardy's novel with him and Gavin Lambert. In black-and-white.

Thomson positions this film as a forerunner to The Bridge on the River Kwai of the same year. Richard Burton lead, almost dissolutely with his signature baritone blunted, perhaps not yet developed. I guess Liz was still a ways off. His delivery was fully realised however. He's some sort of archeologist drafted into the British war machine in colonial Cairo (as an officer, showing he has class standing despite being Welsh) where he chances to encounter his pre-war squeeze Ruth Roman (Strangers on a Train) who he abandoned for an archeological dig (I think). The plot has her taking improbable revenge by getting hitched to the much older and miscast Curd Jürgens.

Soon enough the men are off to Benghazi to fetch some McGuffin papers from the ever-inept Germans. Things go awry and the all-sorts soldiers are in for a long walk home. (Christopher Lee plays a sergeant.) Stuff happens involving bravery and cowardice, doing one's job and another's duty, using a camel as a medicine cabinet. It reeks of the perfidy of the brass, a minor Paths of Glory (from the same year) but is actually a lot smaller than that.

IMDB trivia: a toxic shoot. Excess details at Wikipedia.

I enjoyed Chief Dan George's schtick with Eastwood in The Outlaw Josey Wales and wondered what he did in his Oscar-nominated role. It turned out to be a jag from many recent things: in the lead is Dustin Hoffman (Megalopolis) with Faye Dunaway billed second (Faye, The Thomas Crown Affair). Thayer David is somewhere down the list (he played Dragon in The Eiger Sanction). Directed by Arthur Penn (Bonnie and Clyde) from a script adapted by Calder Willingham (Paths of Glory, Spartacus, One Eyed Jacks, The Graduate, Thieves Like Us) from the novel by Thomas Berger.

This is a take on relations between Native Americans and the white man around the period of the U.S. Civil War. In a framing story Hoffman is about 121 years old and is the last person to have direct experience of General George Armstrong Custer. He proceeds to tell us a tale in flashback that reminded me most of Forrest Gump's take on a good chunk of the twentieth-century U.S. experience. I guess it also inspired Dances with Wolves and provided a runway for the far more ambitious Blazing Saddles. How much you enjoy this depends on how much you're prepared to indulge Hoffman; I felt he was nowhere as comedic as Gene Wilder or Cleavon Little and my general allergy to him was not abated. Dunaway plays the wayward wife of Reverend David who tries so hard to be good. Chief is a chief and is good when given the chance.

Roger Ebert: four stars. "Endlessly entertaining." Vincent Canby: sometimes "the effect [...] is that of borrowed Yiddish humor."

Prompted by Faye which had some promising grabs from this movie. I'm not a fan of Steve McQueen so it was entirely up to Dunaway to make it worthwhile. This was her second feature after Bonnie and Clyde. Directed by Norman Jewison. Won an Oscar for the original song The Windmills of Your Mind.

The scenario has Trump-esque McQueen organise the robbery of a bank in Boston, mostly for the lolz. That part reminded me of Reservoir Dogs with its mildly baroque setup and partial unwinding. The bank gets a payout from their insurers who then send Dunaway to assist the police (Paul Burke) in recovering the funds for a 10% fee which I calculate to be about $260k. She maintains her record of "always getting her man" — honeypots are her speciality, obviously — but McQueen eventually comes out on top. Tears all round.

This is nonsense of many levels. If she was anywhere as smart and immoral as she claimed she'd have married McQueen (we know he's the marrying kind as he just got divorced) and taken him to the cleaners for some significant chunk of his $4M when the lust ran out. Her tenuous inferences are all ridiculously correct. The suggestiveness is lame.

And so we're left with the fashion and the photography. Maybe it works as a time capsule of the Boston of the day. Dunaway is a committed clothes horse with a new outfit in every scene which often makes no sense as it destroys continuity. (Consider one of her afternoon/evening dates with McQueen.) But perhaps, in combination with the disjointed editing, we're supposed to notice that time has slid on by. Overall the movie makes the case for liquidating these idle rich who engage only in antisocial trivialities. In that way it speaks loudly to our present moment.

Roger Ebert: two-and-a-half stars. Renata Adler at the New York Times. Yes, McQueen's castling ruined the entire picture. Dunaway's inspector's monomania may mirror Dunaway's.

A so-so biopic of Faye Dunaway. It seems like her career got very derailed by Mommie Dearest (1981), a Joan Crawford biopic directed by Frank Perry. I learnt about a few of her earliest projects and there's a chance she did something worthwhile in the 2000s. She doesn't share a lot of herself here; the director basically owns to the current-day interview being overly thin by including many older ones, and she's never very eloquent. She expressed a wider emotional range in Puzzle of a Downfall Child. The time would have been better spent with one of her movies; I rewatched Chinatown.

More Clint Eastwood completism. He starred and directed. This is something of a dry run for Unforgiven. The first of his efforts with Sondra Locke who is all doe-eyed desirability. Chief Dan George has the most fun.

The plot has Southerner Eastwood refusing to come in from the cold at the end of the Civil War. This is a wise move in the moment as his militia mates who surrender their arms are immediately slaughtered by calculating, faithless Yankees. On this account (a similar one to Gone with the Wind) the war was fought to keep interfering government out of free men's lives. (Eastwood lays this out in a lengthy dialogue with Chief Will Sampson of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Otherwise he's his usual laconic, taciturn self. There are no Black people in this film.) His refusal results in him being hunted from Missouri to Texas where he aims to hole up in the Indian territories. (It is not specified why this might insulate him from the Yankees.) Along the way he loses protege Sam Bottoms (who is a long way from Apocalypse Now), picks up George and much-abused "Little Moonlight" Geraldine Keams, well-educated-in-all-that-matters Locke and the remnants of her family and finally some good-timers as he repeatedly enters towns for supplies, is recognised and therefore contractually obligated to shoot quite a few people before exiting in haste. That got boring.

The cinematography is a mixed bag. The opening credits overflow with grabs of pitched battles then yield to some murky over-saturated shots of crowds of fatigued soldiers. It is difficult to make faces out. The compositions are often those that made Sergio Leone famous. The battle scenes are poorly choreographed. Eastwood does a lot of spitting.

Roger Ebert: three stars. Richard Eder at the New York Times. Hatchets out!

The funniest Clint Eastwood directorial effort I've seen yet. He stars with squeeze-of-that-moment Sondra Locke in an inversion-of-sorts of his Dirty Harry persona. His mediocre but straight and incorruptible policeman drops lots of f-bombs, some non-P.C. cliches about women and (obviously) still comes out the winner. Locke does what she can in a hooker-in-distress role who cannot help falling in love with Clint. Notionally he's there to get her from Las Vegas to Phoenix to testify in some case but really it's about moving from set piece to set piece. There's a nod to Easy Rider, a cop car shot to hell, a helicopter that randomly explodes when the pilot expertly fails to avoid some powerlines. The climactic scenes have the pair go all Ned Kelly in an armoured bus on a kamikaze mission to stick it to City Hall. They keep telling us that the mob wants to kill them but the actual objective is to assassinate property: apart from the vehicles there's a house that really cops it. Most of the shooting scenes drag on and on. Written by Michael Butler and Dennis Shryack.

Roger Ebert: three stars. Vincent Canby: "a movie without a single thought in its head."

What a mess. I wouldn't've minded so much if it was more original and well paced. The opening scenes are rushed (Babylon did the nightclubbing better) and there's too much exposition (much as I enjoy Larry Fishburne's sonorous delivery). The philosophical musings are incoherent, pretentious, recycled, inaccurate. Uninsightful! Gladiatorial Rome! Shakespeare! Adam Driver's Robert Moses-alike has an Emersonian mind! — and Coppola somehow has all the time in the world for these momentum-destroying languors but little for the action he considered necessary to include. A plot of some kind does progress but connective tissue is often lacking. The conclusion of it all is a baby! — but not a star baby.

The cast was intriguing. Mayor Giancarlo Esposito was very poorly used, ditto his fixer Dustin Hoffman. Shia LaBeouf got the Dennis Hopper role. Nathalie Emmanuel as the mayor's daughter was mostly tasked with standing around looking attentive and available. Connie Corleone (Talia Shire, Coppola's sister) was Driver's mum, Jon Voigt his bank-owning uncle, Fishburne his factotum. Jason Schwartzman performed like he's in a Will Anderson. Balthazar Getty I did not see.

For all that Aubrey Plaza (stealing scenes like a criminal) is a lot of fun as "Wow Platinum", a foxy TV/stock market floor reporter on the make. She has her own conception of integrity and uses what she has (sex) in pursuit of becoming part of a power couple. Somehow city-planning superman/creative Driver isn't interested but Voigt knows a rejuvenator when he sees one. Her sex scene with LaBeouf made me laugh so hard. She copped it late in the day in an unsuccessful Cleopatra getup, and not to slight her hard vamping but surely Coppola must've realised his movie was in trouble when she's the hottest thing going despite the acres of bare young flesh. (Often the gyrating and air-pawing of these barely-there young things are at total odds with the rest of the scene, such as when we and Esposito have to suffer Driver's Hamlet pretensions at a building site.)

Perhaps most fatal to the whole project is Coppola's dated conception of everything from cities to information dissemination (newspapers! just like Citizen Kane). His objective often seems to be to remake bits of famous movies like Ben Hur, Gladiator, the unbounded lurv of Interstellar ... 1980s wrestling (and not The Wrestler). Driver gets rebuilt just like Sharlto Copley. The odd scene or sequence gropes for something fantastic like Gilliam's Brazil or a Malick (The Tree of Life). Perhaps he had in mind Kubrick's outro Eyes Wide Shut but all along I couldn't get Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet (1996) out of mine.

It's difficult to say what this movie has and hasn't; for all I know the multiverse is in there somewhere. Coppola needs to crank out a director's cut that adds coherence. Is scifi really the only genre sufficiently capacious to address our times?

Very widely covered in the media. The coverage is bipolar (pump or dump) and mostly unnuanced. I didn't read the reviews before seeing it and have no appetite for them now.

And yet more Clint Eastwood completism. I'm deep into the dregs with this Cold War military advertisement (for both sides!). He produced, directed and starred — showing true commitment to the cause. The screenplay is an adaptation by Alex Lasker and Wendel Wellman of a novel by Craig Thomas.

The opening scene is a direct ripoff of Apocalypse Now: the Military Police come to pin the assignment on the golden boy while the golden boy is having a breakdown. With the prone-to-psychedelic-PTSD trope bedded down (partly through some vintage exploitation Việt Nam bombing footage) we spend about half the running time watching Clint get into disguise and into position, much like The Eiger Sanction. (This is mostly tedious and never as fun as Lancaster's dress ups in Scorpio.) The position this time is a Russian airbase where the MiG31 is being readied for a maiden flight. Mach-whatever, here we come.

The next hour has Clint fly this thing back from Russia to somewhere undetermined. (I found it weird that the U.S. apparently needed to steal Soviet military technology in the early 1980s.) We're shown the Russian response using a Day of the Jackal two-track structure, and I'd say the Russians marginally have it if only because they get a variety of sets. The other novelty this aircraft is supposed to have is a neuralink weapons system which requires thinking in Russian. Little is made of this opportunity for inadvertent comedy.

Overall it's super boring. I was a bit shocked to see Nigel Hawthorne (!) as a Russian scientist/engineer. The mix of English and Russian is taxing; perhaps there were supposed to be subtitles. I haven't seen Top Gun but I can say The Hunt for Red October is far superior.

Roger Ebert: three-and-a-half stars. It even has a ("logically impossible") homage to Star Wars (original movie). Vincent Canby: "It's a James Bond movie without girls, a Superman movie without a sense of humor."