peteg's blog

A Charles Bickford jag from Brute Force (1947). Loaded with Oscar nominations and a decent rating at IMDB so I could be forgiven for having expectations. Only Jane Wyman (The Lost Weekend (1945)) came away with Best Actress though. Directed by Jean Negulesco from a script by Irma von Cube and Allen Vincent who adapted Elmer Harris's stage play.

A series of segments introduces us to a small village of Scots (?) in Nova Scotia where people farm when they're not hauling in boatloads of cod. Doctor Lew Ayres (All Quiet on the Western Front (1930)) has the post war blues and is too cultured for the ignorant locals. He encounters deaf and mute Wyman, daughter of struggling farmer Bickford, niece of Agnes Moorehead (The Magnificent Ambersons (1942)) and teaches her sign language and lip reading. Stephen McNally (No Way Out (1950)) plays a lad with a mean streak who all the girls have eyes for. There's some very nasty behaviour (including a rape and a murder) that is resolved overly neatly. The final scene, where the remaining non-traditional family ride off into the sunset on a horse-drawn cart, put me in mind of The Night of the Hunter (1955).

Bosley Crowther. The stage play was not great. A mix of grotesque, banal, lurid. IMDB trivia: "While the film won the best actress Oscar, it lost in the other 11 categories in which it was nominated. This is still, as at 2024, a record (tied with Becket (1964)) for the most number of categories lost by a single film."

Kindle. Inevitable after Mueenuddin's debut collection of shorts. Unfortunately this novel isn't any better.

The first three chapters/parts are relatively short. Initially we're filled in on an orphan boy's origins in a Rawalpindi bazaar in the 1950s, giving me the expectation that he'd be a major player later. The second recounts the problems a youthful American-educated scion/feudal lord has with controlling his ancestral lands and serfs in the 1980s, notionally juxtaposing raw power with Western humanism. It ends without resolution, leading me to think we'll get the rest of the tale in passing later. The third is about how the landed gentry hook up, the heir and the spare. Finally the latter half of the text agonises over how a servant botched his failproof get-rich scheme in the 2010s.

The central flaw with this work is that it's all been done before, not the least by Salman Rushdie in Shame (1983) and Mohsin Hamid in How to get Filthy Richy in Rising Asia (2013). There's no humour, political commentary or class struggle so we can quietly ignore Mohammed Hanif and Aravind Adiga. The anachronistic view from the upper class/feudal seat was mined by Aatish Taseer, Rohinton Mistry and many others. Pankaj Mishra recently wrote about the Himalayas as a place for romantic escapes. The servant's view palely foreshadows the one in The Remains of the Day (1989). To echo Rushdie from a long time ago: this novel does not expand the space of things that can be thought.

The writing is often OK and even more often flabby and repetitive. The voices of the characters are flattened and often indistinguishable. Neither of the female characters is interesting or well-drawn. Category errors are rampant. There are no twists. The caste system (I didn't know there was such in Muslim Pakistan) is not clearly articulated though the feudal system is. Mueenuddin's use of the third-person appears to preclude an unreliable narrator but every so often he adopts a phrasing that in other hands would signal a departure from truth. It's a bit boring and there are no payoffs or even moments of quiet grandeur.

Dwight Garner saw a lot more in it than I did but also threw in enough references to signal he knows it's a bit stale. Goodreads.

Brazil's entry to this year's Oscars. Also nominated for best casting, best picture and best actor for Wagner Moura's performance. Written and directed by Kleber Mendonça Filho. In several sittings due to a failure to grip.

Just like the previous year's I'm Still Here (2024) it's once again 1977 in Brazil but this time we're in the small town of Recife. Actually we're there now and then, with Moura also playing his own son in the present day on a somewhat jarring interleaved second track. We're told firstly via an interview and then shown how Moura's academic comes into conflict with a capitalist/industrialist/member of the extractive class from the other side of the north/south split in the country. This leads to him being targeted for assassination in the 1977 timeline. At that time his wife is gone but I don't recall finding out why or how.

Politically there is lots of the usual stagey posturing which yielded much personal peril and no actual change. There's a network that supports survivors of the regime's nastier behaviours but we're not shown how that functions, just that it does.

The film acts as something of a time capsule lovingly made in the present day, much like the current retro computer scene and One Battle After Another (2025). There is no nuance; all the effort went into simulating mystery by delaying the inevitable expositions with excessive nesting of stories. (As with The Outrun (2024) you need to pay attention to the hair, here facial.) Too many scenes are overlong. Much of it is generic: the carnival scenes are generic. Some of the editing is strange: Moura walks out of a darkened cinema straight onto the street and a reverse-angle shot shows us a lit window right next to the door he came out of. The severed leg (found in the gut of a shark) is weird and the CGI for it is terribly cartoonish. I did not understand the weird two-faced cat.

A Critic's Pick by Manohla Dargis. Circuitous. Peter Bradshaw: five stars. Novelistic.

Kindle. The remaining four of Raymond Chandler's novels over several months. The collection I have includes the incomplete The Poodle Springs Story (1962) which I'll skip.

The first two are good. The Long Good-bye (1953) is clearly his masterwork: twisty and funny, a rich source for Altman's adaptation (1973). The last just has Marlowe running around in circles in Esmeralda, somewhere north of San Diego, and is quite unsatisfying; so much so that Chandler concludes with a character from a prior story propositioning Marlowe for marriage!

Hal Hartley's latest feature and hence inevitable. It's been a while since the last one — Ned Rifle (2014) — and I hadn't followed what happened since I saw the original Kickstarter pitch from 2019. That included enough of his collaborators from his 1990s glory years (Bill Sage, Elina Löwensohn, Parker Posey but not Martin Donovan) to get me a little excited. Apparently the pandemic led to the project being abandoned and the rebooted Kickstarter ("three and a half years" later) was shorn of all the stars except Sage. Hmm.

The runtime is brief — barely 75 minutes — with some scenes (all those on the subway) running long enough to feel like padding. Sage is a proxy for Hartley to get his musings on aging out there. It's a life full of people and stuff: records and books, romantic comedies made, some dodgy philosophy. Curated collections in other words. Initially Sage goes looking for a job with cemetery-maintainer Robert John Burke that palely echoed their earlier work in Simple Men (1992). Afterwards he visits an older lady (Kathleen Chalfant) who engages in a expository philosophical dump, and then everyone piles into his apartment. It did not achieve his signature arch artificiality; by falling so far short it just felt bogus. Perhaps he couldn't pull enough actors of the requisite calibre.

Kindle. Thin Brunner. Not much chop. Piles on the cliches and moralism to no discernible end. Somehow Alice Springs survives a nuclear exchange, suggesting that Pine Gap wasn't common knowledge at the time (?). The Māori are once again warriors! Teleportation! The Infinitive of Go (1980). All women are mentally unwell.

Goodreads.

Kindle. Not great. A sapient ship (Ship!) has seeded the promising planets of the arm of a galaxy with humans and is now revisiting them for the nth time. There are rules of the game, of course, and Ship gets lonely so human companions are the order of the day. It's a bit fat Brunner but has more biology than sociology. The time travel mechanic does not work well; that and the exotic landscapes and biospheres evoke 1960s Doctor Who. The closing exegesis needed expansion and more weaving into the main text. There are some cute ideas (and some lazy historical lifts) that have effects too neat and tidy. Too much moralising again. You can see his interest flagged in this project as he was writing it.

Goodreads.

And yet more John Woo completism. Wedged uncomfortably between the superior Bullet in the Head (1990) and Hard Boiled (1992), or perhaps just because Woo felt playful and wanted a vacation in Paris and Cannes. In two sittings along its natural cleavage.

The setup is something like Once Upon a Time in America (1984): three street urchins, played as adults by Chow Yun-Fat (maximal clowning), Leslie Cheung (serious, miscast) and Cherie Chung (mostly the third leg of the inevitable love triangle/ménage, essentialised) are schooled in crime by "father" Kenneth Tsang. "Dad" Kong Chu, a policeman, somehow takes care of them too. The boys are master art thieves, she's a capable pickpocket. The heists are not particularly imaginative. Luxe living! You too could (aspire to) rob an art warehouse/freeport in a wheelchair. The signature gun scenes are uninspired: there's more danger in boredom than anything our heroes face. It's all a bit weird.

City on Fire.

Produced by, and starring, Ben Affleck and Matt Damon. A confected, Sicario (2015)-adjacent paramilitary-cop operation, bent, nowhere as smart as it needed to be. The cash involved is not in the Breaking Bad league but they pretend it is. The procedural aspects are rubbish. Michael Mann got a lot more out of Miami (2006), and those final chase scenes are so lame compared to Heat (1995).

Stop me if you've seen something similar but better before; clearly these boys are too far from Boston (2010), just looking for a payday. The epistemics are very poorly handled: we have little reason to believe anything we’re told at any point. I waited for a twist that just didn’t come.

What's frustrating is that they pulled a strong cast and squandered them. Steven Yeun does what he can but is really only asked to hold on. Teyana Taylor is tame; actually all the female characters do so little that I don't know why they were included. Roid-rage Affleck did not nail the Rambo/Stallone/Josh Brolin role. The cinematography is dingy and washed out. The soundtrack is obtrusive and poor. Directed by Joe Carnahan (The A-Team (2010)) who co-wrote the script with Michael McGrale. The prior art made me wonder why thy didn't pull Sharlto Copley into this as it's not too far from that and Free Fire (2016).

Brandon Yu at the New York Times: "Training Day (2001), with a dash of Bad Boys (1983)".

Inevitable after reading Atticus Lish's source novel (2014) more than a decade ago. Apparently director Bing Liu was making docos before this, even scoring an Oscar nom for his skateboarders/masculinity-in-Chicago Minding the Gap (2018). Adapted by Martyna Majok, her first such after what appears to be a successful career in theatre and perhaps drawing on her play Queens (2018/2025) and own experience. Plenty of people with deep pockets/connections wanted this made including producer Barry Jenkins, executive producer Brad Pitt, and consulting producer Lish.

As with the book it's essentially a two-hander. Sebiye Behtiyar (in her feature debut) leads as Aishe, a Chinese Uyghur Muslim undocumented immigrant. In a clunky meet-cute street scene she encounters Fred Hechinger's Skinner, recently (and ambiguously) out of the military and looking for some recreation in NYC. What follows is a minor-note romance that is often difficult to fathom. Their connection does not evolve much; we really only learn more about his instabilities but not its causes or prospects for treatment. Notionally they bond over fitness but the scene in the gym is ineffective as we don't see them making a habit of it. The ending is uncertain, and we never really know what he sees in her or what she wants her life to amount to, beyond some kind of self-sufficiency. (He seems content to self-medicate.) While she refuses to reduce him to instrumentality (a meal ticket, a vector to formal US residency) or go all-in on the unsalvageable boy, everyone else exploits her.

The narrative arc is not close to the book's; in fact the themes have been wound back, the teeth filed down to the gums. It lacks the clarity of Lish's prose and edges toward the recurring ever now (Charles Yu's present indefinite) and moralism of an American drug flick.

Most of the time it felt like more effort had gone into the cinematography than the script: there's a lot of arty lighting and fancy shots. It might have worked better as a gritty guerilla shoot amongst the people of uncertain residency in NYC. Emile Mosseri's soundtrack adds to the doom. There's a literal echoing The Outrun (2024) and the precarity is a sedentary version of Souleymane's Story (2024). Both actors did what they could.

A Critic's Pick by Jeannette Catsoulis. I can't agree that "Aishe is driven to achieve legal status and financial security." Peter Bradshaw: three stars.

More Lee Byung-hun completism. Highly rated at IMDB. Directed by Kim Jee-woon (The Foul King (2000), The Good, The Bad, The Weird (2008), I Saw the Devil (2010)) who wrote a script based on a "character created by" Dong-Cheol Kim. Shades of Tarantino (Kill Bill) and ultraviolent Hong Kong. A henchman enforcer goes on a rampage after the boss tries to discern why he no longer wants to follow clear orders. Their mutual incomprehension is supposedly provoked by luxury superfluity Shin Min-a who notionally plays a mean cello but does not get particularly romantic with any of her three paramours. The cycle of life, or at least generic cinematic paydays, in the dens, hotels, bars, private rooms and so on of demimonde Seoul.

Peter Bradshaw: three stars.

Post apocalyptic Seoul. Directed by Taehwa Um who wrote the script based on a "webtoon" by Lee Shin-ji and Kim Soong-nyung (says IMDB).

I guess the first apocalypse was the urbanisation of Korea, with the bulk of the population living in apartments that are heavily stratified by class, wealth, etc. as explored at feature length in Parasite (2019) (amongst others) and summarised in a rueful intro here. The second is a massive earthquake that levels the city with the singular exception of a block where young couple Park Bo-young and Park Seo-jono reside. A third takes the form of eventual "delegate" leader Lee Byung-hun (OK but far better in No Other Choice (2025)) who happens to be settling a score there that day and so survives while his wife and child do not.

Things go tediously predictably: Korean Lord of the Flies (1954). The initial mildly amusing black social comedy quickly yields to unfunny repetition and shouty histrionics with too many overlong scenes that canvas some but not all of the things that happen when infrastructure fails. Soon enough it's a boring slog.

A Critic's Pick by Jeannette Catsoulis. "Smoothly shap[ed] familiar genre tropes into a brutal study of class warfare and the stifling of pity".

I liked what director Boris Lojkine did with actress Nina Meurisse in Soleymane's Story (2024) and wondered about this prior art. He wrote the script with Bojina Panayotova.

This is a biopic of French photojournalist Camille Lepage. For reasons unexplored here she went to the Central African Republic to cover the (ongoing) civil war from about 2012 to about 2014. Her addiction proves predictably fatal, and her interest in accompanying the violent young men is sometimes hard to fathom as she always seems to be surprised and disgusted by the killing, dismemberment etc. Perhaps her need to record their stories dominated. The narrative arc can't go anywhere novel — the opening scenes imply she does not survive, and if she hadn't succeeded in getting published in the mainstream media nobody would have known about her. We're told she had no interest in taking assignments in other unsettled regions (specifically Ukraine).

There is some good cinematography, and of course some striking stills. At some point the French media contingent pile into a 78-series troopy. Often the crowds (large and small) burst into song as in Io Capitano (2023).

Costa-Gavras's first feature and hence inevitable. In French, black-and-white. He adapted a novel by Sébastien Japrisot.

A woman gets murdered in a sleeping compartment on a train heading from Marseilles to Paris, so the police, led by Yves Montand, investigate. It's quite amusing and often sweet in its handling of human relations. I particularly enjoyed Charles Denner's snarky take on life and everything, and Catherine Allégret's straightforward ingénue. The shifting viewpoints are not treated quite as well as in his classic paranoid/political thrillers which may have been a matter of editing. (Christian Gaudin edited this.) The brisk pace made it hard to see everything in the frame (the details are often rewarding) while reading the subtitles and appreciating the humour. I did not follow all the red herrings, partly because the eyeglazing final exposition dump mildly ruined the subtle work before it. In a similar space to Le Samouraï (1967) and Jean-Pierre Melville's demimonde; the car chase at the end is a bit Bob le flambeur (1956).

And still more Lee Tamahori completism. Somehow rated near the top of his output. Written by David Mamet! — which blew my brain as the script is light on for snappy dialogue and mostly witless. Did Anthony Hopkins lead any other action movie?

Before Cocaine Bear (2023) there were three blokes who went for a look-see in some remote wooded arctic wilderness and ended up staying for longer than planned. Hopkins played a sort of Bill Gates-ish aspy billionaire (a type well out of fashion now) who somehow landed Elle Macpherson for a wife. She is, of course, too much woman for any man. Alec Baldwin photographed her during daylight hours but somehow thought a Native American would have made a better model; Harold Perrineau tagged along as some kind of factotum. There's a bear, a fair bit of blood and more survival than any character deserved.

Clearly a money job for all involved.

Roger Ebert: three stars. Subtly funny, "in some ways is typical of [Mamet's] work." "The Brother Always Dies First" but that's OK as "Mamet knows that, and is satirizing the stereotype." Janet Maslin.

Kindle. The one that didn't win him the Booker. The edition I had (2025) included a worthless introduction by Amy Liptrot (The Outrun (2024)).

To be honest I was a bit disappointed that he didn't take things much further than he had in Greenvoe (1972) and Six Lives of Fankle the Cat (1980) which I did enjoy. Perhaps I rushed it a bit or was too insapient to grasp all his subtleties; he didn't adopt the fancy tenses of Charles Yu to travel through time, or even the slick trickiness of Murray Bail's prose for that matter, but the simple mechanism of dreamlife, later recounted for profit. The stories are sufficiently straightforward that the rewards are in how they are told. And just who is this entity that is sitting beside (and not inside) the ocean of time with the rest of us?

Goodreads. Cornelius Browne points to Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal (1957).

Lee Tamahori completism. He directed a witless adaption of Philip K. Dick's The Golden Man by Gary Goldman, Jonathan Hensleigh and Paul Bernbaum. Also Nicolas Cage completism. In quite a few sittings as it just doesn't matter.

The sense of just-how-bad-can-it-be doesn't last too long: it's every bit as bad and worse. The rules of the game are that Cage can see two minutes into his own future and arbitrarily far ahead when it involves his dreamgirl Jessica Biel. The FBI, or more precisely Julianne Moore, wants to use him as whatever Samantha Morton was in Minority Report (2002), also a Dick contraption. Everything else is recycled too: some Matrix-ish bullet-time-ish multi-Agent Smith-ish dodging, the iconic eyewear from A Clockwork Orange (1971), shootouts amongst containers ala Heat (1995) at an industrial plant ala The Terminator (1984). And so on.

Cage is unusually flat. Moore's character, dialogue etc. is terrible. Biel gets to use all her facial expressions. The seeing mechanic is nonsensical; the explanations don't even try to make sense of counterfactuality. There's not a lot of action and none of it is surprising. The cinematography is not terrible; I guess Tamahori is more comfortable outdoors. There's some very poor CGI. Mark Isham (Romeo is Bleeding (1993)) composed! Everyone and everything was squandered in service to this purest of money jobs.

Stephanie Zacharek.

Lee Tamahori's next feature after Once Were Warriors (1994). Peter Dexter wrote the screenplay with some help from Floyd Mutrux on the story.

I guess the 1990s saw many attempts to make an L.A. noir as good as Chinatown (1974), not the least being a sequel (1990). The pick was probably L.A. Confidential (1997) but this was a somewhat worthy attempt. A squad of four police officers — Nick Nolte in the lead, partnered with Chazz Palminteri from Jersey, Michael Madsen and Chris Penn just making up the numbers — is tasked with preventing the incursion of organised crime into the city of dreams. Little do they know that the biggest mob of all, the U.S. Federal Government, is already taking care of atomic business just out of town. Jennifer Connelly plays everyone's girlfriend and the main order of the day is to figure out who did her in.

They got a lot of things right enough but some characters were egregiously miscast. Melanie Griffith could do vanilla, wronged 1950s housewife any day of the week but she was capable of a lot more. Michael Madsen's signature menace was completely absent. I struggled to think of John Malkovich as a General. Nolte can do volatile/shambolic but that's not what's called for here, and it's too difficult to consider him a romantic lead at that point in his career; compare with Who'll Stop the Rain (1978) and soon enough The Thin Red Line (1998). Bruce Dern as a disingenuous police chief.

The plot is fairly linear. Mostly shot outdoors, which suited Tamahori's style. Not terrible not great. If nothing else it reminds me how good we had things in the 1990s.

Roger Ebert: three-and-a-half stars. Very Raymond Chandler. Well cast. Janet Maslin. "And Ms. Griffith does give an unusually acute performance here, despite the limiting and even insulting aspects of her role. Once Were Warriors had its fiery feminist heroine, but Mr. Tamahori hasn't exactly made a women's picture this time." Both say the squad actually happened. IMDB trivia: cut to death by the studio.

Park Chan-wook's latest, following the sombre Decision to Leave (2022) or The Sympathizer (2024) if TV series count. He, Lee Kyoung-mi, Don McKellar and Jahye Lee wrote a screenplay based on Donald E. Westlake's novel The Ax (1997). Apparently Costa-Gavras had a go at the very same source material (The Ax (Le couperet) (2005)).

I watched it in a few sittings as it is very amusing but it would've been better in one go as I lost track of some of the early threads. The cast is uniformly excellent. Lead Lee Byung-hun has it all but demand for his papermaking skills is falling and desperate measures are called for. Wife Son Ye-jin has her doubts and does what she can to help with the hanging on. Their very young daughter is a savant on the cello, her only ticket to independence in present-day South Korea. There are scenes of men remaining men separately, but in the same room: a sort of anti-union where everyone taps their heads while saying "there is no other choice" as the nice lady from HR shows them the latest mantras.

It obviously invites comparison with Bong Joon-ho's Parasite (2019) and Mickey 17 (2025). Wikipedia also suggests Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949).

Peter Sobczynski. Manohla Dargis. Peter Bradshaw: this film was dedicated to Costa-Gavras. Brian Tallerico at Roger Ebert's venue: four stars. Great cinematography, framing, etc.

Commander Leonard 'Bones' McCoy, M.D.: Touch God...? V'Ger's liable to be in for one hell of a disappointment.
— It can get in line with the audience!

Eventually inevitable I suppose. Directed by Robert Wise from an underbaked and apparently overworked script by Gene Roddenberry, Harold Livingston and Alan Dean Foster. As soporific and derivative as reputed. Apparently most of the money, time and effort went into the sets; not enough is asked of the cast. By the time man unites with living machine (living machine having already forcibly assimilated woman) we've climbed enough mountains of illogic to cease wondering what the theme music to Star Trek: The Next Generation is doing on this stodgy old fare. I guess it is of a kind with all the other recycling.

Roger Ebert: three stars. Vincent Canby: fan service. Even the IMDB trivia is boring.